Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  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

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  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

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  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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  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

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  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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  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