CHAPTER IX

October 1943–March 1944

“I am taking advantage of a lonely Sunday evening to write you a letter that I have owed you for a long time.” Thus began the plea that Kurt Gerstein—the deeply religious Protestant, Waffen SS officer, and haunted witness of extermination who, in vain, had tried to inform the world—addressed on March 5, 1944, to his father, a retired judge and a firm supporter of the regime. “I do not know what goes inside you, and would not presume to claim the smallest right to know. But when a man has spent his professional life in the service of the law, something must have happened inside him during these last few years. I was deeply perturbed by one thing you said to me, or rather wrote to me…. You said: Hard times demand tough methods!—No, no maxim of that kind is adequate to justify what has happened.

“I cannot believe that this is the last word my father has to say on such unparalleled happenings: my old father cannot depart from this place with such words and thoughts. It seems to me that all of us with some time left to live have more than enough cause to reflect on the practical possibilities and limits, as well as on the consequences of this casting away of all restraint…. However tight the limitations on a man may be and however much, in many things, he may follow the principle that discretion is the better part of valor, he must never lose his standards or his ideas. He must never exonerate himself before his conscience and before the higher order of things to which he is subject by saying: that is not my business, I can do nothing to change things…. He keeps silent but he thinks: that is my business. I am involved in this responsibility and guilt, having knowledge of what is happening and a corresponding measure of blame.

“Dear father, there are situations in which a son is obliged to offer advice to the very father who laid the foundations and formed the ideas in him. The time will come when you, along with others, will have to stand up and be called to account for the age in which you live and for what is happening in it. There would be no understanding left between us…if it were not possible or permissible for me to ask you not to underestimate this responsibility, this obligation on your part to answer for yourself. The call may come sooner than we think. I am aware of this obligation and, admittedly, it is devouring me (consumor in ea). But that is immaterial.”¹

The father did not understand. Gerstein added in a further and last letter: “If you look around you, you will find that this is a rift that is cutting through many families and friendships that were once close.”² Gerstein was exceptional and lonely in his ways as a morally tormented and “treasonous” member of the extermination system; however, the religious source of his attitude of course also played a role for other Germans and Europeans, some of whom we mentioned and thousands of whom we know nothing about. Their oppositional stand, whatever form it may have taken, albeit of limited impact, should be part of any reflections on the role of Christianity in the years of extermination. Generally speaking, however, their path was not the one chosen by the Christian churches as major institutions in the Western world and even less so, as we shall primarily see in this chapter, by their most exalted leaders.

I

In strictly military terms, the last months of 1943 and early 1944 were dominated by steady Soviet progress in all sectors of the Eastern Front, whereas the Western Allies edged only very slowly up the Italian peninsula and actually stalled at the German “Gustav Line.” Yet in terms of the Grand Alliance, the defining event of these months took place at the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin meeting in Tehran, from November 28 to December 1. Notwithstanding British fears and hesitations, the American strategy was accepted: American and British forces would land on the coast of Normandy sometime in May 1944. Simultaneously the Soviet Union would launch a major offensive, thus precluding the shift of any German forces to the West.

Hitler anticipated the Allied landing with much confidence. The German defenses along the Atlantic and North Sea coasts, and the Wehrmacht forces in the West, would turn the Anglo-American operation into a catastrophic defeat for the invaders. Then, immune for a long time to the further threat of a landing, the Nazi leader would turn the entire German might against the Soviet army, recapture the lost territories, and eventually force Stalin to sue for peace.³ In the meantime, unable to effectively counter the allied bombing offensive, the Führer was, in Speer’s words, “in the habit of raging against the British government and the Jews, who were to blame for the air raids.”⁴ And, indeed, the bombings added an element of blind fury and even stronger thirst for murderous vengeance to Hitler’s anti-Jewish obsession: The Jews were guilty!

In his deluge of anti-Jewish tirades, Hitler donned all garbs: prophet, statesman, rabble-rouser; Goebbels was mostly the latter—an extraordinarily effective rabble-rouser who, as Moshe Flinker had sensed, totally believed in his message. And, in unison with the leading tenors, the Rosenbergs, the Darrés, the Leys, sundry Gauleiter, Kreisleiter, Ortsleiter, Blockleiter, clergymen, academics, high school teachers, Hitler Youth, and BdM leaders all spewed the same invectives. Amid this tremendous howling, another voice, on a par with that of Goebbels but different and more ominous, regularly explained and threatened: the voice of Heinrich Himmler. The Reichsführer did not address the mass audiences of grass-root party rallies; he usually kept the presentation of his murderous activities, his admonishments suffused with “moral health” principles, and the lessons he drew from his far-flung “research” for the elite: SS officers or the highest levels of party and Wehrmacht. While Hitler never missed an occasion to let his audience know that, in prophesing and ordering the disappearance of the Jews, he was fulfilling a quasi-divine mission, a task dictated by Providence, fate, history—that in other words he was the exceptional leader chosen for this mission by higher powers and thus beyond doubts and qualms—Himmler’s approach was different.

The Reichsführer regularly presented the extermination of the Jews as a heavy responsibility delegated to him by the Führer and thus not open to discussion; it demanded, from him and from his men, a steady devotion to their task and a steady spirit of self-sacrifice. When, on July 26, 1942, the SS chief rebuffed Rosenberg’s attempts to come up with a definition of “Jew” in the eastern occupied territories, he typically added: “The eastern occupied territories will be freed of Jews: The Führer has laid on my shoulders the implementation of this very difficult order. Nobody can take this responsibility from me in any case. Hence, I strongly resent all intervening” [Also verbiete ich mir alles mitreden].⁵

At times, aside from fulfilling his “difficult orders,” the Reichsführer conceived of grandiose anti-Jewish propaganda operations of his own. The Untermensch pamphlet, for example, published by the SS, was circulated throughout the Continent in fifteen languages.⁶ In early 1943, another such large-scale project took shape. Impressed by a book on Jewish Ritual Murders, Himmler informed Kaltenbrunner on May 19 that he was having it distributed to SS officers up to the rank of Standartenführer; he was sending him one hundred copies for distribution to the Einsatzkommandos and “particularly to the men who have to deal with the Jewish question.” Moreover, the Reichsführer ordered inquiries into ritual murders among those Jews who had not yet been “evacuated” in order to stage some public trials; these inquiries had to be particularly intensive in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria to allow the Nazi press to publicize the results and thus enhance the effort to deport Jews from these countries.

Finally the SS chief suggested the creation, together with the Foreign Ministry, of a special radio program aimed at England and the United States, and exclusively focused on anti-Semitic material, of the kind Streicher’s Der Stürmer had used during “the years of struggle.” The English press and English police announcements should be combed through for any report about a missing child; Himmler’s program would then broadcast that the child had probably been victim of Jewish ritual murder. “In conclusion,” the Reichsführer suggested,” I believe that by launching a vast anti-Jewish propaganda action in English, possibly even in Russian, centered on ritual murder, we could enormously increase worldwide anti-Semitism.”⁷

When he addressed the higher SS echelons or other prominent audiences, Himmler often adopted a matter-of-fact, poised, and rational tone. He confidentially reported about the fate of the Jews, and indicated why what was done had to be done. In 1943 and 1944 the Reichsführer discussed the “Final Solution” with audiences which were well informed and involved in its implementation in one form or another; each time, Himmler offered encouragement and justification. It was in this vein that he addressed SS generals on October 4, 1943, and Gauleiter on October 6, in both cases in Posen (the address to the SS generals is the better known of the two very similar speeches). Once more, on October 6, Himmler described the extermination of the Jews as “the task which became the most difficult of my life.”⁸

“The question has been asked of us,” the Reichsführer declared in his October 6, 1943, address, “how is it with the women and children? I have taken the decision to achieve a clear solution also in this matter. I did not consider that I had the right to eliminate the men—that is to kill them or have them killed—and to let their children grow up to become the avengers against our own sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.”⁹ Himmler was to repeat the same arguments to an assembly of Wehrmacht generals in May 1944, and on several further occasions throughout that year.¹⁰

Goebbels attended the daylong Gauleiters’ conference on October 6: “As far as the Jewish question is concerned,” the propaganda minister recorded on October 9, “he [Himmler] gives a very unvarnished and frank presentation. He is convinced that we can solve the Jewish question throughout Europe by the end of this year. He proposes the harshest and most radical solution: to exterminate the Jews root and branch [Kind und Kegel]. It is certainly a logical solution, even if it is a brutal one. We have to take the responsibility of completely solving this issue in our time. Later generations will certainly not handle this problem with the courage and the ardor that are ours.”¹¹

Himmler adorned his speech to the SS generals, on October 4, with some flights of rhetoric: “The evacuation of the Jews…is a never-written-down and never-to-be-written page of glory of our history.” The explanation that followed closely toed the line of Hitler’s ever-repeated argument: “We know,” Himmler went on, “how difficult it would be if today, given the bombings, the burdens, and the privations of the war, we still had, in every city, the Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and inciters. We would probably have now reached the 1916–1917 stage, when the Jews were still part of the German national body.” The Reichsführer found it necessary to sustain the sense of a grim, hard, but glorious and vital task among his highest-ranking officers at a time when the threat of defeat was becoming more concrete and, with it, the danger of retribution. There may also have been another aim to Himmler’s praise: to soften but nonetheless convey the message that followed the praise, threatening with death those who used the extermination for their own profit (“even one fur, even one watch, even one Mark or cigarette”).¹²

In fact, while the Reichsführer was both praising and threatening, an inquiry commission, headed by SS investigating judge Konrad Morgen, had uncovered widespread corruption and unauthorized killings of political prisoners (mainly Poles and Russians) at the very center of the extermination system, in Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss was relieved of his command (but transferred to a more elevated position in Berlin);¹³ others also had to leave: the head of the political section, Maximilian Grabner; the head of the Kattowitz Gestapo, Rudolf Mildner; even one of the chief physicians whom we already met, Friedrich Entress (who also specialized in phenol injections into the hearts of inmates in the infirmary of the main camp), and smaller fry.¹⁴

Himmler was of course confronted with an ongoing and intractable issue: How to stem wanton murder in an organization set up for mass murder; how to stem widespread corruption in an organization set up for huge-scale looting. Relatively speaking, however, such internal problems of discipline were minor and the Reichsführer’s authority was never in question. Simultaneously his power within the overall structure of the regime was steadily growing.

The Waffen SS had become an army within the Wehrmacht, and in 1944 it comprised some thirty-eight divisions (approximately 600,000 men).¹⁵ As we saw, under Pohl’s leadership both the camp system and the SS industrial enterprises were growing apace; so did the number of their slave laborers. In August 1943 the Reichsführer replaced Frick as minister of the interior. After a brief clash with Bormann over the autonomy of the Gauleiter, Himmler did not further insist on imposing his authority over the party stalwarts, and he soon joined forces with Hitler’s all-powerful “secretary” in an alliance that could crush any competing force.¹⁶ Finally, in early 1944, military intelligence (the Abwehr) was liquidated after accusations of plotting against the regime; its chief, Admiral Canaris, arrested; and the entire organization taken over by the RSHA.¹⁷

In terms of the Reich’s history and that of the extermination of the Jews, the crucial question is not only that of the Reichsführer’s power within the system but of how subservient he still was to his Führer. Mainly, was Himmler extending feelers for potential contacts with the Western Allies, without Hitler’s knowledge? This issue has exercised historians for decades, as no documents allow for any conclusive answer, and as postwar testimonies and memoirs are only partly reliable and lead in different directions; circumstantial evidence is no more conclusive. The “Final Solution” is at the very core of this debate. Is there any indication that, in order to become an acceptable partner to the West Himmler attempted to slow down the rhythm of the extermination or allowed German offers secretly to free Jews to be made? Despite arguments to the contrary, nothing of the kind appears convincing in late 1943 or early 1944. The situation will become more confusing after the German occupation of Hungary, in March 1944, as we shall see in the last chapter.

II

While the deportation and extermination of the tens of thousands of Jews from Salonika, in the spring of 1943, demanded German planning at every stage, including the availability of trains and of sufficient space in the barracks and gas chambers of Birkenau, deporting the eight thousand Jews of Denmark depended essentially on the right political circumstances in the framework of a unique arrangement.

The Germans had allowed a semiautonomous Danish government to stay in place, and their own presence as occupiers was hardly felt. Hitler had decided on this peculiar course to avoid unnecessary difficulties in a country strategically important (the passage to Norway and Sweden and the proximity of the English coast), “racially related” to the community of Nordic peoples, and mainly an essential supplier of agricultural products (more than 15 percent of Germany’s needs by 1941).¹⁸ Until September 1942, a professional diplomat, Cecil von Renthe-Fink, ably represented this policy in Copenhagen. At that point, however, Hitler, irked by King Christian X’s laconic response to the birthday congratulations he had sent him, ordered Renthe-Fink’s recall and, more generally, demanded a harsher policy against the Danes.¹⁹ Werner Best, who had left his position in Paris a few months beforehand and had been attached to the Foreign Ministry, was appointed to Copenhagen in late October, 1942. Hitler’s orders to Best, whom he summoned to Vinnytsa were by then somewhat more moderate than those he had imparted a few weeks earlier to the new military commander in Denmark, Gen. Hermann von Hanneken.²⁰ In fact, during the first nine months of his tenure as Reich plenipotentiary (Reichsbevollmächtigter), Best pursued his predecessor’s policy.

From April 1940 to the late summer of 1943, the persecution of the Jews of Denmark had remained minimal; even Best urged caution, notwithstanding some pressure from the RSHA. The leaders of the Jewish community went along, so to speak, and agreed to the minor discriminations imposed by Prime Minister Eric Scavenius’s government.²¹

In late July 1943, the situation began to change. Mussolini’s fall, the Allied landing in Sicily, and the massive bombing of Hamburg convinced most Danes that Germany’s defeat was approaching. Sabotage, limited until then, grew; strikes erupted in several cities. The Scavenius government was losing its grip. For Best a change of policy appeared unavoidable, as he wrote to Himmler on August 22. Indeed, two days later Hitler ordered sharp countermeasures, and on the twenty-ninth the Germans imposed martial law. It was then, on September 8, as martial law was in force and anti-German demonstrations could be quelled immediately, that in a cable to Berlin, Best demanded that the “Jewish question” be solved. On September 17 Hitler gave his authorization.²² That same day Best ordered the seizure of the membership lists from the Jewish community office.²³

On September 22 Ribbentrop asked Hitler about the advisability of the deportations of the Danish Jews in view of the troubles that could follow: the Nazi leader confirmed his previous decision.²⁴ The date of the operation was set for October 2, although both the army and the navy commanders made it clear that their units would not participate. In fact in Best’s entourage skepticism about the planned round-up was widely shared. Sometime at the end of September, the embassy adviser on shipping matters, Georg F. Duckwitz, disclosed the date of the razzia to one of his Danish friends.²⁵ Thereupon the Swedish government, informed of the forthcoming operation by its ambassador in Copenhagen, made an offer to Berlin to take in all of Denmark’s Jews. Moreover, Stockholm broadcast its offer, thus informing the endangered Jews that they could find asylum in Sweden.²⁶

There is no basis to the widespread interpretation that Best himself, after initiating the deportations, actively engineered their failure by letting Duckwitz inform his Danish counterparts. Still, most likely the Reichsbevollmächtigter was not unhappy that, on the eve of the German move, around 7,000 Jews were ferried over to Sweden in a coordinated operation supported by the vast majority of the Danish population. Some 485 Jews were seized and, after Best’s intervention with Eichmann, deported to Theresienstadt, where most of them survived the war.²⁷

III

By September 29, 1943, Amsterdam was “Jew free.”²⁸ In the previous months, as we saw, some 35,000 Jews from Holland had been rerouted from Auschwitz to Sobibor, as the Auschwitz gas chambers were out of service for a while due to a typhus epidemic in the camp. Nineteen of these Dutch deportees survived. In the meantime deportations from France and Belgium had been temporarily discontinued.²⁹

During the last months of their anti-Jewish campaign in Holland, the Germans went beyond the call of duty. When the hundreds of Jews of Portuguese descent claimed that due to centuries of intermarriage with the local population, they could not be regarded as Jews, the Germans launched a systematic investigation of their racial background; it went on, as we shall see, until early 1944. Mixed marriages represented another difficult problem. Seyss-Inquart suggested sterilization of the Jewish partners as a reprieve from deportation, thereby preempting steps that had been merely discussed but not implemented in the Reich. Some 2,500 Jews (men and women) were ultimately sterilized as a result of the Reichskommissar’s initiative.³⁰

“The partners of mixed marriages have been told that they could postpone their decision about sterilization until next Thursday,” Philip Mechanicus, a Dutch Jewish journalist and inmate of Westerbork from May 1943 to March 1944, noted in his diary on Tuesday, June 15, 1943. “Before then two Jewish doctors will explain to them the significance and consequences of sterilization. Yesterday a typed notice to that effect was put up in the vestibule of the Registration Hall.”³¹ The next day, according to Mechanicus’s entry, the debate became quite heated: “A storm of criticism and indignation descended this morning after breakfast upon the young man who had decided to let himself be sterilized. ‘You are a coward!’ ‘You’ve no strength of character.’ ‘No proper man would do that.’ ‘I am doing it for my wife.’ ‘Your wife wouldn’t want that…. What a joke—a sterilized man!’ ‘Do you know for sure that you won’t be sterilized as soon as you get to Poland? I don’t. Better have it done right away here. And stay with my wife.’³²

And as these futile debates were going on and the daily hurdles of the Westerbork routine filled the inmates’ lives, transports were bringing in more Jews from all parts of Holland and from the labor camps. Then, with absolute regularity, every Tuesday, another transport loaded its cargo of between 1,000 and 3,000 Jews and departed for “Poland.” By the end of the war, more than 100,000 Jews had transited through Westerbork alone, mostly on their way to extermination.

In the camp, as already mentioned, the old-timers were the German Jews, and under the control of the German commandant and his small staff, they lorded it over the mass of Dutch Jews. Mechanicus was an acerbic observer, somewhat in Kaplan’s style, or maybe in the Klemperer vein: “The German Jews have undeniably abused their position of supremacy and continue to do so,” he noted on June 3, 1943. “They form, as it were, an almost exclusive association for the protection of the interests of German Jews. As individuals and acting together they do their best to save all German Jews brought here from being deported and endeavor to keep them here. They have done this from the time that Dutch Jews began arriving at Westerbork. In this way they have, in point of fact, handed over the Dutch Jews to the Germans to suit their own convenience. Wherever possible they have pushed the Germans into jobs and have kept the Germans here. The Registration Department with Kurt Schlesinger at its head has been able to do this. For example, during the seven months that I have been in the hospital, it has nearly always been Dutch Jews that have been deported.”³³

Mechanicus explained part of the existing supremacy of German Jews by the simple fact that the Germans in command preferred to work with German rather than with Dutch Jews: “They are closer together and understand one another better, both psychologically and as far as language and ways of behavior are concerned…. The last commandant mentioned [Commandant Albert Gemmeker] even has a Jewish adjutant in the person of Herr Todtmann who forms the link between the commandant and the Registration Department. The adjutant wears a service uniform. He, Gemmeker, has awarded the now famous red stamps to German Jews” [stamps that, in principle, protected one from deportation—for a while].³⁴

Mechanicus reserved his sharpest barbs for the former members of the Jewish Council. The council was officially disbanded on July 5, but, on that same day, its former members were granted various privileges for themselves and their families, including the “red stamp.” “It is in reality a fiendish tribute,” Mechanicus commented, “from the representatives of a regime which used Jews to catch Jews and hand over Jews and guard Jews. It was the desire to have a safe stamp, the longing to save their own skins that induced these Jews to perform the grisly services that their tormentors demanded and exacted from them…. Now that they have a respite from the breathless chase and the evil frenzy, they should dig down into their consciences, if they have a conscience at all.”³⁵

Nothing changed the German routine in the end. Even a few hundred privileged Jews who had been sent from Amsterdam to a castle at Barneveld with full assurance that they would stay there to the end of the war were suddenly moved to Westerbork in the summer of 1943, albeit with Theresienstadt as their final destination. For the immense majority, however, the ripples on the surface of Westerbork life did not make any difference in regard to the final outcome.

“It will be my parents’ turn to leave soon,” Etty Hillesum recorded on July 10, 1943. “If by some miracle not this week, then certainly one of the next. Mischa [Etty’s brother] insists on going along with them, and it seems to me that he probably should; if he had to watch our parents leave this place, it [would] totally unhinge him. I shan’t go. I just can’t. It is easier to pray for someone from a distance than to see him suffer by your side. It is not fear of Poland that keeps me from going along with my parents, but fear of seeing them suffer. And that, too, is cowardice.”³⁶

A month earlier, on June 8, Etty had described the departure of the weekly transport. “The people have already been loaded into the freight cars; the doors are closed…. The quota of people who must go is not yet [filled]. Just now I met the matron of the orphanage, carrying a small child in her arms who has also to go, alone. I climbed on a box lying among the bushes here to count the freight cars. There were thirty-five, with some second-class cars at the front for the escorts. The freight cars had been completely sealed, but a plank had been left out, here and there, and people put their hands through the gaps and waved as if they were drowning.”³⁷

While Etty, still manifestly uncertain about the fate of the deportees, was watching the transports leaving Westerbork, for Anne, life in hiding was replete with small miseries, but nonetheless it was also increasingly dominated by her first teenage love. The Annex sheltered the Franks, the van Daans, and a Mr. Dussel. Anne would turn fifteen in 1944, and Peter van Daan seventeen. On February 16 Anne recorded some of the topics they had been discussing: “He [Peter] talked about the war, saying that Russia and England were bound to go to war against each other, and about the Jews. He said life would have been much easier if he’d been a Christian or could become one after the war. I asked if he wanted to be baptized, but that wasn’t what he meant either. He said he would never be able to feel like a Christian, but that after the war he would make sure nobody would know he was Jewish. I felt a momentary pang. It’s such a shame he still has a touch of dishonesty in him.”³⁸

In the meantime Rosenberg’s looting agency was sending the furniture stolen from Dutch Jewish homes to the Reich but also, as we saw, to German officials and agencies in the East. On April 30, 1943, the Jews of Holland unexpectedly surfaced in Kruk’s diary: “We have already written about the packing up of 130,000 Jews from Holland and their transport to the East. We have also mentioned that carloads filled with goods from the Dutch Jews are in the Vilna railroad station. Now an issue that clears it all up—beautiful old furniture has been brought here, to our joiners’ workshop, to be repaired. In the drawers people find Dutch documents, including documents from December 1942, which means that ostensibly, the Dutch were not taken to the East before January or February. Thus the Jews [there]…did not know they were going to be exterminated…. In our area, dozens of railroad cars are scattered filled with Jewish junk, remnants of the former Dutch Jewry.”³⁹

In order to increase the number of deportees from France, the Germans were now pushing Vichy to adopt a law revoking the citizenship of Jews naturalized since 1927. But, after seemingly going along with the German scheme in the early summer of 1943, Laval rejected the new demand in August. Reports from the prefects had convinced the head of the Vichy government that public opinion would resent the handing over of French citizens (even recently naturalized ones) to the Germans.⁴⁰

Due to the importance of the issue, Laval informed Eichmann’s men, the decision would have to be taken by the head of state himself. Pétain was of course aware of the possible reactions of the population. Moreover, he had been warned by the delegate of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops, Henri Chappoulie, that the church would react negatively to any collective cancellation of the naturalization of Jews who had become French citizens after 1927.⁴¹ Finally it is likely that by August 1943, when Pétain and Laval rejected the German demand, both—like everybody else beyond the borders of the Reich—simply perceived that the Germans were undoubtedly losing the war.

It is hard to assess which of these elements played a decisive role in determining Vichy’s decision. A public opinion poll completed by the CGQJ in the spring of 1943 on the demand of the government pointed to the existence of an absolute majority (more than 50 percent) of anti-Semites in the country.⁴² These results, which may have been manipulated by the Commissariat, have of course to be regarded cautiously; they did, however, confirm trends previously mentioned, although they did not tally with the prefects’ reports about potential reactions to the cancellation of naturalizations.

The Germans were not deterred: They would start the deportation of French Jews. To that effect, Dannecker’s successor, Obersturmbannführer Heinz Röthke, got reinforcement: Eichmann’s special delegate, Aloïs Brunner, arrived directly from Salonika, where, as we saw, the deportation of almost the entire Jewish population had just been successfully completed. Accompanied by a special group of some twenty-five SS officers, Brunner would be in direct contact with Berlin. He immediately replaced the French officials in charge of Drancy with his own men and ordered UGIF-North to take over the internal administration of the camp.⁴³

In the face of the unremitting German determination, both UGIF-North and South were helpless. André Baur, the head of UGIF-North, refused to go along with Brunner’s plan to entice Jews who had not been arrested to join their families in Drancy (the “Missionary Plan”). When, in desperation in the face of Brunner’s relentless pressure, Baur demanded a meeting with Laval, Eichmann’s delegate had him arrested (on the pretext that two Drancy detainees, one of them Baur’s cousin, had escaped).⁴⁴

Brunner’s intention to decapitate UGIF-North in order to have an entirely submissive Jewish leadership in hand became even clearer when, after Baur’s arrest, the Germans raided various UGIF offices and, using the flimsiest pretexts, sent other UGIF leaders to Drancy. Within a few months the Gestapo envoy had achieved this particular aim: UGIF-North continued to exist (which was all to German advantage as long as tens of thousands of Jews were still residing in the northern zone and children’s homes remained under the control of the organization), but its new leaders were now the subservient Georges Edinger and somebody later never entirely cleared of the suspicion of having played a dubious role, Juliette Stern.⁴⁵

In the meantime, however, still under Baur’s stewardship and more actively so later on, UGIF-North was ready to cooperate in a German scheme whose intention must have been obvious from the start. Some Jewish children would be released from Drancy and, together with others already in UGIF’s care, they would be kept out of the camp on condition that all be sent to designated homes, under the responsibility of the organization. It meant, in other words, that the children were a captive group whom the Germans could seize whenever they wished. In the meantime UGIF would have to take care of them. Foiling the German plan became an increasingly urgent task for some members of UGIF itself, the semiclandestine Children’s Relief Committee (OSE), the officially disbanded Jewish Scouts organization, and the communist “Solidarity” welfare association. All attempted to transfer children from the UGIF homes to foster families, Christian institutions, and OSE safe havens. Yet, as we shall see, when, shortly before the liberation of Paris, the Germans pounced on the UGIF homes, many of the young charges were still there.⁴⁶

In the southern zone the German-French roundups continued to encounter Italian obstruction during the last months of the Mussolini regime and during Badoglio’s brief rule. On February 25, 1943, Ribbentrop had traveled to Rome to confront Mussolini personally. The Duce tried to avoid a clash by declaring that his men were arresting the Jews in their zone, a statement that both he and Ribbentrop knew to be false. In fact, in early March, the Italian military commander in France ordered the local French authorities to release immediately the Jews they had arrested in some of the cities under Italian control.⁴⁷ As news about the Italian attitude spread, Jews fled in ever-greater numbers to this paradoxical safe haven and, by March 1943, some 30,000 of them lived under “fascist” protection in southeast France.

To assuage the Germans, Mussolini announced new measures. The inspector general of the Italian police, Guido Lospinoso, was sent to France to implement the Duce’s decision to cooperate with his Axis partner. With the help of the army and some advice from the Italian Jew Angelo Donati, Lospinoso started the transfer of Jews from the Côte d’Azur to hotels in the alpine resorts of the Haute-Savoie.⁴⁸

In these rescue efforts the somewhat mysterious Donati played a crucial role. No less essential was the assistance he received from a French Capuchin priest, Father Pierre Marie-Benoît, who on his own had already actively helped Jews in the southern zone for two years, mainly by providing them with false identity papers and by finding hiding places in religious institutions. During the summer of 1943, under the Badoglio government, Donati and Marie-Benoît went one step further and planned the transfer of thousands of Jews from the Italian zone via Italy to North Africa. Four ships had even been leased with the financial support of the Italian (Jewish) association for helping refugees, Delasem, and groups of Jews were being moved toward the French-Italian border when the Italian armistice was announced and the peninsula occupied by the Wehrmacht.⁴⁹

No sooner had the Germans moved into Rome, and into Nice and its surroundings, than Brunner and Röthke arrived on the Côte d’Azur: The hunt for the Jews residing in the former Italian zone started. The Germans were ready to pay 100, 1,000, and at times 5,000 francs per individual to professional denouncers who specialized in identifying Jews on the streets.⁵⁰ They also received other well-remunerated help, that of a “society lady,” for example, who delivered seventeen of her clients to the Gestapo.⁵¹ The overall results were disappointing nonetheless. By mid-December 1943, when Brunner returned to Drancy, barely 1,819 Jews had been caught and deported. The partial German failure may have been the result of the nonparticipation of the French police in the operations, and of the greater readiness now shown by the population and by religious institutions to hide the mostly French Jews. And, as the Wehrmacht also refused to take part in the roundups, the Gestapo was essentially left to its own devices.⁵²

In other regions of France the German anti-Jewish drive also ended in mixed results during the last months of 1943, despite the ultra collaborationists’ rise to greater power. In early 1944, the chief of Vichy’s anti-Resistance squads, the Milice, Joseph Darnand, the Gestapo’s man, replaced Bousquet at the head of the French police. And, at the head of the Commissariat Général, Darquier, incompetent and corrupt, was succeeded by the even more incompetent Charles du Paty de Clam, and, shortly thereafter, by yet another outright accomplice of the Germans, Joseph Antignac.

Brunner’s growing frustration led to repeated shows of Gestapo strength in the liquidation of the leadership of French Jewry. As we saw, Baur and several other leaders of UGIF-North had been arrested with their families in the early summer of 1943. In the meantime, in the South, Lambert seemed impervious to the growing threat. “Days go by,” he noted on July 9, “without the events we hoped for having happened…. However, everybody believes that the war will end before the winter. I aspire to it with all my strength, as I doubt whether I shall be able to escape enslavement for more than six months…. Nonetheless some instinct tells me to be confident. I remember how calm I was as a soldier in 1916, during the terrible offensive of April when I underwent my baptism of fire.⁵³

Despite some nervousness, Lambert kept to his routine: much traveling, even some short vacations (two days with his family), and extensive reading (as usual, he noted all titles and wrote some comments about most of the books.) When, on August 17, he was informed of the “huge Russian offensive,” he added: “I believe that we will be in Paris for Christmas.”⁵⁴ Lambert recorded his last diary entry on August 20, 1943; there he summed up the sharp criticism of the Consistoire people that he had meant to write in 1941: “They preferred their own well-being to uncertainty and to the heroism of fighting…. We [UGIF] chose the heroism of doubt and action, the reality of striving.”⁵⁵ It sounded strangely like an epitaph.

On August 21 Lambert, his wife, and their four children were arrested and sent to Drancy; on December 7 they were deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Helbronner’s turn followed. On October 28 the Gestapo arrested the president of the Consistoire, Petain’s and Gerlier’s friend, the most thoroughly French of all French Jews. Vichy was immediately informed, and so was Cardinal Gerlier. Helbronner and his wife were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz in transport number 62 that left French territory on November 20, 1943; they were gassed on arrival. Between October 28 and November 20, neither the Vichy authorities nor the head of the French Catholic Church intervened in any way.⁵⁶ That Pétain did not intervene isn’t astonishing; that Gerlier abstained demonstrates that to the very end the leaders of the French church maintained their ambiguous attitude even toward those French Jews who were the closest to them.

Leo Baeck, Paul Eppstein, David Cohen, and Abraham Asscher, Zwi Koretz, and other Jewish leaders had been deported to Theresienstadt or Bergen Belsen, and most of them survived the war. Why Baur, Lambert, and Helbronner were sent to immediate death in Auschwitz remains unexplained.

As the leaders of French Jewry were being murdered, none of the council heads appointed by the Germans (or by Vichy) at the outset of the war or in the course of the expanding occupation were in office any longer, with the exception of Rumkowski. In a study dealing with former Poland, and comparing a first wave of 146 heads of councils and a second or third one of 101 appointees, historian Aharon Weiss concluded: “Most of the first chairmen managed to defend the interests of their communities. The majority of these [chairmen] were liquidated or removed. The patterns of behavior in the later terms changed greatly. The most striking fact emerging from this summary is the steep rise in submissiveness and yielding of the Judenräte to German pressure in the last period. Responsible leaders were replaced, often with German support, by people less attuned to the interests of the community; during the stages of mass extermination and brutal terror they carried out the Nazi orders.”⁵⁷

Although it is difficult to compare the Jewish leadership in occupied Poland with Jewish leaders in the Reich, the West, the Baltic countries, the Balkans, and the more ephemeral ghettos of the occupied Soviet Union, the correlation between the passage of time and growing submissiveness is substantiated, but not only, so it seems, for the reasons adduced by Weiss. The passage of time meant moving from the predeportation phase to that of systematic deportations and extermination. In other words, while during the earlier phase Jewish leaders were faced with the practical difficulties of survival, albeit under dire circumstances, in the later period they were faced with mass murder. Such would also be the case in 1944 regarding remnants of all Western communities and mainly regarding Hungarian Jewry. There was no Jewish Council in Budapest before March 1944, but no leadership would be more submissive than this first and only batch of appointees.

In fact from the beginning of systematic mass murder, even the Jewish leaders appointed at the outset of the occupation discovered no other way of facing the German demands (except by committing suicide) than delivering the weakest segments of the community (including, of course, the foreigners) in order to “gain time” and attempt to safeguard the “most valuable” elements (emphasis added). In Cohen and Asscher’s views, the most valuable Jews were a small group of middle-class Amsterdam Jews; for Helbronner, the most valuable elements were the French Jews (the Consistoire should be included in the leadership groups, on par with the UGIF); for Rumkowski, only working—mostly local—Jews would eventually be saved. Once the deportations started, Helbronner and Lambert were as compliant as Cohen and Asscher. Rumkowski, for all practical purposes the first major ghetto leader and the last to stay in office, was possibly more compliant than any of the other leaders, east and west, and the remnants of the Lodz ghetto would “almost” be saved, as we shall see.

In other words compliance was not a function of the time spent as head of council, but rather of the phase during which the head of council negotiated with the Germans. During the extermination phase none of the strategies devised by the councils or any other Jewish leader to counter the German drive did work; larger or smaller numbers of Jews remained alive by pure chance and as a result of entirely independent circumstances: the readiness of local authorities, populations or resistance movements to help, or not. Armed Jewish resistance, as important as it was in symbolic terms, did not save lives but accelerated the rhythm of extermination. The council’s interference with armed resistance, as in Vilna, did not save the community either.

Historian Dan Diner has assumed that the Jewish Councils’ frantic search for a strategy to save their communities from extermination, given their attempts to understand the various “rational interests” of the Germans they were facing (the Wehrmacht as well as the SD), offers a starting point for inquiry into the “counterrational” world of extermination policies.⁵⁸ Such an indirect approach may not be necessary if we recognize that the policy ordered by Hitler and implemented by Himmler and the entire murder system stemmed from a single postulate: The Jews were an active threat, for all of Aryan humanity in the long run, and in the immediate future for a Reich embroiled in a world war. Thus the Jews had to be exterminated before they could harm “Fortress Europe” from within or join forces with the enemy coalition they had themselves set against the Reich.

Whether or not they recognized the exact nature of German reasoning during the extermination phase, Jewish leaders could not know that dilatory tactics were hopeless in the end and that, at the last moment, the Germans would attempt to exterminate everyone without taking any “interests” into account. Whatever choice they made, Jewish leaders during the extermination phase were confronted with insuperable dilemmas; neither their organizational and diplomatic talents nor their moral “red lines” and political allegiances had any impact whatsoever on the ultimate fate of their communities.

When no hope of survival remained and no German promise sounded believable anymore, psychological conditions were ready for an uprising: Such was the situation in Warsaw after the January 1943 Aktion, and such it was, in the summer and fall of 1943, for the Jewish workers’ teams left alive in Treblinka and Sobibor. As the deportations to both camps were winding down, these Jews understood that their own liquidation could not be far off.

According to Shmuel Wilenberg, one of the survivors of the Treblinka uprising, by May 1943, after the extermination of the remaining Warsaw ghetto population, not much doubt remained about the outcome: “The workload in the camp was dwindling…. For some time we had been receiving better and more satisfying portions of food. We got the impression that the Germans wanted to kill us all and were trying to dull our senses and deceive us with their behavior.”⁵⁹

In late July 1943, as the exhuming and burning of corpses that had been going on in the upper camp (the extermination area) was coming to an end, the decision was finalized: The uprising had to take place as soon as possible in order to allow as many inmates as possible to flee before the final liquidation of the camp. The date and time were set for August 2, at four-thirty in the afternoon. The head of the main organizing committee in the lower camp, Marceli Galewski, an engineer from Lodz and a former camp elder, could in principle coordinate the exact time for the beginning of the operation with the upper camp, given the fact that master carpenter Jacob Wiernik was allowed by the Germans to move freely throughout both areas.⁶⁰ At the decisive moment, however, nothing went according to plan.

The first shot was fired half an hour ahead of the time set for the beginning of the revolt, due to unforeseen circumstances and, soon, coordination between the different combat teams broke down. Nonetheless, as chaos was spreading and part of the camp was set on fire, hundreds of inmates, either in groups or on their own, succeeded in breaking through the fences and escaping.⁶¹

In his prison conversations with Gitta Sereny, camp commander Stangl described the scene: “Looking out of my window I could see some Jews on the other side of the inner fence—they must have jumped down from the roof of the SS billets and they were shooting…. In an emergency like this my first duty was to inform the chief of the external security police. By the time I had done that our petrol station blew up…. Next thing the whole ghetto camp was burning and then, Matthess, the German in charge of the Totenlager [upper camp] arrived at a run and said everything was burning up there too.”⁶²

According to various estimates, of the 850 inmates living in the camp on the day of the uprising, 100 were caught at the outset, 350 to 400 perished during the fighting, and some 400 fled but half of them were caught within hours; of the remaining 200, approximately 100 succeeded in escaping the German dragnet and the hostile population; the number of those who ultimately survived is unknown.⁶³ After fleeing the immediate surroundings of the camp, Galewski was unable to go on and poisoned himself.⁶⁴Wiernik survived and became an essential witness.⁶⁵

The immediate reason for the uprising in Sobibor was the same as in Treblinka, and from early 1943 on, a small group of the camp’s working Jews started planning the operation. Yet only in late September, when a young Jewish Red Army lieutenant, Alexander Pechersky, who had arrived from Minsk with a group of Soviet POWs, joined the planning group, were concrete steps rapidly taken.⁶⁶ The date of the uprising was set for October 14. The plan foresaw the luring of key SS members to various workshops under some fictitious pretext, and killing them. The first phase of the plan, the liquidation of the SS personnel, succeeded almost without a hitch; although the second phase, the collective moving through the main gate, soon turned into uncontrolled fleeing, more than three hundred inmates succeeded in escaping to the surrounding forests.⁶⁷ Pechersky and his group crossed the Bug River and joined the partisans.

The cooperation of Jewish inmates and Soviet POWs in the breakout was a unique aspect of the Sobibor uprising. Yet it added a further dimension to the security scare in Berlin. Coming after the Warsaw rebellion, the uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor convinced Himmler that the murder of most Jewish workers, even in the Lublin district, should be completed as rapidly as possible. On November 3, 1943, the SS killed 18,400 inmates in Majdanek while music was played over loudspeakers to cover the sounds of shooting and the cries of the dying prisoners. In July 1942 the roundup of Jews in Paris had been baptized “Spring Wind”; in November 1943 the mass murder of the Jews of Majdanek received an equally idyllic code name: “Harvest Festival.”

IV

Barely two weeks after the German occupation of Rome, the main leaders of the community, Ugo Foà and Dante Almansi, were summoned by SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, the SD chief in the Italian capital. They were ordered to deliver fifty kilograms of gold within thirty-six hours. If the ransom was paid on time, no harm would befall the city’s Jews. Although Kappler had been secretly instructed by Himmler to prepare the deportation from Rome, it now appears (from declassified OSS documents) that the extortion was Kappler’s own idea, meant to avoid the deportation and eventually help instead in sending the Jews of Rome to work at local fortifications.⁶⁸ Kappler, who had very few police forces at his disposal, preferred to use them in order to arrest Italian carabinieri, a far more real danger in his eyes than the mostly impoverished Jews of the city.⁶⁹

The gold was collected in time from members of the community (a loan offered by the pope proved unnecessary) and shipped to the RSHA on October 7.⁷⁰ Foà and Almansi believed Kappler’s assurances and, when warned by Chief Rabbi Israel Zolli and by leading officials of Delasem that further German steps could be expected, they chose for a while to ignore the omens: What had happened elsewhere could not happen in Rome. The community itself, mostly the 7,000 poorer Jews living in or near the former ghetto area, also remained unconcerned, like their leaders.⁷¹

And indeed, during the following days, the Germans appeared more interested in looting than in anything else. The priceless treasures of the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica (the Library of the Israelite Community) became a special target. For good reasons. In the words of historian Stanislao G. Pugliese, “among the manuscripts were works of the rabbi and medical doctor Moses Rieti; manuscripts spirited out of Spain and Sicily during the Jewish expulsion in 1492; a Portuguese incunabulum of 1494; a mathematics text of Elia Mizrahi; and an extremely rare edition of a Hebrew-Italian-Arabic vocabulary published in Naples in 1488. There were also twenty-one Talmudic tracts published by Soncino [in the early sixteenth-century]…and a rare eight-volume edition of the Talmud by the famous sixteenth-century Venetian printer Daniel Bomberg.”⁷²

In early October the Rosenberg agency specialists examined the collection. While some precious artifacts belonging to the main synagogue of the ghetto were hidden in the walls of the mikvah [the ritual bath for purification], the library could not be saved: On October 14 Rosenberg’s men loaded the books into two railroad cars and shipped them off to Germany.⁷³ And, although some of the Jews of Rome argued that “crimes against books were not crimes against people,” panic started spreading.⁷⁴ Frantically Jews looked for hiding places; the richer among them were soon gone.

On October 6 Theodor Dannecker arrived in Rome at the head of a small unit of Waffen SS officers and men. A few days later, on October 11, Kaltenbrunner reminded Kappler of the priorities he seemed to ignore: “It is precisely the immediate and thorough eradication of the Jews in Italy which is the special interest of the present internal political situation and the general security in Italy,” the message, decoded and translated by the British, stated. “To postpone the expulsion of the Jews until the Carabinieri and the Italian army officers have been removed can no more be considered than the idea mentioned of calling up the Jews in Italy for what would probably be very unproductive labor under responsible direction by Italian authorities. The longer the delay, the more the Jews who are doubtless reckoning on evacuation measures have an opportunity by moving to the houses of pro-Jewish Italians of disappearing completely. [undecoded] has been instructed in executing the RFSS orders to proceed with the evacuation of the Jews without further delay.”⁷⁵ Kappler had no choice but to submit.

On October 16 Dannecker’s unit, with small Wehrmacht reinforcements, arrested 1,259 Jews in the Italian capital. After Mischlinge, partners in mixed marriages, and some foreigners had been released, 1,030 Jews, including a majority of women and some 200 children under the age of ten, remained imprisoned at the Military College. Two days later these Jews were transported to the Tiburtina railway station and from there to Auschwitz. Most of the deportees were gassed immediately, 196 were selected for labor; 15 survived the war.⁷⁶

Throughout the country the roundups continued until the end of 1944: The Jews were usually transferred to an assembly camp at Fossoli (later to Risiera di San Sabba, near Trieste) and, from there, sent to Auschwitz. Thousands managed to hide among a generally friendly population or in religious institutions; some managed to flee across the Swiss border or to the areas liberated by the Allies. Nonetheless, throughout Italy about 7,000 Jews, some 20 percent of the Jewish population, were caught and murdered.⁷⁷

Since the end of the war the arrest and deportation of the Jews of Rome (and of Italy) have been the object of particular scholarly attention and of a number of fictional renditions, given their direct relevance to the attitude of Pope Pius XII. The events as such are known in detail; the reasons for some of the most crucial decisions can only be surmised at best.

By early October 1943, several German officials in the Italian capital, including Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen, embassy councillor with the German diplomatic mission to Mussolini’s Salo Republic but himself posted in Rome, Ernst von Weizsäcker, former state secretary at the Wilhelmstrasse and newly appointed Ambassador to the Vatican, as well as Gen. Rainer Stahel, the Wehrmacht commander of the city, became aware of Himmler’s deportation order.

For a variety of reasons (fear of unrest among the population, wariness about the possibility of a public protest by Pius XII and its potential consequences), these officials attempted to have the order partly changed: The Jews would be used for labor in and around Rome. Möllhausen went so far as to convey his worries to Ribbentrop, on October 6, in unusually explicit terms: “Obersturmbannführer Kappler has received the order from Berlin to arrest the eight thousand Jews living in Rome and to transport them to northern Italy where they will be liquidated. The city commander of Rome, General Stahel, informs me that he will allow the operation only if the Foreign Minister agrees to it. I am personally of the opinion that it would be a better deal (besseres Geschäft) to use the Jews for work on fortifications, like in Tunis, and together with Stahel, I would present the case to Field Marshall Kesselring.”⁷⁸

The next day Luther’s successor, Eberhard von Thadden, replied: “By order of the Führer, the 8,000 Jews living in Rome have to be taken to Mauthausen as hostages. The Minister asks you to avoid interfering in this matter under any circumstances and leave it to the SS.”⁷⁹ On October 16, as we saw, the roundup took place.⁸⁰

On the morning of the raid a friend of the pope, Countess Enza Pignatelli, informed him of the events. Immediately Maglione summoned Weizsäcker and mentioned the possibility of a papal protest if the raid went on. Strangely enough, however, after hinting that such a step could trigger a reaction “at the highest level,” Weizsäcker asked whether he was allowed not to report the conversation, and Maglione agreed. “I observed,” Maglione noted, “that I had asked him to intervene appealing to his sentiments of humanity. I was leaving it to his judgment whether or not to mention our conservation, which had been so friendly.”⁸¹

The reason for Weizsäcker’s suggestion is unclear. Did he wish to avoid receiving an “official” message that could indeed have led to retaliation against church interests in the Reich? His next step (the letter from Hudal, which we shall refer to) would be a nonofficial warning and thus probably exclude any violent reaction. But if the pope were to protest, all such precautions would have been in vain. Weizsäcker probably hoped that the threat of papal protest would suffice to stop the roundup; a protest would thus not be necessary. Either Maglione was informed of Weizsäcker’s next step and understood his reasoning, or else the cardinal’s acceptance of Weizsäcker’s suggestion not to report the conversation could only be interpreted as a rather strange signal that the possibility of a papal protest should not be taken too seriously.

Be that as it may, on that same day Weizsäcker and fellow German diplomats in the know approached the rector of the German church in Rome, Bishop Aloïs Hudal, a prelate notorious for his pro-Nazi leanings, and convinced him to write a letter to Stahel in which the strong possibility of the pope’s public protest would be mentioned.⁸² Hudal accepted.

A few hours later Weizsäcker cabled Hudal’s message to Berlin and added his personal comments for Ribbentrop’s benefit: “With regard to Bishop Hudal’s letter,” Weizsäcker informed the minister, “I can confirm that this represents the Vatican’s reaction to the deportation of the Jews of Rome. The Curia is especially upset considering that the action took place, so to say, under the Pope’s own windows. The reaction could perhaps be dampened if the Jews were to be employed in labor service here in Italy. Hostile circles in Rome are using this event as a means of pressuring the Vatican to drop its reserve. It is being said that when similar incidents took place in French cities, the bishops there took a clear stand. Thus the Pope, as the supreme leader of the Church and as Bishop of Rome, cannot do less. The Pope is also being compared with his predecessor, Pius XI, a man of a greatly more spontaneous temperament. Enemy propaganda abroad will certainly also use this event, in order to disturb the friendly relations between the Curia and ourselves.”⁸³

The pope kept silent. On October 25, after the deportees’ train had left Italy on its way to Auschwitz, an article in the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, sang the praises of the Holy Father’s compassion: “The August Pontiff, as is well known…had not desisted for one moment in employing all the means in his powers to alleviate the suffering, which, whatever form it may take, is the consequence of this cruel conflagration. With the intensification of so much evil, the universal and paternal charity of the Pontiff has become, it could be said, ever more active; it knows neither boundaries nor nationality, neither religion nor race. This manifold and ceaseless activity on the part of Pius XII has intensified even more in recent times in regard for the increased suffering of so many unfortunate people.”⁸⁴

Weizsäcker sent a translation of the article to the Wilhelmstrasse, with a notorious cover letter: “The Pope, although under intense pressure from various sides, has not allowed himself to be pushed into a demonstrative comment against the deportation of the Jews of Rome. Although he must know that such an attitude will be used against him by our adversaries…he has nonetheless done everything possible in this delicate matter in order not to burden relations with the German government and the German authorities in Rome. As there apparently will be no further German action taken on the Jewish question here, it may be expected that this matter, so unpleasant in regard to German-Vatican relations, is liquidated.” Referring then to the article in L’Osservatore Romano, Weizsäcker added: “No objections need be raised against this statement, insofar as its text…will be understood by very few people only as a special allusion to the Jewish question.”⁸⁵

In August 1941 Hitler had been sufficiently worried about the impact of Bishop Galen’s sermon against euthanasia to alter the course of the operation. Why didn’t the Nazi leader make the faintest move to forestall a threat of much greater magnitude—a public declaration by the pope against the deportation and extermination of the Jews? Why, in fact, did Hitler insist on deporting the Jews of Rome, notwithstanding warnings about dire potential consequences? Even if he assumed that German Catholics would not take a stand regarding the Jews as they could have done regarding their own people (the mentally ill), a public condemnation by the pope would have constituted a worldwide propaganda disaster. Only one answer is plausible: Hitler and his acolytes must have been convinced that the Pope would not protest. This belief probably derived from the multiple and quasi-identical reports reaching Berlin about the pontiff ’s political stand.

As early as the beginning of 1943, in a conversation with the German ambassador to the Vatican, Diego von Bergen, Pius XII had expressed his desire to postpone dealing with all outstanding contentions between the Reich and the Holy See (regarding the situation of the church in Germany) until the end of the war. According to Bergen the pope added that such was his intention except if the Germans took measures that would compel him to speak out “to fulfill the obligations of his office.” Given the context the remark referred to the situation of the church in Germany.⁸⁶ The pope’s readiness to accept, temporarily, the everyday difficulties that party and state created for German Catholics, and to postpone the discussion until after the war, derived, of course, from the ever-increasing worry of the Holy See in the face of gathering “Bolshevik” strength.

A short comment in Goebbels’s diary entry of February 8, 1943, confirmed that Hitler was well aware of the Vatican’s fears. The propaganda minister was listing the main points of Hitler’s address to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter at Rastenburg headquarters, on February 7. In the course of his survey of Germany’s strategic and international situation after Stalingrad, the Nazi leader came to speak of the Vatican: “Also the Curia has become somewhat more active as it sees that now it has only one choice left: National Socialism or Bolshevism.”⁸⁷

Two further Goebbels diary entries of the same weeks have to be viewed with caution, as the minister may have added some wishful thinking to information that was reaching him. Thus on March 3 he noted: “I hear from the most diverse sides, that it could be possible to do something with the present Pope. He is supposed to share, in part, some very reasonable views and not to be as hostile to National Socialism as one could surmise from the declarations of some of his bishops.”⁸⁸ Two weeks later Goebbels noted the “very sharp declaration against the twisting, in the U.S., of a speech by [New York Cardinal Francis] Spellman [who had just met with the pope]…. The Vatican declares that it has nothing to do with the war aims of the enemy. One can see from this, that the Pope is possibly closer to us than is generally assumed.”⁸⁹

On July 5, on presenting his credentials as new German ambassador to the Holy See, Weizsäcker had a conversation with the pontiff that seemed to tally entirely with prior German assessments: Pius first mentioned his “gratitude for the years he had spent as Nuncio in Germany and his affection for Germany and the German people.” After alluding to the ongoing problems between church and state in Germany, the pope expressed the hope that these issues would later be solved. The conversation then turned to Bolshevism. Weizsäcker emphasized Germany’s role in the fight against the Bolshevik threat. According to the ambassador, “the Pope spoke of his own Munich experience with the communists in 1919. He condemned the mindless formula of our enemies that refers to ‘unconditional surrender.’” After mentioning Pius’s lack of expectations regarding any peace initiatives “at the present time,” Weizsäcker indicated in conclusion that although in general the conversation took place without apparent passion, it was “suffused with hidden spiritual ardor which turned into an acknowledgement of common interests with the Reich only when the fight against Bolshevism was evoked.” (“Das Gespräch…wurde vom Papst ohne sichtbare Leidenschaft, aber mit einem Unterton von geistlichen Eifer geführt, der nur bei der Behandlung der Bolschewisten-Bekämpfung in eine Annerkenung gemeinsamer Interessen mit dem Reich überging.”)⁹⁰

The Vatican’s fear of the communist menace grew after Mussolini’s fall and, a few weeks later, in the wake of Italy’s surrender. On September 23 Weizsäcker informed Berlin that “by chance” he had had a look at three Vatican documents all dated July 25 (the day of Mussolini’s fall). The third—and the most important—of these documents was, so Weizsäcker reported, “an exposition by Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione to the Italian Government of the dangers threatening the world. Maglione says that the fate of Europe depends on the victorious resistance by Germany on the Russian front. The German Army is the only possible bulwark—‘baluardo’—against Bolshevism. Should this bulwark break, European culture would be finished.”⁹¹

On September 3 Weizsäcker sent an even more explicit report to Berlin regarding the pope’s political attitude: “I continually receive proof how very much annoyed Vatican people are over Anglo-American policy, the spokesmen of which are regarded as clearing the path for Bolshevism. Concern in the Vatican about the fate of Italy and of Germany, too, is growing. A diplomat who enjoys special connections with the Vatican assured me yesterday the Pope sternly condemns all plans aimed at weakening the Reich. A bishop working in the Curia told me today that in the Pope’s view a powerful German Reich is quite indispensable for the future of the Catholic Church. From confidential transcript of conversation between an Italian political publicist and the Pope, I gather that the Pope, in reply to question as to what he thought of the German people, replied: “They are a great nation who, in their fight against Bolshevism, are bleeding not only for their friends but also for the sake of their present enemies.”⁹²

Three weeks later Orsenigo paid a visit to the new state secretary at the Wilhelmstrasse, Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland, and, without any prodding, started expostulating about the threat represented by world communism. Only Germany and the Vatican could counter the threat: Germany, in material terms, and the Vatican, spiritually.⁹³ In all probability Weizsäcker in his reports and Orsenigo in his communications were trying to please Ribbentrop and, beyond him, Hitler himself, in order to alleviate the constant pressure put by the regime on the church in Germany. Nonetheless the authenticity of the constantly repeated political message could not be doubted.

All this must have been known to both Hitler and Goebbels when, on August 7, they discussed the situation in Italy following Mussolini’s fall. At some point Goebbels broached the subject of the pope: “Undoubtedly, as the Führer also agreed, the Pope is a Roman and an Italian. His efforts are concentrated upon holding back Bolshevism in Europe, under any circumstances. Also, he can certainly be considered as a friend of the Germans; after all he did spend fourteen years in Germany. Naturally he is no friend of National Socialism; but, all the same, he likes it more than Bolshevism. In any case, during the entire Italian crisis he did not express any hostility against fascism or against Mussolini. The Italian clergy in its majority is favorable to fascism. Admittedly though, the Pope is advised by a wide circle of enemies of National Socialism. His Secretary of State in particular, Maglioni [sic], is thoroughly hostile to Germany and National Socialism. I believe however that one can do something with the Pope and that is also Ribbentrop’s opinion. The Führer wants to keep him for a favorable occasion. Here too we have a piece on the chessboard. When to move it remains open.”⁹⁴

On October 14, as the first anti-Jewish measures had already been taken in the Italian capital, Goebbels noted: “The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris has expressed himself regarding the present situation in a conversation with one of our informants: According to him, the Vatican is absolutely hostile to Bolshevism. It would wish to reach firm agreements with the Reich. The Pope watches with greatest worry the increasingly bolshevist mood in all European countries. There is no doubt that the Catholic Church knows that if Bolshevism were to stand at Germany’s borders, it would mean mortal danger for her [the Church].”⁹⁵ Closer to home, Mussolini’s fall energized the partisans active in the northern and central parts of Italy and, among them, communist units, which particularly worried the Vatican.⁹⁶

The Nazi leader could assume therefore that Pius XII would abstain from any step that would harm Germany and increase the communist danger from outside “Europe,” or from inside. The only way that seemed open to the Vatican in order to avoid what it deemed an oncoming catastrophe was to broker a peace agreement between the Western powers and Germany that would establish a common “bulwark” against the advancing Soviets and defend the heart of the Continent. Hence Pius’s criticism of the unconditional surrender formula, if indeed he expressed himself in the way Weizsäcker reported on July 5. Both sides were aware of the papal plan and knew it to be the Vatican’s first priority. Within such a grand scheme there could be no place, the pontiff probably thought, for a public stand regarding the fate of the Jews, either in general or in relation to the events in Rome and in Italy.

It has been argued that in order to bring about the diplomatic compromise that he considered his mission, the pope had decided, from the very beginning of the war, not to speak up for any group of victims of the Nazi regime—either the Poles, the victims of euthanasia, or the Jews. This, however, was not the case. As we saw, the pope publicly expressed his sympathy for the Poles in his encyclical Summi Pontificatus of December 1939. Over the following years Polish bishops and the Polish population felt that Pius did not protest frequently and forcefully enough. This may have been the case until May 31, 1943, when the pontiff expressed a ringing recognition of “the tragic fate of the Polish people,” adding warm praise about the “faithful Polish people, heroically silent about their sufferings down the centuries, [who] have contributed to the development and preservation of Christian Europe.”⁹⁷ Pius spoke again about Polish sufferings in his June 2, 1943, address to the College of Cardinals. Regarding euthanasia the pope most energetically condemned it in letters to the German bishops. Mainly the Holy See addressed numerous protests, demands, and inquiries via diplomatic channels both regarding the situation of Catholics in Poland and about the killing of the mentally ill.⁹⁸Not one such diplomatic intervention dealt with the overall fate of the Jews.

Was the pope convinced that the Nazis would be impervious to any declaration he would make against their anti-Jewish policies? Did he believe that the bishops should respond according to their assessment of local conditions and not be prompted by Rome? Did he fear retaliation against baptized mixed breeds? Was he afraid of endangering the Jews who had gone into hiding in Italy, or did he believe that concealed assistance to the victims was the only possible way of countering the persecution? Furthermore, was he worried about a Nazi onslaught against German Catholics? Or did he fear the occupation of the Vatican? All these arguments have been made, either during the war or in the debates that followed since, and all, in some minor way, may have influenced Pius’s decision to remain silent. The political argument must have played the central role. However, a few of these secondary points demand brief comments.⁹⁹

Was Pius XII referring to the situation of the Jews in the already mentioned address to the College of Cardinals, on June 2, 1943? I thought so in my 1964 interpretation of papal policy, mainly in view of the pope’s mention of “the anxious entreaties of all those who, because of their nationality or their race, are being subjected to overwhelming trials and sometimes, through no fault of their own, are doomed to extermination.”¹⁰⁰ Yet, according to the Vatican editors of the document themselves, the address dealt essentially with the situation of the Poles.¹⁰¹ Therefore the pope’s remarks could have dealt with the Jews only incidentally if at all, and in this context “extermination” may have meant the widespread killing of Poles. The word “sometimes” reinforces this interpretation.

“Every word We address to the competent authority on this subject,” Pius went on, “and all Our public utterances, have to be carefully weighed and measured by Us in the interests of the victims themselves, lest, contrary to Our intentions, We make their situation worse and harder to bear. To put the matter in its most basic terms, the ameliorations apparently obtained do not match the scope of the Church’s maternal solicitude on behalf of the particular groups that are suffering the most appalling fate. The Vicar of Christ, who asked no more than pity and a sincere return to elementary standards of justice and humanity, faced a door that no key could open.”¹⁰²

If this address referred at all to the fate of the Jews, the pope, in mentioning the possibility that his interventions could create an even worse situation, may have had the events in Holland in mind, where, as we saw, the Catholic bishops’ protest of July 1942 led to the deportation of ninety-two Catholic Jews. However, by specifically alluding to a “situation…even harder to bear,” the Pontiff must indeed have rather been pointing only to the sufferings of the Poles; for the deported Jews, there was no situation harder to bear any longer. Moreover, “the ameliorations apparently obtained” also could not refer to the fate of the Jews.

The most important papal document regarding the Jewish issue, during those same months of 1943, is the letter Pius XII addressed to Bishop Preysing on April 30. The bishop of Berlin had informed the pontiff, in a message sent on March 6, 1943, of the new deportations from the Reich (the Fabrikaktion, among others): “Even harder [than by the bombings], we are hit here in Berlin by the new wave of deportations of Jews. Many thousands are destined for the probable fate to which your Holiness has alluded in your Christmas [1942] radio message. There are also many Catholics among these deportees. Would it not be possible for your Holiness to try once again to intervene for these many unfortunate innocents? It is the last hope of so many of them and the innermost prayer of all people of goodwill.”¹⁰³

The Pope did not avoid answering Preysing’s anguished cry: “It was a consolation for Us to learn that Catholics, notably in Berlin, had manifested great Christian charity toward the sufferings of ‘non-Aryans.’ Let this be the occasion for Us to express Our paternal gratitude and Our profound sympathy to Msgr Lichtenberg who is in prison.”¹⁰⁴

Preysing, however, had implored the Pope to intervene in some way. The answer made clear that the pontiff was not ready to do anything beyond his private message of encouragement. He explained his abstention as follows: “So far as Episcopal declarations are concerned, We leave to pastors on the spot the task of assessing whether, and to what extent, the danger of reprisals and pressures and, perhaps, other circumstances due to the length and the psychological climate of the war, counsel restraint—despite reasons that may exist for intervention—in order to avoid greater evils. This is one of the motives for the limitations which We impose upon Ourself in Our declarations.”¹⁰⁵

In other words the complex circumstances and the dangers of each local situation prescribed utmost prudence lest a move by a Catholic dignitary could result “in reprisals and pressures” and even “greater evils.” The pope thus favored a general code of conduct that gave much freedom of decision to the bishops in assessing the advisability of their own interventions in view of local circumstances and, as he explicitly mentioned in the letter, also applied it to his own decisions.

Some historians have suggested that following his Munich “experience” with the local Soviet in 1919, an experience that certainly remained engraved in his memory, as shown by the conversation with Weizsäcker in July 1943, Pius XII’s traditional Christian anti-Judaism became straightforward anti-Semitism. Bolshevism was identified with Jewry, as, indeed, some Jewish leaders had played a prominent role during the brief communist takeover of the Bavarian capital.¹⁰⁶ There is no specific indication that the pope was anti-Semitic or that his decisions during the war stemmed, be it in part, from some particular hostility toward Jews. Yet, contrary to his feelings for his “beloved Polish people,” and mainly for the German people, it does not seem that Pius XII carried the Jews in his heart.¹⁰⁷ This becomes apparent in the last part of the letter to Preysing, in which Pius addresses the help that he extended to Jews in need:

“To non-Aryan Catholics as well as those of the Jewish faith, the Holy See has acted charitably, within the limits of its responsibilities, on the material and moral plane. This action has necessitated a great deal of patience and disinterestedness on the part of the executive arms of Our relief organizations in meeting the expectations—one might even say demands—of those asking for help, and also in overcoming the diplomatic difficulties that have arisen. Let us not speak of the very large sums in American money, which we have had to disburse on shipping for emigrants. We gave those sums willingly because the people concerned were in distress. The money was given for love of God, and We were right not to expect gratitude on this Earth. Nevertheless, Jewish organizations have warmly thanked the Holy See for these rescue operations.”

At this point Pius once more turned to Preysing’s entreaty for some public gesture for the Jews who were being deported to their death: “In our Christmas message We said a word about the things that are presently being done to non-Aryans in the territories under German authority. It was short, but it was well understood. It is superfluous to say that Our paternal love and solicitude are greater today toward non-Aryan or semi-Aryan Catholics, children of the Church like the others, when their outward existence is collapsing and they are going through moral distress. Unhappily, in the present circumstances, We cannot offer them effective help other than through Our prayers. We are, however, determined to raise Our voice anew on their behalf as circumstances indicate and permit.”¹⁰⁸

“Moral distress” and the collapse of “outward existence” were not exactly the right terms regarding the fate of non-Aryan Catholics and all other Jews. As for the “circumstances” that would “indicate” another appeal (such as the Christmas 1942 message), one may wonder what in Pius’s mind would justify such an appeal above and beyond the deportation of the Jews from the bishop of Rome’s own city.

Finally, we mentioned that hundreds, possibly thousands of Jews found hiding places in religious institutions throughout Rome and in all major Italian cities; some even took refuge inside the Vatican. Could it be that the pope chose to abstain from any public challenge in order to facilitate the covert rescue operations by the church in Italy? There is no indication of any connection between the pontiff ’s silence and the assistance given to Jews. As for the assistance as such, it has been thoroughly researched by historian Susan Zuccotti; her conclusion, regarding Rome and Vatican City in particular, is that the pope must have known of the rescue activities without ever explicitly approving them but not forbidding them either.¹⁰⁹ Personally he was not involved in any of the rescue operations throughout Italy.¹¹⁰ No trace of any written directive has ever surfaced; moreover, from among the main religious personalities involved in assistance to the victims, in Rome or elsewhere, no indication of an oral directive from the Holy See to help the fleeing Jews has ever been mentioned. The rescue activities were mostly spontaneous, with or without support from the Jewish relief organization Delasem.¹¹¹

When the arguments that would explain Pius’s silence are assessed as a whole, it seems plausible that, in the pontiff ’s opinion, the drawbacks of an intervention far outweighed any beneficial results. The pope may have thought that by intervening he would grievously jeopardize his grand political project, possibly draw fierce retaliation against the church and its interests, first and foremost in Germany and, arguably, endanger converted mixed-breeds who hadn’t yet been deported. In his mind such calamitous results would probably not be offset by any tangible advantage; he may also have believed that nothing could change the course of Nazi policy regarding the Jews. According to this line of thinking, the only open course would have been covert assistance to individual Jews and some degree of intervention with predominantly Catholic satellite states (Slovakia, Croatia, and Vichy France to a certain extent). We shall return to the issue of individual assistance. As for diplomatic intervention with satellite states close to the Vatican, no direct appeal by the pope himself is known of. Maglione’s remonstrances, whenever they took place, were usually expressed with such diplomatic restraint that they could almost be considered as steps undertaken for the record rather than attempts to effect a change of policy or at least some greater reluctance in collaborating with German measures.¹¹²

In more general terms, if the Catholic Church is merely considered as a political institution that has to calculate the outcome of its decisions in terms of instrumental rationality, then Pius’s choice may be deemed reasonable in view of the risks entailed. If, however, the Catholic Church also represents a moral stand, as it claims, mainly in moments of major crisis, and thus has to move on such occasions from the level of institutional interests to that of moral witnessing, then of course Pius’s choice should be assessed differently.¹¹³ What we do not know and have no way of knowing—and there lies the core of the issue—is whether for Pius XII the fate of the Jews of Europe represented a major crisis situation and an anguishing dilemma, or whether it was but a marginal problem that did not challenge Christian conscience.

Whatever Pius’s anguish about the deportation from Rome may have been, none of it was even hinted at, when he met the American envoy Harold Tittman, on October 19. That day the deportees’ train had reached Vienna: The Vatican was being informed of the transport’s progress at each stage of the journey to Auschwitz. According to Tittman’s cable to Washington, “The Pope seemed preoccupied that in the absence of sufficient police protection, irresponsible elements (he said it is known that little communist bands are stationed in the environs of Rome at the present time) might commit violence in the city.” Tittman added that the pope expressed the wish that “the matter be attended to by the Allies in due time.” Finally, the pontiff conveyed to the American diplomat that “the Germans had respected Vatican City and the Holy See’s property in Rome, that the German general commanding in Rome seemed well disposed toward the Vatican.” According to Tittman, the pope then added that “he was feeling restriction due to the ‘abnormal situation.’”¹¹⁴ Presumably the ‘abnormal situation’ meant the deportation of the Jews of Rome.

V

Little changed in the attitude of the Christian churches (Catholic and Protestant) in continental Europe from the end of 1943 to the end of the war in regard to the fate of the Jews in their midst. Generalizations may possibly not be warranted in considering such vast and diverse domains, yet some basic facts cannot be dismissed and some comments may at least be ventured at this stage:

• Although sporadic protests by some Catholic bishops or Protestant religious leaders did take place, the vast majority of Catholic and Protestant authorities remained publicly silent in the face of the deportations of the Jews and the growing knowledge of their extermination. Whatever the reasons for it may have been, the pope’s silence contributed to the lack of open protest by Catholic prelates in various countries, including Germany. Generally no explicit guidance was given to Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) regarding the duty to help Jews, and almost no obstruction of the roundups and the deportations by religiously motivated groups took place.

• In terms of private interventions and assistance rendered by both Catholic and Protestant personalities or institutions, a clear distinction was systematically established between the tiny minority of converted Jews and the quasi totality of the “ordinary Jews.”

• The distinction thus applied to the two categories of Jews derived of course from a fundamental tenet of religious doctrine in both Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism (with the exception of the “German Christians”) regarding the radical difference existing between Christians (including converts) on the one hand and Jews on the other, not only in terms of ultimate salvation but also in terms of their status within Christian societies. Thus, as we saw, Catholic and Protestant church leaders generally took no exception to legislation that excluded Jews from positions in public life and from significant economic activities in most continental European states; in several countries (apart from Nazi Germany) they supported it.

• The be-all and end-all of this doctrine of fundamental inequality between Christians and Jews (both in this world and in the next) naturally created a “gray zone” in terms of individual Christian conscience and in regard to moral obligations; it allowed for a mix of traditional religious mistrust and contempt toward Jews that could easily—and frequently did—offset any urges of compassion and charity, or even fueled aggressive anti-Semitism.

The stigmatizing of Jews intrinsic to Christian dogma or tradition found a vast array of expressions in accepted theological thinking and mainstream public utterances among all the Christian churches of Europe. Some of it was formulated as generously and carefully as possible, some—although avoiding extreme vituperation—could be downright aggressive, even violently so. In Germany all forms and nuances found their way into the minds and hearts of tens of millions of believers, Protestant or Catholic.

Even an outstanding religious personality such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the moral beacon of the Confessing Church, could not escape the traditional dogmatic position. Bonhoeffer denounced the persecution and deportation of the Jews and in his Ethics, he tried to establish a theological underpinning for his defense of the Jewish people: “Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah of the Israelite-Jewish people, and for that reason the line of our forefathers goes back beyond the appearance of Jesus Christ to the people of Israel. Western history is, by God’s will, indissolubly linked with the people of Israel, not only genetically but also in genuine uninterrupted encounter. The Jew keeps open the question of Christ. He is the sign of the free mercy choice and of the repudiating wrath of God. ‘Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God.’ (Rom.11:22). An expulsion of the Jews from the West must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”¹¹⁵

As one of the commentators on this “intriguing passage” indicated, “It contains the characteristic ambivalence of Bonhoeffer’s work. The ultimate importance of Jews for Bonhoeffer’s Christianity lay in their rejection of Christ, their role as a sign both that belief is a choice and that God punishes unbelievers.”¹¹⁶

Archbishop Gröber of Freiburg used a different tone altogether. In a long report on the situation of the church in Germany sent to the pope on February 2, 1944, he took an unambiguous stand against Nazi ideology and against the Nazi cult of the Volk. In that sense, the prelate who had once been called “the brown bishop” had decidedly turned against any ideological accommodation with the regime. And yet, a quite unexpected transformation occurred when Gröber came to mention Judaism and repeated for the benefit of the pope the content of his own New Year’s message to his archdiocese. “I declared further [after having discussed other themes regarding the Volk] that the new concept of Volk entirely misunderstands the essence of Christianity. It [Christianity] is not some Judaism even if it considers the Israelite people [Volk] as the carrier and mediator of divine ideas and promises. But how Christ himself stood in regard to contemporary Judaism is shown in his struggle against the Pharisees and the doctors [Schriftgelehrten] and it is shown by the cross on Golgotha. The story of the apostles proves that the hatred of the Jews pursued Christians often during early Christianity, that in fact it went on fanatically throughout the history of Christendom.”¹¹⁷ And on May 8, 1945, as Germany surrendered, Gröber again attacked Nazi ideology and again offered the same interpretation of the relation of Judaism to Christianity.¹¹⁸ In both cases Pius XII avoided comment on Gröber’s stand regarding the Jews.

Sermons such as Gröber’s, and tens of thousands of more extreme ones, were but a fraction of a religious-cultural domain including teaching, catechism, and, more generally, a complex web of cultural expressions carrying all forms and degrees of everyday anti-Semitism. None of this, of course, was new either in Europe or in other parts of the Christian world, but the question that surfaced and surfaces repeatedly in our context is stark: What was the contribution of such a religious anti-Jewish culture to the passive acceptance, sometimes to the occasional support, of the most extreme policies of persecution, deportation, and mass murder unfolding in the midst of Europe’s Christian populations?

Paradoxically, evaluating and interpreting the assistance given by Christian organizations, institutions, and religiously motivated individuals to Jews in need of a hiding place or other forms of help is no less difficult. Such assistance, let us remember, entailed risk, extreme risk in Eastern Europe, various degrees of risk in the West. On the other hand, proselytism and conversion were major, albeit most elusive elements in granting such help, particularly in the hiding of children. In some places conversion may have been considered essential for better camouflage, but generally it was an aim in itself. This of course changes the historical assessment of Christian assistance, notwithstanding risk, compassion, or charity. It would be pointless to try and disentangle the components of such situations, the more so since, to a degree, all these motivations probably played some role, wherever mere greed was not the sole overriding factor. Actually, from the point of view of the devout Christian, bringing about the conversion of a Jew (or any other nonbeliever), even as a result of dire circumstances, may have been considered a religious obligation and an act of ultimate charity.

It is probably from that strictly religious point of view that one should interpret the pope’s decision, at the end of the war, to allow the Holy Office to instruct bishops throughout Europe not to return baptized Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions to the Jewish fold. The pope also allowed the keeping of such children who had not (yet) been baptized but had no family members who could claim their return.¹¹⁹

VI

Cordelia Maria Sara was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in early 1944, more or less at the time Primo Levi arrived from Fossoli, a few months before the arrival of Ruth Kluger. Levi was dispatched to Auschwitz III Monowitz where he slaved as a laborer first, then as a chemist in the Buna laboratories. Young Cordelia, first mustered by Maria Mandel, the female commandant of the women’s camp in Birkenau, then by Mengele himself (or was it possibly another SS officer?), was found fit for work and, temporarily at least, dispatched to the camp’s offices.¹²⁰

Ruth Kluger and her mother arrived at Auschwitz from Theresienstadt in May 1944, and for a short while they were shoved into the “family camp” (to which we shall return). Then both were transferred to the women’s camp, where the decisive selection took place: Healthy women aged fifteen to forty five would be sent to a labor camp; the others would be gassed. Ruth was twelve. When her turn arrived, she declared her age. Her fate would have been sealed had her mother not taken a daring initiative: In a moment of inattention among the guards, she rushed her daughter to another line. Ruth promised her to say that she was thirteen. “The line moved,” Kluger recalled, “towards an SS man who, unlike the first one, was in a good mood…. His clerk was perhaps nineteen or twenty. When she saw me, she left her post, and almost within the hearing of her boss, she asked me quickly and quietly and with an unforgettable smile of her irregular teeth: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Thirteen,’ I said as planned. Fixing me intently, she whispered, ‘Tell him you are fifteen.’ Two minutes later it was my turn…. When asked for my age I gave the decisive answer…‘I am fifteen.’ ‘She seems small,’ the master over life and death remarked. He sounded almost friendly, as if he [were] evaluating cows and calves. ‘But she is strong,’ the woman said, ‘look at the muscles in her legs. She can work.’ He agreed—why not? She made a note of my number, and I had won an extension on life.”¹²¹

“Neither psychology nor biology explains it,” Kluger later wrote about the young German woman’s initiative. “Only free will does…. The good is incomparable and inexplicable, because it doesn’t have a proper cause outside itself, and because it doesn’t reach for anything beyond itself.”¹²²

While Cordelia and Ruth were still in Theresienstadt, throughout 1943, some changes took place in the ghetto camp. At the beginning of the year the heads of the Reichsvereinigung arrived from Berlin and so did the remaining leaders of Austrian and Czech communities. For reasons not entirely clear, Eichmann decided on a change in the leadership of the camp: Edelstein remained on the council, but a German and an Austrian Jew were put ahead of him in the new hierarchy. Paul Eppstein, the former de facto leader of the Reichsvereinigung, and Benjamin Murmelstein, the Viennese rabbi whom Edelstein had already met in Nisko, took over the (Jewish) reins of the ghetto. In the meantime a German Mischling converted to Protestantism, ex-officer in the Imperial Army and Prussian to the marrow of his bones, Karl Löwenstein, had been transferred from the Minsk ghetto, on Wilhelm Kube’s request, and appointed chief of the Theresienstadt Jewish police. The changes did not stop at that: For no clear reason again the first commandant, Siegfried Seidl, was replaced by the brutal Austrian SS captain Tony Burger (whose main claim to fame—the deportation of the Jews of Athens—was still a year away).

In August 1943 a mysterious transport of more than one thousand children arrived from Bialystok. The rumor had it that they would be exchanged for Germans and possibly sent to Palestine. Two months later, well dressed and without wearing the yellow patch, they were sent on their way, accompanied by a few counselors, including Franz Kafka’s sister Ottla, straight to Auschwitz.¹²³

Shortly before the departure of the Bialystok children, another transport, an unusually massive one, had also left Theresienstadt. In his diary Redlich did not hide his panic: “What has happened? They incarcerated Fredy [Hirsch] and [Leo] Janowitz and put them on a transport. A transport of five thousand people. They sent five thousand in one day.”¹²⁴ On September 6 the transport was on its way to Auschwitz.

The prehistory of this particular transport started several months earlier when the International Committee of the Red Cross requested a visit to Theresienstadt and also a “Jewish labor camp.” By late 1942, as we saw, the Geneva organization was aware of the extermination and, according to Favez, throughout early 1943, information about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews kept accumulating at ICRC’s headquarters. On April 15, 1943, the Red Cross chief delegate in Berlin, Roland Marti, reported that the Jewish population of the Reich capital had dwindled to fourteen hundred persons and that they, too, were slated for deportation to camps in the East. He then added: “There is no news or trace of the 10,000 Jews who left Berlin between 28.2.43 and 3.3.43 and who are now presumed dead” (if they were presumed dead less than six weeks after deportation they had obviously been murdered). Favez then adds: “The Geneva Secretariat replied thanking Marti for the information and added that it was anxious to discover the deportees’ new addresses, for all the world as if they had merely moved.”¹²⁵

Before sending his report to Geneva, Marti had inquired at the German Red Cross whether packages could be sent to the deportees; the answer had been negative (as reported by an official of the German Red Cross to the ICRC delegate).¹²⁶ Eichmann and his acolytes could have no doubts by then that a request from Geneva to allow ICRC representatives to visit a Jewish camp would be forthcoming. This was precisely the kind of situation Theresienstadt had been established for. But what should be done if the Red Cross delegates insisted on visiting the ultimate reception place for deportees leaving Theresienstadt? As Theresienstadt was meant to be a hoax from the outset, some kind of sham complement had to be set up in Auschwitz, just in case. This was the rationale behind the establishment of a “family camp.”

No selection took place on the arrival of the five thousand deportees’ transport, and the entire group was settled in a special subcamp, BIIb, in which most of the draconian rules of life and death in Birkenau did not apply. The inmates could wear their civilian clothes, families were kept together, and every day some 500 children were sent to a special area, Block 31, where, under the guidance of Fredy Hirsch, they attended some classes, sang in a choir, played games, were told stories—in short were kept as unaware as possible of what Auschwitz-Birkenau was really all about.¹²⁷ In December 1943 another 5,000 Jews from Theresienstadt joined the first batch.

Exactly six months after their arrival, on March 7, 1944, on the eve of the Jewish festival of Purim, the 3,792 survivors of the September transport (the others had died in the meantime, despite their “favorable” living conditions) were sent to Crematorium III and gassed. Hirsch had been warned of the forthcoming gassing by members of the Sonderkommando and encouraged to start a rebellion. Unable to decide between passivity or a course of action that meant death for all his charges, he committed suicide.¹²⁸ Other transports from Theresienstadt arrived in May 1944.

In July, when it became obvious to Eichmann that the Red Cross commission, led by Dr. Maurice Rossel, which had visited Theresienstadt on June 23, would not ask to see Auschwitz, the entire “family camp,” with a few exceptions (such as Ruth Kluger and her mother) was sent to the gas chambers.¹²⁹

The extermination of the first batch of Jews from the “family camp,” on March 7, was secretly chronicled in the diary of one of the Sonderkommando members. Three such diaries were found after the war, buried near the Birkenau crematoriums: those of Zalman Gradowski, Zalman Leventhal, and Leyb Langfus.¹³⁰ Gradowski had been deported to Auschwitz in November 1942 from Lona, near Bialystok, together with his entire family: “mother, wife, two sisters, brother-in-law, and father-inlaw.” The entire family was gassed on December 8, except for Gradowski himself, who was sent to the Sonderkommando.¹³¹ Of the four notebooks hidden by Gradowski, the second includes the story of “The Czech Transport”:

After the defiant but helpless first load of these Czech Jews had been driven into the gas chamber and suffocated, Gradowski and his companions unbolted the doors: “They lay as they had fallen, contorted, knotted together like a ball of yarn, as though the devil had played a special game with them before their deaths, arranging them in such poses. Here one lay stretched out full length on top of the pile of corpses. Here one held his arms around another as they sat against the wall. Here part of a shoulder emerged, the head and feet intertwined with the other bodies. And here only a hand and a foot protruded into the air, the rest of the body buried in the deep sea of corpses…. Here and there heads broke through this sea, clinging to the surface of the naked waves. It seemed that while the bodies were submerged only the heads could peer out from the abyss.”¹³²

Dealing with the corpses was the Sonderkommando’s main task: They dragged them out of the gas chamber into the Leichenkeller, where anything of value was put away: “Three prisoners prepare the body of a woman,” Gradowski went on with his chronicle. “One probes her mouth with pliers, looking for gold teeth, which, when found, are ripped out together with the flesh. Another cuts the hair, while the third quickly tears off earrings, often drawing blood in the process. And, the rings, which do not come off the fingers easily, must be removed with pliers. Then she is given to the pulley. Two men throw on the bodies like blocks of wood; when the count reaches seven or eight, a signal is given with a stick and the pulley begins its ascent.”¹³³

The Sonderkommando diarists knew of course that they could not be allowed to survive as witnesses nor could they hope to survive the uprising they were preparing. On the eve of the rebellion, in early October 1944, Gradowski, one of its organizers, buried his notebooks. Throughout it seems that he remained a religious Jew: After each of the gassings, he would say Kaddish for the dead.¹³⁴

The last part of the process began once the pulley was sent on its way to the upper floor: “On the upper level, by the pulley, stand four men,” the chronicle continued. “The two on one side of the pulley drag corpses to the ‘storeroom’; the other two pull them directly to the ovens, where they are laid in pairs at each opening [“mouth” is used in the translation]. The slaughtered children are heaped in a big stack, they are added, thrown onto the pairs of adults. Each corpse is laid out on an iron “burial board”; then the door to the inferno is opened and the board shoved in…. The hair is the first to catch fire. The skin, immersed in flames, catches in a few seconds. Now the arms and legs begin to rise—expanding blood vessels cause this movement of the limbs. The entire body is now burning fiercely; the skin has been consumed and fat drips and hisses in the flames…. The belly goes. Bowels and entrails are quickly consumed, and within minutes there is no trace of them. The head takes the longest to burn; two little blue flames flicker from the eyeholes—these are burning with the brain…. The entire process lasts twenty minutes—and a human being, a world, has been turned to ashes.”¹³⁵

Why the Red Cross delegate, Maurice Rossel, did not demand to proceed to Birkenau after the visit to Theresienstadt is not clear. He was told by his SS hosts that the Czech ghetto was the “final camp”; yet Rossel could hardly have believed, in June 1944, that Theresienstadt was all there was to see regarding the deportation of the Jews of Europe. Be that as it may, on July 1, the ICRC representative sent an effusive thank-you note to Thadden, the senior official at the Wilhelmstrasse he dealt with. He even enclosed photos taken by the delegation during the visit of the camp as mementos of the pleasant excursion, and asked Thadden to forward a set to his colleagues in Prague. After expressing his gratitude, also in the name of the ICRC, for all the help extended to the delegation during its visit, Rossel added: “The trip to Prague will remain an excellent memory for us and it pleases us to assure you, once again, that the report about our visit in Theresienstadt will be reassuring for many, as the living conditions [in the camp] are satisfactory.”¹³⁶

The German concentration and extermination camp system was geared to send its Jewish victims either to immediate extermination or to slave labor that would end in extermination after a short time. Yet some of the smaller labor camps attached to enterprises working for the armaments industry, whether under control of the SS or not, sometimes kept their Jewish slaves alive for longer stretches of time, either due to essential production imperatives or (and) for the personal benefit of local commanders.¹³⁷ There was also Theresienstadt, of course, antechamber to extermination and holding pen for international propaganda. Then, in the course of 1943, another (very limited) series of camps was added to the overall landscape of destruction—and deception: camps for Jews who could be used as trading objects.

The very notion of keeping some Jews either as hostages or as exchange material for Germans in enemy hands, or else as sources of large sums of foreign currency, was nothing new from a Nazi perspective. Both the hostage idea and that of selling Jews predated the war and reappeared, as we saw, from late 1941 onward: it grew in importance as the war became increasingly difficult for the Reich. Some Palestinian Jews who had remained in Poland were exchanged for German nationals living in Palestine in the late fall of 1942, and at the same time a few Dutch Jews managed to bankroll their way to freedom. In December 1942 Hitler allowed Himmler to release individual Jews for hefty sums in foreign currency.

In early 1943 on the initiative of the Wilhelmstrasse, the same ideas became a larger-scale project. On March 2 a memorandum addressed to the RSHA suggested keeping some 30,000 Jews, first and foremost of British and American nationality, but also Belgian, Dutch, French, Norwegian, and Soviet nationals and to barter them for appropriate groups of Germans.¹³⁸ Himmler agreed, and in April 1943 a partly empty POW camp, Bergen-Belsen, was transferred by the Wehrmacht to the WVHA. As historian Eberhard Kolb has noted, Himmler’s decision not to establish a civilian internees’ camp but to include the new setup within the framework of the concentration camps section of the WVHA was in line with his notion that “the ‘exchange Jews’ could at any time still be transported to extermination camps.”¹³⁹

And indeed the earliest groups of “exchange Jews,” mainly Polish Jews with Latin American “promesas” (promises to receive passports), who were assembled in Warsaw at the Hotel Polski, arrived in Bergen-Belsen in July 1943; by October of that same year, however, they had been transported to Auschwitz under the pretext that the Latin American papers were not valid.¹⁴⁰ Further categories of Jews arrived in Bergen-Belsen throughout 1944, and although very few of these were exchanged for Germans, their fate has to be considered within wider exchange schemes tossed around by German and Jewish operatives during the last two years of the war. These projects, as we shall see, would take on their momentary significance in late 1944 and early 1945.

VII

At the end of October 1943, the Kovno ghetto became a concentration camp. A few days beforehand, batches of young Jews had been deported to the Estonian labor camps, while the children and the elderly were sent to Auschwitz.¹⁴¹ In late December the pits at the ninth fort were opened and tens of thousands of corpses, undug: These remnants of most of the Kovno community and of the transports of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were then burned on a number of huge pyres, restacked day after day.¹⁴²

Abraham Tory, the Kovno diarist, escaped from the city at the end of March 1944 and survived the war. Three months later, as the Soviet army was approaching, the remaining 8,000 inhabitants of the ghetto-camp were deported (including the members of the council and its chairman, Elchanan Elkes). The men were sent to Dachau, the women to Stutthof, near Danzig. By the end of the war three-quarters of these last Kovno Jews had perished. Elkes himself died in Dachau shortly after his arrival.¹⁴³

On October 19, 1943, Elkes had written a “last testament.” It was a letter to his son and daughter who lived in London; it was given to Tory and retrieved with the diary, after the liberation of Kovno. The very last words of the letter were filled with fatherly love, but they could not erase the sense of utter despair carried by the lines that just preceded: “I am writing this in an hour when many desperate souls—widows and orphans, threadbare and hungry—are camping on my doorstep, imploring us [the council] for help. My strength is ebbing. There is a desert inside me. My soul is scorched. I am naked and empty. There are no words in my mouth.”¹⁴⁴

In the fall of 1943 Lodz remained the last large-scale ghetto in German-dominated Europe (except for Theresienstadt). Throughout the preceding months Himmler had reached the decision to turn the Warthegau ghetto into a concentration camp, not on its location, however, but in the Lublin district, within the still existing framework of OSTI, the SS East Industries Company. The advance of the Red Army toward the former Polish borders put an end to the Lublin project, but Himmler continued to cling to his plans, albeit in some other location.¹⁴⁵ Neither Greiser nor Biebow, nor anybody else in the Warthegau administration, had been consulted. When Himmler’s project became known, it triggered fierce opposition at all levels of the Gau, and from the Wehrmacht’s armaments inspectorate. In February 1944 the Reichsführer visited Posen and, atypically, gave in to Greiser’s objections. The Gauleiter did not waste any time in informing Pohl of the new agreement. On February 14, 1944, Greiser wrote a rather abrupt letter to the chief of the WVHA:

“The ghetto in Litzmannstadt is not to be transformed into a concentration camp…. The decree issued by the Reichsführer on June 11, 1943, will therefore not be carried out. I have arranged the following with the Reichsführer.” Greiser went on to inform Pohl that (a) the ghetto’s manpower would be reduced to a minimum; (b) the ghetto would not be moved out of the Wartheland; (c) its population would be gradually reduced by Bothmann’s Kommando [Hans Bothmann was Lange’s successor in Chelmno]; (d) the administration of the ghetto would remain in the hands of the officials of the Wartheland; and (e) “After all Jews are removed from the ghetto and it is liquidated, the entire grounds of the ghetto are to go to the town of Litzmannstadt.”¹⁴⁶

As their fate was being sealed, the unsuspecting inhabitants of the ghetto went on with the misery of their daily life plagued by hunger, cold, endless hours spent in workshops, exhaustion, and ongoing despair. And yet the mood also changed on occasion, as on December 25, 1943, for example, the first day of Hanukkah: “There are gatherings in larger apartments. Everyone brings a small appropriate gift: a toy, a piece of babka (cake), a hair ribbon, a couple of brightly coloured empty cigarette packages, a plate with a flower pattern, a pair of stockings, a warm cap. Then comes the drawing of lots; and chance decides. After the candles are lighted, the presents are handed out. Ghetto presents are not valuable, but they are received with deep gratitude. Finally, songs are sung in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, as long as they are suitable for enhancing the holiday mood. A few hours of merrymaking, a few hours of forgetting, a few hours of reverie.”¹⁴⁷

A few weeks before Hanukkah the chroniclers noted the same urge for some spiritual or cultural sustenance in its wider expression: “Though life weighs heavily upon people in the ghetto,” they recorded on November 24, “they refuse to do without cultural life altogether. The closing of the House of Culture has deprived the ghetto of the last vestiges of public cultural life. But with his tenacity and vitality, the ghetto dweller, hardened by countless misfortunes, always seeks new ways to sate his hunger for something of cultural value. The need for music is especially intense, and small centers for the cultivation of music have sprung up over time; to be sure, only for a certain upper stratum. Sometimes it is professional musicians, sometimes amateurs who perform for an intimate group of invited guests. Chamber music is played, and there is singing. Likewise, small, family-like circles form in order to provide spiritual nourishment on a modest level.¹⁴⁸ Poets and prose writers read from their own works. The classics and more recent works of world literature are recited. Thus does the ghetto salvage something of its former spiritual life.”¹⁴⁹

On March 8, 1944, “by order of the authorities,” all musical instruments were confiscated; they would be distributed to the Litzmannstadt municipal orchestra, to the mayor, and to the music school of the Hitler Youth.¹⁵⁰

VIII

To the very end, research about “the Jew” went on. Notwithstanding the course of the war and the rapid disappearance of their “objects,” German “specialists” did not give up; moreover, some local Nazi officials, apparently acting on their own, launched projects meant to document what had been the world of an extinct race. And throughout all these years, Heinrich Himmler himself, whose thirst for knowledge on the Jewish issue was hard to match, often personally encouraged the most promising avenues of investigation.

Thus on May 15, 1942, Himmler’s personal assistant, Obersturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Brandt informed Standartenführer Max Stollmann, head of Lebensborn [the SS institution taking care of racially valuable single mothers and children born out of wedlock, among others], that the Reichsführer demanded the setting up of “a special card index for all mothers and parents [alle die Mütter und Kindeseltern] who had a Greek nose, or at least the indication of one.”¹⁵¹ But Greek noses weighed less on Himmler’s mind than the indentification of Jewish traits or hidden ancestry, although these matters were indirectly related. A year after his foray into the domain of nasal shapes, on May 22, 1943, the SS chief wrote to Bormann about the need for researching the racial evolution of mixed breeds, not only those of the second degree but even of a higher degree [one-eighth or one-twelfth Jewish, for example]. “In this matter—strictly between us [das aber nur unter uns gesprochen]—we have to proceed like in the breeding of higher races [Hochzucht] of animals or the cultivation of better plants. At least during several generations (3 or 4 generations), the descendants of such mixed-breed families will have to be racially tested by independent institutions; in case of racial inferiority, they have to be sterilized and thus excluded from hereditary transmission.”¹⁵²

At times the Reichsführer gave vent to justified anger against some incompetent scientist. Thus in the matter of three SS men of part-Jewish ancestry, Himmler agreed to keep them temporarily in the SS, but their children were excluded from joining the order or marrying into it. This unpleasant confusion was the result of a scientific evaluation by Prof. Dr. B. K. Schultz, who had pointed out that in the third generation, it could happen that not even one Jewish chromosome would any longer be present. “Thus,” Himmler wrote to SS Obergruppenführer Richard Hildebrandt, on December 17, 1943, “one could argue that the chromosomes of all other ancestors also disappear. Then one should ask: from where does a person get its heredity if after the third generation the ancestors’ chromosomes have all disappeared? For me, one thing is certain: Herr Professor Dr. Schultz is not suitable to head the Race office.”¹⁵³

Sometimes the Reichsführer ventured into somewhat dangerous territory. In April 1942 Winifred Wagner, the widow of Richard and Cosima Wagner’s son Siegfried and herself a much-loving and beloved friend of the Führer, had complained about a lecture allegedly held in Würzburg in an SS institution about “the Jewish ancestry [Versippung] of the Wagner family.” On December 30, 1942, Himmler assured the “lady of Bayreuth” that no such lecture had taken place, but that the rumor stemmed from a conversation between SS officers. To put all such insinuations to rest the Reichsführer asked Winifred Wagner to send him her family’s genealogical chart.¹⁵⁴ It is unknown if this was ever done.

Throughout, collective racial identification remained of the essence, and in this domain some issues stayed unsolved for years, that of the Karaites, for example. On June 13, 1943, Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, head of the political division of Rosenberg’s Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories, issued the following statement: “The Karaites are religiously and nationally different from the Jews. They are not of Jewish origin, rather they are viewed as being people of Turkic-Tatar origin closely related to the Crimean Tatars. They are essentially a Near Asian–Oriental race possessing Mongolian features, thus they are aliens. The mixing of Karaites and Germans is prohibited. The Karaites should not be treated as Jews, but should be treated in the same fashion as the Turkic-Tatar peoples. Harsh treatment should be avoided in accordance with the goals of our Oriental policies.”¹⁵⁵

At first glance it may seem unusual that, as late as June 1943 (and later), the Germans had to restate a decision that the head of the Reich-stelle für Sippenforschung (the “Reich Agency for Ancestry Research”) had already officially conveyed, in a letter of January 5, 1939, to the representative of the eighteen-member Karaite community in Germany, Serge von Douvan. “The Karaite sect should not be considered a Jewish religious community within the meaning of paragraph 2 point 2 of the First Regulation to the Reich’s Citizenship Law,” the letter stated. “However, it cannot be established that Karaites in their entirety are of blood-related stock, for the racial categorization of an individual cannot be determined without further ado by his belonging to a particular people, but by his personal ancestry and racial biological characteristics.”¹⁵⁶

The Reichsstelle’s decision was dictated by political considerations such as the thoroughly anti-Soviet attitude of the Karaites, many of whom had fought in the White armies during the Russian civil war, and by the racial-cultural research of a well-known German Orientalist, Paul E. Kahle, in the Leningrad archives during the 1930s; it confirmed the position taken by the former czarist regime defining the Karaites as a religious group unrelated to Judaism.¹⁵⁷ Yet, as the war began, and mainly after the attack on the Soviet Union, some hesitation remained.

In Lithuania, Gebietskommissar Adrian von Renteln sent researchers to the heads of the local Karaite community, and in the course of 1942 several Jewish specialists were ordered to participate in the investigation: Kalmanovitch in Vilna, Meir Balaban and Yitzhak Schipper in Warsaw; Philip Friedman in Lwov.¹⁵⁸ In a diary entry of November 15, 1942, Kalmanovitch noted: “I continue to translate the book of the Karaite hakham [“sage,” in Hebrew]. (How limited is his horizon! He is proud of his Turkish-Tatar descent. He has a better understanding of horses and arms than of religion, although he is religious in the Christian sense.)”¹⁵⁹

Friedman was loath to participate in the Nazi-directed project: “At the beginning of 1942,” he recollected after the war, “when I was in Lwov, I was asked by Dr. Leib Landau, a well-known lawyer and director of the Jewish Social Self-Help in the Galicia district, to prepare a study of the origins of the Karaites in Poland. The study had been ordered by Colonel Bisanz, a high official of the German administration in Lwov. Both Landau and I saw clearly that a completely objective and scholarly study, indicating the probablility of the Karaites’ Jewish origin, might endanger their lives. Besides, everything in me revolted against writing a memorandum for the use of the Nazis and I asked Landau to give the assignment to another historian of Polish Jewry, Jacob Schall. He agreed, and Dr. Schall prepared a memorandum which I went over carefully, together with Landau. The memorandum was so drafted as to indicate that the origin of the Karaites was the object of heated controversy, and great emphasis was laid on those scholars who adhered to the theory of the Karaites’ Turko-Mongol extraction.”¹⁶⁰

Additional German research in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the East, objections to the non-Jewish identification of the Karaites that came from the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives in France, as well as some opposition within Germany itself delayed Leibrandt’s decision until June 1943. The decision, however, was final. The Karaites escaped the fate of the Jews, and also that of 8,000 Krymchaks murdered by Ohlendorf ’s Einsatzgruppe D in the Crimea, although in many ways Karaites and Krymchaks were linguistically related and both groups displayed identical Turkic-Mongolian features.¹⁶¹

Rosenberg’s ministry, his Frankfurt Institute, and the ERR never established exclusive control over research on Jewish matters, as we saw. Thus RSHA Office VII, dealing with “Research about Enemies” (Gegnerforschung), under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Franz Alfred Six, displayed an impressive level of activity, even after Six moved to the Wilhelmstrasse in September 1942.¹⁶² He was soon replaced by the no-less-dedicated Prof. Dr. Günther Franz, who, in June 1942, had had the brilliant idea of organizing a conference on the “Jewish question” in which appropriate themes were distributed among talented doctoral students (to prepare the next generation of researchers in this domain). When Franz took over the leadership of Office VII, further series of volumes on Jews in various countries were published by the SS Nordland Verlag in runs of one hundred thousand copies in several cases. The volumes came out through 1943 and 1944.¹⁶³ Research on Jews and Jewry was only one aspect of the office’s activities (along with the study of Freemasonry, Bolshevism, “Political Churches”—and on Himmler’s specific order—“Witches and Witchcraft”).

While Rosenberg’s men were looting in the Baltic countries, for example, Six’s and Franz’s envoys were simultaneously emptying Jewish archives and libraries in the very same areas. In Riga, it will be remembered, they got hold of Dubnow’s library. In the same operation “80 boxes containing Jewish literature were taken from the community in Dorpat, as well as various materials from the ‘Jewish Club’ in Reval.”¹⁶⁴ Incidentally, until the end of 1941 at least, Jewish “assistants” were working for the various projects of “Amt VII.”¹⁶⁵

Rosenberg’s “commando” started operating systematically in Vilna from February 1942 on, following a brief survey of the Jewish libraries in the early summer of 1941. As main delegate of the ERR in the Lithuanian capital, Rosenberg appointed one Dr. Johannes Pohl, a Judaica specialist who had spent two years (1934–36) at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had written a book on the Talmud, and contributed articles to Der Stürmer.¹⁶⁶ Kruk, put in charge of the team of Jewish scholars and workers employed by the Einsatzstab, kept regular contacts with Pohl, whom he called the “Hebraist”: “Accidentally I learn from the German Illustrierter Beobachter, Munich, April 30, 1942, that Dr. Pohl is one of those doing Judenforschung ohne Juden [“the study of Jews without Jews”]. Among other things, he is the director of the Hebrew Department of the library for Research of the Jewish Question” [the library of the Frankfurt institute].¹⁶⁷

The main targets of the Einstazstab were the Strashun Library (Vilna’s Jewish communal library), the religious book collections of the city’s main synagogues and the YIVO library.¹⁶⁸ The Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever (who, together with Kalmanovitch and another Yiddish poet, Shmerke Kaczerginski, were Kruk’s colleagues in this enterprise) “noted the parallels between the operations of the Gestapo and the Rosenberg squad. Just as the former raided houses in search of Jews in hiding, the latter conducted aggressive searches for collections of Jewish books.”¹⁶⁹

“In the Rosenberg Task Force in the Yivo building, books rain down again,” Kruk noted on November 19, 1942. “This time, Yiddish ones. In the cellars, where the Yivo library once was, on one side they load…potatoes, on the other, the books of Kletzkin and Tomor publishers. The whole cellar and several side rooms of the ground floor are crammed with packs of those book treasures. Whole sacks of Peretz and Sholem Aleichem are there, bags of Zinberg’s History of Jewish Literature, sets of Kropotkin’s Great French Revolution, Ber Mark’s History of Social Movements of Jews in Poland, etc., etc. Your heart bursts with pain at the sight. No matter how much we have become used to it, we still don’t have enough nerves to look at the destruction calmly. By the way, at my request, they have nevertheless promised to let us take some books for the ghetto library. Meanwhile, we take them on our own. We will, naturally, use the promise.”¹⁷⁰ And, indeed, the Jewish team (the “paper brigade”) secretly smuggled as many books as they could into the ghetto.¹⁷¹

At times the ERR “scholars” came up with truly arcane questions: “Today the head of the Rosenberg task force got a new problem,” Kruk noted on June 29, 1943. “He is interested in knowing if there is a connection between the Star of David and the Soviet five-pointed star.”¹⁷²

Collecting the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars to identify the racial-anthropological characteristics of this vilest species of Jewish political criminality was naturally the preserve of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe. Yet, despite the scientific importance of such a project, it remains unclear who authored the first memorandum addressed to Himmler on February 9, 1942, under the signature of the anatomist Prof. Dr. August Hirt of the Reich University in Strasbourg. On the face of it Hirt must have initiated the project and made the technical suggestions about the safest way of killing the subjects, severing the head from the spine, as well as packing and transporting the precious skulls without damaging them in the process.¹⁷³ There are indications, however, that, although Hirt was ultimately to be the recipient of the material and the project director, the original idea came from Ahnenerbe anthropologist Bruno Beger, a member of the Anthropology Institute of Munich University, led by the world-famous Tibet expert, Ernst Schäfer.¹⁷⁴Whatever the case may be, during the following months and years, Beger and Hirt cooperated closely. Ultimately the anatomical institute in Strasbourg did not receive the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars as, by 1942, the Wehrmacht had second thoughts about executing commissars and frightening away those among them who eventually were ready to cross over to the Germans. This difficulty did not derail Hirt’s and Beger’s project; it merely redirected it.

On November 2, 1942, the acting chief of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram Sievers, wrote to the head of Himmler’s chancellery, Rudolf Brandt, that “for anthropological research purposes,” 150 skeletons of Jews were necessary, that should be made available at Auschwitz. Brandt forwarded the request to Eichmann who in turn informed the Auschwitz authorities. On June 10, 1943, Beger visited the camp, selected his subjects and performed the necessary measurements.¹⁷⁵ On the twenty-first, Eichmann reported back to Sievers that the Munich anthropologist had “processed” 115 inmates: 79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles and 4 men from “inner Asia” (Innerasiaten).¹⁷⁶ The selected inmates were transported to the Natzweiler camp in Alsace. In the early days of August 1943, the commandant of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, Joseph Kramer, personally gassed the first batch of Jewish women with the special chemical agent requested by Hirt.¹⁷⁷ Over the following days the operation was completed. The corpses were all sent to Hirt’s anatomy laboratory in Strasbourg: Some were preserved and others macerated so that only the skeleton remained.¹⁷⁸

The results of Hirt’s research have not been preserved, although Beger survived the war and was briefly sent to jail (Hirt committed suicide). Sievers had ordered the destruction of all related documents and photographs. Yet as the Allied occupied Strasbourg, they nonetheless found some evidence that allowed the record to be kept for posterity.¹⁷⁹

Some projects, such as the setting up of a Jewish Central Museum in Prague, remain puzzling.¹⁸⁰ Whether the idea of establishing such a museum, while the deportations from the Protectorate were putting an end to Jewish life in Bohemia and Moravia, was initiated by officials of the dwindling Jüdische Kultusgemeinde (for all practical purposes, the Jewish Council) or by the two senior Eichmann delegates in Prague, Hans Günther and his deputy, Karl Rahm, is irrelevant. Even if the project was initiated by Jewish officials, it had to be accepted by Günther and Rahm and furthered by them. It was.

The museum project started officially on August 3, 1942, on the site of the prewar Jewish museum; it soon extended to all major synagogue buildings in the Jewish quarter and to tens of warehouses. Artifacts left behind by the disappearing communities of Bohemia and Moravia and pertaining to all aspects of their daily life, to religious rituals and specific customs throughout the centuries, were systematically collected and registered. Whereas the Prague Jewish museum’s collection comprised some 1,000 items in 1941, it included 200,000 artifacts by the end of the war.¹⁸¹

Goebbels’s filming of ghetto life strove to present the most demeaning and repulsive image of Jews to contemporaries and to posterity. All exhibitions dealing with Jewry organized in the Reich during the 1930s or throughout occupied Europe during the war, had a similar aim and so of course, did, full-length films such as Jud Süss and Der Ewige Jude. As for the two films shot in Theresienstadt in 1942 and in 1944, their aim was propaganda of another kind: to show the world the good life that the Führer granted the Jews.

None of these aims was apparent in the Prague museum project. For example, in preparing the exhibition about Jewish religious customs set up in the spring of 1943, “both sides [the Jewish scholars working at the museum and the SS officers] seem to have had a certain objectivity in mind.”¹⁸² Günther and Rahm possibly thought that once the war was (victoriously) over and no Jews were left, the material stored at the museum—not to be shown publicly until then—could easily be molded according to the regime’s needs. Whatever the case may be, Rahm soon had to leave his cultural endeavors to become the last commandant of Theresienstadt.

IX

While throughout 1943 and most of 1944, the Germans were trying to complete the deportations from every corner of the Continent, and while, by then, the Allies had publicly recognized the extermination of the Jews, London and Washington obstinately shied away from any concrete rescue steps, even minor plans. In all fairness it remains difficult to this day to assess whether some of the rescue plans initiated by Germany’s satellites or by some subordinate German officials were genuinely meant as exchanges of some sort or were extortionist ploys, no more.

Thus in late 1942 and during the first months of 1943, the Romanian authorities informed the Jewish Agency that they were ready to release 70,000 Jews from Transnistria for 200,000 lei (or 200 Palestine pounds) per person. The offer could have been an early Romanian feeler for contacts with the Allies but, in a hardly subtle maneuver to keep in the good graces of both sides, Radu Lecca, general secretary for Jewish affairs in Antonescu’s government, who traveled to Istanbul to negotiate with Jewish Agency representatives, soon thereafter informed the German ambassador in Bucharest of the initiative. From that moment on the initiative was doomed.

The Yishuv leadership was divided in its estimate of the proposal and was well aware of the fact that the Allies would not allow the transfer of 70,000 Jews to Palestine. Indeed, the British position, shared by the State Department, was one of adamant rejection. In February 1943 the Romanian offer was reported in Swiss newspapers and in the New York Times, leading to some public outcry about the Allied passivity, to no avail. Over the coming weeks the plan was reduced to the transfer of 5,000 Jewish orphans from Transnistria to Palestine. Eichmann agreed to this latter proposal provided the Allies allowed the transfer to Germany of 20,000 able-bodied German prisoners of war, in exchange for the children.

Sporadic negotiations with the Romanians continued nonetheless throughout 1943, and the possibility of bribing whoever had to be bribed in Bucharest seemed to keep the rescue option alive. The operation was definitively scuttled by the obstruction of the U.S. State Department and the British Ministry of Economic Warfare regarding the transfer by the World Jewish Congress of the necessary money to Switzerland. The Treasury Department had given its authorization but to no avail. In December 1943 the Foreign Office delivered a note to the American ambassador in London, John Winant, indicating that the British authorities were “concerned with the difficulty of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy-occupied territories.”¹⁸³

From early 1943 on, the angry publicity given to the absence of rescue operations had convinced both the Foreign Office and the State Department that some gesture was necessary: A conference on the “refugee situation” was decided. The conference, attended by high-ranking British and American officials (and by a senator and a congressman) opened in Bermuda on April 19, 1943, under the chairmanship of the president of Princeton University, Harold W. Dodds. After twelve days of deliberations, the meeting ended with the release of a statement to the press declaring that “concrete recommendations” would be submitted to both governments; however, due to the war situation, the nature of these recommendations could not be revealed.

American Jewish leaders were themselves anxious to achieve results and well aware of the demand for more forceful initiatives that arose from growing segments of the country’s Jewish population. Moreover, added prodding stemmed not only from the increasingly precise reports about the situation in Europe but also from the relentless campaign for intervention orchestrated by a small but vocal group of right-wing Zionist-Revisionists led by Peter Bergson.¹⁸⁴ Yet for a Stephen Wise, for example, embarrassing the president by public demonstrations against American inaction was unacceptable. Wise’s restraint was recognized by the administration. On the eve of a major meeting organized by the “Bergsonites”—the “Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People in Europe”—scheduled for July 1943, Welles sent a message to Myron C. Taylor, the onetime chairman of the 1938 Evian conference on refugees and later Roosevelt’s special envoy to the Vatican: “I have refused this invitation,” Welles informed Taylor. “Not only the more conservative Jewish organizations and leaders but also such leaders as Rabbi Wise, who was with me this morning, are strongly opposed to the holding of this conference, have done everything they could to prevent it, and are trying to get Bishop Tucker and one or two others who have accepted this invitation to withdraw their acceptance.”¹⁸⁵

Wise did not hesitate to air his views publicly, however. At the American Jewish Conference held in August 1943, one month after Bergson’s “Emergency Conference,” he told his audience: “We are Americans, first, last, and at all times. Nothing else that we are, whether by faith or race or fate, qualifies our Americanism…. We and our fathers chose to be, and now choose to abide, as Americans…. Our first and sternest task, in common with all other citizens of our beloved country…is to win the anti-Fascist war. Unless that war be won, all else is lost.”¹⁸⁶

Wise’s views were echoed by most of the participants at the conference and, all in all, by most of American Jewish organizations and their publications such as the National Jewish Monthly or New Palestine (which expressed the positions of American Zionism). Rare were the mainstream leaders who ready to admit that not enough had been or was being done; one of those was Rabbi Israel Goldstein, who, at the same American Jewish Conference of August 1943, did not hide his feelings: “Let us forthrightly admit that we American Jews, as a community of five millions, have not been stirred deeply enough, have not exercised ourselves passionately enough, have not risked enough of our convenience and our social and civic relations, have not been ready enough to shake the bond of so-called amicability in order to lay our troubles upon the conscience of our Christian neighbors and fellow citizens.”¹⁸⁷

To the dismay of the administration and that of mainstream American-Jewish leadership, the Bergsonites did not let go. At the end of 1943, they succeeded in persuading Senator Guy Gillette from Iowa and Rep. Will Rogers from California to introduce a rescue resolution into Congress. During the debates Breckinridge Long demanded he be allowed to testify and presented the House Committee on Foreign Affairs with misleading data about the number of Jewish refugees the State Department had allowed to enter the United States.¹⁸⁸ When Long’s testimony became known, officials at the Treasury Department brought up evidence about the State Department’s ongoing efforts to hide information about the extermination and hinder rescue efforts. This evidence was submitted to the president by secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. This time Roosevelt considered it politically wise to react and, in January 1944, he announced the establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB) to be headed by John Pehle, assistant secretary of the treasury. The (WRB) had the mandate to coordinate and lead any rescue operations that its officials would have examined and recommended.¹⁸⁹

The confirmation of the news about the ongoing extermination of European Jewry led to mass protests in the streets of Tel Aviv, to the proclamation by the Yishuv’s chief rabbis of days of fasting and other manifestations of collective mourning. Soon, however, everyday concerns and even traditional celebrations resurfaced; throughout 1943 major festivals were organized by the kibbutz movement (the Dalia Dance Festival), and Hebrew University students celebrated Purim in the usual carnival procession. In the words of historian Dina Porat, “agony was a part of daily life and when the news was particularly bitter, expressions of pain multiplied. But public attention was not sustained, and life would return to normal for weeks or months, until the next shocking event.”¹⁹⁰

Even so, the Jewish population in Palestine was probably more responsive to the tragedy of European Jewry than the leadership of the Yishuv itself. Of course, among the leadership as among the population, the individual ties to European Jewry were equally intense, and, as the great majority of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine stemmed from Central or Eastern Europe, many, at all levels, were aware of the possibility (or already knew) of tragic personal loss.

Yet, as strange and even as callous as it may appear with hindsight, in their public declarations from the end of 1942 on, most Zionist leaders, as already mentioned, considered the extermination first and foremost in terms of its impact on the building of a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion’s despondency regarding the impact of the European situation upon the Zionist project may have contributed to his lack of involvement in rescue operations; thus it was left to the hesitant and weak Gruenbaum to coordinate activities in which he did not believe.

A meeting of the Zionist Executive Committee in Jerusalem in February 1943 starkly illustrated the prevalent mood at the top of the establishment: “We certainly cannot abstain from any action,” Gruenbaum declared. “We should do all we can…but our hopes are infinitesimal…. I think we have only one hope left—and I would say the same thing in Warsaw—the only action, the only effort that provides us with hope, that is unique, is the effort being made in the Land of Israel.”¹⁹¹ The debate about the 1943 budget better reflected this shared attitude than any declarations: 250,000 Palestine pounds for new settlements, the same amount for agricultural development, vast sums for irrigation and the like, and 15,000 pounds for rescue activities.¹⁹²

Over the following months the debate concerning the allocation of funds for rescue operations continued. While the Jewish Agency maintained its reticence and Gruenbaum continued to show only apathy, the trade union organization (Histadrut) took the initiative of raising funds by way of a public campaign: “Diaspora Month.” The initiative, launched in mid-September 1943, failed dismally. The skepticism of the population regarding the commitment of the political leadership to the rescue operations certainly contributed to the meager results of the appeal. It seemed to some that “the Yishuv had fallen into atrophy.”¹⁹³

Zygielbojm, it will be recalled, was the Bund’s delegate to the Polish National Council in London. As we saw, it is only at the end of December 1942, that Karski was allowed to meet with him and with his colleague Ignacy Schwarzbart. Until the fall of that year, Zygielbojm had not fully understood the information about the total extermination of the Jews of Poland. By November and December, however, he had grasped major aspects of the German murder campaign and was increasingly bitter about the absence of adequate response, particularly from the Polish government-in-exile and the Delegatura, which did not call upon the population to extend help to the hounded Jews. On December 23 he declared at the meeting of the National Council: “War will end and the tragedy of Polish Jewry [Zygielbojm had not yet perceived the total dimension of the events] will weigh upon the conscience of humanity for generations. Unfortunately, it will be associated with the attitude of part of the Polish population. I leave it to you to find the adequate answer.”¹⁹⁴

There wasn’t much the Bund delegate could do. When, a few months later, the ghetto uprising started and was abandoned to its fate without any outside support, Zygielbojm knew he had reached the end of the road.¹⁹⁵ On May 11, 1943, he wrote a letter to the president of the Polish republic, Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, and to the prime minister of the government-in-exile, Wladyslaw Sikorski. “The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nation in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking passively upon this murder of defenseless millions…they have become partners to the responsibility.

“I am obliged to state that although the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world, it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimension of the tragedy taking place in Poland….

“I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last, heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.”¹⁹⁶

On May 12 Zygielbojm committed suicide. To his comrades of the Bund in New York he had written: “I hope that with my death I shall succeed in what I failed to achieve during my life: to contribute really in saving at least some of the 300,000 Jews still alive [in Poland] out of a population of over 3 million.”¹⁹⁷

X

Unlike her brother Mischa, Etty Hillesum had decided to stay in Westerbork when her parents’ deportation date arrived. But on September 6, 1943, the order came: She was to board the same transport. No interventions helped. In a letter of September 7, a friend, Jopie Vleeschouwer, described the events of that day: “Her parents and Mischa went to the train first. Then I trundled a well-packed rucksack and a small hamper with a bowl and mug dangling from it to the train. And there she stepped on to the platform…talking gaily, smiling, a kind word for everyone she met on the way…every inch the Etty you all know so well…. Then I lost sight of her for a bit and wandered along the platform…. I saw Mother, Father H. and Mischa board Wagon No. 1. Etty finished up in wagon No. 12, having first stopped to look for a friend in wagon No. 14 who was pulled out again at the last moment. Then a shrill whistle and the 1000 ‘transport cases’ were moving out. Another flourish from Mischa who waved through a crack in wagon No. 1, a cheerful ‘bye’ from Etty in No. 12 and they were gone.”¹⁹⁸

On that same September 7 Etty still managed to throw a postcard from the train; it was addressed to a friend in Amsterdam: “Opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower.’ I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, Mother, and Mischa are a few cars away. In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from the Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too. We shall be traveling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care…. Good-bye for now from the four of us.”¹⁹⁹

According to a Red Cross report, Etty was murdered in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943; her parents and her brother Mischa shared the same fate. Her brother Joop survived the camp but died on his way back to Holland, at the end of the war.²⁰⁰