During the nineteenth century, Lithuanian was spoken in the Russian protectorates Kaunas and Vilnius, extending west into predominantly Polish and German places. Squeezed in between Russians, Poles, Germans, and Latvians, most of the poorly educated and impoverished Lithuanian speakers lived in villages. But in the cities, there were increasingly louder calls for a “national rebirth.”
As was the case elsewhere, groups of free-thinking intellectuals, Catholic priests, writers, and politicians imported the nationalist idea from the West. By the 1880s, these elites standardized the Lithuanian language, documented Lithuania’s impressive history, and spoke out against Russian and Polish cultural hegemony and political domination. The project was called “Lithuania Awaken!,” and in the eyes of nationalist pioneers, Jews were the ones who stood most in the way of the economic and social emancipation of their small and universally threatened people. In an 1884 edition of the national-liberal journal Aušra (Dawn), one of the leading nationalists, the physician Jonas Šliūpas, warned: “Jews are bloodsuckers. They suck people dry while they are sleeping and leave them behind completely drained.” As a remedy the author implored his drowsy compatriots to “enter into the productive trades.” That, argued Šliūpas, was the only way out of their stultifying uneducated rural poverty toward a better life. (A national monument to Dr. Šliūpas still stands in today’s Palanga.) In the same journal, other secular Lithuanians encouraged the people to overcome their own “laziness and insecurity” and imitate the Jews’ mercantile spirit. Once mobilized, they would be able to stand up to the “Jewish foreigners,” who like lice “ceaselessly bite at us,” and to drive them, in the words of several nationalist agitators, “from the market towns and cities.”
Conservative Catholic publications were every bit as eager to sound the alarm. Thanks to established institutional structures and the stature of priests, Catholic opinion-makers had particular influence on ordinary people. In 1891, a Catholic editor demanded that all priests explain to peasants that “we can live without this plague, the Jews,” and to popularize the idea that “He who loves God will deliver us from the Jews!” In 1904, echoing the nationalists, Father Pranas Turauskas described Lithuanians’ path to economic emancipation: “The Jews will soon quit Lithuania if we Lithuanians get more involved in trade, found individual and joint businesses, and exclusively buy from our own kind.”
As in other countries, the idea was to use trade and consumer associations to undermine Jews and, if that proved insufficient, to employ violence. Otherwise, alarmists warned, Jews would turn Lithuania into the “Polish province of New Palestine.” In 1905, during the revolutionary unrest and widespread pogroms in the Russian Empire, the conservative Antanas Staugaitis preached uncompromising severity. Anyone who supported the cause of Lithuanian national and social progress, he argued, had to frankly name those who were most impeding it and “point their finger at the Jews.”
Toward the end of the First World War, the tiny nation-state of Lithuania was created. Hemmed in by its neighbors, the country had around 2.3 million inhabitants, including 168,000 Jews (7 percent) in 1930. In the absence of alternatives, Kaunas became the capital. Vilnius, which until 1795 had been the cultural and political, if never the ethnic center of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, had been occupied by Polish troops in 1919 and annexed by the new Poland. There was no Lithuanian majority in any of the tiny state’s few cities. Seventy-five percent of trade was in Yiddish-speaking Jewish hands, while 21 percent of merchants spoke Polish and only 4 percent Lithuanian. The same constellation applied to urban property ownership: 45.8 percent of city real estate was owned by Jews, 33.8 percent by Poles, 7.5 percent by Russians, 6.5 percent by Lithuanians, and the rest by other minorities.
Both Lithuanians and Jews welcomed the end of the Russian yoke, and they both resisted Poland’s ambitions to impose its dominance. Compared with Poland and Romania, there had been very few instances of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuania. But the somewhat harmonious coexistence of different ethnic groups didn’t last long. In 1924, the post of minister for Jewish affairs was done away with, and one year later, restrictions were imposed on the cultural autonomy of Jewish communities. As was the case in other newly founded national states, Lithuania’s political leaders went on a mission to emancipate the titular state population materially and socially—to the disadvantage of other groups who were better off. With the agrarian reforms of 1922, 38,700 landless Lithuanians received fields, and 26,000 tiny farmers were given additional property. The land that was being so generously doled out had previously belonged to Polish, Russian, and a handful of German large estate owners. In this way, the state satisfied impoverished villagers’ hunger for something better in their lives.
Jews weren’t affected by these confiscations of property. But they had other reasons to fear for their existence. From the nationalist perspective, they were blocking the access of Christian Lithuanians to the promising professions connected with the cities. To correct this perceived imbalance, the new Lithuanian government gave almost all the positions in the civil service to members of the majority population. In 1934, only 477 of 35,200 Lithuanian civil servants were Jewish. In 1936, in the capital, Kaunas, where Jews made up a third of the populace and paid one-half of all the taxes, only 11 of the city’s 800 employees were Jewish.
Educational discrimination was less crass in Lithuania than in Hungary, Romania, or Poland, but the proportion of Jewish students nonetheless sank between 1922 and 1938 from 30 to 15 percent. This was the result of significant investments made in the Lithuanian educational system and tests requiring that students speak the new national language, Lithuanian. Jews often spoke good Polish, Russian, or German, but rarely knew Lithuanian, which had been of little use in urban life.
Nationalist students resolutely expressed their hostility toward their Jewish peers and called for a moratorium on admitting Jews to university. To cite one extreme example: In 1933 the proportion of Jewish students at the medical school at Kaunas’s Vytautas Magnus University was fifty-six times that of Jews in the population at large. In 1934, enraged campus activists declared: “Because of our tolerance, many departments today look like neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and not like Vytautas Magnus University.” The fraternity New Lithuania appealed to the state and Lithuanian society to support the “native” intelligentsia because “the outcome of the competition with the non-Lithuanian intelligentsia remains uncertain.”
During the Great Depression, the Lithuanian government encouraged economic and social hostility toward Jews. In 1934, it banned them from being involved in forestry, transport, and the trade of tobacco, matches, coal, sugar, and, a short time later, flax. Public contracts were as a rule awarded to Christian bidders. The Association of Trade, Industry and Artisanship, founded in 1930, pursued the goal of “Lithuania for Lithuanians.” Jews were barred from joining since their mere presence contradicted the purpose of the organization, which was to Lithuanianize the country’s industry within five years—and the commercial sector even sooner. Although the government didn’t adopt the association’s program wholesale as the group desired, it did support it in a variety of respects. In 1923, around 75 percent of all trading companies belonged to Jews, but that number declined swiftly. By the end of the 1930s, 43 percent of domestic and 66 percent of foreign trade had been transferred to Christian Lithuanian hands. Starting in 1937, the Young Lithuania (Jaunoji Lietuva) organization fought for the goal of “Lithuanians playing the leading role in all areas of life.” The government, for its part, promoted “economic independence” from Jews. It encouraged upwardly mobile young people to become hardworking entrepreneurs and not part of an “unproductive academic proletariat,” and nationalist politicians promised to help them get ahead. The Association for National Protection did its best to promote anti-Semitism, with speakers attacking “destructive Jewish behavior.” They demanded that “Jews be eliminated from the economy so as to support the position of Lithuanians” and exhorted the majority, “Let us stand together with our own kind in all areas of life!”
Lithuanians’ economic and intellectual advancement and their urbanization were to be pushed at Jews’ expense. Jewish sociologist Jakob Lestschinsky characterized the economic attacks by Christian Lithuanians on Jews as a gradual and “maliciously organized process of destruction.” In his analysis he stressed social and economic motors: “The broader the social basis of anti-Semitism becomes, the more resolutely Lithuanians of various social classes, especially shopkeepers and artisans, laid claim to Jews’ economic positions.” The same charge could be leveled against Christian Lithuanian students, whose numbers increased fourfold between 1922 and 1932.
Two aspects of the Lithuanian example bear particular attention. First, modern hostility toward Jews was ideologically connected with the economic and social emancipation of the backward masses, who lacked formal education. Second, anti-Semitism gained strength in the “days of freedom” in 1904 and 1905 when Russian censorship and police violence were eased for several months amid revolutionary unrest. No sooner did the government in St. Petersburg reestablish control than violent anti-Semitism tapered off. After the end of Russian rule, with the start of national independence, it smoldered under the initial republican regime and then reignited under the populist, autocratic one that followed—with the new, clearly formulated goal of driving Jews from their economic positions.1
The statesmen who negotiated the peace treaties in Paris in 1919 and 1920 more than doubled Romania’s square area with the aim of making it an anti-Soviet and anti-Hungarian buffer state. They added to the existing Romanian territory Hungarian Transylvania (Siebenbürgen), large parts of Banat, Russian Moldova (Bessarabia), and Austrian Bukovina. According to a 1930 census, 728,000 Jews lived in the country, making up around 4.5 percent of a total population of 16 million people. Before the First World War, Romania had only had around 6.5 million people. Economically and socially, the short-lived and weak government of this newly patched-together Greater Romania faced serious challenges.
Although Romanian anti-Semitism remained virulent, in 1919 the new liberal-democratic order and the conditions imposed upon the country by the Peace Treaty of Paris-Trianon suddenly gave Jews improved educational opportunities. Romania’s new circumstances may not have been clearly defined, but it was obvious that they fundamentally differed from the prewar era. Between the academic years 1921–22 and 1935–36, Jews represented 23 percent of students at the University of Iaşi, and in the departments of law, medicine, and pharmacy they represented, respectively, 20, 40, and 80 percent of those enrolled. Albeit at a lower level, the universities in Bucharest, Cluj, and Cernăuţi reflected similar ratios.
That didn’t work for long. As early as 1920, students and government ministry officials came up with the idea of founding a special university in Chişinău, formerly Russian Kishinev, “in order to train a Romanian elite,” since Russians and Jews made up the majority in the existing universities. Also in 1920, Romanian students in Iaşi set the editorial offices of the Jewish magazine Lumina on fire. In 1922, they ransacked the printing press of the publisher H. Goldner, which put out the Jewish newspaper Opinia. Further acts of violence followed, one after another. In general, Romanian nationalist activists and agents of the secret police suspected Jews of communist and freemason activities.
In Cernăuţi in 1920, university directors approved a course in Hebrew but, following historical examples, demanded double tuition from students enrolled in it. At the University of Cluj in late 1922, students prevented Jewish classmates from taking part in medical classes. One year later, Christian students physically ejected their Jewish counterparts from the Institute for Anatomy at the University of Iaşi. They also demanded that Jews only be allowed to perform autopsies on “bodies of their own race,” that the police be forbidden from entering campus grounds, and that those who had been convicted of acts of violence against Jews be released from prison. Police and officials in the justice system in Iaşi sometimes, but not always, intervened against right-wing nationalist violence. Leaders of anti-Semitic campaigns were occasionally arrested or kicked out of university. Their followers immediately protested against “the brutal intervention of the police” and demanded, sometimes in violent demonstrations, the immediate rescindment of “state repression measures.”
On April 23, 1923, nationalist groups occupied the university in Iaşi, insisting that admission limits be imposed on Jews. The university’s leadership suspended classes and, in a tactical, opportunistic move, hinted that a referendum would be held. At the same time, militant students in Cluj demonstrated against the rector of their university, Jakob Kacobovici, because he was Jewish. In December, the rector in Iaşi called in the army to put down recurring student attacks. Individual professors, including the abovementioned political scientist Alexandru Cuza, sympathized with the rebels. Others took a clear stand against anti-Semitic acts of violence. One of them was the law professor Dumitru Mototolescu in Oradea (Nagyvárad), who was promptly branded a “Jew-lover.” In 1925, a number of classrooms at the University of Bucharest had to be evacuated because of anti-Semitic rioting. In 1926, the University of Iaşi temporarily suspended classes for the same reason. All in all, anti-Semitic activities were becoming more severe and their appeal was increasing. Nationalist and Christian students, who encouraged one another, came together to vandalize synagogues, deface Torah scrolls, and attack their Jewish fellow students in parks, on trains, or at universities themselves.
In October 1924, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu shot dead the police prefect of Iaşi, Constantin Manciu, who had been installed the previous year. Codreanu’s sole motivation? Manciu had repeatedly ordered his officers to suppress anti-Semitic acts of violence. The trial of Codreanu began on March 17, 1925, in Focşani. Hundreds of sympathizers traveled to Iaşi to show solidarity with the defendant. On the streets, they celebrated the murder he had committed as a heroic deed and began to “truly incite people to attack the peaceful Jewish populace.” As the police and soldiers looked on, they destroyed Jewish businesses, throwing their inventory out into the streets, and laid waste to synagogues. A Jewish senator named Sanilievici asked for a declaration from the government about its position toward the “wanton destruction of these villains.” He received no answer.
The judges at Codreanu’s first trial found him guilty, but the appeals judges said he had acted in self-defense and acquitted him. The appeal was held in late May in Turnu Severain. Hardly had he exited the courtroom than Codreanu headed home “like a victor” while “along the way, especially on the trains, Jewish travelers were insulted and physically attacked.” After a demonstration, inspired by Professor Cuza and to show solidarity with Codreanu in Iaşi, university and middle-school students threw two Jewish girls, Manaia Wagner and Marca Rimer, from a moving train. Both were seriously injured. When their attackers arrived in Iaşi, they boasted about what they had done, driving in open cars through the city and gleefully bellowing “Long live Codreanu!” and “Down with the Jews!” In 1926, Nicolae Totu traveled from Iaşi to Cernăuţi and shot dead the Jewish student David Fallik. Under pressure from anti-Semitic student protests, the court that heard the case acquitted the murderer in February 1927. The verdict was upheld in 1930.
Like Codreanu before him, Totu was celebrated as a hero. Cuza was one of his attorneys, and Romanian interior minister and later short-term prime minister Octavian Goga praised his deed as “a defense of Romania, whose honor had been wounded.” Goga accused Jews of treating Romanians “in the country of Stephan the Great” (Stephan II, ca. 1433–1504) as the English treated the people they colonized. When tens of thousands of Jews in Cernăuţi staged a memorial for Fallik, Goga told the country’s parliament that the funeral train had been an “anti-Romanian demonstration.” In September 1933, he paid his respects to Adolf Hitler.2
In the summer of 1925, Jewish parliamentary deputies Adolphe Stern, Yehuda Leib Zirelsohn, and Nathan Lerner addressed the dramatically changed situation: “This cowardly and barbaric attack [on the two girls] is nothing other than the repetition and fatal result of various similar directionless attacks, which have been going on throughout Romania for the past two years together with a whole series of assassinations, ransackings and incidents of Jewish students’ being abused and driven from university.” After Codreanu’s acquittal, “the knights of the swastika” believed that they ruled the land, and set about terrorizing the Jewish population and threatening their lives and security.3 In 1927, when Zirelsohn excoriated acts of violence against Jews in the Romanian Senate, the chamber’s president ordered that his words not be recorded in the protocol. Zirelsohn resigned in protest.
Until his violent death in 1938, Codreanu led the right-wing extremist Archangel Michael Legion, which rose to become Romania’s third-strongest political party in the 1930s. Totu also became one of its leaders. Most of the anti-Semitic students came from modest, often farming backgrounds, a source of insecurity they transformed into militancy. They tried to convince themselves that they belonged to an especially noble people, the unsurpassable Romanians. But behind their martial façade, their sense of intellectual inadequacy was apparent, as revealed in a pamphlet distributed by the Association of Christian Students on November 28, 1924. It read: “December 10 is the third anniversary of the day on which Romanian students took up the cause of matriculation limits in order to defend the nation against foreign interlopers. Privileged by superior material backgrounds and other favorable circumstances, they are striving to destroy us and dominate the Romanian nation.… We students who have become enlightened must defend our nation and not shy away from either hard work or personal sacrifice in our effort to free her from the foreigners’ clutches and protect her from future interlopers.”4
As summarized by historian Lucian Nastasă of the University of Cluj: “The anti-Semitic groups became stronger and stronger at the universities. They created an atmosphere of militant agitation and intimidation that continually led to violence, incited by organizations and parties like the Christian-Social League, the Romanian Action, the National Romanian Fascists, the Christian-National Defense League, the Archangel Michael Legion, the Everything for the Fatherland Association, the Iron Guard, etc.” In the years 1919 to 1930, politicized students and professors who sympathized with them helped form the group who would later pull the levers of state power in the 1930s. As to why organized anti-Semitism attracted so many eager followers between the world wars, Nastasă writes:
Mainly, at least as an initial impetus, it was economically and socially motivated. Romanian Jews had proven long before what remarkably good competitors they were in the areas of the economy and the higher professions so crucial to modernity. That embittered Christian Romanians and stoked their fears of failure.… After the First World War, Romania nominally gave Jews equal rights, although only under pressure from international organizations. Ultimately, in 1923, the constitution guaranteed their full rights as citizens. Banking on these somewhat secure rights, Jews, who had been kept away from universities, seized their new opportunities en masse.5
The scenes playing themselves out at universities also colored Romanian school policy. In 1926, only 8.2 percent of those getting university-qualifying high school degrees were ethnic Romanians. Here, too, Jews were miles ahead. For that reason, in October 1926 in Cernăuţi a commission with a majority of radical nationalists was convened. Students who had passed written exams were subjected to an oral test. The results spoke for themselves: “All the students at the Romanian high school passed the test, while fifty-one out of sixty-eight candidates from the Jewish school failed it, as did twenty-six out of twenty-nine students from the Ukrainian school and ten out of fourteen at the German school.”6
Although Romanian law didn’t bar them from the civil service, Jews were rarely tolerated in it between the world wars—a situation similar to that in Wilhelmine Germany from 1870 to 1918. That left well-educated Jews with little option but to seek out niches in economic life and nonguild professions in order to earn a comfortable living. Within a few years, Jews held top jobs on newspapers, in publishing houses, and in film companies; they also became well-respected doctors, apothecaries, and lawyers. By contrast, their risk-averse Christian contemporaries settled for poorly paid civil-service posts. When they did dare to compete for better positions, they were more prone to failure than their Jewish peers.
The strict autonomy of Romanian universities introduced in 1919 and 1920 allowed nationalist professors to become a powerful and perennial force. When posts needed to be filled, they preferred to tap their own. Among the student body, influential radical nationalist activists demanded the exclusion of the overachieving Jewish minority in the name of democracy and equal opportunity. There were real problems underlying this conflict. Since 1919, Romania had been improving its school system and had fostered enthusiasm for education. But a lack of economic progress, cronyism, and the Great Depression had caused stagnation. This created an unemployed “intellectual proletariat” that demanded some sort of career prospects. Romanian university graduates increasingly tried to enter the nonguild professions and soon sought to get rid of the Jewish competition. Politically they followed their generation’s party leaders who propagated a “moral renewal of society” and called for an end of those parties that obeyed the commands of a “Jewish camarilla operating in the shadows and ruling over the Romanian finance system.”
In 1937, Professor Cuza became a member of the government led by Octavian Goga. Despite only holding office for forty days, Prime Minister Goga pushed through a great amount of anti-Jewish legislation. He had all newspapers belonging to Jewish publishers closed and encouraged the Romanianization of schools, public administration, and companies and private businesses. Most significantly, he introduced a law requiring a review of Jews’ Romanian citizenship. Owing to this legislation more than 30 percent of Romanian Jews lost their rights as citizens by November 1939. In this fashion the Romanian government made 225,222 people stateless.7
At the time the writer and journalist Mihail Sebastian, who had been born in 1907 as Iosif Hechter, noted in his diary that members of the government had adopted the coarse vocabulary of the far right, including terms like “Jewish sow” and “triumph of Judas.” The day after Sebastian jotted this down, on December 30, 1937, Romanian Jews were prohibited from working as journalists. On January 2, 1938, he wrote: “They took away my permission to practice my profession. Our names were printed in all the newspapers as though we were criminals.” On January 7, Sebastian’s friend, the banker Aristide Blank, predicted: “The only hope for Jews is the preservation of the Goga government. What comes after it will be infinitely worse.” As it happened, the government was overthrown on February 10, but the anti-Semitic laws remained on the books, and Blank’s prognosis would prove prophetic.
On March 17, 1938, the newspaper Cuvântul ran the headline: “Pseudo-Scholar Freud Arrested by National Socialists in Vienna.” The same paper claimed that a group of Jewish attorneys who had been physically attacked before a court building in Bucharest had been “fighting among themselves.” On August 22, Sebastian visited his friend Marietta, “who was practically boiling over with anti-Semitism.” To his face she heaped abuse on “the fat-bellied Jews and Jewesses with their jewelry,” making exceptions for “around a hundred thousand ‘reasonable’ Jews,” of whom he was presumably one. On October 1, 1938, after the Munich agreement ceded Czech Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, he noted: “A horrific age is brewing up before us. Only now will we learn what Hitler’s pressure means.”8
How the Nazis viewed conditions in Romania at the time may be seen in a German dissertation of September 1938. “The Jewish Question in Romania” was submitted by Hans Schuster at the University of Leipzig, and praised Cuza as someone “who had worked incorruptibly on the solution to the Jewish question for decades” before complaining, inaccurately, that the Goga/Cuza government’s anti-Semitic measures had “never made it beyond paper.” Schuster was more effusive in his praise for the radical, paramilitary Iron Guard and the leader of the Archangel Michael Brigade, the murderer Codreanu, for his desire to “create a new Romanian man as the one who will carry out all measures and programs” and to sensibly combine “the peasant and the Jewish questions.” According to the ideas of the Guard, “all questions lead back to the Jewish one as the most important national problem, both in the economic areas of trade and industry and the social one of middle-class life.” Indeed, the Romanians were “a people without a middle class.” The foreign Jewish minority, he argued, had continued right up to the present day to hinder the establishment of the Romanian nation. He urged Romanian politicians to do more: “Thus far, despite all Romanian efforts, the Jewish question has been a problem that has not been overcome. It will also be the crux of Romanian national life in the future and attract the attention of those foreign countries with an interest in solving the international Jewish question.”9
This generation of Romanian students stayed true to the sentiments they expressed between 1919 and 1925, later turning them into reality. Schuster was by no means the only one to praise the idea of creating a nationalist middle class in Romania at the expense of Jews. On July 26, 1940, in conversation with Hitler, Romanian prime minister Ion Gigurtu remarked that Romania had already begun with the “solution of the Jewish question” but that “there was no way it could proceed on to a definitive settlement without help from the Führer, who would have to execute a total solution for all of Europe.”10
Encouraged by Hitler, the Romanian regime imposed further restrictions on Jews. On August 8, 1940, the few remaining Jewish employees were fired from the career civil service. On October 4, a decree nationalized all Jewish property and businesses in the country’s heartland. The Romanian economics minister was empowered to appoint commissars to Romanianize larger businesses and corporations. On October 9, marriages between Jews and gentiles were forbidden. On October 14, another decree banned Jews from teaching at or attending public schools and universities. Anyone with a Christian mother and a Jewish father was also considered Jewish.
On November 12, Jewish laborers and clerks in both the public and private sectors lost their jobs. On December 4, Jews were barred from military service, hit with a special tax, and required to do compulsory labor. Back in June, after France had surrendered to Germany, Sebastian had noted: “The rational mind stops functioning and the heart feels nothing anymore.” By January 1, 1941, he wrote: “If we are allowed to survive this year, we will perhaps be that much closer to the end of the tunnel.”
But only three weeks later, it was already apparent that 1941 would be a darker year still. From January 20 to 24, the fascists organized into the Archangel Michael Legion, which had formerly been part of the government and enjoyed German support, and tried to take control of the Romanian army. This putsch was put down with a minimum of casualties among Romanians. A “great catastrophe,” however, was visited upon Bucharest’s Jewish districts. “No window remained unbroken, and no house, regardless of how small, escaped being plundered and set on fire,” reported Sebastian on January 27. “Imagine the burning district on Wednesday night, when hordes of criminals simply shot down horrified people. All of this happened in a wretched neighborhood, a ghetto for the poor. Modestly living tradesmen, small-time merchants, humble, hard-working people who were barely able to earn their daily bread. Here in the ruins an old woman, a wailing, naked child who seemed to be waiting for something. For what? For whom? Long lines of people waiting to enter the morgue. So many people have disappeared. So many bodies have not been identified. Today’s edition of Universul is full of Jewish death announcements. The cemeteries are full of fresh graves. And we still don’t know how many Jews were killed.” By January 27, 121 murdered Jews had been buried in Bucharest.11
On March 18, a law raised rents for Jewish tenants. Sebastian found such legal anti-Semitic measures more frightening and humiliating than the beatings and broken windows. A decree on March 27 nationalized all state property owned and rented by Jews who hadn’t served in the First World War or been naturalized before August 15, 1916. Jews’ homes were to be given to teachers, officers, and civil servants. Sebastian asked himself: “What will follow the appropriation of property? Perhaps the establishment of a ghetto. And then? All that’s left will be a pogrom.” On March 28, Romanian newspapers celebrated the appropriations initiative. On April 20, authorities began confiscating Jews’ radios. Sebastian lost his that very day, his most important point of connection with the rest of the world. He watched as preparations were made for war with the Soviet Union and bemoaned “a summer that will be extremely difficult for us Jews—it can’t be otherwise.” The repressive measures listed here and many others required the creation of a new state authority: the National Center for Romanianization, which took up its work on May 2, 1941.
It was not that the state was imposing anti-Semitic restrictions to head off popular anger or distract attention from social problems. Rather, the Romanian people used their right to assemble and demonstrate to demand such action. As was the case in other countries, gentile students and university graduates—the avant-garde of the nationalist drive to improve Romania’s lot—led the protests and shaped them politically. Protected by a democratic constitution, they founded totalitarian nationalist organizations.
On June 21, 1941, Romanian prime minister Ion Antonescu announced that his country had been engaged since the early morning hours in a “holy war for the liberation of Bessarabia and Bukovina and the destruction of Bolshevism.” That day, a decree was issued requiring fifty thousand Jews who lived in the countryside to surrender their property and move to the cities. Police hung up two different posters in the streets. The first depicted Stalin as the “Butcher of Red Square,” while the second showed a “Jewish sow” with payot, a yarmulke, and a beard, dressed in a red caftan and holding a hammer and sickle. The poster read, “These are the leaders of Bolshevism.” On June 27, Bucharest newspapers ran headlines demanding “Jewish swine” be put in “labor camps.” Officials ransacked Jewish homes, confiscating bedding and pajamas to equip military hospitals. In early September, they ordered the Jewish community in Bucharest to collect and hand over within two days four thousand beds, pillows, and blankets as well as twice that number of sheets and pillowcases.
In August, all male Jews in Bucharest between the ages of eighteen and sixty were required to report to police and register for forced labor. No sooner had these people been conscripted than the Romanian government demanded a ransom of 10 million lei. Some Romanians felt ashamed and tried to console their Jewish acquaintances and offer assurances that they had no part in the repressive measures. “The bad thing,” Sebastian wrote, “is that no one has anything to do with it. The whole world finds it worthy of condemnation and is outraged, yet nonetheless everyone is a small cog in the anti-Semitic factory that is the Romanian state, with its offices, administrative authorities, newspapers, institutions, laws and measures.… And the masses celebrate. The shedding of Jewish blood and the humiliation of the Jew has always been the best amusement for the people.”12
At the 1815 Congress of Vienna, international diplomats created what came to be known as “Congress Poland,” a truncated protectorate state under Russian control. They declared Warsaw the capital and the Russian tsar the Polish king. The idea was to head off Polish desires for liberty while giving cities and communities limited autonomy. Within this framework, despite the occasionally harsh Russian military regime, Polish desires for freedom and Polish nationalism thrived.
Whereas since 1806 German nationalism had been directed against French domination, Polish nationalism primarily saw Russia as the enemy together with Prussia and Austria, who had all agreed to the division of Poland. In both Germany and Poland, the ideology of liberty was accompanied early on by xenophobia and hostility toward Jews. In 1818, as the pioneer of German nationalism Ernst Moritz Arndt was publishing one of his many works containing anti-Semitic passages, the Polish revolutionary nationalist Walerian Łukasiński brought on his own polemic on the Jewish question. In it he accused Jews living in Poland of “total decadence of character,” hatred for everything Christian, and a proclivity toward deception and nontransparent dealings.13
After Polish rebellions against the Russian yoke were violently put down in 1830–31 and 1863, the Narodowa Demokracja (National Democracy) movement rose to become Poland’s strongest political force at the start of the twentieth century. It pursued the goal of a unified, ethnically “pure” populist state and successfully put itself forward as the “defender against everything foreign,” particularly everything Jewish. In 1912, National Democrats made anti-Semitism into a popular centerpiece of their platform. As a beginning, they organized a countrywide boycott of Jewish businesses and companies. In the flyers they distributed, they alternately denigrated Jews as threatening modernizers, as obstacles to Poland’s path to economic prosperity, and as stubbornly “ossified” insisters on tradition who were incapable of assimilation. In general, Jews were cast as willing tools of the exploitative Polish aristocracy and especially the tsarist government, which was trying to Russify Poland with the help of its Jewish henchmen.
The ideologue Roman Dmowski became one of the National Democrats’ leading figures. From 1917 to 1921, he was one of the most prominent founders of the Polish Republic, and a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles that sealed Germany’s abdication of territory to the new Polish state. Dmowski characterized Jews as a “major internal danger” and potential destroyers of basic Christian values. He never tired of warning his Catholic compatriots about Jews’ purported ruthlessness and slyness, or what he called the “instincts and proclivities of the Jewish psychological type.” He demonized the “foreign elements” that could “all too easily force on Poles their social, political and even artistic and literary perspectives” and were capable of “absorbing the majority intellectually and in part also physically.” Proceeding from such assumptions, he demanded that the National Democrats “lead the struggle for the social liberation from Jewish influences.” Dmowski thought that pronounced class conflicts could be overcome, but not the “cultural, economic and political antagonism” of peoples with opposing characters.14
In a 1903 article titled “Thoughts of a Modern Pole,” Dmowski laid out what he didn’t like about Jews—and Germans, for that matter. The Polish people, he complained, had missed the boat with modernity and industrial development and had been unable to exploit the markets opening far to the east. Consequently, on the one hand, there were people who had earned wealth through “initiative, entrepreneurship and personal energy,” while on the other, thousands “had been forced to scale back their needs as they declined socially.” In Dmowski’s eyes, Jews were the primary beneficiaries of dramatic increases in productivity and trade in goods—not because they had swindled people or were part of a treacherous race, but because they were “free of traditionally Polish passivity.” Dmowski was an early supporter of boycotting Jewish businesses, but he didn’t consider this an anti-Semitic end unto itself. Rather, he hoped boycotts would jump-start a social movement that would awaken the Polish people’s “healthy social needs” and help them “seize control” of economic positions for a still-to-be-created nationalist Polish bourgeoisie. Once this process had gotten going, it would become self-perpetuating, thanks to the “increase in active middle-class people who would try to take over commercial fields presently dominated by a foreign element.”15
Narodowa Demokracja’s emphasis on ethnicity, which Dmowski helped bring about, set the tone for politics in the Polish Republic between the two world wars. It was considered perfectly legitimate to use the newly created state as a powerful agency on behalf of the majority—and to the detriment of all ethnic and religious minorities. All the way back in their 1903 party platform, Narodowa Demokracja had called for an end to the “predominance of the Jews in broad stretches of economic life.”16 In 1934, Dmowski interrupted his political retirement to publish his book Przewrot (Upheaval). Filled with anti-Semitic outrage, he blamed Jews for all of Poland’s defeats and humiliation: “If there hadn’t been so many Jews in Poland, there would have been no division of Poland, and the Prussian government wouldn’t have celebrated any triumphs in the East.” In the same breath, he described former British prime minister Lloyd George as a “Jewish agent,” who in 1919 listened to the Jews whispering in his ear and so decided against giving Poland the city of Danzig and major portions of Silesia and East and West Prussia. Dmowski also expressed his respect for Hitler’s policies of “getting rid of Jewish influence in Germany.”17
Dmowski was one of the fathers of the modern Polish state reconstituted in 1918, but also one of the patriarchs of an aggressive Polish anti-Semitism that was modern insofar as it addressed contemporary crises and problems. Today he is revered in his homeland as a hero of Poland’s national rebirth. Dozens of streets and squares bear his name, and in 2006 a hulking memorial to him was unveiled in downtown Warsaw.
Like the National Democrats, equally influential conservative Catholic leaders did not follow the tradition of holding Jews responsible for the Crucifixion. They adhered to new socioeconomically based stereotypes. In his 1912 manifesto Poznaj Żyda! (Know the Jew!), which ran through many editions and is still reprinted today, the widely respected author Teodor Jeske-Choiński merged the Jewish question with Catholic social teachings. In garish terms, he depicted how the “Jewification” of economic life created a “terrible, ruthless battle for existence” and made honestly striving individuals into playthings of selfish industrialism, capital, and speculative investment. He contrasted these demonic forces with an admirably harmonious form of the economy that was “committed to Christian ethics,” that “defended people,” and that knew “no competition at the cost of other suppliers and sellers.”
Jeske-Choiński called upon the Polish people to defend themselves and teach a brutal lesson to their supposed oppressors: “The Jews will reap what they have sown. In the battle for survival, fantasies about love and people’s right to live their lives are obsolete. The Jews would be the first to laugh if they succeeded in halting the Poles’ economic self-defense.”18 In fact since 1870, despite a myriad of Russian and Polish national restrictions, a disproportionate number of Jews had achieved success in academic positions or as entrepreneurs and bankers. In 1929, they still represented half of all Polish doctors, almost half of all Polish writers, artists, journalists, architects, teachers, lawyers, and engineers, and more than half of all chemists, mathematicians, and physicists.19
Freed from the yoke of the powers that had divided the country, the new Polish republic constituted itself in late 1918. Head of state Józef Piłsudski and his troops succeeded in expanding eastward beyond the so-called Curzon line into disputed Lithuanian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian territories. The line, which forms today’s eastern Polish border, had been proposed by British foreign minister George Curzon at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and reflected the complex linguistic and cultural topography of Eastern Europe. With the exception of the Białystok district, it was also the line used by Hitler and Stalin when they divided up Poland in 1939. The Second Polish Republic, which was formed between 1918 and 1921, had 30 million inhabitants, but only two-thirds of them were Poles in the nationalist sense. The country was also home to 5 million Ukrainians, 3 million Jews, 2 million Germans, and 1.2 million Belarussians as well as groups of Lithuanians, Czechs, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and people of mixed heritage like the Kashubians and the Slonzaks (Czech Silesians).
As a military man, General Piłsudski was able to dramatically expand Polish territory in the three years after the First World War. As a politician, he had been one of the leaders of the Polish Social Democratic Party since 1893. In 1926 he staged a military coup against the legitimately elected but chaos-ridden Polish government. From that time on until his death in 1935, supported by the populist Sanacja (Recovery) movement he had founded, he ruled Poland in authoritarian fashion. Sanacja consisted of people who tended both to the political right and left. Together, their aim was to build a national, social-welfare-oriented consensus.
Jews had little to hope for from this newly founded republic. Most of their Catholic compatriots considered them disruptors of solidarity whose liberties were to be curtailed to the benefit of Poles.20 To this end the new democratically elected Polish government went after Jewish schools, professional colleges, and Hebrew academies. Using a variety of pretexts, they limited the right of Jewish tradesmen to train apprentices, knowing full well that Christian tradespeople would not accept Jewish apprentices. The restrictions were aimed at keeping hundreds of thousands of young Jews from continuing to practice their fathers’ trades, forcing them to emigrate. At the time, Jews represented around 10 percent of the Polish population, although they accounted for more like 22 percent of people living in cities. Eighty percent of all employed Jews earned their keep as tradesmen.
The Great Depression hit Poland in 1929 and was still being felt in 1939. Internally, it led to an increase in anti-Jewish activities and took on, in the words of one historian, “terrible dimensions” for Jews, who were effectively shut out of jobs in heavy industry. The broad-based textile economy was an especially important source of work, but Depression-era unemployment rates in that sector ran as high as 80 percent. By 1938, the Warsaw unemployment office only allocated work to Jewish women at two in the afternoon—and only after jobs had been given to all the Christian women seeking work that day.21
A high sales tax disproportionately affected Jews, who mainly lived from trade, artisanship, and small businesses or did regular jobs for bigger companies. Between 1927 and 1931, the Polish government’s revenues from this tax increased by 80 percent, while agricultural work was entirely exempt from the tax, and property tax for farmers was kept low. In comparison to trade and manufacturing, the Christian farmers of largely agricultural Poland contributed only one-sixth of state revenues.
The German-Jewish Relief Organization listed other instances of intentional discrimination. Factories and companies owned by Christian Poles were “increasingly used by the public sector, and cartels were encouraged in an attempt to marginalize Jewish trade.” Moreover, Christian merchants, factory owners, and cooperatives received “cheap credit from state institutions,” whereas Jews were refused such loans. Meanwhile, the state took all the concessions it had granted to Jews for selling products like tobacco, salt, and alcohol and awarded them to “wounded military veterans, civil servants and military personnel.” The timber trade remained completely in state hands, and with the assistance of the government, “Jew-free” monopolies were established. In its allocation of currency and import-export licenses, the state also helped organize the exclusion of Jews from more and more sectors of the Polish economy.
Despite repeatedly promising to do so, the government never relaxed the prohibition of working on Sunday. “Jews are forced to take two, and in winter two and a half days off, which of course makes them less competitive compared to non-Jewish merchants and artisans,” noted the Relief Organization. Although no official restrictions existed, a tacit agreement excluded Jews from “everything from ministerial posts on down to mail delivery and train conductor jobs.” Leading the campaigns and legal proceedings were nationalist, social-nationalist, and Catholic forces who nearly always cooperated with one another. Wherever debates arose about “the Jewish economic type,” as they often did, socialists usually joined in as well. They too advocated the agenda of gentile cooperatives and the “battle against speculative investors.”22
In 1936, social scientist Jakob Lestschinsky registered a decrease in the percentage of Jews in urban populations—perhaps because of non-Jews moving from the country or the incorporation of surrounding rural areas into cities. In any case, Lestschinsky predicted “very dire” consequences for Jews: “The suburban populations absorbed into cities quickly acclimate to urban life and swiftly become intensive competitors in trade and commerce, further increasing the number of people looking to earn a living in ways the cities offered.” Because Polish village populations were leaving en masse, “with the force of a power of nature,” and there were not enough industrial jobs to go around, the battle for positions in the traditionally organized artisan trades, even the least lucrative, sometimes turned violent.
In 1934, after Poland had rescinded the guarantees of protection for minorities it had grudgingly issued in the Paris Treaty, Catholic clergy, journalists, parliamentarians, and the government pushed for legal and extralegal restrictions on Jews. Nationalists harassed Christians who frequented Jewish shops, handing out lists with the names and addresses of Polish businesses and shops from which people were encouraged to obtain goods and services. Cutting off Jewish possibilities for earning a living amounted to an economic pogrom—“so intertwined in contemporary Poland with the physical one,” as Lestschinsky wrote in 1936, “that they can hardly be distinguished.”
Historian Cornelius Groschel concluded: “The desire to economically marginalize the Jewish population in the Second Polish Republic was part of the ‘national modernization’ of the Polish state,” intended to mobilize in equal measure farmers, the self-employed middle classes, and civil servants. Economic and social-welfare goals were paramount.23
Hardly had the Second Polish Republic been founded than Christian students vehemently demanded that universities be protected from being “permanently Jewified.” The Gazeta Warszawska wrote on October 2, 1922, that the University of Cracow was “Jewified both intellectually and in terms of personnel.” On April 21, 1923, nationalist students bombed the Cracow home of the internationally renowned Jewish physicist Władysław Natanson, though the professor was unharmed.
At the time, Jews made up a quarter of student bodies. But in 1923, following Russian, Romanian, and Hungarian models, the Polish government drew up a law regulating admission to the country’s universities on the basis of ethnicity. The draft legislation stipulated that students from religious and linguistic minorities could only be admitted in “the same proportion as the minority in question represented within the whole population.” After a campaign by the Comité des Délégations Juives in Paris, the government decided at the last minute that it didn’t need such a law. But limits on the numbers of Jewish students were gradually and tacitly imposed anyway—in contravention of the agreement to protect national and religious minorities Poland had agreed to in Versailles on June 28, 1919.
Of the 200 places for new students at Warsaw’s medical school in 1923, only nine went to Jews. By contrast, Lviv’s law school instituted what initially seemed to be remarkably liberal quotas: 60 percent of places were reserved for Poles, while 40 percent were allocated to Jews and Ukrainians. In the fall semester of 1925–26, there were 600 openings. But because only 220 Poles applied for them, the university president ordered that the number of spots be reduced, allowing only 145 Jews and Ukrainians. Cracow’s medical school had been limiting the number of Jews since 1922. In the fall of 1925, 100 places were open, of which 13 were given to the 400 Jewish applicants. The dean denied that this amounted to a limit.
Other university heads came up with especially clever ways of keeping Jews from studying medicine. One was to make admission contingent upon “a sufficient number of Jewish corpses” being available for basic anatomy classes—as if the baptized dead couldn’t bear to be dissected by unbaptized students.24 Polish university administrators knew that for religious reasons Jews were far less likely than Christians to donate their bodies to science. They had copied this form of exclusion from their Romanian colleagues who in 1925 had pushed for a law that stipulated: “If Jewish hospitals don’t provide sufficient corpses, Jewish students are prohibited from practicing on Christian bodies.”25
By 1927, 9 percent of the students at Warsaw Polytechnic University, 8.3 percent at the Cracow Medical Academy, and 10 percent at that city’s Institute for Pharmacology were Jewish. But many gentile students were unhappy even with such decreased numbers and demanded a total ban on Jews attending university. Also, as had already happened in Russia and Romania, gentiles soon called for “nostrification,” a refusal to acknowledge academic degrees acquired abroad. “What do Jews do when they’re not admitted to study in Poland?” asked nationalist student leaders. “Large numbers of them go abroad and can look forward afterward to a rosy career.” Polish legislators were encouraged to close this loophole so that ambitious young Christians would be relieved of competition.26
The University of Lublin was made a Catholic institution. In Posen, previously part of Germany, Polish nationalist democrats summarily barred Jews from matriculating. The same thing happened at the University of Cracow, and only a handful of Jews were admitted to the Cracow School of Mining.27 Professors also insisted on excluding women because they feared that “in this way Jewesses could gain access to Polish universities.”
Intimidation of Jews increased throughout society in the 1930s, and universities were no exception. “Hardly a day passes without reports of Jews being assaulted in the streets, Jewish students being attacked in their universities and Jewish shop windows smashed,” wrote the Canadian Jewish Chronicle in 1935. “On top of this violence the Jewish population is also confronted with a rapidly growing anti-Jewish boycott.… Refusal of the authorities to grant the anti-Semites’ demand that Jewish students in the Warsaw Polytechnique Institute be segregated led to a riot during which nationalist students threw Jewish students out of windows.… More than a score of the anti-Semites were arrested.” The majority of professors sympathized with the protesting students and had no objection to the latter’s goals or their means of achieving them. University presidents and deans themselves ordered that Jews could only sit in special sections of lecture halls, so-called ghetto benches, in some cases banishing them to separate rooms entirely. During the 1938–39 fall semester, there were several major acts of violence in Lviv’s two main universities. Three Jewish students—Karol Zellermayer, Samuel Proweller, and Markus Landsberg—were stabbed to death. Because Jewish students began defending themselves against the mounting violence, there were casualties on the other side as well.
Some faculty members did oppose the anti-Jewish violence. As early as 1919, Poland’s leading linguist and enemy of narrow-minded nationalism Jan Nieczysław Baudouin de Courtenay criticized the restrictions. Educated in Prague, Leipzig, Cracow, and St. Petersburg, he taught at the University of Warsaw, where he publicly complained: “Today we are no longer guided by reason and concern for the general welfare, but by bestial hostility and ‘racist’ prejudice. Today we strive for the radical ‘de-Jewification’ of Polish society and the radical ‘de-Jewification’ of Polish science. In our revived state, this is considered evidence of the most stringent sort of ‘patriotism.’ Still, I consider this not just repulsive and disgusting, but worse, foolish and corruptive.”
De Courtenay advised Zionist leaders and those who insisted on a legally protected, semiautonomous Jewish community in Poland to moderate their demands. He thought that claims to “national-personal and cultural autonomy” went too far because they insisted upon “autonomous institutions and administrative separation from the rest of the population.” He argued that Jews had to accept the Second Republic’s constitutional institutions, civil and criminal legal codes, as well as the state’s right to raise taxes. Special Jewish schools should, however, be allowed state support and be under state supervision. “Those born Catholic and those born Jewish,” wrote de Courtenay in a clear and elegant plea for liberalism, tolerance, and loyalty to the state, “must accept that they live on the same soil, within the borders of the same state.”28
Another opponent, the Warsaw professor for philosophy and logic Tadeusz Kotarbiński, complained that Catholic clergy were inculcating young people with hatred of Jews. The so-called Jew parties—annual orgies of violence against Jews in November—were, as he pointed out, “normally kicked off with religious services.”29 Writer Kazimierz Brandys recalled similar scenes from his course in law at Warsaw University from 1935 to 1939. The son of a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family, Brandys had turned his back on religion and joined the Young Legion, which had been founded in the spirit of Piłsudski’s authoritarian policies. He eventually left the organization, later writing: “At the meetings of the Warsaw chapter of the Legion, the speeches are scarcely distinguishable from the slogans of the fascist Falange. When one speaker criticized the anti-Semitic currents in the organization, saying ‘My mother comes from a Jewish family,’ he was greeted with mocking laughter. ‘What am I doing here?’ I asked myself, and turned in my membership card the very next day.”
Brandys recalled that “Polish lawyers and doctors associations required proof of Aryan heritage” and that the Polish Education Ministry allowed universities to segregate Jews in lecture halls. Catholics were assigned to “even places,” and Jews to “odd ones,” with corresponding stamps in their student identification cards. Brandys was considered Christian. Together with other left-leaning fellow students, he remained standing against the wall “in protest at the bench ghetto.” But the protesters were “always in the minority” and were “attacked by troops of brawlers every time.” Meanwhile, the dean of the law school in Warsaw, Roman Rybarski, refused to let students involved in the protest take their exams. “That happened three months before one million Aryan Germans invaded Poland and one and a half years before the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto were built,” Brandys recalled. In 1942, German occupiers murdered Rybarski at Auschwitz as a representative of Poland’s nationalist intelligentsia.
In April 1933, the weekly newspaper of the southern Polish bishopric of Kielce, Gazeta Tygodniowa, offered an ambivalent analysis of the new regime across the border in Germany: “Hitler is Poland’s enemy, but in the struggle against the moral corrosion caused by Jews, we have to admit he’s right.” Two days later, Dzwon Niedzielny, the Sunday paper of the bishopric of Cracow, seconded those thoughts: “Twenty-five professors, almost all of them Jews, have been stripped of their academic chairs in Germany. And they won’t be the last. Only now do we realize how Jewified German academia was—and it’s well known that we in Poland are suffering far worse!” The National Party’s Germany expert, Stanisław Kozicki, and the Berlin correspondent for Gazeta Warszawska, Jerzy Drobnik, agreed that the “German-Jewish conflict was an internal private matter of the Reich,” and Kozicki found warm words to praise the new German government for taking on Jews.30
In 1936, in an extreme exaggeration, Dzwon Niedzielny claimed that Jews owned 75 percent of all public real estate and 80 percent of all industrial facilities, did 85 percent of all trade, and received 90 percent of all private credit. “Must we accept this?” the paper asked. The answer given by these religious reporters and editors, who saw themselves as soldiers in the national vanguard, was absolutely not. They portrayed measures aimed at excluding Jews as acts of self-defense and argued in truly secular fashion: “Jews dominate most free trades. They control artisanship and are making advances in agriculture. They already control literary and artistic creation, and with the help of the press and radio they steer public opinion.”
In 1938, the paper of the tiny bishopric of Tarnów, Nasza Sprawa, sought to stir up envy and hatred for the many Jews getting by as tailors. This was rarely a lucrative undertaking. Nonetheless, the paper pointed out that Kielce with its 58,000 inhabitants had 4,470 tailors’ workshops, only a quarter of which were owned by Christian Poles. “Hundreds of thousands of Jews and their families are leading a comfortable existence,” the paper concluded, thanks to Jewish domination of commerce, the skilled trades, and industry. In 1936 the newspaper Niedziela in the diocese of Częstochowa accused Jews of “spreading out” in Poland while forgetting that they were “not ‘natives’ but rather unwelcome guests.”
As historian Viktoria Pollmann has shown, as a political goal the “de-Jewification of the Polish economy” enjoyed the complete support of the clerical and nationalist press. The 1938 “Week of Polishization of Industry, Commerce and Artisanship” began with a mass in Warsaw Cathedral. Church reporters from Gazeta Tygodniowa reported on the proceedings with frank statements of hatred: “The Polishization of our unbelievably Jewified cities and towns is one of the most urgent questions of our lives and the slogan ‘To each his own’ one of our national commandments.… Only when millions of Poles can earn their daily bread in their own fatherland will prosperity grow in the country and we’ll be rid of the plague that originated in those who have dragged our villages into ruination—the Jews. Only then will the most dangerous enemy—the enemy within—be defeated.” To accelerate this process, the paper instructed its religious readership: “A good Pole doesn’t spend a single złoty in a Jewish place of business.”
Less stridently but no less insistently the head of Catholic Poland, Cardinal August Hlond, had called upon the faithful in a pastoral letter to boycott Jewish businesses: “From an economic perspective it is good to prefer one’s own kind to others and pass by Jewish shops and market stalls.” The cardinal had his letter read from Catholic pulpits throughout Poland in February 1936, providing millions of the faithful with a special variation on the commandment to love thy neighbor. “It’s permissible to love one’s own people more,” he assured Polish Catholics. The cardinal condemned physical violence and conceded that there were many “pious, honest, just, charitable and generous” Jews, but that didn’t negate the existence of a serious problem: “It is a fact that Jews fight against the Catholic Church, encourage free thinking and form the avant-garde of godlessness, Bolshevism and all revolutionary movements. It is a fact that Jews have a corrosive influence on morality and spread pornography with their publishing houses. It is true that Jews engage in deception, usury and slave trading.”
In the fall of 1938, a Gazeta Tygodniowa author asked: “How can the country be de-Jewified?” His answer: “The Jews must be settled in uninhabited and nearly uninhabited places. Left to themselves, they could found a state of their own and no longer corrupt, demoralize or exploit anyone. With all their influence and wealth, it will be easy for them to find and, if necessary, purchase such a settlement area.” The daily newspaper Głos Narodu, which had been owned by the archdiocese of Cracow since 1936, both criticized and expressed understanding for the Night of Broken Glass in Nazi Germany: “The Third Reich is about to burst the shackles Jews have put upon that country’s economic and cultural life.” Jews would have to leave Germany for good, the paper wrote, and recognize that “their hour of history was now at hand.”31
Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, a Franciscan monk who was beatified in 1982, was born in Łódź but studied theology in Rome, where in 1917 he and some of his like-minded brothers founded the Catholic fundamentalist Knights of the Immaculata. The group dedicated itself to fighting secularism, free thinkers, and socialism. Kolbe himself formulated its statutes, which emphasized a series of self-imposed duties including “to try to change the minds of sinners, heretics, schismatics, Jews, etc.… and particularly freemasons and contribute to the salvation of all under the protection and mediation of the Immaculate Virgin.”
In 1927, Kolbe founded the Niepokalanów monastery in the village of Teresin near Warsaw. There, together with several hundred lay brothers, he created the largest Catholic newspaper company in Poland. In 1936, after doing five years of missionary work in Japan, he resumed his duties at the head of the monastery and the company, which included putting out the daily newspaper Mały Dziennik. Founded in 1935 in the style of a modern tabloid, it was published with the express purpose of combating Jews, freemasons, and liberals.
In 1936, the paper attacked the nonreligious doctor Janusz Korczak, a Jew born Henryk Goldszmit, as a “free thinker, atheist and enemy of Catholicism.” Korczak was then director of two orphanages, one for Jewish and one for Christian children, and the paper accused him of favoring the former because the Jewish orphans received additional tutoring. The journalists from Mały Dziennik considered it a “scandal” that “our children are put in the care of our enemy.” They demanded the government put a stop to it, given that Korczak “is hostile to the Polish cause and undermines it.”32
On November 9, 1938, the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath died after being shot by a Jewish teenager in Paris. Mały Dziennik, in an article titled “Lunatic Jews Not Satisfied with the Blood of a Third-Rate Civil Servant,” characterized him as a “victim of Jewish brutality.” The paper didn’t mention the terrible pogrom—the Night of Broken Glass—that immediately commenced in Germany, merely noting: “It is to be expected that Chancellor Hitler will now push through the so-called ‘final’ policy against Jews.”33 One year later, Prelate Stanisław Trzeciak, one of the countless anti-Semitic clerics in Poland, justified Germany’s treatment of Jews by writing: “Hitler derives his laws from the papal encyclicals … he is following the example of prominent popes.”34
A 1938 article in the monthly magazine Rycerz Niepokalanej, which was founded by Kolbe in 1922 and for which he served as editor in chief and frequently wrote, offered the following words of praise: “In the battle against the front of freemasons, the church has found an ally: fascism.… Whenever you encounter people who minimize the destructive, demoralizing, antistate and antinational activities of the Jews, you can be certain that they are influenced by freemasonry, since freemasonry comes from Jewishness and serves its political ends.” The same publication proclaimed in 1939 that Jewishness had eaten its way “like a cancerous tumor into the body of the people,” adding: “It is tearing trade, industry, artisanship and even the land away from us.”35
Those examples suffice to sketch out the extent of daily bias and hatred, although Catholic publications were surpassed in this regard by the younger wordsmiths of the National Party. One of them was the lawyer Michał Howorka, who in his 1934 book Walka o Wielką Polskę (Battle for the New Poland) demanded that Jews in Poland be left with no choice but to emigrate: “But first they must be made bankrupt. Only then should they emigrate. We cannot let them go until they have been turned into a pack of beggars. We can’t afford to be sentimental. In our striving for victory over an enemy like this, we can’t shy away from any sacrifice or effort. We cannot take account of any rights to property, civil rights or indeed life itself. We have to eradicate this tangle of Jews among us once and for all.”36
After Germany invaded Poland, the German occupiers sent Kolbe and Howorka to Auschwitz, where they were murdered on August 14, 1941, and March 10, 1942, respectively, because they were members of the Polish nationalist intelligentsia. Korczak was sent as a Jew to Treblinka, where he was killed on August 7, 1942. He had refused offers by Christian Poles to help him flee the Warsaw Ghetto because he felt it his duty to accompany to their deaths the orphans with whom he had been charged. In Auschwitz, Kolbe had taken the place of a Christian fellow inmate with children who was to be executed in an act of reprisal. The man Kolbe saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek, survived the ordeal, dying in 1995 at the age of ninety-four.
The peace treaty signed on June 4, 1920, in the Grand Trianon Palace in Versailles left behind a Hungary that was little more than a rump state, stripped of two-thirds of its territory and almost 60 percent of its population. The territories taken away consisted of places with non-Hungarian and mixed populations and areas settled by Hungarians, where they were now in the majority. Hungary was forced to cede large stretches of land to the newly formed states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as well as to newly enlarged Romania, while Burgenland was given to Austria. Of the 10 million inhabitants in these territories, some 3.3 million considered themselves Magyars in terms of language, heritage, and culture. Thus it was not without reason that most Hungarians considered themselves to be one of the biggest losers in the aftermath of the First World War.
After the collapse of Béla Kun’s short-lived socialist Hungarian Republic of Councils in 1919, nationalists defamed Hungarian Jews collectively as traitors and Bolsheviks. Counterrevolutionaries killed some five thousand people, three thousand of them Jews. Yet political, social, and religious differences notwithstanding, almost all Hungarians could unite behind the slogan “Nem, nem, soha!” (No, no, never) to the terms of peace dictated to the country at Trianon. In his memoirs, writer Ephraim Kishon, who was born in Budapest in 1924 as Ferenc Hoffmann, described how Hungarians felt between the world wars. He recalled as a student wistfully singing songs about reuniting Hungary (“Oh my sweet Transylvania, we’re prepared to die for you”). In 1942, he even finished his course of study at the Budapest Trade School with a test on the topic of “The heroic resistance of Hungary, the bulwark of Christianity and European culture, against the Bolshevik hordes.”37
Nationalistic and anti-Communist thinking in Hungary paved the way in the 1930s for an alliance with Nazi Germany. Berlin achieved for Budapest what it had only aspired to: a major revision of the Paris peace treaties. Between 1938 and 1941, Hitler helped Hungary gain significant stretches of territory to the detriment of Romania, Yugoslavia, and Slovakia, the state Hitler himself allowed to be created on March 24, 1939. With Italy’s help, the German Führer enlarged Hungary from 93,000 to 172,000 square kilometers and increased the population from 9 to 15 million people. Beginning in 1941, Hungarian troops fought side by side with their German allies against the Soviet Union. Jewish Hungarians were forbidden to bear arms but were deployed to build settlements or clear mines. Some 42,000 of these Jewish “construction soldiers” died. In mid-July 1941, Hungary deported 15,000 “foreigners,” that is, Jews declared to be Polish, Slovakian, or stateless. They were murdered by German police battalions in Kamianets-Podilskyi in what is now Ukraine in late August of that year.38
As Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported on March 21, 1944, two days after the Wehrmacht invaded Hungary, Hungarians determined to destroy the Trianon peace agreement had “permanently trapped the country in the web of German war policies.” It was only at that point, late in the Second World War, that Germany needed to apply moderate pressure to ensure the continued cooperation of conservative, nationalist forces in Hungary.
Up until then Hungary had remained a caste-oriented, reactionary state, dominated by paternalist large landowners and marred by grotesque social inequalities. Yet although communists had been kept down since the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Republic of Councils and important parliamentary rights had been curtailed, Hungary still had a variety of newspapers and political parties. They ranged from moderate social democrats to the oppositional liberal democratic Independent Smallholders, from the Agrarian Workers and Civic Party to the nationalist parties and the right-wing revolutionary and occasionally banned Arrow Cross Party. The conservative Renewal Party gained importance in the 1930s and increasingly influenced the political climate, despite being internally divided. Hungary’s often rotating governments were essentially a club for national-liberal and conservative bigwigs who regularly quarreled among themselves and then came back together in new constellations. Hungary was a “special case,” wrote historian Andreas Hillgruber in 1959, “in an era shaped by clashes between democratic, fascist and communist ideas.”39
The personification of this special case was Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, the monarchist former admiral of the Austro-Hungarian Navy who served as the regent of Hungary from 1920 to October 15, 1944. Horthy, who preferred to be addressed as “your excellency,” decided over questions of war and peace and had the right to convene and dismiss the parliament and to send legislation back for further consultations twice before being required to sign it into law. In contrast to Hitler’s Germany, Hungary was far freer and far less socially equitable. The old European emphasis on tradition by Hungary’s thin upper class prevented an alliance of the lower classes, parvenu intelligentsia, and former elites of the sort Hitler so successfully forged.
Nonetheless, in the May 1939 elections, the fascist Arrow Cross Party, which while related to the National Socialists was more radical due to Hungary’s premodern character, won twenty-nine parliamentary mandates, more than one-sixth of all seats available. In Budapest, it received over one-third of the vote—an impressive result considering that Hungary’s electoral system favored the rich. Arrow Cross supporters fought for “a national workers’ state” and the “liberation of man, soil, work and the [ethnically native] people,” while agitating against the “yoke” of the “Jewish-Marxist plutocracy.” They aimed to simultaneously overcome feudalism and capitalism and to emancipate workers, denigrated as “smelly proletarians,” making them equal members of “a worker-friendly nation.” The Arrow Cross Party represented a threat to the feudal order still running things in Hungary and gave a prominent voice to the lower classes, which had been kept indentured, ignorant, and poor.
A significant number of adherents of the Hungarian Communists, who were banned, found a new home in this explicitly anti-Semitic party. Its membership, platform, and influence explain three aspects of Hungarian society, then and later: the general social welfare benefits from anti-Semitic measures; the ease with which Arrow Cross supporters became reliable pillars in the new populist Communist regime after 1945; and the socially integrative, stubborn refusal after the Second World War to talk about the Holocaust.
In 1920, Jews represented barely 6 percent of the Hungarian population but 51 percent of lawyers, 39 percent of engineers and chemists, 34 percent of journalists, and around 50 percent of doctors. This was no great surprise since between 1910 and 1930 the percentage of Jews over the age of twenty who had graduated from a university-track high school rose from 18.2 to 22.1 percent while it declined among gentiles from 4.3 to 4.1 percent. Jewish students also finished their university studies more quickly and got better marks. The prohibition on Jewish lawyers practicing in Hungary was only lifted in 1867. Thirty years later, according to one estimate, the sons of small-time Jewish merchants and artisans made up “30 to 50 percent of the educated ‘new middle class’” in modernizing Hungary. These people had relatively high earnings and ensured that their own children were also well educated.
Soon after the suppression of the Republic of Councils, the new Hungarian government introduced matriculation limits on Jewish university students. The corresponding law came into force on September 26, 1920. It was passed by an overwhelming majority of the parliament and signed by Prime Minister Pál Teleki and Horthy. In the run-up to this legislative act, nationalist students had demonstrated in favor of it, and because the law initially applied only to new students, the demonstrations continued. The end result was that, to ensure ethnic transparency, “true Magyar” students were given a say in policy. From that point on, they sent delegates to matriculation commissions, who acted like equality commissioners, making sure that the number of Jewish students did not exceed what were seen as fair quotas.
In 1922, Alajos Kovács, a statistician and anti-Semite, calculated that Jews controlled 20 to 25 percent of the national income and assets in Hungary instead of the “proportional” 5.9 percent that was their due. This “terrifying” disproportionality, he insisted, needed to be corrected. But who would benefit? As historian Péter Tibor Nagy has demonstrated statistically, the interests of the Hungarian population as a whole were not, as is often claimed, made a priority. Nagy writes: “Rather, the restrictions on the numbers of Jewish students prioritized the interests of 210,000 middle-class Christian families over those of 60,000 similarly situated Jewish ones.” Christians were afraid of competition from a Jewish minority that seemed able to rise up socially with the greatest of ease.40
The 1920 law bore the wordy, ostensibly harmless title “Regulation on Matriculation to the Universities, Technical University and Economic Faculty in Budapest and the Legal Academies.” Its significant paragraphs don’t mention Jews specifically. The law merely stipulates that “the proportion of matriculates who reside in the country and belong to individual races and nationalities are ideally to reach the proportions of the religions and nationalities concerned and at least nine-tenths of same.”
The word “race” was not used for the sake of ethnic discrimination. Some individual, local acts of bias notwithstanding, Hungarian Jews who had converted to Christianity were still allowed to study without any restrictions. The law used the word so as not to distinguish between the Christian confessions. The intention was to deny practicing Jews access to middle-class educational opportunities and careers. This aim was supported by measures taken by the city administration of Budapest, a city in which every fifth resident was Jewish. In 1920–21, 160 Jewish teachers were fired, a significant number of Jewish deans demoted to teachers, and Jewish professors were transferred from the trade academies to less prestigious people’s schools.41
Both the League of Nations and Jewish organizations in Britain and France considered the matriculation restrictions a violation of the guarantees of minority rights in the Trianon treaty. In response to their protests, the Hungarian government claimed that it was trying to reduce the “intellectual proletariat” and ensure the “patriotic loyalty of future civil servants” and the “proportional” equality of opportunity between various nationalities. Before the restrictions, the government said, the proportion of Jewish students had reached an “intolerable” average of 34 percent; at the University of Pécs, it was 45.2 percent. By late 1921, the proportion of Jewish students had been brought down to an average of 11.3 percent, a two-thirds reduction, and by the 1935–36 fall semester that figure had fallen to 8 percent. As a consequence, thousands of Hungarian Jews who wanted to study at university in the 1920s and 1930s did so at Austrian, Italian, Czech, French, and (until 1933) German universities. In line with its basic aim, the Hungarian matriculation law improved gentiles’ chances in the job market. By 1928, Jews represented around 19 percent of the well-educated people with jobs but 30 percent of the well-educated unemployed, the “intellectual proletariat.” In Budapest the latter number was 38 percent.42
After an initial phase of shock and in response to international pressure, universities became more lax in enforcing the quotas, so that before 1940 the prescribed proportion of 6 percent Jewish students was never attained. The national-liberal Hungarian prime minister István Bethlen, who served from 1921 to 1931, declared ex post facto that he had always wanted to “revoke the numerus clausus [matriculation limits]”—but only when the “social situation in Hungary had been consolidated.” Conversely, Hungarian anti-Semite István Barta, the author of a German-language book on the Jewish question, complained that “the smoldering racial protection movement had been condemned to impotence” by the successful tactics of the Jewish communities. Jewish leaders undertook a series of discreet interventions, and in 1928, the restrictions were in fact officially eased.43
In October 1932, the out-and-out anti-Semite Gyula Gömbös took over the government. The new prime minister came from the lower middle classes, had worked his way up to captain in the military, and had founded the Party for Racial Protection in 1924. Back then, the party had adopted illiberal slogans and demanded that matriculation restrictions be extended to include baptized former Jews. In 1925, he coorganized the International Congress of Anti-Semites in Budapest. As early as January 1921, in the newspaper Szózat (Wakening Call), Gömbös had formulated ideas that would find a broad echo in 1938: “I consider it necessary for the Hungarian government to contact the headquarters of the Zionists to arrange for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of excess Jews with Hungarian citizenship. The fate of this people, which is dispersed throughout the world, must be decided in a way that guarantees the serenity of the other peoples.” In a brochure written in German, Gömbös proclaimed: “Jews should only be allowed to assert themselves in any given area in relation to their numbers.”
Despite these views, in his four years in power Gömbös didn’t make existing anti-Jewish legislation more severe. On the contrary, probably at the urging of Horthy, he declared upon taking office that he had “rethought” his ideas on the Jewish question and would henceforth consider those Jews “who feel that they belong to the Hungarian national community as much my brothers as my Hungarian brothers.” For historian Randolph Brahman, Gömbös’s change of heart was purely tactical, while contemporary Hungarian anti-Semites saw the “power of Jewish money” at work, to which the prime minister had been forced to yield. Whatever the truth may have been, until Gömbös’s early death in October 1936, Hungarian government policy quietly discriminated against Jews. Between the academic years 1932–33 and 1936–37, the proportion of Jewish university students dwindled from 12.5 to 7.4 percent. Meanwhile, Gömbös filled upper-level administrative military and governmental positions with people from diverse social backgrounds, lessening the influence of conservative elites and favoring what was sometimes known as “Young Hungary.” The entry of the latter into state institutions was bad news for Jews. Among the newly promoted parvenus was Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi. His father was a career military man, who had never risen higher than junior officer, while his son made it all the way up to the rank of major in the Hungarian general staff.44
Gömbös’s successor as prime minister, Kálmán Darányi, radicalized the government’s anti-Jewish policies in a telling double move. On March 5, 1938, he banned the Arrow Cross Party while adopting on the same day part of its platform as official state policy. He didn’t announce the reorientation in front of parliament, but rather in a partisan speech to workers in the industrial city of Györ. “Our government platform is dedicated to serving the welfare, health and culture of the lower classes, and I see this platform as embodying the idea of racial protection and national unity,” Darányi told his listeners. “Jewry has succeeded in establishing itself in disproportionately large numbers in those areas of work in which it is easier to earn money.… The basic condition for the legal and systematic regulation of the Jewish question is that we create a socially equitable situation.”45
Darányi, his followers, and most of his listeners understood social equity to mean that Jews would no longer have the right to freely choose what they did for work and that their proportion in certain job sectors would be limited to 20 percent. The government introduced corresponding legislation one month later, on April 8, 1939. It was called the “Law on More Effective Protection of Social and Economic Equity.” Eighteen years after the law limiting Jewish matriculations, and despite Hungary’s social and economic stagnation, parliamentary deputies still felt they had to help ambitious Magyar university graduates find suitably comfortable positions—to the detriment of Jews.
This interpretation of the situation is supported by the debates carried out in the upper and lower chambers of the Hungarian parliament. Tibor Eckhardt, the chairman of the Independent Smallholders Party, justified his vote with the following argument: “Some time ago, before the draft of the Jewish legislation was distributed, I emphasized that the fundamental question was the proper distribution of income and wealth.” Another deputy, inspired by the heat of class conflict, insisted that “the street sweepers are all Christians and the people sitting in the automobiles are all Jews.” Mátyás Matolcsy rejected the draft legislation in the name of the National Peasants Party as being “far too mild.” He demanded that “the Jews be pushed back to 5 percent” and “that key industries be nationalized and there be targeted comprehensive social-welfare reform policies, namely a radical land reform, as a supplement to the Jewish law, which only solves the problems of cities.”
In the upper chamber of parliament, the deputy Zoltán Biró insisted that the law was directed not only against Jewish capital but also against the Jewish proletariat that had emigrated from Eastern Europe and that “sucked the money from and exploited the native populace in Eastern Hungary.” Biró’s colleagues Viktor Károlyi and János Teleszky found the law “compellingly appropriate for the end of preserving the social peace.” After considering the legislation, parliamentary deputies voted it into law on May 29, 1938, by a large majority. Justice Minister Ödön Mikecz portrayed it as an act of “social equity.”
With Jews representing only 6 percent of the Hungarian populace, many people found the 20 percent quota overly generous. But for those it affected, whether they were practicing or would-be doctors, lawyers, or engineers, or worked in the press, film, or theater, the limits were painful. The damage was all the greater because parliamentarians had also come up with clauses designed to additionally hem in the “unjust overrepresentation of Jews.” For example, alongside the 20 percent quota, media companies weren’t allowed to pay more than 20 percent of their total wages to Jews. In companies with more than ten employees, the 20 percent limit on Jews was calculated using only people working in “intellectually influential areas.” At a newspaper, for instance, only journalists and editors counted, not bookkeepers, secretaries, porters, and typesetters. That further restricted the number of Jews in leading jobs.46
The anti-Jewish law of May 1938 was followed before the end of the year by another law directed at “the exaggerated influence of Jewry on the intellectual leadership of the country.” It came into force on May 5, 1939, and aimed to provide a new foundation for “the beautiful edifice of hard-working Christian Hungary.” That was how the newly appointed Prime Minister Béla Imrédy had put it on February 3. But Imrédy was a luckless figure. The anti-Semitism he helped promote turned around to bite him in the form of his Jewish great-grandmother. When this part of his ancestry was revealed, he was forced to resign after only a few weeks in office. Nonetheless, he remained politically active. In 1942 he demanded a “solution to the Jewish question” to be coupled with land reform and better social benefits for workers.47 In 1944, Imrédy was an enthusiastic helper of the German occupiers. Two years later, a popular tribunal in Budapest sentenced him to death, and he was immediately executed.
With the second Jewish law, the quota of Jews in the professions listed above was reduced from 20 to 12 percent, and the reduction also applied to wages. Leading positions such as editor in chief, departmental head, and publisher had to be given to people of the Christian faith. From that moment on, Jews were no longer accepted as civil servants or state employees. Jewish judges and prosecutors were forced to retire within six months. Teachers and notaries were given a deadline of two years. For all institutions of higher education and secondary schools, strict matriculation limits of 6 percent were put in place. Because Jewish students already exceeded that limit, educational authorities reduced the percentage of newly matriculating Jewish students to a mere 1.4 percent for the 1939–40 fall semester. Thus what had been a limit now nearly amounted to an outright ban.48 The 6 percent limit also applied to the awarding of commercial and trade licenses and public contracts given to Jewish-owned companies. To evade foreign complaints, in April 1939 Hungary quit the League of Nations.
A newly established government office with 600 employees supervised the law’s implementation—German diplomats nicknamed it the “Jew Commissariat.”49 Employers were required to report twice yearly how many Jews they employed in intellectual jobs, and they were told how many Jews they would have to fire in the coming six months. The law also stripped most Jews of their right to vote just before the 1939 parliamentary and local elections. Since Jews had tended to vote for liberal parties, the measure favored conservatives and right-wing radicals. Moreover, the Hungarian interior minister was granted the authority to denaturalize all Jews who had gained Hungarian citizenship after July 1, 1914. The most ominous paragraph in the law came at the end. It empowered the government “to encourage the emigration of Jews” and issue decrees concerning their right to take their assets with them “for which normally laws would be required.” These paragraphs in a democratically passed law enabled the government to summarily confiscate the assets of 725,000 Jews in 1944 and abet their “emigration”—in many cases, to Auschwitz.
Hungary’s third Jewish law came into force in August 1941 and defined for the first time in the country’s legal system the term “half-Jew.” Following the lead of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in Germany, children of mixed Jewish-Christian marriages were considered Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish cultural community. In the parliamentary debates about the law, deputies pursued two aims: refining Hungary’s policies of segregation in order to, as Imrédy put it, encourage “the future exodus of Jews” and give the state a way to confiscate land without compensation from half-Jews. Amid these heated discussions, Béla Varga of the Smallholders Party argued for half of all Hungary’s Jews to be forcibly resettled. He was not alone. As the former prime minister Bethlen summarized, “there was no speaker in parliament who suggested a solution other than the Jews’ being forced to emigrate to a Jewish national state.”50
At the same time the state launched a campaign to create a sort of commerce “that was unmistakably permeated by the Christian spirit.” This entailed support programs for ambitious young Christians, including scholarships to attend trade schools, cheap lines of credit to set up businesses, and evening continuing education classes on everything from bookkeeping, customs law, and rail and ship tariffs to shop-window decoration and the use of advertisements. And encouraged by the help they had begun to receive in school, young Christians did indeed seek to “take the chances that the Jewish Law opened up for them.” By mid-1941, Budapest city officials had stripped Jewish market sellers of their stalls, forty-five hundred grain dealers throughout the country had lost their concessions, and the situation was similar in all agricultural sectors. Drawing attention to these measures, Presidential Regent Horthy proclaimed: “We have implanted an interest in economic life and a proclivity for the free trades in our children and our young people.… I trust that our gifted race, which is capable of anything, can achieve everything.”51
Hardly had Hungary regained Northern Transylvania from Romania after the Second Vienna Award on August 30, 1940, than the Hungarian government stripped Jews there of their rights, revoking trade licenses and issuing edicts about where they were allowed to run businesses and where not. Jews were also branded collaborators and profiteers of twenty years of Romanian rule, which had now been overcome. The tone of these initiatives is neatly conveyed by an article in the Magyar Nép (Hungarian People) newspaper on May 9, 1942, about the forced withdrawal of Jewish merchants from the city of Kolozsvár (Cluj): “Until now, the Grüns and Cohens have lorded over the main square. Romanian parvenus, the upper classes of the Romanian occupiers, were these shops’ best customers. Elegant ladies from Romania proper came here to purchase silk and exquisite English fabric, fur coats, jewelry, snake-skin shoes—in short the finest and most fashionable things from anywhere and everywhere. While masses of Hungarians suffered want and privation, they weighed silk and gold.”52
Until 1945, agriculture in scantly industrialized Hungary was based on the feudal estate economy, tiny landowners, serfs, farm maids, and seasonally employed day laborers. Poverty and sluggish industrialization led some 1.4 million of these people to emigrate to the US between 1900 and 1914. In 1937, the authors of a League of Nations report noted the extreme poverty of rural Hungarians compared with others in Europe. They kept themselves alive, the report stated, with “bread and paprika, paprika and bread, and on a good day maybe a little bacon.” Estate owners still enjoyed the right to mete out corporal punishment and to approve or disapprove of marriages, determining how Hungary’s rural poor lived at the time. According to the 1930 census, some 2.3 million people existed in these conditions—almost a third of the entire Hungarian population.53
Against the backdrop of this notorious misery, both chambers of the Hungarian parliament repeatedly debated the issue of land reform, but the politically powerful aristocracy always succeeded in blocking any action. In 1938 a number of leading politicians jointly arrived at an idea of how to break the impasse by “enlisting Jewish land for the purposes of land reform.” There are no precise statistics on how much land Jews possessed, but around 10 percent of all agricultural and forest lands were probably owned or leased by Jews. That expropriation was the subject of paragraphs fifteen and sixteen of the Second Jewish Law of 1939, which mandated “the exclusion of Jews from any possession of rural property,” a move intended “to give new momentum to land reform” and “strengthen Magyar farmers.”54
Hungarian land reform followed the maxim “Peace to peasant huts and palaces—war upon the Jews,” as is evident from Prime Minister Pál Teleki’s justification of it on February 22, 1939: “No government can be in doubt that property and land should make their way into Hungarian hands, safe hands, and not the hands of those who aren’t connected with the land by any family tradition.” Teleki’s successor, Miklós Kállay, also stressed to parliament on March 19, 1942, his determination to “appropriate Jewish property without exception.” After being interrupted by frenetic applause, he continued: “On the basis of the Racial Protection Law, I will enforce our claims upon this property.… I will also appropriate all forests that are in Jewish hands.… We can put the confiscated forest land to good use for our future settlement policies.” This act of expropriation included not just land but everything on it, including livestock.55
Kállay was not just a puppet, carrying out the will of the Nazi regime; he was trying to maneuver Hungary out of its perilous alliance with the Third Reich. He considered his anti-Semitic policies as “proof” of his “independent way of acting” and claimed to be following venerable social-welfare-state goals. To qualify for acquiring and working the newly expropriated land, candidates had to be below a certain income level, have at least three children, or be an officially registered hero or victim of war.
Such was the demand for Jewish land that on September 6, 1942, the Hungarian parliament extended the expropriation of forests and fields to property owned by those defined the year before as half-Jews. A body called the Land and Soil Credit Institute was charged with distributing the stolen real estate and buildings. In 1943 it announced that it had achieved an “excellent balance,” thanks chiefly to “compulsorily relinquished Jewish property.” In 1944, the German-language journal devoted to the Hungarian economy, Ungarischer Volkswirt, offered fulsome praise: “This leading altruistic agrarian institute was able to develop an extraordinarily productive effectiveness.” The body had succeeded in taking away more than 300,000 hectares of land from Jewish owners.
But the demands for “productivity” didn’t stop there. Unsurprisingly, in October 1942, Kállay directed the public’s covetous gaze to new sources of wealth and announced that he was levying a “special war contribution” upon Jews. This was merely a euphemism for another act of expropriation. And that wasn’t the end of his attempts to provide for the Magyar population: “Among our social problems is that of housing, which is also organized in anti-social ways that particularly benefit the Jews. I am not yet in a position to describe precisely how we will proceed. But I intend to solve the housing question in this fashion.”
Kállay had already sketched out Hungary’s happy future, free of Jews, in a public speech the preceding April: “This question can only be solved by creating a tabula rasa. Jewry must be removed, deprived of the right to property and the use of Hungarian soil.” He concluded his address with the words: “There is no other solution than the resettlement of 800,000 Jews out of Hungary.” At that point, there were “minutes of thunderous applause throughout the monumental event hall,” a newspaper reported. Another source quoted Kállay as saying that “the formal de-Jewification of economic life” was insufficient and that it was more crucial to “eradicate the Jewish spirit.” Kállay said that he knew that “Jews would have to be excluded in stages, sooner rather than later, from the concerns of Hungarian life” and that there could be no other “final solution than the resettlement of the 800,000-strong heads of [Hungarian] Jewry.” In Berlin, the Nazi leadership viewed such speeches with satisfaction: “Step by step, the solution of the Jewish question in Hungary is making progress.”56 But as a number of documents show, not everyone was satisfied by the level of progress. On April 16, 1943, Horthy told Hitler that “he [Horthy] had done everything that could be done ethically against the Jews, but there was no way to murder or otherwise kill them.”57
Like Horthy, the advocates of Hungary’s Jewish policy between 1920 and 1943 rarely contemplated the idea of mass murder. They formulated positive goals intended to create a peaceful, homogeneous, and strong nationalist state. Nonetheless, when the Wehrmacht occupied Hungary in March 1944, Germans were immediately able to exploit a nationalist climate that had been spreading since 1920. Increasingly draconian anti-Jewish legislation encouraged the general public’s greedy willingness to help itself to the many things deported Jews left behind. The main thing was that the Jews disappeared. It was to achieve this end that civil servants and police officers from the Hungarian interior ministry closely cooperated with the commando led by Adolf Eichmann.
Years of debates about Jewish laws and the legislation itself had accustomed Hungarian society to “legal” forms of exclusion. The prohibitions on Jews studying at university and practicing the trades of their choice, followed by the partial expropriation of their property, allowed gentile Hungarians, in the words of postwar politician István Bibó, “to create an extraordinarily advantageous situation without any personal exertion, thanks to the state.” The anti-Jewish measures had “the appearance of social reform” that allowed the majority to get behind them. In reality, however, the anti-Semitic policies propped up the old, long-decayed social order. Hungarian Jews were “subjected to increasingly targeted threats to their physical security” and ultimately deported. Playing a decisive social, if not political role in this process were the large number of active anti-Semites who cultivated small-minded resentments and the many people who enriched themselves with what Jews left behind in the second half of the Second World War. They justified their actions by asking: Hadn’t the Jews always been “impertinent and demanding”? Hadn’t their own “selfish interests” been first and foremost on their minds? Such were the observations Bibó recorded in a 1948 essay on the Jewish question in Hungary. The heading of the final section reads: “Our Responsibility for What Happened.”58