War in the west

Thanks to the inertia of the western allies, Hitler had avoided a war on two fronts but after the defeat of Poland he still confronted an alliance of two global empires. His first instinct was to attack in the west as early as possible, in November 1939, but his generals and bad weather held him back. The ensuing ‘phoney war’ was the butt of many jokes in Britain, but it was a period of anxiety in the Third Reich. The economy was strained to breaking point. The German railway system was barely able to cope with the demands of the military and the civilian sectors. Production of armaments could only be maintained at the expense of suppressing domestic consumption across the board, mobilizing women, and importing foreign labour. Daily life on the home front became a little bit harder with each passing month and with each dip in living standards public morale sagged. In October 1939, William Shirer noted the sale of rubberized footwear was limited; the following month clothing was rationed; in December coal ran short. Journeys by train were slow and uncomfortably crowded, making it all the more regrettable that soap was also in short supply. In March 1940, Shirer found it hard to get gasoline for his car and the next month the number of taxis allowed to operate in Berlin was halved. When the middle-aged writer and diarist Friedrich Reck-Malleczewan visited Munich he grumbled that his hotel was shabby and unheated, the restaurants were only open for a few hours and the meat they served was distinctly strange.¹²⁶

Hitler knew that time was running out for the Reich. Since there was no point in husbanding resources for a long war he might as well throw everything he had into one enormous onslaught against the Anglo-French forces. When the assault began, Shirer commented perceptively that ‘It is Hitler’s bid for victory now or never. Apparently it was true that Germany could not outlast the economic war. So he struck while the armies still had supplies and his air force had a lead over the Allies. He seems to realize he is risking all.’¹²⁷

The campaign in the west was triggered by a British naval incursion into Norwegian waters in February 1940. In an attempt to limit iron ore imports to Germany, the British next mined Norwegian sea lanes and landed troops at Trondheim. On 9 April, Hitler responded by launching an invasion of Norway and ordered the occupation of Denmark. The Danes capitulated within a day, but land battles in Norway and naval engagements continued for eight weeks until Allied troops were evacuated. These small-scale actions were a sideshow to the main offensive, which was unleashed on 10 May 1940. Originally, Hitler and his high command planned a conventional invasion through the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg into northern France, during which they hoped to destroy the bulk of the British and French forces. But a copy of the plan, Case Yellow, fell into Allied hands. This gave impetus to a rethink that was already under way thanks to the efforts of General Erich von Manstein, chief of staff of one of the army groups assigned to the attack. Manstein proposed using the advance through the Netherlands and Belgium as a ruse to attract the main Allied forces while powerful German armoured columns pushed through the Ardennes, far to the south. The panzer divisions would cross the Meuse river, breach the French positions where the heavily fortified Maginot Line ended, and then strike into the rear of the Allied armies, threatening them with encirclement. Hitler, ever the inspired amateur strategist, had been toying with such a notion himself. When Manstein’s so-called ‘sickle-cut’ version of Case Yellow was brought to his attention, he seized on it.¹²⁸

Thanks largely to the conservatism of the Anglo-French military leadership, Manstein’s plan worked perfectly. While the best of the British and French divisions rushed into Belgium, the heaviest concentration of German mobile forces wound through the Ardennes and on 13 May fought their way across the Meuse river into a sector defended by second-rate French divisions. By 15 May, the panzer divisions had opened a forty-mile gap in the French line and were moving towards the English Channel, severing lines of communication between Paris and the main Allied force. Five days later, German tank commanders found themselves gazing on the sea at Abbeville. The British Expeditionary Force, which had begun to withdraw south a few days earlier, was instructed to fall back on the coastal ports from where it could be evacuated. Between 26 May and 3 June, 338,226 men, British and French, were taken off the beaches and from the port of Dunkirk. Meanwhile, the German armies closed up to a line along the Somme and Aisne rivers and after a pause to regroup, attacked southwards. In just ten days the remainder of the French army was cut to pieces. The French government, now led by Marshal Pétain as prime minister, sued for an armistice. The formalities were concluded at Compiègne on 21 June 1940, in the same railway carriage in which the Germans had signed the document signifying their capitulation on 11 November 1918. Hitler was jubilant.¹²⁹

This excursus into military history is essential for understanding not just the imminent fate of Jews in the newly conquered countries, but also the unfolding of Jewish policy in the Reich and occupied Poland. Furthermore, the reasons for German victory in the west and the false confidence it inspired in the Wehrmacht leadership are fundamental to grasping the reasons for German military failure in the east a year later, which was to have catastrophic consequences for the Jews in Russia and, ultimately, across Europe.

Unlike in Poland, the German armed forces and the SS in France were not assigned murderous tasks outside of combat. Although several units of the armed SS, the Waffen-SS, distinguished themselves in the ground fighting, Himmler and the security apparatus otherwise had little role in the campaign or the establishment of occupation regimes afterwards. There were no Einsatzgruppen and Heydrich kept himself busy flying missions for the Luftwaffe. Nevertheless, the campaign was not free of atrocities. Waffen-SS units massacred surrendered British army personnel at the Flanders villages of Le Paradis and Wormhoudt on 27–28 May 1940.¹³⁰

At least 1,500 French colonial troops (and possibly as many as 3,000) were shot when captured or while in prisoner of war camps. Most of the victims were Tirailleurs Sénégalais. The German soldiers who encountered these Africans were predisposed to view them as uncivilized. The fact that some fought with knives and attacked Germans from the rear compounded the image of barbaric mercenaries: to German troops their assailants appeared to be savages who did not know how to fight like Europeans. After they surrendered, dozens were mown down by riflemen from panzer and infantry divisions as well as by Waffen-SS troopers. However, in a crucial distinction between the treatment of Black Africans as against Poles and Jews, the killing usually ended in the combat zone. General Halder noted in his war diary under the heading ‘Coloured PWs’ [prisoners of war], that they were ‘to be put in special battalions, receive good treatment’. Black prisoners were not to be sent to the Reich for labour, preserving the principle of racial segregation, but were to be repatriated. The Germans never considered murdering them all and, on the contrary, were content for them to return home. Of course, this lenient policy came too late for the hundreds who were shot or bayoneted in cold blood in trenches and fields in northern France. Yet the fate of captured French colonial soldiers illustrates a fundamental difference between the perception of Jews and others inserted by the Germans into racially defined categories. The Jews were a powerful, dangerous, mortal enemy in a way that other racially differentiated groups were not.¹³¹

The war fought in the west in 1940 may not have been a race war, but the outcome had a dramatic impact on Nazi racial policy. Initially the treatment of the Jewish question was conditioned by the unexpectedness of the German victory. The defeat of France was not designed as ‘blitzkrieg’, or lightning war; no one was more surprised by the rapidity of the French collapse than Hitler and his generals. But this left them totally unprepared for what followed. Thus the immediate fate of the Jews hinged on the speed and the apparent totality of the victory; subsequently, it was shaped by the (erroneous) lessons that the Nazi elite drew from it. In 1940 the Germans planned for a long conflict and were caught unawares when it ended quickly, whereas in 1941 they planned for a brief struggle and were caught on the hop when it dragged out.¹³²

The Nazi hierarchy had no plans for what to do with the countries they had conquered. Over the summer months, Hitler and his inner circle put in place a series of structures for occupation and governance that were shaped by short-term considerations. Denmark, which had barely resisted, was allowed to keep its entire system of government, police and civil service, which continued to run the country. Since it was a vital source of foodstuffs for the Reich, the Germans put a premium on continuity and stability. The Danes only had to put up with a small garrison and the German security apparatus was kept to a minimum. In Norway, where the Germans had faced tough opposition, government was placed in the hands of a Reichskommissar, Josef Terboven. For a while Terboven tried to co-opt Norwegian politicians into a collaborationist government, but he ended up appointing trusted Nazis from Germany or the local Nazi Party to run government ministries. Vidkun Quisling, the head of the Norwegian Nazi Party, which was very small, proved to be a liability and was kept at arm’s length. Like the Norwegian king, the royal family of the Netherlands was evacuated to Britain along with the government. Hitler had ambitions to absorb the Dutch into the Reich so he appointed a civil administration under Arthur Seyss-Inquart, former Nazi governor of Austria. Seyss-Inquart, in turn, appointed German Nazis to oversee the key ministries of the government and gradually levered Dutch Nazis into positions of authority. Day-to-day governance was left in the hands of the Dutch civil service coordinated by a committee formed of the state secretaries, the official heads of each ministry. In contrast, Belgium was placed under military administration, much along the lines of 1914–18, on the grounds that the country would be the launch pad for an invasion of Britain and was, in any case, of strategic importance. Since the Belgian government had fled, daily affairs were left in the hands of civil servants answering to German military personnel.¹³³

For political as well as geo-strategic reasons, occupation policy for France was different again and far more complicated. There was also an element of vindictiveness in the terms of the armistice treaty imposed on France. It compelled the French to reduce the size of their army to 100,000 men, leaving hundreds of thousands of POWs in German hands as a bargaining chip for future dealings. The country had to pay for the costs of the German occupation, with the franc valued at a ruinously low rate against the Reichsmark. As a result, German soldiers on leave stripped the shops of perfumes, soap, stockings, couture, and every sort of food along with wines and spirits and shipped them back to their families. The occupation was a form of organized state larceny. The strategic and highly industrialized regions of the north-east were sundered from France and placed under the military administration of Belgium. The rest of northern France and the entire coastal strip from the Pyrenees to the Belgian frontier was garrisoned and placed under a military administration headquartered in Paris. The demarcation line between the occupied zone and the ‘Free Zone’ was policed and used to control the flow of people as well as goods and foodstuffs. However, France was allowed to retain its government and was theoretically an independent state. Marshal Pétain chose the spa town of Vichy as the new seat of government and from here it claimed jurisdiction over the whole country. In practice, though, its rule was only untrammelled in the Free Zone. In the north, decrees and directives of the Vichy authorities were subject to approval by the German military administration, headed by General Otto von Stülpnagel. It was, nonetheless, intended as a benign occupation. Hitler hoped to win over the French to his new European order and obtain their willing military as well as economic cooperation. The Germans also wanted to achieve maximum cooperation so as to minimize the manpower needed for administration and security.¹³⁴

The inconsistent pattern of German rule over what is sometimes, rather misleadingly, termed ‘Hitler’s empire’, inflected the initiation and implementation of anti-Jewish measures. In general, the defeat of the democratic countries eroded faith in democracy itself, endowing Nazi parties and pro-German politicians with an aura of power. Not only was liberalism eroded as an ideology, but the emergency conditions fostered by defeat and occupation eroded the force of law. In France defeat fomented an upsurge of nationalist feeling, a reaction against the Third Republic and the principles of the 1789 revolution which it espoused. On 10 July 1940, the remaining members of the French National Assembly revoked the constitution of the Third Republic and gave virtually dictatorial powers to Marshal Pétain and his deputy (and designated successor) Pierre Laval. Pétain evoked the disillusionment with republican values when he proclaimed a ‘national revolution’ based on ‘Travail. Famille. Patrie’ (’Work. Family. Fatherland’). His regime set about purging the administration at all levels, from ministries to mayoralties, of anyone associated with the Popular Front. The Jewish prime minister from 1936–7, Léon Blum, was pilloried as the antithesis of the new regime. Anti-Semitism became a fundamental ingredient of the patriotic revival, shared between churchmen who envisaged a state re-founded on Catholic beliefs, conservatives who blamed the defeat on the decadence of modern culture, anti-communists and anti-socialists. Yet it took time for these passions to take the form of anti-Jewish policies. Everywhere the German occupiers proceeded cautiously. They had not prepared any measures against the Jews and were so busy setting up the occupation framework and ensuring that things got back to normal that the Jews were not the first priority. This was not true, however, for the specialists in Jewish policy in Berlin.¹³⁵

‘Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’ and the Madagascar plan

On 25 May 1940, Heinrich Himmler submitted to Hitler a memorandum entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’. It contained his suggestions for the Germanization of annexed Poland. Himmler recommended that the indigenous population should be reorganized into ethnic categories, although no national consciousness should be permitted. Small minorities of all these peoples could be used to provide mayors and local police officials; Poles should receive only the most elementary education. They should be taught simple arithmetic and basic religious precepts such as ‘God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans’. Children ‘of our blood’, opined Himmler, should be taken to the Reich where they would be raised as members of the Volk, whether their parents agreed or otherwise. The ‘inferior remnant’ would end up in the General Government, where it would provide a reservoir of cheap, unskilled labour. Some ethnic groups would simply disappear. Significantly, he mentioned, as an aside, that this would be the fate of the Jews. ‘I hope to see the term “Jew” completely eliminated through the possibility of large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some colony.’¹³⁶

Himmler may have been referring back to the idea of sending Jews to Madagascar, a notion that had been floating around since late 1938. Or he may have been reacting to the possibilities opening up thanks to the impending defeat of France. This prospect offered Germans the entire French overseas empire to dream about, including the island of Madagascar. Well before the armistice with France was concluded, Franz Rademacher, the head of the Jewish desk in the German Foreign Office, seized on the possibility of utilizing these territories as a destination for unwanted Jews. Early in July, he circulated a paper suggesting that the peace treaty to terminate the war should include a provision for sending the Jews to Madagascar. Rademacher opened with a flourish: ‘The approaching victory gives Germany the possibility, and in my view also the duty, of solving the Jewish question in Europe. The desirable solution is: all Jews out of Europe.’ He specified that ‘In the Peace Treaty France must make the island of Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question’ and resettle the 25,000 French citizens living there. The island would be transferred to German rule under a mandate that would prevent the Jews gaining any of the rights associated with statehood. Unlike Palestine, the island would not have a political or spiritual significance either. It would in effect be another version of the Lublin ‘reservation’ where the Jews ‘will remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good behaviour of the members of their race in America’.¹³⁷

Rademacher’s initiative caught Heydrich and the RHSA off guard. Heydrich was immediately worried that the Foreign Office might grab the glory with its solution of the Jewish problem and become the main arm for carrying it out. So, on 24 June, he brusquely reminded the Wilhelmstrasse that the security apparatus, the RSHA, was in charge of Jewish matters. In a later version, dated 3 July, Rademacher added that the island would be governed by the German police forces, ultimately responsible to the Reichsführer-SS, Himmler. But this was not good enough for Heydrich. He wanted his own people to come up with a more detailed format that would bear the exclusive imprimatur of the RSHA. So he appointed Eichmann, the lead expert on Jewish affairs, to devise a rival proposal. Eichmann went to work with his customary diligence, digging up quantities of information on Madagascar and conditions in the tropics. By 15 August the RSHA scheme was ready for submission to Ribbentrop, the foreign minister. It envisaged sending four million Jews to the island using two ships a day, each carrying 1,500 people. Eichmann and his aide, Theo Dannecker, went into great detail about registering Jews and their property, expropriating their wealth, and using the proceeds to cover the cost of the project. The first waves would include ‘pioneers’ to create the infrastructure that would absorb the rest. It was like a parody of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. But Eichmann did not permit any level of self-government to the Jews: the island would be little more than an open prison under SS management.¹³⁸

Characteristically, Eichmann turned to Jewish leaders for much of the preliminary work. On 3 July, he instructed representatives of the Jewish organizations in Berlin, Vienna and Prague to prepare a memorandum outlining how Jewish populations could be mustered for shipment overseas. The Reichsvereinigung was shocked when it learned that the German authorities were giving serious consideration to such an outlandish idea. However, with customary stoicism they set about devising a framework for Jewish life on a remote and less than hospitable island. Word about Madagascar quickly spread through the Jewish communities in Germany and Austria. Victor Klemperer got wind of it from a friendly German woman who heard it mentioned in a radio programme. William Shirer figured out that the regime was thinking seriously about Africa when he heard that members of the SS were learning Swahili.¹³⁹

Hans Frank was informed of the project by Hitler personally on 8 July 1940. He was thrilled at the thought, not least because the prospect of an imminent solution meant that Hitler agreed to suspend further deportations of Jews into his domain. A few days later Frank reported to his subordinates in Cracow, ‘It is planned after the peace to transport the whole Jewish gang from the Reich, the General Government, and the Protectorate as soon as possible to some African or American colony. Madagascar, which France would have given up for this purpose, is what is foreseen … I shall try to arrange that the Jews from the General Government are also able to make use of this chance to build their own life for themselves in this territory.’ The Madagascar project therefore had an immediate effect in Poland. Plans for the creation of a ghetto in Warsaw were suspended and thousands of Jews were spared the necessity to leave their homes and move to designated areas. Adam Czerniaków noted in his diary that the Sipo-SD officer Gerhard Mende, who supervised the Jewish council, ‘declared that the war would be over in a month and that we would all leave for Madagascar’. Across Poland ghetto-building suddenly stopped.¹⁴⁰

As rumours swept through the Nazi ranks, Gauleiters in the Reich could not contain their impatience. After Alsace and Lorraine were formally annexed to the Reich in July, the new rulers expelled over 24,000 French Jews into the unoccupied zone to await shipment to the Indian Ocean. They ended up in camps under Vichy French supervision. The Nazi Party bosses of Baden and the Saarpfalz followed suit in October, having obtained Hitler’s approval to cleanse their precincts of Jews. To the horror of the Reichsvereinigung, 6,500 German Jews were given a day’s notice to prepare for deportation into France. This was the first mass deportation of Jews from western Germany and the Reichsvereinigung felt compelled to react. Its leaders declared a fast while Otto Hirsch addressed a formal protest to the authorities. The protest was as courageous as it was futile; Hirsch was arrested and sent to Mauthausen where he perished about four months later. The Vichy French authorities were not consulted in advance and remonstrated with the German Foreign Office about the imposition. Needless to say, the reproach had no effect. Without any interest in caring for the deportees, most of whom were old and in poor health, the French dumped them in a bleak internment camp at Gurs in south-west France. The number of inmates soared from 1,400 to 12,000 without the provision of any additional accommodation or facilities.¹⁴¹

But there was to be no ‘Madagascar solution’. First of all, Hitler hoped to woo the French into joining the Axis and therefore left them in possession of their navy and their overseas possessions. Even if the Germans had taken Madagascar there was no way to reach it while Britain commanded the sea-lanes, but Hitler’s ham-fisted offer of peace in a speech on 19 July got no response from London. Winston Churchill, prime minister since 10 May, had persuaded his colleagues that the only realistic policy for the survival of the country and the empire was to fight on.¹⁴²

Britain’s defiance placed the Germans in a quandary: they might possess the most powerful land force in Europe but there was no way they could use it to finish off the British, who were protected by the English Channel, the Royal Navy and the RAF. In mid-July, Hitler ordered the army high command to draw up plans for an invasion in August, Operation Sealion, but the Wehrmacht was ill-equipped for such an undertaking. Nor could the small German navy hope to protect the invasion force or its supply lines from attack by British naval units. The Luftwaffe might deter or drive back a naval assault, but its ability to shield the armada depended on achieving air superiority. Consequently, at the end of July, Hitler ordered Göring to break the RAF within two weeks. The air offensive failed – albeit narrowly. On 17 September 1940, Hitler postponed Sealion.¹⁴³

For the moment, the fate of Europe’s Jews had been decided on the battlefield, in the air and at sea. It was shaped less by anti-Semitism and prior anti-Jewish policy than by the geo-strategic framework in which Hitler and his confederates were operating. Had Britain capitulated and had Germany stripped France of its colonies, Jews might have been deported to Madagascar in the autumn of 1940. In which case, the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, would have been instrumental in realizing a vision first conceptualized by the Poles and the French in 1938. Instead, the Germans continued to fumble their way towards a solution according to their racial-biological precepts, but under circumstances they could not entirely control. In the interim, the suspension of plans to remove the Jews from Europe obliged the German occupation authorities, as well as their allies and collaborators, to frame and implement policies to deal with the ‘Jewish question’.

Jews as ‘enemy aliens’: mass internment in Britain and France

The extension of the war had an impact on Jews beyond those who were directly caught up in the fighting, turned into refugees, or condemned to endure a period of foreign occupation. Overnight it turned refugees into ‘enemy aliens’. In Britain and France steps were taken to register and, if necessary, intern enemy nationals along with others deemed a threat to security because of their political affiliations with the far right or the far left. Jewish refugees bore the brunt of these measures.

Approximately 64,000 refugees in Britain had been classified category ‘C’ by tribunals, meaning that although they were technically enemy nationals they were considered innocuous. The vast majority were Jews from Germany and Austria. German and Austrian nationals classed as ‘A’ were immediately arrested and imprisoned; most of them had Nazi connections or were Germans of military age. Category ‘B’ denoted people with political records that rendered them suspicious, including left-wing anti-fascists and communists; they were subject to restrictions. Until the German offensive against France most German and Austrian refugees were left alone. The Home Office, under Sir John Anderson, had no wish to repeat the mass internment of the Great War and saw no reason to apprehend people who had fled Nazism. Unfortunately, MI5 (the secret service) did not see things in quite the same way and regarded the refugee population as a potential nest of spies. The use of German parachute troops behind Dutch and Belgian lines increased their anxiety about allowing refugees to roam freely. How would it be possible to tell if they were bona fide fugitives or storm troopers in disguise? The rapid collapse of Dutch and Belgian resistance as well as the disarray of the French gave birth to the myth of a ‘Fifth Column’: German or pro-German elements that subverted the defenders from within. Consequently, pressure built up on the government to impose controls on enemy aliens.¹⁴⁴

Winston Churchill was sensitive to the warnings issued by the intelligence community and wanted to show the population that his government meant business. On 11 May, the day after he was appointed prime minister, the cabinet agreed to remove enemy nationals from coastal zones and, the following day, to begin selective detention of men in category ‘B’. The catastrophe at Dunkirk generated a panic and the War Office demanded wholesale internment of adult male Germans and Austrians regardless of whether they were Jewish or classed as refugees. With Churchill’s backing the army chiefs of staff and the security services overcame the home secretary’s reluctance to initiate mass internment. At a cabinet meeting on 27 May, in an atmosphere of crisis, there was near-unanimous agreement to round up everyone in category ‘C’. The next day police began to arrest men aged 16–60, even if the tribunals had declared them refugees who were ‘ready to assist this country rather than to assist the enemy’. Italy’s entry into the war on 10 June added 10,000 Italians to the tally of ‘enemy nationals’ and heightened the sense that treachery was afoot. Churchill now issued instructions to ‘collar the lot’. Within a month, 27,000 refugees were being held in makeshift detention centres in disused factories, racecourses, and hastily converted boarding houses on the Isle of Man. From 20 June, groups of internees were deported to camps in Canada and Australia. Over 7,300 ended up in barbed-wire encampments in remote locations, sundered from friends and family, uncertain of what the future held for them. Those detained in Britain were in the miserable position of being trapped behind barbed wire when a German invasion was expected at any moment.¹⁴⁵

Tragically, on 1 July 1940, the SS Arandora Star, carrying over 1,200 internees (Italians and Germans) to Canada, was torpedoed in the Irish Sea and sank with the loss of over 700 lives. This disaster intensified criticism of the mass internment policy that had been building up amongst Members of Parliament and in sections of the press. The backlash was abetted by news about the SS Dunera, a transportation ship that reached Australia with nearly 2,300 refugees who had been robbed and abused by the British soldiers guarding them. After a period of hesitation, the Jewish leadership began to lobby Whitehall to modify its stance. It was tribute to the courage of these critics and the resilience of the democratic system that by autumn 1940 internment had been abandoned. Ever-increasing numbers of Jews were released if they had special skills or wished to enter the Pioneer Corps.¹⁴⁶

Those stuck in the camps, 10,000 on the Isle of Man alone, made the best of their enforced idleness and engaged in an astonishing array of educational and cultural activities. Yet the improvised Viennese-style coffee houses, camp art, witty cyclostyled journals, erudite lectures and string quartets could only partly compensate for the ugly experience of arrest and detention for no good reason. For some German and Austrian Jews it was actually the second time that they had been incarcerated unjustly, although they, especially, recognized the difference between the malice that lay behind the Nazi concentration camps and the impromptu and usually good-natured confinement under the Union Flag. Nevertheless, it was an unpleasant, sombre episode in the midst of Britain’s ‘finest hour’ that revealed the potential of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, especially when combined with security fears and military exigencies.¹⁴⁷

The fate of Jews interned in France was incomparably grimmer. On 3 September 1939 the French authorities ordered all German and Austrian nationals to report at assembly centres. The decree immediately affected 13,000 German and 8,000 Austrian Jewish refugees. They were joined by individuals whom the police and secret service deemed subversive, mostly communists and anti-fascist activists like Arthur Koestler. After days of detention, and without any legal procedures, they were transported to internment camps in the south of the country. These camps, notably St Cyprien, Argelès-sur-Mer, Barcures, Gurs and Le Vernet, consisted of crude wooden barracks with the minimum of facilities surrounded by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers manned by gendarmes. In his searing account Scum of the Earth, written in 1941, Koestler recalled that Le Vernet was ‘a mess of barbed wire and more barbed wire’. The huts sat on ground that was ‘stony and dusty when dry; ankle deep in mud when it rained’. It was ‘run with that mixture of ignominy, corruption, and laisser-faire so typical of the French administration’ and guarded by men of the Garde Mobile who were ‘the most reactionary and brutal force in France’.¹⁴⁸

French Jews declined to assist the internees. Morris Troper, representing the AJJDC in Paris, reported that ‘French Jewry was paralysed. Fearful lest any activity on their part on behalf of German refugees might be construed as consorting with enemy aliens, and further that it might provide a basis for antisemitic sentiment during a period when anything might happen, French Jewry disassociated itself completely from any activity on behalf of the refugees.’ After a while, though, the Committee for the Assistance of Refugees led by Raymond-Raoul Lambert got aid to the internees and pressed for their release. By the end of the year about 8,000 had been discharged because they were old or sick, prepared to join the army (or the Foreign Legion), were valuable to the economy, or had papers to emigrate to the USA.¹⁴⁹

Koestler was extracted from Le Vernet after a campaign coordinated by his wife, and returned to Paris in January 1940. But he was only at liberty for a few months. The German offensive triggered an even more ferocious wave of xenophobia and suspicion aimed at foreigners. During May 1940, 8,000 German refugees, including 5,000 who were Jewish, plus around 10,000 fugitives from Belgium and the Netherlands, were rounded up by police in Paris and held in converted sports halls, the Buffalo Stadium and the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The police came for Koestler a second time on 22 May and took him to the Buffalo Stadium, only on this occasion he refused to comply and escaped amidst the confusion. Like thousands of other Frenchmen and women he took to the roads and headed south, away from the Germans. He eventually made contact with American refugee workers who were assisting Jews and political fugitives to get out of France.¹⁵⁰

The Jews under Vichy and under German occupation in France, Belgium and Holland

For weeks after the French capitulation it seemed to Jews in both the north and south as if nothing much had changed. The period of fighting and the chaotic stampede southwards had left the Jews divided roughly half-and-half between the two zones, with about 150,000 Jews in Paris of whom some 60,000 were foreign-born. One of them was the pioneer historian Léon Poliakov, who had arrived from Russia with his family after the Great War. Poliakov recalled in his memoirs that ‘Life in Paris seemed normal. One was not even alarmed for the Jews. The Germans were “correct”; there were no massacres and no pogroms.’ Indeed, the German military authorities took care to prevent anti-Jewish disturbances by either their own people or Frenchmen who blamed Jews for the calamity of defeat.¹⁵¹

To a Jew like Poliakov, who had already been uprooted by war and revolution, normality was a relative concept. Raymond-Raoul Lambert’s family had lived in France for generations and the shambles left him groping for familiar reference points. Having served as a reserve officer with a unit of colonial troops until it disintegrated he made his way to Nîmes in the south. In early July he resumed writing in his journal to make sense of events, a habit he got into during his service in the trenches in 1914–18. ‘After the past four weeks,’ he wrote, ‘which have seen unfold the most tragic events in our history, and for me the most terrible anxieties I have ever known, I am trying to recover my intellectual balance.’ Lambert averred that to recover from the disaster France required a ‘spiritual reformation’.¹⁵²

The men of Vichy concurred that France was in dire need of spiritual reform but Lambert was shocked to discover that they identified him and his co-religionists as a main source of the rot. Within days of its establishment anti-Jewish edicts began to issue from the new regime. On the 13 July it was decreed that only men of French parentage could serve in government. A few days later, civil service posts and the right to practise medicine were restricted to those of French birth. On 22 July foreigners who had been naturalized since 1927 lost their French nationality. This regulation, which struck at approximately 6,000 Jews, was aimed particularly at Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Eastern and Central Europe. The following day, citizenship was rescinded from anyone foreign-born who had fled France; their property was seized by the state. Next month, the Marchandeau Law was revoked, an act of profound symbolic and practical significance. The law had been passed in 1881 to protect members of religious and racial groups from abuse in the press and became an icon of the liberal Third Republic. Now the way was cleared for unmitigated verbal assaults on Jews, who no longer had recourse to the law in their own defence. Finally, on 3 October 1940, the Vichy government promulgated a charter fixing the status and place of Jews in the new France, the Statut des Juifs. The statute defined who was a Jew more strictly than the Nuremberg Laws. It excluded Jews from public posts and a range of occupations in the professions and cultural life. Jews could serve in the army but were not permitted to obtain commissions. For good measure, on 7 October, Pétain’s government repealed another iconic act of the Republic: the Crémieux Law. This legislation, passed in October 1870, had granted full citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. At a stroke, it deprived 117,000 Jews of their civil rights.¹⁵³

This hail of decrees emanated mainly from the Ministry of Justice under Rafaël Alibert. They were not a response to German pressure or even prompting. On the contrary, until October 1940 interventions by the German military administration concerning Jewish matters were confined to ‘unsystematic bursts of propaganda and border controls’. It was the Vichyites who treated the ‘national revolution’ as the perfect opportunity to roll back the advances made by Jews in France since the Dreyfus affair, if not the revolution of 1789. They were symbolically settling scores with the Popular Front government as well as the Dreyfusards and using the Jews to make a statement about the character of French renewal. The France of Vichy rejected parliamentary democracy, liberalism, modern culture, cosmopolitanism, and of course Marxism. Léon Blum, who was slated to stand trial for his alleged role in corrupting and weakening France, personified the evils wrought by Jews. An official statement in the Parisian newspaper Le Temps explained: ‘The government in its task of national reconstruction has … studied the problem of the Jews and of certain foreigners, who, having abused our hospitality, have contributed to a significant degree to the defeat. Although there are some notable exceptions … the influence of the Jews has been undeniably corruptive and finally decaying. The government … respects the individual Jew as well as his possessions. It will forbid him however to hold certain administrative responsibilities, authority in the national economy and education. Past experience has shown to all impartial minds that the Jews represent an individualistic tendency which leads to anarchy.’ At another level, Laval saw anti-Semitism as a useful gesture of amity towards the Germans. His approach seems to have been coldly instrumental and, if anything, he regarded himself as a barrier to the progress of even more radical anti-Semitic elements in French society.¹⁵⁴

The statute struck at the identity of French Jews and left them reeling. Lambert noted, ‘So it is possible that within a few days I shall see my citizenship reduced, and that my sons, who are French by birth, culture, and faith, will find themselves brutally and cruelly cast out of the French community … I cannot believe it. France is no longer France. I repeat to myself that Germany is in charge here, trying still to excuse this offence against an entire history …’ Nevertheless, he refused to contemplate emigration. In his journal he argued back and forth whether the indignities heaped upon the Jews were the result of external pressure or an expression of authentic French prejudices. ‘The Jews of France, even those who died for our country, have never been assimilated. Racism has become the law of the new state. What boundless disgrace! … All my illusions are crumbling around me … I shall never leave this country for which I risked my life, but can my sons live here if they are not allowed to choose freely what career to follow?’ As an ex-officer with a keen sense of military affairs, Lambert speculated that the situation had two possible outcomes: an Anglo-American victory over Germany or a long night lasting for a hundred years during which the Jews would live as they had done in the Middle Ages.¹⁵⁵

Yet the future historian Jacques Adler, a child of immigrants, remembered that daily life for Jews in Paris ‘regained a normalcy reminiscent of the days before the exodus’. Some of the Jews who attempted to flee south returned to the capital. The synagogues were full for the high holy days. Cafes and communal life returned to normal. Money was raised for relief work and those out of work or homeless were helped. For months it seemed as if the worst was over.¹⁵⁶

Paradoxically, things were worse for refugees in the Free Zone, and much worse for those in the internment camps. In May and June 1940, thousands of French and foreign-born Jews, like Léon Poliakov and Irène Némirovsky, took to the roads to escape the Germans. Foreign Jews often lacked papers but were more inclined to flee, whereas French Jews had the necessary documents but were more attached to their homes and homeland. It is estimated that around 20,000 managed to escape abroad legally or illegally by the time the Germans were able to seal the frontiers. Many remained stranded in the south, homeless and without any livelihood. Given the disorder afflicting the economy, unemployment and shortages, the presence of these outsiders was greatly resented by local people. They were also vulnerable to food controls since they lacked the permanent address and identification papers necessary to obtain ration cards.¹⁵⁷

The number of internees was swollen by a decree of the Vichy regime on 4 October 1940 to detain all ‘foreign-born nationals of Jewish race’. It was aggravated still further by the wave of expulsions from Baden-Württemberg. Although many foreign Jews evaded the Vichy edict, about 34,000 went into the camps. Conditions in Rivesaltes and Gurs were especially bad; during 1940–1 some 3,000 Jews died due to the poor conditions. Partly as a result of this high mortality, the Vichy authorities appointed a civilian inspector to report on the situation. His verdict was so damning that the authorities allowed in relief workers and inaugurated a policy of selective releases. Within a year only about 17,500 inmates remained, of whom 60 per cent were Jews. Thousands were released into labour battalions, while up to 12,000 were assisted to emigrate by Jewish and international aid agencies. HICEM was even permitted to maintain staff inside the internment camp at Les Milles, outside Marseilles, where the Vichy French authorities gathered those with a good chance of legal emigration. Of the 6,538 Reich Jews from Baden-Württemberg and 1,125 from the Saar-Palatinate shoved into the Free Zone on 22–23 October 1940, nearly 2,000 emigrated while almost 3,000 were let out to perform labour service. But 12 per cent died in Gurs. By the end of the year Jews in the north and the south had organized relief programmes, drawing heavily on money sent via the AJJDC, and in January 1941 set up a coordinating committee to rationalize the services provided by numerous Jewish bodies.¹⁵⁸

In the north, the German occupation administration crystallized. It was a tangled skein of agencies, each with a claim to jurisdiction over aspects of Jewish affairs. The head of the military administration, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich (MBF), was Otto von Stülpnagel. His chief of civil affairs was Werner Best, who arrived from the head office of the SS in Berlin. In August 1940, Ribbentrop appointed Otto Abetz Ambassador to France. His mission included a Jewish desk that was manned from April 1941 by Carl-Theo Zeitschel. Although the army insisted on retaining control of security matters, Heydrich succeeded in assigning a senior SS officer, Helmut Knochen, to run the small Sipo contingent. This was the Trojan horse for the insertion of Gestapo officers, led by Kurt Lischka and Herbert Hagen. Finally, Eichmann sent one of his closest co-workers, the ambitious and hyperactive Theo Dannecker, to set up a branch of office IVB4 of the RSHA responsible for Jewish affairs. Göring’s economic office began pressing to take over Jewish enterprises while a special staff responsible to Alfred Rosenberg arrived to pillage the art collections of Jewish dealers and connoisseurs. Finally, an Armistice Commission dealt with matters arising from the peace agreement, notably the fate of German political émigrés in France.¹⁵⁹

During the summer, a commission led by Dr Ernst Kundt, a German Embassy official, trawled through the internment camps looking for people wanted by the Gestapo. The Kundt Commission was not interested in the mass of German and Austrian refugees who were Jews. Indeed, the German Foreign Ministry was doing what it could to facilitate their emigration. However, there were huge obstacles to emigration. The Jews were frequently old and lacked funds. Most pertinently, they lacked destinations. By a supreme effort between July 1940 and May 1941 HICEM assisted 1,400 German Jews to emigrate. Admiral Darlan, who became de facto prime minister in December 1940, unilaterally removed 2,000–3,000 to North Africa.¹⁶⁰

The MBF did not neglect the Jewish question. Its first measure was designed to prevent Jews who had fled to the south from returning to the occupied zone. In late September 1940, the MBF ordered a census of all Jews in the occupied zone combined with registration, including addresses and occupations. The identification papers of foreign and French Jews were marked ‘Juif’. While the military rulers stopped the wild picketing and looting of Jewish-owned shops, they insisted that Jewish enterprises should be marked. The main interest of the military was securing Jewish economic assets for the Reich. On 18 October 1940, the MBF promulgated an ordinance for the expropriation of Jewish property in the occupied zone, to be accomplished by the end of the year. This step provoked panic in Vichy circles. The French were determined not to let the Germans walk off with the wealth of French Jews. In a great rush the regime established the Service de Controle des Administrateurs Provisoires (SCAP) to conduct its own ‘Aryanization’ programme in both zones. Within twelve months, 15,000 enterprises had been taken over and 2,800 French administrators appointed. For the Jewish owners expropriation spelled ruin and the danger of forced labour on the grounds that they were economically inactive.¹⁶¹

The relationship between the central offices in the Reich that were responsible for Jewish policy and the MBF was tortuous. Between August and November 1940, Berlin was working towards the deportation of Jews from the occupied zone to Madagascar. Abetz understood from Hitler that his intention towards the conquered countries was to ‘transfer their Jewish citizens outside of Europe’. On arrival in Paris he told the MBF to prepare for expulsions and stop Jews leaving the occupied zone. Best was simultaneously pushing for the registration of Jews and their separation from the rest of society – as in the Reich. By autumn, when the promise of expulsion had evaporated, thought was turned to the longer-term management of Jewish affairs. It was at this point that the MBF introduced the ordinance of 27 September to survey and register all Jewish assets. At the same time, the SS personnel under Knochen began to agitate for a centralized Jewish representative body that would enable them to monitor and exploit the Jews on the model of the Reichsvereinigung and the Jewish councils in Poland. Early in 1941, Dannecker began to urge the Vichy authorities to create a single office to handle Jewish issues. In March 1941, Darlan caved in to Dannecker’s relentless pressure and ordained the creation of the Commissariat-général aux questions juives (CGQJ). But Darlan then proceeded to place it under Xavier Vallat, a disabled war veteran who loathed Germans. The Vichy government wanted to placate the occupier and demonstrate concord on the Jewish question, but it had no intention of allowing the Germans to interfere in the destiny of French citizens even if they were Jewish and second-class.¹⁶²

For the Vichy French, the fate of the Jews was a field of contested sovereignty and competition for assets. Early in April 1941, Best and Stülpnagel met with Vallat to brief him about German expectations. They demanded the expulsion of Jews from the occupied zone and the internment of ‘undesirable’ Jews. They also wanted to see the discriminatory laws that had been enacted in the Free Zone extended to the north. Vallat had no wish to see more Jews dumped in the south and palmed that demand aside. However, he was delighted at the prospect that the Germans would recognize Vichy legislation and proposed to draft a new raft of measures for application in both zones – a ‘French’ solution to the Jewish question. Ambition, avarice and aversion to German power thus gave birth to the second Statut des Juifs on 2 June 1941. This variant built in a harsh racial definition and a draconian set of exclusions that drove Jews out of almost every professional niche. It also mandated a census of Jews in the Free Zone, including details of property and wealth. To Jews this was a shocking departure since responsibility could not be laid at the feet of the occupier. Even though Vallat inserted a number of exclusions – for old French Jewish families, those who had served the nation with special distinction, veterans and the immediate family of men who died for France – the second statute ‘pushed all Jews to the margins of French society’.¹⁶³

Ironically, given the antipathy of the Vichy regime to foreign-born Jews, the cumulative impact of the anti-Jewish legislation was most severe on long-established French Jewish citizens. In Paris many were civil servants and professionals, owners of businesses and property. The first wave of exclusions barely touched the immigrants, who were left to practise their humble trades. For some, though, the blow was softened by severance pay and pensions. More than a few engaged in protracted wrangling to claim exemption; 215 Jewish civil servants kept their jobs until mid-1942. The extension of Aryanization to the unoccupied zone was equally devastating, but Jews adapted. They exploited loopholes to hang on to businesses or retain an income from them. Others found new jobs, sometimes with the help of Jewish aid agencies. In the north the semi-covert Amelot committee distributed welfare to the unemployed and the impoverished. In the south a similar role was performed by the Nîmes committee. Lambert, who was now working flat out for the relief effort in the south, still found time for his journal and continued to argue with himself over who was to blame for the increasingly parlous situation of Jews in France. He identified the influence of Germans, the corruption of the press, but also felt that Jews had to carry some of the burden for their own fate. ‘Certain facts that unfortunately have seemed to justify modern racism,’ he jotted down, included ‘too many Jews in press, film, banks, politics and it must be said, their inborn exuberance’.¹⁶⁴

In Belgium, the military administration was even more securely entrenched and successful in excluding SS influence than in occupied France. Baron Alexander von Falkenhausen was appointed head of the administration and made it his business to ensure maximum calm. For the first weeks of his rule he expected that Jews would be evacuated, so there was no urgent need for activity regarding the Jewish population. There were about 70,000–75,000 Jews in the country on the eve of the war but thousands fled into France and some escaped by ship to Britain. Of the 65,000 that remained, under 10 per cent were actually Belgian citizens. The vast majority were recent immigrants, mainly from Poland. Just over half of the Jews lived in Antwerp and of these, half were Polish. They made their living from small retail businesses and the crafts, notably clothing manufacture, making leatherwear, and the diamond trade. The balance of the population was mainly in Brussels where, again, about 50 per cent were of Polish origin. These eastern European Jews supported a dense network of cultural and welfare associations that enabled them to surmount the anti-Jewish measures that eventually arrived.¹⁶⁵

On 28 October 1940 the military government published a Jewish statute that required Jews to register with the authorities and subjected them to the same discriminatory measures as in occupied France. By the end of the year Jews were driven out of public service, the professions and employment in the cultural sphere. Over the next eighteen months supplementary and additional edicts arrived at the rate of roughly one per month. Jews were confined to the cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Charleroi and Liège, where they were subjected to a curfew. Jewish children were excluded from the school system and Jews banned from places of sport and recreation. Falkenhausen also presided over a modest policy of Aryanization that mainly targeted small-scale enterprises. Nevertheless, for the mass of Jews in Belgium, who were well used to circumventing government edicts, things continued much as they had been.¹⁶⁶

In the Netherlands there were approximately 140,000 Jews, of whom about a tenth were German Jewish refugees and 7,000 from other countries. Dutch Jews could point to a long and distinguished presence in Holland, which was one of the first European societies to give Jews freedom of religion and allow them to live and work as they pleased. Yet however much Jews had acculturated, they were still a distinctive element set apart by religion, occupations and geography. Nearly 60 per cent of Dutch Jews lived in Amsterdam, with 10 per cent each in The Hague and Rotterdam. The remaining 20 per cent were scattered across small towns and rural communities. Wherever they resided, Jews tended to cluster in certain districts and streets. They were also bunched in a few livelihoods, with an elite in banking and commerce, and a large working class making a precarious living in clothes-making, the wholesale and retail trades, and the diamond industry. Since the Dutch political system was organized along confessional and class lines Jews were largely absent from government and administration.¹⁶⁷

The German occupation regime in the Netherlands was quite different to that in Belgium and France, with severe implications for the speed and character of anti-Jewish policy. Hitler ordered that the country be placed under a civil administration immediately after it was conquered and on 29 May 1940 appointed a Nazi die-hard, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, as his Reich Commissioner. Seyss-Inquart in turn appointed trusted Nazis to oversee the key areas of Dutch governance: Friedrich Wimmer for administration and justice; Hans Fischböck for the economy and finance; Hanns Rauter for security and policing; and Fritz Schmidt for propaganda and political affairs. Rauter had the status of a Higher Police and SS Leader (HSSPF) and as such also represented the interests of Himmler and RSHA. This team met weekly with Seyss-Inquart plus representatives of the German Foreign Office, the Sipo-SD, and intelligence services. In March 1941 the security police were placed under Wilhelm Härster, who also answered to Himmler and Heydrich. As a consequence of these arrangements there was no buffer between Berlin and the Nazi occupation bosses in The Hague and Amsterdam. Paradoxically, though, this made it harder for Eichmann’s man in the Netherlands, Willi Zöpf, to make his presence felt. Anti-Jewish policies and the control of Jewish affairs flowed from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, the Zentralstelle, set up under Härster’s auspices. It was nominally managed by Willy Lages but actually run day-to-day by an SS captain, Ferdinand aus der Fünten.¹⁶⁸

The Germans left routine administration to the top civil servants of each ministry, the general secretaries. They were coordinated by Karel Frederiks, the most senior of their number, who ran the Interior Ministry. Frederiks believed his mission was to preserve the existing personnel who conducted local government in the provinces, cities and towns, thereby blocking the advance of Dutch Nazis and resisting the imposition of German appointees. His other priorities were to safeguard public order, resuscitate the economy and ensure the supply of food. In order to achieve these goals he was prepared to reach many compromises with the Germans; he was certainly not prepared to jeopardize his authority or that of provincial governors and mayors for the sake of the small Jewish minority.¹⁶⁹

The readiness of Dutch civil servants to defend the rights of Jewish citizens was further undermined by the apparently piecemeal way that the occupiers proceeded. On 2 July, on German orders, Jews were expelled from the air raid protection service. At the end of the month, shechita (the slaughter of cattle according to Jewish religious law) was banned. None of these measures seemed very oppressive. In late August, however, the Germans instructed Frederiks and his colleagues to require that all civil servants declare their ‘Aryan’ status. The general secretaries swallowed this, too. Only some university staff and church leaders objected to the requirement to attest whether one was an Aryan or not. They could see where this was leading. On 4 November 1940, Wimmer instructed the general secretaries to dismiss all civil servants who were non-Aryans. After an anguished debate the civil servants capitulated. In a token gesture of resistance they agreed only to suspend rather than sack Jews from public office. This merely delayed the final indignity until March 1941.¹⁷⁰

Whether or not it was a premeditated strategy – and it is most likely a reflection of how unprepared the Germans were – their step-by-step approach left Dutch Jews with the feeling that little had altered and that things were not so bad. Then, at the start of 1941, the situation lurched suddenly and ominously. On 6 January, the Germans commanded the registration of all Jews in the Netherlands. This labour-intensive exercise was conducted through the Dutch civil service and enjoyed its full compliance. The census – which revealed 140,552 ‘full’ Jews, 14,549 ‘half’ Jews and 5,719 ‘quarter’ Jews – served as the basis for the issuance of new ID cards stamped with a ‘J’. The ability to identify Jews on the street enabled the Germans next to decree the exclusion of Jews from a range of occupations, sports and recreations. Jewish-owned businesses were marked.¹⁷¹

Within the Nazi regime there was a vigorous debate as to whether the Amsterdam Jews should be formally ghettoized and, a related question, how to eliminate Jewish traders from the sprawling open air market at the heart of Amsterdam. Both questions acquired a certain urgency due to persistent brawls between Jews and Dutch Nazis, and on occasion German soldiers, who barrelled into the market intent on mischief. On 12 February, Hans Böhmcker, the Nazi commissioner for Amsterdam and an advocate of ghettoization, dispatched Dutch police to seal the Jewish quarter on the pretext that it was a hazard to public order. During the day he also summoned the Chief Rabbis of the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi communities along with Abraham Asscher, the president of the Great Synagogue who was also the head of the main Dutch Jewish refugee relief organization. Bömcker explained the rationale for shutting off access to the Jewish areas of the city and told them to form a Jewish council, Joodse Raad, to serve as an interlocutor and executive for future measures. Asscher agreed to take on the task of forming the council but the two Chief Rabbis stepped down and several other nominees declined to serve. The sole representative of the Jewish workers also soon departed, leaving a group that consisted overwhelmingly of the Dutch Jewish bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, by the end of the day Asscher had assembled a credible team, co-directed by Professor David Cohen, who had been working side by side with him for several years on behalf of German refugees. The following morning the Joodse Raad held its first meeting and declared that it would have a ‘predominantly executive and mediatory task, but could not bear responsibility for the orders it had to transmit, nor could it accept orders that were dishonourable to the Jews’. Asscher and Cohen introduced the council to Amsterdam Jews at a mass meeting that same evening. The Germans quickly abandoned the ill-considered effort to construct a ghetto, but the Jewish council remained.¹⁷²

As if to underline the half-baked thinking that informed German decision-making and actions, Dutch Nazis continued to harass Jewish traders and young Jews continued to respond forcefully. On 19 February a brawl flared up in an ice-cream parlour out of which the Dutch Nazis came off the worst. This time the Germans responded with a large-scale raid on the Jewish district by Ordnungspolizei, during which they seized 400 predominantly young, male Jewish hostages. The German police conducted the operation in broad daylight and with a brutality that shocked the Jewish community and the city’s inhabitants at large. Communist-led Dutch labour organizations, which had been restive for some time, were galvanized into bringing forward strike action, their indignation against the Germans bleeding into their economic demands. The strike spread across the city on 25 February, paralysing municipal services, the docks and the trams. Over the next two days German order police and SS units assailed the strikers, resulting in seven deaths and many more casualties. The strike was broken and despite the sacrifice it achieved nothing for the Jews. On 27 February, 389 hostages were deported to Buchenwald. Some time later 340 were transferred to Mauthausen. Within a few months all were dead.¹⁷³

The general strike was a courageous act but it had tragic consequences. While sympathy for their Jewish compatriots did not diminish, ordinary Dutch people were chastened by the repression that active gestures invited. The fact that the unfortunate hostages were sent to concentration camps in Germany led to the impression that all subsequent deportations were directed to similar destinations. However bad they might be, it was believed that concentration camps were survivable. Hence the strike of February 1941 perversely influenced Dutch perceptions of the fate awaiting the Jews and, more importantly, their capacity to do anything that might avert it.¹⁷⁴

German strategic dilemmas and Judenpolitik in occupied Poland

At its worst the experience of Jews living under German rule in western Europe bore no comparison to the horrors inflicted on the Jews in German-occupied Poland between June 1940 and June 1941. During the battle for France, Polish Jews followed the news closely, knowing that their future depended on the outcome. The mood in Warsaw rose and fell with each bulletin. ‘Misery after the defeat of Norway’, Emanuel Ringelblum jotted down. ‘Our spirits have fallen.’ When the Germans broke the French line on the Meuse he wrote, ‘The population is enveloped in deep melancholy.’ Disregarding his anger against the British over their handling of Palestine, Chaim Kaplan rejoiced that they locked horns with Germany. His glee soon turned to gloom: ‘Every military victory of the Nazis … casts us into melancholy.’ The fall of Paris elicited ‘weeping and wailing’. With his usual perspicacity Kaplan speculated that it might be better for the Jews if the Germans now finished off the war quickly. Italy’s entry into the war was a blow to those who still had a chance to emigrate because it meant that Italian ports were closed to them. Mary Berg’s mother made a desperate journey to Berlin to find a way out of Europe; it was too late.¹⁷⁵

However, the increasingly appalling conditions under which Jews languished were not simply the result of racial anti-Semitism or an intended policy outcome. Rather, they were a consequence of the strategic impasse in which Hitler found himself in the autumn of 1940. Policy towards the Jews, such as it was, stemmed from a succession of failures to find a way to remove Jews either from German living space or the Reich’s wider sphere of influence, failures that related directly to the course of the war and the ‘unconscious incompetence’ of the German military leadership.¹⁷⁶

At the end of July 1940, Hitler called his most senior commanders together at the Berghof. The Leader still considered an invasion of Britain, but meanwhile he entertained various alternatives. The Mediterranean option involved the conquest of Gibraltar and a drive on the Suez Canal in cooperation with Mussolini’s troops in Libya. Under blockade and cut off from the empire, Britain would then be forced to surrender. However, this plan required the compliance of Spain and the assistance of Vichy France, which still commanded significant naval assets. The continental option rested on Hitler’s conviction that Britain was staying in the fight in the hope that America would enter the fray or that Russia would attack Germany. He believed that a victorious assault on the Soviet Union would remove that hope. It would also free Japan to turn on America, depriving the British of succour from across the Atlantic. There was general agreement that, one way or another, Germany would end up in a showdown with the USSR and the United States. Over the next four months, Hitler explored all these angles.¹⁷⁷

He was frustrated at every turn. Franco was reluctant to commit Spain except at an impossibly exorbitant price: fuel, arms, weapons, and chunks of the French Empire in north and west Africa. Marshal Pétain was equally unwilling. Finally, Hitler travelled to Florence to confer with Mussolini, who had, in the meantime, launched an ill-judged invasion of Greece. Inadvertently this sucked Hitler into a version of the Mediterranean option, but without his full-blown commitment. Shortly afterwards, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, arrived in Berlin for talks. It was a fraught visit, punctuated by a British air raid that reminded his German hosts of their dilemma: Britain was still at war with Germany and Germany was still in an awkward strategic position. In July 1940, Stalin had seized Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania. Hitler was forced to concede this land-grab while he took on the British and the French. But it placed Soviet forces within striking distance of the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti, the only major source of mineral oil for the embattled Reich. By the autumn it seemed to Hitler that there was no alternative to confronting the Soviet Union. It was essential to push back the Red Army in order to protect the Ploesti oil region and, by defeating the USSR, remove Britain’s last potential ally on the continent. Furthermore, success would leave the Third Reich in control of limitless natural resources that would render Germany invulnerable to blockade and fully up to wrestling with America.¹⁷⁸

On 17 September 1940, Hitler postponed Operation Sealion; a month later the invasion was called off indefinitely. Instead, he instructed General Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, to prepare plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union to take place in May the following year. In Directive 21, issued on 18 December, Hitler announced his intention to ‘crush the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign’. He had, of course, always anticipated a Manichaean struggle with Jewish Bolshevism. Victory would not only eliminate the greatest threat to the Volk, indeed to mankind, it would also offer huge territories in which to settle the German people. And it offered a solution to the pressing question of what to do with the Jews.¹⁷⁹

Despite the secrecy attached to Operation Barbarossa, word of Hitler’s broad intentions percolated throughout the Nazi hierarchy. During November, Eichmann was working on a memorandum for Himmler summing up progress towards solving the Jewish problem. In the final version, dated 4 December 1940, he mentioned ‘the final solution of the Jewish question. Through resettlement of the Jews from the European economic sphere of the German Volk to a territory as yet to be determined.’ Theo Dannecker used a similar formula in a letter to Eichmann several weeks later and Eichmann repeated it at a meeting in the Reich Propaganda Ministry in March 1941. The precise location of the region ‘to be determined’ was hinted at in the record of a discussion that Heydrich had with Göring regarding areas of responsibility in the territories in the east that it was anticipated would soon fall under German control. Heydrich wanted to ensure that Alfred Rosenberg, who was designated to head a new ministry for the occupied eastern territories, was under no misunderstanding about who would be controlling Jewish affairs there.¹⁸⁰

At the same time as these decisions were being taken in Berlin, Arthur Greiser and Hans Frank were adjusting policy in the expectation that Jews would soon be removed from their provinces. In June 1940, Frank had been led to believe that the Jews dumped in his backyard would soon be shipped off to Madagascar. For this reason he suspended efforts to create a ghetto in Warsaw: why bother if the Jews were on the way out? Unfortunately for him nothing came of the Madagascar pipedream and, worse, in early 1941 Heydrich proposed a scheme to displace 1 million Poles into the General Government. To Frank’s relief, though, on 15 March 1941, Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, vetoed any further transports. This time the rationale was the anticipated removal of Jews to Siberia following the defeat of the Red Army. Between these dates, however, Greiser and Frank were forced to improvise ways to deal with the presence of huge, impoverished Jewish populations. These improvised measures had calamitous effects.¹⁸¹

At the end of July 1940, Greiser and the Higher SS Police Leader for the Wartheland, Wilhelm Koppe, met with Frank and the senior SS personnel in the General Government. Greiser sought Frank’s agreement to let him deport the Lodz Jews to the General Government because ‘it would be impossible to keep these Jews packed together in the ghetto over the winter’. Koppe added that ‘the situation regarding the Jews in the Warthegau worsens day by day’. They had only agreed to establish the ghetto in Lodz on the assumption that the Jews would be swept into the aborted Lublin reservation. But Frank refused to help out. For a while it looked as though Madagascar would provide an alternative, but by September that too resembled little more than a mirage. In the absence of any possibility to expel the Jews from Litzmannstadt (Lodz), Greiser adopted the approach pioneered by Biebow. This involved an extraordinary U-turn. On 19 September, the German city government approved a loan of 3 million Reichsmarks to keep the ghetto afloat. Without this, Rumkowski would have been unable to feed his workers or obtain the raw materials his workshops needed. The loan created an entirely new nexus between the ghetto and the city, the Jews and the Germans. A month later Greiser and Übelhör signalled that Rumkowski could enlarge his workshops. He responded by creating a Central Bureau of Factories, devoted in part to scrounging equipment from Jewish communities that were being liquidated elsewhere in the Wartheland. During the course of the year production inside the ghetto broadened to underwear, furs, leather goods, wooden and metal items, brushes and electrical components. Although private contractors established firms in the ghetto, such as the Josef Neckermann Underwear and Clothing Factory, the bulk of orders came from the German army. By September 1941, the ghetto was producing 2.5 million items of clothing for the military.¹⁸²

Over 5,000 Jews worked for the Jewish council, known as the Beirat. This sprawling organization had a multitude of agencies dealing with finance (including rent collection), food and fuel provision, rationing, the allocation of labour, welfare, education, policing and justice. It included a statistical and records bureau (also responsible from January 1941 for keeping a chronicle of events), a fire department and a post office. The housing department was responsible for running tenements and also finding accommodation for Jews displaced into Lodz from other towns and, later, Jews deported to the ghetto from western Europe. All these offices carried perks, most immediately the immunity to forced labour outside the ghetto. Beirat employees usually worked indoors in heated rooms and were assigned higher rations than other workers. Above all, employees of the Beirat had connections that offered them a degree of security and all sorts of opportunities for private enrichment at the expense of fellow Jews.¹⁸³

One of the most important branches of the administration was the Order Service formed at the start of May 1940. Often called the ghetto police, the Order Service (OS) was intended to do what its name suggested rather than carry out the roles normally associated with a police force – that is, prevention and detection of crime. As Rumkowski explained: ‘On the basis entrusted to me, I have established an Order Service Guard for the protection of the Jewish population and for the maintenance of calm and order.’ Rumkowski called on the Jewish population ‘to be strictly obedient to the Order Service and to obey their commands unconditionally. Acts of resistance and contravention will be punished.’ He expected the Order Service men, who reached a maximum of 530 officers and other ranks, to ‘behave calmly and politely towards the public’.¹⁸⁴

Rumkowski set out to create an equal society inside the ghetto by regulating labour, income, rationing, housing and providing welfare services for everyone. He contrasted his regime with that in Warsaw where Adam Czerniaków presided over a laissez-faire system that, Rumkowski claimed, encouraged extremes of wealth and poverty, leading to high rates of mortality. In fact, due to incompetence and corruption, the Beirat manufactured inequality. Once word reached the ghetto about the atrocious conditions in the forced labour camps dotted across the Wartheland, only the most desperate men volunteered to meet the weekly and sometimes daily requisitions for workers. Around 40 per cent of men summoned simply failed to turn up while 10 per cent bought a substitute to take their place. The ability of rich or well-connected Jews to buy their way out of forced labour caused resentment and cast a shadow over the Beirat’s reputation, but Rumkowski needed the revenue. The forced labourers were paid so badly that the Beirat expended RM1 million on subsidies for their dependants. Hence, only the poorest and most vulnerable marched out of the ghetto to toil on drainage projects, railways, road building and forestry. Few of the labour camps had medical facilities and rations were even worse than in the ghetto. Those who were injured or fell sick were often shot. Almost none of the 12,000 sent out to work ever returned. Eventually, Rumkowski deployed the Order Service to seize men for labour. He also used the manpower requisitions ruthlessly as a means to get rid of people he considered troublemakers.¹⁸⁵

The provisioning system was equally open to manipulation and unfairness. In June 1940, Rumkowski introduced a ghetto currency (called ‘mark-receipts’) and prohibited use of the Reichsmark and Polish zlotys. The idea was to allow the Beirat to calibrate wages, rents and the cost of food to what the ghetto was earning as a whole and eliminate inequalities based on savings. In conjunction with control of the currency, the Beirat attempted to regulate the importation and consumption of food. For a period there was a mixed economy combining an official ration with a number of sanctioned food outlets under private ownership, at which people could purchase whatever they could afford. Private restaurants co-existed alongside soup kitchens. Unfortunately, so many people lacked the means to purchase what they were permitted under the rationing system that almost half the population were eating less than their entitlement. Meanwhile, the cost of supplying free meals to the poor, to schools and hospitals was rocketing. At the end of 1940, the Beirat took over the entire food supply and distribution network. Everyone now had to purchase ration cards and pay for their food and meals. The Provisioning Department ended up controlling seventy public kitchens in tenements and workshops, plus over a dozen private establishments. The Beirat expended more than RM16 million on food in 1940.¹⁸⁶

But this was only half the story. The Germans ordained that in terms of calories each Jew would be entitled to roughly what a prisoner of war could expect. In reality, the delivery of food was erratic and the quality was often poor. Inside the ghetto the Beirat established a nutritional hierarchy that penalized the non-working population. Senior administrative workers and those employed by the Beirat in heavy tasks such as waste removal, along with skilled workers, received the most. Other Beirat employees, Order Service personnel, fire fighters and factory workers were awarded a lesser basic ration but were entitled to various supplements such as meat and sausage when they were available. Factory workers could also buy meals in their workplace. Children got specially concocted cheap meals and those who were sick were prescribed restorative foods. The unemployed had to survive on the basic ration. This amounted to around 1,000 calories per day. In optimal circumstances, those in work could hope to get about twice as much. However, since a normal human being working during the day requires approximately 3,000 calories to maintain their health and 2,400 is the minimum needed to survive, even the most privileged in the community were starving.¹⁸⁷

The consequence of overcrowding, poor sanitation and undernourishment was a soaring rate of mortality. According to the statistical office, 6,197 inhabitants died in 1940, 11,378 in 1941 and 18,134 in 1942. The chief killers were dysentery, typhus and tuberculosis – all of which were easily avoidable in normal times. They struck in seasonal cycles. Dysentery was most severe in the summer and was aggravated because the Germans made it difficult to remove faecal waste or contain it safely. Even the Germans recognized this danger. Mayor Werner Ventzki wrote to Übelhör in November 1941, ‘The hygienic facilities in the ghetto are as pitiful as one can only imagine … So if due to the density of the population an epidemic breaks out, it will be a danger not only for the ghetto population but to the city.’ What the Germans most feared was typhus, the original pretext for the enclosure of the Jewish residential quarter. Typically typhus struck in the spring and raged until summer. It ravaged the most abject, the young and the old. Tuberculosis, which was related to malnutrition and overcrowding, was the next most predominant killer. Jews arriving from small communities and ghettos often brought diseases with them and were more prone to die than the indigenous population, which had better access to medical care and nutrition. German Jews sent to the ghetto, mostly elderly, had very poor life expectancy. Jews from Vienna and Prague managed better, partly thanks to their knowledge of Yiddish and their ability to find their way around faster. Isaiah Trunk, historian of the ghetto, estimated that overall between May 1940 and August 1944, 43,800 people died, when the normal mortality over this period ought not to have exceeded 5,100 souls. Ultimately one third of the ghetto population perished due to the conditions imposed by the Germans.¹⁸⁸

The Beirat’s health department struggled to improve hygiene and control epidemics. It ran several hospitals with up to 2,000 beds and nearly 200 doctors. But it was hamstrung by a terrible shortage of medicine and equipment. Rumkowski also tried to protect the most vulnerable through the establishment of special institutions: an orphanage, a home for the aged, and a summer camp in the less densely populated Marysin quarter where youngsters with TB could spend a couple of weeks inhaling relatively fresh air and enjoying sunshine.¹⁸⁹

Poverty and relentless toil bore down on the health of the family as much as the welfare of individuals. Round-ups and deportations for forced labour had so skewed the gender balance in the ghetto that by the end of 1940 there were almost 50 per cent more women than men. Thousands of wives and mothers not only had to care for their families alone, they had to work to feed them. Absent fathers and working mothers meant that children were often left unsupervised during the day. Gangs of juveniles roamed the ghetto looking for food and getting up to mischief. Even when husbands and fathers remained in the ghetto they were very likely to be unemployed and unable to provide for their families. Youngsters lost respect for parents who could not house, clothe or feed them adequately; mealtimes became an ordeal of humiliation and helplessness that could tear families apart. Some young people chose to leave and forage for themselves, existing on the margins of legality. Unsurprisingly, the birth rate plummeted. Apart from the undesirability of bringing new life into such a ghastly place, men were frequently rendered impotent by exhaustion, malnutrition and illness while women ceased menstruating for the same reasons. The Jewish family was dying, too.¹⁹⁰

Social solidarity in the ghetto all but collapsed as pre-war class formations and the ties that accompanied them evaporated. The bourgeoisie were stripped of their comforts and shared culture; Jewish workers were wrenched out of the secure employment on which collective action rested. A nouveau riche class appeared that inverted former class relations. In a crazy reversal of fortunes the residents and owners of slum properties in the Baluty district suddenly became property magnates, able to let rooms at exorbitant rates. The criminal element who knew the district intimately had the edge over the newcomers and the Order Service. Intellectuals and pre-war politicians found themselves marginalized; Rumkowski had no wish to debate policy with sensitive souls or men who felt they had to respond to popular feeling. During July 1940 Bund activists and members of Poale Zion (the labour Zionist Party) channelled unrest against the paucity of food supplies and the inadequate ration for those without means. On 10–11 August hundreds gathered in front of the Beirat shouting, ‘We want bread, we’re dying from hunger.’ When the numbers grew too large for the Order Service to disperse them with rubber truncheons and batons, Rumkowski notified the Germans. A unit of order police with rifles made short work of the protest. Although Rumkowski publicly denounced the ‘irresponsible elements that want to bring agitation into our life’ a few days later he held private talks with workers’ representatives and made significant concessions. He faced another strike wave in December 1940, this time by ghetto employees. Rumkowski now felt much stronger and denounced the strikers as ‘criminals’. He had the leaders arrested and sent to labour camps.¹⁹¹

Rumkowski may have developed a dictatorial streak, but he took huge pride in Jewish education and for as long as possible defended schooling in the ghetto. During 1940 and 1941, the Jewish administration devoted significant resources to the education of children and vocational training. The ghetto maintained no less than forty-five elementary schools attended by 6,263 children, with two religious schools, one secular institution and a college for teaching crafts. Of the 7,336 children receiving full-time education, three-quarters got free meals. The schools also provided employment for teachers and instructors. Rumkowski encouraged them to foster a ‘national spirit’, using Yiddish as well as teaching Hebrew and Judaism. Dawid Sierakowiak was one of those who benefited from Rumkowski’s commitment to education. While men were being registered for forced labour and sent out of the ghetto, he was attending the Zionist-run school in Marysin.¹⁹²

Rumkowski also saw the value of cultural activity, as long as it was carefully regulated. Musical performances, dramatic productions, poetry readings sprang up spontaneously, often in connection with the soup kitchens, where they provided entertainment and a moment of escapism. The Bund supported a Yiddish cultural society that promoted lectures and concerts, until Rumkowski shut it down in March 1941 as part of his drive against political parties, dissidents and ‘troublemakers’. Instead, the Beirat labour department mounted concerts and revues at the grandly named House of Culture. The influx of Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia brought with it an accession of talented artists. In 1941 there were one hundred concerts. The Beirat employed artists to adorn official reports and statistical presentations. It also maintained a library: the most popular books were classics in Polish and German. The Polish translation of François Mauriac’s life of Disraeli was one of the most frequently borrowed volumes.¹⁹³

While he was not religious himself, Rumkowski defended Sabbath and festival observance and made immense efforts to ensure that there was appropriate food to celebrate the Jewish high holy days. The Beirat employed several rabbis, notably in the Cemetery Department, and maintained a rabbinical court comprised of ten distinguished local rabbis plus five who arrived with the Jews from western Europe. The Germans, however, targeted religious Jews and Jewish observance relentlessly. They routinely forced Jews to work on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish ritual calendar, and after 1942 compelled them to observe Sunday as a day of rest. In addition to banning Kashrut, they forbade the wearing of beards, side-curls and traditional dress. Many religious Jews conformed to these prohibitions, but others resisted. A group of Orthodox Jews, called the B’nei Horeb, ran study circles and offered private lessons to children. One religious association campaigned, in vain, against the consumption of non-kosher food; another devoted itself to fixing mezuzot on the doorposts of homes and institutions. There was a society that offered free bread and coffee for Jews prepared to make the blessings and observe the rituals before eating.¹⁹⁴

Only the most resolute could withstand the pressure to abandon tradition. The rabbinical court granted exemptions on the consumption of non-kosher food and relaxed the regulations concerning marriage to enable women whose husbands disappeared into the labour camps to remarry. Josef Zelkowicz, a Yiddish author who came from a Hassidic background, charted the decay of religiosity with an unflinching eye. In one story, he sketched the fate of a Hassidic rebbe whose followers gradually deserted him: ‘when life became cruel and pitiless and the soul froze and atrophied inside the body, the Hassidim forgot about their rebbe … Instead of dreaming about “Torah”, they dreamed about “flour”.’¹⁹⁵

Observers noted the dramatic erosion of moral standards in the ghetto: crime was endemic, almost always centred on foodstuffs. Those in the food supply chain practised fraud, adulterating and short-weighting the produce that passed though their hands. Gangs of youngsters and starving men raided shops, warehouses and wagons. There were murders for food. In one case a Hassid killed a thirteen-year-old girl to get her ration coupons. During the winter of 1940–1, Jews also stole combustible material, sallying out after nightfall to rip apart fences and entire wooden buildings to fuel stoves and cookers. Although extreme hunger was the chief motor of criminality, Zelkowicz attributed the pervasive moral degeneration to the brutish conditions of life. ‘Grave crimes were committed in the ghetto. The gravest of them was the transformation of people who had worked for decades to maintain their culture and ways, the fruits of millennia of efforts, into predatory beasts after half a year of life under inhuman conditions. Overnight they were stripped of every sense of morality and shame. Ghetto inhabitants pilfered and stole at every opportunity whether they needed the booty or not. Some rummaged in the trash like pigs for leftovers, which they ate there and then. Some starved and died, but others exploiting the opportunities available to them stole, pilfered, gorged themselves, and drank themselves silly.’¹⁹⁶

The crime wave grew so severe that in January 1941 Rumkowski set up a summary court; after three months its chairman was arrested for corruption. The Order Service referred the most heinous offences, such as murder and rape, to the German criminal police, who maintained a post inside the ghetto. Lesser infractions were handled internally and could carry a custodial sentence; the Order Service maintained a prison for such malefactors. In March 1941 this establishment held 200 Jews on various charges, although many of them were ‘troublemakers’ who had crossed Rumkowski rather than felons. According to Zelkowicz the real law breakers escaped justice. ‘Managers of the food shops had the very best victuals – meant for the entire population – sent to their homes with the mediation of their lackeys in the Kehilla [Beirat]. To make up the shortfall that their pilfering created, they cheated their “customers” on weights. The supervisors of the summary-justice courts left these pirates and thieves, who controlled the ghetto streets, untouched and unaccountable for their crimes.’ Vice and promiscuity were equally rampant. The OS had a special unit to combat prostitution although it turned a blind eye to the prevalence of mistresses attached to members of the Beirat.¹⁹⁷

The winter of 1940–1 was particularly cruel for the inhabitants of the ghetto. In January a group of pre-war writers, poets and academics began recording daily events for an official chronicle, collecting documents and conducting research. The first entry stated baldly: ‘Today 52 people died in the ghetto. The principal cause of death was heart disease, followed by exhaustion from hunger and cold with tuberculosis in a third place.’ Thefts continued but the Order Service itself was restive over wages, fuel and food supply. The authors of the chronicle wrote under the patronage of the Elder of the Ghetto and in danger of examination by the Germans, so they employed Aesopian techniques to disguise their real meaning. But the facts spoke for themselves. Over the next three days, for example, the fuel shortage worsened, food deliveries were erratic, there was a three-day ‘backlog’ for burials, and a starving mob attempted to loot a turnip wagon.¹⁹⁸

In a desperate attempt to increase rations for the population as a whole, Rumkowski ordered a reduction of the allocation for skilled workers. The cut led to protests by militant carpentry workers that culminated in the occupation of the joinery workshops. After negotiations failed Rumkowski sent in the Order Service. The carpenters were locked out of their shops, condemning them to starvation, and the ringleaders arrested. At the end of the month the strike was broken. When food protests recurred in March 1941, the chronicle recorded: ‘Chairman Rumkowski made it known that he is bringing the most rigorous of methods to bear against individuals who impede him in his work, the criminal element in particular; that is, malefactors and notorious criminals, and thieves of public property are being ousted from the ghetto and sent to do manual labour in Germany.’¹⁹⁹

Throughout April, transports left Lodz for labour camps. Sierakowiak commented with relief that ‘All the letters that arrive from those sent out for labour assure us about satiety there.’ The ghetto inhabitants were not to know, but the deployment of Jewish labour was connected with the build-up of German forces in preparation for the assault on the Soviet Union. Ironically, the voracity of the German armed forces as they geared up for the invasion acted as a tonic on the ghetto economy: orders poured in. In May 1941 Greiser toured the factories with an entourage of officials and journalists. On 7 June the ghetto received an even more illustrious visitor: Himmler. The entire population was placed under curfew while the Reichsführer-SS went to the German ghetto administration in Baluty Square and then inspected a clothing enterprise. The new mayor of Litzmannstadt, Karl Marder, reflected that since the decision in the previous October not to dissolve the ghetto it had evolved into ‘a significant element in the economic system’. German attitudes were transformed not just by the benefits that the ghetto brought to the Reich; one of Eichmann’s men, based in Poznan, insinuated that ‘Übelhör … does not favour the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto because it gives him an opportunity to earn a great deal of money.’²⁰⁰

Although more Jews gained employment the food situation remained dire throughout spring 1941. The ghetto was shocked by the case of a father who concealed the rotting body of his dead child in order to collect the infant’s ration; but this was far from an isolated case. People driven to the edge by starvation, unable to sell anything or earn money, committed suicide by throwing themselves off the bridge that crossed the Aryans-only road bisecting the ghetto. By a supreme effort, Rumkowski secured flour to produce matzoh for the Passover festival although other basic foods were perilously short. Sierakowiak noted sardonically, ‘Our holiday starvation will be identical to what we experienced every other day of the week.’ He had secured a job in a warehouse, weighing out turnips, and was able to monitor the ‘system of connections employed by the people doing the weighing to favour clerks and other parasites’. Things improved in early summer and Rumkowski was able to arrange an extra ration of bread for the festival of Shavuot. However, as the German army reached its maximum strength it sucked up supplies, leaving Poles and Jews with the scrapings. Quite literally: one shipment of flour consisted of the detritus swept off the floor of a flour mill. In August 1941, according to the chronicle, ‘a freight car of meat arrived in the ghetto. It had been travelling for three days. The meat was covered with worms.’ Ghetto food experts tried to salvage what they could, but only succeeded in triggering a wave of food poisoning. To Zelkowicz the apt symbol of the ghetto was not barbed wire or the yellow star: ‘The symbol of the ghetto is the pot.’ All people could think about was the ache in their stomachs and where they could find something to eat. The death rate soared again, overwhelming the cemetery department. ‘Decent people bury their dogs with greater dignity than the people of the ghetto are buried’, he despaired.²⁰¹

Amidst this horror children continued to attend school. At the end of the final term, 700 high-school students sat their examinations. The soup kitchen for the intelligentsia managed to provide up to 1,000 meals per day, offering those ‘who are today déclassé and pauperized … a clean and well-set table … and, finally, pleasant surroundings and good company’. Although the political opposition to Rumkowski was cowed by the arrests and deportations in March–April 1941, groups continued to meet covertly. Dawid Sierakowiak had begun reading Marx and Lenin and considered himself a communist; he attended a meeting of his ‘union’ and remarked that ‘we’ve become a committed element of the political movement in the ghetto’. On May Day he joined a celebration at which a communist teacher ‘pointed out the need to hold out and survive the ghetto. She spoke of being ready to act and fight.’ A month later, two communist teachers were fired by Rumkowski, that ‘sadist-moron’.²⁰²

Dawid was buoyed up by letters from a friend in Warsaw and by news about the war. The ghetto was not cut off from the outside world. Indeed, it had one of the busiest post offices in Poland. In March 1941 it handled a million letters and postcards, 135,000 parcels from the Reich, and over 14,000 from other countries. The parcels often contained food that supplied the ghetto’s black economy. One of the major informal currencies was tobacco. That month smokers were gratified by the delivery of 1.5 million cigarettes. By mid-1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, Jews and Germans had developed a lopsided rapprochement underpinned by rational self-interest. In the short term the invasion would lead to an improvement in conditions in Warsaw as in Lodz.²⁰³

In the Warsaw ghetto

Warsaw Jewry avoided full ghettoization until November 1940. Indeed, the period from mid-May to mid-August was marked by vacillation and confusion amongst the city’s German rulers. On 10 June work was completed on the barrier around the Jewish residential district, but at the start of July the SS officer who liaised with Czerniaków told him that the war would soon be over and that the Jews ‘would all leave for Madagascar’. A fortnight later, Czerniaków heard that the Germans had abandoned the idea of a ghetto. In fact, German planners had returned to the notion of a closed Jewish quarter but had given up the idea of locating it on the city outskirts. During August they published details of the quarter where Jews would be permitted to live and sent a delegation to Lodz to see how it was done there. Czerniaków noted in mid-September, ‘The project of the ghetto outside Warsaw has been abandoned. In its place the Sperrgebiet.’ (This was the area previously demarcated off-limits to Germans and Poles on health grounds.) Waldemar Schön, the director of the Resettlement Office, reasoned that in addition to the necessity of separating Aryans from Jews, a closed residential district was essential for health reasons and to prevent Jews draining the city’s food supply. In theory segregating the Jews would cut their access to the black market, depress prices and release food for the Polish population to consume.²⁰⁴

The proposed Jewish living area was significantly smaller than the quarantine zone and Czerniaków haggled over every street and building. On the eve of the holy day marking the Jewish New Year, 2 October 1940, Ludwig Fischer, the district governor, decreed that Jews had until the end of the month to move into the Jewish district; conversely, Poles had to relocate over the same period. He also issued instructions to Czerniaków to establish an Order Service. Nothing, though, could avoid the chaos that ensued when 138,000 Jews who were obliged to leave their homes moved in, while 113,000 Poles moved out. The disruption was so severe that the Germans agreed to extend the deadline by two weeks. On 16 November, the ghetto was sealed. From this point Jews would need permits to enter or exit through one of the twenty-two gates (later reduced to thirteen) that were guarded on the outside by German order police and Polish policemen. The German contingent consisted of one lieutenant and eighty-seven other ranks: from their point of view it was an extraordinarily efficient use of manpower. When the ghetto was finally severed from the outside world it covered 452 acres and was surrounded by 11 miles of wall. About 395,000 Jews were confined within, an average of 128,000 per square kilometre. Because only 375 acres were covered by residential buildings the density of population was actually greater than this equation suggests, with 9.2 people per room. Thirty per cent of Warsaw’s population was jammed into less than 2.5 per cent of the city’s area. Yet the Germans constantly decanted more Jews into the ghetto from surrounding districts and, eventually, deportees from the Reich. They also periodically excised streets and blocks, reducing the availability of housing still further.²⁰⁵

In terms of numbers, the movement into the ghetto was roughly equivalent to merging the Jewish population of the Netherlands into the Jewish population of France. The population exchange was made even more anarchic by the ghetto’s shifting boundaries. Sometimes Jews had to move two or three times because the building they went to was re-zoned. Czerniaków was himself caught up in the confusion, spending several days looking for accommodation for himself and his wife. Helena and Stanislaw Szereszewska made their move weeks earlier, possibly anticipating the dénouement because Stanislaw was so well connected. They located a three-room, bomb-damaged flat, which they occupied along with their daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law, and his mother and sister. Thanks to the wealth they managed to salvage they had the services of a Polish maid for several months, and a Jewish maid thereafter. The gas and electricity meters continued to be read by a Polish municipal employee until June 1942. But the Szereszewska family belonged to the aristocracy of the ghetto. Stanislaw ran the Welfare Department of the Jewish council and went to work each day with starched shirt and clean collar. Their youngest daughter and son-in-law worked for the Jewish council, too; their niece was married to an Order Service man. Less fortunate people repeatedly begged Helena to help them get jobs. Mary Berg’s family had the good fortune to find accommodation on Sienna Street, one of the best thoroughfares assigned to the ghetto (although eventually it would be switched to the Aryan side). Nevertheless, they too were joined by other family members and sub-let a room.²⁰⁶

For most Jews the formation of the ghetto was a nightmare. Large numbers clung to their homes until the last minute in the hope that the edict would be suspended. When there was no miracle, Bernard Goldstein recalled, ‘Everywhere there was wild panic, unashamed hysterical terror. People ran frantically through the streets, a deathly fear unmistakable in their grim, weary eyes. They searched desperately for any kind of conveyance to transport their belongings. The multitude filled the streets, a nation on the march. Long, long lines of little carts and all sorts of makeshift vehicles heaped with household possessions, wailing children, the old, the sick, the half dead, moved from all directions towards the ghetto, pulled or led by the stronger and healthier, who plodded along, tearful, despairing, bewildered.’ In the precincts of the ghetto, ‘the unfortunate hunted for living quarters, an apartment, a room, a corner of a room, anything. They searched the cellars, the hallways, the rubble of bombed-out buildings, for a place to lay their heads or shelter their children. They lay on the streets or roamed through the gutters, soaked by the rain, shivering from the cold, hungry, worn-out, helpless.’²⁰⁷

Jews watched the wall being completed and wondered what it would mean. Mary Berg heard some people express approval because the wall would insulate Jews from raids by Poles and Germans. Stanislaw Adler, a lawyer who had returned to Warsaw from Soviet-ruled eastern Poland, noticed that many Jews, fed up with assaults by Volksdeutsche, ‘hoped for improved conditions once they were assembled in a closed quarter’. Chaim Kaplan, Zionist and champion of Orthodoxy, greeted the ghetto decree with satisfaction: ‘They have segregated us as a separate ethnic group, and this separation has made us into a nation, living alone with all its cultural, literary and artistic attributes.’ He changed his tune when he confronted the perils of extreme congestion. ‘There is no filthier place capable of spreading contagious diseases, than a Jewish trolley on a single ride, where everyone is infected, where sick people sweat and slobber on you.’ As he digested the implications he was gripped by apprehension. ‘A closed ghetto means death by starvation in a concentration camp with inhuman living conditions.’ The influx of people was stupefying: ‘There is no room in the ghetto – not an empty crack, not an unoccupied hole.’ The Jewish council tried to get a grip on the crisis, calling on house and building committees to supply information about any spare accommodation. However, rents soared and so did the cost of food. As soon as Jews were cut off from the free market, shortages occurred and prices rose. Kaplan’s hopes for Jewish self-government had turned into a sick, disastrous parody. ‘Polish Jewry’, he lamented, ‘has been destroyed.’²⁰⁸

The number of ghetto inhabitants fluctuated over the following year. Tens of thousands left (usually unwillingly) to perform forced labour and tens of thousands died. Meanwhile, 130,000 refugees were forced in. The ghetto reached its peak population of 445,000 in April 1941. Feeding, housing and finding employment for this mass of humanity was insuperable. Initially, the Germans had no interest in the ghetto developing any kind of economy to generate jobs and revenue. To the contrary, the forced relocation of population had produced mass unemployment by tearing artisans away from their ateliers, depriving them of raw materials, and cutting them off from their markets. The Jewish council desperately tried to reconstruct the Jewish economy inside the ghetto, scraping together or cannibalizing machinery to form workshops and recycling anything that could be used for raw material. German perceptions changed during 1940, partly due to the transfer of forces eastwards and the possibility of production for the military. Towards the end of the year the establishment of the Transferstelle under Alexander Palfinger and army demand for carpentry, brushes, and clothing began to exert a positive effect.²⁰⁹

With the preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the General Government became a vast military base area and transport hub. Suddenly Hans Frank, who as Governor-General of the Occupied Territories had responsibility for their well-being, could see value in the ghetto. In January 1941 he convened a meeting to explore ways to harness production to the war effort and increase output. The new policy resulted in a certain liberalization of the regime, allowing for the opening of synagogues and schools. The advent of Heinz Auerswald as commissioner for the Jewish district in May 1941 further transformed the district’s economy. The Transferstelle was removed from the resettlement department and attached to the office of the new commissioner. Auerswald appointed Max Bischoff, who had gained experience in Lodz, to manage its operations in a commercial spirit. Under Bischoff, the Transferstelle was turned from a provisioning agency into an import/export business, seeking orders, purchasing raw materials, and handling financial transactions. The Germans actually set up a clearing bank, later utilizing a branch of the Polish Cooperative Bank. German entrepreneurs and businessmen gravitated to the Jewish district, many acting independently of the Transferstelle. Thirty factories were established inside the ghetto, with eighty-five smaller firms and no less than 1,900 businesses. However, throughout 1941 the ghetto failed to break even. It cost the Jewish council 12.6 million zlotys per month to feed the inhabitants, but the most it earned monthly was 1.2 million zlotys. While 45,000 Jews were employed in productive enterprises this was only two thirds of the number needed to generate sufficient revenue to cover the council’s expenditure. Furthermore, the Germans continued to exert a stranglehold over the food supply. The result of the persistent shortfall was a crippled Jewish council and a catastrophic nutritional deficit.²¹⁰

Immediately following the announcement of the ghetto, Adam Czerniaków summoned a meeting of the Jewish council and appointed commissions to handle housing, the economy and establishment of the Order Service. The council, housed at 26 Grzybowska Street, mutated into a quasi-government, but with little money and limited authority. It had twenty-six departments covering finance, labour, trade and production, provisioning, housing, welfare, health, education, internal policing, sanitation and the postal service. Like Lodz, Warsaw was connected to the outside world by mail. In May 1941, the postal service received 114,000 letters (including telegrams and money orders) and dispatched 29,000 postcards. That month 113,000 packages arrived, mostly food parcels that provided sustenance for families and specialities that could be sold to delicatessens. One peculiar feature of the ghetto was the role played by the municipality, which continued to supply the Jews with water, electricity and gas. The council had to negotiate separately with Polish officials responsible for these services and hundreds of city employees were given permits to move in and out. These meter-readers and maintenance men frequently acted as couriers for information and were a mainstay of smuggling. Czerniaków thus had to deal with a host of Polish and German bureaucrats, but he was ultimately answerable to the security police and the Jewish office of the Gestapo. While steering between these agencies, with their conflicting priorities, he had to manage the demand for forced labour, oversee the ghetto institutions and raise funds.²¹¹

Czerniaków, who could not speak Yiddish and was not particularly observant, favoured Polonized Jews and converts for senior roles in his administration. At best, such men had useful connections on the outside, but beneath the patina of sophistication they were often incompetent and lacked empathy with the Jewish masses. Kaplan complained that ‘Strangers in our midst, foreign to our spirit, Sons of Ham who trample on our heads, the president of the Judenrat and his advisers are muscle men who were put on our backs by strangers. Most of them are nincompoops no one knew in normal times. They were never elected and would not have dared dream of being elected Jewish representatives.’ Kaplan derided Czerniaków personally: ‘Who paid any attention to some unknown engineer, a nincompoop among nincompoops, who was an assimilationist not for ideological reasons but for utilitarian purposes.’ Stanislaw Adler was rather more respectful. He viewed Czerniaków as ‘a man of crystal clear character but weak convictions’. The council chairman could be indecisive and verbose and was ‘easily impressed by people who were ready to undertake action even if they had questionable ethical standards’. Like Rumkowski, Czerniaków became less and less tolerant of debate and dissent. In April 1941 Ringelblum grumbled that ‘The Jewish council has adopted the old Czarist slogan: “Keep quiet. Don’t argue.” No discussion is permitted at any of their meetings and certainly no questions.’ Czerniakow was ‘regarded as an idol. His edicts are not to be questioned: his word is command.’ It smacked of the ‘Führer principle’. Yet no one doubted the chairman’s courage. In February 1940 he was offered an emigration certificate for Palestine, but chose to stay with his people. He had contempt for members of the elite who got out when they had the chance. More than once he was detained and beaten. And he was no youngster: Czerniaków went through one such ordeal just a few days before his sixtieth birthday.²¹²

Yet conditions in the ghetto were not only attributable to German malice and the impossible economic situation; some of the suffering was self-imposed, the result of decisions made by Jews. In August 1940, the labour department was compelled to supply the Germans with 1,000 men per week; by November 30,000 were slaving for the Germans. The news that trickled back from camps in the Lublin area was so dismal that the council sent doctors and truckloads of food and clothing. Meanwhile, the welfare department had to maintain 70,000–80,000 dependants in the ghetto. To avoid alienating the rich and to cover this huge expenditure, Czerniaków allowed those with means to buy substitutes. So the rigours and brutality of the labour camps fell most heavily on the poor. Rather than impose a tax on personal wealth, he chose to use indirect taxes on consumables that everyone had to purchase regardless of their income. Again, this imposed the heaviest burden on those least able to afford it. Basic services such as waste removal were subcontracted to entrepreneurs who got rich through smuggling. Finally, he relied on voluntary payments by the well-off and self-taxation from the house and building committees to support welfare and health services. His laissez-faire approach was a recipe for confusion, corruption and inequity.²¹³

When the Order Service was launched it claimed an exalted mission and was able to pick and choose from the cream of the ghetto, mainly lawyers and middle-class men. Many of its senior personnel, though, were Polonized Jews and several were refugees from Lodz. They knew the Order Service there but felt no particular bond with Warsovians. To run the service, Czerniaków selected Jozef Szerynski, an ex-colonel of the Polish police who brought experience and the promise of close cooperation with the Poles. But Szerynski was a Catholic convert and quickly earned the hatred of the ghetto. His force started with 1,000 patrolmen, plus an administrative organization of several hundred, reaching a peak of 2,500 in July 1942. Its first tasks were escorting labour columns to and from the ghetto, patrolling the streets to regulate vehicle traffic and pedestrians, and preventing petty crime. It also enforced sanitation regulations and quarantined buildings where typhus was detected. One unit kept order in the Jewish council building and another maintained a prison. Order Service men manned the ghetto gates, which handed them a key part in smuggling. Although the service was awarded good rations and had access to health care, its members did not receive pay. Inevitably, they started exploiting their activity to earn money. In addition to facilitating smuggling for a cut of the profits, they took bribes from men evading forced labour.²¹⁴

When they first appeared on the street, the Order Service men caused Jewish hearts to beat faster. Mary Berg experienced ‘a strange and utterly illogical feeling of satisfaction when I see a Jewish policeman at a crossing’. Even the usually sceptical Kaplan was charmed by the sight: ‘The residents of the ghetto are beginning to think they are in Tel Aviv. Strong bona fide policemen from among our brothers, to whom you can speak in Yiddish! First of all it comes as a godsend to the street vendor. The fear of the Gentile police is gone from their faces. A Jewish policeman, a man of humane sensibilities – one of our own brothers would not turn over their baskets or trample their wares.’ However, Stanislaw Adler, who joined up to avoid labour service, saw the force from the inside and quickly gained a different impression. Although he was asked to draw up a legal code governing the operation of the force he received no remuneration; he had to sell his belongings to survive. Adler saw other servicemen in the same position resort to partnerships with smuggling gangs, Poles and Jews, passing entire truckloads of contraband through the ghetto gates for a generous fee. This illicit activity ‘badly demoralized the Order Service. Large and uncontrolled incomes allowed many to lead debauched and corrupted lives. Against a background of universal impoverishment and misery, this contemptible conduct resulted in a macabre effect and it helped to erect a barrier not only of loathing, but of absolute hatred between them and the rest of the population.’ The rot started at the top: Czerniaków left Szerynski to run his department and Szerynski used this autonomy to appoint cronies. Since none of the department heads or district chiefs had an adequate budget, private initiative was at a premium, blending institutional priorities with personal gain. As decent men left the service they were replaced by opportunists and criminals.²¹⁵

To complicate the administration of law and order, a separate anti-smuggling unit, the Office to Prevent Profiteering and Speculation, was set up by the German security police in late 1940. Dubbed ‘The Thirteen’ because it operated out of 13 Leszno Street, it consisted of 300–400 men under Abraham Gancwajch. They were mostly not from Warsaw and a fair number were recruited from the criminal fraternity. Gancwajch set out to undermine Czerniaków by setting up and funding a rival network of welfare agencies. A long power struggle ensued between his shady outfit and the Jewish council until the Gestapo tired of its creature and dissolved it in mid-1941. The Thirteen was reputed to include Gestapo agents, although according to Rabbi Huberband, from the first instance the ghetto was ‘flooded with a huge number of informers, collaborators, blackmailers and thieves’. The porters who helped Jews to move in would frequently lead Germans to the homes and stashes of the wealthy. Carpenters who built hidden spaces to contain jewellery ‘were well paid for such work. But in many cases they informed on the wealthy Jews.’²¹⁶

Unemployment, inadequate rations, hunger and swarms of refugees led to begging, crime and even cannibalism. Of 173,000 inhabitants of working age only half had anything like a job: 50,000 worked in manufacturing, 18,000 eked out a living from commerce, mostly street trading, while 9,600 were employed by the Jewish council, including 3,000 in the Order Service. The Jewish council issued the population with ration cards to cover staple items: flour, sugar, potatoes, kasha, marmalade, bread, soap and matches. But unless they were destitute, ghetto residents had to pay a tax on their ration cards. In January 1941, 20 per cent were exempted from paying this impost, finally reaching 140,000 in October 1941. By this time 34 per cent of Jews in the ghetto were so poverty-stricken they could not even afford to purchase ration cards. The only way to survive was by getting supplementary meals or by purchasing food on the black market, which led to grotesque inequalities. Ultimately, this life-sapping deficiency stemmed from the Germans’ refusal to supply the ghetto with anything like adequate provisions and the council’s inability to purchase more through the Transferstelle. It was worsened by the uneven rate of food deliveries, which depended on the whim of the Germans, but it was aggravated by adulteration and cheating by the food handlers inside the ghetto.²¹⁷

The paucity of rations forced Jews onto the black market, the motor that propelled smuggling. The chief conduits for contraband were municipal employees and labourers who went to and from the ghetto each day, specialist gangs and children. Workers employed outside the ghetto purchased produce and concealed it in their clothing when they returned. Sometimes gangs cooperating with Polish policemen and the Order Service at the gates were able to bring in wagons packed with foodstuffs. Youngsters were particularly adept at crawling through breaches in the fence and openings made in cellar walls enabling passage between the ghetto and the Aryan side. One of the main routes was via the cellars under the municipal courts. Leszno Street, which bordered the wall, was another prime smuggling location. Bags were tossed over, packages were hurled from the tram that passed through, and even livestock was brought in via the Jewish cemetery. It was estimated that illicit imports exceeded the amount legally admitted to the ghetto by a factor of forty. Over 80 per cent of provisions were the result of smuggling operations. The effect on Warsaw’s economy was so pronounced that the Germans repeatedly tried to crack down, imposing the death sentence on smugglers. German order policemen routinely shot and killed Jews caught in the act or even those who strayed too close to the barrier.²¹⁸

Adults who would have been conspicuous on the Aryan side arranged for children to cross over to obtain food. Kaplan noted that ‘These children are clever, and they are sent by their parents to buy food cheaply. Usually they are successful in their mission, and bring home bargains.’ Adler rhapsodized over the child smugglers, easily distinguished by the rents in their garments caused by the jagged apertures they passed through in the course of their risky business. ‘Sole breadwinners of their families, they spend hours lying in wait in order to glide like an eel at the moment the gendarme wiped his nose or the policeman turned his back.’ If they were captured they could expect a beating and were frequently lacerated with barbed wire.²¹⁹

Poor nutrition, appalling overcrowding and abysmal sanitation combined to generate repeated epidemics and a phenomenal mortality. The main scourges were typhus, tuberculosis and oedema. Professor Ludwik Hirszfeld, a world-renowned expert on typhus who became chairman of the ghetto’s Health Council, summed up the causes pithily: ‘If you pack into a district 400,000 ragged paupers, take everything away from them, and give them nothing, then typhus is created. In this war, typhus is the work of the Germans. And history might even forgive medicine for this. For you cannot make German medicine responsible for political crimes. But it will not forgive the lie that responsibility for the epidemic which they themselves called forth, lay on the shoulders of the Jewish council.’ Typhus was commonly imported by refugees and the worst phases of the disease coincided with major inflows, in January–May 1940 and January–March 1941. Lice flourished on filthy bodies encased in rancid clothing. There was not enough soap in the ghetto and what could be found was poor quality. Nor were there enough private or public baths. The sanitation teams sent to quarantine and disinfect houses were regularly bought off by tenants who feared the inconvenience and loss of income if they could not go to work. Paradoxically, there were more doctors per person inside the ghetto than outside but they lacked medicine and facilities. The ghetto had one large general hospital that ran an inoculation service and pharmacies, and boasted a single X-ray machine. At the height of the epidemics it was so packed with the sick (and dying) it did more to spread illness than contain it. There was also a well-equipped children’s hospital. Self-employed doctors ran expensive private clinics and dispensaries, often supplied by smugglers. But nothing could alleviate the enormous death toll. In 1941 it reached 43,000, fully 10 per cent of the entire ghetto population. Mortality eventually levelled off in the autumn when the food supply and employment situation improved and the sanitation effort paid off. The other reason was tragic: the most vulnerable, particularly the old, the frail, and the very young, had already died.²²⁰

The Jewish council endeavoured within its limited power and resources to provide welfare for precisely these groups. The welfare department ran shelters and soup kitchens for refugees and subsidized the dependants of forced labourers. There was also an elaborate network of independent relief organizations operating under the umbrella of ZTOS, Jewish Self-Aid, which received funds from the AJJDC until November 1941. These organizations consciously arrayed themselves against the Jewish council, promoting a spirit of self-reliance as against paternalism and encouraging democratic participation. They worked closely with the spontaneously formed tenement and house committees that took charge of sanitation, organized childcare, and raised funds in their locale. Mary Berg entered public life by putting on a show in her building to raise money for refugees from Lodz. Bernard Goldstein and other Bundists tried to use the tenement committees to restore a semblance of social cohesion and collective action, turning courtyards into community centres and making them a platform for political work. But the money that trickled down from the AJJDC was ‘a pebble thrown into a bottomless pit’.²²¹

A range of charities focused on the plight of refugee children and orphans. The TOZ organization (Society for the Protection of Health) worked to improve hygiene and combat tuberculosis. It ran a clinic with an X-ray machine, day-care centres, and twenty-three soup kitchens for children, each one equipped with a doctor and trained nurses. CENTOS (Central Organization for the Care of Orphans) maintained the central refuge for street children, thirty other children’s homes, and an orphanage directed by Poland’s foremost child-care expert, Janusz Korczak. Michael Zylberberg remarked that to Korczak, keeping Jewish children fit and happy in his clean, bright and meticulously run establishment on Chlodna Street was a form of resistance. ‘He regarded the struggle for life as a personal battle with the enemy.’ Toporol, a society that offered agricultural training, marshalled youngsters to cultivate vegetables on the few patches of arable ground within the walls and supplied the produce to CENTOS. Another pre-war charity, ORT, provided vocational training that proved enormously important because it enabled youths to enter the workforce in skilled occupations such as leatherworking, carpentry and metallurgy. Mary Berg went to ORT classes to learn graphics and her sister was taught how to make children’s clothing. There were about 48,000 children of school age in the ghetto, including 10,000 refugees. Until it was permitted in late 1941 schooling continued covertly on a limited scale, mainly for those who could afford to pay for private tuition singly or in groups. Kaplan, a teacher himself, boasted to his diary that ‘Jewish children learn in secret. In back rooms, on long benches near a table, little children sit and learn what its like to be Marranos [secret Jews in the era of the Spanish Inquisition].’ Teaching went on at the homes for children and soup kitchens. Pre-war youth movements and parties arranged clandestine gymnasia, including Dror, where Yitzhak Zuckerman was a teacher, and Tarbut, the Hebrew-oriented cultural organization. Religious Jews ran numerous classes and one underground school for girls, Bet Yaakov. Sadly, most children got their education on the streets, where they absorbed harsh lessons in survival under awful circumstances.²²²

Illicit schooling and artistic creativity became means to fight the dehumanizing effects of German policy and conditions in the ghetto. Bernard Goldstein recollected that ‘As a reaction to the campaign of hatred and discrimination against the Jews, educational and cultural activity took on a new importance. The ghetto days were marked by a compulsion to build spiritual and moral defences – compensation for our utter helplessness.’ Kaplan, who was otherwise rather staid, welcomed the ‘frivolity in the ghetto, in order to somewhat lessen its sorrow … It is almost a mitzvah [good deed] to dance … Every dance is a protest against our oppressors.’ The council established a Central Committee for Artists that registered nearly 300 actors, musicians and singers. Professionals and amateurs, like Mary Berg, put on shows to raise money for good causes. The ghetto supported a full symphony orchestra that regularly played to packed houses at the Melody Palace. There were several theatres, including the Eldorado and the Femina, each catering for different kinds of audience. For those with spare cash it was possible to see an operetta, a Yiddish melodrama or a classic European play performed by professional actors every week. Stanislaw Adler observed a ‘craving for books’ that was as intense as the distraction of card-games. Several privately run lending libraries did brisk business, although borrowers had to be careful in case the volumes they took out were lice-infested.²²³

Religious Jews, who formed a majority of the population, maintained the observance of tradition with an energy and fortitude that many observers found inspiring. The Germans had long banned shechita and until late 1941 forced the synagogues to stay closed. Collective prayer, monthly visits to the ritual bath, Sabbath and festival observance all went on in secret. During the high holy days in October 1940, Chaim Kaplan ruefully confided to his journal, ‘We have no public worship, even on the high holy days. There is darkness in our synagogues, for there are no worshippers – never before in our history, drenched in tears and in blood, did we have so cruel and barbaric an enemy.’ Nevertheless, the believers were not intimidated. ‘Secret minyanim [prayer quorums] by the hundred throughout Warsaw organise services, and do not skip even the most difficult hymns in the liturgy. There is not even a shortage of sermons. Everything is done in accordance with the ancient customs of Israel.’ He felt pride when Hassidim celebrated the festival of Sukkot with song and dance. Chanukkah was marked with even greater fervour since it evoked the struggle for freedom. The festival of Purim in March 1941 occasioned great merriment, which Kaplan shared with a group of like-minded Zionists at their soup kitchen. They made music, sang, read poetry and enjoyed the traditional cakes, hamentashen, with coffee. Individual Hassidic sects continued to cluster around their rebbe, studying when possible and worshipping as tradition prescribed. In February 1941, Ringelblum reported, ‘In the prayer house of the hassidim from Braclaw on Nowolipie street there is a large sign: “Jews Never Despair!” The hassidim dance there with the same religious fervour as they did before the war.’ The Jewish administration strained to ensure that there would be food appropriate for the festivals, particularly Passover. Ringelblum noted in April 1941 that ‘Passover Seders complete with meat, kneidlech, wine were held at many of the refugee centres. For a brief moment the refugees were able to forget the sadness of their situation and their misery. The Seders were a source of spiritual strength to the exhausted and homeless refugees.’²²⁴

The concentration of Jews in one place had curious effects on religious observance. Shimon Huberband observed the fluctuations and adaptations of religiosity in the ghetto for the Oyneg Shabas project. He noticed that because there were no non-Jews in the ghetto it was impossible to find Gentiles to kindle a fire on the Sabbath. As a result, more Jews had recourse to the traditional Sabbath repast, cholent, a stew that was prepared before sundown on Friday and kept hot in a baker’s oven to be consumed the next day. He noted, wryly perhaps, that when the Germans mandated observance of the Sabbath in 1941, the Order Service was given the job of enforcing rest and fining violators. This caused howls of protest from the genuinely observant who pointed out that it was futile to make unwilling Jews keep the Sabbath, especially if in the process the enforcers themselves violated it by levying fines or taking bribes.²²⁵

The strangest and saddest manifestation of faith was the community of about 5,000 non-Aryan Christians. Many of them lived on Sienna Street where, in December 1940, Mary Berg observed them taking delivery of Christmas trees smuggled into the ghetto. She was struck by the painful situation of their children. ‘These Christian children, born of Jewish parents are now living through a double tragedy as compared with Jewish children. They feel entirely lost …’ While she looked on them with a compassionate eye, Chaim Kaplan viewed their existence as ‘a truly unique tragicomedy’. Czerniaków saw no problem appointing converts to the Jewish council, but the rabbis in the ghetto protested vehemently. They had no interest in the paradoxes of Nazi racial policy that forced converts back into a Jewish community they had chosen to leave. Michael Zylberberg captured the absurdity of their predicament: ‘They suffered as Jews and finally died as Jews, unable to resolve the terrible dichotomy created by their religious and philosophical conflicts … For us it was an inevitable adjunct of our heritage; for them it was an additional burden, an unrelieved trauma.’²²⁶

Daily life in the ghetto was characterized by a lack of space and privacy, a constant hubbub, disgusting smells and distressing sights. While certain avenues such as Sienna and Chlodna were lined by handsome buildings inhabited by the well-off and privileged, more were dominated by rows of grim tenements that resembled ant-heaps. In September 1941, Ringelblum remarked that ‘On Sienna Street, where the Jewish aristocracy lives – particularly the baptized Jews – fashion is in full swing again. Smartly dressed women promenade up and down …’ By contrast, Edward Reicher, entering the ghetto for the first time in December 1940, was ‘completely stricken’ by the vista he encountered. ‘Filthy, narrow, dark streets. Swarms of children, a huge tattered crowd. Leszno Street led straight to hell. There were market stalls along both sides, one after another, selling cheap, shoddy merchandise … Next to them were poorer traders whose tables were spread with spools, thread, ribbons, lace, pins, or nails … There were peddlers too, with all their wares on their back – bric-a-brac, clothes, often even dirty laundry. The sidewalks were dotted with hundreds, even thousands of beggars pleading for a piece of bread … Most were so weak that they could no longer sit up.’ Because the tenements formed steep canyons, Kaplan observed that to catch sunlight ‘mothers take up positions on the sidewalks with their children’s cradles and they lean against the sides of buildings all along the street’. Where Bernard Goldstein lived, ‘continual fights took place for access to the kitchen, the bath, the toilet, the right to use the gas or get a key to the entrance door. The privacy of family life, even of the bedroom, could not be preserved.’²²⁷

People became accustomed to the new occupational and social hierarchy, signified by the armbands of the Order Service, the Jewish council staff, welfare and health workers. Inequality defined the ghetto. Those who had managed to bring money and valuables with them could obtain practically anything that was available outside. Employees of the administration who took bribes (most of them), anyone connected with the food supply system, owners and managers of workshops, corrupt OS men, smugglers and criminals provided the clientele for smart clothes shops, delicatessens, restaurants and nightclubs. In private Czerniaków raged against ‘The arrogant rich [who] talk back, each and every one of them, taking advantage of my good will.’ He was appalled when he heard that his deputy and other council officials went to ‘a party with caviar, smoked salmon and brandy’. But such indulgence was widespread. Ringelblum, who was a socialist, noted that ‘A number of caviar shops have been set up.’ Yet when ‘appeals were made to the Warsaw rich to levy a tax on themselves for the benefit of the refugees, they replied “That won’t help. The paupers will die out anyway.”’²²⁸

In the spring of 1941, Mary Berg, who belonged to the golden youth of the ghetto, wrote gaily that ‘new cafés and expensive grocery stores have appeared, where everything can be had. On Sienna Street and Leszno Street, women are seen in elegant coats and dresses fashioned by the best dressmakers.’ For those who could afford it there was a ‘beach’ on a piece of open ground where ‘For two zlotys one can bask in the sun for an entire day. Bathing suits are obligatory.’ Berg patronized nightspots like the Café Sztuka where Wladsylaw Szpilman played. He recalled that ‘Besides the concert room there was a bar where those who liked food and drink better than the arts could get fine wines and deliciously prepared cotelettes de volaille or boeuf Stroganoff. Both the concert room and the bar were nearly always full.’ He also played at a rather less respectable establishment, Café Nowoczesna, where ‘To the sound of popping champagne corks, tarts with gaudy make-up offered their services to our profiteers seated at laden tables.’ He added caustically that ‘No beggars were allowed outside the Nowoczesna. Fat doormen drove them away with cudgels.’²²⁹

Prostitution was a common sideline of waitresses in the restaurants. At Café Hirschfeld, Mary Berg saw ‘the most expensive liqueurs, cognac, pickled fish, canned food, duck, chicken and goose. Here, the price of a dinner with drinks is from 100 to 200 zlotys. The café is the meeting place of the most important smugglers and their mistresses; here women sell themselves for a good meal.’ It was not the only place in the ghetto where sex was for sale: the Britannia Hotel was notorious. According to Adler, who worked for the OS, ‘Clandestine prostitution was carried on in the circles of dancers, barmaids, and waitresses; they drew their clientele from Jewish Gestapo men, collectors of spoils …’ Ringelblum realized that women were selling sex in order to survive. ‘Recently streetwalking has become notable,’ he wrote in January 1941. ‘Yesterday a very respectable-looking woman detained me. Necessity drives people to do anything.’ Edward Reicher, who obtained a job as an inspector with the housing department, gained insights into the lengths to which poor women were driven. He documented the case of an eighteen-year-old girl whose family was starving. ‘Prostitution was the only way out, but Yola had too much integrity.’ So she became a smuggler, instead, using her looks to charm her way past the police at the gates. This only shifted her vulnerability to sexual exploitation from one location to another. One day, a Pole stopped her on the Aryan side and when she begged him to let her go replied, “‘Oh no, you’re too pretty for that. You can go afterwards.”’²³⁰

Starvation eroded moral standards relentlessly. Adler remarked, ‘How can one speak of moral behaviour in a concentration camp … Or of culture in a place where every day hundreds of human beings die in the street of hunger and disease?’ Children who could no longer be fed were abandoned on the steps of the Order Service headquarters. Gangs started excavating bodies from the mass graves under cover of darkness in the hope of finding gold in the dentures of the deceased. Families would offer refuge to the terminally ill in order to strip them of their clothing and sell it once they were dead. There were cases of cannibalism. But the most prevalent manifestation of moral decay was the epidemic of theft, with Jews preying on each other mercilessly. Ringelblum recorded that ‘The hunger is so great that the poor people are snatching bread from the equally poor bread vendors.’ In his eyes, though, the greatest crime was the inequality of suffering. ‘The rich boys are working on the police force, in the community organisations, or are registered with the sick fund as supposedly employed by various firms – but, most important, they can always buy their way out of work-camp duty.’ By spring 1941 when the pool of volunteers for forced labour dried up, the Order Service began to press-gang those without work. In response, Jewish men vulnerable to apprehension hid or resisted. Their evasion led to a downward spiral of pursuit and violence. Between 19 and 21 April, the Order Service smashed their way into the homes of men requisitioned for labour and dragged them to the Germans. These were ‘hideous days’, Ringelblum lamented, ‘and they will forever be remembered unto the Jewish council as a mark of shame’.²³¹

The refugees who poured into the ghetto existed at the bottom of the social and economic scale. They were driven out of communities that had been plundered and wrecked over a period of months. Many had been penned in temporary ghettos where they had starved and fallen prey to typhus. Since the men had been taken for forced labour, the refugees were overwhelmingly the old, the very young, and female. Mary Berg recalled that ‘All of them tell terrible tales of rape and mass executions.’ They arrived ‘ragged and barefoot, with the tragic eyes of those who are starving … They become charges of the community, which sets them up in so-called homes. There they die, sooner or later.’ The Jewish administration bathed, quarantined and provided quarters for the refugees in hostels that rapidly became squalid slums. In April 1941 there were 17,000 of them. Michel Mazor recollected that ‘They had no inkling that in a very short time, hunger, filth, deprivation, sickness, and a promiscuous lack of privacy would transform them into living corpses – emaciated or inordinately swollen – with only agony and death to follow. A terrible fatality hung over these people, and nothing in the life of the ghetto could defeat its implacable course.’ Without jobs or possessions they were driven to beg on the streets, where thousands expired: in the summer they were stricken by dehydration and malnutrition, in the winter they froze to death.²³²

During the spring and summer of 1941, the conjunction of hunger, disease and the influx of refugees turned Warsaw into a city of death where the sudden extinction of life was an ordinary occurrence. Ringelblum registered the numbness that overcame the population: ‘Almost daily, people are falling dead or unconscious in the middle of the street. It no longer makes a direct impression … Death lies in every street,’ he wrote. ‘The children are no longer afraid of death. In one courtyard, the children played the game of tickling a corpse.’ Social structures could no longer cope. ‘The mortality rate is so high that the house committees have to worry now as much about the dead as about the living’. Since it cost 15 zlotys to bury someone, corpses were hauled out of buildings and left on the pavements. It was then up to the OS to arrange for the cadavers to be taken to mass graves in the Jewish cemetery. These pits were shallow and covered with a meagre layer of sandy soil. As a result, ‘On hot summer days, the stench from these mass graves is so strong you have to hold your nose when you pass.’ Bernard Goldstein reported, ‘sick children lay, half-dead, almost naked, swollen from hunger, with running sores, parchment-like skin, comatose eyes, breathing heavily with a rattle in their throats. The elders stood around them. Yellow and gaunt, whimpering in their weakness, “A piece of bread … A piece of bread …” The street [Leszno] was packed with people: death, death and more death; yet there was no end to the overcrowding. People elbowed their way through the noisy throngs, fearing to touch each other, for they might be touching typhus.’ In some buildings where the last member of a family died the corpse would lie, rotting, until the smell alerted neighbours. Rats fed on decomposing bodies in houses where starvation and typhus had carried off all the residents. ‘If things continue this way’, Ringelblum wrote bitterly, ‘the “Jewish Question” will soon be resolved very quickly in Warsaw.’²³³

Ringelblum did not know that at this very moment the Germans were, indeed, planning to resolve the ‘Jewish Question’, but not in Warsaw or Lodz or Lublin. The war was taking a fateful turn, entering a phase that would have shattering consequences for Jews across the continent.