Transnistria and the Romanian killing operations

In south-west Ukraine, bordering Bukovina and Bessarabia, German policy ran up against the predilections of its allies. This area was the location of one of the first huge massacres and it became a zone of horrific violence. During August, Hungarian officials in the border region of Carpatho-Ruthenia, annexed to Hungary in 1938, decided to emulate the Romanians and expel the resident Jews, whom they considered aliens. This was a local initiative, implemented by Hungarian gendarmes under local commanders. Around 18,000 Jews were transported to the border and from there marched into former Soviet territory as far as Kamenets-Podolsk. This was what the Romanians had attempted a few weeks earlier, and the Germans were not pleased. However, instead of sending them back, this time Jeckeln took cognizance of the new instructions to dispose of Jews in the most radical fashion. He added the Jews from Hungary to some 8,000 Jewish men, women and children from Kamenets-Podolsk and had 23,600 shot over a three-day period.¹¹¹

On 30 August, the Germans resolved their differences with the Romanians by handing them the area of land between the Dniester and the Bug, known as Transnistria, in return for the right to maintain bases there and control over the lines of communication to their armies in the southern USSR. The Tighina Convention, as it was called, cleared the way for the Romanians to use the region as a dumping ground for Jews expelled from their homes in Moldavia, Bukovina and Bessarabia. Consequently, Transnistria became one of the most ghastly killing grounds in eastern Europe. It was overwhelmingly rural, with an area of 40,000 square miles and an indigenous population of about 2.5 million, including roughly 300,000 Jews. Some two thirds of them were concentrated in Odessa, a city with an illustrious reputation in modern Jewish history as the birthplace of numerous writers, poets, political thinkers and musicians. That was until the territory was overrun by Romanian forces between 15 and 30 July. Odessa was surrounded but held out until 17 October, during which time up to half its Jews were evacuated or mobilized for military service and withdrawn by sea in a Dunkirk-style operation. Meanwhile, Sipo-SD units and Romanian killing squads murdered thousands of Jews in the cities of Transnistria, including Mogilev-Podolski, Tulchin and Balta.¹¹²

Once the territory was opened, the Romanian authorities began emptying the ghettos and camps in which Jews had been held for the previous weeks. It is estimated that about 66,000 Jews were force-marched eastwards and across the Dniester. Along the way they were systematically robbed by the police, gendarmes and army units assigned to escort them. Up to 25,000 died or were killed. Women were raped and murdered as a matter of course. One witness reported how a single Romanian contingent behaved: ‘During the night, the members of the new detachment and their helpers would pick out girls from the throng and abuse them until dawn. During the day they managed to make a little money by “selling” a girl to a peasant.’ Villagers congregated along the line of march would scrutinize the clothing Jews were wearing and identify attire they fancied; the guards would then shoot the wearer, strip the body, and sell the garb to their client. When the Jews reached the Dniester, officials of the Romanian National Bank relieved them of any currency and valuables they still possessed. The expulsions led to a local economic boom.¹¹³

The evacuation of the Chisenau ghetto between 8 and 13 October 1941 was accompanied by plunder, confiscations and body searches of women suspected of concealing valuables. The Jews were placed on trains that took them as far as Atachi on the Dniester; then they walked for days until they reached Tighana, Tiraspol, Orhei or Rezina where they were placed in makeshift camps, often converted pig farms, without any provisions or any way of making a living. By November only 130 Jews were left in Chisenau, allowed to stay thanks to enormous bribes and connections with corrupt local officials. In Cernauti things went quite differently, due to the exertions of the mayor, Traian Popovici. He vigorously contested the removal of professionals and skilled workers, fighting to get whole groups exempted from the deportations. Nevertheless, thousands left for northern Transnistria by train every day between 17 October and 15 November until only about 19,000 remained. In the absence of the city’s Jewish citizens, production in its saw mills and chemical plants, metal works and textile mills ground to a halt. The Romanian authorities found themselves with a glut of vacant apartments and warehouses stuffed with plundered household goods. Antonescu’s vision for the orderly redistribution of wealth from Jews to those he considered genuine Romanians turned sour and most of the bonanza went to opportunists, nicknamed ‘Californians’ by knowing locals. About 7,500 Jews were deported from Dorohoi county, too, even though it was in Romania. There local officials made fortunes selling exemptions to Jews who could afford them. In spite of the endemic corruption, so much property, precious metal, currency and assets flowed into the Romanian National Bank that gold backing for the lei rose from 2.1 billion in 1941 to 11.3 billion a year later.¹¹⁴

Transnistria now became the unwilling home to some 145,000 Jews. Less than half would survive more than twelve months. Having been stripped of valuables, cash, bedding, spare clothing, cooking utensils and food, they were directed to towns and villages where they found whatever shelter was available and scrounged for anything to eat. Many ended up in rough-hewn farm buildings. Rakhil Fradis-Milner and her family were amongst those who were further uprooted from the miserable camps to which they had been sent in July–August 1941. This time it was winter, and on the march her mother and nieces died of exhaustion and exposure. ‘The last stops were the villages and collective farms around Bershad, in Balta County. The remains of the convoys were herded together there and housed in filthy pig and cow sheds with neither doors nor windows. Here typhus spread from filth, cold, and hunger, and hundreds of people were dying each day without help. After a few days, the dead were lying among the living.’ Those deported from Cernauti to the Mogilev-Podolski area fared best. They arrived with their communal leaders and immediately began setting up self-help organizations. An engineer, Siegfried Jagendorf, persuaded local Romanian police officials to let him repair and start up an abandoned metal works, providing work for the deportees and products to exchange for food. He later expanded his activities to food-processing and textile plants. Jagendorf’s enterprises offered a lifeline to the otherwise unemployed and destitute Jews. Their representatives also sent pleas for help to the Jewish leadership in Bucharest. Wilhelm Filderman, a wealthy businessman who led the Romanian Jews, responded by boldly addressing appeals to Antonescu. In a typical demonstration of the incoherent Romanian policy he won the regime’s consent to send funds to the deportees. Those who ended up in camps in central and southern Transnistria suffered the worst. In these areas there were large communities of ethnic Germans who supported Selbstschutz (self-defence militia) units that were very willing to massacre the hapless communities of starving, disease-ridden Jews. But the most terrible fate was that of the Jews in Odessa.¹¹⁵

By the time the city capitulated, the Romanian besiegers had suffered heavy casualties and were in the mood for revenge. It is estimated that 8,000 Jews were slain over the two days following the Romanians’ entry into the city. On 22 October, a time-bomb went off in the former Soviet secret police building that was being used as the HQ of a Romanian infantry division and the city commandant. Antonescu was furious at the further loss of life and determined on a terrible reprisal. Einsatzgruppe D reported that ‘As a counter measure, the Romanians seem to be preparing to shoot the Jews in Odessa. To date, about 10,000 have been shot.’ The retaliation was barbaric: dozens of Jewish men were strung up from the balconies of apartment buildings. A resident told Vera Inber, a post-liberation investigator, that ‘There were thousands of them. At the feet of the hanged lay the bodies of those who had been tortured, mutilated and shot. Our town was a terrible sight, a town of the hanged.’ Some 25,000 Jews were driven to nine warehouses in the Dalnic suburb. Once the Jews were packed inside, the Romanian army turned machine guns and artillery on them. When this method of destruction proved time-consuming, the buildings were doused in petrol and set on fire. Another 30,000 Jews of all ages, men and women, were force-marched out of the city towards the village of Bogdanovka, where they were butchered over a period of days. The rest of the Jewish population, about 40,000, were packed into a temporary ghetto in the Slobodka district. Jewish women were frequently separated out and raped en masse. A week later, Anna Morgulis, a middle-aged stenographer in an Odessa shipyard, was arrested on suspicion of sabotage and taken to a prison where she was beaten unconscious. ‘That night, with impenetrable darkness all around us, thirty Romanian soldiers burst into our cell and, after throwing their coats onto the damp floor, threw themselves on us. We were all raped, even the old women. Some of the younger girls were driven insane. We, the older women – and there were women there even older than I was – sat there and wept.’¹¹⁶

Over the next weeks, and well into the winter, the Jews were removed by train and on foot from the miserable Slobodka quarter to ghetto-camps at Bogdanovka, Domanevka and Akhmetchetka in Golta county. They were joined by Jews driven out of the southern portion of Transnistria. Countless numbers died in the trains and on the roads. The odyssey of schoolboy Lev Rozhetsky took him first to Beryozovka Station, where he saw Jews being burned in pits. He was then marched through snow to Sirotskoe. There they were lodged in stables, but ‘At night, drunken Romanian policemen and local bandits, armed with guns, knives, and clubs, burst into the stables, stabbing, killing, robbing, raping.’ His column finally came to rest in a camp outside Domanevka, thirty miles from the rail-head. The conditions were nearly indescribable. Peasants sold the Jews scraps of food for exorbitant sums. Typhus carried off so many each day that the weakened survivors left the bodies to rot, having stripped them of clothing in the hope of exchanging it for something to eat. But most Jews did not have to endure these horrors for very long. The majority were massacred a few days or weeks after they arrived. In Bogdanovka, out of 48,000 in the camp at its peak, 30,000 were killed in mass shootings between 21 and 30 December and 3 and 9 January 1942. Karp Koneevich Sheremet, a Ukrainian and a native of Bogdanovka, later testified that ‘Mass shootings … continued for days on end. They shot them beside the ravine outside the forestry collective, then burned them right away. There was a pause from 24 to 26 [December] because the execution detachment went to Golta to celebrate Christmas.’ The 14,000 Jews held at Domanevka were almost all killed between 10 January and 18 March 1942. The Romanian guards and German Selbstschutz seemed to lose all inhibitions. One survivor recalled that ‘the Romanians ripped the babies in half or grabbed them by the feet and smashed their heads on stones. The women had their breasts chopped off, and many whole families were either buried alive or burned alive in the bonfires.’ The commandants of one village ‘nightly sent their assistants to the camp to bring back pretty girls. They always derived a particular pleasure from watching the death agonies of these girls on the morning of the next day.’ In Akhmetchetka 4,000 Jews were confined to a pig farm; most died of starvation and disease. Only about 3,000 Jews were left in the whole of Golta county by late 1943.¹¹⁷

The destruction of the Jews of Bukovina, Bessarabia and Transnistria was improvised and created all sorts of unforeseen problems. The Germans were bothered by the epidemic of typhus in settlements straddling their supply lines. Eventually this would lead to a decision that the Jews in Transnistria should be handed over to the Selbstschutz for disposal. During early 1942 these ethnic Germans shot about 33,000 Jews in Berezovka county alone. The Romanians had a different sort of headache. They quibbled with the Germans over who would get the homes and household property of the murdered Jews of Odessa. Their argument was somewhat weakened by the fact that there were not enough Romanians to fill the apartments vacated by Jews and nor was there sufficient transport to cart away the loot. The storage vaults of Odessa were filled to overflowing with looted pianos; there was no one left to play them.¹¹⁸

The crisis at the front and the crisis of anti-Jewish policy

At the end of 1941, Karl Jäger, commanding officer of Einsatzkommando 3, a sub-unit of Einsatzgruppe A, operating in Lithuania, provided his superiors with a detailed report of its homicidal activities over the previous six months. His men had killed 136,423 Jews: 46,403 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children. The only Jews left were workers in three ghettos: 15,000 in Vilnius, 15,000 in Kaunus and 5,000 in Shauli. In fact, there were probably 10,000 more than his computation since there were many unregistered or in hiding. Notwithstanding the incertitude concerning these gruesome statistics, the balance sheet for the massacres committed on the coat tails of Operation Barbarossa is staggering. There were only 6,500 Jews left in Latvia out of a pre-war Jewish population of about 95,000. The Jewish population of Byelorussia had been pared down from about 300,000 to 80,000–90,000. Some 200,000 Jews had been slaughtered in the Soviet Ukraine and around 90,000 in Transnistria.¹¹⁹

Yet however monstrous the achievement, it was only partial. Shortly after Jäger finished blowing his trumpet, Einsatzgruppe A informed Berlin that 139,000 Jews were still present in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Between 270,000 and 290,000 Jews were also alive in Volhynia, Polesie and Podolia. No less than 522,000 were living in east Galicia and 90,000 were clinging to life in Transnistria. While the murder operations at the eastern reaches of the German advance had verged on the total, for logistical reasons and due to the concentration of the Jewish population, in the western regions nearly a million Jews remained.¹²⁰

Though the Germans and their accomplices succeeded in inflicting unimaginable suffering and destruction of life on the Jews in the conquered parts of the USSR, the assault evolved haphazardly and turned into the customary incoherent jumble of mutually conflicting policies. There was little or no coordination with Germany’s Axis partners, with the result that Hungary and Romania ended up taking action that ran counter to German interests. This was not sorted out until months into the campaign. Nor was there coordination between the SS and the civil authorities. When Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for the Ostland, issued draft guidelines for the treatment of Jews, the security police were indignant. First they objected that he was treading on their turf and, second, that he had got it all wrong anyway. The Higher SS Police Leader Hans Prutzmann and Stahlecker, the Einsatzgruppe commander, protested to Berlin, where the ministry for the occupied eastern territories was quick to correct Lohse: the Sipo-SD had autonomy as far as Jews were concerned. Lohse’s eventual directive of 16 August defined who was Jewish and mandated that Jews should be registered and marked. Their property and assets were to be confiscated and they were to be given a subsistence allowance. He ordered that Jews be cleared from rural areas and concentrated in urban ghettos, where they would receive rations according to what food could be spared. They would also perform forced labour. But the directive stressed that these were the minimum steps and were applicable where ‘measures for the final solution’ were not possible. In other words, if the Sipo-SD chose another fate for the Jews, Lohse was powerless to obstruct them.¹²¹

Friction arose repeatedly over the treatment of skilled workers. Heinrich Karl had objected to a Lithuanian police battalion wiping out the Jews who manned the workshops and factories in Slutsk, his city. Not long afterwards, Lohse raised the same issue with Stahlecker and HSSPF Krüger (who replaced Prutzmann). He formally inquired of the Ostministerium whether the elimination of Jews extended to those working for the Wehrmacht and the arms industries. Elements of the army, too, expressed reservations about the wanton destruction of skilled labour. The Armaments Inspectorate in the Ukraine accepted the need to remove ‘superfluous eaters’ from the cities and to eliminate hostile populations, but expressed concern over the risk of economic and reputational damage, not to mention the demoralizing effect on the troops who either saw or took part in brutish mass killings. Occasionally there was a principled protest. One Gebietskommissioner in the Ostland passed on the query ‘if it was necessary to exterminate children … In no civilized country, not even in the middle ages, was it possible to execute pregnant women.’¹²²

Ghettos, considered a ubiquitous feature of anti-Jewish policy, appeared late in the occupied areas of the USSR and were hardly standard practice. Furthermore, the rationale for them differed from place to place. To Army Group Centre they were a security measure; in the rear of Army Group North ghettos were a way to control food consumption. Some ghettos had a Jewish council and an Order Service, others did not. Whereas by late 1941 the ghettos in Poland had acquired an economic rationale, the temporary structures in the USSR were never more than detention camps.¹²³

The absence of consistency with regards to ghettos can be traced back to a fundamental confusion over means and ends. Were Jews to be expelled, placed in ghettos, or put to death? Until October 1941, the hope was that Jews would be expelled into Siberia after the end of hostilities. In mid-September, EK 6 of Einsatzgruppen C commented that ‘While a considerable number of Jews could be apprehended during the first weeks, it can be ascertained that in the central and eastern districts of the Ukraine, in many cases 70 per cent to 90 per cent and in some cases even 100 per cent of the Jewish population had bolted. The gratuitous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Jews may be considered to be an indirect success of the work of the security police. As we hear mostly from the other side of the Urals, this is a considerable contribution to the solution of the Jewish question in Europe.’ On 16 October 1941, Antonescu told his council of ministers that ‘I have decided to evacuate all [Jews] from these regions. I still have about 10,000 Jews in Bessarabia who will be sent beyond the Dniester within several days and, if circumstances permit, beyond the Urals.’ Yet by then, Himmler had already instructed his executioners to annihilate the Russian Jews to the last man, woman and child.124

In fact, when Himmler changed the nature of their mission, the evacuation of Soviet Jews was in full swing. In the first two weeks of the campaign the ability of Jews to flee was hindered by the speed of the German advance and the refusal of the Soviet security services to let refugees cross the old Russo-Polish border. As a result most of the Jews in eastern Poland were trapped. Thereafter the Jews were better able to escape and the Soviet regime put into place measures to evacuate the population from the path of the German armies. Jews were not evacuated as Jews, but because so many were skilled white-collar workers they benefited disproportionately from the policy to evacuate the staff and families of state agencies and industrial enterprises. The historian Yitzhak Arad estimates that about 5 per cent of Volhynian Jews managed to elude the Germans, while the proportion of Jews evading capture rose dramatically further into eastern Belarus, in the Russian Federation and in the eastern Ukraine. Although roughly one million Jews came under German occupation in the USSR, most of whom would perish, an equal number outran them or were pulled to safety by the Soviet state.¹²⁵

The greatest failure of policy was military. On 2 October 1941, Army Group Centre launched Operation Typhoon, a last bid to capture Moscow and end the war before winter set in. At first all went well. The German armies made stunning gains, again thanks largely to the ineptitude of the Soviet commanders. Then the rain came and the front bogged down. When the frost arrived in mid-November and the attack resumed, it was little more than a desperate gamble. The troops were at the end of their tether, the army had used up all its replacements, and there were no more reserves. The transport system was barely able to supply the forward units with more than a portion of their requirements; fuel, fodder and ammunition took priority over winter clothing, condemning the miserable infantry to exposure and frostbite. On 6 December the Russians counter-attacked. Not only was the war going to last longer than the German leadership had anticipated, the eastern armies now found themselves fighting for survival against fresh Siberian divisions that Wehrmacht military intelligence did not even know existed.¹²⁶

Defeat had multiple ramifications for anti-Jewish policy. The aim of solving the Jewish problem through expulsion to a territory beyond the living space of Germans had been premised on victory. That policy was now foiled, but the failure to end the war made it even more pressing to find a solution. The Third Reich faced a food crisis and a security crisis, both of which could be attributed to the Jews. Instead of postponing a reckoning with the Jewish question until the war was over, it had to be solved – and solved quickly – precisely because the war was not going to end soon. Finally, there was the international context. Germany had not knocked Russia out of the war, so Britain would stay in the fight and it was evident that the USA was edging towards the fray. Since in the minds of the Nazis the Jews were responsible for these developments, the Jews within their grasp would have to answer for them. The collision of military failure with failed Jewish policy would have devastating consequences for the Jews of the Third Reich.

The deportation of Jews from the Reich

Life for the remaining Jews in Nazi Germany was shabby, constricted and weighed down by apprehension. Confined to Jew-houses, limited to shopping at certain times, and banned from any cultural activities or outdoor recreation, they were almost completely cut off from the rest of society. In August 1940, the authorities confiscated the telephone in the Jew-house where Klemperer lived. A year later, he was prohibited from using the local lending library. The clothes Jews wore grew threadbare and their shoes deteriorated. Their diminishing rations and the poor quality of the food damaged their health. Those who fell ill found it arduous to get medical attention from the few remaining Jewish doctors and nurses. Although a high proportion were elderly and frail, 40,000 were forced to work for paltry remuneration. Indeed, by the end of 1940 they came to be seen as a valuable pool of skilled labour.¹²⁷

During 1941, the remnant, including ‘privileged Jews’ and Jews in mixed marriages, came under increasing pressure. Local officials now demanded that Jews give up even the shared accommodation in Jew-houses. Some were motivated by the need to rehouse families whose homes were damaged or destroyed by RAF bombing, but the wave of evictions spread well beyond the cities struck by air raids. In Hanover, 100 Jews were forced to relocate to an old synagogue, 150 were jammed into a funeral parlour, and 200 into the communal offices. In Essen, the authorities provided a camp on the site of a disused coal mine. In Cologne they used barracks built for Russian prisoners of the Great War. Dresden Jews were housed in huts near a factory where most of them worked. In Breslau the 8,000–9,000 Jews were concentrated around the Storch Synagogue. They could only do business with one another, but somehow sustained a communal existence. The community ran a school for 500 children, a hospital, provided kosher food and organized cultural events. Eventually, the Breslau authorities evicted them from their homes, thirty apartments at a time, and shoved them into barracks that were little more than transit camps. This final dislocation left the many elderly Jews in utterly unfamiliar surroundings, battling with overcrowding and poor sanitation.¹²⁸

As the world of the Jews shrank, the Germans benefited from the confiscation of their property. Gestapo men and Nazi Party officials were the first to grab the contents of vacated homes. What remained was auctioned off by the municipal pawnshops. In Hamburg the haul included 600 medical books and a top hat. Local people would approach the dealers with requests for specific items of household furniture. At a more rarefied level, the Museum of Art in Breslau applied for the best paintings from a private collection owned by Max Silberg. At no level of German society did there appear to be much concern about the fate of the Jews whose everyday articles and prized possessions found new owners.¹²⁹

The Reichsvereinigung worked tirelessly to alleviate the conditions of the beleaguered communities. Much of its work was devoted to emigration. Even as Jews were dying in Polish ghettos and being slaughtered in Russia, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was still pushing the orderly departure of Reich Jews. Hundreds who held visas for emigration to the USA were given exit papers and allowed to make their getaway, mainly via Spain and Portugal. Jews were now prepared to accept destinations that would once have been considered bizarre. In April 1940, thirty-five German and Austrian Jews arrived in Buena Tierra, a remote area of Bolivia, with the intention of constructing an agricultural settlement that would eventually absorb up to 1,200 refugees. The project was funded by the Sociedad Colonizadora de Bolivia, a joint venture between a local Jewish tycoon, Mauricio Hochschild, and the AJJDC. It proved too challenging, though, and the scheme faded. The 20,000 central European Jews who ended up in Bolivia preferred to cling to the more familiar urban jungle of La Paz. There they created Viennese-style coffee houses and cultural associations, while Lebensmittelgeschäft Brückner & Krill specialized in supplying them with continental delicacies. Across the Pacific, around 16,000 Jews from Mitteleuropa struggled to establish themselves in a corner of the international concession in Shanghai. In May 1940, Illo Koratkowski and her mother travelled by train 4,000 miles from Berlin via Moscow, Irkutsk and Harbin, to the Chinese port of Dairen where she boarded a ship to Shanghai. There her father awaited them. Victor Klemperer, however, was not among the lucky ones. ‘New regulations about immigration into the USA,’ he noted on 27 July 1941. ‘Our affidavit … is thereby invalid. The new procedure means effectively that it will be impossible to get out in any foreseeable future. That suits us. All vacillation is now at an end. Fate will decide.’¹³⁰

Klemperer was in no doubt that his fate would depend on the war, that there was a correlation between the regime’s manipulation of anti-Semitism and developments on both the eastern front and the home front. Even though he was not allowed to own a radio he accurately monitored German military progress. In late July he noted, ‘Advance into Russia appears to have come to a standstill; everyone knows or spreads rumours about heavy German losses.’ The roller-coaster campaign was certainly taking a toll on domestic morale. Ulrich von Hassell calculated the popular mood using what he called his war ‘barometer’. In early August after factoring in the evidence of heavy Russian resistance, mounting losses, and RAF air raids he came up with ‘low barometer readings, a general feeling of endlessness and doom’. By the middle of the month he was alerted to the dissension between Hitler and his commanders and concluded that the war would persist into the winter. Klemperer, relying on fewer sources of information, reached the same prognosis. ‘German position most precarious, total victory before onset of winter impossible, lasting through the winter next to impossible, given the shortage of raw materials.’ He also learned that morale in the Rhineland, the target of regular RAF bombardment, and in Berlin ‘which is frequently attacked, is said to be catastrophic’. Even the victory at Kiev and the pitiful sight of captured Russians did not deceive Reck-Malleczewan. He sardonically observed that the increasing use of synthetic products and food substitutes was responsible for the frequent bouts of biliousness in cafes.¹³¹

Foreign journalists, too, observed the deterioration. Howard Smith, one of the last American correspondents in Berlin, knew that even before the invasion of the USSR ‘Germany was already actually scraping the bottom of Europe’s economic bin.’ Operation Barbarossa made things worse: ‘the eastern front drained away already scarce fats so quickly that swift and huge reductions had to be made within a very short period’. Potatoes vanished from the shops and tomatoes disappeared into cans for the boys in Russia. In November beer consumption was reduced for the same reason. Smith noticed that bus and tram lines were quietly discontinued. ‘The underground became shoddy, dirty, worn out.’ Three-quarters of taxis were withdrawn from service and when lifts broke they went unrepaired. The rolling stock available to the Reichsbahn was reduced in order to replace 4,000 locomotives and freight wagons damaged in the east, half of the entire fleet servicing the eastern armies. ‘Germany’, he concluded ‘has been winning itself to death.’¹³²

Joseph Goebbels, an arch-realist in the privacy of his diary, could not deny the crisis. During July he acknowledged, ‘Food situation in Berlin is very bad.’ Even when harvest produce began to roll in, things were ‘extraordinarily precarious’. On 24 August he admitted with a characteristic mixture of clarity and black humour, ‘The mood of Germany has grown more serious. One is gradually becoming aware that the eastern campaign is no stroll to Moscow.’ At the end of the month he acknowledged, ‘we have underestimated Bolshevism’. Though there were up-ticks in morale, the trend was sober. Smith reckoned that by the third month of Operation Barbarossa ‘a moral depression set in which joined the economic decline’. It was a watershed. Winter was approaching but victory was no closer. The euphoria that accompanied the offensive towards Moscow evaporated once the advance got bogged down, leaving people lower than ever and interested in only one thing: a final, decisive victory. Goebbels could not deliver that, but he could demonstrate that the Jewish enemy in Germany was beaten.¹³³

Anti-Semitic propaganda had, of course, continued unabated since the war started. In October 1940 Goebbels scored one of his greatest successes as a film producer and propagandist with the release of Jud Süß, based on the story of a court Jew in the eighteenth century. It depicted ‘the Jew’ as avaricious, scheming, licentious and ruthless, but so skilfully that Germans attended in droves and applauded the movie. He followed it up with a documentary, Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), intended to show the Ostjude as he really was. The film exploited the occupation of Poland to present scenes that would confirm the Nazi image of the eastern Jew. One segment cut from crowded streets in the Jewish district of Warsaw to hordes of rats swarming through a building. Some viewers were distressed by a deliberately gruesome sequence in an abattoir where cattle were slaughtered according to Jewish religious law. To Goebbels’ disappointment, the documentary flopped. The head office of the SS reported that ‘the disgusting character of what was presented as such, and most particularly the ritual slaughter scenes, were repeatedly cited as the main reason not to see the movie’. The SD office in Höxter commented rather more unflatteringly that people found it ‘a bit boring’. Nevertheless the two films had a perceptible influence. Klemperer observed, ‘Public Jew-baiting is rising again. Film propaganda Jew Süß and The Eternal Jew’. It was scant consolation that the latter disappeared from cinemas after a week.¹³⁴

As his contribution to Operation Barbarossa, Goebbels ratcheted up the propaganda campaign. His articles, speeches, and directives to the press called particular attention to the ‘alliance of plutocracy and Bolshevism’, which was intended to explain the attack on the USSR and also to stigmatize American aid for both Britain and Russia. He was gifted an opportunity in July 1941 after an American Jew named Theodore Kaufman privately published a vitriolic book entitled Germany Must Perish!, which, amongst other things, demanded the sterilization of all Germans. Goebbels’ press machine blew the influence of the book out of all proportion, claiming that its author, in truth a nonentity, had ties to the White House and was giving vent to American, or rather Jewish, plans for the Germans should the Third Reich be defeated. The SD welcomed publication of excerpts from the book which would ‘show that this war is really one where the stakes are life or death’.¹³⁵

Not coincidentally, the Gestapo and Nazi officials began to call for more draconian measures against the Jews in the Reich, specifically, marking them. The demand to render Jews visible was malicious but also practical. It related to the shortages of food and the belief that Jews were taking what should rightfully go to Germans. The SD in Bielefeld, for example, complained about the ‘provocative’ behaviour of Jews whose offence was to buy food in the market. The same office protested that a Jewish man married to an Aryan woman had bought ‘pure coffee’ in defiance of rationing restrictions. The NSDAP Gau office for racial policy in Munich raised the alternative possibility of an index of Mischlinge, since ‘there is often an attempt to mask the degree of Jewish genetic background’.¹³⁶

Against this febrile background, on 18 August Goebbels met with his officials at the Ministry of Propaganda to discuss Jewish policy. They assumed that it would only be a matter of time before the Jews were evacuated to the east, but agreed that until then they should be marked. When he had an audience with Hitler at the Führer headquarters later the same day Goebbels complained about the Jewish ‘parasites’ in Berlin and demanded that before they were removed they should be clearly indicated with a badge. Hitler agreed. He was, it seems, in a particularly vicious mood at this juncture and was in the habit of repeating his prophecy that the Jews would suffer for bringing about the war. He reiterated to Goebbels that ‘In the east the Jews must pay the bill.’ Closer to home, though, they would have to bear the marking that was already part of the Jewish way of life in Poland and the occupied USSR. On 1 September 1941, the Ministry of the Interior issued a decree that from the 19th of the month all Jews would have to wear a yellow Star of David with the word ‘Jude’ in gothic lettering at its centre. In the accompanying press comment, Nazi commentators explicitly linked the imposition to the war. The Völkischer Beobachter explained that ‘The German soldier has met in the Eastern campaign the Jew in his most disgusting, most gruesome form. This experience forces the German soldier and the German people to deprive the Jews of every means of camouflage at home.’¹³⁷

The application of the yellow star was greeted with enthusiasm by Nazis and those in tune with them, but more coolly by other Germans. The Gestapo men in Bielefeld rejoiced that now they could identify Jews on the street they could enforce all the many restrictions against them. The SD Head Office in Berlin claimed general public satisfaction, although it reported that some people were astonished to find so many Jews still around. The visibility of Jews actually ramped up demands for harsher action. The SD soon received complaints that Jews in mixed marriages were exempted and so remained indistinguishable as Jews. Shopkeepers whose premises were designated for Jewish use were alarmed that the discernible presence of Jews would deter their other customers. Leland Morris at the US Embassy informed Washington that many Germans were indeed ‘unpleasantly surprised’ to see that such numbers ‘still live in good residential sections of the large cities occupying valuable apartments at a time of big shortage’. He added, however, that ‘a very large proportion of Berliners have shown embarrassment and even sympathy rather than satisfaction at the display of Jewish badges’.¹³⁸

Victor Klemperer certainly thought that the ‘Jews’ star did not meet with much public approval’. His perception was confirmed to some extent by the SD office tracking public opinion: it concluded that older and more religious people actually disapproved. Harry Flannery, who replaced William Shirer for CBS in Berlin, detected that ‘most of the German people, even on this first day, paid no attention to the Jews’. Conversely, his colleague Howard Smith recalled that ‘the day the Yellow Star was introduced, people all over Berlin were asking one another, why in God’s name was a manoeuvre like this necessary? It was too obvious that the poor, wretched Jews living in Germany had nothing to do with the disappearance of foodstuffs and the failure of the High Command to conquer Russia in time.’¹³⁹

The badge occasioned plenty of black humour. Since the order mandating the wearing of the star also forbade Jews from wearing medals, one wag suggested that the yellow star was the new ‘Pour le Semité’. Flannery asserted that ‘Jews wore it with visible pride’ but gave no evidence of this. German Jews told another story. Klemperer keened to his diary, ‘I feel myself shattered, cannot compose myself.’ Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist in pre-Nazi Berlin and a member of the anti-Nazi underground, confided to her journal, ‘It’s here. As from today the Jews are outlawed, marked as outcasts by a Yellow Star of David that each one must wear on the left chest. We feel like crying abroad for help. But what good is our outcry. Those who would help us don’t hear us – or perhaps don’t want to. Thank God the greater part of the people are not pleased with the new decree. Almost everyone we meet is as much ashamed as we.’¹⁴⁰

The marking of Jews in the Reich was but a prelude to their deportation, a tragedy that had been in the making for months. Back in July 1941, during the weeks when the Nazi elite was swollen with ambition, Heydrich had solicited from Göring the authority ‘for making all necessary preparations with regard to organisational, practical and financial aspects for an overall solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence’. Göring requested prompt delivery of the plan for ‘the intended final solution’, presumably since he and Heydrich anticipated that the war would be over in a matter of weeks or months, at which point it would be put into effect. But the war dragged on and Hitler repeatedly refused to countenance major deportations until it was over. During August, when Heydrich and Goebbels requested permission to set deportations in motion, they were told to wait. Hitler’s resolve weakened once it became apparent that the war was going to continue into the next year. First of all, pressure was building up to deal with the housing shortage in Berlin. Since April 1941, Albert Speer’s building inspectorate had been evicting Jews to provide homes for the victims of air raids. Nazi Party bosses in cities like Hamburg and Lübeck that had taken a pasting from the RAF were furious that Jews still occupied good apartments. In view of the ‘catastrophic’ housing situation why not deport them to the east? Overcrowding on trams and the railways occasioned similar grousing. Of course, the war was responsible for the declining standards of comfort, but Jews got the blame. Local authorities also reported anger amongst the parents of soldiers because they had to rub shoulders with Jews while their sons were engaged in the ‘battle against Jews and Bolshevism’. Finally there was pressure on food supplies. Not only was the Wehrmacht consuming vast quantities of fats, meat and cereals, but the retention of millions of men at the front meant there were fewer hands to bring in the harvest. The regime could not afford to delay measures that would alleviate these pressures and distract attention from them at the same time. The final trigger may have been news that Stalin had ordered the forced resettlement of 400,000 ethnic Germans from the Volga region to Siberia. Ribbentrop met Hitler on 17 September and proposed that Germany retaliate by uprooting the Jews of central Europe to the eastern territories. Thus, between 15 and 17 September, Hitler finally ordered the deportation of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate. The solution of the Jewish problem would go ahead regardless of what transpired on the eastern front. As he had predicted: the Jews would pay.¹⁴¹

Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann now engaged in a round of meetings to implement the Führer’s wish. It was no mean challenge. After all, there were almost 250,000 Jews in the Greater Reich and around 88,000 in the Protectorate. Notwithstanding success in the battle of Kiev the situation in the east was indeterminate. As in the case of all their previous schemes, the preparations were hasty and half-baked and they ran up against repeated obstacles that forced them to scale back their ambitions and improvise still further.

To begin they had to locate destinations for the Jews and, then, ensure that they would be received appropriately. On 18 September, Himmler informed Arthur Greiser by letter that,’The Führer wishes the Altreich and the Protectorate to be cleared of and freed from Jews from West to East as soon as possible. Consequently, I shall endeavour, this year if possible, and initially as a first stage, to transport the Jews of the Altreich and the Protectorate to those Eastern territories which became part of the Reich two years ago, and then deport them even further eastwards next spring.’ Then came the bad news: ‘My intention is to take approximately 60,000 Jews of the Altreich and the Protectorate to spend the winter in Litzmannstadt ghetto which, I have heard, still has available capacity. I ask you not only to understand this step, which will certainly impose difficulties and burdens on your Gau, but to do everything in your power to support it in the interests of the Reich.’ Greiser was dismayed, but after some hard negotiating agreed to take 20,000 Jews and 5,000 Roma into his domain. His consent was conditional on getting carte blanche to make room for the western Jews by removing 100,000 ‘sick’ Polish Jews.¹⁴²

In early October, Heydrich consulted with the ministry for the east concerning the dispatch of Reich Jews to locations under its nominal control. Minsk and Riga emerged as the two most likely destinations, since anywhere further east would strain transport resources and impinge on the rear of the German army groups. When the information reached Minsk that it would be necessary to accommodate 50,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate the local Sipo-SD knew exactly what to do. There were no complications and no opposition. On 7 November, 12,000–17,000 non-working Jews were assembled in the ghetto and trucked to the Tuchinka ravine, where they were shot by detachments of German soldiers, Byelorussian police and Ukrainian auxiliaries. The first trainload of Reich Jews, comprising 990 cold, hungry, bedraggled and mostly elderly men and women, arrived the next day. They were taken to a special section of the ghetto that was segregated from the remaining Russian Jews. In a second massacre on 20 November, another 5,000–10,000 local Jews were murdered. These ghetto clearances were conducted with the customary mixture of avarice and barbarism. A survivor recalled that ‘As soon as the small children got down from the trucks, the police took them from their parents and broke their spinal column against their knees. Small babies were thrown in the air and shot at or caught on bayonets and then flung into the trenches. Naked people were lined up next to the pit and shot with machine guns. Those who refused to undress were machine gunned in their clothing. If their clothing was of good quality, they were undressed after being killed.’¹⁴³

Heydrich had meanwhile added the job of running the Protectorate to his already extensive list of offices. One of the first things he did was intensify the persecution of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia. On 10 October, ten days after he was installed as Reich Protector in Prague, he told Karl-Hermann Frank, his secretary of state, Adolf Eichmann, and Hans Günther, who ran the Prague office for Jewish emigration, that he proposed to evacuate 5,000 Jews to the east in a few weeks and send the rest to a ghetto at a location still to be identified. At a press conference afterwards he announced his intentions to the world and added that the ghetto was nothing more than an ‘interim’ solution. In fact, he had absolutely no notion where the Jews would be housed, let alone what the permanent solution would be. Next day, Hans Günther called together the Jewish leadership in Prague and ordered them to come up with a list of suitable places. Even as they deliberated, five transports conveyed 5,000 Jews to Lodz, including the cream of the Prague Jewish intelligentsia, followed by 5,000 to Minsk and Riga. On 16 November, 1,000 Jews were sent from Brno (Brünn) to Minsk. A few days later, Karl Rahm, acting for Günther, selected the fortress town of Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech) as the site for the ghetto. The first building team, comprising young Jewish men and skilled workers, was dispatched from Prague’s Masaryk Station at 4.30 in the morning on 24 November 1941. By 10 a.m. they were at work, preparing the town for an influx of 60,000 Czech Jews.¹⁴⁴

When Jeckeln, the new Higher SS Police Leader in the Ostland, informed Hinrich Lohse that he was expected to take 50,000 more Jews into the Riga ghetto, Lohse was taken aback. He protested to Rudolf Lange, commander of the Sipo-SD in Latvia and hence one of Heydrich’s men, that it was an impossible undertaking. Where would they go? Jeckeln already had something in mind: they would make room for the Reich Jews in the ghetto by eliminating the Latvian Jews currently living there, much as he had wiped out communities in southern Russia, beginning with his exploits at Kamenets-Podolsk. Lohse seems to have been alarmed at this prospect and countered that there were useful workers in the ghetto. His dissension was ineffective. On 27 November, security police units, reinforced by order police, reorganized the ghetto into two parts and began selecting those who would be retained as a workforce. About 5,500 men and 300 women were segregated from the rest. Three days later, Latvian Sipo-SD and German police entered the ghetto and began rounding up people; they used such extreme violence that some 800 perished in the process. The 15,000 assembled Jews were then marched through snow and ice to the Rumbula forest where Jeckeln’s experienced team (who had come with him from Ukraine) had excavated three massive pits, each with a ramp at one end so that the Jews could walk into their grave and lie down prior to being shot. The slaughter went on all day, but even though Jeckeln was able to draw on teams of Latvian policemen they could not quite finish the job. At nightfall the traumatized remnant were marched back to the ghetto.¹⁴⁵

Numerous German soldiers and officers witnessed the carnage. One of them, a major general of pioneers called Walter Bruns, recalled the scene in a conversation that was secretly taped while he was a POW in Britain in 1945. He had an engineer’s eye for detail: ‘the pits were 24 metres in length and 3 metres in breadth – they had to lie down like sardines in a tin, with their heads in the centre. Above them were six men with submachine guns who gave them the coup de grâce. When I arrived those pits were so full that the living had to lie down on top of the dead; then they were shot and, in order to save room, they had to lie down neatly in layers. Before this, however, they were stripped of everything at one of the stations.’ At these ‘stations’ they had to hand over jewellery, packs and suitcases. ‘All good stuff was put into suitcases and the remainder thrown on a heap.’ Further on they had to undress completely: ‘they were only permitted to keep on a chemise and knickers. They were all women and small two-year-old children.’ He remembered the ‘nasty remarks’ made by the shooters such as ‘“Here comes a Jewish beauty!”’ The image of one woman stuck in his mind. ‘Talk about keeping the race pure,’ he continued, ‘at Riga they first slept with them and then shot them to prevent them from talking.’ Bruns sent two other officers to observe the scenes so that they could support his formal complaint. Shortly afterwards steps were taken to conduct the massacres with greater discretion.¹⁴⁶

The Riga murders created a stink in Berlin, although not because of the dismay expressed by a few senior Wehrmacht officers. By chance, a transport of 950 Berlin Jews had arrived at the Skirotava Station on the same day and Jeckeln had them shot along with the locals. The murder of the Berlin deportees annoyed Lange because Reich Jews were under the control of the RSHA and Jeckeln, as HSSPF, had no jurisdiction over them. Lange made a formal protest to the RSHA, as a result of which Jeckeln was summoned to Berlin and given a mild reprimand by Himmler. After his return, the killing resumed. Now, though, the Jews knew the fate awaiting them and there was considerable resistance. During the action on 7–9 December they refused to assemble meekly and many sought to evade the German and Latvian police units. In the ensuing turmoil about 900 were gunned down in the ghetto, including members of the Jewish council and the Order Service. In spite of this disruption, roughly 10,000 Jews were driven to Rumbula and murdered there, mainly by Latvians under the command of Victor Arajs.147

The deportation of the Reich Jews had all the familiar hallmarks of improvisation, lack of resources, and partial success. Lange gave instructions to build a reception camp at Salaspils, a few miles southeast of Riga on the railway line between the capital and Daugavpils, but by the end of the year it was nowhere near complete. Instead, trainloads of incoming Jews were bundled into a special section of the ghetto or diverted to a concentration camp at Jungfernhof. Whereas Himmler had aimed to evacuate 70,000 Jews, he managed to uproot only 53,000. Because the Riga ghetto was ‘full’ and Salaspils was not operational, during November several trainloads of German Jews were diverted to Kaunus or Minsk. Since no one in authority had any interest in receiving them, the Jews reaching these destinations were shot on arrival. The massacre of 1,000 Jews from Breslau (from a transport that departed on 23 November) shocked the Kaunus ghetto. For days afterwards Jewish workers sorted the belongings taken from the doomed train: ‘The finest possessions that the eye can see … the nicest foods, all prepared with a generous hand to last a long time, the best clothing, the rarest of medicines, and various professional instruments. An endless number of books – scientific, professional, Jewish books, prayer books, prayer shawls … they were so shockingly deceived. Their first step toward their new life was also their last – the pits of the 9th Fort.’ Amongst the slain from Breslau were Willy Cohen, his wife and two daughters aged nine and three years old.¹⁴⁸

Jews from the west began arriving in the Lodz ghetto in late October. Despite repeated protests to Berlin by Mayor Ventzki and the ghetto manager Friedrich Übelhör, by the end of the year the ghetto had absorbed nearly 20,000 from the Old Reich, Prague, Vienna and Luxemburg. Yet no immediate steps were taken to thin out the existing population. Instead, Herbert Lange, the head of a Sonderkommando that had murdered the inmates of Polish asylums, was deployed to use the same techniques to get rid of unwanted Jews from the Wartheland. Lange had pioneered the use of gas vans. He arranged for the large storage compartment mounted on a furniture lorry to be made airtight. The victims were loaded into the back, the doors were sealed, and exhaust fumes from the engine were piped into it until they were asphyxiated. As a light touch, each lorry was painted to make it appear like one of an innocuous fleet of vehicles belonging to the Kaiser Kaffee Geschäft – a coffee company. Lange identified the small town of Chelmno as a suitable base for his operation and constructed a crude facility with barracks for his staff and the guard detail, cells for the Jewish labour force, sorting and storage units, and a burial site in a nearby forest. His first victims were several hundred Jews from the nearby towns of Kolo and Czachulec who were murdered on 8–10 December 1941, perhaps as a trial run. But Chelmno was just waiting for the Jews of Lodz. On 20 December the ghetto authorities informed Chaim Rumkowski that 20,000 Jews would have to be removed from the ghetto due to food shortages and the influx of German Jews. Rumkowski bargained the numbers down to half that, then set up a commission to determine who would go. ‘The news of the coming resettlement’, the authors of the ghetto chronicle noted, ‘has created a mood of depression in the ghetto.’149

German Jews, preoccupied with their own fate, had no inkling that their imminent deportation was causing misery and horror 600 miles away. On 15 October, Jewish emigration from the Reich was prohibited. The title of Eichmann’s office, IVB4 of the Gestapo, was adjusted to signify that it handled evacuation rather than emigration. Guidelines for the removal of the Jews began to flow from office IVB4 to Gestapo offices and police stations across the Reich. Jews who were scheduled for evacuation were given precise instructions and ordered to fill in numerous forms detailing their property and assets. At the appointed date and time they had to appear at the assembly place, a synagogue or communal building, with all the necessary documentation, a suitcase weighing no more than 50kg, a blanket, food for three days’ travel, and 200 Reichsmarks. When leaving their apartments they had to make sure the gas was turned off, lock the front door and hand the key over to the police. Helpfully, the envelope that contained the instructions and forms issued to each deportee also included a key ring. At the point of departure, usually a suburban railway station or a freight yard, they had to hand over share certificates, foreign currency, bank savings books, and any precious objects, with the exception of wedding rings. Their identity cards were then stamped ‘Evacuated’.¹⁵⁰

To ensure that there was no legal impediment to the Reich taking all their property and assets the Interior Ministry promulgated the 11th supplement to the Reich Citizenship Law. This stated that any Jew who left Germany was automatically stripped of his or her nationality and forfeited his or her wealth to the state. Since Jews who were deported to Theresienstadt technically remained within the Greater Reich they were required to sign a document by which they exchanged their home and belongings for a new residence in the Reich ghetto.¹⁵¹

The Reichsvereinigung in Berlin and the IKG in Vienna tried to make the lot of the deportees as comfortable as possible. Food kitchens were stationed at the assembly areas and medical staff were in attendance. In Vienna, Jewish marshals actually escorted Jews to the trains, sometimes carrying their baggage for them. But the fact that Jewish officials were there to help Jews on their way gave the impression that the Jewish organizations were colluding in the deportation process. The exemption of these officials compounded the jaundiced opinion of those who passed through their hands. Large numbers of Jews preferred to take their own lives in surroundings that still offered a modicum of familiarity and consolation. Howard Smith noticed that the official Jewish newspaper in Berlin was filled with death notices on the eve of each transport. It is estimated that 4,000–5,000 Jews in the Reich capital died by their own hand rather than face the indignity and hardship of relocating to a strange, primitive land. Most of them were elderly and a high percentage were women. In a significant number of cases, women opted for suicide after their non-Jewish spouse, who shielded them from removal, had died or been killed (some were in the army). Some Nazi bureaucrats regarded it as a defeat when a Jew cheated deportation in this way. The district governor of Upper and Central Franconia, for example, reported that ‘The Jew Dr Martin Israel Offenbacher avoided evacuation by committing suicide.’ In 1943, Hannah Arendt wrote in an essay about refugees that ‘Jewish suicides in the Third Reich, especially after the deportations began, were therefore acts of self-assertion rather than acts of resistance against the National Socialist murderers’ policies.’¹⁵²

In spite of all the efforts of the regime to prevent turf wars over the property of the deported and to regulate the disposal of their belongings, the enforced exodus generated the usual unseemly squabbles. Howard Smith recorded how ‘their pitiful belongings were sold at public auctions, and good Aryans fought like jackals over a carcass to buy shabby objects the Reich war had made scarce’. The public sales were often conducted inside homes unsealed for the purpose; they were an ‘ugly spectacle’. In Göttingen, the NSDAP office was ‘swamped by requests for the assignment of apartments’. The Minden Gestapo office fought with the revenue office over the right to dispose of vacated properties. There were no public protests; the Churches remained silent. But there was private unease, especially once news of their fate leaked back to Germany. Klemperer got wind of the Riga massacre not long afterwards. A rumour, he wrote, ‘but it is very credible and comes from various sources – evacuated Jews were shot in Riga, in groups, as they left the train’. Ulrich von Hassell recorded ‘revulsion on the part of all decent people towards the scandalous measures taken against the Jews and prisoners in the east, and against harmless, and often distinguished Jews in Berlin and other large cities’.¹⁵³

Those who boarded the transports endured a wretched three- or four-day journey only to arrive at what was, to them, the end of the world. Henry Rosenberg, deported from Hamburg to Minsk in early November, recalled: ‘The carriages were not heated. With so many people and so much luggage it was not possible to settle down let alone sleep. People were so anxious that the slightest affront led to an altercation.’ Since they arrived in darkness they were confined to the carriages until 5 a.m. when SS officers arrived and issued orders. ‘We had to leave the train and assemble with our hand luggage in front of each carriage to be counted. Then we … were taken to the ghetto and told, “Anyone who runs away or refuses to obey orders will be shot. A hundred will be shot for every one who runs away.”’ He was sent with some other men to clear a school building which had been used to accommodate a group of local Jews prior to removal from the ghetto. ‘The stoves were still burning, everything was strewn about, and the floor was covered with hundreds of corpses.’ Russian Jews tried to get near, to look at the bodies. ‘They cried and screamed and searched for their relatives among the dead. That is how we got to know that, in Minsk, on 9 November, 30,000 had been murdered.’ Rosenberg was the only one from his transport to survive the war.¹⁵⁴

From 10 December 1941, Jews from the Reich began to fill the spaces in Riga vacated by murdered Latvian Jews. The ghetto was divided into two parts, each surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. North of Ludzas Road, the ‘small ghetto’ was inhabited primarily by Latvian Jews. The German Jews occupied several blocks to the south, including an area for growing vegetables. Although transports delivered 20,000 German Jews to Riga, little over half that number were actually admitted to the ghetto. The old and the sick were taken from the railway station and shot. One of those who arrived was twenty-three-year-old Josef Katz, from Lübeck, who obtained permission from the Gestapo to accompany his mother when she received her deportation order. The Jews from his transport were sent to the Jungfernhof camp. In a postwar memoir Katz described his first impressions of the place: ‘Several large barns, a few service buildings and off by itself the big house, that is all that awaits thousands of people at Camp Jungfernhof.’ The next morning he saw a ‘mountain of luggage, stoves and sleeping bags’ covered by snow in the courtyard. ‘The muddy roads are deeply rutted by the trucks and strewn with rubbish. Crowds are everywhere. The one pump in the camp is surrounded by people trying to wash up a little.’ Within a few days, around 200 Jews had expired from cold, hunger, and the effects of hard labour. Katz, who was later transferred to the Salaspils camp, learned in January that his mother was dead. As he embarked on an odyssey that took him through one camp and one work detail after another, thoughts of revenge kept him going.¹⁵⁵

The German, Austrian and Czech Jews deposited in Lodz were spared anything quite as horrific, although the sights that greeted them were shocking nonetheless. Oskar Rosenfeld was a fifty-eight-year-old writer who had been the Prague correspondent of the London Jewish Chronicle for many years. He started keeping a journal of his experiences soon after arriving. He saw ‘Dreary mud huts … pools of sewage … stinking refuse … countless tired, crooked creatures … faces that had already overcome all misery, in which was written: We’ll persevere, we’ll survive you … shabby sundry stores, taverns, coffee houses, cigarette vendors, young girls and children who were selling something or other, the smell of things unknown in the West, young people in uniform with Zion stars on their arms, screams amidst the silence … This was the criminal quarter of Lodz, the ghetto of Litzmannstadt.’¹⁵⁶

The newcomers were directed to hostels set up in school buildings and any other vacant premises. So many were elderly that the Jewish council created a special home for the aged filled only with German-speakers. Most of them could not work and, if they could, there were no jobs, so they sold off their possessions in order to supplement the paltry rations. At first this led to a boom and the cost of food on the black market shot up. According to the chronicle, ‘Since the arrival of the transports from Germany, all the restaurants and pastry shops, half empty until then, have truly been besieged by newcomers … from the moment they arrived, the newcomers began selling their personal property and, with the cash they received, began to buy up literally everything available on the private food market.’ The natives resented this inflation although the better-off were glad of the chance to obtain new clothing, footwear and cosmetics. Soon, however, the new arrivals began to run short of items. In a matter of weeks they could be seen wandering the ghetto, ‘forever hungry and searching for food’. They surrounded the post office so that they could send beseeching postcards to relatives and friends in the Reich. Then they started to die off. Not a few succumbed to despair and committed suicide. The wife of a rabbi from Prague ‘asked the sentry on duty at the border of the ghetto at the corner of Brzezinski Street to take her life’. She walked ten metres beyond the boundary and was killed with a head shot.¹⁵⁷

Rumkowski struggled to keep a lid on inflation and stop the western Jews vacuuming up so much of the food that the rest of the ghetto went hungry. He warned German Jews to be careful about selling their possessions too quickly since there was no possibility of relief once they were destitute. And he warned the intellectuals to toe the line: ‘watch your bones’, he admonished the lawyers, professors and rabbis from Prague. The rest of the populace regarded the Reich Jews with suspicion because they had a cultural affinity with the ghetto overlords. The more street-wise despised them for their gullibility. Later, Polish Jews came to appreciate the cultural enrichment of the ghetto that flowed from the accession of so many artists, musicians, singers and actors. Few, however, had warm feelings for the converts who were added to the hundred-strong Christian community. At Christmas 1941, there was a minor sensation when forty Christian Jews attended a service conducted by a Carmelite nun from Vienna. Dawid Sierakowiak heard that some of these converts had ‘sons at the front’ and were suspected of being Nazi sympathizers.¹⁵⁸

The war in the east and the Polish ghettos

Despite German hegemony across the continent, because of Operation Barbarossa the Jews in different parts of Europe experienced wildly diverging fates between June and December 1941. The invasion of the USSR brought a fathomless calamity on the Jews who lived in the path of the German armies and the Einsatzgruppen. For Jews in the General Government and the Wartheland, the invasion actually brought a measure of relief. The requirements of the German armed forces and war industries offered them an economic lifeline. In western Europe, Jewish life continued with a remarkable degree of normality. There was one exception to this trend: the assault on the Soviet state reversed the uneasy truce between communism and Nazism, sparking a wave of communist-led resistance from Paris to Belgrade. Given that the Nazis saw Jews behind any opposition to their cause, this eruption inevitably brought reprisals onto Jewish communities.¹⁵⁹

Jews in the Polish ghettos were thrilled by news of the attack on the Soviet Union, an event many of them anticipated thanks to the numerous warning signs such as civil defence exercises. Dawid Sierakowiak in Lodz exclaimed, ‘The entire ghetto is buzzing like one big beehive. Everybody feels that a chance for liberation is finally possible.’ In Warsaw, Mary Berg was overjoyed: ‘War between Germany and Russia! Who could have hoped it would come so soon!’ Despite the run of German victories Emanuel Ringelblum astutely grasped the significance of any continuing Russian resistance and commented that ‘The Soviet Army’s stand is amazing the Jewish population.’ Adam Czerniaków monitored the German advance closely, not least because his son was in Lwow. Like him, many Polish Jews anxiously followed the military bulletins with relatives in mind. By October, however, even Ringelblum was cast into gloom and Sierakowiak had become resigned: ‘The war will take a long time, and our task now is to fight with all our strength to stay alive.’ As the year drew to a close, German reverses and the entry of the United States into the war rekindled Jewish optimism. They gave Warsaw ‘a new breath of hope’. Ghetto residents could scarcely conceal their glee when the Germans started confiscating furs from the Jewish population, a sure sign of how badly the Wehrmacht was equipped for winter warfare.¹⁶⁰

In Lodz, the invasion led to an economic boom. In late August 1941, Sierakowiak boasted that ‘The ghetto is developing more and more gloriously. A large number of new workshops and factories are being established … Hundreds of people are now finding employment, and everything appears to be going for the better.’ The employment surge compensated for the loss of packages sent by relatives in the Soviet zone of Poland and the USSR, which amounted to about half the total volume received by the ghetto post office. Partly because of this the cost of food increased, but the rate of mortality fell. Towards the end of 1941, the ghetto was inundated with orders from the German army for winter equipment, including 56,000 white camouflage smocks. An essay in the ghetto chronicle dated January 1942 concluded that the food supply situation had been ‘displaying a tendency towards complete stabilization. In the areas of basic items, the ghetto is quite regularly receiving food in quantities which correspond to the stated need.’ Unfortunately, inequalities in the distribution meant that the ‘upper 10,000’ benefited at the expense of the masses. Those with means or in receipt of a bigger ration thanks to their work (or connections) were able to exchange vegetables for fats, sugar and meat. This pushed up prices on the open market beyond what most could afford and left them with inferior nourishment.¹⁶¹

Jews in other parts of the Wartheland and East Upper Silesia were barely affected by the cataclysm that unfolded to the east. On the contrary, Albrecht Schmelt found even more productive work for the Jewish labour force in the cities of East Upper Silesia, including Bedzin and Sosnowiec. By autumn 1941, he was employing approximately 17,000 Jews on road building, the railways, and producing items for the army. Operation Barbarossa saw a rapid expansion of Jewish employment in munitions factories as well as with private corporations that began to relocate to the region from areas coming under RAF bombardment. Consequently, aside from the restrictions and indignities already imposed on Jews, little changed. In Bielsko-Biala, Gerda Weissmann’s family remained in the cellar of their former home. She started learning English and began a romance with a young boy. Letters arrived from her brother in Lwow. ‘And so the winter passed,’ she wrote, looking back on 1941. David Rubinowitz lived close enough to the Russo-German demarcation line to hear the opening salvoes of Operation Barbarossa, but other than that it hardly impinged on his life. A few miles away Jews were being massacred, but in the Kielce region conditions remained relatively stable. A ghetto was created in Kielce in March 1941 and sealed in October – with a population of about 30,000 Jews, including refugees and deportees into the city – but Jews in the small town where David lived were able to come and go much as they pleased. In September 1941 he was still collecting mushrooms and blackberries in the woods nearby.¹⁶²

The transformation of the Warsaw ghetto economy began in May 1941 and was accelerated by the needs of the German army. On hearing of the invasion, Czerniaków noted tersely, ‘It will be necessary now to work all day …’ By early July, the Umschlagplatz, a rail freight yard on the northern border of the ghetto, was heaving with activity. During a visit Czerniaków saw: ‘A vast area, huge warehouses, numerous personnel’. The depots were ‘full of supplies for our productive enterprises’. The German army placed orders for mattresses, brushes, uniforms and footwear and employed Jews to repair and recondition equipment and clothing. Unfortunately, as Stanislaw Adler sagely observed, instead of operating a command economy and concentrating production into large units, Czerniaków perpetuated his laissez-faire approach. This resulted in a proliferation of small workshops that competed with one another, driving down profits and incomes. Yet this burgeoning created ‘an illusion of abundance which infuriated the Nazi dignitaries’ who inspected the ghetto economy. On the other hand, the cut-throat competition between producers made it even more attractive as a place for Germans to invest. As Adler noted, ‘The ghetto constituted a real goldmine as far as the supply of cheap labour was concerned.’ An increasing number of German private enterprises located into the ghetto between May 1941 and May 1942, providing employment, generating revenue, and allowing more food to be imported legally. For the first time, in October 1941 Czerniaków was able to contemplate a balanced budget.¹⁶³

Nevertheless, starvation and disease continued to ravage the poorer sections of the population. One reason was the limitation that Auerswald imposed on the total amount of food that the ghetto could import. Czerniaków repeatedly called on him to increase the supply, but Auerswald was adamant. In August 1941 he told Czerniaków, ‘the rations cannot be increased at this point because the newly captured territories absorb a lot of food’. Consequently, at the end of the year, Czerniaków calculated that the ghetto was importing 1.8 million zlotys’ worth of food legally and 80 million zlotys’ worth illegally. The Germans knew this too, and it confirmed their worst prejudices: first, that the Jewish residential district was sucking in food and, second, that the Jews had the wherewithal to pay for it. Indeed, in early August 1941 smuggling was so effective that bread inside the ghetto was cheaper than outside. This profusion undermined Czerniaków’s efforts to get access to the free market in Warsaw and reinforced the determination of the German ghetto administration not to increase the food allocation.¹⁶⁴

Smuggling did little to alleviate the mass poverty and hunger because it was in the hands of private entrepreneurs who sold produce at the price the market could bear to those who could afford it. The dependants of men transferred to forced labour outside the ghetto, the unemployed, those unable to work because of age or infirmity, orphans and refugees, relied on public soup kitchens. The nutrition these institutions dispensed was inadequate. Czerniaków joked grimly, ‘I write verse occasionally. A vivid imagination is needed for that, but never did I have the imagination to refer to the soup that we are doling out to the public as lunch.’ Moreover, the crowded, unsanitary premises where they operated served to spread typhus and tuberculosis amongst the already weakened clientele. Mary Berg wrote that Grzybowska Street was ‘always filled with hordes of beggars’ because it was the site of a public kitchen and therefore a ‘terrible breeding ground for typhus’.¹⁶⁵

Michel Mazor recalled that ‘the two sovereign powers ruling the ghetto were typhus and hunger’. Typhus raged through the ghetto in the spring and summer of 1941 and like hunger was aggravated by the social chasm dividing the Jewish population. Mary Berg recorded that ‘setting people down in front of hospitals has become a daily occurrence. Mothers, unable to stand the sight of their child suffering without medical aid, hope that by this method they will succeed in getting the patients to a hospital.’ By contrast, the well-off minority were able to buy serum to guard against typhus, some obtaining it by post from Switzerland. According to Mary, ‘A lively trade in medicines is being carried out in the ghetto.’ The publicly funded health service could not cope. When Czerniaków toured one of the hospitals he saw ‘Corpses in the corridor and three patients in each bed’. It was not until the autumn that the health services were reorganized and Ludwig Hirszfeld was brought in to direct countermeasures against the epidemic.¹⁶⁶

Of course, the callous attitude of the Germans was ultimately driving the tragedy. In October 1941, Auerswald amputated several blocks from the Jewish district, partly on the grounds that they straddled a German supply route. This resulted in the displacement of 6,000 people. Yet inequality within Jewish society inflected the impact. Ringelblum noted that ‘The Warsaw Jews viciously exploited the dilemma of those who were forced to move from Sienna Street,’ charging 150–200 zlotys per month for a room. Exorbitant rents did not deter those like the Berg family with money and connections. Mary’s father had been able to bribe his way into a job as a building janitor in July 1941 when Polish janitors were finally ordered out of the ghetto. These were coveted positions and most went to former Jewish professionals, especially lawyers. The job brought with it an armband that ensured exemption from forced labour, exemption from taxes, and extra food rations on top of a monthly salary of 200 zlotys. It also offered opportunities for backhanders from people sneaking in or out of a building after curfew. When the Bergs were forced to leave Sienna Street due to the contraction of the ghetto, they moved to ‘a large comfortable apartment on Leszno, where there is even a piano’. Not only did they get a roomy place to live, her father again got work as a janitor. Few were as fortunate.¹⁶⁷

Coincidentally, ten days after thousands were made homeless, the first snow came. Ringelblum knew what this would mean: ‘the populace is trembling at the prospect of cold weather. The most fearful sight is that of freezing children. Little children with bare feet, bare knees, and torn clothing, standing dumbly in the street weeping … Frozen children are becoming a general phenomenon.’ Jews were not dying from the cold only because of a fuel shortage for which the Germans were responsible. Mary Berg reported that ‘on the black market coal fetches fantastic prices and often cannot be obtained at all’. But when it was available, the rich could buy it. So the wealthy in the ghetto kept warm while freezing temperatures spelled catastrophe for the rest. According to Berg, in the tenements ‘Most of the sewage pipes are frozen, and in many the toilets cannot be used. Human excrement is often thrown onto the street with the garbage.’¹⁶⁸

The Jews in German-occupied western and southern Europe

During 1941, Helga Weiss, in Prague, continued to attend a makeshift Jewish school in an apartment. She accompanied her mother in the hours when it was permitted for Jews to go shopping. Meanwhile, her father idled away his time at home like all the other Jewish fathers who had been removed from their jobs or banned from business. In October she was forced to don the yellow star. In her diary she clinically analysed the reaction of Prague’s denizens: ‘One person will pass by me not noticing, at least apparently … another will smile sympathetically or encouragingly; with a third, a mocking and sneering jeer will cross his mouth.’ She had to travel in the back of trams that were full of ‘stars’ but found the city centre ‘swarming’ with her own kind, visible for the first time. As autumn wore on, the rumours about transports turned into reality. By mid-October, Helga would start the school day by identifying who had gone and who was left. Adults packed rucksacks, purchased mess kits, and assembled hard-wearing, warm clothes. Children picked their favourite toys. Mothers made bread for the journey: in Prague, the deportations were associated with the aroma of home-cooking. Finally, the Weiss family received the summons to report at the assembly centre in the Messepalast, the Trade Fair Palace, for relocation to Theresienstadt. Over the next two days ‘Aryan visitors’ came by, some to console and others to snap up whatever the family could not take with them. At 5 a.m. on 7 December, Helga took a last look around the home in which she had grown up. The family had breakfast then caught the tram to the Trade Fair, hurried along the way by ‘Ordners’, the Jewish marshals.¹⁶⁹

At the Messepalast they were issued with transportation numbers. Inside, the floor was marked with numbered squares, one square to each person. There was ‘nothing but dirt, dust, an unbearably heavy atmosphere, suitcases and between them people stretched out’. A field kitchen stood in the courtyard, but it was so cold that water froze in the latrines. People slept fully clothed on the floor. The following day the men’s hair was shaved and they were obliged to hand over their valuables, including the keys to their homes. At dawn the next morning they were told to assemble by number. A German officer informed them that they were going to a ‘new land to avoid persecution’. They were then marched to a nearby station. ‘Pedestrians stop on the pavements and stare curiously at us. Tears even appear in some of their eyes … the inhabitants of Prague don’t get to see such a spectacle every day: people being led along main streets in broad daylight under military guard, carrying all their possessions on their backs. Children, pensioners, it doesn’t matter, all with stars and transport numbers on their coats.’ At eleven in the morning they were all seated in passenger carriages and at noon the transport left. Three hours later they arrived at Bohusovice Station, near Theresienstadt.¹⁷⁰

On entering the ghetto the Jews were separated by gender. Helga and her mother were assigned to the Dresden barracks where they were allocated 1.2 square metres of space. ‘We stick our feet in other people’s faces,’ she wrote, ‘truly horrible. If you’ve not seen it with your own eyes you would never believe it …’ Her father was sent to the Magdeburg barracks and employed for several days transporting suitcases. It was a mark of how assimilated these Czech Jews were that the year ended with a Christmas show.¹⁷¹

Throughout the second half of 1941, the Vichy regime continued to make the running with anti-Jewish policies in France. French-born Jews faced relentless exclusion from economic activity and the expropriation of their businesses. Thousands of foreign-born Jews languished in barren, ill-equipped internment camps. Nearly 15,000 German and Austrian Jews were confined to Gurs and Saint-Cyprien, while over 2,000 were held in the ‘punishment camp’ at Le Vernet. Some 3,000 who had emigration papers were cooped up in Les Milles, near Marseilles, awaiting the chance to leave France. Hundreds of Jewish men were transferred from the camps into Foreign Worker Units, forced to do hard labour on land reclamation schemes or canal digging. The pay was meagre, the rations were poor, and they laboured under a harsh disciplinary regime. Thousands more were under ‘village arrest’, scattered in towns and hamlets across the foothills of the Pyrenees, under the watchful eye of the local gendarme and the native inhabitants. Jewish relief agencies, funded largely by the AJJDC, conveyed food and money to the internees and others toiled to release as many as possible. They began with the children and by May 1942 had succeeded in rescuing almost all of them. Then they argued that adolescents and adults should be allowed out for the sake of family reunification. Thanks to these efforts, the Jewish camp population fell from around 40,000 at the start of 1941 to about 11,000 in November.¹⁷²

During this period Raymond-Raoul Lambert was living comfortably with his family in the Free Zone, working with a committee bringing aid to refugees and internees. In early July he went to his local prefecture to complete the census on the Jews that was imposed on the south at the same time as the second Statut des Juifs was promulgated. There he encountered ‘the classical disorder of official bureaucracy’. An office of ‘Jewish Affairs’ had appeared ‘next to those for “Gun Permits” and “Permits to hold public dances”’. The clerk manning it was ‘quite friendly, a bit embarrassed’, although Lambert also noted that the officials handling Jewish affairs displayed an ‘appalling sectarianism’ and believed all the anti-Semitic propaganda that was spewed out by both the Germans and the French.¹⁷³

A week later he travelled to Paris and met with Xavier Vallat, with whom he still enjoyed ‘cordial’ relations. The rapport between these two veterans, both of whom loathed the ‘Boches’, was a key factor in a dramatic new development. Theo Dannecker had been nagging Vallat to create a central Jewish representative body in France modelled on the Reichsvereinigung in Germany. Dannecker, who represented office IVB4 of the Gestapo, was in something of a competition with Carl-Theo Zeitschel, who headed the Jewish desk at the German Embassy, to devise a far-reaching anti-Jewish policy. In August, Zeitschel suggested to the ambassador, Otto Abetz, that it was now opportune to consider deporting the Jews from France. ‘Progress in the conquest and occupation of vast territories in the East’, he wrote, ‘may bring about within a short time a definitive and satisfactory solution to the Jewish problem all over Europe.’ Abetz discussed the proposal with Hitler, but the Führer was still opposed to any mass deportation until the war was over. In the meantime, Dannecker succeeded in winning over Vallat to his scheme for a centralized representation of the Jews, although only because the wily head of CGQJ insisted that it answer to Vichy. Vallat approached Lambert as the man to establish and lead just such a body.¹⁷⁴

These machinations took place against the background of a deteriorating situation for the Jews in the occupied zone. Stalin’s call for resistance against the Germans had galvanized the French Communist Party. Anti-German leaflets began to appear on the streets and demonstrations against the occupiers took place in July and August. The first German soldier to be killed by the underground was shot dead on 3 September 1941. This upsurge rattled the military administration and the security police, who called on the Vichy authorities to suppress communist agitation. The Vichy police responded by intensifying the repression of foreign Jews. Back in May, nearly 6,500 Polish, German, Austrian and Czech Jews had been ordered to report at police stations in Paris. Only 3,747 turned up, but they were immediately bundled off to internment camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Roland. On 20 August the French police staged a ‘rafle’, or round-up, in the 11th arrondissement, a district popular with Jewish immigrants. This exercise netted over 4,232 foreign and French Jews, who were dispatched to a new camp in the Paris suburb of Drancy. Some 750 Jews, mainly French citizens, were subsequently released.¹⁷⁵

Pressure on the Jews increased during the autumn. Two hundred thousand French people visited the exhibition on ‘The Eternal Jew’, an anti-Semitic extravaganza staged in Paris. The film Jud Süß played to enthusiastic audiences across the country. On 2–3 October, the chief of the security police in Paris, Helmut Knochen, tried to stampede the military administration into handing Jewish affairs over to the SS by secretly setting off bombs at a number of synagogues. The explosions were supposed to be evidence of popular anger against the Jews, justifying a crackdown, but the subterfuge was quickly exposed. Instead, the army emerged as the driving force of anti-Jewish measures. In response to a succession of attacks on German military personnel the military administration set in train a spate of arrests and executions that fell disproportionately on Jews. As a reprisal for the latest shooting incident, on 12 December 1941, the military administration ordered the arrest of 743 French Jews, mostly professionals and intellectuals. They were consigned to a detention camp at Compiègne-Royallieu.¹⁷⁶

The round-ups and arrests nearly undermined Vallat’s negotiations with Lambert. When the two met on 27 September, Vallat proposed the creation of a unified Jewish communal organization. It would operate separately in the two zones, but benefit from official protection in both. This would guarantee the continued distribution of aid and financial relief to refugees and displaced Jews as well as support for the panoply of education and welfare institutions in the north and the south. However, the Consistoire and the traditional leadership were appalled when they learned of Lambert’s negotiations. They would not countenance a representative body resting on a racial definition of the Jews and refused to shelter under the same umbrella as those who were foreign-born. To men like Jacques Helbronner, Vallat’s initiative spelled a form of ghetto and its implementation would be bound to deepen the isolation of Jews from French society. Lambert retorted that the Germans were determined to impose a unitary representation on them come what may, so it was better to reach an arrangement with the Vichy authorities, especially one that ensured the ability of the existing charities to continue their work. The leadership of the immigrant Jews was ambivalent: on the one hand they feared a trap, but on the other they were afraid that vital rescue and relief work would be choked off unless it received official sanction. While controversy raged in Paris, Lambert went ahead under his own steam. During November 1941 he concluded a deal with Vallat to set up the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF), on the understanding that its work would be purely philanthropic and not political. It would not claim to represent the purely religious organizations, the Consistoire and the synagogues, and nor would it draw on funds that French Jews regarded as illegally confiscated.¹⁷⁷

By an unfortunate coincidence, the law to underpin the existence of UGIF was published ten days before the arrests of 12 December. The conjunction of the two events caused consternation amongst French Jews; Lambert was immediately cast in the role of a collaborator. His haughty attitude and the fact that he was appointed to run UGIF did not help him to sell it. He confided to his journal, ‘I am the only one capable of being secretary general – a heavy and very serious task … the Jewish agencies, militants, the philanthropists, and those who I call the “Jewish princes” are agitated, jealous and already criticizing me.’ He believed that in his new role he could fulfil his desire to ‘remain both an excellent Jew and an excellent Frenchman’, but others regarded him as a traitor.¹⁷⁸

The formation of UGIF exposed the rift between native and foreign-born Jews in France: put simply, the Jewish population was splintering under the weight of persecution. Far from creating solidarity, the arrest of French and foreign Jews in December 1941 drove a sharper wedge between the two groups. Jean-Jacques Bernard, a half-Jewish playwright who was interned at Compiègne, evoked this gulf in a memoir penned soon after France was liberated. He recalled the feeling of the intellectuals, lawyers, and artists like himself who found themselves thrown together in jail by the Germans: ‘in nearly all these Frenchmen no feeling of race existed. They considered themselves attacked as Frenchmen and only as Frenchmen.’ At Compiègne they were joined by foreign-born Jews transferred from Drancy. These were ‘nearly all Jews from central Europe, stateless people who had been driven from their own country and had come to find hospitality in France but had kept in their hearts the sense of being a Jewish community. This sentiment was generally unknown, and even resented by the majority of the Frenchmen arrested with me.’ Conditions in the camp were grim: the barracks were unheated and the food was poor. In the space of a few weeks thirty men died, while Bernard’s health steadily declined. Fearing the worst he declared in an oration to his fellow prisoners, ‘if I have to die in this business, I shall have died for France; I don’t want to be claimed by Judaism as a martyr’. Bernard was lucky: he never faced that choice. He was released and limped back to Paris where he could recuperate.¹⁷⁹

In the Netherlands the same period saw the tightening of restrictions on Jewish life, but also German efforts to promote Jewish emigration. Jews were excluded from state education at all levels and driven out of the remaining sectors of the economy in which they were still active. Under a decree of 8 August 1941, their assets, including art works, were entrusted to the Lippmann–Rosenthal Bank, which acted as a front for state-sponsored larceny. Inevitably, the displacement of Jews from business and industry resulted in unemployment. In November the Germans required that idle Jews should be sent to work camps and gave the Jewish council the task of selecting and assembling them. Ominously, the Germans also instructed all German and stateless Jews to register, ostensibly for the purposes of emigration. Around 10 per cent refused and began the process of living underground.¹⁸⁰

Until May 1941, German policy was still to expedite the emigration of as many Jews as possible. SS officials, frustrated that so few were departing, summoned Gertrude van Tijn to discuss ways to increase the numbers. Van Tijn suggested that the answer was to be found in Lisbon, which had turned into a bottle-neck for would-be emigrants. In early May the SS sent her to Portugal to meet with the Jewish relief agencies and Portuguese officials to try and unblock the flow. It was a successful mission: soon afterwards the AJJDC and HICEM chartered a ship to evacuate hundreds of refugees who had been unable to get passage to the USA. In return, the Portuguese lifted a temporary ban on accepting transmigrants. However, just when the SS had managed to accelerate Jewish emigration, the United States tightened immigration controls. In June 1941, President Roosevelt prohibited the transfer of funds to belligerent and neutral countries in Europe, crippling the work of the Jewish aid organizations. The following month, US consulates in Germany and German-occupied territory were shut down. Months before the Germans finally curtailed German Jewish emigration from areas under their control, the Americans had effectively ended the opportunity of escape.¹⁸¹

The turmoil Operation Barbarossa occasioned in France was nothing compared to the havoc it provoked in the German-occupied Balkans. On 6 April 1941, the Germans had invaded Yugoslavia in response to a coup d’état against the pro-Berlin government. Simultaneously they launched an attack on Greece in support of their hapless Italian allies. Although the Wehrmacht deployed a scratch force and fought the campaign on a shoestring, superior operational doctrine and tactics enabled them to destroy far more numerous armies. Yugoslavia surrendered on 17 April, Greece a week later. A British expeditionary force sent to Greece mainly to offer moral support withdrew to Crete and thence back to Egypt. As a result of these victories, about 80,000 Jews in Yugoslavia and approximately 77,000 in Greece fell under Axis control. Fully two thirds of the Greek Jews lived in Salonica, which had a Sephardi Jewish population of great antiquity and distinction. Yet, despite the fact that the Germans controlled the city, the Jews were left more or less undisturbed. The same was true for the Jews of central Greece, including 6,000 in Athens, living under Italian rule, and a similar number in eastern Thrace who were under Bulgarian administration.¹⁸²

After Yugoslavia surrendered, the country was dismembered and its Jewish population spread between different overlords. Around 40,000 Jews ended up in the German client-state of Croatia; 15,000 in Serbia, which was little more than an autonomous region under direct German rule; about 16,000 in Backa, a block of land annexed to Hungary; 8,000 in western Macedonia, occupied by Bulgaria; and several thousand more in the coastal strip of Macedonia under Italian jurisdiction. Croatia was ruled by the Ustasha Party led by Ante Pavelić, whose creed was a mixture of Catholic conservatism and Croatian nationalism. Soon after the state gained its independence, the Ustasha government passed a slew of racial laws. In May 1941, Jews were compelled to wear the yellow badge. Following the invasion of the USSR, to which the Croats contributed a mobile brigade, the Jews were almost totally excluded from the economy and society. Some 20,000–25,000 were interned in a concentration camp constructed around a disused brick works at Jasenovac, about sixty miles south of Zagreb.¹⁸³

Serbia was placed under a civilian administration and remained a backwater of German-controlled territory until Operation Barbarossa. The invasion of Russia triggered a popular uprising which soon had the Germans reeling. Harald Turner, the head of the administration, and the military commanders immediately assumed that the Jews were behind the insurgency. One month into the revolt, Felix Benzler, the Foreign Office representative in Belgrade, informed Berlin that the security forces planned ‘extreme measures against the Communists who will be captured, and against the Jews, since it is obvious that they collaborate with the Communists’. Benzler requested permission to expel the Jews to Poland or Romania, but was told by Berlin to put them in concentration camps instead. Unfortunately, the camps were already full of dissident Serbs, so the head of the Jewish desk at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin consulted Eichmann about what to do with them. Eichmann responded curtly, ‘shoot them’. But the advice was superfluous: the army had been shooting Jews as a reprisal measure for several weeks. In September, Hitler dispatched General Franz Böhme with two infantry divisions to suppress the insurrection before it spread further. He ordered that Jews should be held as hostages and executed. Even though most Jewish men were now interned, Turner continued to insist that they were a ‘danger to public order and safety’. In the course of October and November about 6,000 Jewish men were shot as a reprisal and to break a rebellion that had absolutely nothing to do with them.¹⁸⁴

Due to Operation Barbarossa, a certain uniformity began to appear in the German attitude towards the Jews across the continent. Towards the end of the year, developments in the war and Germany’s international situation would begin a process of convergence that would tip the whole of European Jewry into a common, dreadful fate.

The widening war and Hitler’s prophecy

In the autumn of 1941 the anti-Jewish policy of the Third Reich was in confusion. Hitler’s September 1941 decision to permit the deportation of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate to the east was made without much thought as to where they would go. Nor was there any firm policy about what would happen to them once they got there, wherever it was. Would they be warehoused in ghettos? Or shot? Would the deportation apply to Mischlinge and privileged Jews? If persons in these categories were sent east, would they be shot too? The deportations triggered a new wave of massacres and experiments with new techniques of mass killing, but these were hurriedly improvised local solutions to problems arising from decisions carelessly made in Berlin or Prague. By contrast, the Polish ghettos, with their massive Jewish populations, experienced months of relative stability and modest economic growth. Although conditions in the ghettos were appalling and the rate of mortality was unnaturally high, Jews and Germans had developed a mutually beneficial modus vivendi. Moreover, enclosed ghettos were not uniform: in swathes of East Upper Silesia, the Wartheland, the General Government, and even Galicia, Jews lived in demarcated residential districts or simply remained where they had clustered before the war. Having weathered the early depredations and anti-Jewish regulations, Jewish communities persisted in thousands of small towns and villages. The shtetl was still alive. Likewise in western Europe, Jews had adapted to life under occupation, cramped and impoverished by anti-Jewish restrictions though it was. The leading figures in the regime had no ideas for dealing with them beyond the vague notion that they would all be transported to the interior of the Soviet Union after the war was over. Not a single concrete step had been taken to organize such a massive deportation programme.¹⁸⁵

However, the failure of Operation Barbarossa made the status quo untenable. First of all, the Third Reich was staring in the face of a European-wide food crisis. Famine had already taken hold in Greece, where the German army had devoured much of the available food. Germany was supplying three-quarters of the grain that Belgium required. The eastern armies had stripped Byelorussia bare of cereals, meat and fats. To compound the crisis, the invasion had so disrupted the harvest in the occupied Ukraine that only a fraction of what the Germans anticipated was actually brought in – and the army consumed 25 per cent of that. In order to supply viable rations to those elements of the population working for the Reich or serving the German army, Göring and Backe in effect revised the food plan. For workers to receive enough to function effectively, non-workers would get less or nothing at all. The Poles would have to shift for themselves; the elderly, children, POWs and Jews would starve. Even this was not enough to prevent belt-tightening in the Reich.¹⁸⁶

The prolongation of the war also engendered a security crisis. While the Nazi leadership had anticipated that the invasion of the USSR would provoke an eruption of communist resistance they did not expect that it would be sustained, turning occupied Europe into a huge fifth column. Their reflex thinking was to see Jews behind the communists, who were, in turn, blamed for every manifestation of dissent, sabotage and violent resistance. Reprisals acted as a deterrent, but according to their perverse logic the massacres in the Soviet Union provided the Jews with even more reason to bring down the Reich. Hence Operation Barbarossa had transformed the entire Jewish population of Europe into a cunning, merciless adversary. Moreover, the perceived security threat represented an opportunity for Himmler and Heydrich to extend their powers. They had taken the lead in the war against partisans, Jewish-Bolsheviks, in the east: this very experience qualified them to take the leading role in the west. Anti-Jewish policy fused with security policy, with the SS in the driving seat.¹⁸⁷

Finally, Germany’s inability to knock out the Soviet Union had created a dangerous geo-strategic dilemma regarding the USA. In July 1941, Hitler had fantasized about launching an attack on America using enhanced naval forces and a Luftwaffe equipped with long-range bombers. Instead of gaining the capability to tackle the USA, Hitler was obliged to watch Roosevelt prepare his country for war and edge closer to combatant status. Despite the ideological gulf between them, the USA started sending military supplies and food aid to the Soviets. American troops occupied Iceland in July, taking over from the British, who had invaded the Danish-ruled island after the Nazi conquest of Denmark in May 1940. On 14 August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt announced the Atlantic Charter, setting out their shared aspirations. Although it stopped short of military cooperation it was virtually a joint declaration of war on the Axis. During September and October there were several clashes between US Navy vessels and German U-boats. After the USS Kearny was attacked, Roosevelt solemnly told the American public, ‘The shooting has started.’ Within weeks he had achieved legislation for US merchant ships to be armed and permitted to venture into combat zones. The administration issued orders for the US Navy to ‘shoot on sight’ any German submarine that came within range.¹⁸⁸

While Roosevelt believed that he had to move gradually, winning over the American public to the idea of entering the war, to Hitler it was obvious that the Jews were rushing the United States towards combat with the Reich. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, he resolved that he had nothing to lose by taking the initiative. Within hours of the news reaching him, he instructed the U-boat fleet to move to unrestricted warfare against American shipping and in a speech to the Reichstag on 11 December formally declared war on the United States. Even though he was relatively restrained in his comments about the Jewish enemy, he ensured that the German people understood who was to blame: ‘That the Anglo-Saxon-Jewish-Capitalist World finds itself now in one and the same Front with Bolshevism does not surprise us National Socialists: we have always found them in company.’¹⁸⁹

The extension of the war finally brought clarity and theoretical, if not practical, coherence to Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Germany was now involved in a global conflict engineered by the Jews, fighting a war, against Jewish-Bolshevism in Russia, against the Jewish-communist fifth column across Europe, and Jewish plutocracy in the USA and Britain. The Jewish population of the Reich and German-occupied Europe, who the Nazis had held hostage against such a prospect, no longer served that purpose. Instead they would pay the price, as Hitler had prophesied. In a series of meetings between 7 and 18 December, Hitler briefed the highest cadres of the Nazi Party and his most trusted aides about his new determination to punish the Jews during the war rather than wait to expel them from German living space in its aftermath. Having returned from a gathering on 12 December at which Hitler addressed the regional party bosses, Goebbels wrote, ‘Concerning the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if once again they were to cause a world war, the result would be their own destruction. That was no figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence.’¹⁹⁰

Four days later, Hans Frank, who attended this assembly, brought his administration in the General Government up to speed. Hitler had told them in Berlin, ‘We must put an end to the Jews.’ There was no room for compassion: ‘they will disappear. They must go.’ Frank informed his listeners that a major conference would be held the following month in Berlin to discuss the ‘migration’ of the Jews. ‘But what is to happen to the Jews?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Do you believe they will be lodged in settlements in the Ostland? In Berlin we were told: why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat [Ukraine] either; liquidate them yourselves.’ To avoid any misconceptions about what this meant, Frank added, ‘Gentlemen, I must ask you, arm yourselves against any thoughts of compassion. We must destroy the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever it is possible, in order to preserve the entire structure of the Reich.’ He even went as far as to speculate on how this goal was to be accomplished, revealing that the precise means were still unresolved. ‘We have an estimated 2.5 million Jews in the General Government, perhaps with the half-Jews and all that that entails some 3.5 million. We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but nonetheless we will take some kind of action that will lead to a successful destruction.’ That would be discussed in January.¹⁹¹

On 18 December, Otto Bräutigam at the ministry for the east wrote to Hinrich Lohse, ruler of the Ostland, that ‘clarity on the Jewish question has been achieved through oral discussion: economic interests are to be disregarded on principle in the settlement of this question’. In other words, Lohse was to have no more qualms or objections about the mass killing of Jewish workers. Bräutigam’s missive followed a meeting between his boss, Alfred Rosenberg, and Hitler, at which the former had raised the Jewish question. Rosenberg afterwards noted that Hitler told him ‘they had burdened us with this war … It should come as no surprise when they above all suffered the consequences.’ The same day as Bräutigam’s communication, Himmler met Hitler. The topic in his appointment book stated simply, ‘Jewish question/to be exterminated as partisans’. Since the Jews in the occupied areas of the USSR were already being ‘exterminated as partisans’ this suggests he was consulting with the Führer about plans to widen his murderous security operation to the Jewish communities across the rest of German-controlled Europe. The fate of the Jews had been decided.¹⁹²