8
Auschwitz symbolizes the intention to murder all Jews under German control, and Jews from every corner of the German empire were murdered in its gas chambers. Some Jews survived Auschwitz because it remained, to the end, a set of camps as well as a death facility, where Jews were selected for labor as they entered. Thus a story of survival at Auschwitz can enter collective memory. Almost literally no Jew who stood at the edge of a death pit survived, and almost literally no Jew who entered Treblinka or Bełżec or Sobibór or Chełmno survived. The word “Auschwitz” has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time that Auschwitz became a major killing facility. Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.
Auschwitz has been a relatively manageable symbol for Germany after the Second World War, significantly reducing the actual scale of the evil done. The conflation of Auschwitz with the Holocaust made plausible the grotesque claim that Germans did not know about the mass murder of the European Jews while it was taking place. It is possible that some Germans did not know exactly what happened at Auschwitz. It is not possible that many Germans did not know about the mass murder of Jews. The mass murder of Jews was known and discussed in Germany, at least among families and friends, long before Auschwitz became a death facility. In the East, where tens of thousands of Germans shot millions of Jews over hundreds of death pits over the course of three years, most people knew what was happening. Hundreds of thousands of Germans witnessed the killings, and millions of Germans on the eastern front knew about them. During the war, wives and even children visited the killing sites; and soldiers, policemen, and others wrote home to their families, sometimes with photographs, about the details. German homes were enriched, millions of times over, by plunder from the murdered Jews, sent by post or brought back by soldiers and policemen on leave.
For similar reasons, Auschwitz was a convenient symbol in the postwar Soviet Union and today in post-communist Russia. If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in places that the Soviet Union had just conquered. Everyone in the western Soviet Union knew about the mass murder of the Jews, for the same reason that the Germans did: In the East the method of mass murder required tens of thousands of participants and was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people. The Germans left, but their death pits remained. If the Holocaust is identified only with Auschwitz, this experience, too, can be excluded from history and commemoration.
Auschwitz was one of the few parts of the Holocaust to which Soviet citizens did not contribute. Soviet citizens were recruited by the Germans for the mass shootings of Jews, and Soviet citizens built and guarded the gassing facilities at Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór. To be sure, all of this was possible because the Germans sought to destroy the Soviet state, and because the Soviet citizens in question were unmoored from prewar reality and in some cases trying to preserve their own lives. Yet after the war, Soviet propaganda was helpless to explain how so many people produced by the Soviet system had proven to be useful collaborators in the mass murder of so many other people produced by the Soviet system. It was enough of a problem, in the post-Stalin era that began with his death in 1953 and continues to this day, to explain why Soviet policy brought about the death of millions of Soviet citizens by famine and terror in the 1930s. This historical reality remains thoroughly politicized. The perhaps deeper problem, that tens of thousands of Soviet citizens could contribute to the murder of further millions of Soviet citizens on behalf of a totally alien system, has never been addressed. It has instead been displaced.
Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar as the Holocaust is limited to Auschwitz, it can be isolated from most of the nations it touched as well as from the landscapes it altered. The gates and walls of Auschwitz can seem to contain an evil that, in fact, extended from Paris to Smolensk. Auschwitz, a German word defining a bit of territory that before and after the war was in Poland, does not seem like an actual place. It is surrounded by mental as well as physical barbed wire. Auschwitz calls to mind mechanized killing, or ruthless bureaucracy, or the march of modernity, or even the endpoint of enlightenment. This makes the murder of children, women, and men seem like an inhuman process in which forces larger than the human were entirely responsible. When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.
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In the history of the Holocaust, Auschwitz was a place where the third technique of mass killing was developed, third in chronological order and also third in significance. The most important technique, because it came first, because it killed the most Jews, and because it demonstrated that a Final Solution by mass killing was possible, was shooting over pits. The next most important, and the next to be developed, was asphyxiation by the exhaust fumes of internal combustion engines. At around the time that these carbon monoxide facilities were coming into use, in early 1942, the policy of murdering all Jews was extended from the occupied Soviet Union and occupied Poland to all lands that fell under German control. Auschwitz became the major killing site for Jews in 1943 and 1944.
Auschwitz arose as a concentration camp, the seventh large one in the Reich, after Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück. Its notorious greeting, “Arbeit macht frei,” arose from these German precedents. This new camp, unlike these antecedents, was located in the lands of occupied Poland annexed by the Reich and thus within the zone where the Nazi imagination flourished. Its original purpose in 1940 was to prepare the way for the larger eastern empire to come. Its first prisoners were Poles who were punished for their real or anticipated resistance. Its next major victim group was Soviet prisoners of war taken after the invasion of 1941. Insofar as Jews were admitted to Auschwitz in these early years, it was with the intention of marching them east in columns as slave laborers who would exhaust themselves building the German empire on conquered Soviet lands. Jews who lived near Auschwitz were actually among the last Polish Jews to be killed. They were first deported to Auschwitz as forced laborers, because that was Auschwitz’s original mission. After the vast majority of Jews in the rest of Poland were already dead, murdered in pits or at Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, or Chełmno, most Jews of the Auschwitz region were still alive.
The purpose of Auschwitz changed as the Nazi colonial mission gave way to the Final Solution, as the subjugation of Slavs was deprioritized and the murder of Jews became urgent. This general shift was evident across a whole range of Nazi endeavors: the shift by the Einsatzgruppen from killing some Jews to killing all of them; the use of German policemen originally assigned to other missions for the mass shooting of Jews; the recruitment of local people for auxiliary police; the release of some Soviet prisoners of war so that they could aid in the killing of Jews; the transformation of the Lublin District from a forepost of empire to an experimental ground for gassing facilities. In the case of Auschwitz, the shift from the dream of conquest to the reality of annihilation meant that a camp became a killing facility. The killing agent itself reveals the evolution. Hydrocyanic acid, sold under the trade name Zyklon B, was originally used to fumigate the barracks of the Polish prisoners. Then it was used to murder Soviet prisoners of war. Finally it would be used to murder nearly a million Jews.
Auschwitz was built in a zone of state destruction, after the invasion of Poland and as part of the attempt to obliterate the Polish political nation. Its original infrastructure was that of a Polish military barracks. As a territory it was conquered by Germany in September 1939 and granted to Germany by the terms of the German-Soviet Treaty on Borders and Friendship. Neither its construction nor its subsequent adaptations would have been thinkable, let alone possible, without the German campaign to eliminate rival polities and without the special talents and unusual goals of the state destroyers of the SS.
Auschwitz was unusual, however, in one important respect. Unlike the death pits in the doubly occupied zone and the occupied Soviet Union, unlike the death facilities at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Chełmno, it was the planned murder site for very large numbers of Jews who were still citizens of states that Germany recognized as sovereign. Its intended Jewish victims were generally people who lived beyond the German zone of state destruction and who were therefore much less vulnerable to the imposing power of the SS. Such individuals had to be abandoned by their governments or stripped of their citizenship and physically transported from their country of residence to Auschwitz. There was nothing automatic about this, and indeed it often proved to be difficult.
Hitler’s fantasy of a planet without Jews was always present, and his desire to rid Europe of Jews was known to his subordinates no later than the spring of 1942. As of that moment, the policy of the mass murder of Jews, initiated the previous year in the Soviet Union, was general. Yet whether and to what extent that policy could be realized depended upon where Jews happened to live. Because the successful killing strategies were a result of prior decisions and actions that were specific to a certain part of eastern Europe, they could not be repeated with the same kind of success elsewhere. What happened to states in 1939, 1940, and 1941, in other words, was crucial for what would happen to Jews in 1942, 1943, and 1944. The Germans could not exploit the psychological, material, and political resources created by Soviet occupation in places where there had been no Soviet occupation. The Germans could not reassemble the fragments of destroyed states in places where they or the Soviets had not destroyed the state. The Germans could not apply the politics of relative deprivation in places where the war was not a campaign of racial mastery. In the museum at Auschwitz built in communist Poland after the war, its victims were classified by citizenship. This was designed to obfuscate the basic fact that the great majority of them were Jews, and murdered for no other reason. The emphasis on citizenship also obfuscated a more subtle but central fact: that the Jews who were killed were first separated from their states.
In many of the places from which the Jews were to be sent to Auschwitz, none of these conditions existed, and so Jews survived. Millions of European Jews who were condemned to die at Auschwitz survived because they never boarded a train. Jews under German control who were supposed to be sent to Auschwitz were more likely to survive than Jews under German control who were not supposed to be sent to Auschwitz. That is the Auschwitz paradox, and it can only be resolved by considering how states were and were not destroyed. These are the political particularities that explain the different outcomes within the universal design. Auschwitz demonstrates the universal design to kill Jews. It also demonstrates the general significance of statehood in protecting them.
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A comparison between two countries under German occupation can suggest the significance of the political factor. Estonia and Denmark had a great deal in common when the Second World War began. Each was a small northern European state with a long Baltic coast, and each was home to a very small number of Jews. During the war both were under German occupation, both were subject to the Final Solution, and both were declared judenfrei—free of Jews—by their German occupiers. And yet the history of the Holocaust in each land could hardly have been more different. In Estonia, about 99 percent of the Jews who were present when German forces arrived were killed. In Denmark, about 99 percent of Jews who had Danish citizenship survived. The Jews of Denmark were marked for Auschwitz; the Jews of Estonia met their fate before Auschwitz became a death facility.
In no country under German occupation did a higher percentage of Jews die than in Estonia, and in none did a higher proportion survive than in Denmark. Given the totality of the German policy of killing Jews, this difference calls for an explanation. Surely the population of Estonia was known for its antisemitism? If anything, such a tradition is easier to document in Denmark. Surely the Estonians were governed by antisemites before the war? The double dictatorship of Konstantin Päts and Johan Laidoner was clearly conservative, but it came to power in a coup against the Far Right in 1934. In fact, Estonian Jews were equal citizens of the republic, which took in some Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany. Denmark, by contrast, turned away Jewish refugees after 1935.
Intuitions fail. The extremely different outcomes seem to have little to do with popular attitudes and prewar politics, and much to do with different experiences of war and occupation. Auschwitz reminds us of Hitler’s vision of a world without Jews; it should also teach us of the importance of politics in hastening or hindering the realization of that vision.
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Estonia shared the fate of Lithuania and Latvia in 1940. Like the other two Baltic states, it was granted by Germany to the Soviets by the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, as modified and confirmed by the Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 1939. The Soviet occupation of Estonia brought the complete destruction of the Estonian upper administration and political elite. President Päts, for example, was taken from his farm and deported to the Soviet Union, where he died. Laidoner, the commander in chief of the armed forces, also perished in exile after deportation. Of the eleven members of the last Estonian government, ten were imprisoned and nine of these killed (four by execution, five dying in Soviet camps).
Soviet law was applied retroactively in occupied Estonia, under the logic that the Estonian state not only did not exist, but had never existed. State service in the 1920s and 1930s was thus considered a crime. In what quickly became Soviet Estonia, the new Soviet authorities carried out some four hundred executions, and were preparing mass deportations as the German armed forces assembled to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. On the night of June 14, the Soviet NKVD deported about 10,200 Estonian citizens, one percent of the entire population (and about ten percent of the Jewish minority, which was hugely overrepresented in Soviet repressions). A few days later, as German forces raced north through the Baltics to Estonia, the Soviets were shooting Estonian prisoners and leaving their corpses in the prisons.
The Germans arrived in Estonia in early July 1941 with their handpicked Estonians. As in Lithuania and Latvia, the Soviet occupation of Estonia had forced thousands of people to flee the country, many to Berlin. This left the Germans their choice of future collaborators. Many Estonians wished to return; the Germans could choose the ones they saw as most useful to their own purposes. The double occupation, here as elsewhere, meant a double filtering of the political elite. The Soviets destroyed the former ruling class; the Germans now prevented anyone who did not seem sufficiently pliable from returning. Naturally, the Nazi selection excluded the political Left and Center. As elsewhere that summer, the Germans could exploit moral, material, and political resources created by the Soviet occupation.
As in Latvia and Lithuania, the political resource in Estonia was especially abundant. An entire state had been destroyed in humiliating and vicious fashion only a year earlier, so people were prepared for personal and political redemption. By July 1941, when Einsatzgruppe A reached Estonia, the Germans had perfected their argument that the liberation that they offered was from Jews and that local participation in such liberation was a precondition to political negotiations. As in Lithuania and Latvia, locals in Estonia served as translators of this message, adding the element that the Germans themselves would not have understood: that if Estonians collaborated with the second (German) occupier, their first (Soviet) collaboration would be forgotten. No pogroms of Jews took place in Estonia, nor were such seen as necessary by the Germans.
Double collaboration was quite widespread. Some of the Estonian anti-Soviet partisans known as the Home Guard killed Jews; the most zealous killers among those partisans were Estonian communists who had switched sides as the German invasion began in order to clear their names. The Estonian policemen who had collaborated in the Soviet deportations of Estonians and Jews now carried out the German murder of Estonians and Jews. Whereas the Soviets deported about ten thousand Estonian citizens, including about 450 Jews, under German occupation some ten thousand Estonian citizens were executed, among them 963 Jews. From the local perpetrator’s perspective the work was not entirely different.
Former employees of the Soviet NKVD were especially significant in the mass murder of Jews in Estonia. Ain-Ervin Mere, for example, was an NKVD agent and director of a special department of the Estonian Rifle Corps, a Soviet unit that was supposed to defend Soviet Estonia from capitalist invasion. Instead he joined the Estonian Security Police under the Germans, serving as its commander from May 1942 through March 1943. The Estonian Security Police was the major agency charged with the murder of Jews. From April 1943 through the end of the war, Mere was a battalion commander in a Waffen-SS division. Ervin Viks, an Estonian policeman in the interwar period, worked for the NKVD in 1940 and 1941. Then he joined the Estonian Security Police under the Germans, where he ordered hundreds of executions of Jews and non-Jews. Alexander Viidik had served in the Estonian Political Police before the war, then offered his services to the Soviet NKVD in 1940. After the German invasion he worked for the SD, the intelligence section of the SS, where he recruited his former Soviet contacts.
In Estonia, as everywhere else, the people who killed Jews under the German occupation also killed others. In occupied Lithuania, the policemen who took part in the shooting of more than 150,000 Jews in 1941 also guarded the camps where a similar number of Soviet prisoners of war starved. In Latvia, the commando that murdered the country’s Jews also killed psychiatric patients and Belarusian civilians. Because there were very few Jews in Estonia, the murder of non-Jews was relatively more important than elsewhere. All of the 963 Estonian Jews murdered under German occupation were killed by Estonians, usually policemen. About ten times as many non-Jewish Estonians were also killed by those same Estonian policemen.
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In Denmark almost everything was different. Unlike other northern European states such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the Kingdom of Denmark shared no border with the Soviet Union, was not subject to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and was not occupied by the Red Army. When the Second World War began with a German-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Denmark was not involved. It suffered no Soviet invasion; its elites were untouched by Soviet practices of mass shooting and deportation. The political resource that was generated in Estonia could not be created in Denmark, since the Danish state was never destroyed. No double collaboration could be expected when there was only one occupation.
The German occupation of Denmark, when it came in April 1940, was mild. Denmark was, for Germany, neither an ideological enemy nor a racial target, and its territory was invaded for straightforward military reasons. The Germans did not declare, as they had already in Poland and would soon in the USSR, that the state they had attacked no longer existed. On the contrary, the German occupation proceeded on the explicit basis of Danish sovereignty. The Germans made clear that they did not “aim at disturbing the territorial integrity or the political independence of the Kingdom of Denmark.” King Christian remained in Copenhagen and ruled as head of state. Democratic elections continued, parliament functioned, and governments changed according to the wishes of Danes. After 1941, during the unexpectedly long and fruitless German campaign in the East, Denmark’s main task in the German empire was to provide food. Six thousand Danish men did serve in the Waffen-SS, some of them in the Wiking division alongside Estonians.
When the Final Solution was extended westward from the occupied Soviet Union to the rest of Europe in 1942, this created a problem in German-Danish relations. Danish authorities understood that yielding Jewish citizens to Germany would compromise Danish sovereignty. In December 1942, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued a warning that collaborators in the German crime of killing Jews would face consequences after the war. Sovereign governments, such as the Danish one, were in a position to heed such warnings. In early 1943, after the German surrender at Stalingrad, the tide of the war turned visibly against Germany. Copenhagen had ever less reason to participate in the Final Solution, while German authorities had ever less reason to alienate the Danes.
The elimination of the Jews nevertheless remained a constant priority in Berlin, and for Werner Best, the leader of the Nazi occupation authority in Denmark. In his initial communications with Berlin, Best maintained that a Final Solution in Denmark was impractical, since it would violate the constitution and lead to the fall of the government. This would force a massive German intervention and disrupt the favorable equilibrium that had been attained. But when the Danish government fell for other reasons, Best saw the opportunity to kill the Jews. It could be done, he thought, in the interval of instability, before a new government was formed. He made the appropriate proposal to Berlin in early September 1943.
There was a will but there was not a way. Rudolf Mildner was assigned to Copenhagen as the head of the Security Police and SD on September 20. He came directly from Katowice, in occupied Poland, where he had been the Gestapo chief with responsibility for Auschwitz. In other words, he was hardly a man without experience in the mass murder of Jews. Yet what he saw in Copenhagen convinced him that a Final Solution, at least of the sort that had been achieved in the stateless zone, was impossible in Denmark. He was confronted in Copenhagen with institutions that had been abolished further east: a sovereign state, political parties with convictions and support, local civil society in various forms, a police force that could not be expected to cooperate. Other German authorities had already drawn much the same conclusion. The local army commander refused to support the German police in any action against Jews. The local naval commander sent all of his ships for repairs on the day chosen for the roundup of Jews, October 2, 1943, so that the coast would be clear for whatever the Danes would wish to do. He also informed Social Democratic politicians of the date, and they in turn informed Danish Jews.
Denmark’s neighbor Sweden, neutral in the war but complicit in the economic side of Germany’s war effort, had every reason in 1943 to demonstrate a tilt towards the Allies. The Swedish government now proposed to Germany that Sweden take Denmark’s Jews. It repeated the proposal over the radio on an open frequency, so that Danish Jews knew that they would be welcome in Sweden. Danes then arranged for a flotilla to ship their Jewish population to Sweden. The German police knew about this undertaking and did not stop it; the German navy watched the Danish boats float slowly by. The Danish citizens did this work at little risk to themselves, since helping their fellow citizens was not a crime in their own country. The German police raid of October 2 caught only 481 of the 6,000 or so Jews of Danish citizenship. The sovereign Danish government intervened with Berlin on behalf of these citizens. Some of them were released, and the rest were sent to Theresienstadt, a transit camp in what had been Terezín in Czechoslovakia, rather than to Auschwitz. Not a single one of them was gassed. Other Jews from other countries were however sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and murdered to make room for the Danish Jews. German authorities took advantage of the presence of Danish Jews to make a propaganda film about the ostensibly good conditions for Jewish life in their camps.
Jews who were Danish citizens survived, which is not exactly the same thing as Jews in Denmark surviving. Danish authorities did not accept Jewish refugees after 1935, and they deported some of the ones who had arrived earlier back to Germany. The Jews who were denied state protection in Denmark shared the fate of Jews who lacked state protection in Estonia or, for that matter, everywhere else: death.
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Occupied Estonia was part of the zone of statelessness where the entire Holocaust took place. In Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the western Soviet Union, Hitler’s vision of global racial struggle was converted, in conditions of statelessness, to new forms of politics. In each of these places the sequence of events that permitted the emergence of the Final Solution as mass killing was different. Nevertheless, a set of actions and absences can be identified.
The actions were the advance creation of racial or hybrid institutions whose major task was state destruction; the undertaking of aggressive war, permitting these institutions to fulfill their mission beyond their own homeland and in a permissive environment; the fact of state destruction, the removal of political capacity, the murder of leading classes, and the redefinition of such actions as law; the solicitation of collaboration, which was effective when it involved the exploitation of political resources created by an earlier state destroyer, but which always required the exploitation of existing local police forces, cut off from previous authority or eager to prove their loyalty after previous collaboration; the mobilization of psychological resources such as the release from humiliation and the gratification of the desire for revenge; the exploitation of greed, the material resource, enabled by ongoing or prior elimination of property rights; the recruitment of German institutions beyond those originally tasked with killing civilians; the exploitation of fragments of institutions remaining from earlier destructions of states.
After German (or Soviet and German) power destroyed states, the absences were the formal denial of sovereignty and the nullification of any connection by foreign policy to a larger world beyond German power; the lack of an overarching political entity that might protect its citizens, or motivate its citizens to protect it, and thus the disappearance of citizenship as a reciprocal relationship; the experience of the removal of traditional state protections in the form of laws and customs; the resulting spread of the dark market, the economic behaviors that arise in a free market without individual rights in which some people are treated as mere economic units to be consumed or sold; and the legal abyss, where all was permitted, where colonial thinking was natural, because international law in the traditional European sense did not apply.
These lists of actions and absences are both ways of characterizing the same extreme: the stateless zone where a Holocaust could be imagined, begun, and completed. At the other extreme during the Second World War were sovereign states that were untouched by German power. Although these generally pass unmentioned in analyses of the Holocaust, they are worth considering. After all, Hitler’s racial theory was planetary, and his declaration of war against the Jews was global. There is no particular reason to think that antisemitism was more prevalent in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania between the wars than it was in the United States, Great Britain, or Canada.
Most Jews in the world were safe during the Holocaust for the simple reason that German power did not extend to the places they lived and did not threaten the states of which they were citizens. Jews with Polish passports were safe in countries that recognized the prewar Polish state, and killed in countries that did not. American and British Jews were safe, not just in their home countries but everywhere. The Germans did not contemplate murdering Jews who held American and British passports, and, with few exceptions, did not do so. Statehood, like statelessness, followed Jews wherever they went. Soviet Jews were killed, with few exceptions, if they were caught in the lands occupied by the Germans and where Germany fought its war of extermination. In these places the Germans behaved as if the Soviet state had been destroyed and sought to annihilate all of its traces. So long as Jews were in Soviet territory and east of the German occupation, however, they were preserved from the Final Solution—although they were of course subject to Soviet policies. Roughly fifteen percent of the Polish Jews deported by the NKVD in 1940 died in transit or in the Gulag; even so, at the end of the war these deportees were the largest surviving group of Polish Jews.
At one extreme of state destruction, the Holocaust took place; at the other extreme of state integrity, it did not. The middle cases, where the Nazi leadership sought but could not complete a Final Solution, are places where German power reached but where the state was not destroyed: the countries that were allied with Germany or occupied by Germany (or both). German policy was that Jews who inhabited such places were to be extracted, deported, and killed. Although a horribly high number of Jews from such countries were killed, and the fate of Jews in such places was always worse than that of their fellow citizens, more than half of the Jews who had been citizens of these countries, taken together as a group, survived. The scale of suffering, almost one murder for every two Jews, exceeds that of any other category of people in the Second World War. Yet it is sufficiently different from the murder rate in the stateless zone, something like nineteen murders for every twenty Jews, to warrant serious attention. The history of each country that retained (some measure of) sovereignty despite German influence was, of course, distinct, but the logics of survival were everywhere the same: citizenship, bureaucracy, and foreign policy.
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Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places where the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection. This meant that the other major German mass crimes, the starvation of prisoners of war and the murder of civilians—mostly Belarusians and Poles and Gypsies—also took place almost entirely within zones of statelessness. These policies together killed about as many people as the Holocaust, and they were implemented, and could only be implemented, in the same places. Where the state was not destroyed such extremes were impossible.
In states allied with Germany or states under more traditional occupation regimes, where the major political institutions remained intact, non-Jews who protected Jews were rarely punished for doing so. Non-Jews who were citizens of states could not simply be killed if they aided Jews. In the General Government and in the occupied western Soviet Union, however, the punishment for aiding Jews was death. More Poles were executed for aiding Jews in individual districts of the General Government than in entire west European countries. This is not because Poles were particularly inclined to rescue Jews, which they were not. It is because they were, in fact, sometimes executed for doing so, which rarely happened in western Europe. Indeed, in some places in German-occupied western Europe it was not even a punishable criminal offense to hide a Jew.
Compare the fates of Victor Klemperer, Anne Frank, and Emanuel Ringelblum, three famous chroniclers of these years. Klemperer was a German scholar of Jewish origin who wrote a brilliant analysis of the language of the Third Reich. Frank was a German Jewish girl in hiding in the Netherlands who kept a diary that later became the most widely read text about the Holocaust. Ringelblum was a historian of Jewish life in Poland who, within the Warsaw ghetto, organized the assembly of an entire archive, creating one of the most important collections of sources of the Holocaust. “Collect as much as possible,” said Ringelblum to a colleague in the project known as Oneg Shabbat. “They can sort it out after the war.” Klemperer lived and so did the person who cared for him; Frank died but the people who tried to shelter her survived; Ringelblum was shot along with several people who had helped him. These fates reflect the different legal structures of Germany, the occupied Netherlands, and occupied Poland during the war.
Because Klemperer was a German citizen with a non-Jewish wife, he was not subject to the general policy of the deportation and murder of German Jews. Since his wife did not divorce him, he, like many such German Jewish men, survived. Anne Frank was also a German Jew, but in fleeing to the Netherlands she lost even the residual state membership available to her under the Nuremberg Laws. She and her family were eventually discovered and deported to Auschwitz. She died after a transfer to Bergen-Belsen, probably of typhus. The Dutch citizens who had hidden her family survived, since what they did was not subject to criminal prosecution in the Netherlands. Ringelblum’s history was different. He was captured and rescued multiple times, aided by both Polish Jews and non-Jewish Poles. In the end, he and the Poles with whom he was hiding were all executed, probably together, in the ashes of the Warsaw ghetto. Most Poles who tried to aid Jews were not killed, but many of them were; and it was a risk that they all faced. This was the stateless predicament.
For Jews themselves, the existence of a state meant citizenship, even if only in an attenuated and humiliating form. Citizenship meant the legal possibility of emigration. Most German and Austrian Jews exploited this possibility, although they generally lost their possessions and their connections to their previous lives in doing so. Citizenship for Jews meant the existence of a civil code, even if sometimes a very discriminatory one, which allowed them claims to property. These could be traded, in ways that were obviously unjust, for the right to depart. The legal exploitation of Jews is often seen as a step towards their extermination, but this was not exactly the case. Even the most exploitative and painful forms of legal discrimination were much less risky to Jewish life than regime change or removal of state authority. In those situations, Jews were suddenly and totally vulnerable, since they lost their access to the civil code and thus their property rights. Rather than trading their property for their lives, they lost both.
Legal discrimination by antisemitic states did not bring an automatic downward spiral toward death, but state destruction did. Once a Jew lost access to a state he or she lost access to the protection of higher authorities and lower bureaucrats. Jews could live if they restored that access, but this was a difficult feat. Anton Schmid was a German (Austrian) soldier from Vienna who, in Vilnius, was responsible for the office that returned individual German soldiers to their units. He saved a Jewish man by providing him with a Wehrmacht uniform and paybook. He saved a Jewish woman in Vilnius by inventing for her a legal identity. With a bit of charm and bluster he generated a false baptismal certificate and moved her through the five necessary offices until she was fully documented. No Jew alone in the stateless zone could have done that. All in all, Schmid provided at least one hundred Jews with documents that gave them a chance to live.
Citizenship in modern states means access to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has the reputation of killing Jews; it would be closer to the truth to say that it was the removal of bureaucracy that killed Jews. So long as state sovereignty persisted, so did the limits and possibilities afforded by bureaucracy. In most offices, time is slowed and matters are considered, perhaps with the help of petitions or bribes. When people in sovereign states beyond Germany wished to be noble, bureaucracy provided them with the opportunity to frame their arguments on behalf of individual Jews in the pragmatic or patriotic terms that employees of the state could understand and endorse. The bureaucracies beyond Germany also exhibited the typical tendencies of passing the buck, awaiting clear orders from higher authorities, and insisting on clarity of expression and proper paperwork. Many of the things that make bureaucracies annoying in daily life could and did mean survival for Jews.
Even German bureaucracy did not kill Jews by itself. Even after it was overlaid and penetrated by Nazi structures for six years, German bureaucracy was not capable of murdering the Jews of Germany. German officials were never even instructed, in any final and dispositive way, as to who among German citizens counted as a Jew. At the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the issue seems to have consumed more time than any other; but it was not resolved, either then or later. This was not for lack of desire: The lawyers concerned believed that Jewish “blood” had to be cleansed “from the German and indeed the entire European bloodstream.” Such a thing could be undertaken only when neighboring European countries were invaded and their polities wrecked. German Jews died not because of bureaucratic precision in Germany but because of the destruction of bureaucracies in other countries. German Jews were not killed, with a very few exceptions, on the territory of prewar Germany. Instead they were extracted from Germany and deported to bureaucracy-free zones in the East, places where they would have been entirely safe before the war.
The killing sites of German Jews were places such as Łodż, Riga, and Minsk. If the Holocaust is recalled from the perspective of German Jews, as it usually is, these names evoke nothing but the horror of death amidst the unknown. In the minds of many Germans, and thus in many German sources, these cities are nothing more than improbable assemblages of subhumans in the colonial Lebensraum. The combination of Nazi and German Jewish sources can convey a misleadingly incomplete impression of these places.
Before the war, before the arrival of policies of state destruction, each of these cities was a model of Jewish civil society in Europe. Łodż, for example, was Poland’s second largest city and its second largest Jewish city, with a sizable Jewish middle class. It was the birthplace of one of the most influential poets of the Polish language, Julian Tuwim, who was a Jew. It was annexed to the Reich after the 1939 invasion of Poland. Riga had been the capital of Latvia, where Jews enjoyed equal rights under the civil code, had sat in parliament, and were ministers of government. In the late 1930s, Riga was a site of refuge for a considerable number of Jews from Germany and Austria. It was altered first by Soviet state destruction in 1940 and then by German state destruction in 1941. Minsk, before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, had been the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Rates of intermarriage were high, and Jewish and non-Jewish schoolchildren were often close friends. Jews had been executed in large numbers in the Soviet Great Terror of 1937, but not as Jews; most often they were taken away by the NKVD’s black ravens and shot on false charges of espionage for Poland. Antisemitism was certainly present in Soviet Minsk; but it was a crime. Minsk had to be occupied by Germany, as it was in 1941, before it could become a place where people were murdered as Jews. Jewish urban civilization in eastern Europe had exhibited great variety; only the destruction of the state transformed cities with Jewish particularities into sites for a general policy of killing.
Bureaucracies in Germany could kill Jews only when bureaucracy-free zones elsewhere had been established. The elimination of Polish statehood at the beginning of the war was thus crucial for the entire course of the Holocaust, since it was on occupied Polish territory, in Germany’s special colonial zone, that death facilities could be established. The Germans also considered creating a death facility in the occupied Soviet Union, in Mahileu. This was never undertaken; the crematoria designed for Mahileu were delivered instead to Auschwitz.
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As a general matter, bureaucrats owed their salaries and their dignity to the sovereign state, and they understood that compromises over citizens meant compromises about citizenship, and that compromises over citizenship meant the weakening of sovereignty. Even when bureaucrats were implementing anti-Jewish measures, it mattered to them that these were policies that originated locally, rather than ones imposed from abroad. The thought “our Jews, our solution” was not noble, but it was typical. Then as now, sovereignty meant the visible ability to conduct foreign policy. In most places and times, the fundamental goal of foreign policy was to preserve the state. This required the ability to alter Jewish policy, since one Jewish policy or another might seem more strategically promising given the constellation of international power at a given moment. Even ethnic cleansers who were convinced that deporting Jews served the state did not lose sight of the fact that the Jewish question was only one issue among others.
For everyone making foreign policy who maintained the typical political focus on the state itself, the crucial question was always the likely outcome of the war. In general, states allied to Nazi Germany tacked towards Nazi policy through 1942 (although none of them followed it completely), and then toward Allied policy thereafter (while, of course, beginning from a position of antisemitic policy and sometimes a record of mass killing). Insofar as states were sovereign, policy was changed, and Jews sometimes survived as a result. Where sovereignty had been eliminated, foreign policy was no longer made.
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Thus citizenship, bureaucracy, and foreign policy hindered the Nazi drive to have all European Jews murdered. Of course, each of the many states affected but not destroyed by German policy had its own history and its own particularities. Among the states that were not destroyed but were in some way dominated by Germany, three groups emerge: first, puppet states such as Slovakia and Croatia created in the wake of the destruction of other states; second, states that existed before the war and allied with Nazi Germany of their own accord, such as Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy; and third, states whose territories were occupied by Nazi Germany after defeat on the battlefield and whose institutions were altered to various degrees without being completely destroyed, such as France, the Netherlands, and Greece. The variation among these countries was not as extreme as that between Estonia and Denmark. They supply points on the spectrum between the two points of double annihilation of sovereignty and mild German occupation. The history of their Jews confirms the connection between sovereignty and survival.