CHAPTER II

May 1940–December 1940

On October 22, 1940, the 6,500 Jews of the German provinces of Baden and the Saar-Palatinate were suddenly deported into nonoccupied France. According to a report from the prosecutor’s office in Mannheim, on the morning of that day, eight local Jews committed suicide: Gustav Israel Lefo (age seventy-four) and his wife Sara Lefo (sixty-five), gas; Klara Sara Schorff (sixty-four) and her brother Otto Israel Strauss (fifty-four), gas; Olga Sara Strauss (sixty-one), sleeping pills; Jenny Sara Dreyfuss (forty-seven), sleeping pills; Nanette Sara Feitler (seventy-three), by hanging herself on the door of her bathroom; Alfred Israel Bodenheimer (sixty-nine), sleeping pills.¹

Registration of the property left behind by the deportees was thorough. Thus the gendarmerie station of Walldorf, in the district of Heidelberg, reported on October 23 that nine hens, four roosters, and one goose were found at Blanca Salomon’s; Sara Mayer owned ten hens and three roosters; Albert Israel Vogel was the possessor of four hens and Sara Weil, of three hens and one rooster. As for Moritz Mayer, he owned a German shepherd who responded to the name “Baldo.”² On December 7, 1940, the gendarmerie of Graben opened and searched the apartment previously shared by four deportees: two Jewish widows, Sophie Herz and Caroline Ott, and a couple named Prager. The officials registered a golden medal—Paris Eiffel Tower—1889, a golden medal—Paris—1878, a gilded wristwatch bracelet, a gilded brooch, three golden rings, seven foreign copper coins, six silver kitchen knives, seven silver coffee spoons in their étuis, and so on.³

I

No major military operations had taken place from the end of the Polish campaign to early April 1940. The “winter war,” which started with the Soviet attack against Finland in December 1939, ended in March 1940 after the Finns gave in to Soviet territorial demands in the province of Karelia. This conflict in northern Europe had no direct impact on the major confrontation except, possibly, by strengthening Hitler’s low opinion of the Red Army. During these same months of military inaction on the Western Front (the “phony war”) optimism was rife in London and in Paris, and consequently among Jewish officials who kept in touch with Western governments. On November 4, 1939, Nahum Goldmann, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, reported to Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress in New York, that both in London and Paris people in the know had the highest expectations. Goldmann himself was slightly more prudent: “I would not go as far as some do to say that the breakdown of Hitler is already sealed, but it seems indeed that the Reich is in a terrible position. Italy is definitely no more on the Axis’ side…. Next spring the Allies will have twice or three times as many aeroplanes as Germany, whose aeroplanes, by the way, seem to be inferior to those of the Allies…. Most of those who still a month ago in France and Britain believed in a very long war, do not believe in it anymore and very important people hold the view that by next spring or summer the war may be over. The internal situation of Germany seems to be very bad. It is Germany at the end of 1917.”⁴

On April 9, in a sudden swoop, German troops occupied Denmark and landed in Norway. On May 10 the Wehrmacht attacked in the West. On the fifteenth, the Dutch surrendered; on the eighteenth, Belgium followed. On May 13 the Germans had crossed the Meuse River, and on the twentieth they were in sight of the Channel Coast near Dunkirk. Some 340,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated back to England, thanks in part to Hitler’s order to stop for three days before attacking and taking Dunkirk. At the time the decision appeared of “secondary importance,” in German terms.⁵ In hindsight it may have been one of the turning points of the war.

In early June the Wehrmacht moved south. On the tenth Mussolini joined the war on Hitler’s side. On the fourteenth German troops entered Paris. On the seventeenth French prime minister Paul Reynaud resigned and was replaced by his deputy, the elderly hero of World War I, Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain. Without consulting France’s British ally, Pétain asked for an armistice. The German and Italian conditions were accepted, and on June 25, shortly after midnight, the armistice took effect. In the meantime the British government had been reshuffled. On May 10, the day of the German attack on the Western Front, Neville Chamberlain had been forced to resign; the new prime minister was Winston Churchill.

On July 19, in a triumphal address to the Reichstag, Hitler taunted England with a “peace offer.” In a radio broadcast three days later, British foreign secretary Lord Halifax (who, a month earlier, had still been the supporter of a “peace of compromise”), rejected the German proposal and vowed that his country would continue to fight, whatever the cost. Did England have the military resources, and did its population and its leadership have the resolve, to pursue the war alone? None of this was obvious in the early summer of 1940. The appeasement camp, although it had lost one of its champions in Lord Halifax, remained vocal, and some highly visible personalities, the Duke of Windsor in particular, did not hide their desire to come to terms with Hitler’s Germany.

Stalin, who within days of the French collapse had occupied the Baltic countries and wrung Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania, snubbed Churchill’s carefully worded query about a possible rapprochement. The American scene was contradictory. Roosevelt, an uncompromising “interventionist” if there ever was one, had been nominated again as Democratic candidate at the Chicago convention on July 19; his opponent, the Republican Wendell Willkie, was no less a determined interventionist, which augured well for Great Britain. But in Congress and among the American population, isolationism remained strong; soon the America First Committee would give it a firm political basis and a framework for militant propaganda. At this stage, however, even Roosevelt’s reelection would be no guarantee that the United States would move closer to war. Throughout Europe, in occupied countries and among neutrals, a majority of the political elite and possibly a majority of the populations did not doubt in the summer of 1940 that Germany would soon prevail. Many were those who aspired to a “new order” and were open to the “temptation of fascism.” The sources of this surge of antiliberalism were deeper than the immediate impact of German military might; as alluded to in the introduction, they were the outcome of a gradual evolution that had unfolded throughout the previous five or six decades.

A vast literature has described and analyzed all the twists and turns of antiliberalism and the rise of a new “revolutionary Right” (and Left), mainly on the European scene, from the end of the nineteenth century onward. In terms of this “New Right,” as opposed to the traditional, essentially conservative Right, it is generally accepted by now that the wide array of movements that came under this rubric did not spring only from a narrow social background (the lower middle classes), inspired mainly by fear of the mounting force of the organized Left on the one hand and of the brutal and unaccountable ups and downs of unrestrained capitalism on the other. The social background of the New Right was wider and extended to parts of a disenchanted working class as well as to the upper middle classes and elements of the former aristocracy. It expressed violent opposition to liberalism and to “the ideas of 1789,” to social democracy and mainly to Marxism (later communism or Bolshevism), as well as to conservative policies of compromise with the democratic status quo; it searched for a “third way” that would overcome both the threat of proletarian revolution and capitalist takeover. Such a “third way” had to be authoritarian in the eyes of the new revolutionaries; it carried a mystique of its own, usually an extreme brand of nationalism and a vague aspiration for an antimaterialist regeneration of society.⁶

Whereas the antimaterialist, antibourgeois spirit surfaced both on the Right and among segments of the Left in pre–World War I Europe and found strong support among Catholics and Protestants alike, its fusion with exacerbated nationalism, and the related cult of camaraderie, heroism, and death in the aftermath of the war, became standard fare of the New Right and of early fascism. Following the revolution of 1917 the fear of Bolshevism added an apocalyptic dimension to the sense of looming catastrophe. It is in this context that the attraction of a “new order” (as the political expression of the “third way”), under the leadership of a political savior who could rescue a world adrift from the weak and corrupt paralysis of liberal democracy, grew in the minds of many.

The world economic crisis of the thirties merely brought the fears and the urges of earlier decades to a head: the fascist regime in Italy, inaugurated by Benito Mussolini’s so-called march on Rome in October 1922, was outdistanced by the considerably more powerful and impressive Nazi phenomenon: The “new order” was becoming a formidable political and military reality. The defeat of France seemed to confirm the superiority of the new order over the old, of the new values over those that had so utterly failed.

The Danish government, kept in place by the Germans, issued a statement in July 1940 expressing its “admiration” for the “great German victories” [that] “have brought about a new era in Europe, which will result in a new order in a political and economic sense, under the leadership of Germany.”⁷ For several months the Belgian government, which had taken refuge in London, considered the possibility of rejoining King Leopold III (who had stayed) and accepting German domination; in October 1940 it finally chose opposition and exile. By then Marshal Pétain’s government had openly chosen the path of collaboration with the Reich. As for the populations in most of Western Europe, they soon accommodated to the presence of an occupation army widely praised for its correct, even polite behavior.

Intellectual accommodation to the new order and intellectual collaboration with it will be a recurring theme in this book. Suffice it to mention here that not only the far right of the European intellectual scene welcomed the German triumph. A strong contingent of Christian thinkers hailed the demise of materialism and modernity and acclaimed the rise of the “new spirit.” Thus, in a letter from Peking, the Jesuit paleontologist and a philosophical luminary of post-1945 Paris, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, showed an impressive understanding of the new times: “Personally, I stick to my idea that we are watching the birth, more than the death of a world…. Peace cannot mean anything but a higher process of conquest…. The world is bound to belong to its most active elements…. Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world.”⁸

Teilhard’s voice was one among many, even on the Catholic left. “Europe divided against itself is giving birth to a new order, not only perhaps for Europe but for the whole world,” the French left-wing Catholic thinker, Emmanuel Mounier, wrote in October 1940. “Only a spiritual revolution and an institutional rebirth of the same scope as the fascist revolution could perhaps have saved France from destruction…. Germany against the West is Sparta against Athens, the hard life against the pleasant life.” And Mounier foresaw the birth of a Europe that “will be an authoritarian Europe, because too long it was a libertarian Europe.”⁹

More significant for the ready acceptance of a “new order” than the enthusiasm of some Christian thinkers was the coalition between the carriers of this new order and most of the right-wing authoritarian regimes on the Continent. As the nationalist Right in Germany had become the natural ally of National Socialism during the crucial period preceding and immediately following the “seizure of power,” and then went along as a submissive partner with the policies of the new Reich, so did the European Right during the thirties and, with even greater enthusiasm, after Hitler’s early victories. As in Germany—and in Italy—common enemies, mainly Bolshevism and liberal democracy, superseded the social (and ideological) antagonisms between the traditional elites and the extremism inherent in Nazism or even Italian fascism. And, in order to accommodate its conservative partners, mainly in east central Europe, Hitler at times sided with the authoritarian-conservative governments against their internal fascist opposition; thus, for example, the Nazi leader supported Romanian marshal Ion Antonescu’s regime against Horia Sima’s fascist “Iron Guard” during the guard’s attempted putsch of January 1941.

The ideological ambitions of a “new order” and the Nazi-fascist-authoritarian power coalition were undermined from the outset by contrary forces, weak at first but growing in strength as time went by. When it became clear that Great Britain would not give in and that the United States would mobilize its industrial power to support the British war effort, doubts about a final German victory surfaced here and there. Hatred of the Germans spread, intensely in Poland, then in the Balkans, more slowly yet persistently in the West. Generally speaking, during the early years of the war, before the German attack against the Soviet Union, the majority of the European populations was neither psychologically nor practically ready for some form of anti-German resistance (despite armed attacks against the Wehrmacht in Poland and later in Serbia). In the West in particular the population concentrated on overcoming everyday difficulties and opted for various strategies of “accommodation.”¹⁰

One of the major factors that bolstered accommodation with the existing power coalition on the European continent was the conciliatory attitude of the traditionally conservative Christian churches, and particularly—in terms of its influence—that of the Catholic Church. During the rise of Nazism to power in Germany, and during the 1930s, the tension between Hitler’s movement and then between his regime and the Catholic Church had been considerable, as already alluded to; yet, as we shall see, Pius XII’s accession to the pontificate signaled a resolute quest on the part of the Vatican for an arrangement with the Reich. Catholicism would not give in on matters of dogma (the sanctity of baptism and its precedence over the notion of race) or on issues of canon law. Yet political considerations outweighed any thought of adopting a strong stand against the fascist-authoritarian front.

And, during these same years, Antonio de Salazar’s Portugal, Francisco Franco’s Spain, the post-Pilsudski Polish governments, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary, and, from March 1939 on, Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia, displayed various shades of a not-unnatural political-religious alliance against communism, liberalism, and “materialism,” the common enemies of both the Christian churches and authoritarian right-wing regimes. Soon Antonescu’s Romania would march down the same path, and, even more violently and viciously, so would Ante Pavelíc’s Croatia. As for Vichy France, its authoritarianism and Catholicism epitomized a strangely stunted return of the “ancien régime”—without the monarchy.

The alliance against communism, liberalism, and “materialism” included to various degrees, as we have seen, some of the main ingredients of modern anti-Jewish hostility. One should add to this brew the themes spread by Nazi propaganda and a variety of national anti-Semitic rantings: those of the Endeks in Poland, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Croatian Ustasha, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Action Française—and, for good measure—those of the still-exiled Ukrainian OUN and the underground nationalist militants in the Baltic countries in the summer of 1940. The “new order” thus also became an intrinsically anti-Jewish new order. In 1940, however, the ultimate consequences of this tide of hatred could not yet be perceived; the common aim was exclusion and segregation.

Against the background of this momentous ideological evolution and in the midst of an expanding war and a heightening political and moral crisis throughout much of the Western world, the influence of the pope came to play a major role. A few months before his death, Pius XI, whose growing hostility to the Nazi regime we already mentioned, had demanded the preparation of an encyclical against Nazi racism and anti-Semitism. He received a draft of Humani Generis Unitas as he lay dying. His successor must of course have known of the existence of the document and probably decided to shelve it.¹¹

Pius XII’s attitude toward Germany and mainly toward the Jews has often been contrasted with that of his predecessor, thus creating the impression that, in many ways, Pius XII’s policy was unusual, even aberrant.¹² In fact Pius XI, as legate nuncio to Poland in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and during most of his pontificate, openly expressed unconcealed anti-Jewish attitudes, as had been the case among most of his predecessors in the modern era. The change that led to Humani Generis Unitas occurred during the last years of Pius XI’s life and created a growing rift with the Curia, the Roman Jesuits of the periodical Civiltà Cattolica; the Vatican daily, Osservatore Romano; and possibly his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII.¹³ Thus it can safely be said that Pacelli himself, as secretary of state and later as pope, merely followed a well-established path, even though he may have perceived that the world around him was changing radically. The new pontiff, however, added a personal imprint and initiatives of his own to a well-honed tradition.¹⁴

Distant, autocratic, and imbued with a sense of his own intellectual and spiritual superiority, Pacelli was as fiercely conservative in politics as in church matters. Nonetheless he was considered an able diplomat during his tenure as nuncio in Munich (1916–20) and then in Berlin in the 1920s. His drive for centralization and for the control of the Vatican bureaucracy over the national churches led him to strive for a concordat with Germany, even at the cost of sacrificing the German Catholic Party, the Zentrum, in the process. The Concordat was signed in July 1933 and ratified that September. The German signature was Adolf Hitler’s. In return, on March 23, 1933, the Zentrum had voted full powers for the Nazi leader, which, for the Catholic Party, meant its own demise and the final demise of the German Republic.

The appearance of good relations between Pius XI and Nazi Germany did not last. From 1936 on, as the danger Nazi racial tenets posed to Catholic dogma grew clearer, as important aspects of the Concordat regarding Catholic institutions (youth movements and religious orders) and church property were disregarded by Berlin, and as trumped-up charges against priests and nuns signaled the possibility of direct persecution of the Catholic Church, Pius XI became increasingly hostile to the new Reich. The pope’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Deepest Concern”) heightened the existing tension. There can be little doubt that Secretary of State Pacelli was involved in the preparation of the encyclical and shared Pius XI’s outrage at Nazi measures. It was most probably in this context that, in April 1938, Pacelli handed a confidential memorandum to the U.S. ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, during a meeting in Rome. Compromise with the Nazis, it stated, was out of the question. At approximately the same time, in a conversation with the U.S. consul general in Berlin, Alfred W. Klieforth, Pacelli supposedly said “that he [Pacelli] unalterably opposed every compromise with National Socialism. He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel, but as a fundamentally wicked person. He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation.”¹⁵

Once Pacelli was elected pope, however, some of his first initiatives (apart from the shelving of Humani Generis Unitas) confirmed the persistence of an ultraconservative stance and showed an unmistakable desire to placate Germany. Thus, in mid-April 1939, in a radio broadcast, the pontiff congratulated the Spanish people on the return of peace and the achievement of victory (Franco’s, of course), adding that Spain “had once again given the prophets of materialist atheism a noble proof of its indestructible Catholic faith.”¹⁶ A few months later Pius XII rescinded his predecessor’s excommunication of the French antirepublican, monarchist, furiously nationalist, and anti-Semitic Action Française. The Holy Office lifted the condemnation on July 7, 1939, but the decision was announced in the Osservatore Romano on July 15, that is, on the morrow of Bastille Day: The choice of date may have been sheer coincidence.¹⁷

On March 6, the new pontiff had announced his election to Hitler (as was the custom) in a particularly long letter originally written in Latin, the German version of which he had manifestly reworked himself and signed (as wasn’t the custom).

The Nazi-Soviet pact, on the other hand, must have reinforced Pius XII’s personal lack of confidence in the Nazi leader; it may explain why the pontiff maintained brief contacts with German opposition groups planning an anti-Hitler coup in the fall of 1939. From the outset, however, the pope was faced with a very different and no less pressing issue: What should both his diplomatic and public reaction be in the face of ever more massive Nazi crimes?

Pius XII made it clear to his entourage that he would be personally in charge of relations with Hitler’s Germany. Intentionally, no doubt, the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Cesare Orsenigo was kept as nuncio in Berlin.¹⁹ Regarding the entire gamut of Nazi crimes, Pius’s policy, during the first phase of the war, may be defined as an exercise in selective appeasement. The pope did not take a public stand regarding the murder of the mentally ill, but he made a plea for the “beloved Polish people” in his encyclical Summi Pontificatus of October 20, 1939 (although this appeared insufficient to the Polish episcopate and the Polish minister to the Vatican).²⁰ Concerning both euthanasia and the fate of the Catholics in Poland, the Vatican also appealed to Berlin either via the nuncio (mainly about Poland) or in urgent pleas to the German bishops. In letters of December 1940 to both Cardinal Bertram of Breslau and Bishop Preysing of Berlin, Pius XII expressed his shock about the killing of the mentally ill.²¹ In both cases and otherwise, however, nothing was said about the persecution of the Jews.

On June 11, 1940, the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant sent a letter from the Vatican, where he was residing, to his Paris colleague, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard. Although the letter should be read in its 1940 context, as France was collapsing and the day after Mussolini’s joining the war, it had an uncannily wider significance: “Our governments [the democracies] refuse to understand the true nature of the conflict and persist in imagining that this is a war like the wars of times gone by. But Fascist ideology and Hitlerism have transformed the consciences of the young, and those under thirty-five are willing to commit any crime for any purpose ordered by their leader. Since the beginning of November, I have persistently requested the Holy See to issue an encyclical on the duty of the individual to obey the dictates of conscience, because this is the vital point of Christianity…. I fear that history may have reason to reproach the Holy See with having pursued a policy of convenience to itself and very little else. This is sad in the extreme, particularly when one has lived under Pius XI.”²²

II

German occupation differed from country to country. While Denmark kept a semblance of freedom until the summer of 1943, Norway and Holland—although countries of “related racial stock”—were governed by Nazi Party appointees, Reichskommissare, who were both satraps and ideological envoys. Belgium and northern France (north of the Loire River and along the Atlantic coast) remained under the authority of the Wehrmacht, and two French departments along the Belgian border were put under the authority of the military command in Brussels. The central and southern parts of France, on the other hand, were granted a measure of autonomy under Marshal Pétain’s leadership, becoming “Vichy France.” Germany de facto annexed Luxembourg and the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. A southeastern part of France was occupied by the Italian army, as a reward for Mussolini.

Occupied Europe was dominated by a whole array of German agencies and appointees, independent of one another but fully subservient to the single central authority of the Führer. In a maze of institutional power attributions, no agency was solely in charge of the Jewish question either in 1940 or later. And, as in all domains since early 1938, state agencies were increasingly shunted aside to subordinate positions by the party and its organizations. The dominance of party old-timers (from Germany or former Austria) in all matters related to occupation or anti-Jewish policies was all-pervasive. Only the military, by dint of wartime circumstances, kept a somewhat undefined position. Whereas in Poland, as we saw, the Wehrmacht had been divested of its control over civilian matters soon after the end of the campaign, it nonetheless remained the dominant authority for imposing anti-Jewish measures in several occupied Western European countries. It would also actively participate in the oppression and mass killings in the occupied Soviet Union and the Balkans.

Otherwise, in territorial as well as in functional terms, the party and its organizations had almost all power in its hands. Hans Frank held sway in the General Government; Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau; Arthur Seyss-Inquart in Holland; Konstantin von Neurath (the only initial exception), then Reinhard Heydrich, and finally Hermann Frank in the Protectorate; Josef Terboven in Norway; later Hinrich Lohse in the “Ostland,” and Erich Koch in the Ukraine. All of them were party stalwarts. In functional termsHermann Göring oversaw economic exploitation and expropriation, Fritz Sauckel and Albert Speer would handle foreign labor; Alfred Rosenberg looted art and cultural assets (he later would be in charge of the civilian administration of the “occupied eastern territories”); Joseph Goebbels, of course, orchestrated propaganda and its multiple ramifications; Joachim von Ribbentrop dealt with foreign governments, while Heinrich Himmler and his minions controlled population transfers and “colonization” as well as arrests, executions, deportations, and extermination.²³

Throughout the Continent German domination could rely on a collaboration that was in part determined by “rational” calculations but often was also a willing or even an enthusiastic embrace of Germany’s supremacy on assorted ideological and power-political grounds. Such a collaboration involved national and regional agencies and institutions, auxiliaries of all hues, political support groups, and independent agents, ranging from politicians to civil servants, from intellectuals to police forces and railway administrations, from journalists to industrialists; from youth movements to peasant leagues, from clergy to universities, from organized to spontaneous killer gangs. And, as the war became fiercer and resistance movements more active, the dyed-in-the-wool collaborators turned more savage in their hunting down of Germany’s enemies and of Germany’s victims.

At the time of Hitler’s triumph in the West, the Nazi terror system controlled directly (or with the assistance of its satellites) around 250,000 to 280,000 Jews remaining in the Greater Reich, 90,000 in the Protectorate, 90,000 in Slovakia, 2.2 million in the German-occupied or -annexed parts of ex-Poland, 140,000 in Holland, 65,000 in Belgium, about 330,000 in both French zones, between 7,000 and 8,000 in Denmark, and 1,700 in Norway. Thus, at the beginning of the summer of 1940, a total population of almost 3,200,000 Jews was, to all intents and purposes, already caught in Hitler’s clutches.²⁴

Among the Jews of Europe, Hitler’s new victories triggered a wave of fear. “On the Eiffel Tower, the swastika,” the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian noted in his diary two days after the fall of Paris. “At Versailles, German sentries. At the Arc de Triomphe, the ‘Unknown Soldier’ with a German ‘guard of honor.’ But the terrible things are not the trophies or the acts of provocation: they could even arouse and maintain a will to survive among the French population. What scares me more is the ‘harmony’ operation that is about to follow. There will be newspapers, declarations and political parties that present Hitler as a friend and sincere protector of France. When that time comes, all the panic and all the resentments will find release in one long pogrom. Where can Poldy [Sebastian’s brother, who lived in Paris] be? What will he do? What will become of him? And what of us here?”²⁵

In 1940 the thirty-three-year-old Sebastian was already a well-known novelist and playwright on the Romanian literary scene. He lived in Bucharest, in close touch with the local intellectual elite—some of whose members, such as E. M. Cioran and Mircea Eliade, were to achieve world fame in the postwar years—an elite massively drawn to fascism in a Romanian garb and to the most vulgar and violent anti-Semitism. Yet Sebastian, strangely enough, tried to find excuses and rationalizations for the behavior and insulting spewings of his former friends and, in fact, ongoing acquaintances. Whatever the peculiarity of Sebastian’s forgiveness, his diary offers a faithful portrait of a regime that was to impose Nazi-like measures and participate in mass murder, and of a society widely supporting it.²⁶

In Warsaw, Czerniaków noted the rapidly changing situation without adding comments.²⁷ While Ringelblum and Sierakowiak did not leave any notes for those months, Kaplan moved from wrath to despair and from despair to very short-lived hope. Wrath at Mussolini’s move, on June 11: “The second hooligan has dared, as well! Whether voluntarily or by compulsion it is difficult to say, but the fact remains that Benito Mussolini, the classic traitor, the Führer’s minion, the monkey-leader of the Italian nation, has gone to war against England and France.” The illusions about France were quickly waning, as the same entry indicated: “The French are fighting like lions with the last of their strength. But there is a limit to acts of valor, too. It is dubious that the military strength still remaining to France will suffice to resist the Nazi military might.”²⁸ Then came the dreadful news of Paris’s fall and of the French demand for armistice: “Even the most extreme pessimists,” Kaplan noted on June 17, “among whom I include myself, never expected such terrible tidings.” The unavoidable question followed: “Will England keep fighting?”²⁹ Kaplan was doubtful at first, then again, three days later, filled with intense hope: “The war is not over yet! England is continuing to fight, and even France will henceforth carry on her battle from the soil of her empire, her colonies in all parts of the world.” Thereupon Kaplan added an astute insight: “The Germans are, of course, the heroes of the war, but they require a short war; as they say in their language, a Blitzkrieg. They could not survive a long war. Time is their greatest enemy.”³⁰

Once again, as it had during the previous months, catastrophe bred messianic dreams. “Some people see mystical proof of the imminent coming of salvation,” Kaplan noted on June 28, 1940: “This year is Tav-Shin [5700 in the Hebrew calendar]. It is known that the redemption of Israel will come at the end of the sixth millennium. Thus, according to this calculation, three hundred years are lacking. But that can be explained! Some of those who calculate the date of the Messianic age have already been disappointed. But this will not prevent people from finding more proofs, nor other people from believing them. They want the Messiah, and someone will yet come forth who will bring him.”³¹

After alluding to the despondence among Jews and the certainty of final victory “before the end of the summer” among the German populace, Klemperer noted an incident on July 7 that possibly showed the complex individual feelings of many a German toward the persecuted Jews in their midst: “Yesterday Frau Haeselbarth came to see us in the late morning, in black: her husband fallen near St. Quentin…. She brought me socks and shirts and briefs. ‘You need it, it’s of no use to me anymore.’ We really did accept the things. Sympathy? Very great…(but) limited to the woman. The husband whom I had not known, had first been a lawyer on his own account, and then for the Regional Farmers’ Association, in direct service of the Party therefore.”³²

As with Jews everywhere, Klemperer’s mood switched from hope to despair and from despair to hope again with every bit of news, every rumor, even every chance remark. After England’s rejection of Hitler’s “peace offer,” there was widespread belief among Germans—and among many Jews—that England was doomed: “In the Jews’ House,” Klemperer noted on July 24, “I always play the role of the optimist. But I am not quite sure of my position at all. The language of the charlatan certainly [a reference to Hitler’s July 19 Reichstag speech], but so far every charlatanlike announcement has been realized. Even Natscheff [a friend] is now in very low spirits and says: ‘I cannot imagine how he can succeed—but so far he has succeeded with everything.’”³³

In the same July 24 entry, Klemperer went on, significantly: “Peculiarity of the Jews’ House that each one of us wants to fathom the mood of the people and is dependent on the last remark picked from the barber or butcher, etc. (I am too!) Yesterday a philosophical piano tuner was here doing his job: It will last a long time, England is a world empire—even if there were to be a landing…immediately my heart felt lighter.”³⁴

The most unexpected reaction to Hitler’s victories came from the Kleppers: They welcomed them: “We tell ourselves,” Jochen Klepper noted on July 4, 1940 (alluding to the opinion he shared with his wife, Hanni), “that for us, in our special situation, nothing could have been as dangerous, in fact as awful, as a lost war the outbreak of which was attributed to world Jewry. We would have had to pay for it. It may well be that we also won’t escape paying for a victorious war, but not so terribly.”³⁵

III

Throughout 1940 the Nazi leader maintained the public restraint regarding the Jews that had already been noticeable since the beginning of the war. Although during the victory speech of July 19, 1940, the Jews were mentioned, it was only in terms of standard Nazi rhetoric: “Jewish capitalists” and “international Jewish world poison” were lumped together with the Freemasons, the armaments industrialists, the war profiteers, and the like.³⁶ The same almost haphazard mention of the Jews among Germany’s enemies surfaced in the September 4 speech for the launching of the annual winter relief campaign, public collections for the poor at the onset of winter.³⁷ And on December 10, in a speech to the workers of a Berlin munitions factory, Hitler again listed the enemies of the Reich, yet this time the Jews were nothing more than “this people which always believes that it can exterminate nations with the trumpets of Jericho.”³⁸ In other words, at the height of his victory euphoria, in his repeated addresses to the German nation and to the world, Hitler put but minimal emphasis on the Jewish issue. The issue, however, was not forgotten.

On April 13 Hitler declared to Wiljam Hagelin, the Norwegian minister of commerce in the collaborationist government of Vidkun Quisling, that in Sweden the Jews were “taking a large part” in anti-German propaganda.³⁹ On July 26 the Nazi leader tried to assuage Romanian fears about a collapse of their economy if the Jews were eliminated too rapidly by declaring to the newly appointed prime minister, Ion Gigurta, that “on the basis of numerous examples from the evolution in Germany, despite all talk to the contrary the Jews were proved to be absolutely dispensable.”⁴⁰

Of course Hitler’s exhortations were not restricted to the sharing of theoretical insights about the role of Jews in the economy. On July 28 he and his foreign minister, Ribbentrop, met with the Slovaks in Salzburg. On the same day Ribbentrop imposed a reorganization of the Slovak government on President Jozef Tiso: Ferdinand Durčansky, who had been both minister of the interior and of foreign affairs, was replaced by two fanatically pro-Nazi politicians, Alexander Mach at the Interior Ministry and Vojtech Tuka at Foreign Affairs. Simultaneously a former SA leader, Manfred von Killinger, was appointed minister to Bratislava. Finally, SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann’s men at section IVB4 (and, earlier, in charge of the Jewish desk at the SD) became, on September 1, 1940, “the adviser on Jewish affairs” to the Slovak government.⁴¹

The conversation between Hitler, Tiso, Tuka, and Mach was most urbane: The Nazi leader recommended to his Slovak guests that they align their internal policies with those of the Reich; he explained that Germany was intent on building an economic bloc that would be “independent of international Jewish swindle.” Later Hitler imparted to the Slovaks that there were forces in Europe that would try to prevent the cooperation between their two countries (Jews, Freemasons, and similar elements), to which Tiso agreed, adding his own comments about Jews, Magyars, and Czechs.⁴²

During these same months the Nazi leader prohibited the use of individual Jews as laborers in German territories or even among German workers.⁴³ At the same time, though, as Himmler was busying himself with resettlement plans, Hitler acquiesced to his henchman’s memorandum of May 27, 1940, “Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Populations in the East.” The “ethnic mush” under German control would be deported to the General Government and the Jews—worse in Himmler’s eyes than just “ethnic mush”—would be shipped off to some colony “in Africa or elsewhere.” According to the SS Reichsführer, physical extermination, a “Bolshevik method,” would be “un-German.”⁴⁴

Thus, on the face of it, Hitler accepted Himmler’s ideas, and in several meetings during the second half of June, he backed the project to ship the Jews of Europe to some African colony. To his own ambassador to Paris, Otto Abetz, he disclosed, on August 3, “that he intended to evacuate all Jews from Europe after the war.”⁴⁵ The island of Madagascar, which belonged to defeated France, seemed an obvious destination; such a deportation had for decades been a pet plan of anti-Semites of all hues.⁴⁶

Mussolini had apparently received the happy tidings from the master of the Reich himself during their discussion of the armistice with France.⁴⁷ A few months later, on November 20, the Hungarian prime minister shared the same privilege;⁴⁸ this somewhat belated announcement—and even some later ones—show that Hitler used the Madagascar idea as a vague metaphor for the expulsion of the Jews of Europe from the Continent.

For a short while preparations moved into high gear both at the Wilhelmstrasse and at the RSHA, at least on paper.⁴⁹ One of the main “planners” at “Department Germany” (Abteilung Deutschland) was the fanatical anti-Semite Franz Rademacher, second-in-command to Martin Luther (in charge of Jewish affairs). One sentence in Rademacher’s lengthy memorandum of July 3 should be kept in mind: “The Jews [in Madagascar] will remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.”⁵⁰

At the beginning of July, Eichmann informed delegates of the Reichsvereinigung and of the Vienna and Prague Jewish communities that the transfer of some four million Jews to an unspecified country was envisioned.⁵¹ In Warsaw it was Gestapo sergeant Gerhard Mende who passed on the good news to Czerniaków: “Mende,” Czerniaków noted in his diary on July 1, “declared that the war would be over in a month and that we would all leave for Madagascar. In this way the Zionist dream is to come true.”⁵²

On July 12 Frank had conveyed the news to the heads of his administration: The entire “Jewish tribe” would soon be on its way to Madagascar.⁵³ A few days later, in an address in Lublin, the governor-general even showed some unexpected talents as an entertainer when he described how the Jews would be transported “piece by piece, man by man, woman by woman, girl by girl.” The audience roared with laughter.⁵⁴ And as the governor also had a practical side, he ordered all ghetto construction in his kingdom to be stopped.⁵⁵ Greiser had been skeptical from the outset: He doubted that the Jews could be evacuated before the onset of the winter, and for him their transfer from the Warthegau to the General Government was the only immediate and concrete option.⁵⁶Greiser and Frank met in Kraków at the end of July to find a compromise, but to no avail.⁵⁷

The Madagascar fiction was abandoned over the next months, as the defeat of Great Britain was nowhere in sight.⁵⁸

IV

Jewish emigration from the Reich and from occupied countries continued after the beginning of the war. On January 24, 1939, as mentioned, Göring had put Heydrich in charge of Jewish emigration. Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller became head of the Berlin “Central Emigration Agency,” under Heydrich’s command. The day-to-day operations were left in Eichmann’s hands: For all practical purposes he became the “chief of operations,” both for the deportations and for the emigration of Jews (in Nazi eyes both were identical at this stage). It is in line with the overall policy of expulsion—and with Hitler’s explicit agreement—that, mainly in the fall of 1939, Jews deported to the Lublin area were often driven by the SS over the Soviet demarcation line or were allowed to flee into Soviet-occupied territory, as mentioned in the previous chapter. By mid-October 1939, however, this possibility tapered off, mainly due to a change in Soviet asylum policy. There also was a semiclandestine route out of Poland over the border into Hungary; it allowed for the flight of several thousand Jews but, as we shall see, not to lasting safety.

During the first few months of the war, Jews from Poland or Polish areas annexed to the Reich could also leave by applying for visas as was the case in the Reich and the Protectorate. Thus, the Jewish Council of the town of Auschwitz, part of annexed eastern Upper Silesia, complained to the office of the Jewish relief organization the American Joint Distribution Committee in Amsterdam on January 4, 1940, for not sending the funds necessary for emigration: “As you might probably know,” the Ältestenrat’s letter stated, “a central emigration bureau has been established at Auschwitz for the whole district of Kattowitz based on the approval of the competent authorities. To this emigration office belongs also a department for emigration to overseas countries and a Palestine office…. In order to release people from various camps, emigration possibilities have to be provided…. A considerable number of unused Palestine certificates and several holders of affidavits for America have to be dealt with.” Money was needed, urgently.⁵⁹

The Germans soon established their priorities. In April 1940, as departures and border crossings became increasingly difficult, Heydrich issued a first set of guidelines: intensification of Jewish emigration from the Reich, except for men of military age; limitation and control of emigration to Palestine; no emigration of Polish or ex-Polish Jews in concentration camps; no further deportation (“or free emigration”) of Jews into the General Government.⁶⁰

On October 25, 1940, Jewish emigration from the General Government was forbidden, mainly to keep the emigration possibilities from the Reich as open as possible. Yet Heydrich added some comments that sound genuine—and true to type: “The migration of the Eastern Jews means a continuous spiritual regeneration of world Jewry, as these Eastern Jews, due to their orthodox religious attitudes, represent a large part of the rabbis, Talmudic teachers, etc., who are much in demand, particularly in Jewish organizations active in the United States. For these American-Jewish organizations, each orthodox Jew also represents an additional element in their constant effort to effect both a spiritual rejuvenation and further cohesion of American Jewry. American Jewry also aims, with the particular help of those Jews newly arrived from Eastern Europe, to create a new basis from which to pursue its struggle, especially against Germany, with ever greater energy.”⁶¹ In fact, for Jews trapped in former Poland, the chances of reaching the United States were slim at best, except for the lucky ones who had managed to flee to the Soviet-occupied zone and on.

With the beginning of the war, the number of American visas issued to refugees from Germany or German-occupied countries declined precipitously, well below the already limited possibilities offered by the U.S. quota system. A special committee, the Emergency Rescue Committee, or ERC, was set up on June 25, 1940, to facilitate the immigration (from southern France, where many had found a temporary refuge), of a select group of refugees deemed particularly valuable to the United States or in danger of being delivered to the Gestapo, according to article 19 of the Franco-German armistice agreement.⁶²

At first ERC headquarters in New York, in complying with the regulations imposed by the Vichy authorities and in establishing new screening procedures to exclude all politically unwanted immigrants, created as many difficulties as it solved. In August 1940, however, the ERC decided to send a member of the Foreign Policy Association, Varian Fry, on a brief fact-finding mission to France. Instead of returning to the United States, Fry set up the Centre Américain de Secours in Marseilles and started helping the most endangered individuals to leave the country. In the face of the massive obstacles put in place by the French and also the Spaniards and the Portuguese, Fry took it upon himself to cut many a legal corner, in fact to initiate blatantly illegal steps (forged exit and transit visas and the like). Hundreds of refugees—Jews and non-Jews—owed him their move to safety. In August 1941 Fry was briefly arrested by the French and recalled.⁶³

At times well-known individuals intervened on their own. Thus, on July 9, 1940, the world-renowned novelist Stefan Zweig wrote (from New York) to a Mr. Adolphe Held at the New York Amalgamated Bank to ask for his help in saving “Frederike Maria Zweig, my former wife and her two daughters; Mr. Hugo Simon, who has been active in a number of anti-Nazi efforts; Theodor Wolff, the former editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt and his family; and Mr. Alfred Polgar, the well-known Austrian writer.” All these people were stranded in Montauban, a small town in southwest France.⁶⁴

In most cases, in the summer of 1940, immigration to the United States became a hopeless quest. It seems that the fear of enemy agents infiltrating the country as refugees had a significant influence on American decisions: The fact that among those attempting to flee many were Jews did not alleviate the suspicion.⁶⁵ No clash of policies existed between the bureaucratic level (the State Department) and the political level (the president). Roosevelt’s advisers believed in the “fifth column” threat as intensely as did the majority of the population, swayed by a hysterical press campaign.⁶⁶ In the course of one day in May 1940, 2,900 allegations of espionage were received at the FBI.⁶⁷

One of the most active restrictionists was the head of the State Department’s “Special Problems Division,” Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. His attitude, openly expressed in his diary, derived from an unmistakable hostility to Jews. Long’s anti-Semitism was neither shrill nor rabid; yet there is little doubt that the assistant secretary of state spared no effort to limit Jewish immigration to the utmost while it was still possible, and to scuttle any rescue projects during the crucial 1942–43 period.⁶⁸

The situation grew worse over time. The Bloom–Van Nuys Bill, signed by Roosevelt on June 20, 1941, authorized the refusal of any type of visa to an applicant whom a U.S. [consular] official would deem liable to “endanger public safety.”⁶⁹ In real terms the possibility of Nazi agents entering the United States as Jewish refugees and becoming a “threat to public safety,” although existent, was minimal.⁷⁰ On the eve of crucial elections, Roosevelt’s own considerations in this matter were probably political first and foremost. Some American Jewish leaders seemed aware of the president’s reasoning (which they described as that of his friends) and were willing to go along with it. Such in any case was the gist of a letter sent by Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, to Otto Nathan, one of Roosevelt’s Jewish economic advisers, in September 1940: “With regard to the political refugees, we are in the midst of the most difficult situation, an almost unmanageable quandary. On the one hand, the State Department makes all sorts of promises and takes all our lists and then we hear that the Consuls do nothing. A few people slip through, but we are afraid, this in strictest confidence, that the Consuls have private instructions from the Department to do nothing, which would be infamous beyond words. What I am afraid lies back of the whole thing is the fear of the Skipper’s [Roosevelt] friends in the State Department that any large admission of radicals to the United States might be used effectively against him in the campaign. Cruel as I may seem, as I have said to you before, his re-election is much more important for everything that is worthwhile and that counts than the admission of a few people, however imminent their peril.”⁷¹

The stringent restrictions on entry to the United States had ripple effects on the policies of other states in the hemisphere. Jews intent on fleeing Germany after the beginning of the war often tried to obtain visas for Latin American countries, such as Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba. The end result was usually a matter of bribes and sheer luck. But in 1940, Chile and Brazil closed their doors, in part as a result of internal political pressures; also, however, because the United States had warned both governments that German agents could enter in the guise of Jewish refugees. The desperate candidates for emigration now helplessly watched the Western Hemisphere turn increasingly off-limits, except for a happy few.⁷²

A special chapter in the saga of Jewish refugees’ attempts to reach Latin America is that of the Brazilian visas for “Catholic non-aryans.” In the spring of 1939, after repeated requests from the Sankt Raphaelsverein (the German Catholic organization helping Catholic emigrants and particularly converted Jews), Pius XII obtained from Brazil the granting of three thousand visas for the converts. Soon, however, the Brazilian authorities did add new conditions and it does not seem that the Vatican made strenuous efforts to compel Getúlio Vargas’s government to keep its promises. Fewer than one thousand of these visas were finally used. The Holy See helped the refugees finance their passage to freedom—with money deposited for that purpose by American Jewish organizations. As we shall see, during the war the pope did not hesitate to mention the efforts he had made and the money he had spent to help Jewish emigrants. After the war the three thousand visas and the financing of the entire Brazilian operation were grandly attributed to the pope’s care and generosity.⁷³

Three routes remained available: illegal immigration to Palestine, semilegal transit via Spain and Portugal or via Lithuania, the USSR, Japan or Manchukuo, and Shanghai (in very small numbers by then) to overseas destinations, with the United States or some other countries of the Western Hemisphere still remaining the ultimate goal.⁷⁴

On January 23, 1941, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee headquarters in New York informed the “Committee for the Assistance of European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai” that five hundred Jewish refugees were en route from Lithuania to Japan without valid visas. The “Joint” assured the Shanghai committee that many of these refugees would ultimately receive U.S. visas, and asked it to do everything possible to get them temporary entry permits to Shanghai, in order to avoid serious difficulties with Japan. The committee’s reply, on February 7, casts a glaring light on the situation of the thousands of Jews trying to flee Europe in all possible directions. “We transmitted your message to our friends in Yokohama,” the Shanghai committee wrote, “and received telephonic information to the effect that there were already about 300 refugees from Poland and Lithuania in Japan with visas from Curaçao and South American Republican States…. There can be no doubt that this is placing our friends in Japan in a very serious predicament, as the South American Republics have since forbidden the entry of further Jewish emigrants.

“As you are no doubt aware, one vessel carrying about 500 emigrants for Haiti is still floating around somewhere trying to land its human freight…. Should this vessel not be able to land these unfortunate people, the Shipping Company will be compelled to bring them back to the port of embarkation in Japan…. With the further arrival of 500 or more refugees and the 300 that there are already, plus the 500 that were unable to land in South America, we shall be facing a very serious problem in Japan, more so as the Japanese visas are only valid for 14 days. As practically every port is closed to our refugees and in view of the restrictions now in force in Shanghai, we fail to see what can be done in regard to an ultimate destination for the unfortunate beings who are at present roaming the world without an atom of hope.”⁷⁵

The unsavory but necessary cooperation between the leaders of the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine], who wanted to draw Jewish emigration to Eretz Israel, and the Nazis, who wished to oust the Jews from the Reich, had started as early as 1933. It went through different phases but was reconfirmed by Hitler himself in 1938. This common venture took an unusual turn in early 1939, after Great Britain closed the doors of Palestine to mass Jewish emigration for fear of pushing the Arab world toward the Axis: Heydrich and emissaries from the Yishuv joined forces to organize the illegal departure of Jews from Europe to Eretz Israel. On the German side Eichmann was in charge of the practical aspects of the operation.

Immediately after the beginning of the war, grandiose plans were concocted on the assumption that the harbors of neutral Holland could be used as departure bases. The so-called Dutch plan failed.⁷⁶ Italy was then considered as an alternative outlet, without success.⁷⁷ There remained the possibility of reaching a Romanian harbor by sailing down the Danube; from Romania the voyage would lead across the Black Sea, through the Bosporus into the Mediterranean, and—after avoiding British surveillance—to the coast of Palestine. In most of these operations Eichmann used an Austrian Jew born in Bukovina, Berthold Storfer, as agent—and informer—in the negotiations with Jewish organizations: the Mossad L’Aliyah Beth (the agency for illegal immigration set up by the Jewish authorities in Palestine), the right-wing Revisionist Zionists, or the Joint Distribution Committee, which financed a major part of the rescue effort.⁷⁸

For the Mossad activists and for the political leadership in Palestine, the outbreak of the war created an insoluble dilemma: How to help Jews to flee Europe to Eretz Israel in direct opposition to the British and help the British in their struggle against Germany and Italy. No clear priorities were set, and more often than not, the Mossad’s operations were ill prepared almost to the point of recklessness.⁷⁹ The Kladovo episode was but one such case. In the summer of 1939, the Mossad envoy in Vienna, Ehud Ueberall (later Avriel) insisted on the rapid departure of a group of twelve hundred candidates for immigration (mainly belonging to Zionist youth movements) without previously acquiring a ship for the journey from Romania to Palestine. After being stalled in Bratislava, the group reached a location on the Yugoslav shore of the Danube but then could not proceed any farther. The Romanians would not allow entry if no ship was ready for the Black Sea and Mediterranean crossing. All attempts to acquire ships failed, and when the Mossad finally got hold of one, it planned for months to use it in a covert British operation in the Balkans. In the meantime the Kladovo group lived on unheated river barges on the frozen Danube, and as the thaw came, no solution had been found. A small group of around 110 children was transferred to Palestine; the remaining one thousand Jews were caught by the Germans after the conquest of Yugoslavia and, soon thereafter, murdered.⁸⁰ All in all, after the beginning of the war, fewer than thirteen thousand Jews managed to leave the Reich and the Protectorate for Palestine, and only part reached their destination. In March 1941 the Germans put an end to the common venture.

From the outset the British authorities in Palestine, the Colonial Office, and the Foreign Office were determined to foil any such illegal immigration attempts, in view of potential Arab reactions. That a number of high officials, particularly in the Colonial Office, were far from being philo-Semitic added an element of harshness to British policy in the face of a rapidly worsening human tragedy. An April 1940 memorandum by the deputy Undersecretary at the Colonial Office, Sir John Schuckburgh, about the Jews of Palestine illustrated this convergence of anti-Semitism and straightforward national interest: “I am convinced that in their hearts they hate us and have always hated us; they hate all Gentiles…. So little do they care for Great Britain as compared with Zionism that they cannot even keep their hands off illegal immigration, which they must realize is a very serious embarrassment to us at a time when we are fighting for our very existence.”⁸¹

Not everybody in the British administration—and even less so at Cabinet level—was as vehemently hostile to the Jews and their attempts to flee Nazi Europe as was the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office, some of whose members even outdid Schuckburgh and saw the Jews as plotting the destruction of the British Empire and as worse enemies than the Germans.⁸²

Yet whatever sympathy for the Jewish plight still may have existed in London, measures aimed to deter refugee ships from running the navy’s blockade off the coast of Palestine became even more determined once Britain stood alone. In the fall of 1940, the Colonial Office decided that the illegal immigrants who succeeded in reaching Palestine would be deported to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and put in barrack camps surrounded by barbed wire.⁸³

In response the Yishuv leadership hoped to arouse public opinion, mainly in the United States, by an act of defiance. In November 1940 explosives were afixed to the hull of the Patria (about to sail to Mauritius with its cargo of illegal immigrants) to disable it and prevent its departure. The ship sank, and 267 refugees drowned.⁸⁴ The remaining passengers of the Patria were allowed to stay in Palestine, as the only exception to the deportation policy.

Finally there was the route over the Pyrenees. During the days just preceding or following the armistice it was the easiest way to leave France; the main crossing point was Hendaye. Alfred Fabre-Luce, a French journalist and author who in many ways echoed attitudes widespread among his countrymen, commented on “the Hendaye road”: “One discovers,” he noted, “that the Israelite world is much vaster than one would have thought. It doesn’t include only Jews but also all those whom they corrupted or seduced. This painter has a Jewish mistress, this financier would be ruined by racism, this international journalist does not dare to quarrel with the Jews of America. They all find good reasons to take the road of Hendaye. Don’t listen to their declarations; rather look at them: you will find somewhere in their body the stamp of Israel. In these days of panic, the most basic passions lead the world and none is stronger than the fear of a pogrom or the urge for it.”⁸⁵

Approximately twenty-five to fifty refugees per day were allowed to cross the Spanish border if they carried valid passports and a visa to a country of final destination. Soon, however, passage through Spain became conditional on French exit visas that, as we saw, could take months to obtain, due to a peculiar twist of French administrative sadism. Other restrictions followed: From November 1940 each Spanish transit visa needed permission from Madrid; authorization from the American consulate in Marseilles, for example, was no longer sufficient. These Spanish regulations lasted throughout the war, despite new difficulties in 1942, and did not discriminate between Jews and non-Jews. Ultimately, however, passage through Spain meant salvation for tens of thousands of Jews.⁸⁶

Spain, however, allowed only brief transit; Portugal was even more restrictive. But while the Portuguese dictator, Salazar, ordered stringent anti-immigration measures and strict control of transit visas, from fear of an influx of “ideologically dangerous” individuals, Portugal’s consuls in several European countries nonetheless delivered thousands of visas, in the face of Lisbon’s explicit instructions.⁸⁷ Some, like the consul general in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, were to pay for their courage with their careers.⁸⁸

Even the limited generosity shown by the fascistlike regimes in Spain and Portugal was not replicated by two other neutral countries, Switzerland and Sweden, model democracies by any standard. The Swiss authorities clamped down on Jewish immigration immediately after the 1938 Anschluss, demanding that a distinctive sign be stamped on the passports of Jews from the Greater Reich. The Germans acquiesced and, from the fall of 1938 onward, every Jewish passport which they issued was stamped with an indelible red J (the Swiss made sure that it could not be effaced).⁸⁹ For all practical purposes, therefore, Switzerland was closed to the legal entry of Jews, precisely as their need for transit authorizations or asylum became overwhelming. Sweden also wanted a Jstamp on Jewish passports and was about to demand it from Germany when the Swiss took the initiative. In fact, until the late fall of 1942, Swedish immigration policy regarding Jewish refugees was as restrictive as that of the Swiss. In late 1942, as we shall see, a change occurred in Stockholm.⁹⁰

From the beginning of the war, one may remember, the Kleppers wanted their daughter Reni to leave for Switzerland. Jochen’s wife, Hanni, had converted to Protestantism, and Reni was about to take the same step. A Zurich family, also deeply religious, it seems, the Tappolets, were ready to open their home to the young girl and let her stay as long as necessary. A member of the Swiss embassy in Berlin had promised to help and, on January 20, 1940, Klepper recorded that this official was in touch with a relative who worked as secretary at the Bundesrat [the Swiss government]. But he [the secretary] “wishes above anything else to protect Switzerland from being overrun by foreigners” [Überfremdung].⁹¹

In February, after the deportation from Stettin, the rumor spread in Berlin that all Jews would be sent to Lublin. Reni’s departure seemed more urgent than ever. The Tappolets wrote daily about the difficulties they encountered with the local authorities.⁹² On March 17 Klepper met the well-known Swiss historian and diplomat, Carl Burckhardt, the ex–high commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig, who promised to intervene. He apparently mentioned the matter to the Swiss minister in Berlin, Fröhlicher, who seemed ready to assist.⁹³ On March 27 the Swiss legation sent forms and questionnaires.⁹⁴

On April 25 the Tappolets forwarded a letter just received from Carl Burckhardt: “Unfortunately, I have the feeling that Miss Stein’s matter is being dealt with in a very dilatory way. I have myself been asked to help in so many entry and residence requests that my credit is somewhat spent for the time being.”⁹⁵ On April 28 Klepper was advised that Reni’s application had reached Bern. On May 15, as German victories in the West followed one another, the Tappolets wrote that the request had been rejected: “Any further attempt would be hopeless…. Due to the critical war situation, the aim is now to expel foreigners who are in possession of residence authorizations. Even somebody like Professor Burckhardt could not help anymore.”⁹⁶

At some stage Klepper asked Pastor Grüber’s office for assistance in arranging Reni’s departure, but to no avail. Set up shortly before the war by the Confessing Church administration to help “non-Aryan” Protestants emigrate, to provide relief for them or cater to their religious and educational needs, Grüber’s office cooperated with Bishop Wilhelm Berning’s Raphaelsverein for assistance to “non-Aryan” Catholics and with the Reichsvereinigung. The Gestapo tolerated these activities for a while. In December 1940 Grüber was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau on the charge of using forged passports in his operations. Limited activities continued under the direction of Grüber’s colleague, Werner Sylten, a converted Mischling. In February 1941 Sylten was also arrested and sent to Dachau: The office was closed. Grüber survived the war; Sylten was murdered.⁹⁷

Eichmann closely followed the dwindling emigration. In an internal memorandum of December 4, 1940, prepared as background material for an address that Himmler was to give on December 10 at the annual meeting of Gauleiter and Reichsleiter in Berlin, he estimated the total number of Jews who had left the Reich, Austria, and the Protectorate at 501,711. The surplus of deaths over births reduced the remaining Jewish population by 57,036 persons. Thus, according to Eichmann’s computation, 315,642 Jews, as defined by the Nuremberg laws, remained in the Greater Reich (including the Protectorate). The head of the Jewish desk at the RSHA then turned to the second section of his report; titled “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” it was very brief: “It will be achieved by way of transfer of the Jews out of the European economic space of the German people to a still-to-be-determined territory; the numbers that come into consideration in this project are approximately 5.8 million Jews.”⁹⁸

While Jews from the Reich and Western Europe were desperately trying to leave the Continent, an unexpected and sudden deportation of Jews from two German provinces was ordered by Hitler, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter. In October 1940 the Nazi leader gave the go-ahead for the deportation of the Jews from Baden and the Saar-Palatinate. The operation, led by Gauleiter Josef Bürckel and Robert Wagner, was organized by the RSHA;⁹⁹ it ran smoothly and was hardly noticed by the population.

Assembly points had been designated in the main towns of the two provinces; buses were ready; a criminal police commissar was assigned to each bus, and, just in case, police units were on standby. The Jews boarded the buses according to names lists: They were allowed to take one suitcase per person, weighing up to fifty kilograms (or thirty kilograms for a child), a blanket, food for several days, tableware, and one hundred reichsmarks in cash, as well as the necessary identification documents. Valuables had to be left behind; food was turned over to the NSV representatives; apartments were closed and sealed after water, gas, and electricity had been disconnected. Pets were delivered to party representatives “against a receipt.” Finally, it was forbidden to mistreat the deportees.¹⁰⁰

Without any consultation with Vichy, the RSHA shipped the deportees to the nonoccupied zone; the French sent them on to camps, mainly to Gurs, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, and Les Milles; there the cold weather, the lack of food, and the absence of the most elementary hygienic conditions took a growing toll. According to a report of the Swiss Basler Nachrichten of February 14, 1941, even without any major epidemics, half of the population of Gurs would be wiped out within two years.¹⁰¹ The Germans explained to the French authorities that these Jews would be sent to Madagascar in the near future.¹⁰²

It seems that Hitler had decided to take advantage of a clause in the armistice agreement with France that foresaw the expulsion of the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine into the unoccupied zone. The October 1940 expulsion was an “extension” of that clause as Baden, the Palatinate, and the Saar, adjacent to the two French provinces, were meant to become part of two new Gaue. The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine had themselves already been expelled on July 16, 1940. Thus, the two new Gaue would be entirely “Judenrein.”¹⁰³

On April 4, 1941, on Himmler’s order, the property and assets belonging to the Jews deported from the two provinces and from Pomerania (Stettin and Schneidemühl) were impounded. The Reichsführer based his decision on the decree issued on the morrow of the Reichstag fire, on February 28, 1933, granting extraordinary executive powers to the Reich chancellor for the protection of the Volk and the state. On May 29, 1941, Hitler ordered local authorities to turn over all such confiscated property to the Reich.¹⁰⁴

Two days after the beginning of the deportations, Conrad Gröber, the archbishop of Freiburg, wrote to the papal nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo: “Your Excellency will have heard of the events of the last days concerning the Jews. What pained me most as Catholic bishop is that a great number of Catholic Jews were compelled to abandon home and work and to face an uncertain future far away, with only 50 pounds of movable property and 100 RM. In most cases, these are praiseworthy Catholics who appeal by way of my letter to the Holy Father to ask him, as far as is possible for him, to change their lot or at least to improve it…. I urgently ask your Excellency to inform the Holy See of the fate of these Catholic Christians [sic]. I also ask your Excellency to use your personal diplomatic influence.”¹⁰⁵ No answer is on record, either from the nuncio or from the pope.

V

While considering the deportation of all European Jews to Madagascar and ordering the expulsion of Jews from two German provinces to Vichy France, the supreme leader of the German Reich did not miss any detail regarding the fate of the Jews living in his own backyard. On April 8, 1940, Hitler ordered that half Jews—even “Aryan” men married to Jewish or half-Jewish spouses—be transferred from active service to Wehrmacht reserve units. Quarter Jews could be maintained in active service and even promoted. Yet the order had barely been issued when the Western campaign transformed the situation: many of these partly Jewish soldiers received citations for bravery. Without a choice, in October 1940, the Nazi leader had them turned into “full-blooded Germans,” on a par with their fellow German soldiers. The status of their Jewish relatives, however, would remain unchanged.¹⁰⁶

During the same weeks and months, most German state and party agencies were competing to make life ever harder for the Jews of the Reich. On July 7, 1940, the Reich minister of postal services and communications forbade Jews to keep telephones, “with the exception of ‘consultants’ (the title given to Jewish lawyers after 1938), ‘caretakers of the sick’ (the appellation of Jewish doctors from the same year), and persons belonging to privileged mixed marriages.”¹⁰⁷ On October 4, the remaining rights of Jews as creditors in judicial proceedings were cancelled.¹⁰⁸ On October 7 Göring, as commander of the Luftwaffe, ordered that in air raid shelters “the separation [of the Jews] from the other inhabitants be ensured either by setting aside a special area, or by a separation within the same area.”¹⁰⁹ Actually the separation was already being enforced in many shelters, as William Shirer, the CBS correspondent in Berlin, noted in his diary on September 24, 1940: “If Hitler has the best air raid cellar in Berlin, the Jews have the worst. In many cases they have none at all. Where facilities permit, the Jews have their own special Luftschutzkeller, usually a small basement room next to the main part of the cellar, where the “Aryans” gather. But in many Berlin cellars, there is only one room. It is for the “Aryans.” The Jews must take refuge on the ground floor…. This is fairly safe if a bomb hits the roof…. But it is the most dangerous place in the entire building if a bomb lands in the street outside.”¹¹⁰ In the fall of 1940 English bombings were not yet a major problem in Berlin; later, when the Allied air attacks became a major threat to German cities, very few Jews were left to worry about shelters.

On November 13, 1940, Jewish shoemakers were allowed to work again in order to take some of the pressure off German shoemakers, but they could cater only to Jewish clients. As for German shoemakers who belonged to the party or affiliated organizations, they were not allowed to repair the shoes of Jews. Those who were not party members “were to decide according to their conscience.”¹¹¹ In matters of clothing and shoes Jews of all ages, young and old, were actually compelled to engage in complex strategic planning. Thus, in Hamburg, a few months before the war, a Jewish mother received a winter coat for her adolescent son from the Jewish community. In May 1940 the community gave him a pair of shoes and bartered his coat for a used one; he was allowed to have his shoes repaired one last time in January 1941. “By 1942,” according to historian Marion Kaplan, “needy Jews sometimes received hand-me-downs of neighbors who had committed suicide or had been summoned for deportation. Receiving such clothing was patently illegal, since the government confiscated all Jewish property.”¹¹²

On November 15, 1940, Himmler instructed all members of the German police to see Jud Süss during the winter.¹¹³ On December 12 the minister of the interior ordered that all mentally ill Jewish patients should henceforth be confined to only one institution, Bendorf-Sayn, in the Koblenz district, which belonged to the Reichsvereinigung.¹¹⁴ This was becoming technically possible because since June of that year a great number of Jewish mental patients were being sent to their death.¹¹⁵

On July 4, 1940, the police president of Berlin issued an order limiting the shopping time for Jews to one hour per day, from four to five p.m. “In regard to this police order,” the decree indicated, “Jews are persons whose food cards are marked with a ‘J’ or with the word ‘Jew.’”¹¹⁶ In Dresden the shopping hours for Jews were not yet restricted at the beginning of the summer of 1940, but the J card was a constant problem. On July 6 Klemperer noted: “But it is always horrible for me to show the J card. There are shops…that refuse to accept the cards. There are always people standing beside me who see the J. If possible I use Eva’s “Aryan” card…. We go for short walks after our evening meal and utilize every minute until exactly 9 p.m. [the summer curfew hour for Jews]. How anxious I was, in case we got home too late! Katz maintains that we should not eat at the station either. No one knows exactly what is allowed, one feels threatened everywhere. Every animal is more free and has more protection from the law.”¹¹⁷

Of course all major decrees were uniformly applied throughout the Reich, but nonetheless local variations allowed for the expression of the bountiful production of all imaginable forms of anti-Jewish harassment. Thus, according to the diary of Willy Cohn, a Breslau high school history teacher, his city’s officials did not lack imagination. “January 30, 1940: Jews need travel permits; March 27, 1940: Barber service is only available until nine o’clock in the morning; June 14, 1940: Overseas mail must be taken to the post office personally; June 20, 1940: Jews are forbidden to sit on all public benches. [Only three months earlier, on April 1, Cohn had remarked that along the waterfront there were still some benches where Jews could rest.] July 29, 1940: No fruit available for Jews; November 2, 1940: A storekeeper is summoned by the police after being denounced for selling fruit to Cohn’s wife.”¹¹⁸

With the help of her non-Jewish ex-husband, Hertha Feiner had succeeded in sending their two teenage daughters, Marion and Inge, to a boarding school in Switzerland, immediately after Kristallnacht. Her own chances of leaving were practically nil (registration number 77,454 for an American visa, sometime in the spring of 1940).¹¹⁹ Her daily life and chores as a teacher in a Jewish school in Berlin were becoming increasingly difficult: The schoolrooms remained unheated during the bitter cold months of early 1940; soon her telephone would be taken away. In Hertha’s desolate condition, one essential lifeline remained: the regular exchange of letters with her daughters. It was to them that over the next two years she would, at times openly, but mostly in veiled allusions, describe her path to an as-yet-unimagined end.

“First I want to tell you,” she wrote on October 16, 1940, “that we are not in our beautiful school anymore. Yesterday we moved into an old house, which we have to leave again. Yes, yes, comments are superfluous. We do not know yet where we shall teach. I have 46 children in my class.”¹²⁰ A few weeks later she wrote to her daughters that on the following day she was starting millinery courses (a milliner probably had a better chance of getting an American visa than did a schoolteacher): “Shall we open a fashion shop together?” she asked.¹²¹

Under the hail of new regulations, issued at all levels of the system, no Jew in the Reich knew exactly what was allowed and what was forbidden. Even the “Jewish Cultural Association,” the Kulturbund, now a section of the Reichsvereinigung, was often at a loss regarding what could be included in its programs. Thus, in mid-September 1939, after his first meeting with the immediate overseer of the Kulturbund’s activities, Erich Kochanowski from the Propaganda Ministry, the new artistic director of the association, Fritz Wisten, wrote in mock confusion about the contradictory and absurd instructions given him. The performance of Ferenc Molnar’s play The Pastry Chef ’s Wife was forbidden, as were all plays with an “assimilatory” tendency (“assimilatory” meaning encouragement for Jews to stay in Germany and assimilate to its society and culture). “I cannot see,” Wisten wrote, “any assimilatory aims in ‘The Pastry Chef ’s Wife.’”¹²²

On January 5, 1940, Wisten received new instructions. All German composers were banned from the Kulturbund’s musical repertory, including Handel (who mostly lived in England), except for German Jews. All foreign composers were allowed. The same principle applied to theater except, it seems, for the contemporary English repertory: “There are no reservations about Shakespeare. All authors of German descent or those who belong to the Reich Theater Chamber are excluded from consideration.”¹²³ Six months later Kochanowski authorized the performance of Liszt and Sibelius, which immediately encouraged Wisten to submit other Hungarian and Nordic composers.¹²⁴ Some of Wilde’s plays were acceptable, but this demanded much explanation, as Wisten noted on January 3, 1941: “I ask for permission to submit Wilde’s ‘Bunburry’ [the German title of The Importance of Being Earnest]. At the same time, I stress that Wilde is Irish and belongs to a past epoch so removed from us that the English atmosphere should not be able to cause offense.”¹²⁵

Kochanowski’s directives stemmed from the highest reaches of the Propaganda Ministry, possibly from Goebbels himself. Jews had been forbidden to perform for German audiences, and from the very beginnings of the regime Jewish composers and authors had been banned, due to their intrinsic absence of quality and mainly to their potentially dangerous impact on German hearts and minds. Later, Jews were forbidden to attend theater performances or concerts to spare the sensitivity of Aryan audiences to their presence. Thus the Kulturbund catered to the cultural needs of Jews, with works performed by Jews. Why, under these segregated circumstances, would Jews not be allowed to listen to German music or to perform German plays? Clearly the ban meant that a Jew listening to German music was desecrating it in some mysterious way, or, to put it differently, the music, the play, and the poem would be desecrated by Jewish performance or reading. In fact the threshold of magical thinking had been crossed: Any contact between the German spirit and a Jew, even if the Jew was merely a segregated and passive recipient, soiled and endangered the source itself.

Although the ubiquitous propaganda minister was probably the source of the changing directives given to the Kulturbund, throughout the first half of 1940 Goebbels’s attention seems to have been strongly focused, as it had been since October 1939, on the production of his three anti-Semitic films. As we saw in the previous chapter, Hitler was regularly consulted and regularly demanded changes, particularly in regard to Der Ewige Jude.

On April 4, 1940, the minister noted once again: “New version of the Jew film. Now it is good. As is, it can be shown to the Führer.”¹²⁶ Something must have gone wrong nonetheless, as Goebbels’s June 9 entry indicated: “Reworked once more the text of the Jew film.”¹²⁷ At least the minister could be pleased by Jud Süss: “An anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for. I am happy about it,” he noted on August 18.¹²⁸ In the meantime the premiere of Erich Waschneck’s Die Rothschilds had taken place in July. Within two weeks, however, it became clear that the film had to be reworked and better focused. When it reappeared a year later, it had finally received its full title: Die Rothschilds: Aktien auf Waterloo (The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo). It was a story of Jewish worldwide financial power and profiteering by the exploitation of misery and war: “We can make much money only with much blood.”¹²⁹

Germany’s best actors, as well as 120 Jewish extras, participated in the most effective of all Nazi anti-Jewish productions, Jud Süss. In the film Süss (the character’s actual name was Joseph Ben Yssachar Suesskind Oppenheimer) befriended a Hapsburg military hero, Prince Karl Alexander, who became Duke of Württemberg in 1772; he appointed Süss as his financial adviser.¹³⁰ Some of the most basic Nazi anti-Semitic themes were the leitmotifs of the brilliantly directed and performed “historical” fabrication. Süss, played by Ferdinand Marian—a highly successful lago on stage—opens the gates of Stuttgart to hordes of Jews, extorts money from Karl Alexander’s subjects by the most devious means, seduces any number of beautiful German maidens, particularly the exquisite Maria Dorothea Sturm, who gives in to save the life of her husband, the young notary Darius Faber, threatened by Süss. After submitting to the Jew, Maria Dorothea commits suicide. When Karl Alexander suddenly dies of a stroke, Süss is arrested, put on trial, sentenced to death, and hanged in a cage. The Jews are expelled from Württemberg. To make the Jews appear even more malevolent, Harlan introduced the figure of a mysterious kabbalist, Rabbi Loew, who hovers in the background as the occult and deadly force behind Süss’s criminal dealings.

According to excerpts from Harlan’s unpublished memoirs, in a notorious synagogue scene, “The Hassidic religious service had a demonic effect…. The alien [spectacle] performed with great vitality, was highly suggestive…like an exorcism.” For this scene and for the arrival of the Jews in Stuttgart and their later expulsion, the director chose “racially pure Jewish extras.” These Jews did not come from the Lublin ghetto (although that had been the initial intention) but rather from the Prague community.¹³¹ For the anti-Semitic Harlan and mainly for the enthusiastic viewers, the effect was ultimately the same.

Jud Süss was launched at the Venice Film Festival, in September 1940, to extraordinary acclaim; it received the “Golden Lion” award and garnered rave reviews. “We have no hesitation in saying that if this is propaganda, then we welcome propaganda,” wrote Michelangelo Antonioni. “It is a powerful, incisive, extremely effective film…. There is not a single moment when the film slows, not one episode in disharmony with another: it is a film of complete unity and balance…. The episode in which Süss violates the young girl is done with astonishing skill.”¹³² On September 24 Goebbels attended the Berlin opening at the Ufa-Palast: “A very large public, almost the entire Reich Cabinet. The film is a wild success. One hears only enthusiastic comments. The audience is in a frenzy. That is what I had wished for.”¹³³ And the next day, the propaganda minister was even prouder: “The Führer is very taken by the success of ‘Jud Süss.’” Everybody praises the film to the skies; it deserves it.”¹³⁴

The film’s popular success was overwhelming: “Although last week the [attendance] of ‘Jud Süss’ could already be considered excellent,” the Bielefeld SD reported on October 15, 1940, “now it surpasses all expectations. No film has yet succeeded in having such an impact on wide segments of the public. Even people who to this day rarely went to the cinema or never went at all do not want to miss the film.”¹³⁵ The effect of Harlan’s production can be judged from a previous report from Bielefeld: “The Jew is shown here as he really is,” a worker declared. “I would have loved to wring his neck.”¹³⁶ On September 30, 1940, as mentioned, Himmler ordered all SS and police members to see the film during the coming winter.¹³⁷ By 1943 the number of viewers had reached 20.3 million.¹³⁸

Ten days after the Reichsführer SS had recognized the outstanding educational value of Harlan’s film, the third major screen production of the anti-Jewish campaign was completed: “‘The Eternal Jew’ finally ready. Now it can confidently be shown. We have worked on it for long enough,” Goebbels noted on October 11.¹³⁹ On November 29 this ultimate anti-Jewish propaganda product opened throughout the Reich. Two different versions of the film had been prepared: an original version as well as another that deleted the gory scenes of ritual slaughtering. In Berlin alone the film started simultaneously in sixty-six theaters. The posters advertising the opening night in the capital carried the following warning: “As in the 6.30 p.m. presentation original images of Jewish animal slaughtering are shown, a shortened version presented at 4.00 p.m. is recommended to sensitive natures. Women are allowed only to the 4.00 p.m. presentation.”¹⁴⁰

Each city had its own posters. In Betzdorf, in the Altenkirchen district, Der Ewige Jude was described as “a documentary film about world Jewry”: “It is unique,” the description continued, “because it is no fantasy, but undiluted interesting reality.” Then came the usual warning, but in its local version: “Only in the evening presentations, to which there is no entry for youngsters, not even when accompanied by adults, the film shows the original images of the slaughtering of animals by Polish Jews. It shows their true face—sadistic and horrible.”¹⁴¹ The singsong of Jewish prayers and a synagogue cantor’s modulations were contrasted with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue whenever scenes of Aryan Christian beauty appeared. The chiseled faces of princes, knights, and saints were juxtaposed with the most unattractive Jewish physiognomies caught by Nazi cameras in the ghettos.

In a particularly horrendous sequence, swarms of rats scurry through cellars and sewers, and, in rapid alternation, hordes of Jews move from Palestine to the most remote corners of the world. The text was on par: “Where rats turn up, they spread diseases and carry extermination into the land. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel; they mostly move in large packs, exactly as the Jews among the people.”¹⁴² Even worse was the ritual slaughter scene depicting the slow death throes of cattle and sheep, bathing in their own blood, heads partly severed, throats slit while the laughing faces of the Jewish ritual slaughterers were set in repeated contrast to the pitiful stares of the dying animals.

Although “racially ideal” Aryans became the ultimate counterpoint to the most revolting portrayals of Jews, no random scenes from the streets of Berlin filled the screen, but rather carefully chosen shots from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 propaganda film about that year’s Nuremberg rally. The narrator stressed the first commandment: to maintain the purity of the race. The film closed on Hitler’s January 30, 1939, speech to the Reichstag, announcing that in the case of another world war, the European nations would not be destroyed, but the Jewish race would be exterminated.

After the Berlin opening the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of November 29 commented: “When the film ends, the viewer can breathe again…. From the deepest submersion [Niederung], he comes back to the light again.”¹⁴³ For the Illustrierte Film-Kurier, “In shining contrast to this [the swarming rats], the film ends after the most horrifying scenes [probably the scenes of ritual slaughter] with images of German people and German order, which fill the public with the deepest sense of gratitude for having the privilege of belonging to this people, whose leader is fundamentally solving the Jewish problem.”¹⁴⁴

Despite such dutifully positive press reviews, in terms of public response Der Ewige Jude was a commercial failure. The SD reports from many regions of Germany and from Austria were unanimous: The horror scenes disgusted viewers; the documentary was considered nerve-racking; having seen Jud Süss shortly beforehand, most people were saturated with “Jewish filth,” and so on.¹⁴⁵

Yet the commercial success of Jud Süss and the limited commercial appeal of Der Ewige Jude should not be viewed as contrary results in terms of Goebbels’s intentions. Images from both films were endlessly replicated in Nazi anti-Semitic posters or publications, all over the Reich and occupied Europe. The scurrying rats of Der Ewige Jude or its hideously twisted Jewish faces may have ultimately settled in the collective imaginary of European audiences at greater depth than the plot of Jud Süss. In both cases the goal was the same: to elicit fear, disgust, and hatred. At this straightforward level both films can be considered two different facets of an endlessly renewed stream of anti-Jewish horror stories, images, and arguments.

The campaign against “the Jew” raged on many fronts; on the home front, Goebbels and Rosenberg confronted each other more often than not. The ongoing feud between the two main architects of the anti-Jewish ideological war and the two guardians of Nazi ideological purity antedated the accession of Hitler to the chancellorship, ran wild throughout the 1930s and, as we saw, did not subside with the beginning of the war.¹⁴⁶ While Goebbels held the political high ground and was vastly savvier than his adversary, Rosenberg managed nonetheless to impose the stricter ideological line in a host of issues. Thus, while in the early 1930s the propaganda minister opposed changing original choir texts to expurgate their Jewish content, particularly in the works of Handel, Rosenberg got his way: In 1939 Der Feldherr (military leader), a “cleansed” version of Judas Maccabeus reworked by Hermann Stephani (a Rosenberg protégé), premiered throughout Germany.¹⁴⁷ In May 1940 Goebbels changed his initial stance and decided to establish his own organization for the reworking of libretti, choir texts, and the like, as an extension of the music division of his ministry. Obviously Handel’s oratorio got another, more radical, reworking and became Wilhelm von Nassauen; it opened in Hamburg in 1941.¹⁴⁸ In the meantime, Stephani was busy with Mozart’s Requiem: “God of Zion” and “Sabaoth” disappeared. Handel’s Jephthafollowed: The struggle went on.¹⁴⁹

The Jews of Germany were powerless against the blows that hit them ever harder and the constant vilification to which they were subjected. Usually the attitude of the Reichsvereinigung was meek and submissive; in hindsight its compliance was sometimes excessive, even under the existing circumstances. Thus, during the discussions of the Madagascar plan, the RSHA ordered the German Jewish leadership to cooperate in planning the mass transfer of its communities. In compliance, executive director Otto Hirsch came up with a detailed memorandum—apparently discussed at length among the representatives of all the political and religious groups on the executive board—about the education to be given to the Jews deported to their island…. The last tenet of the program, as drafted by Hirsch, read: “The aim of this education is to prepare for life in the Jewish settlement. It is our wish that [this settlement] be realized in the Jewish land of Palestine. However, these principles are valid for educational preparation toward life in any Jewish settlement, wherever it may be.”¹⁵⁰ There were exceptions to such subservience, however.

The Reichsvereinigung had already protested against the deportations from Stettin and Schneidemühl. After the sudden deportation of the Jews of Baden and the Saar-Palatinate to Vichy France, the association sent a circular to all communities in the Reich, warning the Jews of the two provinces who had been absent from their homes at the time of the roundup not to return.¹⁵¹ In addresses at synagogues, the leading members of the Vereinigung raised their voices publicly against the new deportations. A fast day was declared, and all cultural events were canceled for a week. Otto Hirsch even lodged a complaint with the RSHA. The Nazi reaction was foreseeable: One of the leading members of the association, the lawyer Julius Seligsohn, was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Shortly thereafter he was dead.¹⁵² As for Otto Hirsch, the Gestapo waited a few more months: He was arrested in February 1941 and transferred to Mauthausen in May. His death was registered as having occurred on June 19, 1941, due to “Colitis ulcerosa.”¹⁵³

VI

On May 1, 1940, the Germans hermetically sealed the shabbiest area of Lodz, the Baluty district; the 163,000 Jewish inhabitants of the city who had been ordered to move there were cut off from the outside world.¹⁵⁴ The no-man’s land that surrounded the ghetto made escape practically impossible. The city of Lodz as such, increasingly Germanized by a growing influx of Reich Germans and Volksdeutsche, most of whom were known to be enthusiastic Nazis, would certainly not have offered any hideout to a Jew. Thus, even more than in Warsaw, the Lodz ghetto would become a vast urban concentration and labor camp of sorts, without clandestine political or economic links to its surroundings, mostly deprived of information about the fate of Jews living and dying outside its own barbed-wire fence.¹⁵⁵ As for the housing conditions in the ghetto, the numbers are telling: apartments with drains, 613; with water pipes and drains, 382; with a toilet, 294; with toilet, drain, and bath, 49; lacking these comforts, 30,624.¹⁵⁶

In the General Government, Frank, as will be remembered, had stopped the building of ghetto walls in the summer of 1940 in the belief that the Madagascar plan would become concrete; by September he knew better. In a meeting with the heads of his administration on the twelfth, he announced his decision regarding Warsaw: “As far as our handling of the Jews is concerned, I have agreed to close the ghetto in Warsaw, mainly because…the danger represented by these 500,000 Jews is so great that we have to eliminate any possibility of their causing mischief.”¹⁵⁷

On October 2, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the governor of the Warsaw district, Ludwig Fischer, ordered the establishment of an exclusively Jewish quarter in the city. “Today began the removal of Poles from certain streets in the south of Warsaw,” Ringelblum recorded. “The Jewish populace is terribly uneasy; no one knows whether he will be sleeping in his own bed tomorrow. People in the south of town sit at home all day waiting for the hour when they will come and drive the Jews out.”¹⁵⁸ The next day the Jews were optimistic again: “The fear of the ghetto has passed…a rumor is widespread that the matter has been postponed,” Kaplan noted; but he also added “The very thought of a ghetto has left an impression on our nerves. It is hard to live in a time when you are not sure of tomorrow, and there is no greater torture than waiting. It is the torture of those condemned to die.”¹⁵⁹

On October 12, Yom Kippur, Czerniaków was informed of the final decision. The chairman was ushered into the presence of several German officials: “It was thereupon proclaimed that in the name of humanity and at the behest of the Governor [the governor-general] and in conformity with higher authority, a ghetto is to be established. I was given a map of the ghetto. It turns out that the ghetto border streets have been allocated to the Poles…. Until October 31, the resettlement will be voluntary, after that compulsory. All furniture must remain where it is.”¹⁶⁰

The ghetto was officially sealed on November 16. The wall that surrounded it was built over a period of several months and paid for by the Jewish Council. The Poles who had lived in the area left; the Jews moved in. Some 380,000 Jews were now cut off from the world (their number, inflated by further arrivals from smaller towns or from the Warthegau, would peak at 445,000 in May 1941, even with a catastrophic mortality rate).¹⁶¹ The ghetto area was divided into a larger section and a smaller one, linked by a wooden bridge built over the “Aryan” Chlodna Street. The entire area comprised only 4.5 percent of the city; even this area was later reduced. According to Trunk, “In March 1941, the population density of the Warsaw ghetto reached 1,309 persons per hundred square meters, with an average of 7.2 persons sharing one room, compared to 3.2 persons sharing one room in the “Aryan” sections of the city. These were average figures, for as many as 25 or even 30 people sometimes shared one room 6 by 4 meters.”¹⁶²

By all accounts the Warsaw ghetto was a deathtrap in the most concrete, physical sense. But cutting Warsaw off from the world also meant destroying the cultural and spiritual center of Polish Jewry and of Jewish life well beyond. In his memorandum of March 12, 1940, some six months before the closing of the ghetto gates, Kleinbaum had grasped the situation in its general terms: “With the destruction of the Polish Jewish community, the basis upon which all of world Jewry found support was severely damaged, for both the Jews of the United States and the Jewish community in Palestine obtained spiritual sustenance from Polish Jewry, including national Jewish culture and especially popular culture…. During recent times Polish Jewry had fulfilled the same task in the life of the Jewish people that Russian Jewry fulfilled earlier. Now that these two communities have been destroyed, the role of the Eastern [European] Jewry remains vacant.”¹⁶³

In October 1939 Ringelblum had begun to document systematically the fate befalling the Jews of Poland. Others soon joined, and the group adopted the code name Oneg Shabat (Sabbath rejoicing), as its meetings usually took place on Saturday afternoons. In May 1940, the structure of the group was finalized and a secretary, Hersch Wasser, appointed to coordinate the effort. Paradoxically, once the ghetto was closed, the activities of Oneg Shabat expanded: “We reached the conclusion,” Ringelblum noted, “that the Germans took very little interest in what the Jews were doing amongst themselves…. The Jewish Gestapo agents were busy looking for the rich Jews with hoarded goods, smugglers, etc. Politics interested them little…. In conditions of such “freedom” among the slaves of the ghetto it was not surprising that the work of Oneg Shabat could develop successfully.”¹⁶⁴

Like so many other Jewish chroniclers of those days, the members of Oneg Shabat—whether they sensed it during this early phase of their work or not—were assembling the materials for the history of their own end.

The small voice of twelve-year-old Dawid Rubinowicz, the youngest of the diarists, had none of the widely shared sense of urgency nor did his notes aim at systematic chronicling. And yet in their simple, unassuming, and straightforward entries, Rubinowicz’s five school exercise books reveal an unusual facet of Jewish life in the General Government between March 1940 and June 1942, that of a quasipeasant family of five (Dawid had a brother and sister) living in Krajno, a village near Bodzentyn, in the Kielce district. The father had bought a piece of land, then a dairy. When Dawid started writing, the Rubinowiczes still owned one cow (it is not clear from the text whether they ever owned more than one).¹⁶⁵ Dawid’s first entry, on March 21, 1940, mentioned a new decree: “Early in the morning I went through the village in which we live. From a distance I saw a notice on the shop wall. I quickly went up to read it. The new notice said that Jews may under no circumstances travel on vehicles” [the railway had long been forbidden].¹⁶⁶ It was thus on foot that, on April 4, the boy went to Kielce: “I got up earlier today because I had to go to Kielce. I left after breakfast. It was sad following the paths across the fields all by myself. After four hours I was in Kielce. When I went into Uncle’s house I saw them all sitting so sad, and I learned that Jews from various streets are being deported [into a ghetto] and I also grew sad. In the evening I went out into the street to get something.”¹⁶⁷

In his matter-of-fact way Dawid noted the small events of his daily life and other occurrences whose significance he may or may not have understood. On August 5, 1940, he wrote: “Yesterday the local government officer came to the mayor of our village and said all Jews with families must go and register at the rural district offices. By 7 o’clock in the morning we were at the village offices. We were there for several hours because the grown-ups were electing the Council of Jewish elders. Then we went home.”¹⁶⁸On September 1, the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war, Dawid mused about suffering and the widespread unemployment: “Take us,” he wrote. “We used to have a dairy and now we’re utterly unemployed. There is only very little stock left from before the war; we’re still using it up, but it’s already running out, and then we don’t know what we’ll do.”¹⁶⁹

“Wherever one looks there is filth, and the Jews themselves are full of filth,” Wehrmacht private E, stationed somewhere in former Poland, informed his family on November 17, 1940. “It is really comical: The Jews all salute us, although we don’t respond and aren’t allowed to. They swing their caps down to the ground. In fact, the greeting is not compulsory, but is a remnant from SS times; that’s how they trained the Jews. When one looks at these people, one gets the impression, that they really have no justification for living on God’s earth. You must have seen this with your own eyes, otherwise you cannot believe it.”¹⁷⁰ In August 1940 Cpl. WW was been stationed near the demarcation line with the Soviet Union; he too had something to write home about the Jews: “Here, in this town (Siedlce), there are 40,000 inhabitants, of whom 30,000 are Jews. Half the houses have been destroyed by the Russians. The Jews lie on the street like pigs, as becomes a ‘chosen people.’…Wherever we serve our Great German fatherland, we are proud to be able to help the Führer. Only in many generations will the greatness of these times be recognized. But we all want to stand before History, full of pride, as having also done our duty.”¹⁷¹ In March 1941 Cpl. LB summed up the situation of the Jewish population in his own area of Poland: “Here, one deals with the Jews and [you should see] how the SS takes care of these swine…. They would like to take off their armbands, not to be recognized as Jews. But then they receive quite a reminder from the SS and become very small, these Jew-pigs.”¹⁷²

VII

A month after signing the armistice, seven days after the demise of the Third Republic, Marshal Pétain’s new regime, on its own initiative, introduced its first anti-Jewish measure. One hundred fifty years after the emancipation of the Jews of France, the rollback had started.

Of the approximately 330,000 Jews in prewar France almost half were either foreigners or born of foreign parents. And among the foreigners 55,000 had arrived between 1933 and 1939 (40,000 since 1935).¹⁷³ While anti-Semitism had been part of the French ideological landscape throughout the nineteenth century, first on the left, then—increasingly so—on the conservative and the radical right, it was the Dreyfus affair that turned it into a central issue of French politics in the 1890s and throughout the turn of the century. Yet World War I brought a significant decrease in anti-Jewish incitement (contrary to what occurred in Germany), and the immediate postwar years seemed to herald a new stage in the assimilation of native French Jewry into surrounding society. The “Israélites français” had found their rightful place as one of the familles spirituelles that were part and parcel of France.¹⁷⁴

The resurgence of a vociferous anti-Semitism from the early 1930s on was due to the presence of a deep-rooted anti-Jewish tradition (even if dormant for a few years), to a series of financial-political scandals in which some Jews were conspicuously implicated (the Stavisky affair, among others), to the rising “threat” of the Popular Front (a coalition of Left and Center Left parties) led by the Jewish socialist Léon Blum—and to Blum’s brief government—to the influence of Nazi agitation and to the massive immigration of foreign Jews. A new sense of unease among the native Jews turned them against their non-French “brethren,” whom they accused of endangering their own position. From then on, more forcefully than ever before, the native Jews—although they did set up an assistance organization for the refugees—insisted on establishing a clear dividing line between themselves and the newcomers.

During the months that preceded the war, the French government seriously considered the possibility of integrating Jewish and other refugees into that most sacred of national institutions, the army, by creating special foreigners’ units (distinct from the Foreign Legion) to fight in the French ranks. Most of the foreigners were more than ready to join the campaign against Hitler’s Germany. But almost as soon as the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, a sharp reversal took place: Refugees, whether communists or not, Jews or not, were suddenly suspects; the hysterical fear of a “fifth column” turned eager anti-Nazis into potential enemies. Their place wasn’t in the army but in internment camps.¹⁷⁵

A law of November 18, 1939, ordered the internment of people “dangerous to national defense.” At the end of the same month some twenty thousand foreigners, among whom were many Jewish German (or Austrian) male refugees, were sent to camps or camplike facilities. Over the following weeks most of the internees were released, once their anti-Nazi credentials had been checked.¹⁷⁶ Their freedom was cut short, however, by the German attack in the west. As described by the Jewish German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, the new government order was read over the radio: “All German nationals residing in the precincts of Paris, men and women alike, and all persons between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five who were born in Germany but who are without German citizenship, are to report for internment.”¹⁷⁷ In fact the measure applied to the whole country, and thus, once more, thousands of Jewish and other refugees from Hitler were assembled at Le Vernet, Les Milles, Gurs, Rivesaltes, Compiègne, and other camps at the very moment when the Germans shattered the French defenses. Some of the internees managed to escape the trap. Others never did: For them the road to death began in the French camps in the spring of 1940.

As France disintegrated, about 100,000 Jews joined the 8 to 10 million people fleeing southward in the utter chaos and panic of “la débâcle.” They had been preceded by some 15,000 Jews from Alsace-Lorraine and about 40,000 Jews from Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.¹⁷⁸ Overall the catastrophe was perceived in national terms; its specific Jewish aspect was as yet no more than a vague anxiety about the possibility of dire changes.

On July 10 the French Republic scuttled itself; a massive vote of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate granted Pétain full executive powers. In the nonoccupied zone of the country, the eighty-three-year-old marshal became the leader of an authoritarian regime in which he was both head of state and head of government. Vichy, a small spa city in the Allier department, at the geographical center of the country, was chosen as the capital of the new state. The motto of the État Français, Travail, Famille, Patrie(Work, Family, Fatherland) replaced that of the republic: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Most of the hard-core French admirers of Nazism and militant anti-Semites stayed in Paris. Vichy was too conservative for them, too clerical, too timid, too hesitant in its subservience to Germany and its struggle against the Jews. This extremist fringe did not recognize any limits. The writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline demanded an alliance with Germany, in his view a racially kindred country: “France,” he proclaimed, “is Latin only by chance, through a fluke, through defeat…it is Celtic, three-quarters Germanic…. Are we afraid of absorption? We shall never be more absorbed than we are right now. Are we to remain slaves of Jews, or shall we become Germanic once more?”¹⁷⁹ Though Céline’s anarcho-nazism, like his anti-Semitic style, was sui generis in many ways, his hatred of Jews was shared by a noisy phalanx of writers, journalists, and public figures of all ilks; it was spewed day in, day out, week after week, by an astonishingly high number of newspapers and periodicals with anti-Semitism as their core message. (On the eve of the war forty-seven such publications systematically spread anti-Jewish propaganda.)¹⁸⁰ “Finish with the Jews!” Lucien Rebatet titled an article in Le Cri du peuple on December 6, 1940: The Jews were bugs, rats, “but much more harmful”; yet, as they were human bipeds, “we do not demand their extermination.” They should be driven out of Europe, punished, and so on.¹⁸¹ Worse was to come. Anti-Jewish rage found organized political expression in a series of collaborationist parties such as Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (PPF), Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), and Charles Maurras’ Action Française.¹⁸²

Strident collaborationism was rarely heard in Vichy during the summer of 1940, but traditional native anti-Semitism was rife from the very first days. After reporting on August 16, 1940, about an expulsion campaign from Vichy, on orders of the new government, the American chargé d’affaires in Pétain’s capital, Robert Murphy, added: “There is no question that one of its objectives [of the campaign] is to cause the departure of Jews. These, Laval [the deputy prime minister] told me recently, were congregating in Vichy to an alarming extent. He believed they would foment trouble and give the place a bad name. He said he would get rid of them.”¹⁸³

Vichy’s first anti-Jewish decree was issued on July 17. The new law limited civil service appointments to citizens born of a French father. On July 22 a commission, chaired by Justice Minister Raphael Alibert, started checking all post-1927 naturalizations.¹⁸⁴On August 27, Vichy repealed the Marchandeau Law of April 21, 1939, which forbade incitement on racial or religious grounds: The floodgates of anti-Semitic propaganda reopened. On August 16 a National Association of Physicians was established, whose members had to be born of French fathers. On September 10 the same limitation was applied to the legal profession.¹⁸⁵ And, on October 3, 1940, Vichy, again of its own initiative, issued its Statut des Juifs (Jewish Statute.)

In the opening paragraph of the statute, a Jew was defined as any person descending from at least three grandparents of the “Jewish race,” or of two grandparents of the “Jewish race” if the spouse too was Jewish (the German definition referred to the grandparents’ religion; the French, to their race). The next paragraphs listed all the public functions from which Jews were barred. Paragraph 5 excluded Jews from all positions of ownership or responsibility in the press, theater, and film. The statute, drafted under Alibert’s supervision, was signed by Pétain and by all the members of his cabinet. The next day, October 4, a law allowed the internment of foreign Jews in special camps, if the administration of their department so decided. A commission responsible for these camps was established. The same regional administration could also compel foreign Jews to reside in places defined by the authorities.¹⁸⁶

The October 1940 statute was approved by all members of the French government, with some individual nuances. Neither before nor later did Pétain publicly attack the Jews as such, yet he alluded to an “anti-France” that in common ideological parlance also meant “the Jews”; moreover he strongly supported the new measures during the cabinet discussions.¹⁸⁷ It seems that Laval, arguably the most influential member of the cabinet, although not a declared anti-Semite either, mainly thought of the benefits to be reaped in exchange from Germany; Adm. François Darlan, on the other hand, displayed open anti-Semitism in the French Catholic conservative tradition; as for Alibert, his hatred of Jews was closer to the Paris collaborationist brand than to the traditional Vichy mold.¹⁸⁸

In a cable sent on October 18 to Gaston Henry-Haye, Vichy’s ambassador in Washington, the secretary general of Vichy’s Foreign Ministry presented the arguments that could be used to explain the new statute to the Americans. The responsibility was of course that of the Jews themselves. A Léon Blum or a Jean Zay (the minister of education in Blum’s government) was accused of having propagated antinational or amoral principles; moreover they helped “hundreds of thousands of their own” to enter the country, and the like. The new legislation, it was said, neither targeted the basic rights of individuals nor threatened their private property. “The new legislation merely aims at solving definitively and without passion a problem that had become critical and to allow the peaceful existence in France of elements whom the characteristics of their race turn into a danger when they are too intimately present in the political and administrative life of the country.”¹⁸⁹

Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation was generally well received by a majority of the population in the nonoccupied zone. As will become increasingly apparent in the coming chapters, French popular anti-Semitism grew as a result of the defeat and during the following years. On October 9, 1940, the Central Agency for the Control of Telephone Communications (Commission centrale de contrôle téléphonique)—a listening service, in other words—reported that “hostility against the Jews remains”; on November 2 it indicated that the statute had been widely approved and even that for some it did not go far enough.¹⁹⁰ Although only fourteen préfets (district governors appointed by the state) out of forty-two reported on public reactions to the statute nine indicated positive responses and one reported mixed ones.¹⁹¹ In the midst of such a dire general situation, public opinion would of course tend to follow the measures taken by the savior and protector, the old maréchal. Moreover, a large segment of the population remained attentive to the spiritual guidance offered, now more than ever, by the Catholic Church.

In the 1930s, alongside the resurgence of a vocal Catholic anti-Semitism in France, prestigious thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, or the bestselling Catholic novelist François Mauriac, and an influential daily La Croix, opposed traditional Catholic anti-Jewish attitudes.¹⁹² Yet even among these liberal Catholic opponents of anti-Semitism, insidious anti-Jewish themes remained close to the surface during the prewar years. Thus, in 1937, when Mauriac joined La Juste Parole, a periodical devoted to the struggle against the growing anti-Jewish hatred, he saw fit to send an explanatory letter to the editor of the journal, Oscar de Ferenzy. “For a Catholic,” Mauriac stated, “anti-Semitism is not only an offense against charity. We are bound to Israel, we are tied to it, whether we wish it or not.” This said, Mauriac turned to the responsibility the Jews carried for the resentment surrounding them: Jewish “clannishness,” of course, was brought up, but there was more: “They cannot corner international finance without giving people the feeling of being dominated by them. They cannot swarm everywhere into a place where one of them has insinuated himself [the Blum ministry], without arousing hatred, because they themselves indulge in reprisals. Some German Jews acknowledged in my presence that there existed in Germany a Jewish problem which had to be resolved. I am afraid that in the end one will also exist in France.”¹⁹³ As for Mounier, he wrote an article on the Jews and had it published on March 1, 1939, in Le Voltigeur; it was also meant to defend the Jews against the growing attacks from the Right. It did so to a point, but added that in some respects the Jews bore part of the responsibility for their predicament, along the lines taken by Mauriac; both shared the same hateful stereotypes.¹⁹⁴

What counted in the end was the official position adopted by the church. During the summer of 1940 the Catholic hierarchy had been informed of the forthcoming statute. When the assembly of cardinals and archbishops met in Lyon, on August 31, 1940, the “Jewish question” was on the agenda. Émile Guerry, adjunct bishop of Cambrai, summed up the assembly’s official stand: “In political terms, the problem is caused by a community [the Jews] that has resisted all assimilation, dispersion and the national integration of its members taken individually. The State has the right and the duty to remain actively vigilant in order to make sure that the persistence of this unity [of the Jews] does not cause any harm to the common good of the nation, as one would do in regard to an ethnic minority or an international cartel. Here, we are not mentioning the foreign Jews, but if the State considers it necessary to take measures of vigilance, it is nonetheless its duty to respect the principles of justice in regard to those Jews who are citizens like others: they have the same rights as other citizens as long as they haven’t proven that they are unworthy of them. The statute that the State prepares has, in this case, to be inspired by the rules of justice and charity.”¹⁹⁵ In other words the assembled leaders of the French Catholic Church gave their agreement to the statute that, a month later, would be announced by the government. Of course when the official announcement came, no Catholic prelate protested. Some bishops even openly supported the anti-Jewish measures.¹⁹⁶

The most immediate reason for the French Church’s attitude stemmed from the unmitigated support granted by Pétain and the new État français to the reinsertion of Catholicism into French public life, particularly in education. Whereas the republic had established the separation of church and state and thus banned the use of state funds for the support of religious schools, Vichy canceled the separation and all its practical sequels: In many ways Catholicism had become the official religion of the new regime.¹⁹⁷There was more, however.

Since the French Revolution a segment of French Catholicism had remained obdurately hostile to the “ideas of 1789,” which they considered to be a Judeo-Masonic plot intent upon the destruction of Christianity. Such militant Catholicism found its modern political voice during the Dreyfus affair in the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic party then created by Charles Maurras: the Action Française. The Action Française had been excommunicated in the 1920s, but many Catholics remained strongly attached to it, and the ban was lifted by Pius XII on the eve of the war. It was the Action Française that inspired Vichy’s Statut des Juifs, and it was the same anti-Semitism that belonged to the ideological profile of an influential part of the French church in 1940.

Finally, some of the most fundamental tenets of Christian religious anti-Semitism resurfaced among French Catholics, in a less vituperative form than in Poland of course, but resurfaced nonetheless. Thus the newspaper La Croix, which during the 1920s and 1930s had abandoned its violent anti-Jewish diatribes of the turn of the century (mainly during the Dreyfus affair), could not resist the temptation offered by the new circumstances. “Are the Jews Cursed by God?” was the title of an article published on November 30, 1940. Having justified the new statute, the author, who wrote under the pseudonym C. Martel, reminded his readers that since the Jews themselves had called Jesus’ blood “upon their heads and those of their children,” a curse indeed existed. There was only one way of escaping it: conversion.¹⁹⁸

The small French Reformed (Calvinist) Church was influenced by the general cultural-ideological stance shared by most of the country, although Pastor Marc Boegner, its leader, was to become an outspoken critic of Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws. Yet, in the summer of 1941, Boegner himself would emphasize on several occasions that his support was granted to French Jews only and that, in his opinion, the influx of Jewish immigrants had created a major problem.¹⁹⁹

In the occupied zone, the Germans didn’t remain idle either. The first anti-Jewish initiatives did not stem from the “delegate of the Security Police and the SD,” Helmut Knochen, or from the military command, but from the embassy in Paris. On August 17, after a meeting with Hitler, Ambassador Otto Abetz demanded that Werner Best, the head of the civil administration branch at military headquarters, prepare an initial set of anti-Jewish measures. Best was surprised by Abetz’s initiative, but the following instructions were drafted nonetheless: “(a) with immediate enforcement, Jews who had fled southward should no longer be allowed back into the occupied zone; (b) preparations should begin for the removal of all Jews from the occupied zone; (c) the possibility of confiscating Jewish property should be examined.”²⁰⁰ On August 26 Abetz was informed by Ribbentrop that Hitler had agreed to these “immediate measures.”²⁰¹ Everybody fell into line.

By mid-September 1940, the commander of the army, General Brauchitsch, gave the formal go-ahead, and on the twenty-seventh, the “First Jewish Decree,” defining as Jewish anybody with more than two grandparents of the Jewish religion or with two such grandparents and belonging to the Jewish faith or married to a Jewish spouse, was issued. The decree forbade Jews who had fled to the Vichy zone to return into the occupied zone; it instructed the French prefects to start a full registration of all Jews in the occupied zone (in order to prepare their removal), as well as to identify Jewish businesses and register Jewish assets (for later confiscation).²⁰² On October 16 a “Second Jewish Decree” ordered the Jews to register their enterprises before October 31.²⁰³ From that day on, Jewish stores carried a yellow sign reading Jüdisches Geschäft/Entreprise Juive[Jewish business].²⁰⁴

The registration of all Jews in the occupied zone started on October 3, Rosh Hashanah. It proceeded in alphabetical order and was to be completed on October 19. In Paris the Jews registered at the police stations of their districts; outside Paris, at the sous-préfectures. The vast majority (over 90 percent) of Jews, whether French or foreign, obeyed the orders without much hesitation. Some even turned the registration into a statement. The terminally ill philosopher Henri Bergson, although exempted from the registration and for years far closer to Catholicism than to Judaism, dragged himself in slippers and dressing gown to the Passy police station in Paris to be inscribed as Jew; a Col. Pierre Brissac went in full military uniform.²⁰⁵

At the end of October 1940, 149,734 Jews had been listed. Late registration of an additional few thousand Jews continued sporadically during the following weeks and months: 86,664 were French, 65,707 were foreigners.²⁰⁶ Pierre Masse, a former minister and senator of the Hérault department wrote to Pétain on October 20: “I obey the laws of my country even if they are imposed by the invader.” In his letter he asked the maréchal whether he should take away the officer stripes that several generations of his ancestors had earned in serving their country since the Napoleonic Wars.²⁰⁷

The identification of “ordinary Jews” as such depended on their readiness to register. No such hurdle existed regarding Jewish writers, alive or dead. It had always been a specialty of anti-Semites to uncover the identity of writers, artists, intellectuals who at first glance were not identifiable as Jews; this was common practice in France as everywhere else. Thus a list of names was readily available when, in September 1940, the association of French publishers promised the German embassy in Paris that no Jewish authors, among other excluded groups, would be published or reprinted any longer: The publishers would, from then on, exercise strict self-censorship. Within days, a first list of banned books, the “liste Bernhard,” was made public, soon followed by a “liste Otto.” It was preceded by a short declaration from the association: “These are the books which by their lying and tendentious spirit have systematically poisoned French public opinion; particularly the publications of political refugees or of Jewish writers who, having betrayed the hospitality that France had granted to them, unscrupulously agitated in favor of a war from which they hoped to take advantage for their own egoistic aims.”²⁰⁸

Some French publishers came up with new initiatives. Whereas at Mercure de France, a French translation of the autobiographical part of Mein Kampf was being planned, Bernard Grasset, afraid that he would not be allowed to reopen his publishing house in Paris, informed the Germans, by way of intermediaries, that “as far back you go in both branches of my family, you will find neither a Jew or a Jewess.”²⁰⁹

Possibly more than any other Western European capital, Paris soon became a hotbed of intellectual and artistic collaboration. In the earliest period of German occupation, some initiatives appear as a mixture of abjection and comedy. Thus, the star of the French dance scene, Serge Lifar, much impressed by Goebbels during the latter’s visit to Paris in July 1940, started pressing the German embassy for another meeting with the Nazi propaganda chief. In historian Philippe Burrin’s words, “Lifar fancied his chances as the führer of European dance.” In the meantime, the Germans were worrying about Lifar’s Aryan ancestry. After the dancer was cleared of any Jewish stigma, he was invited to perform at the Embassy—not for Goebbels, alas—but at least in honor of Brauchitsch.²¹⁰

As a result of the Vichy laws of the summer and fall of 1940, 140 faculty members of Jewish origin, around 10 percent of the teaching body nationwide, were banned from the universities. Fourteen particularly eminent Jewish scholars were exempted from the ban on condition that they continue teaching in the Vichy zone only. The French academic community acquiesced.²¹¹ At the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic institution in the country, its four Jewish professors were dismissed, according to the new regulations.

The director of the Collège, Edmond Faral, had not waited for the new laws. In a January 1941 report to Vichy’s delegation in occupied France, Faral eagerly mentioned his own initiative: “The Jewish question: no Jew has taught at the Collège de France since the beginning of the academic year. That decision was taken even before the law of October 3, 1940.” In the draft of the report, the last sentence, later deleted, read as follows: “The administration had taken that decision.”²¹² When the Jews were no longer allowed to teach at the Collège, none of their “Aryan” colleagues protested.²¹³ The same happened in all French institutions of higher learning. At the prestigious Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, the assistant director, Roger Seydoux, expelled all Jewish professors when asked to do so by Karl Epting, the head of the cultural section of the German embassy in Paris. No attempts were made to obtain exemptions.²¹⁴

The two main figures of the community, the head of the Consistoire Central, French Jewry’s traditional representative body, and the head of the Consistoire de Paris, Édouard and Robert de Rothschild, fled the country in June 1940.²¹⁵ They left a Jewry in complete disarray in the feeble hands of the newly elected chief rabbi of France, Isaie Schwartz, and the remaining members of the Consistoire, most of whom had sought refuge in the nonoccupied part of the country.

Even before the armistice became effective, the chief rabbi received a first intimation of things to come: On June 20 the archbishop of Bordeaux broadcast an address to the Catholics of France: on the twenty-third Pastor Boegner spoke to the Protestant community. Schwartz should have been next, but no invitation came; in response to his query he was told that from then on the Jewish religious program would be taken off the air.²¹⁶

Vague forebodings spread among native French Jews and, even more so, among the foreign Jews, whether they lived in the occupied or the nonoccupied zone. In fact nobody knew, in the summer of 1940, what to expect and what to fear. Two very different chroniclers recorded the events from “opposite” perspectives. The first, Raymond-Raoul Lambert, was a native French Jew belonging to an old Alsatian Jewish family; the other, Jacques Biélinky, was born in Vitebsk and, after having experienced the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and then being jailed in Russia for clandestine socialist activities, he arrived in France in 1909 as a political refugee. For the Germans and for Vichy—both were first and foremost Jews. Lambert was French to the core: French schools, decorated frontline officer during World War I, briefly appointed to the Foreign Ministry, yet also consciously Jewish, even actively so: He organized the assistance to German Jews after 1933 and simultaneously was appointed editor in chief of L’Univers Israélite, the main periodical of the Consistoire. When the war broke out, Lambert donned the uniform once again, this time as a reserve officer.

Biélinky had been naturalized in 1927, and thus, belonged to his adoptive France as much as Lambert. During the coming events, however, Biélinky’s voice would be that of a foreign Jew, of an Ostjude, to a point. He had worked as a journalist for various Jewish newspapers, and although his formal education had stopped with the cheder [the traditional Jewish religious elementary school], he acquired a solid knowledge of painting, and it was as a reporter dealing with the Parisian artistic scene that he signed many of his articles. Between 1940 and 1943 Lambert’s path would not be the same as Biélinky’s; their fates would, however, be identical in the end.²¹⁷

“French Jewry lives in a particular state of anxiety,” Lambert, still in the army, recorded on July 14, 1940. “It accepts the suffering shared by all, but fears the possibility that the enemy will demand further discrimination. This anxiety makes my future and that of my sons appear especially threatened, but I am still confident. France cannot accept everything, and it is not for nothing that for more than a century my ancestors have been buried in its soil, that I fought two wars. I cannot imagine for myself, my wife and my sons, the possibility of life under another sky, an uprooting that would be worse than an amputation.”²¹⁸

In fact during the summer and fall of 1940, Jewish life seemed at first to return to a measure of normalcy, even in Paris under direct German occupation. As early as October 1940, all communal welfare offices had resumed their activities and, at this stage, they were able to face the needs of a substantial part of the immigrant community. The French Jews turned to the Consistoire, and, in August, Paris’s chief rabbi, Julien Weill, returned to the French capital. Among French Jews anxiety about the future seemed to be on the wane. The respite was short-lived.

On October 2, 1940, Lambert got an inkling of the forthcoming Statut from early indications in the newspapers. “It is one of the saddest memories of my life,” he noted in his diary. “Thus it can be that in a few days I shall be a second-class citizen, that my sons, French by birth, culture, and faith will be brutally rejected from the French community…. Is it possible? I can’t believe it. France is not France anymore.”²¹⁹ A few weeks later, the pain was no less intense but saving formulas were emerging: “A friend writes to me: One does not judge one’s mother when she is unjust. One suffers and one waits. Thus we Jews of France have to bend our heads and suffer,” Lambert noted on November 6 and added: “I agree!”²²⁰

Biélinky, who continued to live in Paris, noted the announcement of the Statut almost laconically. Two days later, on October 4, after attending the Rosh Hashanah prayers, he mentioned the large number of worshippers and the presence of police forces around the synagogue; as for troublemakers, there weren’t any. After the service he entered a coffee shop. The owner, “a Catholic one hundred percent, loudly expressed his indignation against the persecution of the Jews. He [the owner] declared that the local population, very French and very Parisian, is indifferent to the fate of the Rothschilds, but otherwise it would openly support the Jewish population of modest condition.”²²¹

Among the official leaders of French Jewry, the first to respond to the statute was Chief Rabbi Schwartz. In a letter to Pétain on October 22, 1940, he reminded the chief of state that the French Jews, now excluded from all public office, had always been “the faithful servants of the fatherland [la Patrie]…. We always called in our prayers for the glory and greatness of France…Frenchmen, who do not separate the religion of our fathers from the love of our homeland [sol natal], we will continue to obey the laws of the State…. To a law of exclusion [loi d’exception], we will answer with unfailing devotion to our fatherland.” Pétain’s curt answer praised “obedience to the law.”²²²

In the meantime Eichmann’s envoy in Paris, the SD officer in charge of Jewish affairs, Theodor Dannecker, was taking the first steps to establish a nationwide Jewish Council. Rather than impose the council by a simple Diktat, the sly German used a roundabout way: He persuaded both the Consistoire and the organizations of foreign Jews to coordinate their welfare agencies in a single framework that (so he promised) would not be interfered with by the Germans. They agreed.

On January 30, 1941, the Comité de Coordination was established. Most Jews did not yet understand Dannecker’s tactics. However, even those credulous enough to believe Dannecker’s promises of nonintervention felt an imminent threat when Eichmann’s delegate brought in two former members of the Vienna Judenrat, Israel Israelowitz and Wilhelm Bieberstein, and imposed them as “advisers” to the committee. In April 1941 the first issue of Informations Juives, written almost entirely by the two Austrian Jews—“in poor French” according to Biélinky—was published.²²³It was becoming increasingly clear that Dannecker’s Jewish agents were in Paris to take charge of the new organization.²²⁴

VIII

As the Wehrmacht broke through the Dutch lines, a wave of panic engulfed the country’s 140,000 Jews: On May 13 and 14, thousands rushed to the North Sea coast in the hope of finding some way to reach England:²²⁵ their fear found its hateful echo in the letters of German soldiers. Cpl. HZ described, in a letter of June 2, 1940, an incident that must have taken place in Belgium or in northern France: “You should have seen the Jews, as the Germans were advancing. I saw a Jew with luggage standing by a taxi and offering the driver 6,000 Frs (600 RM) if he could take him to the coast, so that he still could catch a boat to England. Just then, a second Jew arrived and offered 7,000 Frs for the same ride; then came a third one, completely distraught, with trembling knees: please, please, take me along, I shall give you 10,000 Frs.”²²⁶ In Amsterdam the number of suicides increased threefold from 1939 to 1940: Most of those who killed themselves were probably Jews. According to various estimates, some two hundred Jews committed suicide during the week starting May 15.²²⁷

In two ways the situation of Dutch Jewry was different from that of other Western countries at the onset of the German occupation. Whereas the Jews of Belgium were predominantly foreign and one-half of the French community was not native, in the Netherlands the twenty thousand foreign Jews represented only one-seventh of the Jewish population in May 1940. Moreover, even if some measure of traditionally religious anti-Semitism lingered in the rural areas of Holland, in Amsterdam—where half the Jews of the country were concentrated—and in larger cities in general—anti-Jewish feelings did not lead to public intolerance, although traditional religious anti-Judaism persisted among a majority of Dutch Protestants and Catholics. Even Anton Mussert’s Dutch Nazi Party counted some Jewish members (about one hundred) before the Germans arrived.²²⁸

During the first months of the occupation, German domination seemed relatively mild. The Dutch were considered a kindred race and, ultimately, they would be integrated in the greater community of Nordic nations. The two top Nazi envoys to Holland, both Austrians, Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Higher SS and Police Leader Hanns Albin Rauter (Himmler’s delegate in The Hague), did not foresee any major difficulties in handling the Dutch population and its Jews. Queen Wilhelmina and the government had fled to London, but current affairs were impeccably run by a model bureaucracy under the guidance of the so-called College of the Secretaries-General (the highest-ranking officials in every ministry), with the help of an obedient and zealous civil service, an efficient police force, and the full cooperation of all local authorities. The Germans became the supervisors of a smoothly working administrative system.²²⁹

The Dutch political scene was not unfavorable to the occupiers either. Mussert’s party (NSB) never became a significant political force; it was vocal, it supplied henchmen to the Germans, but all in all it remained peripheral, somewhat like the collaborationist parties in occupied France. Yet, soon after the defeat, a new party, the Dutch Union (Nederlandse Unie), gained wide support among the population received tentative acceptance from the Germans and initiated a policy of moderate collaboration not very different from the Vichy line.

It was in this “conciliatory” climate that the first anti-Jewish measures were imposed by the Germans throughout the summer of 1940. They did not seem ominous: air raid protection teams would no longer include Jews: Jews were forbidden to work in Germany; Jews in the civil service could not be promoted, and no new appointments of Jews were allowed. But in October the first standard German steps were taken: By the middle of the month all civil servants had to fill out forms about their racial origin. On October 22, 1940, the edict defining Jews was proclaimed.²³⁰

The definition of who was a Jew was essentially identical to that of the Nuremberg laws, except in regard to the cut-off date for mixed breeds: A person was considered Jewish if descending from three or more grandparents of the Jewish religion. A person descending from two Jewish grandparents was considered a mixed breed of the first degree if not married to a Jewish spouse or belonging to the Jewish faith on May 9, 1940 (the eve of the German attack in the West); otherwise that person was Jewish.

From this early stage the secretaries-general and the civil service as a whole displayed the compliance that would later have fateful consequences. Although some civil servants had qualms about the anticonstitutional aspect of the forms regarding their racial origin, the highest officials of the land decided to accept them. The secretary-general of the Department of the Interior, K. J. Fredericks, led the way: Out of some 240,000 civil servants, apparently fewer than 20 refused to fill out the questionnaire.²³¹ By mid-November all Jewish civil servants had been dismissed, and the Dutch Supreme Court voted by a majority of 12 to 5 to dismiss its own president, the Jew Lodewijk E. Visser.²³²

On October 21, 1940, the registration of Jewish businesses began. It was followed on January 10, 1941, by the compulsory registration of the Jews themselves; nearly everyone complied. In the Netherlands, moreover, personal identification had become an unusually precise and foolproof system, “improved” even further regarding Jews (after the German registration order) due to the zeal and talent of the head of the “State Inspectorate of Population Registers,” Jacob Lentz. The forging of identity papers became almost impossible until the very last year of the war.²³³

In Amsterdam the city council and the municipal personnel at first went beyond the call of duty in obeying German demands: Although Dutch law did not compel them to fill out declarations of Aryan descent, all volunteered to do so in January 1941.²³⁴ Yet when the Germans mentioned the possibility of establishing a ghetto in the city, the council expressed its opposition. In the meantime, however, a situation was developing that in principle should have helped the German plans. Mussert’s Dutch Nazis, encouraged by the Germans, particularly by Seyss-Inquart’s delegate in Amsterdam, Dr. H. Böhmcker, initiated scuffles in the Jewish area of the city. On February 19, 1941, the owners of the Koco (Kohn and Cahn) ice-cream parlor in south Amsterdam mistook a German police unit for Dutch Nazis and sprayed them with ammonium gas.²³⁵ Three days later the Germans sealed off the Jewish quarter of the city and arrested 389 young Jewish men, whom they deported to Buchenwald and then to Mauthausen: One survived.

On November 26, 1940, shortly after the dismissal of all Jewish civil servants, Professor R. P. Cleveringa, the dean of the Law School at the University of Leiden, the oldest Dutch university, addressed a meeting in the main auditorium, so packed with faculty and students that the speech had to be transmitted by loudspeaker to an adjacent hall. He spoke in honor of his Jewish colleague, Professor E. M. Meijers, who, like all other Jewish civil servants, had been dismissed on German orders on November 15. “Their [the Germans’] actions are beneath contempt,” Cleveringa declared. “All I ask is that we may dismiss them from our sight and gaze instead at the heights, up to that radiant figure in whose honor we are assembled here…. This noble son of our people, this man, this father to his students, this scholar, whom usurpers have suspended from his duties…. A man who, as all of us know, belongs here and, God willing, shall return to us.”²³⁶ On the afternoon of that day the students in Leiden and Delft started a strike. Both universities were closed on German orders on November 29, 1940, and some of the protesters, including Dean Cleveringa, were arrested.²³⁷

The Germans had their own way of explaining the situation. In a report of January 16, 1941, on the situation in the Netherlands, the representative of the Foreign Ministry in The Hague, Otto Bene, sent a description of the events in the universities to the Wilhelmstrasse: “Introduction of the anti-Jewish laws has provoked considerable unrest, owing to the strong influences of the Jews on the intellectual life of the Netherlands, especially in the university cities of Leiden and Delft, where students under the leadership of Jewish students and probably, as a result of behind-the-scenes manipulations of the Jewish professors affected, allowed themselves to be carried away to stage demonstrations which resulted in the closing of the two universities.”²³⁸

But protest was not limited to the academic elites. A month before the manifestations in Leiden, the Dutch Protestant Churches (Reformed Churches) and the Mennonites—with the telling exception of the small Lutheran Church of the Netherlands (that is, the same denomination as that of the vast majority of German Protestants) and the Dutch Catholic Church—addressed a jointly signed letter to Seyss-Inquart. After evoking Christian charity and the issue of converted Jews, the letter continued: “Finally, this issue [the statute about the Jews and the expulsion of Jews from public service] has also brought profound dismay because it applies to the people from which the Savior is born, the object of the prayers of all Christians and the one they recognize [as] their Master and King. For all these reasons, we turn to your Excellency, with the urgent request to take the necessary steps to cancel the aforementioned measures.”

The last sentence may have been particularly galling for the Reichskommissar: “Besides, we wish to recall the solemn promise given by your Excellency to respect our national identity and not to impose on us a way of thinking that is foreign to us.”

The text of the letter was read from the pulpits of all Reformed temples on the following Sunday.²³⁹ Simultaneously the first protest articles appeared in the Dutch clandestine press. Thus a December 1940 issue of the pro-Communist De Waarheid (Truth) did not mince words: “Dutch workers and all freedom-loving Dutchmen should fight this imported poison of hate against the Jews.”²⁴⁰ A few months later, in February 1941, Het Parool joined the protest and so, one after another, did all major clandestine publications in Holland.²⁴¹ And, as we shall see in the next chapter, in February 1941 Dutch workers would go on strike in Amsterdam and other cities to protest German anti-Jewish brutality.

Historically puzzling is the fact that almost none of this occurred in France. From the reports sent by the directors of lycées (high schools) to the Ministry of Education it appears that all Jewish professors left “without incident”—that is, without any public manifestation of sympathy or open protest by either colleagues or students.²⁴² French academic institutions of higher learning preempted both Vichy and the Germans in expelling their Jewish faculty members, as we saw; publishers and publications vied for German or Vichy authorizations to resume their activities and showed open readiness for “self-censorship.” And, as we also noted, the assembly of French cardinals and archbishops favored the limitation of Jewish rights even before Vichy introduced its statute. The French student unions did organize a pro–de Gaulle rally in Paris, on November 11, 1940, but in the leaflets distributed during the demonstration, not a word appeared regarding the measures taken against the Jews in both zones of the country.²⁴³

IX

When, in May 1940, the Klemperers were forced to move into a “Jews’ house,” Victor commented: “It is still quite impossible to know whether a tolerable existence can be established here.”²⁴⁴

In that summer of 1940, “tolerable” had a very different meaning for the inhabitants of the Jewish quarters or ghettos in former Poland; it had a different meaning for various categories of Jews in the Reich—and, for those among them who, although having been identified as full Jews, lived in “privileged mixed marriages,”²⁴⁵ or again for mixed breeds of the first or second degree; it had a different meaning for the Jews in Western countries who lived under direct German control and for those who lived in Vichy France, or, for the most favored of all, those who had managed to settle in the Italian-occupied zone in southeastern France. For all, however, growing isolation, anxiety regarding ever-darker prospects, and complete uncertainty about what the future held in store seeped into everyday life.

Increasingly the Jews of occupied Eastern Europe would be convinced that nobody cared about their fate. Thus, in a letter sent from Warsaw in December 1940 to members of her movement in Eretz Israel, Zivia Lubetkin—who some two years later was to become one of the organizers of the Warsaw ghetto uprising—expressed her growing despair about this abandonment: “More than once, I have decided not to write to you anymore…. I will not describe here what I am going through, but I want you to know that even one word of comfort from you would have sufficed…. To my regret, however, I have to accept your silence, but I will never forgive it.”²⁴⁶

The same uncertainty, the same dread about what the future held in store, the same feeling that the closest friends living peacefully in the free world were not doing enough, if anything at all, recurred as a constant yet restrained leitmotif in the letters that the German philosopher and literary scholar Walter Benjamin was sending from France. After the Germans occupied Paris, he had found a temporary refuge in the small pilgrimage town of Lourdes, near the Spanish border.

“My dear Teddy,” he wrote on August 2, 1940, to his longtime friend, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had emigrated from Germany to New York via Paris, “The total uncertainty about what the next day, the next hour is about to bring has dominated my existence for several weeks. I am condemned to read each newspaper (they are published on one single page) as a notification addressed directly to me and to perceive in each radio broadcast the voice of a messenger of misfortune. For some time now it has been impossible for a foreigner to obtain permission to change location. Therefore, I entirely depend on what you will be able to achieve from the outside…. My fear is that the time at our disposal could be much more limited than we supposed.”²⁴⁷

Benjamin received an American visa from the consulate in Marseilles, probably within the nonquota category established by the Emergency Rescue Committee. He also had possession of a transit visa through Spain to Portugal. Normally he would have had no difficulty in crossing the French-Spanish border, notwithstanding the refusal of French authorities to grant exit visas. But by sheer bad luck, on September 26, 1940, the day on which Benjamin and his group arrived at the border, at Port Bou, the Spanish guards refused to recognize visas issued by the American consulate in Marseilles.

In January 1940 a still-defiant Benjamin was urging his friend, the historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, to publish the lectures he was giving at the time in New York: “Every line that we publish nowadays—as uncertain as the future to which we transmit it may be—is a victory forced upon the powers of darkness.²⁴⁸ At the Spanish border, carrying an unpublished manuscript in a briefcase that was never found, too ill, too exhausted, and mainly too desperate to try and cross the border once again, Benjamin killed himself.²⁴⁹