As supplement to the task that was entrusted to you in the decree dated 24 January 1939, namely to solve the Jewish question by emigration and evacuation in the most favourable way possible, given present conditions, I herewith commission you to carry out all necessary preparations with regard to the organizational, substantive and financial viewpoints, for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. In so far as the competences of other central organizations are hereby affected, these are to be involved.¹⁵³

Heydrich, in turn, gave orders to Adolf Eichmann, his RSHA official in charge of ‘Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Affairs’. He had administrative responsibility for the Holocaust as a whole, though Himmler exercised operational responsibility through his camp commanders. It was Eichmann who actually drafted the 31 July 1941 order signed by Göring. But at the same time an additional oral order was given by Hitler to Heydrich and transmitted to Eichmann: ‘I have just come from the Reichsführer: the Führer has now ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews.’¹⁵⁴

Construction of the mass-killing machinery went on throughout the summer and autumn of 1941. Two civilians from Hamburg came to Auschwitz to teach the staff how to handle Zyklon-B, which was the preferred killing method there. In September, the first gassing was carried out, in Auschwitz Block II, on 250 Jewish hospital patients and 600 Russian prisoners. Then work began on Birkenau, the main Auschwitz killing-centre. The first death camp to be completed was Chelmno, near Lodz, which started functioning on 8 December 1941, using exhaust gases from mobile vans. An RSHA conference on the killing had been planned for the next day, at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. But it was postponed because of Pearl Harbor, and did not take place until 20 January 1942. By then there was a certain note of anxiety among the top Nazis. The survival of Russia, and the entrance of America into the war, must have convinced many of them that Germany was unlikely to win it. The conference was to reaffirm the object of the Final Solution and to co-ordinate means to carry it through. There was lunch, and while waiters handed round brandy, several present urged the need for speed. It was from this point on that the exigencies of the Holocaust were given priority even over the war effort itself, reflecting Hitler’s resolve that, whatever the outcome of the war, the European Jews would not survive it.

Wannsee was followed by rapid action. Belzec became operational the next month. The building of Sobibor began in March. At the same time Majdanek and Treblinka were transformed into death centres. Goebbels, after a briefing by Globocnik, in charge of the General Government camps, noted (27 March 1942): ‘A judgment is being visited on the Jews [which is] barbaric…. The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner.’155

Goebbels, however, was confiding to his diary. In actual orders, even for very limited circulation, the genocide was invariably described in euphemistic code. Even at the Wannsee conference, Heydrich used code. All Jews, he said, were to be ‘evacuated to the East’ and formed into labour columns. Most would ‘fall away through natural decline’ but the hard core, capable of rebuilding Jewry, would be ‘treated accordingly’. This last phrase, meaning ‘killed’, was already familiar from Einsatzgruppen reports. There were many official euphemisms for murder, used by those within the operations and well understood by countless thousands outside them: Security Police measures, worked over in the Security Police manner, actions, special actions, special treatment, moved East, resettlement, appropriate treatment, cleansing, major cleansing actions, conveyed to special measures, elimination, solution, cleaning up, making free, finished, migration, wandering, wandered off, disappeared.

The euphemisms were considered necessary, even among the professional mass-killers, to minimize any brooding on the sheer enormity of what they were doing. There were about 8,861,800 Jews in the countries of Europe directly or indirectly under Nazi control. Of these it is calculated that the Nazis killed 5,933,900, or 67 per cent. In Poland, which had by far the largest number, 3,300,000, over 90 per cent, were killed. The same percentage was reached in the Baltic States, Germany and Austria, and over 70 per cent were killed in the Bohemian Protectorate, Slovakia, Greece and the Netherlands. More than 50 per cent of the Jews were killed in White Russia, the Ukraine, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Norway.¹⁵⁶ The six big death camps formed the main killing areas, murdering over two million at Auschwitz, 1,380,000 at Majdanek, 800,000 at Treblinka, 600,000 at Belzec, 340,000 at Chelmno and 250,000 at Sobibor. The speed with which their gas chambers worked was awesome. Treblinka had ten of them, each accommodating 200 people at a time. It was Höss’s boast that at Auschwitz each of his gas chambers could take 2,000. Using Zyklon-B gas crystals, the five Auschwitz chambers could murder 60,000 men, women and children every twenty-four hours. Höss said that he murdered 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone (as well as other groups) during the summer of 1944, and that in total ‘at least’ 2,500,000 humans (Jews and non-Jews) were gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz, plus another half-million who died of starvation and disease. For many months in 1942, 1943 and 1944, the Nazis were each week killing in cold blood over 100,000 people, mainly Jews.157

That atrocities on this scale could have been carried out in civilized Europe, albeit in wartime and behind the protective screen of the German army, raises a number of questions about the behaviour of the German people, their allies, associates and conquests, about the British and Americans, and not least about the Jews themselves. Let us examine each in turn.

The German people knew about and acquiesced in the genocide. There were 900,000 of them in the ss alone, plus another 1,200,000 involved in the railways. The trains were one giveaway. Most Germans knew the significance of the huge, crowded trains rattling through the hours of darkness, as one recorded remark suggests: ‘Those damned Jews, they won’t even let one sleep at night!’¹⁵⁸ The Germans were beneficiaries of murder. Scores of thousands of men’s and women’s watches, fountain-pens and propelling pencils, stolen from the victims, were distributed among the armed forces; in one six-week period alone, 222,269 sets of men’s suits and underclothes, 192,652 sets of women’s clothing, and 99,922 sets of children’s clothes, collected from the gassed at Auschwitz, were distributed on Germany’s Home Front.¹⁵⁹ The recipients knew roughly where these came from. The Germans did very little to protest about what was being done to the Jews or to help Jews escape. But there were exceptions. In Berlin, at the very heart of Hitler’s empire, several thousand of the city’s 160,000 Jews managed to escape by going underground, becoming ‘U-boats’ as they were called. In each case it meant some connivance and assistance by non-Jewish Germans.¹⁶⁰ One such was the scholar Hans Hirschel, who became a U-boat in February 1942. He moved into the flat of his mistress, the Countess Maria von Maltzan, sister-in-law of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, an ardent Nazi. She designed for him a box-like bed into which he could climb, with holes drilled for breathing. Each day she put in a fresh glass of water and a cough-suppressant. One day she came back to her flat and heard Hirschel and another U-boat, Willy Buschoff, singing at the top of their voices: ‘Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one’.161

The Austrians were worse than the Germans. They played a role in the Holocaust out of all proportion to their numbers. Not only Hitler, but Eichmann and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Gestapo, were Austrian. In the Netherlands, two Austrians, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Hanns Rauter, directed the killing of the Jews. In Yugoslavia, out of 5,090 war criminals, 2,499 were Austrian. Austrians were prominent in the mobile killing battalions. They provided one-third of the personnel of the SS sextermination units. Austrians commanded four out of the six main death camps and killed almost half of the six million Jewish victims.¹⁶² The Austrians were much more passionately anti-Semitic than the Germans. Menashe Mautner, a disabled veteran of the First World War with a wooden leg, fell on the icy pavements of Vienna and lay there three hours vainly asking the passers-by for help. They saw his star and refused.¹⁶³

The Rumanians were no better than the Austrians; worse in some ways. There were 757,000 Jews in pre-war Rumania, among the worst-treated in the world. The Rumanian government followed Hitler step by step in his anti-Jewish policy, with far less efficiency but added venom. From August 1940, laws stripped Jews of their possessions and jobs and subjected them to unpaid forced labour. There were pogroms too–in January 1941 170 Jews were murdered in Bucharest. The Rumanians played a major part in the invasion of Russia which for them was also a war against the Jews. They killed 200,000 Jews in Bessarabia. Jews were packed into cattle-trucks without food or water and shunted around with no particular destination. Or they were stripped of their clothes and taken on forced marches, some actually naked, others dressed only in newspapers. The Rumanian troops working with Einsatzgruppe D in southern Russia outraged even the Germans by their cruelty and their failure to bury the corpses of those they murdered. On 23 October 1941 the Rumanians carried out a general massacre of Jews in Odessa, after a land-mine destroyed their army HQ. The next day they herded crowds of Jews into four large warehouses, doused them with petrol and set them alight: between 20,000 and 30,000 were thus burned to death. With German agreement, they carved out the province of Transnistria from the Ukraine, as their own contribution to the Final Solution. In this killing area, 217,757. Jews were put to death (an estimated 130,000 from Russia, 87,757 from Rumania), the Rumanians dispatching 138,957 themselves.164 After the Germans and Austrians, the Rumanians were the biggest killers of Jews. They were more inclined to inflict beatings and torture, or to rape, the officers being worse than the men since they selected the prettiest Jewish girls for orgies. They were also more mercenary. After they shot Jews they sold the corpses to local peasants who stripped them of their clothes. They were willing to sell live Jews too if they could get enough cash for them. But from 1944 on their attitude became less bellicose as they realized the Allies would win.¹⁶⁵

In France too there was an important section of opinion willing to take an active part in Hitler’s Final Solution. It had never forgiven the Dreyfusard victory in 1906 and its hatred of the Jews was reinforced by the Blum Popular Front government of 1936. As in Germany, the anti-Semites included a great many intellectuals, especially writers. They included a doctor, F. L. Destouches, who wrote under the penname Céline. His anti-Semitic diatribe, Bagatelle pour un massacre (1937), written under his real name, was highly influential just before and during the war, arguing that France was already a country occupied (and as a woman raped) by Jews, and that a Hitlerian invasion would be a liberation. This extraordinary book resurrected a deep-seated notion that the English were in unholy alliance with Jews to destroy France. During the Dreyfus case the phrase ‘Oh Yes’, pronounced in an exaggerated English accent, was an anti-Semitic war-cry, and in Bagatelle Céline lists the slogans of the Anglo-Jewish world conspiracy: ‘Taratboum! Di! Yie! By gosh! Vive le Roi! Vivent les Lloyds! Vive Tahure! Vive la Cité! Vive Madame Simpson! Vive la Bible! Bordel de Dieu! Le monde est un lupanar juif!’¹⁶⁶ There were no fewer than ten anti-Semitic political organizations in France, some of them funded by the Nazi government, calling for the destruction of the Jews. Mercifully they could not agree on a common policy. But their moment came when the Vichy government adopted an anti-Semitic policy. Darquier de Pellepoix, who had founded the Rassemblement Anti-Juif de France in 1938, became Vichy Commissaire-Général aux Questions Juifs in May 1942.¹⁶⁷ Most of the French declined to collaborate with the Final Solution policy but those who did were more enthusiastic than the Germans. Thus Hitler contrived to kill 90,000 (26 per cent) of French Jews, and of the 75,000 deported from France, with the help of the French authorities, only 2,500 survived.¹⁶⁸ There was a large element of personal hatred in French wartime anti-Semitism. In 1940, the Vichy and German authorities received between three and five million poison-pen letters denouncing particular individuals (not all of them Jews).¹⁶⁹

Hitler found his Italian ally much less co-operative. Since the end of the papal states, the Italian Jewish community had become one of the best-integrated in Europe. As King Victor Emmanuel III told Herzl (1904): ‘Jews may occupy any position, and they do…. Jews for us are full-blown Italians.’170 It was also one of the oldest in the world. Benito Mussolini liked to joke that Jews ‘supplied the clothes after the rape of the Sabine Women’. Jews had produced two Italian prime ministers and one war minister; they provided a disproportionately large number of university teachers, but also of generals and admirals.¹⁷¹ Mussolini himself oscillated all his life between philo-semitism and anti-Semitism. It was a group of Jews who helped to convert him to intervention in the First World War, the critical moment in his life when he broke with Marxist internationalism and became a national socialist. Five Jews were among the original founders of the fasci di combattimento in 1919 and Jews were active in every branch of the Fascist movement. The learned article on anti-Semitism in the Fascist Encyclopaedia was written by a Jewish scholar. Both Mussolini’s biographer, Margharita Sarfatti, and his Minister of Finance, Guido Jung, were Jews. When Hitler came to power, Mussolini set himself up as the European protector of the Jew and was hailed by Stefan Zweig as ‘wunderbar Mussolini’.¹⁷²

Once the Duce fell under Hitler’s spell his anti-Semitic side became uppermost but it had no deep emotional roots. There was a definite anti-Semitic fringe within the Fascist Party and government but it was much less powerful than in the Vichy regime and seems to have had no popular support at all. Italy, in response to German pressure, introduced race laws in 1938 and when war came some Jews were interned in camps. But it was not until the Italian surrender in 1943 delivered half of Italy into German military control that Himmler was able to draw it into the Final Solution. On 24 September he sent instructions to his ss boss in Rome, Herbert Kappler, that all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, were to be rounded up and sent to Germany. But the German ambassador in Rome, whose Italian mistress was hiding a family of Jews in her home with his approval, gave no help and the military commander, Field-Marshal Kesselring, said he needed the Jews to build fortifications. Kappler used his order to blackmail the Jewish community. There was a gruesome, medieval scene in the German embassy, where he saw its two leaders, Dante Almansi and Ugo Foa, and demanded 50 kilos of gold within thirty-six hours; otherwise 200 Jews would be murdered. The two men asked to be allowed to pay in lire but Kappler sneered: ‘I can print as much of that as I want.’ The gold was delivered to the Gestapo within four days. Pope Pius XII offered to provide as much as was needed but by this time enough had been collected, many non-Jews, especially parish priests, contributing. A more serious loss was the most valuable volumes of Judaica in the community library, which went to swell Alfred Rosenberg’s private collection.

Himmler, who wanted live Jews to kill, not treasure, was furious with Kappler and sent his round-up expert, Theodor Dannecker, with a team of forty-four ss killers, to conduct a Judenaktion; he had carried out similar ones in Paris and Sofia. The German ambassador to the Holy See warned the Pope, who ordered the Rome clergy to open sanctuaries. The Vatican sheltered 477 Jews and a further 4,238 found refuge in convents and monasteries. The raid was a failure. Kappler reported: ‘The anti-Semitic section of the people was nowhere to be seen during the action, only a great mass of people who in some cases tried to cut off the police from the Jews.’ But it yielded 1,007 Jews, who were sent straight to Auschwitz and all but sixteen were murdered.173 There were raids in other Italian towns, also largely frustrated by the Italians. One notable survivor was Bernard Berenson, the intensely bookish scion of a Lithuanian rabbinical family who, in a secular age, had become the world’s leading authority on Italian Renaissance painting. He was tipped off in code by the local police: ‘Dottore, the Germans want to come to your villa but we are not sure exactly where it is. Could you give us instructions for your visit tomorrow morning?’ The Italians hid him for the rest of the German occupation.¹⁷⁴

In other European states, the ss got little or no help. But this did not necessarily mean failure in rounding up Jews. In occupied Greece, without any local help, they murdered all but 2,000 of the ancient 60,000-strong Salonika Jewry. In Belgium, despite local resistance, they killed 40,000 out of 65,000 Jews and almost wiped out the famous diamond-trading quarter of Antwerp. The ss effort in the Netherlands was particularly fierce and unremitting and, although the Dutch went so far as to hold a general strike to protect the Jews, the total loss was 105,000 out of 140,000. The Finns, Germany’s ally, refused to yield up their 2,000 Jews. The Danes succeeded in ferrying almost their entire Jewish community of 5,000 into Sweden. On the other hand, the great Hungarian Jewry, the last to be sacrificed, lost heavily: 21,747 were murdered in Hungary, 596,260 were deported, of whom only 116,500 survived.¹⁷⁵

The mass murder of the Hungarians took place at a time when the Allies had complete air superiority and were advancing rapidly. It raised in acute, practical form the question: could the Allies have done anything effective to save European Jewry? The Russians were closest to the Holocaust but never showed the slightest desire to help the Jews in any way. On the contrary: Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian, who tried to save Jewish lives in Budapest, vanished when the Red Army arrived there, the Swedes being told: ‘measures have been taken by the Soviet military authorities to protect Mr Raoul Wallenberg and his belongings’. He was never seen again.176

The British and American governments were in theory sympathetic to the Jews but in practice were terrified that any aggressively pro-Jewish policy would provoke Hitler into a mass expulsion of Jews whom they would then be morally obliged to absorb. For the Nazis, emigration was always one element in the Final Solution, and although the balance of evidence seems to show that Hitler was determined to murder Jews rather than export them, he was quite capable of modifying his policy to embarrass the Allies if they gave him the opportunity. Goebbels wrote in his diary, 13 December 1942: ‘I believe both the British and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff.’ This was not true. But neither power was prepared to save Jewish lives by accepting large numbers of refugees. Of all the major European powers, Britain was the least anti-Semitic in the 1930s. Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt movement, founded in 1932, was a failure, not least because it attacked Jews. The government feared, however, that widespread anti-Semitism would be the inevitable result of a mass immigration of Jews. Nor were they prepared to budge from the immigration restrictions laid down in the 1939 White Paper for Palestine. Winston Churchill, always a Zionist, favoured a larger Jewish intake. But his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, argued that to open up Palestine would alienate all Britain’s Arab allies there and destroy her military position in the Middle East. When the New York Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise asked him in Washington (27 March 1943) to support an Anglo-American plea to Germany to let the Jews leave occupied Europe, Eden told him the idea was ‘fantastically impossible’. But he privately confessed: ‘Hitler might well take us up on any such offer.’¹⁷⁷ The Foreign Office were against taking Jews and resented even Jewish requests to this effect: ‘A disproportionate amount of the time of this office’, minuted one senior official, ‘is wasted in dealing with these wailing Jews.’¹⁷⁸

The United States could certainly have accommodated large numbers of Jewish refugees. In fact during the war period only 21,000 were admitted, 10 per cent of the number allowed under the quota law. The reason for this was public hostility. All the patriotic groups, from the American Legion to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, called for a total ban on immigration. There was more anti-Semitism during the war than at any time in American history. The polls showed, 1938-45, that 35-40 per cent of the population would have backed anti-Jewish laws. In 1942, according to the polls, the Jews were seen as a bigger threat to America than any other group after Japanese and Germans. In 1942-4, for instance, every synagogue in New York’s Washington Heights was desecrated.179 News of the extermination programme was available from May 1942, when the Polish Jewish Labour Bund got verified reports to the two Jewish members of the Polish National Committee in London. This included descriptions of the gas vans at Chelmno and the figure of 700,000 Jews already murdered. The Boston Globe gave it the headline ‘Mass Murders of Jews in Poland Pass 700,000 Mark’ but buried the story on page 12. The New York Times called it ‘probably the greatest mass slaughter in history’ but gave it only two inches.¹⁸⁰ In general the Holocaust news was under reported and tended to get lost in the general wartime din of horror stories. But there was also great resistance in America to accepting the fact of the Holocaust, even when the US army broke into the camp areas. James Agee, writing in the Nation, refused to watch the atrocity films and denounced them as propaganda. The GIS were furious when people back home refused to believe what they had seen or even look at their photos.¹⁸¹

A major obstacle to action was F.D. Roosevelt himself. He was both anti-Semitic, in a mild way, and ill informed. When the topic came up at the Casablanca Conference, he spoke of ‘the understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50 per cent of the lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, college professors in Germany were Jews’ (the actual figures were 16.3, 10.9, 2.6 and 0.5 per cent).¹⁸² Roosevelt seems to have been guided purely by domestic political considerations. He had nearly 90 per cent of the Jewish vote anyway and felt no spur to act. Even after the full facts of systematic extermination became available, the President did nothing for fourteen months. A belated Anglo-American conference on the issue was held in Bermuda in April 1943, but Roosevelt took no interest in it, and it decided that nothing of consequence could be done. Indeed it specifically warned ‘that no approach be made to Hitler for the release of potential refugees’.¹⁸³ In the end, a War Refugee Board was created. It had little help from the government and 90 per cent of its funds came from Jewish sources. But it did contrive to save 200,000 Jews, plus 20,000 non-Jews.

The question of bombing the gas chambers was raised in the early summer of 1944, when the destruction of the Hungarian Jews got under way. Churchill in particular was horrified and keen to act. The killing, he minutes, ‘is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world’. He instructed Eden, 7 July 1944: ‘Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.’184 An operation was feasible. An oil-refining complex 47 miles from Auschwitz was attacked no less than ten times between 7 July and 20 November 1944 (by which point the Holocaust was complete and Himmler ordered the death machinery to be destroyed). On 20 August 127 Flying Fortresses bombed the Auschwitz factory area less than five miles to the east of the gas chambers.¹⁸⁵ Whether bombing would have saved Jewish lives cannot be proved. The ss were fanatically persistent in killing Jews, whatever the physical and military obstacles. It was certainly worth trying. But Churchill was its only real supporter in either government. Both the air forces hated military operations not directed to destroying enemy forces or war potential. The US War Department rejected the plan without even examining its feasibility.

Here we come to a harsh and important point. The refusal to divert forces for a special Jewish rescue operation was in accordance with general war policy. Both governments had decided, with the agreement of their respective Jewish communities, that the speedy and total defeat of Hitler was the best way to help the Jews. This was one reason why the vast and powerful US Jewish community gave little priority to the bombing issue. But once winning the war was accepted as the overriding objective, the Final Solution had to be seen in this perspective. And, for the Nazi war-effort, it was from first to last a self-inflicted wound. On the German side it was opposed by everyone, whether army or industrial chiefs, who took a rational view of the war. It occupied scores of thousands of military personnel. It often paralysed the railway system, even during critical battles. Most of all, it killed over three million productive workers. Many of these were highly skilled. Moreover, Jewish war-workers, knowing their likely fate, tried fanatically to make themselves indispensable to the war effort. There is a mass of evidence to show that all those Germans involved in production tried hard to keep their Jewish staff. To quote only one of many examples, the organizer of war factories in occupied Russia reported:

Almost insoluble was the problem of finding expert managers. Almost all former owners were Jews. All enterprises had been taken over by the Soviet state. The Bolshevik Commissars have disappeared. The Ukrainian trustee administrators [were] incompetent, unreliable and completely passive…. The real experts and real heads are Jews, mostly the former owners or engineers…. They try their utmost and extract the very last ounce of production, until now almost without pay, but naturally in the hope of becoming indispensable.186

But of course all these Jews were killed. Hence the Holocaust was one of the factors which were losing Hitler the war. The British and American governments knew this. What they did not sufficiently appreciate was that the main military beneficiary of the Holocaust was the Red Army, and the ultimate political beneficiary would be the Soviet empire.¹⁸⁷

The Allied calculation might have been different if the Jews had produced a resistance movement. None emerged. There were many reasons for this. The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight. Then too, the Jewish communities, especially in eastern Europe, had been emasculated by many generations of mass migration. The most ambitious had gone to America. The most energetic, adventurous, above all the most militant, had gone to Palestine. This drain of the best and the brightest had continued right up to the war and even during it. Jabotinsky had predicted the Holocaust. But the uniformed, trained, even armed Jewish groups in Poland were designed not to resist Hitler but to get Jews to Palestine. When war broke out, Menachem Begin, for instance, was escorting a group of 1,000 illegal emigrants across the Rumanian frontier on their way to the Middle East. So he got out too.¹⁸⁸ That made sense. The fighting Jews wanted to make their stand in Erez Israel, where they had a chance, not in Europe, where it was hopeless.

The great mass of Jews who remained, overwhelmingly religious, were deceived and self-deceived. Their history told them that all persecutions, however cruel, came to an end; that all oppressors, however exigent, had demands that were ultimately limited and could be met. Their strategy was always geared to saving ‘the remnant’. In 4,000 years the Jews had never faced, and had never imagined, an opponent who demanded not some, or most, of their property, but everything; not just a few lives, or even many, but all, down to the last infant. Who could conceive of such a monster? The Jews, unlike the Christians, did not believe the devil took human shape.

The Nazis, precisely to minimize the possibility of resistance, made pitiless use of Jewish sociology and psychology. In Germany they exploited the Jewish Gemeinde in each city, the Landesverbände in each region, and the Reichsvereinigung for the entire country, to get Jewish officials to do the preparatory work for the Final Solution themselves: to prepare nominal rolls, report deaths and births, transmit new regulations, set up special bank accounts open to the Gestapo, concentrate the Jews in particular housing blocks and prepare charts and maps for deportation. This was the model for the Jewish Councils in the occupied countries which unwittingly helped the Nazis push through the Final Solution. About 1,000 of these Judenrate were organized, involving 10,000 people. They were formed mainly out of the pre-war religious kehillot (congregational bodies). In the Soviet-occupied areas, all the bravest community leaders had already been shot before the Germans arrived. The Germans used the Judenrate to spot the actual or potential troublemakers and kill them instantly. Thus the Jewish leadership tended to be compliant, fearful and sycophantic. The Nazis used them first to despoil the Jews of all their valuables, then to organize bodies of Jews for forced labour and deportation to the killing centres. In return they were given privileges and power over their fellows.189

The system was seen at its most odious and formidable in the biggest Polish ghettos, especially Lodz and Warsaw. The Lodz ghetto had 200,000 Jews crowded into it, with a living density of 5.8 a room. It was a killing centre in itself, 45,000 dying there of disease and starvation. The Warsaw ghetto had no less than 445,000 Jews, with a room-density of 7.2; there, 83,000 died of hunger and sickness in less than twenty months. Jews were concentrated in the ghettos, then funnelled out of them into the death trains. Internally, the ghettos were petty tyrannies, run by men like Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, the strutting dictator of the Lodz ghetto, who even had his head printed on postage stamps. Their power was enforced by unarmed Jewish police (there were 2,000 in the Warsaw ghetto), supervised by Polish police, with the armed German Sip (security police) and the ss watching everyone. The ghettos were not wholly uncivilized. The Jewish social services worked to the best of their meagre resources. Secret yeshivot were organized. Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna and Kovno even had orchestras, though they were officially allowed to play only music by Jewish composers. There were clandestine newspapers printed and circulated. The Lodz ghetto, as befitted a medieval-type institution, had a chronicle.¹⁹⁰ But there was never any doubt in the minds of the Germans about the function of the ghetto and its Jewish authorities. It was to make what contribution it could to the war effort (Lodz had 117 little war factories, Bialystok twenty) and then, when the deportation orders for the camps came, to ensure that the process was orderly.

To keep resistance to a minimum, the Germans lied at every stage of the process, and employed elaborate deceptions. They always insisted that deportations were to work-sites. They had postcards printed stamped Waldsee, which camp-inmates were made to send home, which read: ‘I am well. I work and am in good health.’ On the transit to Treblinka, they constructed a dummy station with a ticket office, hand-painted clock and a sign reading: ‘In transit to Bialystok’. The death chambers, disguised as shower-rooms, had Red Cross markings on the doors. Sometimes the SS had all-inmate orchestras play music as the Jews were marshalled towards the ‘shower-rooms’. The pretence was kept up until the end. A note found in the clothes of one victim reads: ‘We arrived at the place after a long journey and at the front of the entrance is a sign “Bathhouse”. Outside, people receive soap and a towel. Who knows what they will do with us?’191 At Belzec, 18 August 1942, an SS disinfectant expert, Kurt Gerstein, heard an SS officer chant, while naked men, women and children were pushed into the death chamber: ‘Nothing is going to hurt you. Just breathe deep and it will strengthen your lungs. It is a way to prevent contagious diseases. It is a good disinfectant.’¹⁹²

The deception often worked because the Jews wanted to be deceived. They needed to have hope. The SS skilfully fed rumours into the ghettos that only a portion of Jews were required for deportation, and successfully sold the Jewish leadership the line that a maximum degree of co-operation produced the best chance of survival. The ghetto Jews were reluctant to believe in the existence of the extermination camps. When two young Jews escaped from Chelmno early in 1942 and described what they had seen there, it was argued that they had been unhinged by their experiences and their report was withheld from the underground press. Not until April, when reports from Belzec confirmed the Chelmno story, did the Warsaw Jews believe in the death machinery. In July the Warsaw ghetto boss, Adam Czerniakow, realizing he could not save even the children, took cyanide, leaving a note: ‘I am powerless. My heart trembles in sorrow and compassion. I can no longer bear all this. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do.’¹⁹³ But even at this stage, many Jews clung to the hope that only some would die. Jacob Gens, the ghetto boss in Vilna, told a public meeting: ‘When they ask me for a thousand Jews, I hand them over. For if we Jews do not give of our own, the Germans will come and take them by force. Then they will take not one thousand but many thousands. By handing over hundreds, I save a thousand. By handing over a thousand, I save ten thousand.’194

Jewish religious training tended to encourage passivity. The hasidic Jews were the most ready to accept their fate as God’s will. They quoted scripture: ‘And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have no assurance of thy life.’¹⁹⁵ They got into the death trains wrapped in their prayer-shawls, reciting the psalms. They believed in martyrdom for God’s glory. If, by chance or God’s mercy, they were spared, then it was a miracle. A whole collection of hasidic tales about the wondrous sparing of individual lives grew up during the Holocaust.¹⁹⁶ One community leader noted: ‘The truly pious have become even more pious, for they see God’s hand in everything.’ A member of the Jewish Sonderskommando, who cleared out the Auschwitz death chambers after a gassing, testified that he saw a group of pious Jews from Hungary and Poland, who had managed to get some brandy, dance and sing before entering the gas rooms, because they knew they were about to meet the Messiah. Other, more secular Jews also found joy and acceptance of God’s will in the horror. The remarkable diaries which a Dutch-Jewish woman, Ettie Hillesum, kept in Auschwitz show that the tradition of Job lived on in the Holocaust: ‘Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on your earth, my eyes raised towards your heaven, tears run down my face, tears…of gratitude.’¹⁹⁷

As the ghettos were gradually emptied, some Jews did determine to fight, though political divisions delayed agreement on a plan. In Warsaw, under pretence of building air-raid shelters, the Jews constructed dug-outs connected to the sewer system. They were led by a twenty-four-year-old, Mordecai Anielewicz, who recruited 750 fighters and contrived to get possession of nine rifles, fifty-nine pistols and a few grenades. The Nazis decided to destroy the ghetto on 19 April 1943, using the Waffen-ss. By that time there were only 60,000 Jews left in it. In the desperate fighting that followed, mainly underground, they killed sixteen Germans and wounded eighty-five. Anielewicz was killed on 8 May, but the rest held out another eight days, by which time several thousand Jews were dead in the debris. Some European countries, with well-equipped armies, had not resisted the Nazis for so long.¹⁹⁸

There was even a revolt within Auschwitz itself on 7 October 1944. Jews working in a Krupp plant smuggled in explosives; they were turned into grenades and bombs by skilled Soviet POWS. The revolt itself was carried out by the Sonderskommando of Crematoria III and IV. They managed to blow up Crematorium III and kill three SS men. About 250 Jews were massacred by the guards, but twenty-seven escaped. Four Jewish girls who got the explosives in were tortured for weeks, but gave no information. Roza Robota, who died under torture, gave as her last message: ‘Be strong and brave.’ Two of them survived the torture to be hanged in front of all the women in Auschwitz, one of them with the cry ‘Revenge!’ as she died.199

But as a rule there was no resistance at all, at any stage of the extermination process. The Germans always struck suddenly, with overwhelming force. The Jews were numb with terror and hopelessness. ‘The ghetto was encircled by a large SS detachment,’ wrote an eye-witness at Dubno (Ukraine),

and about three times as many Ukrainian militia. Then the electric arclights erected in and around the ghetto were switched on…. The people were driven out in such haste that small children in bed were left behind. In the street women cried out for their children and children for their parents. That did not prevent the SS from driving the people along the road at running pace, and hitting them until they reached the waiting freight-train. Car after car was filled, and the screaming of women and children, and the cracking of whips and rifle shots, resounded unceasingly.²⁰⁰

Many Jews died on the trains, and when the survivors arrived they were hustled straight off to the death chambers. Kurt Gerstein watched, in the early morning, a trainload of 6,700 Jews arrive at Auschwitz in August 1942. There were 1,450 dead on arrival. He saw 200 Ukrainians, armed with leather whips, open up the freight-car doors, order out the living and beat them to the ground. Loudspeakers screamed at them to strip naked. The hair was brutally shorn from the heads of all females. Then the entire shipment, stark naked, were driven towards the gas chambers which they were told were ‘disinfectant baths’.²⁰¹ At no point did anyone have a chance to resist. The most they could do was to tear up the miserable crumpled dollars they had concealed on their persons, so that the Nazis would not have the use of them–their last and only gesture of protest.²⁰²

No Jew was spared in Hitler’s apocalypse. The Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia, full of old people, was run to preserve the pretence that the Jews were merely being ‘resettled’. To it were sent so-called privileged Jews, holders of the Iron Cross First Class or better, and 50-per-cent disabled war veterans. But of the 141,184 sent there, only 16,832 were alive when the camp fell to the Allies on 9 May 1945: more than 88,000, the old and the brave alike, had been gassed.²⁰³ No Jew was too old to be murdered. After the Anschluss, the friends of Freud, old and dying of cancer, had ransomed him from the Nazis and brought him to England. It did not occur to him, or to anyone, that his four elderly sisters, left behind in Vienna, were at risk. But they too were swept into the Nazi net: Adolfine, aged eighty-one, was murdered in Theresienstadt, Pauline, eighty, and Marie, eighty-two, in Treblinka, Rose, eighty-four, in Auschwitz.

No Jew was too young to die. All women arriving at the death camps were shaved to the skin, the hair being packed up and sent to Germany. If a breast-fed baby was a nuisance during the shaving, a guard simply smashed its head against the wall. A witness at the Nuremberg trials testified: ‘Only those who saw these things with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans performed these operations; how glad they were when they succeeded in killing a child with only three or four blows; with what satisfaction they pushed the corpse into the mother’s arms!’204 At Treblinka, most babies were taken from their mothers on arrival, killed, and hurled into a ditch, along with invalids and cripples. Sometimes thin wails could be heard from the ditch, whose guards wore Red Cross armbands and which was known as The Infirmary.

The smashing of babies’ heads reflects the extent to which the dualism of anti-Semitic violence persisted, with secret, scientific killing proceeding alongside sudden, spontaneous acts of unspeakable cruelty. Jews died in every kind of way known to depraved humanity. At the Mauthausen quarry, an Italian Jew with a good voice was made to stand on top of a rock already wired with dynamite, and then blown to death as he sang ‘Ave Maria’. Hundreds of Dutch Jews were forced to jump to their deaths from the cliff overlooking the quarry, known as The Parachutist’s Wall.²⁰⁵ Many thousands of Jews were flogged to death for trivial camp offences: keeping a coin or wedding ring, failing to move Jewish insignia from the clothes of the murdered, having a piece of bread from an outside bakery, drinking water without permission, smoking, poor saluting. There were even cases of beheading. Kurt Franz, deputy commandant at Treblinka, kept a pack of fierce dogs used to tear Jews to death. Sometimes the guards killed with anything that came to hand. A Belzec eye-witness testified about ‘a very young boy’ who had just arrived at the camp:

He was a fine example of health, strength and youth. We were surprised by his cheerful manner. He looked around and said quite happily: ‘Has anyone ever escaped from here?’ It was enough. One of the guards overheard him and the boy was tortured to death. He was stripped naked and hung upside down from the gallows; he hung there for three hours. He was strong and still very much alive. They took him down and laid him on the ground and pushed sand down his throat with sticks until he died.²⁰⁶

In the end, as the Reich imploded and first Himmler, then his camp commandants, lost control, the scientific side of the Final Solution broke down or was abandoned, and the dualism merged into one insensate force: the desire, right up to the last possible moment, to kill any Jews who remained. The Sonderskommandos, the ghetto bosses, Rumkowski included, the Jewish police and SS spies–all were killed. As the front collapsed, the SS made determined efforts to march columns of Jews away from it, so they could be killed at leisure. The fanaticism with which they clung to their duties as mass murderers, long after the Third Reich was irretrievably doomed, is one of the gruesome curiosities of human history. There was one revolt of the killers. At Ebensee, a Mauthausen satellite camp and the last in German hands, the SS refused to mow down 30,000 Jews who would not march into a tunnel to be blown up. But some killings continued even after camps were liberated. British tanks took Belsen on 15 April 1945 but moved on into action, leaving Hungarian SS guards ‘in partial command’ for forty-eight hours. During that time they shot seventy-two Jews for such offences as taking potato-peelings from the kitchen.207

So nearly six million Jews died. Two millennia of anti-Semitic hatred, of all varieties, pagan, Christian and secular, superstitious and cerebral, folk and academic, had been soldered by Hitler into one overwhelming juggernaut and then driven by his unique energy and will over the helpless body of European Jewry. There were still 250,000 Jews in displaced persons’ camps, and scattered survivors everywhere. But the great Ashkenazi Jewry of eastern Europe had, in essence, been destroyed. An act of genocide had indeed been carried out. As the camps were opened and the full extent of the calamity became known, some Jews in their innocence expected an outraged humanity to comprehend the magnitude of the crime and say with one thunderous voice: this is enough. Anti-Semitism must end. We must be done with it once and for all, draw a line under this stupendous outrage, and start history afresh.

But that is not how human societies work. Nor, in particular, is it how the anti-Semitic impulse works. It is protean, assuming new forms as it consumes the old. The effect of the Holocaust was chiefly to transfer the principal focus of anti-Jewish hatred from east-central Europe to the Middle East. What worried some Arab leaders was that Hitler’s solution had not, in fact, been final. On 6 May 1942, for instance, the Grand Mufti had protested to the Bulgarian government that Jews were leaving there for Palestine. They should, he said, be sent back to Poland ‘under strong and energetic guard’.²⁰⁸

Even in Europe, there was often loathing, rather than pity, for the bewildered survivors. Their very nakedness, the habits bred by their atrocious treatment, stirred new waves of anti-Semitism. Among those who yielded to revulsion was General Patton, who had charge of more Jewish DPS than any other commander. He called ‘the Jewish type of DP’ a ‘sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time’. No ordinary people, he said, ‘could have sunk to the level of degradation these have reached in the short space of four years’.209 More active hostility to the pitiful survivors was shown in the countries from which they had been drawn, especially Poland. The Jewish DPS knew what awaited them. They resisted repatriation to the best of their strength. A Jewish GI from Chicago, who had to load survivors on to railroad trucks for Poland, related: ‘Men threw themselves on their knees in front of me, tore open their shirts and screamed: “Kill me now!” They would say, “You might just as well kill me now, I am dead anyway if I go back to Poland.” ’²¹⁰ In some cases they were proved right. In Poland, anti-Semitic riots broke out in Cracow in August 1945 and spread to Sosnowiec and Lublin. Luba Zindel, who returned to Cracow from a Nazi camp, described an attack on her synagogue on the first Sabbath in August: ‘They were shouting that we had committed ritual murders. They began firing at us and beating us up. My husband was sitting beside me. He fell down, his face full of bullets.’ She tried to flee to the West but was stopped by Patton’s troops. The British ambassador in Warsaw reported that anyone in Poland with a Jewish appearance was in danger. During the first seven months after the end of the war there were 350 anti-Semitic murders in Poland.²¹¹

Nevertheless, in two important respects the Holocaust, by its sheer enormity, did bring a qualitative change in the way international society reacted to violence inflicted on Jews. It was universally agreed that both punishment and restitution were necessary and to some extent both were carried out. War-crime trials began at Nuremberg on 20 November 1945, with the Final Solution as a principal element in the indictment. The first trial of Nazi leaders ended on 1 October 1946, which coincided with the Day of Atonement, when twelve defendants were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment, four to prison terms, and three were acquitted. There followed twelve major trials of Nazi criminals, known as Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, in four of which the planning and execution of the Final Solution were a chief element. In these twelve trials, 177 Nazis were convicted, twelve sentenced to death, twenty-five to life imprisonment, and the remainder to long prison terms. There were many further trials in each of the three Western occupation zones, nearly all of them involving atrocities against Jews. Between 1945 and 1951 a total of 5,025 Nazis were convicted, 806 being sentenced to death. But in only 486 cases was the death sentence carried out. Moreover, a Clemency Act passed in January 1951 by the US high commissioner in Germany led to the early release of many senior war criminals in US hands. The United Nations War Crimes Commission prepared lists of 36,529 ‘war criminals’ (including Japanese), the majority of them involved in anti-Jewish atrocities. In the first three years after the war, additional trials were held by eight Allied countries of 3,470 on the list, of whom 952 were sentenced to death and 1,905 received prison sentences.

Large numbers of national war-crimes trials were held in nearly all the states involved in the war, involving about 150,000 accused and producing over 100,000 convictions, many of them in punishment of anti-Jewish crimes. Many thousands of Nazis and their allies involved in the Final Solution were swallowed up in the Gulag Archipelago. When German courts began to function again in 1945, they too began to try war criminals, and in the first quarter-century they sentenced twelve to death, ninety-eight to life imprisonment and 6,000 to prison terms.212 With the creation of Israel in 1948, she also (as we shall see) was able to take part in the retributive process. The pursuit and arraignment of Nazi war criminals continues in the late 1980s, more than forty years after the Holocaust ended, and is likely to last another decade, at the end of which all those involved in perpetrating it will be dead or in extreme old age. No one can say that justice was done. Some of the senior executants of the Final Solution disappeared and lived out their lives in peace or at any rate in hiding. Others received or served sentences which bore no relation to their crimes. Yet equally, no one can doubt the scale of the effort made to punish those who committed history’s gravest crime or the persistence with which it has been maintained.

The struggle to secure compensation for the victims produced similar mixed results. Chaim Weizmann, on behalf of the Jewish Agency, submitted a reparations claim to the four occupying powers on 20 September 1945. Nothing came of it, mainly because no general peace treaty was ever negotiated or signed. The three Western powers set aside proceeds from the sale of confiscated Nazi property for Jewish victims. But they had to make individual claims and a well-meant project turned into a bureaucratic muddle. By 1953 only 11,000 claims had been processed, yielding $83 million. In the meantime, in January 1951 the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, had submitted a collective claim to the federal German government for $1.5 billion, based on Israel’s absorption of 500,000 refugees from Germany at a capital cost of $3,000 each. It meant negotiating directly with the Germans, something many camp survivors found unacceptable. But Ben Gurion got majority approval with his slogan: ‘Let not the murderers of our people also be their heirs!’ Agreement on a figure of $845 million, paid over fourteen years, was reached and, despite attempts by the Arab states to prevent ratification, came into effect in March 1953, and was duly completed in 1965. Moreover, it also provided for the passing of a federal Indemnification Law, indemnifying individual victims or their dependants for loss of life or limb, damage to health, and loss of careers, professions, pensions and insurance. It further made restitution for loss of liberty at a rate of a dollar for each day the victims were imprisoned, forced to live in a ghetto, or wear a star. Those who lost the family breadwinner received a pension, former civil servants got notional promotions and compensation was also given for loss of education. Victims could also claim for loss of property. This comprehensive settlement was administered by a staff of nearly 5,000 judges, civil servants and clerks, who by 1973 had processed over 95 per cent of 4,276,000 claims. For a quarter of a century it absorbed about 5 per cent of the federal budget. At the time of writing, about $25 billion has been paid out, and by the end of the twentieth century the figure will be over $30 billion.213 These payments cannot exactly be described as generous or even adequate. But they are a great deal more than Weizmann or Ben Gurion ever expected and they represent a genuine desire on the part of the federal government to pay for Germany’s crime.

The rest of the reparations story is much less satisfactory. None of the German industrialists involved in the slave-labour programme ever acknowledged the smallest moral responsibility for its atrocious consequences. They argued, in defending themselves against both criminal charges and civil claims, that in the circumstances of total war the forced-labour procedure was not unlawful. They resisted compensation every legal inch of the way and behaved throughout with a striking mixture of meanness and arrogance. Friedrich Flick declared: ‘Nobody of the large circle of persons who know my fellow defendants and myself will be willing to believe that we committed crimes against humanity and nothing will convince us that we are war criminals.’²¹⁴ Flick never paid out a single deutschmark and was worth over $1,000 million when he died, aged ninety, in 1972. Altogether the German companies paid out a total of only $13 million and fewer than 15,000 Jews got a share of it. The IG Farben slave-workers at Auschwitz got $1,700 each, the AEG-Telefunken slaves $500 or less. The families of those who had been worked to death got nothing.215 But the behaviour of the German capitalists was no worse than that of the Communist successor states. The East German government never even troubled to reply to requests for compensation. Nor was there any response from Rumania. The whole vast area of oppression controlled by Communist authorities since 1945 yielded the Jews nothing whatever.

Austria’s behaviour was the worst of the lot. Though the great majority of Austrians had supported the Anschluss, though nearly 550,000 out of seven million Austrians were actually Nazi Party members, though Austrians had fought alongside Germany throughout and (as we have noted) had killed nearly half the Jewish victims, the Allied declaration of November 1943 in Moscow categorized Austria as ‘the first free nation to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression’. Austria was therefore exempted from reparations at the post-war Potsdam Conference. Thus legally absolved, all the Austrian political parties entered into an agreement to evade moral responsibility too, and to claim the status of victim. As the Austrian Socialist Party put it (1946): ‘It is not Austria that should make restitution. Rather, it is to Austria that restitution should be made.’ Austria was obliged by the Allies to pass a war criminal law, but did not even establish a prosecuting body to enforce it until 1963. Even so, many were amnestied by decree and those trials that did take place usually produced acquittals. Jews claiming compensation were told to apply to Germany, unless they could actually identify their former property in Austria itself; and very few indeed got as much as $1,000.

There was a belated but nevertheless welcome attempt to make moral reparation by the Christian churches. Both Catholic and Lutheran anti-Semitism had contributed, over many centuries, to the Jew-hatred which culminated in Hitlerism. Neither church had behaved well during the war. Pope Pius XII, in particular, had failed to condemn the Final Solution, though he knew of it. One or two isolated voices had been raised on behalf of the Jews. Fr Bernhard Lichtenberg, from St Hedwig’s Catholic Cathedral in Berlin, had publicly prayed for the Jews in 1941. His apartment was searched and notes found for an undelivered sermon in which he planned to tell his congregation that they should not believe in a Jewish conspiracy to kill all Germans. For this he served a two-year sentence and on his release was ordered to Dachau. This seems the only case of its kind. Among eye-witnesses of the Judenrazzia in Rome on 16 October 1943 was a Jesuit priest, Augustin Bea, who came from Baden in Germany and acted as Pius XII’s confessor. Twenty years later, during the Second Vatican Council, he had the chance, as head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, to quash, once and for all, the ancient accusation of deicide against the Jews. He took charge of the council schema, ‘On the Jews’, enlarged it into a ‘Declaration of the Relations of the Church to Non-Christian Religions’, taking in Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam as well as Judaism, and successfully steered it through the council, which adopted it in November 1965. It was a grudging document, less forthright than Bea had hoped, making no apology for the church’s persecution of the Jews, and inadequate acknowledgment of the contribution of Judaism to Christianity. The key passage read: ‘True the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be represented as rejected of God or accursed, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.’216 This was not much. But it was something. In view of the fierce opposition it aroused, it might even be considered a great deal. Moreover, it was part of a much more general process whereby the civilized world was attempting to strike at the institutional supports of anti-Semitism.

That was welcome. But the Jews had grasped that the civilized world, however defined, could not be trusted. The overwhelming lesson the Jews learned from the Holocaust was the imperative need to secure for themselves a permanent, self-contained and above all sovereign refuge where if necessary the whole of world Jewry could find safety from its enemies. The First World War made the Zionist state possible. The Second World War made it essential. It persuaded the overwhelming majority of Jews that such a state had to be created and made secure whatever the cost, to themselves or to anyone else.