Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  The Dutch police outdid German expectations: “The new Dutch police squadrons are performing splendidly as regards the Jewish question and are arresting Jews in the hundreds, day and night,” an obviously elated Rauter reported to Himmler on September 24.18 Indeed the Amsterdam police performed magnificently; and Sybren Tulp personally participated in every roundup.19 Secretary-General of the Interior Fredericks feebly tried to shield the municipal police from participating in the roundups, but in vain. Rauter insisted on the involvement of all Dutch police forces, and all took part.20 Dutch detectives were attached to the German Security Police. Moreover, in May 1942, a unit of “Voluntary Auxiliary Police” had been created, comprising some 2,000 men belonging either to the NSB “storm detachments” or to the Dutch SS.21 These local police collaborators vied with the Germans in sheer sadism and brutality; most of the spies who obtained handsome profits from denouncing Jews in hiding came from their ranks.22

  The German staff in charge of the “Final Solution” in Holland was small. According to Harster’s testimony in 1966, “Some 200 employees worked for Section IV [the Security Police] in the whole country.” The Jewish section at The Hague headquarters, under the command of Willi Zöpf, employed no more than thirty-six officials.23 In his computation Harster did not include the Amsterdam “annex” of Zöpf ’s IVB4 office. This “annex,” the Zentralstelle, headed by Willi Lages and Aus der Fünten, steadily grew in importance until, in July 1942, it was put in charge of organizing all the deportations from Amsterdam to Westerbork. By then its staff, partly German but mainly Dutch, had grown to about one hundred employees.24

  According to historian Louis de Jong, the Germans had informed the Jewish Council as early as March 1942 that Jews would be sent to labor camps in the East. The council believed that the deportees would be German Jews only and thus “took no action; it even refrained from warning those representatives of the German Jews with whom it was in touch.”25 It was shocked in late June when informed that Dutch Jews would be included in the deportations.26 Lages and Aus der Fünten then chose the usual method: Some Dutch Jews would not be sent away (for the time being), and the council was allowed to distribute exemption certificates that, quite naturally, offered the hope of reprieve. The Germans knew they could rely on the docility of the people not immediately threatened.

  The general secretary of the council, M. H. Bolle, established several categories of Jews (identified by numbers) and compiled the list of the 17,500 privileged ones whom the council could exempt: These Jews had special stamps affixed to their identity cards, the “Bolle stamps.” According to a member of the council, Gertrud van Tijn, when the first exemption stamps were issued, the scenes at the Jewish Council were quite indescribable. Doors were broken, the staff of the council was attacked, and the police had often to be called in…. The stamps quickly became an obsession with every Jew.”27 More often than not the decisions of the “exemptions’ committee” were influenced by favoritism and corruption.28

  “The Jews here are telling each other lovely stories: They say that the Germans are burying us alive or exterminating us with gas. But what is the point of repeating such things, even if they should be true?”29 This July 11 entry in Etty Hillesum’s diary shows that ominous rumors about “Poland” were circulating in Amsterdam as the deportations started; it also shows that neither Hillesum nor most of the other Jews really believed them. Etty had been advised to seek a job with the council as a possible way of escaping immediate danger. “My letter of application to the Jewish Council…has upset my cheerful yet deadly serious equilibrium,” she noted on July 14, 1942, “as if I had done something underhanded. Like crowding onto a small piece of wood adrift on an endless ocean after a shipwreck and then saving oneself by pushing others into the water and watching them drown. It is all so ugly. And I don’t think much of this particular crowd either [the council].”30 The next day she was hired as a typist at the Cultural Affairs department of the council; she became (briefly) one of the privileged Amsterdam Jews.

  A few days later Etty wrote the most concise and damning two sentences about what she perceived as the council’s overall behavior: “Nothing can ever atone for the fact, of course, that one section of the Jewish population is helping to transport the majority out of the country. History will pass judgment in due course.”31 On July 29, shortly after her guru and lover, Hans Spier, suddenly fell ill and died, Etty volunteered to work for the council at Westerbork.32

  Immediate deportation threatened foreign refugees such as the Franks. On July 5, Margot, Anne’s elder sister, received a summons to report to the assembly center. On the next day, assisted by the faithful Dutch couple Miep and Jan Gies, the Franks were on their way to a carefully prepared hiding place, an attic in the building where Otto Frank’s office was located. Margot and Miep left first, on bicycles. Anne made sure that her cat would be taken in by neighbors, and on July 6, at seven-thirty in the morning, the Franks left their home. “So there we were,” Anne noted on July 9, “Father, Mother, and I, walking in the pouring rain, each of us with a schoolbag and a shopping bag filled to the brim with the most varied assortment of items. The people on their way to work at that early hour gave us sympathetic looks; you could tell by their faces that they were sorry they couldn’t offer us some kind of transportation; the conspicuous yellow star spoke for itself.”33

  The relations between council members and Aus der Fünten seem to have been almost cordial at times, and the Hauptsturmführer did apparently convince David Cohen, council official Leo de Wolff, and others that he was fulfilling his task against his will.34 Jacob Presser believed that the SS officer’s protests were genuine, and yet, in his postwar history of the destruction of Dutch Jewry, he described an event in which he was involved, when Aus der Fünten—obsequiously attended by de Wolff—displayed prime sadism.

  On August 5, 1942, a hapless crowd of some 2,000 Jews had been kept overnight in the yard of the Zentralstelle. The following day, after a short interview, individuals would be waved to the left (reprieve) or to the right (Westerbork). Aus der Fünten intentionally kept the majority waiting almost to the end of the selection (five p.m.). Those who had not been interrogated by then were automatically sent to Westerbork: “The tension became unbearable in the afternoon,” Presser wrote. “There we were, hundreds of us, anxiously watching the clock.” At ten to five, at what turned out to be the last muster, the writer and his wife came face-to-face with Aus der Fünten, who looked at their papers, waved him to the left and then, turning to de Wolff, said: ‘She’s still very young.’ What de Wolff replied, I cannot say, but my wife was waved to the left as well. A moment later we were in the street with ordinary people and children playing…. Some 600 were sent to Westerbork and on.”35

  On September 18, 1942, at a special meeting of the council, both Cohen and Asscher expressed their belief that cooperation with the authorities was necessary. According to the minutes of the meeting, David Cohen affirmed that, “in his opinion, it was the bounden duty of community leaders to stay at their post; indeed it would be criminal to abandon the community in the hour of its greatest need. Moreover, it was imperative to keep at least the most important men back [in Amsterdam] for as long as possible.”36 At the end of that same meeting Cohen made a terse announcement: “Finally, the first report of a case of death in Auswitz [sic] is received by the meeting.”37

  While transports of Jews were leaving Amsterdam for Westerbork, Jews from the provinces were steadily being moved to Amsterdam. The Wessels family, who lived in the village of Oostvoorne, was transported to Amsterdam in October 1942 (the eldest son had already been deported to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz, in August); they remained in the city for almost a year. The younger son, Ben—whose letters to Oostvoorne friends have been saved—was sixteen in October 1942: He was first employed as a “courier” for the Jewish Council, then as an elevator boy in the building of the German police.

  One of Ben’s initial letters from Amsterdam indicates how thorou
ghly the Wehrmacht officer and the soldiers who arrested him in Oostvoorne took care of every small detail. “I guess you mustn’t mind the pencil writing,” Ben informed his friends on October 15, 1942. “My fountain pen was taken away…. My entire equipment with backpack and six woolen blankets is gone…. That pocket flashlight, the one with the battery they also took from us, there, opposite the bandstand in Oostvoorne. We were frisked completely, and whatever they could use, money, in fact everything, they took from us. That day, Mother had already been picked up in the afternoon. That night was frightful…. The family van Dijk [the only other Jewish family in Oostvoorne], we were with them, they are going on to Poland….”38

  Much of the outrage expressed by the Dutch population at the German persecution of the Jews during the first year of the occupation had turned into passivity by 1942. The Dutch government-in-exile did not exhort its countrymen to help the Jews when the deportations started, although on two occasions, at the end of June and in July 1942, “Radio Oranje” did broadcast information previously aired by the BBC about the exterminations in Poland. These reports did not make any deep impression on either the population or even the Jews. The fate of Polish Jews was one thing; the fate of the Jews of Holland quite another; this was common belief even among the leaders of the council.39

  Two young Dutch political prisoners who had witnessed the earliest gassings in Auschwitz (those of Russian prisoners and small groups of Jews) were released from the camp and, on their return to Holland, attempted to convince the leadership of the Dutch churches of what they saw: to no avail.40 Letters sent home by members of the Dutch Waffen SS described in detail and with pride their participation in the massacre of Jews in the Ukraine, but the information was either taken in stride or, as one of the authors intimated, considered as a portent of things to come once men like himself returned to the home country.41

  Some protests against the deportations nonetheless did take place. On July 11 all major church leaders signed a letter addressed to Seyss-Inquart. The Germans tried conciliation first: They promised exemptions for some baptized Jews (but not for the Jews baptized after the occupation of the country). At first the churches did not give in: The main Protestant church (Herformde Kerk) proposed having the letter publicly read on Sunday, July 26. The Catholic and Calvinist church leaders agreed. When the Germans threatened retaliation, the Protestant leadership wavered; the Catholic bishops, led by the archbishop of Utrecht, Jan de Jong, decided to proceed nonetheless, and they did. In retaliation, during the night of August 1–2, the Germans arrested most Catholic Jews and sent them to Westerbork. According to Harster’s postwar testimony, Seyss-Inquart’s retaliation stemmed from the fact that the bishops had protested against the deportation of all Jews, not that of converted Jews only. Ninety-two Catholic Jews were ultimately deported to Auschwitz, among them the philosopher, Carmelite nun, and future Catholic saint, Edith Stein.42

  As months went by, the Germans had every reason to be satisfied. On November 16, Bene, Ribbentrop’s representative in The Hague, sent a general report to the Wilhelmstrasse: “The deportation has been going on without difficulties and incidents…. The Dutch population has gotten used to the deportation of the Jews. They are making no trouble whatsoever. Reports from Rauschwitz [sic] camp sound favorable. Therefore the Jews have abandoned their doubts and more or less voluntarily come to the collecting points.”43

  Generally speaking Bene wasn’t wrong, as we know, although some details of the overall picture manifestly escaped him, as they escaped Harster’s and Tulp’s men. Soon after the beginning of the deportations, children were moved from the main assembly and processing hall, the Hollandsche Schouwburg (renamed Joodsche Schouwburg), to an annex on the opposite side of the same street (the Crèche), a child-care center mainly for working-class families. At that point two members of the Jewish Council, Walter Süskind and Felix Halvestad succeeded in gaining access to some of the children’s files and destroying them.44 Thus bereft of administrative identity, children were sporadically smuggled out of the Crèche with the help of the Dutch woman director, Henriette Rodriguez-Pimental; they were passed on to various clandestine networks that usually succeeded in finding safe places with Dutch families.45 Hundreds of children—possibly up to one thousand—were saved in this way.46

  Jewish adults encountered much greater difficulties in hiding among the population. The refusals (or the inaction) they encountered could have resulted from fear, distaste for Jews, traditional anti-Semitism and “civic obedience,” although—regarding the last—when in the spring of 1943, the Germans used utter brutality against any assistance to Dutch men hiding from work in the Reich, the readiness for illegal initiatives grew all around. From the outset, however, small networks of people who knew and trusted one another and mostly shared a common religious background (Calvinist and Catholic) did actively help Jews, notwithstanding the risks. The limited scope of the grassroots actions has been attributed to the absence of hands-on leadership from the hierarchy of all Dutch Christian churches, despite some of the courageous protests, particularly of Archbishop de Jong.47

  At the beginning of 1943 the Germans started rounding up the approximately eight thousand Jewish patients in various hospitals, and among them the psychiatric inmates of Het Apeldoornse Bos. The raid on this largest Jewish mental institution was conducted on the night of January 21 by a Schutzpolizei unit under the personal command of Aus der Fünten. The patients were ferociously beaten and pushed into trucks. “I saw them place a row of patients,” an eyewitness declared, “many of them older women, on mattresses at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human bodies on top of them. So crammed were these trucks that the Germans had a hard job to put up the tail-boards.”48 The trucks carried the patients to the cordoned-off Apeldoorn railway station.

  According to the station master’s report, when he tried to activate the ventilation system in the wagons, the Germans closed them. The report then continued: “I remember the case of a girl of twenty to twenty-five, whose arms were pinioned [in a straightjacket] but who was otherwise stark naked…. Blinded by the light that was flashed in her face, the girl ran, fell on her face and could not, of course, use her arms to break the fall. She crashed down with a thud…. In general, the loading was done without great violence. The ghastly thing was that when the wagons had to be closed, the patients refused to take their fingers away. They simply would not listen to us and in the end the Germans lost patience. The result was a brutal and inhuman spectacle.”49 Some fifty (Jewish) nurses accompanied the transport.

  A Dutch Jew described the arrival of the transport in Auschwitz: “It was one of the most horrible transports from Holland that I saw. Many of the patients tried to break through the barrier and were shot dead. The remainder were gassed immediately.”50 There are diverging accounts of the fate of the nurses, none of whom survived. Some declare that they were sent to the camp; others that they were gassed; according to another witness “some of them were thrown into a pit, doused with gasoline, and burned alive.”51 Aus der Fünten had promised them that they could return immediately after the trip or work in the East in a thoroughly modern mental institution.52

  In early 1943 the Germans established the Vught labor camp, which supposedly would allow Jews to remain as forced laborers in Holland. It was a sophisticated “legal” option to avoid deportation; the council strongly encouraged it, and the obedient Dutch Jews went along. Of course it was one further German scam, and the Vught inmates were systematically transferred to Westerbork or, on several occasions, deported directly to the East.53

  Between July 1942 and February 1943, fifty-two transports carrying 46,455 Jews left Westerbork for Auschwitz. Some 3,500 able-bodied men were redirected to the hydrogenation plant in Blechhammer (later Auschwitz III–Monowitz and Gross Rosen). Of the workers’ group, 181 men survived the war; of the remaining 42,915 from the 1942 and early 1943 transports, 85 remained alive.54 The deportations went on.

  III

>   “The papers announce new measures against the Jews,” Jacques Biélinky recorded on July 15, 1942: “They are forbidden access to restaurants, coffeehouses, movie theaters, theaters, concert halls, music halls, pools, beaches, museums, libraries, exhibitions, castles, historical monuments, sports events, races, parks, camping sites and even phone booths, fairs, etc. Rumor has it that Jewish men and women between ages eighteen and forty-five will be sent to forced labor in Germany.”55 That same day the roundups of “stateless” Jews started in the provinces of the occupied zone, on the eve of the operation in Paris.

  According to a July 15 report from the police chief of the Loire-Inférieure, French gendarmes were accompanying German soldiers on their way to arrest Jews in the department; according to another report of the same day, the French authorities were providing police officers to guard fifty-four Jews on the request of the SS chief of Saint-Nazaire. Jews arrested throughout the west of the country—among them some two hundred arrested in Tours, again on July 15—were taken to an assembly point in Angers (some were selected from French camps in the region) and, a few days later, a train carried 824 of them directly from Angers to Auschwitz.56

  On July 16, at 4:00 a.m., the Germano-French roundup of 27,000 “stateless” Jews living in the capital and its suburbs began. The index cards prepared by the French police had become essential: 25,334 cards were ready for Paris, and 2,027 for the immediate suburbs.57 Every technical detail had been jointly prepared by French and German officials in their meetings on July 7 and 11. On the sixteenth fifty municipal buses were ready, and so were 4,500 French policemen.58 No German units participated in the arrests. The manhunt received a code name: Vent printanier (Spring Wind).