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

by Saul Friedlander

  Despite the information at his disposal, Burckhardt was opposed to any form of public ICRC protest, even very mildly formulated. This was also the position of the Swiss government, which had appointed Federal Councillor Philippe Etter to sit on the committee. And although at a plenary meeting on October 14, 1942, a majority of the members was in favor of a public declaration, Burckhardt and Etter blocked the initiative. Yet Burckhardt’s confirmation to the American consul in Geneva of the information sent by Riegner probably contributed to the steps that followed in Washington and in London.

  By November 1942, as further information about the German extermination campaign was accumulating in Washington, Welles had no choice but to tell Wise: “The reports received from Europe confirm and justify your deepest fears.”254 Within days the news became public in the United States, in England, in neutral countries, and in Palestine.

  In fact, since October 1942 information about the extermination had been spreading in Great Britain, and on October 29 a protest meeting chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the participation of British, Jewish, and Polish representatives took place at the Royal Albert Hall. A month later, on November 27, the Polish government-in-exile officially recognized the murder of the country’s Jews “along with Jews from other occupied countries who had been brought to Poland for this purpose.”

  On December 10 a detailed report about the mass exterminations in Poland was submitted to the Foreign Office by the Polish ambassador to London, Count Edward Raczynski. The total and systematic eradication of the Jewish population of Poland was once again confirmed. The information reached Churchill, who demanded additional details. At this point the diplomatic obfuscations both in London and in Washington finally stopped, and on December 14 Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden informed the cabinet of what was known about the fate of the Jews of Europe.255

  A few days beforehand, on December 8, Roosevelt had received a delegation of Jewish leaders. Although the half hour conversation was in and of itself of a rather perfunctory nature, Roosevelt clearly indicated that he knew what was happening: “The government of the United States,” he is quoted as saying, “is very well acquainted with most of the facts you are now bringing to our attention. Unfortunately, we have received confirmation from many sources…. Representatives of the United States government in Switzerland and other neutral countries have given us proof that confirms the horrors discussed by you.”256 Roosevelt also readily agreed to a public declaration.257 On December 17 all the Allied governments and the “Free French National Committee” solemnly announced that the Jews of Europe were being exterminated, vowing that “those responsible for these crimes would not escape retribution.”258

  In his diaries Goebbels dismissed the significance of the protests arising in London and Washington, but his instructions to the press demanded a sharp counterattack describing atrocities perpetrated by the Allies, “in order to get away from the unpleasant topic of the Jews.”259 Thus, for representatives of the German newspapers, the extermination was no longer denied but had to be downplayed as quickly as possible.

  In that respect Himmler had some problems of his own. On November 20 he passed on to Müller “a memorandum” written by Stephen Wise two months beforehand. Although the memorandum attached to Himmler’s letter has not been found, its date as such, what we know of Wise’s communications at the time, and Himmler’s response all imply that the president of the World Jewish Congress had used the information sent by the representative of the Association of Orthodox Rabbis in Switzerland, Isaac Sternbuch, to the president of Agudath Israel in New York, Jacob Rosenheim. According to this information, “the corpses of the murdered victims are used for the manufacture of soap and artificial fertilizer.”260 The Reichsführer was indignant about such calumny. He wanted Müller “to guarantee” that everywhere the corpses were either burned or buried and that “nowhere can something else happen with the bodies.”261

  XI

  On March 17, 1942, Gerhard Riegner and Richard Lichtheim were received by Monsignor Filippe Bernardini, the apostolic nuncio in Bern. Following the meeting, a lengthy memorandum about the fate of the European Jews in the countries under German rule or control was submitted to the Nuncio and, undoubtedly, sent by him to the Vatican. The report listed camps, ghettos and mass executions in considerable detail.262

  In fact, since the beginning of 1942, news about the extermination of the Jews were reaching the Vatican from the most diverse sources. As previously mentioned, in February 1942 German prelates were already informed about the mass murder of Jews in the Baltic countries. On March 9 Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican’s chargé d’affaires in Bratislava, sent a particularly ominous report. After having previously warned of the imminent beginning of the deportation from Slovakia to Poland and after stating in his March 9 telegram that the intervention with Tuka to have deportations postponed had failed, Burzio ended his communication with a sentence that has become an indelible part of the events: “The deportation of 80,000 people to Poland, at the mercy of the Germans, is equivalent to the condemnation of a majority to a certain death” [La deportazione di 80,000 persone in Polania alla merce’ dei tedeschi equivale condannare la gran parte a una morte sicura].263

  In May the Italian abbot Piero Scavizzi, who frequently traveled to Poland, officially with a hospital train but possibly on secret missions for the Vatican, sent the following report directly to Pius XII: “The struggle against the Jews is implacable and constantly intensifying, with deportations and mass executions. The massacre of the Jews in the Ukraine is by now nearly complete. In Poland and Germany they want to complete it also, with a system of murders.”264

  Among the messages that continued to arrive at the Vatican during the following months, one carried particular weight due to the standing of its author and his direct witnessing of the events: It was the letter sent on August 31, 1942, by the spiritual leader of the Uniate Catholic Church in Lwov, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyskyi. The letter’s importance could not have escaped the pope or Sheptyskyi’s friend at the Vatican, the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant. The metropolitan, although known for his personal friendship for Jews, did repeatedly condemn “Judeo-Bolshevism” in letters to the Vatican during the Soviet occupation of eastern Galicia and, like most nationalist Ukrainians, enthusiastically greeted the Germans when they entered eastern Poland.265 Thus the author’s credentials were impeccable. His letter was written after the deportation of some 50,000 Jews from Lwov.

  “Liberated by the German army from the Bolshevik yoke,” the metropolitan wrote, “we felt a certain relief…. [However], gradually the German [government] instituted a regime of truly unbelievable terror and corruption…. Now everybody agrees that the German regime is perhaps more evil and diabolic than the Bolshevik. For more than a year, not a day has passed without the most horrible crimes being committed. The Jews are the primary victims. In time, they began to kill Jews openly in the streets, in full view of the public. The number of Jews killed in our region has certainly surpassed 200,000.”266 Although the pope answered the metropolitan’s letter, not a single word addressed the Jewish issue. In the meantime the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto was known to all, and week after week the deportations from the West were carrying their loads of Jews to “unknown destinations,” by then well known to the Vatican.

  On September 26, 1942, the American minister to the Holy See, Myron C. Taylor, delivered a detailed note to Secretary of State Maglione: “The following was received from the Geneva Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine in a letter dated August 30, 1942. The office received the report from two reliable eyewitnesses (Aryans), one of whom came on August 14 from Poland. (1) Liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the Ghetto in groups and shot…. (2) These mass executions take place, not in Warsaw, but in especially prepared camps for the purpose, one of which is stated to be in Belzek…. (3) Jews deported from Germany, Belgium, Holla
nd, France and Slovakia are sent to be butchered, while Aryans deported to the East from Holland and France are genuinely used for work.” Taylor’s note ended as follows. “I should much appreciate it if Your Eminence could inform me whether the Vatican has any information that would tend to confirm the reports contained in this memorandum. If so, I should like to know whether the Holy Father has any suggestion as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities.”267

  The cardinal secretary of state’s answer was handed to the American chargé d’áffaires, Harold Tittman, who, on October 10, cabled the gist of it to Washington: “Holy See replied today to Mr. Taylor’s letter regarding the predicament of the Jews in Poland in an informal and unsigned statement handed me by the Cardinal Secretary of State. After thanking Ambassador Taylor for bringing the matter to the attention of the Holy See the statement says that reports of severe measures taken against non-Aryans have also reached the Holy See from other sources but that up to the present time it has not been possible to verify the accuracy thereof. However, the statement adds, it is well known that the Holy See is taking advantage of every opportunity offered in order to mitigate the suffering of non-Aryans.”268

  The British minister to the Vatican, Francis d’Arcy Osborne, confided his bitterness about the pope’s obstinate silence in private letters and in his diary: “The more I think of it,” he wrote in his diary on December 13, “the more I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand and, on the other, by the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation with the…possibilities of the bombardment of Rome.” A few days later Osborne wrote to the cardinal secretary of state that “instead of thinking of nothing but the bombing of Rome, the Vatican should consider its duties in respect of the unprecedented crime against humanity of Hitler’s campaign of extermination of the Jews.”269 The Vatican’s answer, as conveyed by Maglione, was brutal: “The pope could not condemn ‘particular atrocities’ or verify the numbers of Jews killed that had been reported by the Allies.”270

  In the Vatican’s view the pope did speak up in his Christmas Eve message of 1942. On page 24 of the twenty-six-page text, broadcast on “Radio Vatican,” the pontiff declared: “Humanity owes this vow to lead humanity back to divine law to hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or their race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” And Pius XII then added: “Humanity owes this vow to the thousands upon thousands of noncombatants—women, children, the sick and the aged; those whom the air war—and we have, from the outset, often denounced its horrors—has deprived, without distinction of life, possessions, health, homes, refuges and places of worship.”271

  Mussolini scoffed at the speech’s platitudes; Tittman and the Polish ambassador both expressed their disappointment to the pope; even the French ambassador was apparently perplexed.272 It seems that most German officials also missed the portent of the papal address: Ambassador Bergen, who, at the Vatican, followed every detail of Pius’s policy, did not refer to the speech at all. As for Goebbels, the master interpreter of any propaganda move, his opinion of the papal speech was entirely dismissive: “The Christmas speech of the pope is without any deep significance,” he noted on December 26. “It carries on in generalities that are received with complete lack of interest among the countries at war.”273 The only German document that interpreted the speech as an attack on the basic principles of National Socialist Germany and also on its persecution of Jews and Poles was an anonymous RSHA report, whose date is unclear, although it must have been drafted between December 25, 1942, and January 15, 1943, when it was addressed to the Foreign Ministry.274

  The pope was convinced that he had been well understood. According to Osborne’s January 5, 1943, report to London, the pontiff believed that his message “had satisfied all demands recently made on him to speak out.”275

  In early July 1942 Henry Montor, the president of the United Palestine Appeal in the United States, asked Lichtheim to send him a 1,500-word article reviewing “the position of Jews in Europe.” “I feel at present quite unable to write a ‘report,’” Lichtheim answered Montor on August 13, “a survey, something cool and clear and reasonable…. So I wrote not a survey but something more personal—an article, if you like—or an essay, not of 1,500 words, but of 4,000, giving more of my own feelings than of the ‘facts.’” The letter concluded with “all good wishes for the New Year to you and the happier Jews of ‘God’s own country.’” Lichtheim titled his essay “What Is Happening to the Jews of Europe”:

  “A letter has reached me from the United States, asking me ‘to review the position of Jews in Europe.’ This I cannot do because the Jews are today no more in a ‘position’ than the waters of a rapid rushing down into some canyon, or the dust of the desert lifted by a tornado and blown in all directions.

  “I cannot even tell you how many Jews there are at present in this or that town, in this or that country, because at the very moment of writing thousands of them are fleeing hither and thither, from Belgium and Holland to France (hoping to escape to Switzerland), from Germany—because deportation to Poland was imminent—to France and Belgium, where the same orders for deportation had just been issued. Trapped mice running in circles. They are fleeing from Slovakia to Hungary, from Croatia to Italy. At the same time, thousands are being shifted under Nazi supervision to forced labor camps in the country further east, while other thousands just arrived from Germany or Austria are thrown into the ghettos of Riga or Lublin.”

  As Lichtheim was writing his “essay,” information was reaching Allied and neutral countries from increasingly reliable sources about what was really happening to the European Jews, as we saw. And yet, even without indications about the extermination, Lichtheim’s letter conveyed his anguish in sentences that, decades later, can sear the reader’s mind: “I am bursting with facts,” he went on, “but I cannot tell them in an article of a few thousand words. I would have to write for years and years…. That means I really cannot tell you what has happened and is happening to five million persecuted Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Nobody will ever tell the story—a story of five million personal tragedies every one of which would fill a volume.”276

  CHAPTER VIII

  March 1943–October 1943

  “My dear little Daddy, bad news: After my aunt, it’s my turn to leave.” Thus began the hasty pencil-written card sent on February 12, 1943, from Drancy by seventeen-year-old Louise Jacobson to her father in Paris. Both Louise’s parents—divorced in 1939—were French Jews who had emigrated from Russia to Paris before World War I. Louise and her siblings were born in France and all were French citizens. Louise’s father was a master cabinetmaker; his small business had been “Aryanized,” and, like all French Jews (naturalized or not), he was waiting.

  Louise and her mother had been arrested in the fall of 1942, following an anonymous denunciation: They were not wearing their stars and supposedly were active communists. On a demand from the SD, French police officers searched their home and indeed discovered communist pamphlets (belonging in fact to Louise’s brother and brother-in-law, both prisoners of war). A neighbor must have seen Louise’s sister hiding the subversive literature under a stack of coal, in the cellar. While her mother remained in a Paris jail, Louise was transferred to Drancy in late 1942 and in February 1943, slated for deportation.

  “Never mind,” Louise went on. “I am in excellent spirits, like everybody else. You should not worry, Daddy. First, I am leaving in very good shape. This last week I have eaten very, very well. I got two packages by proxy, one from a friend who was just deported, the other from my aunt. Now your package arrived, exactly at the right moment.

  “I can see your face, my dear Daddy, and, that’s precisely why I would like you to have as much courage as I do…. You should send the news to the Vichy zone [to her sister, among others] but carefully. As
for Mother, it would probably be better if she knew nothing. It is entirely unnecessary that she be worried, mainly as I may well be back before she gets out of jail.

  “We leave tomorrow morning. I am with my friends, as many are leaving. I entrusted my watch and all my other belongings to decent people from my room. My daddy, I kiss you a hundred thousand times with all my strength. Be courageous and see you soon [Courage et à bientôt], your daughter Louise.”1

  On February 13, 1943, Louise left for Auschwitz in transport number 48 with one thousand other French Jews. A surviving female friend, a chemical engineer, went through the selection with her. “Tell them that you are a chemist,” Irma had whispered. When her turn arrived and she was asked about her profession, Louise declared: “Student”; she was sent to the left, to the gas chamber.2

  I

  Five months after Stalingrad, the last German attempt to regain the military initiative failed at the decisive battles of Kursk and Orel. From July 1943, the Soviet offensives determined the evolution of the war on the Eastern Front.3 Kiev was liberated on November 6, and in mid-January 1944 the German siege of Leningrad was definitively broken.

  In the meantime the remnants of the Afrika Korps had surrendered in Tunisia, and in July 1943, while the Germans were being battered on the Eastern Front, British and American forces landed in Sicily. Before the month was over the military disasters swept the Duce away. On July 24, 1943, a majority of the Fascist Grand Council voted a motion of no confidence in their own leader. On the twenty-fifth, the king briefly received Mussolini and informed him of his dismissal and his replacement by Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new head of the Italian government. As he left the king’s residence the Italian dictator was arrested. Without a single shot being fired, the fascist regime had collapsed. The former Duce was moved from Rome to the island of Ponza and finally imprisoned at Gran Sasso, in the Appenines. Although German paratroopers succeeded in liberating Hitler’s ally on September 12, and the Führer appointed him the head of a fascist puppet state in northern Italy (the “Italian Social Republic”), a broken and sick Mussolini regained neither popular acceptance nor power.