THE MAIN SCENE OF ANTISEMITISM between the two world wars was Eastern Europe even though the situation in Germany became more and more critical with the rise of the Nazi party during the late 1920s. The Jewish presence in Eastern Europe was much stronger than in Western and Central Europe—12 percent of Poland’s population was Jewish, 6 percent of Hungary’s, and about 5 to 6 percent of Romania’s. Furthermore, Poland and Romania were countries in which minorities constituted large sections of the population, and the Warsaw and Bucharest governments, feeling insecure, exerted strong pressure on minorities and in particular the Jewish community.
In all three countries, antisemitism was religious-nationalist rather than racialist, with the church taking a strongly anti-Jewish position in Poland. It is true that in all three countries the extreme right-wing parties for which antisemitism was a central issue increasingly developed toward fascism and racialism, and in the case of Romania and Hungary, toward an extreme form of fascism as embodied in the Romanian Iron Guard and the Hungarian Arrow Cross. In the aftermath of World War One a few riots took place in Vilna and Lvov in 1919, and there were anti-Jewish riots in Hungary following the overthrow of the Communist government of Bela Kun, during which hundreds of Jews were killed.
During the early years of the existence of the Polish republic with Joseph Pilsudski as its head, antisemitism had played a minor role. Antisemitism in Poland increased partly as a result of the world economic crisis and in particular after Pilsudski’s death, when a new generation came to the fore. “Street antisemitism” was stronger in certain parts of Poland than in others; it has been noted that in western Poland, where fewer Jews lived, there was on the whole more antisemitism than in the eastern part, which had greater concentrations of Jewish communities.
The antisemitism of the church persisted—the Jews were a community of alien morality and values, hostile to Christianity, and while the church did not advocate physical violence, it favored legal measures as well as economic boycott. Some clergymen argued that baptism was not a solution: there were too many Jews and the “Talmudic soul” was too resistant. Baptism in most cases was seen as merely an attempt to break into Polish society.
There was economic antisemitism—the Jews were made responsible for the collapse of the zloty and, being middlemen, of exploiting the peasantry—underpaying the peasants for their produce and overcharging the public, and thus adding to the high cost of living.
While Jews in Poland were certainly overrepresented in the country’s trade (hence the call for the Polonization of Poland’s trade), they had no stranglehold. There was an “objective Jewish question” in Poland, as the Zionists maintained, in view of the social make-up of Polish Jewry, but this accounts more for the pauperization of Polish Jewry than for the growth of antisemitism. Antisemitism among the Polish peasant parties was no more pronounced than among other political parties; that antisemitism in Poland became more rabid in the late thirties than in the years before was largely due to other-than-economic causes.
The major political parties, including Pilsudski’s Sanacja, developed under the rule of the colonels further toward a strong antisemitic orientation. The other big party, Roman Dmowski’s National Democrats, originally pro-Russian and later pro-Mussolini, had always been strongly antisemitic. Under the rule of the colonels in the late 1930s, the economic and political situation of the Jews became critical. Legislation was passed that aimed at squeezing the Jews out of the economy and public life.
During the early years of the Polish republic, the old Russian anti-Jewish (antiminority) laws had still been in force; Jews had had to pay double taxes for certain activities, and the use of Hebrew and Yiddish in public was forbidden. These laws were eventually abolished, albeit with considerable delay, but new ones were introduced in the 1930s which, while not naming the Jews specifically, were directed against them. These laws aimed at squeezing Jews out of many trades, professions, and places of work. Mass boycotts of Jewish shops took place in Poland from 1936 to 1939. While the antisemitic propaganda of students did not succeed in keeping Jews completely out of universities, they did obtain the right to have Jews taught in separate lecture halls. Entrance to city parks was to be forbidden to Jews in some places, and maneuvers were afoot to strip most Jews of their Polish nationality.
For the antisemites, the Jews were an alien body that could not be assimilated; they were deemed essentially anti-Polish, pro-Soviet, left-wing radicals. Successive Polish governments, not only the rabidly antisemitic ones, advocated the emigration of 1.5 million Jews to Madagascar, Palestine, or whichever country was ready to have them. Isaac Gruenbaum, a prominent Zionist leader, said at the time that there were one million Jews too many in Poland. This declaration caused a great deal of resentment in certain Jewish circles—did it not play into the hands of the antisemites?—but it may have been close to the truth.
Hungary had a tradition of modern antisemitism dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century. At first the main complaint was that the Hungarian Jews were making no effort to be Magyarized, that their knowledge of the language and culture was imperfect. In fact, most of Hungarian Jewry tried hard to become assimilated, and they were second to none as Hungarian patriots. There were also a significant number of conversions, especially during the late 1930s. But Jews had also been prominently involved in the Bela Kun revolution and the Communist dictatorship of 1919, and this led to a massive anti-Jewish backlash under Admiral Miklós Horthy who, while not a rabid antisemite, was not willing to oppose a very popular mood.
The number of Jews in Hungary had rapidly grown between 1850 and the First World War mainly as the result of immigration from the East; by the turn of the century one-quarter of the inhabitants of Budapest were Jewish. At the same time, Jews had made rapid social and economic progress—about half of Hungary’s lawyers and physicians were Jewish, and more than half of the leading banks and industries were in Jewish hands. The Hungarian middle class was largely Jewish or German. These demographic and social developments (very much in contrast to Poland, where most Jews were quite poor) played a significant role in the spread of antisemitism.
Antisemitism in Hungary grew in the 1930s partly under the impact of the world economic depression—as in Poland, the Jews were made responsible for the economic miseries that befell the country. The rise of Nazism in Central Europe also played an important role.
THE YEAR 1933 constituted a watershed in European politics. Until that time France and Britain had been the paramount powers and even the League of Nations mattered politically. Openly antisemitic legislation was frowned upon by Britain, France, and the United States. Furthermore, the peace treaties after World War One had provided special safeguards for minorities in Eastern Europe (because there was no confidence that these countries would treat their minorities fairly). But Hitler was showing that the Western nations could be defied with impunity; the European balance of power was changing and the Nazis did away with protection for minorities. In fact, Polish Jewry, to give just one example, had been attacked by Polish nationalists for having pressed for these laws that limited Polish state sovereignty. Ultimately these safeguards were of little help to minorities.
There were other indirect repercussions as the result of the Nazis’ rise to power. Groups on the extreme Polish right became openly racialist, and some of them even declared that the main enemy to an independent Poland was neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union, but the internal foe, the Jews.
The situation in Hungary was similar. When Julius Gombos, a radical antisemitic leader, came to power in 1935, a number of anti-Jewish laws were promulgated. A numerus clausus of 20 percent was to confine Jewish representation in various fields. This was further restricted in subsequent years under Gombos’s successors since it did not satisfy the more radical antisemites. Ironically, it was revealed that one of these radicals, prime minister Bela Imredi, was of Jewish origin; this led to his resignation but not to a change in policy.
Romanian antisemitism, perhaps the most virulent in Europe during the nineteenth century, had certain common features with antisemitism in Poland and Hungary. The universities played a central part in its militancy and spread. The Iron Guard, responsible for many pogroms in later years, came into being as a students’ association; many of Romania’s leading intellectuals had originally belonged to it. Also as in Eastern Europe, the agrarian crisis and the global economic depression of the early 1930s had a considerable impact on the growth of social and national tensions. Unlike Poland, most of Romanian Jewry was not concentrated in the capital and other big cities; half of them lived in outlying provinces, such as Hungarian-speaking Transylvania, German-speaking Bukovina, and Russian-speaking Bessarabia.
King Carol provided some protection for the Jews, as Pilsudski did in Poland and Horthy in Hungary, but he was in no position to oppose the radicalization of domestic politics. In Vaida Voevod, Romania had a politician in power who openly called the Jews parasites and invoked the old blood libels. Octavio Goga, who became prime minister in 1938, was an important figure in a tradition of intellectual Romanian antisemitism that reached back to the previous century. While Poland never produced an influential, outright fascist party, Hungary did in the form of the Arrow Cross, which by 1940 was the second strongest party in the country. But the most radical party was the Romanian Iron Guard, originally called the Legion of Archangel Michael. This extreme antisemitic group was frequently banned by the authorities, for its social radicalism and unruly behavior (they assassinated four Romanian prime ministers) rather than its antisemitism. Although its support also came from the countryside—peasants who faced bankruptcy as the result of the agrarian crisis—its leadership was in the hands of young intellectuals. Among them were several figures who later attained world fame, such as Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran. At the same time, antisemitism became official state policy and severe antisemitic legislation was introduced, eliminating Jews not only from public life but from various professions, a policy that was somewhat mitigated only by the corruption prevalent in the country.
All major Jewish concentrations in Eastern Europe were subject to growing antisemitism, which manifested itself not just in the general intellectual climate but, generally speaking, in attempts to get rid of the Jews by means fair and foul.
More than any other political movement, fascism shaped European political life during the 1920s and 1930s; Britain, France, and the Scandinavian countries were the only major exceptions. Antisemitism was a crucial ingredient of fascist theory and practice although it was certainly not the only one, and in the early period of some fascist parties it had been virtually nonexistent. This is true especially with regard to fascism’s birth place—Italy. While Jews were very prominent in the Italian antifascist resistance from its very beginning, there were also more than a few Jewish members of the fascist party, albeit not in leading positions. The situation in Italy was to change only in 1938, mainly as the result of the ascendancy of Nazi Germany in Europe, when Italy too introduced its racial, antisemitic legislation.
Elsewhere there was no uniform pattern among fascist or profascist groups; in countries with very small Jewish communities, such as Denmark, antisemitism could not possibly be a major issue, whereas in Switzerland it was for a while a factor of some importance. Individual Jews belonged to the Mussert movement in the Netherlands. In Spain, a country virtually without Jews, the extreme right (the old Carlist party) and the profascist circles frequently invoked the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, even before the outbreak of its Civil War, emphasized a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons against Spain. But it is also true that this antisemitism by and large remained a marginal phenomenon, just as fascism, German or Italian style, never became a decisive force under the rule of General Franco.
How important was antisemitism in Nazi doctrine, to what extent was it the decisive motive that made thousands and later millions of Germans join the Nazi party? Antisemitism played a very important role in Hitler’s propaganda right from the beginning, in Hitler’s Munich days, and those who followed him disliked or hated Jews. But his followers had many other motivations—extreme nationalism, revanchism following the defeat in the war and the imposition of the Versailles treaty, the fear of Bolshevism, the mystic belief in the unity of the people (Volksgemeinschaft), and, last but not least, the Hitler cult. It is next to impossible to establish with any kind of exactitude the specific weight of antisemitism, high as it was, in this mixture of motives. It is known that among Hitler’s very early followers in Munich, only about one-fifth said antisemitism was the most important single factor in their decision to join the movement. There is much reason to assume that when the Nazi party experienced its great upsurge in the late twenties and early thirties, considerations other than antisemitism—such as the impact of the world economic crisis and the failure of the Weimar republic—played the crucial role. But Hitler’s continual, relentless, and effective antisemitic propaganda fell on fertile ground.
HITLER HAD BECOME an antisemite during his early years in Vienna, where antisemitism was rampant at the time both in the mainstream of Austrian politics and as the ideology of a variety of racialist sects. Hitler was familiar with the ideas of the antisemitic sectarians and to a large extent shared them; he also understood that while antisemitism was of great potential importance in the mobilization of the masses, the traditional abstruse theories he had come to know in Vienna would be of little use in the political struggle.
Since the personality of Hitler was crucial to the rise of his party as well as to the policy of the Third Reich, it would be of great importance to know when he actually became a confirmed antisemite. But this cannot be established with any certainty; during his years in prewar Vienna some of his close associates were Jews or of Jewish extraction, and there are no indications that he was anti-Jewish at the time. In Mein Kampf he writes that he became an antisemite as the result of a spiritual crisis, but this is a cryptic reference and nothing is known about the specific reasons and circumstances of this crisis. All we know is that in later years his antisemitism became more and more radical. In the end, Albert Speer, who served as his adviser and minister, wrote that the hatred of the Jews was Hitler’s main driving force, perhaps even the only element that moved him.
A variety of factors made antisemitism politically very attractive in Germany when Hitler appeared on the Munich political scene after the war had ended. The general upheaval after World War One had opened the door to all kinds of extreme movements on the left and the right, the economic crisis culminated in hyperinflation, and Jews had leading roles in revolutionary Communist parties. This made it possible to attack the Jews as capitalist exploiters and war profiteers, as well as agents of Germany’s enemies, and as a mortal danger to all established values—family, fatherland, traditional culture. Paragraph 4 of the program of the Nazi party of 1920 stated that a Jew could not be a member of the community of the German people (Volksgenosse). The program also mentioned the removal of foreigners from Germany, though the details were left vague.
During the fight for power in Germany, Nazi storm troopers attacked Jews in the streets, but by and large physical attacks were rare and the propaganda was limited to threats that the day of reckoning with “Juda” was near. This quickly changed after Hitler seized power in January 1933. On April 1, a general one-day boycott of Jewish shops was declared, which was accompanied by street violence; during the months that followed a series of laws made it impossible for Jewish lawyers to practice and for Jewish physicians to treat patients covered by state insurance.
According to a law of April 1933, Jews were removed from state and local administrations; there were initially a few exceptions, such as World War One veterans, but these were quickly eliminated. Yet another law removed the great majority of Jewish students from universities and other schools. On a local level, villages and small towns were declared free of Jews (judenrein) or, at least, access to public places was denied to Jews. Among those arrested and sent to concentration camps during the first year of Nazi rule was a high percentage of Jews, and there was a steady stream of anti-Jewish propaganda in the media, which were all controlled by the state.
The segregation of the Jews was codified in the Nuremberg laws of 1935 (the laws of the protection of the German blood and honor and the Reich Citizenship law), which tried for the first time to establish who was to be considered a Jew—although this remained a matter of some discussion and interpretation for years. Marriages between Jews and non-Jews were banned, and extramarital sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews became a crime punishable with heavy prison sentences. During the years that followed, pressure—often physical—was exerted to force Jews out of the German economy. Many enterprises owned by Jews had been “Aryanized” during the first year of Nazi rule; their owners were usually forced to sell their businesses at a fraction of the real value.
If during the first two years of Nazi rule there had been a certain restraint with regard to the anti-Jewish policy in view of foreign political considerations—the regime did not yet feel secure enough—such restraint disappeared as Germany reasserted its position in Europe, rearmed in contravention of the Versailles peace treaty, and left the League of Nations. The only interruption in this process of radicalization were the early months of 1936 when, in preparation for the Berlin Olympic Games, Nazi Germany tried to present to the outside world and the many visitors a face of normalcy. Almost immediately after the games, however, discussion began on ways and means to intensify the pressure on the Jews and to force Jewish emigration which, as the Nazis saw it, did not proceed fast enough. The fact that emigrants from Germany could as a rule take with them only a paltry sum of money did not help; but the Nazis were not willing to make any concessions in this respect and, on the contrary, emigrants had to pay a special high tax (Reichsfluchtsteuer). In 1938 every male Jew was given the additional first name of Israel, and every Jewish woman, Sarah. These names appeared on passports together with the capital letter “J”; the measure made it more difficult for Jews to obtain visas to foreign countries. According to rough estimates, Jewish assets in Germany were halved between 1933 and early 1938—from 12 billion to 6 billion reichsmarks.
By and large, anti-Jewish measures in Germany had been gradual—even in early 1938 there were still a few Jewish students in German schools and Jewish physicians treating non-Jewish patients—practices that were totally ended only in July 1938. But in Austria, occupied by the Nazis in early 1938, anti-Jewish measures were far more rapidly (and brutally) carried out, with the result that emigration of Austrian Jews in the eighteen months that remained until the outbreak of World War Two proceeded far more quickly than in Germany.
Anti-Jewish persecution quickened and became more intense with the Kristallnacht pogrom (the Night of Broken Glass) on November 10–11, 1938. A junior German diplomat had been shot by a young Jew at the German embassy in Paris; the parents of the assassin had been expelled from Germany a few weeks earlier together with thousands of other Jews of Polish nationality. Since the Poles were not willing to receive them, they were dumped in the most primitive conditions in a no man’s land at the border at Neu Benschen.
The retaliatory pogrom in Germany was carried out by storm trooper units in coordination with the police and the fire brigades, which took care that the fires put to synagogues, Jewish schools, shops, and offices would not spread to non-Jewish property. Some 7,500 Jewish businesses were plundered or wrecked, and 30,000 male Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. In a series of further punitive laws following Kristallnacht, a collective fine of one billion marks was imposed on the German Jews (this was later increased to 1.7 billion); all Jewish commercial activities were prohibited; Jewish cultural institutions, publishing houses, and communal newspapers were closed. Taken together, these measures meant the dispossession of German Jewry and the end of communal and cultural life.
In a speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, on the anniversary of his seizure of power, Hitler said that in the event of another war, the Jewish race in Europe would be exterminated. The war that Hitler unleashed was still eight months away.
THE STORY OF THE SYSTEMATIC EXTERMINATION of European Jewry has been well documented and analyzed and for the purposes of this study is retold in only the briefest outline. That Hitler wanted the physical removal of the Jews from Germany and Europe was never a secret, even though there were no detailed plans until the outbreak of the war. Forced emigration did not provide a satisfactory solution as far as Hitler was concerned, and with the conquest of Poland and the addition of two million more Jews, a number of plans were discussed and dismissed—the deportation of German Jews to Poland and, following the attack against Russia in June 1941, of Polish Jews to the Soviet Union. For a short while, the deportation of Jews to Madagascar was debated and also the establishment of a Jewish reserve in Lublin, in southern Poland. The first deportations of German and Czech Jews to the east took place in 1940, but these were on a small scale.
As Germany expanded its territory during the war, many more Jews came under Nazi rule. A variety of steps were taken to prepare and facilitate a “final solution” of the Jewish question; the term was apparently first used in March 1941 in a memorandum by Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s deputy. Among these steps were forcing the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe into ghettos and ordering every Jew to wear a yellow star. While hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews had been killed even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, and more had died as a result of disease and starvation, systematic annihilation began with the activities of the special units (Einsatzgruppen) that were dispatched to Russia and the Ukraine to engage in the systematic murder, usually by shooting, of Jews at the rear of the German front. But these methods were found to be wanting, as the units could not kill a sufficient number of Jews quickly enough. The mass murder was extended to territories outside Russia in August and September 1941. In a conference at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, in January 1942, leading German officials from various ministries discussed the logistic and administrative problems connected with the “final solution.”
Who had given the order to carry out the mass murder of millions of Jews? No written order has ever been found and this led some historians to believe that there had been no such order, but that there had been an automatism of sorts, that deportations and mass executions were carried out following local initiatives, and that one thing led to another—once a certain number of Jews had been killed, the annihilation of the rest seemed only a question of time. But this contradicts the nonwritten evidence—a speech by Himmler on October 4, 1943, in the city of Poznan in which he spoke about the extermination of the Jews, and numerous postwar admissions by leading figures in the execution of the Final Solution. Orders had been given orally and often used circumlocutions (“final solution” and “transportation” instead of annihilations or killings were two of several euphemisms employed).
There has been much speculation whether an oral order was given by Hitler in late summer of 1941 or only two or three months later, but the timing is hardly a matter of paramount importance, and it could well be that there never will be a conclusive answer. Evidence confirms, however, that by November 1941 a massive wave of deportations of Jews from Central and Western Europe was under way that concentrated the Jews in major ghettos such as Warsaw, Lodz, Riga, and Minsk. The number of those who died during these transports, carried out in the most primitive winter conditions with hardly any food and water provided, was considerable. Some of the deportees were employed for a while in work for the German military effort and war-related industries in labor camps, but the majority of deportees were eventually shifted to the extermination camps, which were operational by the first half of 1942. Later transports were dispatched directly to these death factories; Chelmno, not far from Lodz, was the first such center but also one of the smallest. The big death factories were Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and, most important, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the gas chambers used Zyklon B poison gas and the corpses were burned in giant crematoria. In most death factories, those who arrived on the transports were immediately killed; in Auschwitz, which also housed a number of factories and had over thirty smaller labor camps nearby, there was a selection at arrival: the very young, the old, and the infirm were immediately sent to be gassed; the others were sent to work. But living and working conditions were such that the chances of surviving more than a few months were very small; those no longer able to work were dispatched to the gas chambers.
Hundreds of thousands of German and Polish Jews perished during the second half of 1942; the last major Polish ghettos were destroyed in 1943 and only Lodz survived for another year. There was some armed resistance in Warsaw, Bialystok, and a few other places, but since the arsenal of the resisters consisted only of improvised explosives and light arms, the Germans put down ghetto resistance without difficulty.
About a third of the Jews living in France at the time of the German invasion were deported and killed, while the others succeeded in hiding; nearly two-thirds of Belgium’s Jewish population were killed. In the Netherlands and in Greece the percentage of the Jews who perished was far higher, an estimated 75 to 85 percent. In most countries the Germans could count on the collaboration of the local administration in rounding up Jews and deporting them. Denmark and Bulgaria were the two major exceptions. Most of Danish Jewry was saved in the mass escape to Sweden in November 1943. In the case of Bulgaria, the government was willing to sacrifice the Jews living in occupied Thrace (formerly part of Greece) but not those who were Bulgarian citizens. Romania, which had a major Jewish community, was also different. Thousands were killed in pogroms inside Romania (such as at Jassy in 1941); more than two hundred thousand were deported to Transnistria, kept in camps and ghettos, where approximately two-thirds of them died from hunger and epidemic diseases.
Jews living in Italy or Italian-occupied territories were on the whole safe (with the exception of Croatia, where most Jews were killed by local fascists), until the fall of Mussolini and the German occupation of Italy in 1943. Given the late date and the relatively small number of Italian Jews who had remained in Italy (over seven thousand had emigrated by 1941), the possibilities of successfully hiding were better there than in most other European countries.
Many Russian Jews had fled with the retreating Red Army in 1941–42; as the German army advanced into Russia, the hundreds of thousands who stayed behind, unable to flee or evacuate, were murdered at mass executions (as at Babi Yar), or herded into ghettos that were later liquidated.
According to the figures published by Richard Korherr, the chief SS statistician, most of European Jewry had been liquidated by 1943. The only major Jewish community remaining was the Hungarian one, and their turn came with the German invasion of Hungary in the summer of 1944. Hundreds of thousands were transported to Auschwitz and gassed there; a much smaller number was sent to forced labor in various German camps.
The deportation of small and very distant Jewish communities continued to the very end (for instance, the Jews of Rhodes and Kos in the Eastern Mediterranean in July and August 1944). Among those employed in the execution of the final solution were locals as well as Germans; the Hungarian Arrow Cross, Romanian legionnaires, and Ukrainian personnel acted sometimes in coordination with the Nazis, sometimes on their own initiative.
As the Soviet offensive reached Poland and East Germany, the death factories were hurriedly dismantled and the Nazis attempted to obliterate the traces of the mass murder. Thousands more survivors were killed or perished during the evacuation “death marches” from concentration camps such as Auschwitz toward West Germany. As a result of starvation and epidemics in Bergen-Belsen, which had become the main absorption camp during the last months of the war, only a few thousand people who had been forced to walk all the way from the east survived the experience.
All together between five and six million Jews were killed, the great majority of continental European Jewry. Only a tiny remnant of the Jews who had lived before the war in Central and Eastern Europe remained. The fact that wholly exact figures do not exist is not surprising, given the nature of war and the secrecy imposed on the Nazi SS and Einsatzgruppen operations. Nevertheless, reliable estimates have been assembled from census figures from before the war, Nazi documents, and statistical analysis.
According to reliable estimates, the numbers of Jews killed or perished in the Holocaust were 2.7 million in Poland, 2.1 million in the territories of the Soviet Union; 559,000 Hungarian Jews, 192,000 German and Austrian Jews, 143,000 from Czechoslovakia, 120,000 from Romania, 102,000 from the Netherlands, 58,000 from Greece, 51,000 from Yugoslavia, 29,000 from Belgium, 5,500 from Italy (Wolfgang Benz in Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2002).
When the war ended, European Jewry had effectively ceased to exist. It was the only one of Hitler’s promises he was able to keep.
What was known about the mass murder while it went on and what was the reaction of the outside world? While attempts were made to keep the killing a secret, so many people were involved one way or another that news about it reached the outside world through many channels within a short time, though the details became known only later on. Not only Jewish organizations but the Polish government in exile informed the allied governments throughout 1942, and there were protests issued in public speeches, solemn official declarations, and radio broadcasts.
Inside Germany and other European countries, the disappearance of hundreds of thousands was, of course, widely known; it was not widely known that most of the victims were gassed, but it was generally assumed that the Jews would perish and never return. Of those about to be deported, many committed suicide or tried to hide, despite the great odds of surviving in illegal circumstances. This was common knowledge even in small and isolated towns in Germany and demonstrates that there were few illusions about the fate of those deported. Initially there might have been such illusions, but news about the killing of those who left on the first transports dispelled them.
If most Jews still did not offer resistance, the reasons are obvious. The majority of those deported and gassed were elderly people, women, and little children; they had been weakened and starved and there was no hope of rescue. If millions of Soviet prisoners of war were killed without resistance, it was not surprising that Jewish civilians, with few exceptions, did not offer resistance.
The neutral countries in Europe, fearful of Nazi threats, refused to help and give shelter to those few able to cross their borders—until the tide of war had turned. The allies were in no position to extend help to the Jews during the initial phase of the war, when Hitler was victorious on all fronts. The situation changed after the siege of Stalingrad, the allied victory in North Africa, and the landing in Italy. Still, at first there was some disbelief, because the extent of the mass murder often exceeded the imagination of people living in democracies, who had only a faint understanding of Nazism and kindred movements. Frequently there were no great sympathies for the Jews and it was claimed that Jews were alarmists who exaggerated and engaged in spreading atrocity stories.
From 1943 on, much more could have been done not only by publishing the news about the Holocaust and threatening the perpetrators with post-conflict treatment as war criminals but also by interfering with the logistics of the mass murder; it ought to be recalled that the killing of Hungarian Jews and many thousands of others took place as late as 1944. The general assumption in both the West and East, however, was that the overall priority was to win the war and that no resources should be wasted for other purposes, such as helping to save civilians. With the victory over Hitler, this argument ran, European Jews too would be saved. The fact that by that time hardly anyone would be left to be saved was ignored.
In brief, the fate of the Jews, while not altogether dismissed, had low priority. It is quite possible that with only a minimal effort tens of thousands, if not more, could have been saved during the last two years of the war.
Last, there is the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which continues to preoccupy experts and the general public alike up to the present day. The annals of history are full of incidents of genocide from the Old Testament and the Koran to the slaughter in Rwanda in our time. Tribes and besieged cities were annihilated; there were mass killings of heretics such as the Albigensians in South France in the thirteenth century. In modern history such abominations have become very rare in Europe and less frequent elsewhere. The behavior of the Nazis and followers of Nazism in World War Two was a relapse into barbarism, and it is true that among the many civilians killed, the Jews were a minority.
Nevertheless, there were significant differences between the treatment of, for instance, the Armenians in World War One or the Romas and Sinti or homosexuals in World War Two. The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians was limited to the eastern parts of the Ottoman empire, while those living in Constantinople and other urban centers were not affected. The Nazis did not limit the final solution to Poland and Lithuania, leaving the Jews of Paris and Berlin and Vienna in peace. Thousands of gypsies were killed as Nazi policy considered them an inferior race, but again the treatment was selective. (Django Reinhardt, the famous jazz guitarist and a manouche or gypsy by origin, was invited to entertain officers and soldiers of the German army; it is unthinkable that Yehudi Menuhin would have been invited.) Some countries were little affected or not at all by persecutions of gypsies. Homosexuals were detained and kept in concentration camps but only a few were killed.
The Nazi murder of the Jews was total—not selective—and it was carried out systematically, following industrial organization and techniques. It was not a series of pogroms and somewhat spontaneous massacres, nor was there an escape for Jews. Jehovah’s Witnesses or Communists could gain their freedom from the concentration camps if they abjured their faith and promised to collaborate with the Nazis. As far as the Jews were concerned, their religious or political beliefs were wholly unimportant to the Nazis. The Jews were killed not because of what they did or thought but because they were Jews. In this respect the Holocaust was unique.