In similar fashion, the Hungarian government, which had nationalized Jewish-owned land and begun discussions with the German government about the deportation of Hungarian Jews, also began finding excuses for failing to co-operate with the increasingly insistent demands of the German Foreign Office. In October 1942 the Hungarian Regent and effective Head of State, Mikl’s H’rthy, and his Prime Minister, Mikl’s Kall’y, rejected a German request to introduce the wearing of the Jewish star for Hungarian Jews. While Hitler did not want to offend either Romania or Bulgaria, he became increasingly irritated with the failure of Hungary to deliver up its Jewish population of 800,000 for extermination and the confiscation of its assets. In addition, H’rthy was now pulling troops out of the German-led army on the Eastern Front, in the belief that Germany was on the way to losing the war. On 16 and 17 April 1943, therefore, Hitler met with H’rthy near Salzburg, in the presence of Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, to put some pressure on him on both these issues. Among other things, H’rthy made it clear during the first day’s discussion that any Hungarian solution of the ‘Jewish question’ would have to take the specific circumstances of Hungary into account. Dismayed by his reluctance to accede to their request, Hitler and Ribbentrop returned to the topic on the second day. Both sides now dropped the diplomatic circumlocutions. According to the interpreter’s minutes, Ribbentrop told H’rthy ‘that the Jews must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other way.’ Hitler weighed in with a lengthier series of arguments:
Where the Jews were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. They were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews there didn’t want to work, they were shot. If they couldn’t work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. This was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one any more spare the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.198
But H’rthy would not budge. He would soon pay the price for his intransigence.
The small and predominantly agricultural Catholic state of Slovakia, set up as an autonomous state after the Munich agreement in 1938, had been led since March 1939, when it had become nominally independent, by the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso as President and the extreme nationalist law professor Vojtech Tuka as Minister-President. The radical wing of the nationalist movement, which Tuka led, had moved steadily closer to National Socialism, and was able to rely on a paramilitary force known as the Hlinka Guard, named after the priest Andrej Hlinka, who had long encouraged the growth of Slovakian nationalism. At a meeting with Hitler on 28 July 1940, Tiso, Tuka and Interior Minister Mach had been told to put in place legislation to deal with Slovakia’s small Jewish minority - 80,000 people, making up 3.3 per cent of the country’s total population. They agreed to the appointment of the German SS officer Dieter Wisliceny as their official adviser on Jewish questions, and soon after his arrival in the Slovakian capital Bratislava, the government began a comprehensive programme of expropriating the Jewish population, driving them out of economic life, removing their civil rights and drafting them into forced labour schemes. Slovakian Jews were forced to wear the Jewish star, just as it was being introduced in the Reich. Within just a few months, the country’s Jewish population had largely been reduced to a state of destitution. Responding early in 1942 to a request from the German government for 20,000 Slovakian workers for the German arms industry, the government offered 20,000 Jewish workers instead. The matter thus passed into the hands of Eichmann, who decided they could be used to build the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He also offered to take their families, or in other words, to ensure, in a manner that was to become customary, that the men who could work would be drafted into labour schemes on arrival at the camp, and anyone who could not work would be taken straight to the gas chamber. On 26 March 1942, 999 young Slovakian Jewish women were loaded with blows and curses on to cattle-trucks by the Hlinka Guard, assisted by local ethnic German units, and taken to Auschwitz. More men, women and children swiftly followed. Unusually, the Slovakian government paid 500 Reichsmarks to the German authorities for each ‘unproductive’ Jew to cover the costs of transportation and as compensation for being allowed to keep their property. Eichmann assured the Slovakians that none of the deportees would ever return. And indeed by the end of June 1942 some 52,000 Slovakian Jews, well over half the country’s entire Jewish population, had been deported, the vast majority to Auschwitz; even those spared to work on construction projects at Birkenau did not live very long.199
By this time, however, the deportations, undertaken, it must be remembered, on the initiative of the Slovakian government itself, not in response to any request issued by the Germans, were running into trouble. Distressing and violent scenes at the railway yards, as Jewish deportees were beaten up by the Hlinka Guard, were causing mounting protests from ordinary Slovakians, voiced in addition by some leading churchmen, such as Bishop Pavol Jantausch, who demanded that the Jews be treated humanely. The formal position of the Slovakian Catholic Church was somewhat more ambivalent, since it coupled a demand for the Jews’ civil rights to be respected with an indictment of their alleged responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Cross. The Vatican called in the Slovakian ambassador twice to inquire privately what was going on, an intervention that, for all its moderation, caused Tiso, who after all was still a priest in holy orders, to have second thoughts about the programme. More important by far was the initiative of a group of still-wealthy Slovakian Jewish community leaders, who systematically bribed key Slovakian officials to hand out exemption certificates. By 26 June 1942 the German ambassador in Bratislava was complaining that 35,000 of these had been issued, as a result of which there were virtually no more Jews left to be deported. At the German Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizs̈cker responded by telling the ambassador to remind Tiso that ‘Slovakia’s co-operation in the Jewish question up to now has been greatly appreciated’ and that the halting of the deportations would thus cause some surprise. Nevertheless, apart from a brief and temporary resumption in September 1942, the Slovakian deportations were now brought to an end. In April 1943, when Tuka threatened to resume them, he was forced to backtrack by public protests, especially from the Church, which by this time had been convinced of the fate that awaited the deportees. Pressure from the Germans, including a direct confrontation between Hitler and Tiso on 22 April 1943, remained without effect.200 However, in 1944 the Slovakian resistance movement, which had been growing in strength and determination, made a disastrous attempt to overthrow Tiso, and was brutally suppressed by the Hlinka Guard aided by German troops. At this point, Tiso ordered the deportation of the country’s remaining Jews, some of whom were sent to Sachsenhausen and Theresienstadt, but most to Auschwitz.201
V
All over occupied Europe, resistance movements were beginning to gain headway by 1943, and in some parts well before that. In France, the labour draft led to the formation of the Maquis, resistance groups so named because they originally emerged in the eponymous brushwood of Corsica. Resisters were sometimes advised, trained and supplied by British agents of the Special Operations Executive. They undermined support for the German occupiers by distributing propaganda leaflets and spreading rumours, encouraging various forms of non-cooperation all the way up to strikes. They attacked individual German soldiers or significant local collaborators, including the police, and increasingly engaged in acts of sabotage and subversion. Early in 1944, Joseph Darnand, head of the Vichy militia, replaced Ren’ Bousquet as Chief of police, while Philippe Henriot, for many years a well-known right-wing extremist, took over the management of the regime’s propaganda. Henriot began pumping out virulently antisemitic literature, branding the rapidly growing French resistance as a Jewish conspiracy again
st France. At the same time, Darnand’s police tortured and murdered numerous prominent Jews and resistance fighters. The resistance responded in June 1944 by assassinating Henriot.202 German military authorities in France operated a policy of reprisal, arresting and shooting ‘hostages’. In early June 1944 the military ordered an escalation of reprisals, which the Second SS Tank Division took to mean implementing the kind of policy that had long been standard in the east. On 10 June 1944 its troops entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, shot all the male inhabitants, and herded the women and children into the church, which they set alight, burning them all alive. Altogether 642 villagers perished in the massacre. Supposedly a reprisal for recently committed, violent attacks on German troops, it took place in a community which in fact was completely unconnected with the resistance. Its only effect was to send a wave of revulsion through France and alienate people still further from the German occupation.203
As the resistance spread, it worked in ever closer co-operation with regular Allied forces. At the same time, however, resistance movements almost everywhere were deeply divided amongst themselves. Stalin’s injunction to Communists to form partisan groups in July 1941 galvanized them into action, but at the same time rival, nationalist and often right-wing partisan and resistance movements emerged that often owed their allegiance to governments in exile in London. And Nazi antisemitism, sometimes echoed by nationalist resisters, prompted Jews in some places to form their own partisan units as well. The scene was set for a complex struggle in which, for many partisans, the Germans were far from being the only enemy.204 Perhaps the most serious divisions between resistance movements occurred in South-east Europe. In Greece, the Communist resistance launched successful attacks on German communication lines and had effectively taken over much of the mountainous and inaccessible interior by the middle of 1944. In August 1943, serious fighting broke out between its forces and its smaller right-wing rival, led by the ambitious, aptly named Napoleon Zervas, backed by the British as a counterweight to the Communists. The conflict was eventually to descend into a full-blown civil war. A rather similar situation emerged in the former Yugoslavia, where the Yugoslav Communist partisans under Tito won the backing of the British because they were more active than the Serb nationalist Chetniks. By 1943 Tito’s forces numbered some 20,000 men. As in Greece, the Communist partisans managed in the teeth of ferocious reprisals from the German occupying forces to take over immense tracts of the inhospitable and remote interior of the country. Yet even more than in Greece, the two resistance movements spent as much time fighting each other as they did the Germans. Indeed, Tito even negotiated with the Germans, offering his services in crushing the Chetniks if the German occupying forces agreed to suspend their anti-partisan campaigns, which they did for a time until Hitler personally vetoed the deal.205
Behind the Eastern Front, German rule began to disintegrate within a year of the invasion of the Soviet Union. Already by the spring of 1942 the security situation in some parts of Poland was out of control. In his diary, the hospital director Zygmunt Klukowski recorded one robbery after another; partisans, he noted, were everywhere, taking food and killing people working for the German administration. ‘It is nearly impossible to find out who they are,’ he wrote, ‘Polish, Russian, even German deserters or plain bandits.’ The police had given up trying to intervene.206 Many partisan groups were well armed and organized and some Polish officers were forming regular units of the Home Army. Villagers thrown out of their homes to make way for ethnic Germans swelled their ranks, thirsting for revenge. Often they went back to their villages to burn down their own homes before the Germans could occupy them.207 The Home Army liaised with the Polish government in exile in London, whose advice to be patient it seldom heeded. From January 1943 onwards, Klukowski devoted an increasing number of his diary entries to describing its acts of military resistance and sabotage. Already some local railway lines were made impassable by constant explosions and machine-gun attacks. German settler villages were attacked, the livestock was expropriated and anyone who protested was beaten up. Local partisan leaders became folk heroes; Klukowski met one of them and agreed to provide medical supplies for the movement.208 After this, his contacts with the Home Army became more frequent. Using the code name ‘Podwinski’, he provided its fighters with money, wrote down reports on events in his area and acted as a postbox for partisan units. He also treated wounded partisans, ignoring the German requirement that he report any cases of gunshot wounds to the police. He remained characteristically cautious: when commanders of partisan units visited him, he made them undress ‘so that in the event of German intrusion it would appear to be a normal physical examination’.209
Rival partisan groups, notably those organized by the Russians, were now active too. Some of them were several hundred strong.210 Partisan activity led to radical reprisals from the German occupying forces, who took hostages from the local population and threatened publicly to kill ten or twenty of them for every German shot by the resistance, a threat they carried out repeatedly, adding to the general atmosphere of terror and apprehension in the local population.211 The German and Polish auxiliary police were increasingly unable to mount effective operations against either the resistance movement or the rising tide of violence, robbery and disorder. The brutality of German rule in Eastern Europe from the very beginning had completely alienated the majority of the population.212 The argument, supported by Alfred Rosenberg among others, that this was the main reason for the spread of partisan resistance, cut no ice either with Himmler or with the army hierarchy. Partisan activity further fuelled the antisemitism of civilian administrators as well. One official in Belarus wrote in October 1942 that Jews had in his view a ‘very high participation in the success of the whole campaign of sabotage and destruction . . . One operation carried out on a single day . . . revealed 80 armed Jews amongst the 223 bandits who were killed. I am happy,’ he added, ‘to see that the 25,000 Jews who were originally in the territory have shrunk to 500.’213 Some 345,000 people, making roughly 5 per cent of the population of Belarus, died in the partisan war. It has been estimated that over the whole period of the German occupation, about 283,000 people in Belarus took part in partisan groups of one kind or another.214 Similar loss of life was caused by German military reprisals in other parts of Eastern Europe.
Jewish partisan groups, consisting of men and women who had taken to the deep forests of eastern Europe in flight from the machine-guns of the SS Task Forces, also began to emerge early in 1942.215 Many individual Jews escaped to the forest on their own, but failed to link up with the partisans. Often robbers stole their clothes, and many starved. So badly did they fare that, as Zygmunt Klukowski noted, ‘it is a common occurrence that Jews come on their own to the gendarme post and ask to be shot.’216 Villagers, he reported, were often hostile to these partisans. ‘There are many people who see the Jews not as human beings but as animals that must be destroyed.’217 Nevertheless, Jewish involvement in the partisan movement was widespread. The first Jewish resistance group in Eastern Europe was started by the twenty-three-year-old intellectual Abba Kovner in Vilna on 31 December 1941. At a meeting of 150 young people disguised as a New Year’s Eve party, Kovner read out a manifesto, in which, basing his reasoning on the mass shootings and killings that had been in progress since the previous summer, he declared: ‘Hitler plans to annihilate all the Jews of Europe . . . We don’t want to allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughtering-block.’218 By early 1942, another group had been set up by the four Bielski brothers, villagers in Belarus whose parents had been killed by the Germans in December 1941. Based in a secret camp deep in the endless woods of the region, the brothers set up an elaborate system of procuring weapons and were joined by other Jews; their number reached 1,500 by the end of the war. Many more Jews joined local Communist-led partisan units as individuals.219
The New Order in Europe was beginning to crumble. Its early ambition of a broad sphere of economic and political c
o-operation had vanished in the face of the grim realities of war. German rule everywhere had grown harsher. Executions and mass shootings, the fruits of a belief that terror was the only way to combat resistance, had replaced informal mechanisms of co-operation and collaboration. Regimes friendly to the Third Reich, from Vichy to Hungary, were distancing themselves or losing their autonomy and falling into the same pattern of repression and resistance that was undermining German control in directly occupied countries. The insatiable demands of the German war economy for labour and materials, and the ruthless exploitation of subject economies, were driving more and more young men and women into resistance movements whose spreading campaigns of non-cooperation, disruption, sabotage and assassination were calling forth ever harsher reprisals, engendering in turn a further alienation of subject peoples and a further escalation of resistance. Yet this cycle of violence was also a reflection of the generally deteriorating position of Germany in the war itself, above all from early 1943 onwards. The early belief across Europe that there was no alternative to German domination was beginning to disappear. At the heart of the new preparedness of Europeans to resist was the perception that Hitler might, after all, lose the war. The turning-point was provided by a single battle that more than any other showed that the German armed forces could be defeated: Stalingrad.
TOTAL WAR
I
The extension of the Nazi programme of extermination in 1942 took place in a military context in which the German armed forces were on the offensive once more. To be sure, the German army’s defeat before Moscow meant that Hitler’s belief in the fragility of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union had been proved decisively wrong. Operation Barbarossa had signally failed to achieve the aims with which it had set out in the confident days of June 1941. After stemming the German tide before Moscow, the Red Army had gone on to the offensive and forced the German army to retreat. As one German officer wrote to his brother: ‘The Russians are defending themselves with a courage and tenacity that Dr Goebbels characterizes as “animal”; it costs us blood, as does every repulse of the attackers. Apparently,’ he went on with a sarcasm that betrayed the German troops’ growing respect for the Red Army as well as a widespread contempt for Goebbels among the officer class, ‘true courage and genuine heroism only begin in Western Europe and in the centre of this part of the world.’220
The Third Reich at War Page 49
