yellow star and, at the beginning of 1942, labour camps for Jews were set up, in
which ultimately some 15,000 people were held. 265
At the beginning of 1941, the first deportations of Dutch Jews had already
begun, at first (comparable to the situation in France at the end of the year) as
‘a reprisal’ for Dutch acts of resistance. By the end of the year 850 Dutch Jews had
been deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where they had been subjected
to the most extreme hard labour; none was to survive to the end of the war. 266
Immediately after the RSHA’s decision in June 1942 to deport 40,000 Jews from
the Netherlands, preparations got under way. The representative of the Foreign
Ministry in the occupied Netherlands, Otto Bene, reported to Berlin early in July
1942 that the deportation of around 25,000 stateless Jews from the Netherlands
would begin in mid-July and take about four months; after that the deportation of
Jews with Dutch citizenship would begin. 267
As early as June 1942 the Central Office for Jewish emigration had informed the
chairman of the Dutch Jewish council of an imminent ‘police labour deployment’
of the Dutch Jews in Germany. 268 After the freedom of movement of the Jews had been greatly restricted by a series of regulations at the end of June, on 5 July 4,000
362
Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
Jews, most of them living in Amsterdam, were summoned to report to Westerbork
transit camp to join the ‘labour deployment’. Only some of those summoned
actually appeared, but the occupation authorities managed to exert so much
pressure that enough Jews arrived in Westerbork to assemble the first two
transports to Auschwitz carrying over 2,000 Jewish men.
By 12 December, another forty transports were dispatched from Westerbork to
Auschwitz, so that by the end of the year about 38,000 people had been deported
and the quota announced by Eichmann in June had hence almost been reached.
As with the French transports, from the end of August many of the trains were
halted at Kosel in Silesia, where men who were ‘fit for work’ were separated from
the rest.
In no other country under German occupation did the Security Police manage
to carry out the arrests and deportations so smoothly as in the Netherlands.
Tellingly, the deportation victims were not generally captured in raids or ‘actions’,
but arrested in their homes. The relatively calm progression of the arrests and the
continuous course of the deportations may be explained by a series of factors that
played into the hands of the Germans: the relatively strong position of the SS and
radical Party forces in the occupation authorities, the comprehensive registration
of Jews living in the Netherlands and their relatively pronounced trust in the
measures of the authorities, the cooperative stance of the Dutch authorities and
parts of the police apparatus, an ingenious system of ‘exemptions’ from the
deportations that left the majority of Jews in relative safety at first, the fact that
a relatively large number of people had always been put in camps, the weakness of
the Dutch resistance, and other factors. 269
There were still about 52,000 Jews in Belgium at the end of 1940, only about
10 per cent of whom were Belgian citizens. 270 From October 1940, and more intensively in the spring of 1941, the German military administration introduced
the measures against the Jews that were customary in German occupied territory:
definition, registration, dismissal from state employment, and ‘Aryanization’; the
formation of a ‘Jewish council’, the Association des Juifs en Belgique. 271
In comparison with similar steps in the Netherlands, these measures were
carried out much more slowly and inefficiently, not least because the German
Security Police in Belgium was given comparatively little room to manoeuvre by
the military administration, and the Belgian administrative apparatus was not so
associated with the anti-Jewish measures. There was also the fact that the Jews
living in Belgium, precisely because of their relatively low level of integration,
mistrusted the measures of the authorities and tried to elude them, and the fact
that in Belgium both the national resistance organization, which had come into
being relatively early, and specifically Jewish resistance groups could provide
greater support than in the Netherlands. 272
After the RSHA’s decision in June 1942 to deport 10,000 Jews from Belgium to
the extermination camps, the initial focus was upon Jews who had become
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
363
stateless. 273 In July 1942 Jews who were unemployed and who did not have Belgian citizenship were summoned to report to the collection camp of Malines for ‘labour
deployment in the East’. When this did not occur on the desired scale, raids were
carried out. 274
The first transport left Malines on 4 August 1942, heading for Auschwitz. By the
end of October 1942, a total of sixteen further transports had followed, so that the
quota of 10,000 people specified by the RSHA was already reached by 15 September
and the Security Police set themselves a goal of 20,000 deportees by the end of
1942. 275 By the end of 1942, 16,882 Jews had been deported from Belgium, all the foreign or stateless Jews. As in the case of the deportations from France and the
Netherlands, in a series of transports workers were taken off the trains at Kosel in
Silesia.
After the first deportations of 6,000 hostages from France the deportations in
the second half of 1942 were extended to the whole of the occupied Western
territories and set in motion on a large scale. The following overview may further
clarify this development:
After Heydrich’s statement in April 1942 that a deportation of a total of ‘half a
million’ Jews from the Protectorate, Slovakia, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands
was taking place, in June the RSHA had established concrete deportation quotas
until the end of the year for France (100,000), the Netherlands (15,000), and
Belgium (10,000). In July these numbers had been altered, because of difficulties
arising in France, to 40,000 each for France and the Netherlands and 10,000 for
Belgium.
In July the order was issued that in the next four months 25,000 stateless Jews
were to be deported from the Netherlands. In mid-December 38,000 people
overall were to be deported. In Belgium the originally specified quota of 10,000
people had already been filled in September, and towards the end of the year
considerably exceeded with far more than 16,000 victims. At the end of August
Eichmann pursued the intention of deporting a total of 75,000 people from France
by the end of October, and all ‘foreign’ Jews by the end of June 1943. In fact, by the
end of the year 42,000 people had been deported from France.
Efforts to Involve Germany’s Allies in the
Deportation Programme (Summer 1942)
After the deportations from Central and Western Europe to the extermination
camps had begun in July 1942, the RSHA immediately set about involving other
German allies in the murder programme above all in South-Eastern Europe, apart
from Slovakia, which had agreed to
the deportation of Jews living in the country.
The Foreign Ministry was heavily involved in this policy.
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
As a general rule the Germans initially—as a first step to the involvement of the
allies in the extermination programme—tried to win the consent of the countries
in question to the deportation of their Jewish citizens living in the Reich or in the
occupied territories. The governments of Romania, Croatia, and Slovakia had
already declared their agreement with this process at the end of 1941. 276
A second batch of such requests followed in the summer of 1942. In July, the
Foreign Ministry managed to win the consent of the Bulgarian government to
the deportation of its Jews living in the Reich by responding to a suggestion from
the Bulgarian Foreign Minister Popoff in 1941 that henceforth all Jews with
European citizenship should be treated the same. 277 The deportation of Bulgarian Jews was quickly extended to the occupied Western territories. 278 In August 1942
the Romanian government again expressly declared its agreement with the inclu-
sion of the country’s Jews in the German deportation measures. The Romanian
government had in fact already given such a declaration in November 1941, but in
the meantime it had become concerned about the possible worse treatment of
Romanian Jews in comparison with Hungarian Jews in a similar position. How-
ever, the German Foreign Ministry had been able to allay these concerns. 279
In contrast, in August 1942 the Hungarian government resisted the German
deportation plan. In response, the Germans asked Hungary to withdraw Jews of
Hungarian citizenship from the whole of the German sphere of influence by the
end of the year; this deadline was later extended a number of times. 280
Also, in August 1942, the Foreign Ministry approached the Italian government
with a request either to agree to include the Italian Jews in Germany’s Jewish
persecution measures, or to withdraw this group of people from the occupied
Western territories by the end of the year. 281 In their reply, on 10 October 1942, the Italians made it clear that they had to protect Jews with Italian citizenship in the
Mediterranean area because of their important economic role for reasons of
national interest. Involvement in the German deportation programme in the
occupied Western territories would weaken this position and must therefore be
rejected. 282
The willingness on the part of the allies to consent to the inclusion of their Jews
living in Germany or in the occupied territories in the German deportation
programme was to smooth the way to bringing about a general agreement on
the part of the allies to hand over their Jews. As early as the end of 1941, in the
‘wishes and suggestions’ that he had noted as part of the preparations for the
Wannsee Conference, the desk officer for Jewish affairs in the Foreign Ministry
had stressed to the RSHA that they should ‘express their willingness to the
Romanian, Slovakian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Hungarian governments to evacu-
ate to the East the Jews living in those countries as well.’283
While the deportation of the Slovakian Jews had already begun in the spring
of 1942, the Germans did not develop any initiatives towards the other four
countries named (Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Croatia) during the next six
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
365
months. On the contrary, a suggestion by the Foreign Ministry’s Jewish desk
officer, Rademacher, in May 1942, concerning the ‘Abtransport’ (transporting
away) of the Croatian Jews received a negative response from the RSHA284 and in June 1942 the German embassy in Sofia received the instruction to give a
basically positive response to any wishes by the Bulgarians concerning the de-
portation of their Jews, but to point out that this could not occur in the course of
the current year. 285 In July 1942, however, this picture would fundamentally change.
In July 1942 the German police attaché in Zagreb was commissioned by the
RSHA to prepare the ‘resettlement’ of the Croatian Jews to the ‘German Eastern
territories’. At this point over half of the more than 30,000 Jews living in the
country had been interned in camps by the Ustasha regime. 286
The Croatian government formed after the occupation of the country, which
was based on the Fascist Ustasha movement, had already passed its first anti-
Jewish law on 30 April 1941 according to which the approximately 30,000 Jews in
the country were defined on the model of the Nuremberg Laws. A wave of anti-
Jewish legislation followed on the German model: ‘mixed marriages’ were
forbidden, the Jews were to be labelled, their property confiscated. This policy
must be seen in the context of the policy of the Ustasha regime to create a
homogeneous Croatian nation and systematically exclude Serbs (who consti-
tuted 30 per cent of the population), Jews, and Gypsies from citizens’ rights.
This mass murder of the Jews must in turn be seen in the context of the mass
murders of Serbs and Gypsies. A few weeks after the foundation of the Ustasha
state, the displacement of Serbs resident in Croatia to German-occupied Serbia
began, while the Ustasha were already organizing various massacres. After Hitler
had encouraged the new Croatian head of state, Ante Pavelic, in his policy of
‘ethnic corridor cleansing’ on his visit to Berlin, 287 and in a German-Croatian treaty an exchange of 170,000 Slovenians from Serbia had been agreed against the
corresponding number of Serbs from Croatia, a massive wave of displacement and
flight began, in the course of which possibly as many as 200,000 Serbs reached
Croatia. Around 200,000 Serbs were forced to convert to Catholicism. In addition
to this, however, Ustasha units began large-scale massacres of Serbs and interned
Serbs in concentration camps built on the German model, in which a large
number were murdered. Most of the prisoners were interned in the notorious
camp complex at Jasenovac. The number of victims in this camp alone is
estimated as 60,000–80,000; we may assume a total number of far more than
200,000 victims. 288
In parallel with the anti-Serbian policy, the persecution of the 30,000 to 40,000
Jews in Croatia also escalated. From May 1941 onwards more than half of the
Jewish population was interned in such camps; the majority of the Jewish
prisoners lost their lives in these camps. A large number of the Jewish prisoners
were executed immediately after entering the camp; the survivors were exposed to
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
constant ‘murder actions’ by the guards or lost their lives because of the terrible
conditions or as the result of epidemics. 289
On 31 July 1942 all Croatian Jews were summoned for registration. In those
parts of Croatia occupied by German troops (there was also an Italian zone of
occupation) further Jews were arrested in addition to the large number already
interned. On 13 August the first deportation train left Zagreb for Auschwitz
containing 1,200 Croatian Jews. 290 Seven railway transports to Auschwitz had already been specified for the month of August; 291 in fact four trains can be shown
to have arrived in Auschwitz that month. 292 Thus, in the summer of 1942, 4,927
Jews were deported from Croatia and murdered in Auschwitz almost without
exception. 293
In July 1942, German efforts to extend the deportations were also directed
towards Romania. Romania had taken an active part in the German extermination
policy towards the Jews in the newly conquered Eastern territories. In the newly
conquered territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina an estimated 50,000 people lost
their lives in massacres; the surviving Jewish population of that territory, around
150,000 Jews, had been deported to the area between Dnjestr and Bug, where at
least 65,000 more people perished through hunger, epidemics, and shootings; in
the Ukraine Romanian forces had also taken an active part in the German
extermination policy, particularly in the massacre in Odessa. 294
The approximately 320,000 Jews living in Romania itself had been subject to
constantly tightened anti-Semitic special legislation since 1938. From early 1942
onwards they were registered by a newly created compulsory body, the Centrala
Evreilor din Romania. 295 The deportation of 60,000 Jewish men to Bessarabia in August 1941 as forced labourers had only failed because of a German intervention
that sought at all costs to prevent further mass deportations to German-occupied
Ukraine while the war was going on. 296
In July 1942 the adviser on ‘Jewish questions’ at the German embassy in
Bucharest, Gustav Richter, and the deputy Prime Minister, Mihai Antonescu,
agreed to the deportation of the Romanian Jews authorized by Marshal Anto-
nescu, which was to begin around 10 September 1942. The transports were to go to
the district of Lublin where, as the German plenipotentiary Manfred Killinger
reported to the Foreign Ministry ‘the part that was fit for work will be deployed
in a work programme, and the rest subjected to special treatment’. 297 The immediately imminent deportations were already being publicly announced. 298
However, the fact that this agreement was reached behind the back of the
Foreign Ministry greatly annoyed Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. He demanded
that the director of the German department, Martin Luther, explain his previous
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