Upon the initiative of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, international representatives came together for a conference on refugees from July 6 to 15, 1938, in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains. The event was organized by American and British diplomats for the express purpose of discussing how the roughly 500,000 Jews left in Germany and Austria could emigrate from the Third Reich. The auspices weren’t good. In the run-up to the conference, many of the thirty-two countries that participated took steps to hinder or block the mass arrival of Jews fleeing Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany. German authorities were driving people across its borders and onto migrant ships without any money.
Before 1938, the year when the Nazi leadership radicalized its policy of expelling Jews from Germany, they had been leaving the country at a steady rate. Of the half million Jews who then lived in Germany, 135,000 had yielded to rising pressure by fleeing or legally emigrating. Thirty thousand went to other Western European countries, 15,000 to North America, 21,000 to South America, 4,000 to South Africa, and 2,000 to the rest of the world. In addition some 20,000 Jews returned to countries in Eastern Europe, mostly Poland, from where they had originally come.1
The measures decided upon in Évian have been subjected to more than enough moral evaluation, and it is not my intention to criticize the individual nations and their initiatives. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s rational and humane intentions were flouted by the machinations of Hitler’s Germany. But it is worth investigating how the concerns and special wishes that preceded, accompanied, and followed the conference reflected the situation and prospects of the approximately four million Eastern and Central European Jews outside the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
Top officials in the British Foreign Office who were charged with preparing the conference feared it might encourage other countries to follow Germany and Austria’s lead and try to get rid of their own Jewish populations. No matter how little or how much was achieved in Évian, a May 1938 briefing for British foreign minister Lord Halifax made clear that “the question of the Jews in Central Europe will be raised sooner or later and can only be resolved comprehensively and perhaps radically.” Organizers were afraid that a crackdown on Jews by Poland, Romania, and Hungary would unleash “a movement of population possibly involving several million people.”2
When the US formally invited Romania to take part, Romanian foreign minister Nicolae Petrescu-Comnen reacted with delight, telling the US ambassador that he hoped the Jewish resettlement initiative would be “extended” to his country. One of the final acts of the Goga-Cuza government was to give an interview with the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter newspaper on February 9, 1938, in which Cuza detailed his vision for a strategic alliance with Hitler’s Germany: “We have to force the Western democracies to choose between opening up new territories for Jewish immigration or accepting a violent solution to the conflict. It is difficult for us to constrain the people from carrying out pogroms, and those in Paris and London should be made to know that we won’t always be able to do this. A decision must be taken quickly.” In a more moderate tone, but ultimately pursuing the same goal, the next Romanian government drew up a memorandum that it presented to London on December 5, 1938. A Jewish state, it demanded, must be established in cooperation with Jewish organizations and be supported by “a decisive action” on the part of the Western powers to “quickly and thoroughly solve the Jewish question.”3
On September 20, 1938, there was a remarkably cordial discussion between Polish ambassador Jósef Lipski and Adolf Hitler, in which a jovial Führer suggested that “the Jewish problem could be solved by emigration to the British colonies based on an agreement with Poland, Hungary and possibly Romania.” Polish foreign minister Józef Beck recorded Lipski’s answer: “On this score, I told [Hitler] that we would erect a magnificent monument to him in Warsaw, if he brought about such a solution.”4 At that juncture Warsaw had good relations with Nazi Germany because as part of the imminent German annexation of the Sudetenland, Hitler intended to toss Poland a territorial scrap, the Czech border town and transportation hub Český Těšín and the surrounding territory of Olsa. It was this prospective “pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak state” that led Winston Churchill to describe Poland as having a “hyena appetite.”5
Things would soon turn frosty again between Berlin and Warsaw as Hitler prepared for war against Poland. By the time Beck visited London on April 5 and 6, 1939, Germany had deported 17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany back to their “homeland,” staged the Night of Broken Glass pogrom, destroyed the state of Czechoslovakia, forced Lithuania to cede the city of Memel (Klaipėda), and given Hungary much of Slovakia. In a communiqué on Beck’s visit, the British government announced that it would sign a solidarity pact with Poland. Although it was hardly a priority, Whitehall publicly endorsed Beck’s suggestion that “all international efforts to resolve the Jewish problem should also include the Jews of Poland.” At the behest of Bucharest, Beck drew attention “to a similar problem in Romania,” to which the British side declared that it recognized the difficulties at hand and was willing “at any time to consider suggested solutions with the Polish and Romanian governments.”6
US diplomats had rejected similar ideas—at Britain’s request—in the immediate wake of the Night of Broken Glass. But Poland’s ambassador in Washington, Jerzy Potocki, quickly intervened. He considered it unjust that “the US directed its attention solely to refugees of Germany who were being terribly persecuted” while ignoring Poland’s 3.5 million Jews. “The Polish government wants to get rid of them,” Potocki said, “but they’re not being mistreated.” The following day, he met with the chief of the State Department’s Western European Division and threatened that if Poland weren’t treated the same as Germany on the question of Jewish emigration, it could come to numerous outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence.7
London diplomats trying to engineer a minimal consensus and only too aware of Poland, Romania, and Hungary’s hard-line attitudes tried to keep those countries away from the Évian Conference—no mean feat. Appeals to members of the British Commonwealth and British colonies to play a constructive role fell on deaf ears, and some even refused to respond. Initially, only Australia agreed to send a delegate to Évian and declared itself willing to accept five hundred Jewish refugees a year. New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa declined to participate. “My own feeling is that nothing will help solving an international problem by bringing it to other nations,” Canadian prime minister William Mackenzie Lyon King asserted. “We must be careful not to try to play the role of a dog in the manger, with our wide open spaces and our small population.” He added, “We would have riots if we agreed to a policy that admitted [large] numbers of Jews.” South Africa let it be known that it already had enough Jews and, with a general election approaching, would not do anything to facilitate further immigration.
During the conference itself, Australian trade minister Thomas W. White articulated what was probably running through many of the delegates’ heads: “It will no doubt be appreciated also that as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” Afterward, while discussing the duties that could potentially result for the United Kingdom from the final conference resolution, Home Secretary Samuel Hoare protested that although he would do his best, “there was a good deal of feeling growing up in this country … against the admission of Jews to British colonies.”8
Orderly Jewish emigration presupposed that German authorities would cooperate. But realistic British diplomats realized that Nazi Germany was pursuing two contradictory aims: to deport Jews once they had been rendered penniless and to use them as hostages to force concessions from the Western democracies. On April 26, 1938, Hermann Göring decreed that all non-Aryans would have to register their assets with tax authorities. The Foreign Office in London had no doubt that this requirement was intended to help the Germans gain control of Jewish wealth, even if the people being expropriated remained in the country. Those in power in Berlin, it was understood, intended to have Jews suffer, starve, and die—and that humanitarian objections would therefore be useless.9
Adding to the immediate difficulties in helping Europe’s Jews was the general global political situation. Beginning in 1936, there were repeated uprisings in British-run Palestine against Jewish emigration. To head off further unrest, London gave in and throttled back the numbers of Jews moving to the Middle East. (Some 300,000 Jews had settled in Palestine since 1920, including around 40,000 who came from Germany as of 1933.) Spain was engaged in a civil war that was being stoked by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, which presented a danger for British military and commercial ships passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. Italy possessed colonies in Eritrea and Somalia and, as of 1935, was expanding into Ethiopia. In 1937, Mussolini began an attempt to conquer Libya, while Japanese troops landed in China. All these conflicts relegated the Jewish question to secondary importance in London and Paris.
In order to secure the Suez Canal, which was so important strategically and economically, Britain had to reach a tenable understanding with Arab states and the Muslim world. Their loyalty was purchased with money and a refusal to allow the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The British military and many British colonial authorities viewed geopolitical interests as more important than any considerations derived from the persecution of Jews in Germany, Austria, or elsewhere. At the time, several hundred thousand Jews lived in the British Empire, compared with eighty million Muslims.
Leading US diplomats saw the unpredictable nations of Europe as a “topsy-turvy world” and were left shaking their heads at the Spanish Civil War, the quarrels over national minorities, and the European proclivity toward authoritarianism. Typical American sentiments at the time were: “The European pot is boiling again”; “The crises are succeeding one another with exhilarated tempo”; and “Stalin stands to profit by other people fighting, but not by fighting himself.” There were concerned American reports about the pitiful state of the French Air Force and the gap between the British and German aircraft industries. Conversely, British leaders pressured their American partners to build huge warships. From Cologne, American general counsel Alfred W. Klieforth reported that ordinary people were fully behind Hitler since he gave them food, jobs, and national pride. German workers were happy to labor fifty-eight to sixty hours a week, Klieforth wrote, saying he had never seen the like of it in any other country. Those who were especially productive were given berths on cruises to Norway or the Canary Islands.10
Nonetheless, Roosevelt told advisors that it was time to tackle the Jewish problem in “Napoleonic” fashion. As his main advisor on refugee issues, James G. McDonald, made clear in a preliminary meeting in London, Roosevelt envisioned a large-scale settlement plan paid for in part by state and in part by private funds and goods. The US president’s determination to act was fueled by his contempt for the hesitant, ineffective dillydallying of the League of Nations, and once he began to think in grand terms, he approved of extending the agenda at Évian to include Central Europe. He was also prepared to treat the anti-Semitic wishes and plans of the Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian, and Hungarian governments as legitimate. Roosevelt’s loose talk on this score horrified London and Paris—which successfully shot down his ideas.11
But grand presidential aspirations notwithstanding, the suggestion McDonald made to his British colleagues was pragmatic and immediate: the United States was prepared to accept 27,000 Jewish refugees a year. That was the upper limit on the number of immigrants from Germany as a whole, and it was now to be reserved exclusively for German and Austrian Jews. That number could even be expanded slightly if returnees to Germany were taken into account. McDonald expected the states and colonies in the Commonwealth to offer similar quotas. He had no hopes of help from France, which he thought would use the conference to get rid of its own refugees. The subject of the costs of limited emigration was studiously avoided. Publicly, American and British negotiators demanded that German Jews be allowed to take some of their assets with them, but privately and realistically they acknowledged that the Nazi government intended to plunder their wealth and keep them as a class of helots.12
On March 19, 1938, Roosevelt announced that the conference would be held. A week later, Hitler answered with a speech broadcast live on the radio and printed in the Völkischer Beobachter: “I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy with these criminals [the Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. For our part, we are ready to place all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, if need be by putting them on luxury ocean liners.” From that point on, in characteristically bad faith, the Nazi regime tried both to disrupt and use the conference for its own ends. In the weeks that followed it herded hundreds of destitute Jews across land borders and the Danube River into Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
A bit later, on the express command of SS and Reich Security Office leader Reinhard Heydrich in Vienna, 4,000 young Jewish men were arrested and severely mistreated. Half of them were taken to the Dachau concentration camp. Terrorizing Jews in this way was designed to outrage world opinion. It was a staged humanitarian catastrophe, thanks to which word of the humiliation, torture, imprisonment, and murder of Jews would get out, and Jewish organizations would be forced to put pressure on their respective national governments. Jewish defense associations and foreign states, the Nazis hoped, would then transfer large sums of hard currency to free the Jews who were being so badly mistreated. During the Night of Broken Glass pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, and the subsequent, unusually brutal internment of 25,000 Jewish men in concentration camps, Hitler used the same strategy of increasing the pressure on Jews to emigrate. On November 24, the SS newspaper Das schwarze Korps wrote that if Jews didn’t disappear immediately, they would be “eradicated like criminals.”13
The Nazi government, which had run up massive debts and was not considered creditworthy even within Germany itself, had a vested interest in continuing its unconstrained confiscation of Jewish assets. In 1938, Jewish wealth was estimated at eight billion reichsmarks—a considerable sum considering that Reich tax authorities only took in 17 billion reichsmarks from taxes, duties, and levies that year.14 With this in mind, on the second day of the Évian conference, the German Foreign Ministry issued the following orders to its embassies in countries affected by the refugee question: “The question of whether Germany can ease its stance on the transference of capital in Jewish hands is to be answered in the negative since, especially after the war, a transfer of capital accumulated by Jews would be intolerable for Germany.” In other words, by this point Germany had already decided to retain all the assets of Jews. Embassies were also told to insist that the Jewish question was “a domestic German problem exempt from all discussions.”15
Hungary didn’t send a delegation to Évian; Romania, Poland, and Greece were represented by observers; and Italy boycotted the conference. The event could not be held in Geneva, the home of the League of Nations, because Switzerland didn’t want to further strain its already precarious relationship with Germany, so the neighboring French city was chosen as a substitute. Bern’s own delegation didn’t consist of any diplomats, but rather Immigration Police head Heinrich Rothmund. The Geneva newspaper Journal des Nations didn’t mince words about the event, running a headline on its opening day that read: “Voilà une conférence qui est morte, avant qu’elle soit née”—behold a conference that is dead before it’s even been born.
The conference began on July 8, 1938, with some sobering words from its chairman, Myron C. Taylor, who spoke of large-scale forced migration and the need for quick and effective results and long-term, comprehensive solutions. How these were to be achieved remained unclear. British representatives had been ordered to avoid using the word “Palestine” and to keep as much distance as possible from the many representatives of Jewish organizations who had traveled to Évian. It was equally taboo for American delegates to discuss the possibility of financial assistance from the states represented at the conference to fund emigration. French and British negotiators insisted that their US colleagues, whom they considered naïve, not even suggest that aid could be offered to refugees from Poland, Romania, and other Central European countries. That, the European diplomats asserted, would immediately make the governments in question increase pressure on their own minorities to emigrate, creating an inestimable problem for Western destination countries.
In their official statements, delegates recited statistics about how many refugees their countries had already accepted, suggesting that they had reached their limits. The German-language Jewish newspaper Jüdische Rundschau reported with obvious disappointment: “The representatives of these countries probably had no choice but to speak like this, and anyone who expected anything different was probably, as the conference joke had it, reading Évian from back to front [naively].” Non-Jewish newspapers were often more frank about the anti-Jewish bias the conference had to try to overcome. On July 11, the Gazette de Lausanne pointed out that many people believed Jews possessed “a far too powerful position for such a small minority” and that this was the cause of the “resistance to them, which in many places has become a general attack.” The middle-class Catholic paper La Libre Belgique asked just ahead of the conference on July 7: “Was it not said before the [First] World War that a tenth of all the gold in the world belonged to Jews?” By contrast, on July 14, a similar French newspaper, La Croix, stressed the need to heed Jewish cries for help: “We must not become complicit in a solution to the Jewish question that entails the erasure, the complete destruction of an entire people.”16
As is to be expected from a conference of this sort, the delegates in Évian agreed upon the minimum, including the formation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which had a modicum of authority to negotiate whatever it could between the Third Reich and Jewish organizations. As far as the assets of those forced to emigrate went, the delegates could hardly have been expected to achieve much in the way of future concessions from Germany. But internally, they spoke of forcing it to allow refugees to take 15 to 20 percent of their wealth with them.
The question of transferring wealth was a serious problem. By increasingly terrorizing Jews, the Nazi regime wanted to force western nations to quit boycotting German products and services in return for minor humanitarian concessions. Germany suffered from a lack of hard currency, and its ability to import raw materials and goods for its armament program was limited. Because the regime had racked up such enormous debts, the reichsmark was no longer accepted on foreign markets. For that reason, Jews who legally emigrated from Germany had to leave behind any jewelry, gemstones, artworks, gold, currency, and foreign securities they possessed. Jews who remained in Germany and Austria were required in the summer of 1938 with “the greatest haste” (Göring) to sell their valuables to the Reichsbank, for which they received next-to-worthless government bonds.17
Humanitarians who tried to buy Jews’ freedom with currency sent to Germany or in return for bolstering German exports faced the moral dilemma of helping to build up Hitler’s “war machine,” as Joseph Tenenbaum put it on August 17, 1938, in a letter of alarm to the founding president of the World Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise. Wise sought advice from his mentor, Louis Brandeis, who agreed with Tenenbaum and also warned that financial arrangements with Hitler would be a fateful mistake for both Jews and the entire world. Three years later, in his introductory remarks at the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich spoke of how important it had been to protect Germany’s currency reserves, adding that Jewish organizations abroad had provided 9.5 million dollars.18
Those who held power in Germany tried any way they could to acquire currency for armaments, including taking everything Jews owned and expelling them penniless across the country’s borders. On December 6, 1938, four weeks after the Night of Broken Glass, during the first negotiations with the intergovernmental committee created at Évian, Göring gave a speech on the Jewish question to Nazi Gauleiter (local leaders) and other high officials. With an eye toward the pogrom, Göring praised “the positive side of the latest activities: that the emigration question has become acute and other peoples now see that Jews can no longer live in Germany.” Financially, Göring said that, as he had told representatives of Jewish organizations, Germany neither could nor wanted to use its currency to help Jews leave the country. “There is only one way, I told them, namely that your racial comrades take out loans in hard currency with the help of those governments that support you—America and England being the two that primarily spring to mind.” Göring demanded an end to foreign anti-German boycotts as well as “very extensive contributions,” crowing, “How I use this money is my business.”19 He was referring to money for buying raw materials desperately needed by German arms factories.
The demand for orderly forced migration formulated in the final resolution in Évian had a pragmatic, humanitarian side, for which the US argued more or less alone. If America accepted some 30,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, that would represent only 0.2 percent of the country’s total population. If Britain’s global empire with its 600 million people did the same, the percent of refugees compared with the total population would be far smaller. And if all the other nations at Évian would pledge to accept a similar quota, just enough smaller not to cause major domestic political disputes, then 100,000 Jews from Germany and Austria could easily be accommodated. Within five years, a short period for major international projects, all of 500,000 people on whose behalf the conference had been called could be taken care of. The American government’s goal was to steer the chaotic forced emigration of German Jews into orderly channels and to ensure it happened in regulated fashion. Despite all the difficulties, the tenacious American diplomats succeeded in getting conference participants to agree to a framework for further talks. And the US kept its promise. In 1939, the United States accepted 43,500 and in 1940 37,000 endangered European Jews.20
The American plan and conference chairman Taylor presumed that the German side would return to reason. But Hitler’s regime was bent on war, trampling upon all attempts at diplomacy. From the German perspective, talks were only good for keeping adversaries in the dark for a few additional months. Germany was thus solely responsible for the failure of Évian.21 With hindsight, we know that a preventive war against Germany would have been the preferable alternative. But how could politicians at the time, democratically elected and bound to defend constitutions and act according to the voters’ will, have answered for and pushed through such a course of action?
At the start of the Second World War, the German regime combined the propagandistic and predatory intentions of its Jewish policy and its overarching aims to “ethnically disentangle” many millions of people and conquer additional “German living space” in Eastern Europe. Hitler’s speech of October 6, 1939, set the general direction: he announced the transfer of numerous German ethnic groups, in particular those who fell under Stalin’s power after the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 24 and the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty of September 28, 1939. When 200,000 southern Tiroleans were included, Hitler was talking about a total of half a million people. In passing, he mentioned that the southeast of Europe was also “filled with unsustainable splinters of the German people.” He was referring to the two million people of German extraction who were citizens of Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, and Bulgaria.
Hitler euphemistically described his plans as a “forward-looking ordering of European life,” marking the start of a general “feeling of European security” thanks to remade “ethnographic relations.” He understood this to mean, among other things, the “resettlement of nationalities,” combined with a correction of national borders, so as to create “better lines of separation” between individual peoples not just in East-Central Europe but in “almost all Southern and Southeastern European states.” In line with his duplicitous promises of peace, he claimed that the measures he proposed would be sufficient “to remove at least a part of the causes of conflict in Europe.” Jews were one of these alleged causes of conflict—one that especially preoccupied the regimes of Eastern and Southeastern Europe and that Germany constantly stoked. “In this context,” Hitler said, there had to be “an attempt to order and regulate the Jewish problem.”22 That was how he described mass deportations.
Hitler concealed his true intentions behind semimoderate words and from day one presented a sanitized picture of Germany’s barbaric occupation of Poland. But one particular personnel decision gave outside observers a good idea of how and to what end the European resettlements directed from Berlin would proceed. On October 7, 1939, the day after his programmatic speech, Hitler named none other than Heinrich Himmler to execute “the ethnic sweeping out of corridors,” as the initiative was known among Nazis. In preparation for this task, the head of the SS and the German police gave himself a third, grandiose title: Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood.
From that point on expulsion and resettlement projects would be tightly connected with acts of terror against Jews in the countries dominated by Germany. To structure his new task, Himmler created two new offices, both headed by Heydrich, who also controlled the Gestapo, the Security Police, and the Security Service. The first, the Central Immigration Office, was responsible for resettling Germans living abroad in the Third Reich. The second, the Central Office for Migrants (UWZ), took care of the mass expulsions and ghettoization of undesirables. The offices were supposed to work in tandem, importing and expelling hundreds of thousands of people. They were staffed with experienced SS functionaries, among them Adolf Eichmann, who up to the autumn of 1939 had been in charge of “Jewish emigration” in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague. He now returned full-time to Berlin to head the newly created department of “Emigration and Evacuation Matters,” known as the IVD4 (later IVB4). His employees in branch offices, for example in Posen or Łódź, were part of the UWZ. From his headquarters in Berlin, Eichmann presided over the deportations first of Poles, then Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Jews.
The drive toward homogeneity covered the Germans outside Germany as well. In line with a treaty the Nazi leadership had signed with Italy in the fall of 1939, German-speaking Southern Tiroleans were to be resettled. They faced the choice of either returning to the Reich or being forced to Italianize. Only a small group who chose to remain resisted either alternative. In a pamphlet addressed to “fellow countrymen” and distributed in the region in late 1939, they wrote:
You have been given the freedom to choose between your homeland [Tirol] and Galicia.… You are to live in huts from which Polish occupants have been driven and to work on farms from which the owner and their wives and children have been driven. Plopped down in the midst of hostile people, surrounded by Slovaks, Czechs and Polacks, with Russian Bolshevists very nearby, you are to be ‘deployed’ in the national struggle against Poland. You will be despised and hated as intruders by these people and ultimately driven from the country, since the wheel of fortune constantly turns, and in the not-too-distant future these people will demand that the houses and fields taken from them be returned. You, in turn, will be left with nothing and will be forced to wander. But where to? No one knows, least of all those people who are trying today to lure you from your homeland with unconscionable propaganda.23
Despite the evidence available to anyone who bothered to read the newspapers, Germany’s ethnopolitical plans didn’t elicit any negative response. Ever since the Greek-Turkish Resettlement Treaty of 1923, the pioneers of compulsory resettlement had been gaining followers. The tone Hitler had taken in his October 6 speech fit in with an already accepted political school of thought. Before the Second World War, Italy concluded a minor resettlement treaty with Yugoslavia and prepared the one that concerned Southern Tiroleans. Thanks to similar agreements, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria had been “returning” members of their Muslim minorities to Turkey for years. The Munich Agreement of September 29, 1938, also included a passage about such “repatriations.” The agreement forced Czechoslovakia to cede Sudetenland with its predominately German population to the Third Reich. The agreement had been signed by Hitler, Mussolini, and the prime ministers of Britain and France. Point Seven allowed for the exchange of minorities who after the dramatic shifting of borders found themselves living in the “wrong” country.24 This clause was never invoked because Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia a few months later.
Nonetheless, circles within the British government once again considered an exchange of populations as a way of pacifying the situation between Germany and Poland. On August 18, 1939, just two weeks before the start of the Second World War, the British Foreign Office asked its consul in Katowice whether he thought population transfers could end the conflict. No, he answered—the population was much too mixed. Nevertheless, a few days later, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, met with the Polish ambassador to Germany and proposed an exchange of populations to the German Foreign Ministry. Henderson considered it the only way to end conflicts between minorities and found the situation on the German-Polish border far simpler than that in Tirol. On August 27, Henderson reported by cable to London that Hitler had told him he was determined to end the “Macedonian conditions” on his eastern border. Henderson said he agreed, remarking that “the nationality idea being so strong today, the exchange of populations was a very useful solution.”25 But Hitler had lied throughout his conversation, claiming, for instance, that Germany was determined never again to enter into hostilities with Russia.26
As morally ambivalent as the British search for compromises with the Third Reich may have been, like the American efforts at Évian, blame for the failure of diplomacy falls squarely on Hitler, who was determined to take Germany to war. Five days after his talk with Henderson, Nazi Germany attacked Poland. The country would be divided, becoming the victim of ethnic policies that were from the very start connected with Germany’s homicidal deeds. In November 1939, the man who ran the German general governorate of occupied central Poland, Hans Frank, announced: “The winter will be a hard one. If there’s no bread for Poles, they shouldn’t complain.… No kid gloves for the Jews.… The more who die, the better.”27
Like Hungary, Austria, and Germany, Bulgaria was one of the losers of the First World War and had been forced to accept territorial losses. While Romania was among the victors in 1918, in 1940 it became the victim of Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Soviet redrawing of borders. Slovakia and Croatia only came into existence because of Germany’s policies of violence. The common thread among these allies of Nazi Germany was they all had large national minorities that they wanted to get rid of, be it via organized exchanges of populations or expulsion into hostile neighboring states.
Until the Second World War, Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews had mostly lived inconspicuously among the general population of six million. Bulgaria had resettled people in exchange with Greece and had concluded a treaty with Turkey governing the number of Muslims, of whom there were several hundred thousand, to be “repatriated.” In 1940, Bulgaria reached agreement with Romania over the division of the contested Dobruja region and an attendant resettlement program.
In response to German influence, but without any compulsion, the Bulgarian government made anti-Semitism an official state policy in 1940, bringing a “Law for the Protection of the Nation” before parliament. Deputies debated this legislation in two separate sessions and ultimately passed it. On January 23, 1941, the final law, signed by Tsar Boris III, came into effect. In one blow, Bulgaria’s Jews lost nearly all their rights. They were forbidden from marrying Christians, were subject to forced labor instead of military service, needed police permission to change their place of residence, had no right to vote, were required to register their assets, were prohibited from buying property, and were admitted in only limited numbers to certain professions.
After Germany defeated Greece and Yugoslavia in April 1941, Bulgaria received the territorial gifts it had been promised by Berlin: Yugoslavian Macedonia (so-called Vardar Macedonia), Yugoslav territory around the city of Pirot, Greek Western Thrace, and parts of Greek Eastern Macedonia (Kavala Macedonia). Bulgarian troops marched into these places on April 21. Bulgarian prime minister Bogdan Filow, a classical philologist and archaeologist who had been educated in the German city of Freiburg, sent Hitler a telegram expressing his “deepest gratitude for the German army’s liberation of Macedonia and Thrace.”
In order to ease the financial burden of administering all this new territory, the Bulgarian government confiscated a quarter of Bulgarian Jews’ declared assets in the summer of 1941. In May 1942, it expropriated 4,612 large- and small-scale Jewish businesses. On top of that, Jews were forced to build rail track and roads, and were made to wear special armbands. The government also issued decrees nationalizing Greek property in the Macedonian and Thracian areas it had acquired. By March 1942, it had seized 1,761 Greek businesses, including textile factories and shipyards, as well as the remaining assets of Serbs who had been driven elsewhere. These assets were auctioned off to Bulgarians.
The regime in Sofia wanted to Bulgarianize the “re-won territories” quickly. As troops were still marching in, the government said the “main task” would be to “cleanse them of the foreign population, including Greek and Serbian colonists, Jews, Turks, gypsies and Armenians.” Montenegrins and Dalmatians were also targeted by the government plans.
For starters, the Bulgarian government expelled the Greek and Serbian “colonists,” who had immigrated to the regions between 1913 and 1919 or who had been settled there strategically by their countries of origin for the sake of ethnic predominance. A government edict read, “The Serbian colonists must be forced to return to Serbia,” while Greeks represented a bigger problem since they had originally been resettled from Asia Minor. Nonetheless, the Bulgarian state ordered: “The race principle applies not only to all Jews but to the Greeks and all other non-Aryans.”
As a result, 26,450 Serbs were hounded from the Macedonian region of Skopje back to Serbia and at least 30,000 Greeks from Thrace to Greece. The citizenship law passed by the Bulgarian parliament in June 1941 for the “reliberated territories” stripped all non-Bulgarian residents of their civil rights. They were required to pay supplementary taxes and were marked for resettlement. Before 1943, this fate befell some 100,000 Serbs and an equal number of Greeks. Twenty-five thousand other Greeks were forced to move to the interior of Bulgaria.28
German officials, especially military ones, pressured the Bulgarians to slow down or cease the expulsions since they threatened the prospect for a peaceful German occupation of Serbia and Greece and increased the number of partisans. Germany was also keen not to place a burden on its relations with neutral Turkey, which explains the Bulgarian government’s decision not to drive Muslims there. Sofia declared: “In consideration of the demands for an ethnically pure state, it is obvious the final solution of the Turkish question can only be the resettlement of Turks in Turkey on the basis of a bilateral treaty. But such a final solution is a question for the future. At the present time, it cannot be realized.”29 The situation was different with Jews. For them, Bulgaria’s German allies offered a solution that seemed to have no negative side effects.
On February 22, 1943, Bulgarian Jewish Commissar Alexander Belev and Eichmann’s envoy Theodor Dannecker reached an agreement, previously endorsed by the Bulgarian government, that more than 11,000 Jews would be “transported from the new provinces of Thrace and Macedonia to the eastern German territories.”30 In fact, they were taken one month later to Treblinka, where they were murdered. The Bulgarian government was responsible for rounding up these condemned people, locking them into train carriages, and bringing them to the port of Lom on the Danube River. Bulgarian settlers moved into the residences vacated by the Jews as part of an initiative to permanently Bulgarianize this territory. A short time later, the envoy of the commissariat on Jewish affairs in Macedonian Bitola, Georgi D. Džambazov, reported selling off the contents of the houses of almost 800 deported families: “With the departure of the Jews, on the basis of Edict Nr. 8655 on the liquidation of belongings of people of Jewish origin who have been taken abroad, the sales of what they left behind began. The quickest and most practical method turned out to be sales on site.”31
As historian Jens Hoppe has shown, Bulgaria’s treatment of Jews must be located in the “wider framework of its overall policy toward minorities,” which focused on the “homogenization of the population through compulsory assimilation, expulsions (for example, of Greeks in the occupied territories) and even murder (for example of Jews in the occupied territories).”32 But they drew a line at handing over Jews in the core of the country who mainly lived in the capital in Sofia. Germany’s consul and its police attaché in Sofia were less than impressed. Indignant, they reported back to Berlin that because of shortcomings in worldview and on racial policy, the Bulgarian government didn’t see the Jewish problem as “needing a solution.” The measures they enacted in the annexed territories were only aimed at “mostly materialistic interests,” which consisted of “assigning reliable Bulgarians to the property of deported Jews” and thereby “pacifying their demands.”33
After the deportations of the 11,000 Jews from the annexed territories, the members of the Bulgarian Commissariat for Jewish Affairs began handing over Jews from Bulgaria proper to the Germans. Yet in 1943, after protests from the country’s intellectual and religious elites, the government in Sofia refused to deliver up Jews who resided in the Bulgarian capital.
The reasons were pragmatic. In the winter of 1942–43, the Wehrmacht had been defeated in the Battle of Stalingrad, and German troops were heading toward capitulation in Northern Africa as well. That caused a political change of heart in Sofia, where government officials began to worry that further deportations of Jews could harm Bulgaria’s postwar standing should Germany not prevail. It was this calculation that enabled the increasingly successful Allied campaigns against Hitler’s Germany to save the lives of 50,000 Jews in central Bulgaria. The governments of Romania and Slovakia, who were also allied with Germany, were guided by a similar expediency.
Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy had long supported policies of ethnic violence, which he promoted as an instrument of ensuring peace, and he congratulated Hitler for his agenda-setting speech of October 6, 1939: “Your intention to resettle the German minority in their ancestral homeland solves a multitude of questions and prevents tensions. This excellent idea should be applied to other minorities.” Horthy was thinking of the Germans, Romanians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Serbs, Ruthenians, and Jews in his own country. He himself had already been a longtime adherent of radical resettlement programs. In 1934, he had told his Polish colleague Józef Piłsudski what he hoped would happen, should their mutual enemy, the Soviet Union, collapse: “In order to create peace and satisfaction for all time, the populations of various areas and nationalities could be exchanged.”34
With the help of Germany and Italy, Hungary reacquired Northern Transylvania from Romania in 1941 and Voivodina, Bačka, and Prekmurje from Yugoslavia. But these annexations all brought with them not just expatriate Magyars, as was desired, but also several million people of undesirable nationalities into the Empire of the Holy Crown of Hungary. As a result, the number of Jews in Hungary increased from 400,000 to 725,000 from November 1938 to April 1941. The shifting of borders also meant that 220,000 Romanians left Northern Transylvania for Romania, which increased the pressure to find them jobs and places to live. Many Romanians chose to stay in Hungary, even though they were considered a foreign irritant.35
In 1943, when Horthy complained at a meeting with Hitler about the past incitement of unrest among 700,000 German-Hungarians by Nazi leaders, the protocol shows the two leaders quickly reaching agreement: “The Führer interjected that under the circumstances, the best solution would be to simply remove the Germans from Hungary. Horthy agreed strongly with this suggestion and drew attention to the recent exchange of Serbians and Hungarians.” Germany, he said, needed a larger population while Hungary required additional living space for its own people. So Horthy said he would welcome it if “the Germans would be removed from Hungary.”36 On a much smaller scale during the war, Hungary arranged mutual resettlements with Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia.37
Long before Horthy’s meeting with Hitler, Hungarian representatives had repeatedly raised the topic of resettling Jews with their German partners. In late 1940, then prime minister Pál Teleki told Hitler “that the Jews will have to be removed from Europe as part of a peace agreement.”38 In early 1942, Major General József Heszlényi made German ambassador Carl August Clodius an offer to deport some “100,000 stateless Jews” across the Dniester River. In July, the Hungarian military attaché in Berlin, Sándor Homlok, reiterated the offer, phrasing it as a request. Eichmann refused. Such a “partial action,” he said, would require an unjustifiable effort without “coming closer to a solution of the Jewish question in Hungary.” In an off-the-record conversation with the editor in chief of the Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd, Döme Sztólay, Hungary’s ambassador in Berlin, advocated deporting 300,000 Jews “to Russia”—later correcting that number down to 100,000 in response to a question from the journalist. The journalist insisted on knowing what the consequences would be for the deportees, whereupon Sztólay eventually admitted they would die.
On October 6, 1942, Baron László Vay—a leading official in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, which was under the direct command of Prime Minister Kállay—received Eichmann’s henchman Dieter Wisliceny in Budapest and informed him that Hungary was prepared to resettle 100,000 Jews from Carpathian Ukraine and Northern Transylvania to Germany. The second phase, Vay added, “would have to include the flatlands [the Great Hungarian Plain] and finally the capital Budapest.” On November 25, 1942, the general secretary of the Transylvanian Party, Béla Teleki, suggested in parliament that Orthodox Jews living in what was again Hungarian Transylvania be resettled. Some 150,000 pure Magyars would find new homes there at the same time.39
These proposals foreshadowed the order in which Jews would be deported from Hungary in 1944, with the Yiddish-speaking Orthodox being the first to be taken away. These people lived primarily in nationally disputed regions like Carpathian Ukraine and Northern Transylvania. The Hungarian government wanted to get rid of them in order to settle the new parts of the country, especially the cities, with Magyars and to offer them better career chances and a better life at the cost of those who had been deported. This is precisely what Hitler had advised Horthy to do when the two met in Salzburg on April 16, 1943. The protocol of that meeting has Hitler saying that Hungary, like Slovakia, “could house Jews in concentration camps.” Hitler laid out the advantages of such a course of action: “It would open many opportunities to the children of the country by freeing up positions occupied by Jews and allow the children of people to build résumés previously closed off to them by Jews.”40
The idea of enabling Christian Hungarians to better their social lot at the expense of Jews had dominated public discussions in Hungary since the matriculation limits law of 1920, and it had only gained momentum since 1938. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were not part of what Hungarian politicians and ordinary Christians envisioned, but stripping Jews of their wealth and deporting them to destinations unknown certainly was. For that reason, it is not enough to speak of Hungarian collaboration with Nazi Germany. There was a congruence of interests. While Germans and Hungarians may have had differing wishes and intentions, the result was the deportation of 423,000 Hungarian Jews with Hungarian permission to Auschwitz—370,000 were murdered there or in other camps. Hungarian officials stripped Jews of everything they owned, auctioning off their movable property to ordinary citizens and filling state coffers with the proceeds. They confiscated savings, insurance policies, and securities and nationalized real estate and businesses to be sold off later. All this proceeded without any great friction and in close cooperation with German occupiers.
In the months preceding Germany’s conditional surrender on May 8 and 9, 1945, there was a parallel development in Hungary that spoke volumes about the continuities in the European politics of ethnicity. In March of that year, eastern Hungary had already been conquered by the Red Army. There, on March 15, in the provisional capital Debrecen, the Hungarian general Béla Miklós signed a decree ordering the confiscation of assets belonging to German Hungarians. Only the year before, on July 21, he had visited Hitler in his Wolf’s Lair retreat in the wake of a failed assassination attempt and assured the Führer of Hungary’s loyalty, listening without interruption to his lengthy digressions about the murder of Jews. Along with Miklós, the March 15 decree was signed by Agriculture Minister Imre Nagy, who would become the leader and principal martyr of the anti-Stalinist uprising in Hungary in 1956. The decree bore the title “Eradication of Large-Scale Property Ownership.” It was also directed against aristocrats, but paragraphs four and five specifically targeted the 200,000 Hungarian citizens of German origin who were members of the minority organization Popular League of Germans in Hungary or who had “readopted their German-sounding family names.”41 Thus, in the spring of 1945, Hungarians used the same methods they had employed against Jews to impoverish German Hungarians in the east of the country. The final destination of these people wasn’t Auschwitz, but the goals of the policy were familiar: ethnic homogenization, the need to accommodate Hungarians from North Transylvania, which was now again part of Romania, land reform, and the imperative of filling state coffers. At the same time, Hungarians in the west of the country, which was still under Wehrmacht control, were continuing to expropriate Jews. Soon, however, they would also change sides and confiscate the property of German Hungarians, too.
Hungary’s first postwar civilian government was headed by the liberal democratic politician Zoltán Tildy, who became prime minister and then president. In 1948 the communists forced him to resign. In 1956, he became a minister of the rebel government. All the way back in 1938, his party, the Western-oriented, liberal-democratic Smallholders Party, which had been represented in the Hungarian parliament until 1944, had voted for the first Hungarian law sanctioning material discrimination against Jewish Hungarians. Their justification for doing so was to bring about the “correct distribution of income and wealth.”42
The policy of ethnic cleansing extended across various Hungarian governments and forms of state. What President Regent Horthy had so fervently wished for in May 1944, the start of the deportations of Jews, became a reality between then and 1950: “After the war, every foreign race—be it the Jew, the Romanian, the Serbian, or the German—will have to leave the country since the Hungarians want to and must become the lords of this country.”43 After the Germans had been driven out, and following several transfers of populations with neighboring countries, Hungary became more ethnically “pure” than ever before.
The resettlement of the German minorities from Estonia, Latvia, and eastern Poland in the winter of 1939–40 affected around 200,000 people. They came from Soviet-annexed areas of eastern Central Europe and were forced to leave their homes after the secret treaties concluded by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in September 1939. The resettlement of most of the Romanian Germans happened for different reasons and was part of the ethnic, national, and economic reordering Germany wanted to carry out in Southeastern Europe.
On June 28, 1940, the Soviet Union completed its annexation, sanctioned by Germany, of the Romanian provinces of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia (Moldova). On August 30, 1940, Romania lost Northern Transylvania to Hungary and one week later Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. To satisfy its allies Hungary and Bulgaria and its treaty partner the Soviet Union, the German government had severely infringed upon Romania’s interests three times in succession. Nonetheless, Germany needed Romania for its oil reserves and grain exports, both of which were vital to the wartime economy. So Hitler promised to resettle Romanian Germans to Germany from those places where Romania’s territorial losses had created a large number of migrants and refugees from what were now Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Soviet areas. Within a short time, the government had brought back to the Reich not just Germans from the Soviet areas but all those from the still Romanian Southern Bukovina and North Dobruja as well—all in all, 215,000 people. Almost all of them were to be resettled in occupied Poland, and their presence meant that Poles and Jews would be treated even more harshly.44
In Bucharest, Sabin Manuilă, a population researcher, led the ranks of the pragmatically oriented scientists in his field. In 1932 he published a study in which he suggested creating a state agency to “initiate an exchange of populations with Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Bulgaria and Greece” as a way of solving the problems of minorities in Romania.45 From 1937 to 1947, he headed the Central Institute for Statistics, enjoyed direct access to those in power, and emphatically pleaded for the compulsory transfer of populations. In the summer of 1940, he founded an initiative to this end, using the same wording and justifications that Hitler had in his October 6, 1939, speech. Like the Führer, Manuilă claimed that the “transplantation” of millions of people would “end frictions that at present cause continual tension between states.” In April 1941, he gushed about his great fortune in being able to help shape an epoch in which Romania’s population problems would be permanently solved.46
In June and July 1941, together with the Wehrmacht, twelve Romanian divisions invaded the Soviet Union and retook Bessarabia and North Bukovina. That October, on the back of these victories, Manuilă developed plans for a “comprehensive and compulsory forced exchange of populations.”47 He had been encouraged to do so by Romanian head of state Marshal Ion Antonescu in a personal conversation about “political population projects” on August 15. Antonescu had ordered the demographer to come up with a survey of the population and property in Bessarabia and Bukovina. Manuilă’s data referred to Greater Romania in its 1939 borders, which included not just Bessarabia and Bukovina but also Northern Transylvania, now under Hungarian control. Romania hoped that most of this region would be returned, believing in Hitler and Göring’s disingenuous assurance that they were willing, after victory was achieved in Eastern Europe, to review the conflict between Germany’s two allies with a friendly eye toward Romania and to compensate Hungary with territory elsewhere.48
Manuilă suggested ceding several highly urbanized areas on the margins of Transylvania and Banat to Hungary and then carrying out a radical exchange of populations. “Politically, the time has come,” he said, to create “a thoroughly homogeneous Romania.” In an attempt to unite all patriotic sentiments, he envisioned “deporting all minorities with centrifugal leanings across the border.” Later, the future Romanian state territory could be filled with pure-blooded Romanians from neighboring countries, and the external border of what he called “Romanian Romania, the eternal Romania,” could be drawn so that “the political and ethnic lines would completely correspond” once and for all. According to his plan, the first step was to exchange large numbers of Serbs for a significantly smaller group of Romanians. Similar exchanges were to take place with Hungary, Bulgaria, and the German protectorates of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
After this stage, some 820,000 Siebenburg Saxons and Banat Swabians would remain in Romania, but in Manuilă’s eyes there was no reason not to “repatriate” those Saxons and Swabians in a significantly larger “future Germany.” Meanwhile, the Turkish government, as had been stipulated by treaty in 1936, would transfer 200,000 Tatars and Turks in phases to Anatolia. Between January 1, 1931, and July 1, 1938, 52,000 ethnic Turkish and Muslim emigrants had already left Romanian Dobruja for Turkey. The 1936 resettlement treaty, which took effect on April 1, 1937, envisioned that a further 35,000 families would leave Romania within the following five years, thereby freeing up 100,000 hectares of land for Christian Romanian farmers.49 After Manuilă had made all his calculations and worked out a schedule, he turned to the topic of the 760,000 Jews in Greater Romania. They and the Roma, for whom he had no figures, were the subjects on the final, very brief point in his program, “Step Nr. 7.” He wrote, cryptically: “The Jewish and gypsy questions are to be resolved in conjunction with the exchange of populations as a one-sided exchange.” All told, Manuilă’s ideas would have seen 5.4 million non-Romanians disappear from Romania, which amounted to 28 percent of the population, plus an unknown number of Roma. In return, 1.6 million expatriate Romanians were to be “pulled in.”
Unlike for steps one through six, Manuilă didn’t name any geographical destination for those to be resettled in step seven. What did he mean by “one-sided exchange”? While he and other bureaucrats adjusted the details of their ethnopolitical master plan in the late summer of 1941, the one-sided exchange of Jews was already under way in the form of deportation, ghettoization, and murder—even before steps one through six had begun in earnest. The reasons Manuilă gave for deporting Jews into oblivion were not racial or religious but materialistic. According to his statistics, the majority of Jews lived from trade, industry, and self-employed professions, and “this fact assures them a much higher standard of living than the middle classes of the country.” The demographer was eager to break their “economic predominance.” With their stores and banks, Jews “ruled over” the high streets while numerically far greater Romanians led wretched lives: “They live in side streets, are scattered through the fields and are public officials, servants and the like.”50
In January 1941, Hitler had intimated to his Romanian allies that war with the Soviet Union was coming. Against this backdrop, on February 7, Antonescu told his cabinet of ministers what he intended for Romania’s Jews. Initially they would be put in ghettos and then, when the time was ripe, deported to territories “allocated to them on the international level.” That was also the main thrust of Germany’s Jewish policy in the months before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Upon victory in the east, the Jews would be deported to the most inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union. This, too, was what Manuilă meant by “one-sided exchange.”51
On June 22, 1941, German and Romanian troops started waging war on the Soviet Union. That day Antonescu explained to the leader of the Farmers Party of Romania, Iuliu Maniu, that the country’s grave structural problems could be solved “in their full breadth and complexity” as soon as the Jews had disappeared. Expropriating them would enable Romanian businesses and farmers to get the lines of credit they needed to modernize. Jewish personnel would be replaced, thus decreasing unemployment. All these things would be of “direct use” to Romanians and lead to “reforms … in the vital interest of our people.”
Two weeks later, on July 3, Antonescu’s deputy, Mihai Antonescu, told officers stationed in reconquered Bessarabia and North Bukovina that they were participating in a “historical moment” that had put the “ethnic cleansing” of the country on the agenda. At first, Jews would be put in labor camps and then be subjected, like other “foreign elements,” to “forced emigration.”52 When he addressed the Romanian cabinet five days later, he expanded his ideas to Southern Bukovina in Romania proper: “The entire Jewish population must disappear from the villages and immediately turn over their profits.… Let’s take this felicitous opportunity to get our hands on further agricultural properties, which we can then reallocate without running into problems with the owners as we did in 1940.” The latter remarks referred to Soviet authorities’ distribution of agriculturally useful land in the summer of 1940 to better politically integrate the rural poor during the year in which Bukovina and Bessarabia had been Soviet-annexed. A compromise needed to be found between the old and new landowners. Now the Romanian government figured that it could maintain psychological, social, and economic harmony in the country by using Jewish real estate, businesses, stocks of goods, inventories, and personal possessions.
Antonescu answered the question of what would happen to the people thus dispossessed in that same meeting with utter clarity: “Even if some of you traditionalists don’t understand me, I am for the compulsory resettlement of all Jews away from Bessarabia and Bukovina. Likewise I am for the compulsory resettlement of all Ukrainian elements that no longer have any business being here.… Never in our history has there been a better opportunity for us—comprehensively, radically and in freedom to get rid of our ethnic shackles once and for all, and to nationally cleanse and renew our people.”53
He issued the following call to the military officers and police leaders who had been invited to the meeting: “Be pitiless. Sweet-sounding, blurry, philosophical, humanitarian chatter has no place here.” Now or never, the Romanian nation “had to be cleansed of all filth.” Antonescu exhorted them: “If necessary, use your machine guns! From the very beginning, pay as little attention as possible to formalities.” This was his way of attacking a “race” that he claimed “was striving for mastery everywhere.” At this juncture, the 300,000 Jews in Romanian-occupied territories were probably foremost on his mind, and not Jews living in Romania proper. This homicidal speech was no doubt delivered in the name of the prime minister, who a few days before the onset of war had issued his own orders to the gendarmerie to kill village Jews “on the spot” in any newly conquered territories.54
During the first year of war, the Romanian police and army murdered between 150,000 and 180,000 Jews of all ages, mainly in reconquered areas and Transnistria. Many Jews from South Bukovina and the border town of Iași, in the east of Romania proper, also fell victim to the genocide. On June 29, 1941, it was the scene of a pogrom that cost 13,000 Jews their lives.55 Goebbels considered Romania’s bloodthirsty rigor a model for other countries. On August 19, 1943, the German propaganda minister noted in his diary: “Where the Jewish question is concerned, it is clear today in any case that a man like Antonescu has acted more radically than we have done thus far.” Two days later, in Bucharest, a Romanian cavalry officer recounted over breakfast that “dozens, hundreds, thousands of Jews had been shot” on both sides of the Dniester River. “Although but a simple lieutenant,” the man said, he had been allowed “to kill as many Jews as he wanted on orders or on his own initiative.” The chauffeur who had brought him to Iași, the man added, had himself killed four Jews. All told, Romanian soldiers and police murdered at least 250,000 Jews between 1941 and 1944.56
On September 5, 1941, while large numbers of Jews were being murdered, Ion Antonescu issued instructions to his cabinet concerning future population policies in Bukovina and Bessarabia: “The complete clearing out [curăţirea totală] of Jews and all others who have seeped into our midst, namely Ukrainians, Greeks, Gagauzes—all must be evacuated, one column after another.” On February 26, 1942, he told his cabinet that he intended to “remove all the foreigners” from annexed Transnistria. Of the 2.3 million inhabitants of the region, only 8.3 percent spoke Romanian.
There was already a government agency in place for resettlement projects. In September 1940, Romania had created a precursor to what was later the Office for Romanianization, Colonization and Inventorization in order to organize a small-scale exchange of populations, agreed upon the previous month, with Bulgaria. One hundred and ten thousand Romanians had been forced to leave South Dobruja, and about half as many Bulgarians North Dobruja. After North Transylvania was once again made part of Hungary, around 200,000 Romanian-speaking refugees also arrived back in Romania. More followed when the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia.57 In this situation, the Romanian government enacted even more stringent anti-Semitic measures and laws. Germany’s Frankfurter Zeitung reported retrospectively in 1943: “One by one, measures were enacted to target Jews’ economic position. On October 5, 1940, the state was declared the legal owner and beneficiary of all Jewish land. Confiscated assets were primarily allocated to refugees from ceded territories.… In March the following year, urban property followed.”58
As part of its demographic strategy Romania settled new arrivals in those places where Jewish property had been expropriated and where the Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood had evacuated 80,000 people of German origin from the Romanian heartland. In a short report about the “settlement work,” a subordinate of Manuilă’s later explained to an audience of German specialists: “The material element consisted of what were 260,000 hectares of fields, which thanks to the resettlement of Germans and expropriation of Jews passed into state hands.”59
On December 4, 1941, the cabinet secretary Titus Dragoş took over the Office for Romanianization, Colonization and Inventorization. Before that, he had served as a general secretary in the Finance Ministry, where he was responsible for the Directorate for Refugees and Settlers, which expropriated Jews and placed Romanians in new homes. By May 1942, Ion Antonescu had ordered his interior minister to work with Dragoş to come up with a plan to “evacuate” all non-Romanians from South Bessarabia and to colonize the territory with “Romanian elements.” On November 6, 1942, Antonescu demanded that the “theoretical, preliminary work” for this transfer of populations be accelerated and that all of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and especially Transnistria be included.60
In the end, not much came of Dragoş’s efforts. In late 1942, the resettlement plans were dramatically cut back and put off until some indefinite point in the future. As was the case with Bulgaria, the Romanian government’s course was changed not by any moral epiphany but by the military triumphs of the anti-Hitler coalition, especially the heavy defeats inflicted on German and Romanian troops on the eastern front in the winter of 1942–43. From this point on, the Romanian government moderated its use of terror and rebuffed requests from Berlin to deliver up to 300,000 Jews from the Romanian heartland. What’s more, Jewish refugees from Poland and Hungary to Romania were also kept safe from German clutches.61
Having been created as an independent state in 1939 by Nazi Germany, Slovakia remained dependent on Berlin’s favor, and the German regime constantly interfered in Slovakian domestic affairs. But there were limits to the Slovaks’ willingness to accept German “advice.” Like Bulgaria and Hungary, Slovakia initially handed over Jews to Germany, but then unilaterally ended the deportations. Moreover, like Romania, Slovakia also offered Hungarian Jews protection in the summer of 1944.
In 1940, there were only 89,000 Slovakian Jews out of a population of 2.7 million. But in the spring of 1942, Slovakia’s rulers decided of their own accord to send 60,000 of them to German “work camps.” At the end of the year, after the deportations had taken place, a temporary, then a permanent moratorium was put in place. According to historian Tatjana Tönsmeyer, the government in Bratislava “ended its cooperation with the Third Reich” for two reasons. Respected representatives of the Catholic Church—a number of bishops together with Vatican diplomat Giuseppe Burzio—intervened on behalf of Slovakia’s Jews, and Germany’s lack of success in the war caused a change in popular opinion. While Slovakia’s remaining 29,000 Jews were expropriated, they were otherwise largely left alone until the Wehrmacht occupied Slovakia for several weeks in late 1944.
Tönsmeyer cites the same motivations as in the other countries for the rapid denaturalization and expropriation of Slovakian Jews in 1940 and the urgent desire to deport this now penniless minority. Like elsewhere in southeastern Europe, she writes, “hostility toward Jews in Slovakia served as a common denominator in a society that had no idea how to deal with its modernization problems and the anxiety they engendered.” Aryanization was carried out by Slovakia in the form of “social-welfare policies that took from the ‘wealthy Jews’ and gave to the ‘impoverished Slovaks.’”62 The synagogues in Bratislava survived the Second World War undamaged. The Orthodox one was torn down in 1961.
IN APRIL 1941, the Wehrmacht entered Belgrade. Six months earlier, the Yugoslav government, which had previously not been anti-Semitic, instituted broad matriculation limits regulating how many people of Jewish extraction could study at universities and other institutions of higher education. A few days before the law took effect, Jews were summarily expelled from educational institutions throughout Yugoslavia.63
Just as the Nazi government had split Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, in 1941, with some help from Italy, it demolished the state of Yugoslavia. A much-diminished Serbia was governed by the military working with a regime of collaborators, and Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary annexed significant stretches of Serbian territory. Croatia, on the other hand, was formed as a nominally independent vassal state and enlarged with parts of Slavonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was ruled by the fascist Ustashe organization. Closely following German models, the Ustashe passed a series of Jewish laws in its first weeks in power. Six months on, it had the main synagogue in Zagreb demolished.
Of a total population of 6.6 million, Croatia contained 3.3 million Catholic Croats, 1.9 million Serbs, and 800,000 Muslim Bosnians, as well as German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Italian minorities, 40,000 Jews, and 25,000 Roma. On its own initiative, the Ustashe began a campaign of mass murder in which, according to historian Alexander Korb, the motif of ethnic cleansing emerged with “terrible clarity.” More than 310,000 Serbs, some 26,000 Jews, and around 20,000 Roma fell victim to the genocide. By 1944, Croatian militias had displaced 240,000 surviving Serbs, who escaped with their lives but were rendered penniless. With the permission of the government in Zagreb, henchmen of Eichmann also deported an additional 6,650 Jews to German extermination camps.
As Korb has shown, the Croatian mass murderers were “by no means German marionettes” but rather people who acted “self-confidently and in their own interests.” They pursued goals that “were clearly differentiated from those of the National Socialists” and tried to exterminate Jews and Roma to further their own large-scale political repopulation project. Valuables, whether they were left behind by Jews or Serbs, were redistributed by the state in the interest of economic renewal. “The stolen assets of minorities were set aside to strengthen the Croatian middle classes,” writes Korb. Historian Philipp Ther adds that fields taken from Serbian farmers were used for modern forms of agriculture. In many villages, Croatians terrorized their neighbors of other nationalities with extreme brutality in the name of “improving the social standard and economic conditions of the community.” Political loyalties and long-term, ingrained racist thinking played little or no role in all this.64
In Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Slovakia, all German allies, homicidal policies toward Jews were part of more broadly conceived projects of ethnic cleansing. They were also understood by social elites as a crucial element of forming the nation. They continued the practices of displacement, compulsory resettlement, and murder that had been common since the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. The 1923 Lausanne Convention that had temporarily put a halt to the mass killings and refugee tragedies proved to have a hateful legacy insofar as it legitimized the exchange of populations and ethnic homogenization. In 1941, the Croatian regime elevated this treaty to its “guiding leitmotiv for the ‘ethnic de-mixing’ of the Balkans.” That phrase also signified mass murder, as was shown in early 1943 when German special envoy Edmund Veesenmayer tried to exert a moderating influence on Ante Pavelić, the Croatian dictator, who answered: “The extermination and displacement of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire made the later job of building up Turkey much easier.”65
With war having desensitized people to mass violence, the German government provided to many southeastern countries an example of how to deal with Jews—by deporting them with an eye toward their murder. Whether in Zagreb, Bratislava, Bucharest, Budapest, or Sofia, elites and others increasingly began to believe that the war offered a unique chance to realize long-held plans for radical ethnopolitical action. Ion Antonescu was typical of many leaders when he said in the fall of 1941: “This is wartime, and a good time to settle the Jewish problem once and for all.”66
Germany’s allies Romania and Croatia were directly involved in genocide against Jews. Under pressure from “Jew advisors” from German embassies, Bulgaria and Slovakia allowed parts of their Jewish populations to be transported to the death camps. The same is more or less true of Hungary, which spent more time as an ally of Germany than a nation occupied by it. Circumstances were different in France, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the Czech territory, which was known under Nazism as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where Germany installed comparatively mild occupation regimes intended to encourage cooperation. State leaders in those countries differed as to how willingly they supported the German policy of deporting and exterminating Jews.
There were two notable exceptions to the voluntary participation in the Holocaust. The case of Denmark is well known. Thanks to its proximity to neutral Sweden, the ethical fiber of its royal family, the scarcity of German occupiers, and the efforts of a German diplomat determined to help, all 7,500 Jews in Denmark were saved in 1943. The situation in Belgium was different. This small, thickly settled part of Western Europe was governed by a German military administration, which relied on a council of state secretaries (Comité des Secrétaires-généraux) to organize the civilian aspects of Belgian life, while the elected government waited in London exile. Because Belgium was so close to the British Isles, the Wehrmacht deployed a great many soldiers in the country.
By the end of the occupation, German forces had succeeded in deporting around half of Belgium’s 56,000 Jews, but Germans had to apprehend most of the victims themselves. In contrast to their French colleagues, Belgian bankers, notaries, and judges, who had access to information about accounts and property and commercial registers, refused to become complicit in the expropriation of persecuted people,67 although there were isolated instances of Belgian police assisting German occupiers, especially in Antwerp in the Flemish part of the country. Historian Isa Meinen has detailed the significant differences between Belgium—where both government officials and the civilian population refused to cooperate—and France and the Netherlands. The head of the German military administration, the lawyer and honorary SS general Eggert Reeder, repeatedly had to report with regret back to Berlin that, unlike in France, the military administration in Belgium had to “force … political measures to be taken against Jews or carry them out itself.” He complained that “the Belgian” had “no appreciation for the justice of the Jewish measures.” Or as he telegraphed Himmler, “Appreciation for the Jewish question not very widespread here.”
In May 1942, the military administration in Belgium ordered that all Jews wear Stars of David visibly on their clothing. Reeder wanted local communities to procure and distribute the yellow patches. But one week later, the conservative Catholic mayor of Brussels, Jules Coelst, categorically refused. In the name of all the nineteen mayors in the greater Brussels metropolitan area, he wrote to the head of the local commander’s office: “It is not our place to debate with you whether the measures you have taken against Jews are appropriate. Yet it is our duty to inform you that you cannot demand that we participate in them. Many Jews are Belgian citizens, and moreover we cannot commit ourselves to enforcing an edict that so obviously runs contrary to the dignity of human beings, whoever they may be.”68
In Belgium some 20 percent of deported Jews were apprehended with the help of local governmental offices or individuals. French police captured a far larger percentage of deportees on their own accord, and in the Netherlands, too, German occupiers found willing helpers, particularly within the state bureaucracy. During the first half of 1941, officials at the Dutch population registry drew up a “central registry of Jews and Jewish half-breeds.” Their German superiors praised them as “loyal and even very diligent.” The registry contained the names, addresses, and personal details of 160,820 people. Dutch government agencies also issued special Jewish identity cards featuring passport photos, fingerprints, and copies for residency offices. Dutch officials stamped the cards of full Jews with an upper case “J,” of half-Jews with “BI,” and quarter-Jews with “BII”—the “B” stood for bastard. On September 24, the superior SS and police leader responsible for the Netherlands, Hanns Rauter, sent a telegram to Himmler: “The new units of the Dutch police are performing well on the Jewish question and are arresting hundreds of Jews day and night.”69
The extent of deportations to the death camps, then, was not solely determined by edicts from Berlin but was affected by the degree of state collaboration or resistance and by societal participation or refusal, as these figures show: more than 75 percent of Jews in the Netherlands went sent to death camps, 50 percent in Norway (out of 2,000), 45 percent in Belgium, 34 percent in Luxembourg, 25 percent in France, and only 2 percent in Denmark.
In the course of armistice negotiations in July 1940, after France’s defeat by Germany, the two sides agreed upon how the country was to be administered. The French government, which continued to exist and was already led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, was responsible for the nonoccupied, southern part of France and enjoyed remarkable autonomy until late 1942. It also controlled the French administration in the occupied zone. For two years, the comparatively mild form of occupation there led many French officials, particularly in financial administration and the police, to act in the interests of the German occupiers. The German military commander and the German ambassador to France both resided in Paris, while the leaders of the French government were based in the southern spa town of Vichy. They no longer described their nation as the French republic, but rather as the French state. Coming from the nationalist right, many had advocated authoritarian forms of rule for quite some time and had admired Mussolini’s success in Italy. Some even thought positively of Hitler. The Vichy government stripped Jews of their rights both in conjunction with the occupational authority and of its own accord. On July 2, 1941, it ordered the registration and on July 22 the expropriation of all Jews. Six months later, French officials had more or less confiscated everything Jews owned.70
One year earlier, on July 17, 1940, only a short time after it had been established, the Vichy government ordered that only those who could prove their fathers were French would be allowed to work for the state. Laws passed on August 16 and September 10 extended that restriction to the medical and legal professions. While the laws technically applied to anyone whose father was born abroad, they were only ever enforced against Jews. If we recall the vociferous protests by the corresponding professional organizations in the 1930s against allowing large numbers of Jews to practice law and medicine, then the rulers of the État Français were fulfilling demands that had been made long before the war in the République Française—ones which from the perspective of the protesters had never been adequately addressed.
Furthermore, on July 20, 1940, the Vichy regime created a commission to review and, in some cases, reverse, the 650,000 naturalizations that had taken place since 1927. This body harked back to the commissions de triage in Alsace-Lorraine in 1919 and 1920. The focus was on the tens of thousands of Jewish émigrés who had become French, and by 1943 thousands of them had been stripped of their citizenship. This meant that the Vichy regime could legally hand them over to the German occupiers to be sent to Auschwitz. Historian Michael Mayer has uncovered a telling detail that illustrates how far the Vichy regime was complicit in the Holocaust. On February 10, 1942, after the justice ministry and the commissariat on Jewish affairs had given their blessing, Pétain signed a law concerning the adoption of new names. It prohibited Jews from changing their names and established a commission to review all cases in which typically Jewish names had been changed since October 24, 1870.
Two years earlier, on October 4, 1940, a law had been passed allowing all foreign Jews to be detained without justification in camps. The Vichy government estimated that around 20,000 foreign Jews were living in France; a few months later, the same number of Jews were incarcerated. The law was intended to create a general acceptance for their deportation, with German assistance. To that end, the Vichy government’s commissioner-general for Jewish questions, Xavier Vallat, declared in early 1942: “In normal times, the first partial solution consists of deporting all foreign-born Jews back to their countries of origin.” But in times of war that wasn’t possible, Vallat went on, since the countries in question had chosen to follow “the path of anti-Jewish policies.”71 It was thus up to the German occupiers to suggest to the Vichy government a solution commensurate with the unusual times. On July 2, as the Reich Main Security Office was about to commence deportations, Germany’s ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, told his superiors in Berlin that, in his view, the French had no concerns about the “transport of 40,000 Jews from France to the Auschwitz camp.” Nevertheless, he advised that mass apprehensions be carried out in such a way “that would increase the anti-Semitic sentiment that has been growing recently.” As in Germany, the strengthening of anti-Semitic views in France “can largely be put down to the immigration of foreign Jews in past years.” Therefore it would be “psychologically effective for the broad masses of the French people if the evacuation measures first affected those foreign Jews.”72 That is precisely what happened.
With considerable help from French officials and police, German occupiers were able to send 76,000 Jews from France to the death camps. More than 50,000 of them had never been or were no longer French citizens. Only a few survived. Just as was later the case in Hungary, French government agencies saw it as their duty to detain Jews, hold them in camps, and accompany and secure the transports as far as the French-German border. The cooperation worked extraordinarily well as long as most of those being deported were foreign Jews.73
Nevertheless, 225,000 of the approximately 300,000 Jews living in France at the time were saved. That was a high percentage compared with other countries conquered or subjugated by Germany. Many honorable French people, including Catholic clergy, nuns, and monks as well as communists, ordinary people, and individual officials, offered those under threat protection from their German and French persecutors. As Germany’s military situation worsened after the Battle of Stalingrad, the cooperativeness of French civil servants and the Vichy regime declined. But hostility toward Jews and simple envy still were deadly threats, as two examples illustrate.
Albert Drach, a Jewish Viennese attorney who spoke with a pronounced German accent, survived the war in France thanks to forged identity papers. He later described an experience he had in the fall of 1943 in an overcrowded bus in the Maritime Alps near the Italian border. There he was verbally abused by “a couple of very young people … in the typical fashion of the country” as a “ridiculous métèque” (foreign intruder). Suddenly a German police officer stopped the bus and checked the passengers. “The door of our vehicle was opened from the outside,” Drach related later.
“Is everything okay?” asked a fat Prussian wearing gloves. “No,” screamed the teenagers in the back, “there’s a Jew here.” The Prussian must have thought this was a joke. He grinned and shut the bus door, giving the signal for it to continue on. “Stop, stop!” yelled the young men. But the bus drove on. The young men kept on with their loutish behavior. In loud voices, they informed their fellow passengers that in their communities and elsewhere there were still Jews who should be apprehended and handed over.74
The other story comes from the world-renowned mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, who was born in Warsaw in 1924 and came from a Jewish Lithuanian family. In 1936 he emigrated with his parents and brother to Paris, and in 1940 they fled to southern France. Zina Morhange, a friend of the family and a physician who had also come from Poland, was deported to Auschwitz because a colleague, “who simply wanted to get rid of the competition,” turned her in. Morhange survived. The Mandelbrots remained undiscovered for two reasons. “We were fortunate that we didn’t represent competition to anyone and didn’t look like foreigners. My parents’ systematic efforts at assimilation paid dividends. My brother and I sounded almost like native French boys, and we looked like them too.”75
As was true with the populations, particularly elites, of other European states, most French people kept silent for decades about anti-Semitic collaboration with their German occupiers. After the Germans had been forced out of France in the fall of 1944, several interest groups immediately formed among those French people who had—innocently, they claimed—profited from what Jews had been forced to leave behind. The members of these associations demonstrated, chanted “France for the French,” and did everything in their power not to restore to the Jews who returned their rightful businesses, companies, homes, and other belongings. In his 1995 novel Quoi de neuf sur la guerre? (What’s the Latest from the War?) Robert Bober describes how difficult it was for the small numbers of returnees to get their apartments and houses back. Although they had injunctions in their hands and were accompanied by officers of the court and police, they were usually forced to retreat, business undone, in the face of “organized bands of people who had alarmed the occupants.”76
All the files from the German occupation, and especially those of the French expropriation authority and the Finance Ministry, remained classified for half a century after the Second World War. Only at that point were they gradually released to the public. As of 2016 this process was still not complete.77
Shortly before being invaded by the Wehrmacht, all those states that hadn’t enacted anti-Semitic laws and other measures did so. As was the case in France, the main justification was the perception that too many Jews displaced from elsewhere had been allowed to immigrate, legally or illegally. In the months before their respective German invasions, both Belgium and the Netherlands set up holding camps for such refugees.
As in France, the moderate anti-Semitism in Luxembourg before the 1930s intensified with the arrival of many immigrants and refugees. Of the 3,144 Jews who lived in this tiny country in 1935, 870 were citizens. Fears that the country was getting too foreign inspired the idea of scrapping Luxembourg’s liberal citizenship law, based on the French model, and instituting the German idea of citizenship through blood. On March 9, 1940, two months before German troops marched in, the loi sur l’indigénat luxembourgeois was passed. Conservatives and socialists in parliament voted for this legislation, according to which “only those of Luxembourgish blood” could be citizens of the country.
This anti-Jewish law was inspired not by some sort of racist ideology but by simple fear of Jewish competition. A 2015 study commissioned by the Luxembourg government found: “Documented in numerous police files and articles in the right-wing extremist, Catholic and even liberal press, Jews were collectively accused of aiming to buy up whole segments of the Luxembourg economy. With cosmopolitan cleverness, it was alleged, they had also resorted to using hired proxies to achieve their ends.” In May 1940, amid popular panic, the highest institution of civilian administration, the Commission administrative, began cooperating with Luxembourg’s German occupiers. Officials were “invited” but not forced to persecute Jews, but they often enthusiastically took up this offer.78
In Salonika, the anti-Jewish measures enacted after the Wehrmacht’s invasion on April 9, 1941, were applauded by a significant majority of the city’s Greek residents. As a strategically important port, Salonika was put under German administration together with the Greek hinterland. Meanwhile Italian troops occupied the majority of Greece until Italy renounced its alliance with Germany in late summer 1943. Hardly had he arrived than the head of the German military administration reinstated the forbidden right-wing extremist National Union of Greece (Ethniki Enosis Ellados), which soon renamed itself the National Socialist Union of Greece (Elliniko Ethniko Sosialistiko Komma). For their part, Germans commandeered only the houses of Jews in Salonika, not Greeks.
In the months that followed, 48,000 refugees arrived from the parts of Northern Greece annexed by Bulgaria. They, too, were accommodated in houses where Jews had lived. Greek officials pushed for this to happen, and the local press began referring to Jews as “parasites.” In the newspaper Nea Evropi, which supported Greek collaboration with Nazi Germany, the influential journalist Nikolaos Kammonas wrote a whole series of articles about the “diabolical depravity and poisonous treachery with which Jews built their financial and racial empire on the corpse of Macedonian Greece.” On July 11, 1942, Salonika’s German occupiers ordered 800 Jewish men to assemble in the city’s Plateia Eleftheria (Liberty Square), where, watched by Greek police, they were humiliated all day in the scorching sun. In the end they were forced to register for forced labor. This action took place after consultations with—some say at the behest of—the Greek head of the general governorate of the province of Macedonia, Vasilis Simonidis. Many Greek residents watched the repugnant spectacle, unmoved or scornful.79
In December 1942, the mayor of Salonika succeeded where his predecessor had failed in 1917 and forced Jews to sign over ownership of the large Old Cemetery to the municipal government. Thirty-five hectares of inner-city real estate became available for construction. As early as August 4, 1930, and March 21, 1934, the Greek government had issued edicts on the basis of which the cemetery could be expropriated and destroyed, but its rightful owners had always prevented this from happening. Salonika city planners were first able to achieve their ends with German help. Today, the land is the site of Aristotle University, which had been planned as far back as 1917 but was only constructed after the Second World War.
The head of the German military administration, Max Merten, knew that the eradication of the cemetery would win points with the Christian Greek majority. In their eyes, writes historian Rena Molho, “the cemetery destruction represented a tabula rasa enabling Salonika’s further Hellenization while for Jews it was a harbinger of the mass murder to come.” With the visible destruction of the cemetery, the Christian majority was sending the Jewish community a clear message: your time is up.80
Indeed, no sooner had 500 city employees begun to dig up the cemetery’s half-million graves than the first train rolled off to Auschwitz. The date was March 15, 1943. In the following five months, 43,850 Jews were taken from the city along with a further 2,134 from the surrounding German-occupied areas. Greek police, local administrators, and the Macedonia prefecture did all they could to assist in the deportations.81 While the death trains were pulling out of the station, Greek merchants snapped up the businesses of their deported former competition. Jacques Stroumsa, a Jew born in 1913 in Salonika who also grew up there, remembered that it “served absolutely no purpose” to ask Christian families for shelter. Aside from a few rare exceptions, they refused.82
In the spring of 1944, German occupiers began to go after Jews in those Greek cities that had been under Italian military administration until the previous September. On March 25, the Jews of Patras were arrested by German soldiers and Greek police. Astro Alballa had left his home as a precaution and in hiding was able to observe telling scenes: “You could see people in the street taking everything they could carry from the homes of Jews.”
That same day 1,850 Jews were detained in Ioannina and later deported. On May 27 the local newspaper Ipeirotikos Kyrix ran an article with the headline “Jewish Property.” It describes widespread thievery: “More than two months ago the Jews were removed from Ioannina. Since then, various committees have met, and this and that has been heard. The broadest variety of plans has been discussed, but as this has been going on, Jewish property has continued to dwindle. We don’t know how long this uncertain situation will carry on, but one thing is sure: if things proceed the way they’re going, soon there’ll be nothing left to distribute.”
One of the few Jews who escaped capture by the Germans was Yushua Matsas. Like Alballa, he joined the Greek partisans and didn’t resurface until the end of the occupation. While Greeks celebrated their liberation in October 1944, he felt like an unwanted foreigner despite having returned home: “We had difficulty finding a place to stay in our own homes. People had quartered themselves everywhere, and they took offense when we even asked if there was a room we could sleep in.” Some of the goods looted from Jewish shops were still in a warehouse. But the leaders of the communist partisan organization ELAS only handed out 1 percent of them. “They gave every Jew present in the city some clothes and household items worth thirty gold sovereigns,” recalled Matsas. Communist functionaries spirited the vast majority of these stolen goods off to Albania—as a reserve fund for the imminent Greek civil war.83
A short time later, British soldiers reached Ioannina. In their weekly report, they noted that deported Jews’ assets were distributed to Greeks under the direction of the governor of Epirus Michalis Tsimbris. The Greeks who profited, speculated British troops, would probably not agree to return everything, and nothing was done to help Jews who had escaped deportation. In neighboring Preveza, portable Jewish belongings had been stored in warehouses, and a committee had been formed under the head official Aletras. It was an open secret, wrote the soldiers, that this committee was selling off things piece by piece and doing good business.84
On June 14, 1944, Germans transported 1,795 Jews from the island of Corfu to Auschwitz five days after they had been apprehended in a joint German-Greek action. Prefect Ioannes Komianos, Corfu mayor Spyridonos Kollas, and Police Chief Pericles Dedopoulos jointly proclaimed: “As has also been the case in the rest of Greece, Jews have been rounded up and are waiting to be sent to do forced labor. This measure has been welcomed by Corfu’s upstanding native population. It will benefit our beloved, wonderful island. From now on, trade will be in our hands! Now we will harvest the fruits of our labor ourselves! How the supply of food and the economic situation will turn to our advantage! The entirety of Jewish property belongs to the Greek state and therefore to us all. The prefecture will take it over and administer it.” In the community council, Kollas declared, “Our great friends the Germans have cleansed our island of Jews.”85
Everyone concerned knew what would happen to the Jews taken from Salonika. After the first deportations on March 15, 1943, following a conversation between the Italian consul, Guelfo Zamboni, and Merten, Lucillo Merci, an Italian liaison officer and translator, noted: “After all it is known that the Jews of Salonika are being sent to Poland. There, the physically fit among them are put to work, whereas the rest are eliminated. In the end, the physically fit will also be liquidated.” In the wake of such reports, the Italian Foreign Ministry declared Jews living in Greece to be Italian citizens and transported them to the Italian occupation zone.
Nearly three weeks later, on April 6, Merci wrote: “The Germans have transported around 20,000 Jews from Salonika to Poland.” During the deportations, which were carried out using cattle cars, groups of 2,400 were watched over and herded onto the trains by German and Greek police. “The Greeks break into the houses emptied of the deportees and loot anything they can get their hands on,” Merci wrote. During the Greek Orthodox Easter festival on April 5, a large puppet wearing a yellow Star of David was strung up next to the White Tower, the city’s main landmark. In Merci’s interpretation, Greeks had put it there “to imply that the turn of the murderers of Jesus had come.”86
Correspondence between Spanish diplomats also reveals how openly people in Salonika talked about the mass murder of the city’s Jews. Late in the process, in June 1943, Federico Díez de Isasi, first secretary at the Spanish embassy in Berlin, brought up the fate of Spanish Jews living in Greece with the German Foreign Ministry. According to German notes taken, Isasi said he understood why Jews were being interned but rejected their deportation with the argument that Madrid “could never agree to Spanish citizens being liquidated in Polish camps.”87 A short while later, Spain’s ambassador in Berlin, Ginés Vidal, approached the Spanish foreign minister to inform him about the “tragic and final consequences” for Spanish Jews if they were shipped from Greece to Poland. At the same time, the junior embassy official Federico Oliván wrote to the general director of foreign policy in the Spanish Foreign Ministry, José María Doussinague, with the urgent message that inaction would “automatically lead to the deaths” of those deported. “This is the tragic reality,” Oliván wrote, “before which we should not close our eyes.” He warned that after the war Spain could be held accountable if “we wash our hands like Pontius Pilate, full in the knowledge of what happens next—and abandon these people to their sad fate.” Under pressure from its diplomats in Berlin, the Spanish government first tried to stall before slowly deciding that a surgical intervention was necessary. After a series of complicated detours, Madrid managed to rescue more than 500 Spanish Jews in Salonika from certain death.
The actual hero of this rescue was a man who acted vigorously in the background, Sebastián Romero Radigales, Spanish consul in Salonika and Athens. Initially he was accused of overreacting by his colleagues in Madrid. Undeterred, Radigales ignored orders to cooperate with German authorities. Unofficially, he sent a list with the names of all the endangered people to his colleagues in Spain’s Berlin embassy and won over allies there. In 2014, the Yad Vashem memorial posthumously honored Sebastián Romero Radigales as one of the Righteous Among Nations.88
In Poland and the Soviet Union, Germany pursued a scorched-earth policy involving daily arrests and executions and the systematic murder of religious leaders, lawyers, professors, Polish business leaders, and Soviet government workers. People were turned out of their homes, and hundreds of thousands of young men and women were arrested on market squares or in front of cinemas and then taken to Germany to perform slave labor. In short, people in these places were subjected to despotic cruelty and constantly had to fear for their lives, which undermined their morality and basic humanity.
Those hiding Jews in occupied Poland or the German-conquered part of the Soviet Union were risking their lives. Police official Bernhard Kaupp reported how his SS police battalion “de-Jewified” the village of Samary together with thirty-nine Ukrainian auxiliary officers on October 30, 1942: “All in all, seventy-four Jews were apprehended and executed. One Ukrainian family—a man, two women and three children—who harbored a Jewess living together with the family were also taken out and shot.”89
In March 1942, the head of SS Einsatzgruppe C, Dr. Max Thomas, stationed in Kyiv, wrote, “cooperation with Ukrainian officials and the [Ukrainian] militia is generally good,” and “in terms of mood the stringent measures taken against the Jews and the former party communists have had a positive effect.” But Thomas also reported that his men had executed the mayor of Kremenchuk because he had “sabotaged the orders he had been given” by allowing “the leading local cleric Protejerej Romanskyj to baptize Jews and give them Christian Russian first names,” which were then attested by the notary and entered into the registry of residents.90
When documenting the behavior of the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarussian populations during the war, we need to keep in mind the boundless terror to which people were subjected. Likewise we should also remember those Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians, and Russians who summoned the inner strength in an inhumane world created by Germans to shelter the persecuted. If they survived the war, they often thought it better not to inform their neighbors that they had helped Jews.
The courtyard between the library and the learning center at Yad Vashem is called Family Plaza. A huge raw iron sculpture there depicts the final steps taken by Nachum Freydovicz with three small children, two of them his grandchildren. Their story unfolded in 1943 in the Jewish ghetto of Grodno. Genia and Aaron Zandman learned that a “major action” was scheduled for the ghetto and realized they would have to hide. They and another family faced the barbaric decision of leaving behind three defenseless, tiny children, whose crying would have betrayed everyone hiding in the secret spaces of a vaulted synagogue basement. Genia Zandman’s father, Nachum Freydovicz, encouraged by his wife, Tema, volunteered to stay behind with the children. He carried them in his arms to their deaths.
Felix Zandman was the only one of the Freydoviczes’ grandchildren to survive the Holocaust. A Catholic couple named Jan and Anna Puchalski hid him and four other fugitives from the ghetto in the vicinity of Grodno. The couple themselves were desperately poor, starving, and had five children of their own to provide for. The Puchalskis kept their heads even when Germans raided their house and held out until the summer of 1944 when the Red Army liberated them and the people they sheltered. Why did they do this? Why risk their own lives in this fashion? “God gave you to us,” Anna Puchalski told Felix Zandman. “I will not allow you to be killed. If we die, we die together. But you will survive, no question. You will stay here.” Thousands of Europeans behaved in this way, including some Germans. Poles and Soviet people undoubtedly braved the greatest risk. In 1986 Jan and Anna Puchalski and their daughters Irena (married name: Bagińska), Grystyna (Maciejewska), and Sabina (Kazimierczyk) were recognized as Righteous Among Nations.91
In 1940, with help from the Catholic Church, the Polish government in exile quickly created a tight network of trusted agents and distributed a number of resistance pamphlets and flyers. Along with other sources, these publications yield insight into what Poles under German occupation thought about the Jewish question, which had been so hotly debated in prewar Poland.
On June 16, 1940, the Polish nationalist underground newspaper Walka (Struggle) published an article with the headline “General Governorate—paradisus Judaeorum.” It contended that “the Jews are being clearly privileged by the anti-Semitic German racists,” that they had “no reason to complain about the occupation,” and that they served as spies helping Germans keep Poland under surveillance. In December of that year, the Jewish representative of the government-in-exile, Ignacy Schwarzbart, asked engineer Józef Podoski to fill him in on the situation of Polish Jews. Podoski had lived in Warsaw until the end of the previous September before making his way to London. He reported: “A great number of Poles from the intelligentsia, from the bourgeoisie and even the working classes have taken over Jews’ positions in the economy.… In this form, despite the Polish hatred for Nazism and the Germans as occupiers, one Polish political goal has been reached: the strengthening of the Polish bourgeoisie.” All in all, as Podoski summed it up, “the social strata concerned are tacitly satisfied with how things have turned out.” He said he anticipated major conflicts should Jews demand their property back at some later point. Anti-Semitism, from which leftist parties too could never completely divorce themselves, would break out once again in even stronger form. Staggered, Schwarzbart recorded what Podoski had told him. His fears that “as far as Jews went, the Polish soul seems to have hardly changed at all” had been confirmed.92
On July 31, 1941, the farmers’ newspaper Placówka (The Watch) wrote: “Today the Jews are weak and without influence. But when Poland is liberated, they will want to immediately tear down the ghetto walls and take back their factories and houses, which they only obtained via exploitation.” Around the same time, the “Church Report from Poland for the Period June to Mid-July 1942,” which was distributed by the government-in-exile, characterized the general situation as follows: “As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Germans—alongside the great injustice they have done and continue to do to our country—have made a good start. They have shown us how to free the Polish populace from the Jewish plague and have pointed us down the path we should follow—of course less cruelly and brutally, but no less resolutely. It is undeniably a sign from Providence that the occupiers have taken it upon themselves to solve this burning question since the Polish people are too soft and unsystematic and would have never decided upon the powerful steps necessary in this matter.”93
In January 1942, at a time in which Germans were getting the first gas chambers up and running, the Catholic-oriented magazine Naród (People) announced: “We insist that the Jews not be given back the political rights and property they have lost. In addition, in the future, they must all leave the country.” Naród was published by the Christian Democratic Workers’ Party, which was part of the Polish government-in-exile and advocated a federation of Slavic states. For the future treatment of the “extremely acute Jewish Question,” they demanded: “We must cleanse all of Central and Southern Europe of the Jewish element, which amounts to removing some 8 to 9 million Jews.”94
There were opposing voices. One of them, in the likewise Catholic-oriented newspaper Pravda, indirectly illustrated how common it had become for Poles not only to profit from but to participate in the mass murder of Jews. On May 5, 1941, the paper wrote:
The immorality and barbarism that slaughter of Jews has caused among us has become an urgent issue. In many places (Kolno, Stawiski, Jagodne, Szumów, Dęblin) locals have taken part in the massacres. Everything must be done to combat this shameful scandal. The people must be made to understand that they are becoming the henchmen of Herod. They should be held up for condemnation in the underground press, and the executioners should be boycotted, threatened with severe legal punishment in the Free Polish Republic.95
On August 8, 1942, two thousand of the roughly four thousand Jews in the eastern Polish town of Szczebrzeszyn were to be rounded up and taken to the train station, where a train with fifty cars stood ready to make the short journey to the Belzec death camp. But the people condemned to death refused to obey orders to go to the local market hall. No one in the town believed these Jews were to be resettled in Ukraine. Many went into hiding. As the head physician at the town hospital, Zygmunt Klukowski, observed, German, Polish, and Jewish security officials, together with city employees, members of the Jewish council, and Jewish ghetto police, combed the town in search of them. While the search went on, city workers cleaned out the apartments where the Jews had lived and had their household effects and clothing taken to storehouses near the Rathaus. On top of that, wrote Klukowski in his journal, “a great many Poles, predominantly young men, eagerly helped search for the Jews.”96
Klukowski managed to maintain a sense of humanity in the brutal conditions Germans had created. His diary entries depict how the terrorizing occupational authority made the community in general inhumane and how it exploited that condition. On February 23, 1941, he noted, as he had dozens of times about Polish colleagues, friends, and acquaintances from in and around Szczebrzeszyn: “Notary Henryk Rosinski died in the Dachau concentration camp. I have never in my life been in such a state of grief over the death of a friend, I cannot control myself; I cannot cover up my tears.” On March 8: “A few days ago, another transport of evacuees arrived in Szczebrzeszyn, this time 200 persons. So far no group has had as many sick. I admitted more than twenty, mostly small children and very old people; three have already died.” After sunset, hundreds of young people from Szczebrzeszyn would seek refuge in the forest so that they wouldn’t be arrested in the German occupiers’ nighttime raids and sent to Germany to do slave labor. “We are living like hunted animals,” Klukowski wrote. “People are losing the energy to fight back … they are exhausted both physically and mentally.”
On June 21, the day before Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, the hospital was told to prepare for “large numbers of wounded.” Orders were issued to herd all sick Jews into two special buildings on the outskirts of town. Klukowski could only watch as a Polish police officer named Tatulinski was a “very active” participant in this action. By April 1942, trains full of Jews, first with twenty and later with fifty cars, were heading for Belzec. It was widely rumored that when they arrived, “some are killed with electricity, some with poison gases, and their bodies are burned.” Now and again, one of the trains was forced to stop in Szczebrzeszyn station. “A young woman gave away a gold ring in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child,” Klukowski recounted. “In Lublin, people witnessed small children being thrown through the windows of speeding trains. Many people are shot before reaching Belzec.”
On May 8, 1942, “a real hell started” in Szczebrzeszyn. Gestapo officers brought in from Zamość and local German police stormed the ghetto. Polish police assisted them. “They shot people like ducks, killing them not only on the streets but also in their own homes—men, women and children, indiscriminately.” German medical administrators strictly prohibited Polish doctors from treating injured Jews. Impassioned pleas to be allowed to help led to Gestapo troops storming the hospital and looking for Jews. “The way some Poles behave is completely out of line,” Klukowski wrote at the end of his diary entry. “During the massacre some even laughed. Some went sneaking into Jewish houses from the back door searching for what could be stolen. Here is something different: the gestapo [sic] ordered the Judenrat [Jewish council] to pay 2000 złoty and 3lbs. of coffee for the ammunition used to kill Jews.” Those in charge of Szczebrzeszyn could commit murder on any scale at will. They shot dead twenty elderly people at a construction site in broad daylight in the middle of the city. Their mass graves had already been dug a few days before. Six more Jews were subsequently shot dead, and then a young woman who had been caught without a yellow star. The killing went on day in, day out.
At around this time, the former teacher Leopold Rytko attempted to blackmail the widow of the dentist Nathan Bronsztein, who had been murdered. Rytko told her that if she didn’t pay up, he would inform the authorities that she was a Jew, and she would be killed, too. Three weeks later, Rytko—“known as a gestapo informant”—was found dead at home. The Polish underground army (Armia Krajova) had struck. Gestapo troops immediately began to search for those who had taken vengeance. In the process, they shot a Mrs. Byk, Karol Turowski, and nine other Polish men. A number of men were taken into custody and sent to the city of Biłgoraj. “What will happen to them nobody knows,” Klukowski noted. The daily terror hardened people’s hearts. A bit earlier Klukowski had written: “Now when people meet on the streets the normal way of greeting is, ‘Who was arrested? How many Jews were killed last night? Who was robbed?’ These events are so common that, really, no one seems to care. Slowly you become accustomed to everything.”
The final “so-called German displacement of Jews, in reality a liquidation of the entire Jewish population” began on October 21, 1942. The remaining Jews in Szczebrzeszyn were rounded up. Some were dragged from their hiding places, hand grenades were lobbed into basements, and more than four hundred Jews were shot to death that day at the Jewish Cemetery. The victims were largely elderly people, women, and children—young men hid out in the woods. There were posters throughout the city telling Poles that those who helped Jews would be executed, while those who betrayed them would be rewarded. This action involved not only German and blue-uniformed Polish police, but black-uniformed Polish security guards as well. Armed with sticks, they lashed out at defenseless people, herding them toward the cemetery. Polish men over the age of fifteen were forced to dig mass graves. As the Jews were being taken away, a large number of onlookers congregated, “laughing and even beating the Jews; others searched homes for more victims.” While the massacre was taking place, other Jews were locked in a waiting train. They included a group from the neighboring town of Zwierzyniec. Just as in Szczebrzeszyn, Jews were killed in several hundred Polish cities and towns. After five days of mass murder, Polish plunderers seized what Jews had left behind. At the conclusion of the first of these hellish days, a shaken Klukowski noted: “You cannot even imagine the barbarism of the Germans. I am completely broken and cannot find myself.”97
The situation of Jews in Poland remained extremely dangerous, as we can see from an order issued by one of the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising, Brigade General Tadeusz Pełczyński, on August 4, 1944, while he was fighting the Germans. After the insurgents had liberated several hundred Jews from a Warsaw camp, he commanded: “Make preparations for a provisional camp in which to accommodate all liberated Jews and other undesirable elements. Units will be issued orders so as to prevent possible abuse of Jews.”98 On the one hand, Pełczyński considered Jews undesirables; on the other, he considered it his duty to protect them from his Catholic countrymen.
Beginning in 1943, as Soviet troops started liberating the German-annexed parts of their country, many Jewish soldiers in the Red Army returned home. They later told what they had experienced. Civilian Jewish survivors, too, bore witness to how they were rejected. In total, around half a million Jews served in the Red Army, of whom 200,000 fell in battle or were murdered in German captivity, after being forced to drop their trousers and identified as Jews.
On May 28, 1944, the soldier Boris Fayvelis told Solomon Mikhoels about Jews who had gone into hiding in Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula. When they returned home after their liberation, they were greeted with “open hostility”—former neighbors had “plundered most of their property.” Fayvelis cited the example of what happened to Dora and Rosa Aysenberg’s families, who had miraculously survived, when they went home. Their neighbors, including a policeman named Grygory Ivanov, had stolen everything they owned, right down to their milk cow. Fayvelis complained to every Soviet institution he could think of in an effort to get the Aysenberg sisters and their half-starved children their cow back, but the authorities and courts of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea refused to help. Instead, they protected thieves and informants.
On July 22, the physician Israil Adessman wrote from Odessa to Ilya Ehrenburg: “After the German and Romanian cultural cannibals had been driven from Odessa, I could have halted the sun for joy. But in fact I’m practically choking here in an atmosphere poisoned by anti-Semitic propaganda. Everyone I know who has returned from the ghetto to Odessa can confirm that the Romanian-German plague has penetrated all of our Soviet institutions. Especially bizarre is the combination of anti-Semitism and an absence of Jews. Until recently, more than 200,000 Jews lived in Odessa. Today there are fewer than 200.” Adessman had the impression that the few remaining Jews had “resurfaced from the underworld” to “ruin the mood [of the Russian majority] by their sheer existence,” since Russians now feared they would lose the apartments and furnishings they had stolen.
That same summer, Blyuma Bronfin wrote a letter from the Ukrainian city of Chmelnik to her loved ones. “What can I tell you?” it began. “Riva, you ask where your sister Sura is. She’s in the same place as my Mishunya, Beba, Isyunya and all our other relatives. They were killed on January 9, 1942. Six thousand Jews were murdered on this day.” Bronfin was able to escape the Germans and flee to Romania. There she lived in “indescribable conditions” in a forced labor camp with 300 other Jews from Chmelnik. When she returned to the city, she was able to move back into her partially destroyed home, sharing it with a Russian woman who had purchased the house during the German occupation. Bronfin wrote: “Those who helped the Germans destroy us are still occupying their posts.… The city administration isn’t taking care of us in the slightest. Thus far, they haven’t given us any work, while our enemies find jobs everywhere. They’re irritated that we’re still alive. So you see, dear Riva, how ‘good’ we have it here.… Forgive me for writing such confused stuff after all we’ve been through. I can’t write or speak anymore to tell you what it’s like. My hands are trembling, and blood is running out of my eyes.”99