PART III

Shoah

Summer 1942–Spring 1945

“It is like being in a great hall where many people are joyful and dancing and also where there are a few people who are not happy and who are not dancing. And from time to time a few people of this latter kind are taken away, led to another room and strangled. The happy dancing people in the hall do not feel this at all. Rather, it seems as if this adds to their joy and doubles their happiness….”

—Moshe Flinker (sixteen years old), Brussels, January 21, 1943

CHAPTER VII

July 1942–March 1943

Wilhelm Cornides, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer, was stationed in Galicia in the summer of 1942. According to his diary entry of August 31, while he was waiting for a train at the railway station in Rava Ruska, another train entered the station: It carried Jews in some thirty-eight cattle cars. Cornides asked a policeman where the Jews came from. “‘Those are probably the last ones from Lvov,’ the policeman answered. ‘That has been going on now for five weeks uninterruptedly. In Jaroslav, they let only eight remain, no one knows why.’ I asked: ‘How far are they going?’ Then he replied, ‘To Belzec.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Poison.’ I asked: ‘Gas?’ He shrugged his shoulders. Then he said only: ‘At the beginning, they always shot them, I believe.’”

Later, in his compartment, Cornides struck up a conversation with a woman passenger, a railway policeman’s wife, who told him that such transports “were passing through daily, sometimes also with German Jews. I asked: ‘Do the Jews know then what is happening with them?’ The woman answered: ‘Those who come from far won’t know anything, but here in the vicinity they know already.’…Camp Belzec is supposed to be located right on the railway line and the woman promised to show it to me when we pass it.”

“At 6:20 p.m.,” Cornides recorded, “the train passed Belzec: Before then, we had traveled for some time through a tall pine forest. When the woman called, ‘Now it comes,’ one could see a high hedge of fir trees. A strong sweetish odor could be made out distinctly. ‘But they are stinking already,’ says the woman. ‘Oh nonsense, that is only the gas,’ the railway policeman [who had joined them] said, laughing. Meanwhile we had gone on about 200 yards—the sweetish odor was transformed into a strong smell of something burning. ‘That is from the crematory,’ says the policeman. A short distance further the fence stopped. In front of it, one could see a guard-house with an SS post.”¹

I

By late August 1942 the German armies on the Eastern Front had reached the oil fields and the (destroyed) refineries of Maikop and, farther south, the slopes of the Caucasus; soon the German army flag would be hoisted on Mount El’brus, Europe’s highest peak. At the same time, Paulus’s Sixth Army was approaching Stalingrad’s outer defenses; it reached the Volga, north of the city, on August 23. In the north a new attack to break through the defenses of Leningrad was planned for early September.

Yet, in the late summer of 1942, despite such impressive advances, the German military situation on the Eastern Front was becoming increasingly precarious. In the center and the south, the armies were spread over considerable distances and their supply lines were dangerously overstretched. But, instead of heeding the warnings of his generals, Hitler obstinately insisted on forging ahead.

The confrontations at headquarters led to a series of dismissals, that of Army chief of staff Halder, among others (Halder was replaced by Kurt Zeitzler) and to the breakdown of all personal relations between Hitler and his top commanders. On Hitler’s orders the daily military conferences were thereafter stenographically recorded so that his words could no longer be twisted.² According to Hassell’s diary entry of September 26, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the director of the Charité hospital in Berlin, a world-renowned surgeon and probably the most eminent medical authority in Germany at the time, told him—after meeting Hitler during those same days—that “he was now unquestionably mad” (Er sei jetzt unzweifelhaft verrückt).³

The fateful turn about came suddenly, in the course of a few weeks. On October 23, 1942, Montgomery’s Eighth Army attacked at El Alamein; within days Rommel was in full retreat. The Germans were ousted from Egypt, then from Libya. The debacle of the “Afrika Korps” would halt, albeit for a short time, only at the Tunisian border. On November 7, American and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria. On November 11, in response to the Allied landings, the Germans occupied the Vichy zone and sent forces to Tunisia, while the Italians slightly enlarged their own occupation area in the Southeast of France. The major drama, however, unfolded on the Eastern Front.

The battle for Stalingrad had started in the last days of August, after a devastating German bombing of the city that left some 40,000 civilians dead. To face the mediocre Paulus, Stalin had sent his most brilliant strategist, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, to command the Stalingrad front and the unflappable Vasily Chuikov to organize the defense of the city itself. By October the battle had turned into house-to-house combat among the hulks of buildings, the ruins of factories, the remnants of grain silos, carrying names that resonated as so many symbols, “Stalingrad” itself, “Red October,” and the like. And as, under Hitler’s relentless pressure, Paulus was desperately attempting to take the city center and reach the Volga, Soviet divisions were gathering undetected on both flanks of the Sixth Army.

On November 19 the Red Army counterattacked, and soon the Soviet pincer movement shattered the German rearguard at its weakest point, the area held by Romanian forces. Paulus’s army was cut off. A second Soviet offensive destroyed a mixture of Italian and Hungarian units: The encirclement was complete.

While ordering a hasty retreat from the Caucasus, Hitler adamantly refused to abandon Stalingrad. The battle for the city soon became, in the eyes of millions the world over, a portent of ultimate victory or defeat. Hoth’s attempt to break through the Soviet ring failed, as did the airlift of supplies to the beleaguered German forces. By the end of the year the Sixth Army was doomed. Nonetheless the Nazi leader rejected Paulus’s entreaty to allow him to surrender: Soldiers and commanders, the newly promoted field marshal was told, had to resist to the last and die a heroic death. On February 2, 1943, the Sixth Army stopped fighting. It had lost 200,000 men; 90,000 soldiers, including Paulus and his generals, were led into captivity.

The German defeats in North Africa and on the Eastern Front were compounded by the rapid expansion of the Anglo-American bombing campaign: German industrial production did not slow down, but the toll in lives, homes, and entire city areas began to undermine the population’s faith in victory.

Simultaneously partisan warfare turned into a growing threat in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, while resistance networks multiplied and grew bolder in the West. And, in order to demonstrate their common resolve (mainly for the benefit of their suspicious Soviet ally), Roosevelt and Churchill announced, at their meeting in Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, that the sole option left to Germany and its allies was “unconditional surrender.”

In the meantime, Hitler’s diatribes against the Jews went on with the same fanatical obsessiveness. The themes, either in his public speeches or in his private disquisitions, were the same as before. The “prophecy” resurfaced again and again as a mantra announcing to all and sundry that the fate of the Jews was sealed and soon none would remain alive. Yet minute nuances surfaced here and there. Thus, in his Sportpalast speech of September 30 for the launching of the “winter relief” campaign, Hitler bandied his extermination threat with a particularly sadistic twist. Once more he reminded his audience that in his September 1, 1939, Reichstag speech he had stated: “If Jewry instigated an international world war for the elimination of the Aryan peoples of Europe, then not the Aryan peoples would be exterminated but Jewry would be. The wire-pullers of the madman in the White House (des Geisteskranken im Weissen Haus) succeeded in dragging one nation after another into the world war. But, in the same measure, a wave of anti-Semitism engulfed one people after the other and it will further expand and include one state after the next, that joins this war, and each one will turn into an anti-Semitic state over time. The Jews have once laughed at my prophecies, also in Germany. I don’t know whether they are still laughing today, or if they have stopped laughing. But I can assure now as well: Everywhere they will stop laughing (Es wird Ihnen das Lachen überall vergehen). And I shall also be vindicated in this prophecy.”⁴

Some Jews understood what the crazed German messiah was proclaiming. “‘The Jews will be exterminated,’ Hitler said in his speech yesterday [at the Sportpalast]. He hardly said anything else,” Sebastian commented on October 1.⁵ The next day, Klemperer recorded: “Hitler’s speech at the beginning of the Winter Aid campaign. The same old song mercilessly exaggerated…. Merciless threats against England, against the Jews in all the world, who wanted to exterminate the Aryan nations of Europe and whom he is exterminating…. The shocking thing is not that a crazy man raves in ever greater frenzy, but that Germany accepts it, for the tenth year now and in the fourth year of the war, and that it [Germany] continues to allow itself to be bled…”⁶

Of course the party grandees were now following the extermination stage by stage. After mentioning protest meetings that had taken place in London, Goebbels noted on December 14: “All this won’t help the Jews. The Jewish race has prepared this war, it is the spiritual instigator of all this misfortune which came upon the world. Jewry must pay for its crimes, as the Führer prophesied at the time in his Reichstag speech; it means the wiping out [Auslöschung] of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world.”⁷

Goebbels was well informed: “The higher SS and police leader who is in charge [probably Krüger] informs me about the situation in the [Warsaw] ghetto,” the minister had recorded on August 21, 1942. At this time the Jews are being evacuated in vast numbers and pushed to the East. All this is happening on quite a significant scale. Here the Jewish question is handled in the right way, without sentimentality and without much consideration. That is the only way to solve the Jewish problem.⁸

No dissenting voices arose among the party faithful or anywhere else. At most, some suggestions from the regime’s elite pointed to possible adaptations of the killing program to the needs of the hour. Thus, on June 23, 1942, Viktor Brack, in a letter to Himmler, had suggested that some two to three million of the “ten million” Jews designated for extermination should be sterilized instead by using X-rays. These Jewish men and women were, according to Brack, “in very good condition to perform work.”⁹ In response Himmler encouraged Brack to start the sterilization experiments in one camp, not more.¹⁰

A few months later, on October 10, 1942, “a long conversation regarding the Jewish question” took place between Göring and Bormann. According to the head of the Party Chancellery, Göring declared that he considered Himmler’s measures “entirely correct” but emphasized that exceptions were necessary in special cases and that he [Göring] would discuss the matter with Hitler.¹¹ What these exceptions were and whether this discussion with Hitler ever took place remains unclear. In the meantime, at various administrative levels, a flurry of activity surrounded the exclusion of Jews from any recourse to the Reich’s judiciary system. In fact, by then the problem was losing its relevance, except for the implications of the “Thirteenth Ordinance” of July 1, 1943, to which we shall return.¹²

It also seems that, in the fall of 1942, keeping the extermination at least formally hidden from the population was still considered important, although the information was widely available, also from the bloodthirsty speeches of the “highest authority.” In any case the constant flood of propaganda depicting the Jews as the enemies of humanity, as the leaders of the hordes of Untermenschen, beastly creatures who had only the semblance of human beings (according to the SS propaganda pamphlet Der Untermensch, distributed in a score of languages throughout the Continent), led logically to only one possible solution. Thus not too many soldiers could have misunderstood Bormann when, in October 1942, in answering the questions most frequently asked by the troops, he addressed question number 9—“How will the Jewish question be solved?”—in the tersest yet clearest way: “Very simply!”¹³

II

During his visit to Auschwitz, on July 17, 1942, after touring some of his pet agricultural projects, Himmler watched the extermination of a transport of Jews from Holland. According to Höss, the SS chief remained silent throughout. While the gassing took place, “he unobtrusively observed the officers and junior officers engaged in the proceedings, including myself.”¹⁴ A few days later, an order came from the Reichsführer: “All mass graves were to be opened and the corpses burned. In addition the ashes were to be disposed of in such a way that it would be impossible at some future time to calculate the number of corpses burned.”¹⁵

In the evening Himmler attended a dinner party organized in his honor by Gauleiter Fritz Bracht. Höss, invited with his wife, found the guest a changed man, “in the best of spirits”…he talked on every possible subject which came up in the conversation. He discussed the education of children and new buildings and books and pictures…. It was fairly late before the guests departed. Very little was drunk during the evening. Himmler, who scarcely ever touched alcohol, drank a few glasses of red wine and smoked, which was also something he did not usually do. Everyone was under the spell of his good humor and lively conversation. I had never known him like that before.”¹⁶

During these same days of July 1942, the German onslaught against the Jews of Europe reached its full scale. Throughout the spring and early summer, the extermination process—after decimating part of the Jewish population of the Warthegau, of Lodz, and of the occupied territories of the Soviet Union—had expanded to Jews from the Reich, from Slovakia, and, district after district, from the General Government, except for Warsaw. In the second half of July the deportations from Holland and France began, followed by Warsaw, all within days of one another. In August the Jews of Belgium were included. In the General Government, while the Warsaw Jews were being killed, a large part of the Jewish population of Lwóv was carted away. In the first days of September major roundups struck again at the Jews of Lodz, and throughout, deportations from the West continued.

The steady expansion of deportations and killings from the early summer of 1942 on was enabled by the activation of further extermination facilities: “Bunker 2” at Auschwitz-Birkenau; and Belzec, Sobibor as previously, and also at Treblinka. Thus while most of the Jewish populations from the General Government were deported to Belzec and Sobibor, the first victims of Treblinka would be the Warsaw Jews. Simultaneously the deportees from the Reich, Slovakia and the West would increasingly be directed to Auschwitz-Birkenau (and, for a time, from Holland to Sobibor, due to a typhus epidemic in Auschwitz).

Although Himmler’s supervision of the entire system remained necessary and his interventions regarding transportation and slave labor allocation (or extermination) guided the rhythm and implementation of the killings, Hitler himself kept regularly abreast. As we shall see, within a few months he would be given the most updated progress report and would intervene personally to push for or decide on the deportations, which had not yet started (Hungary, Denmark, Italy, and again Hungary). Otherwise the “Final Solution,” despite all unforeseen political, technical, and logistic problems, had turned into a smoothly running mass-murder organization on an extraordinary scale. In regard to control over various aspects of the extermination whatever the feuds between various agencies and individuals within the SS or between the SS and party officials may have been, nothing indicates that these tensions had any impact on the overall progress of the campaign, on its unfolding, or on the ultimate distribution of the spoils.

As for the attitude of the surrounding populations and their social, political, or spiritual elites, throughout the Continent, although some small groups were ready to help Jews once the deportations started, in general only very rare gestures of solidarity with the victims occurred on a collective scale. And, in their vast majority, the Jews did not understand the fate that awaited them.

The Jews whose murder Himmler had watched were probably the deportees of the first transport that had left the Netherlands for Auschwitz, on July 14. The meticulous registration work accomplished by the Dutch census office, the German Central Emigration Office (Zentralstelle), and the Jewish Council allowed for summons to be sent on July 4 to 4,000 (mainly refugee) Jews chosen from the updated lists. To fill the quota the Germans organized a sudden police raid in Amsterdam on July 14; it netted 700 more Jews.¹⁷

The Dutch police outdid German expectations: “The new Dutch police squadrons are performing splendidly as regards the Jewish question and are arresting Jews in the hundreds, day and night,” an obviously elated Rauter reported to Himmler on September 24.¹⁸ Indeed the Amsterdam police performed magnificently; and Sybren Tulp personally participated in every roundup.¹⁹ Secretary-General of the Interior Fredericks feebly tried to shield the municipal police from participating in the roundups, but in vain. Rauter insisted on the involvement of all Dutch police forces, and all took part.²⁰ Dutch detectives were attached to the German Security Police. Moreover, in May 1942, a unit of “Voluntary Auxiliary Police” had been created, comprising some 2,000 men belonging either to the NSB “storm detachments” or to the Dutch SS.²¹ These local police collaborators vied with the Germans in sheer sadism and brutality; most of the spies who obtained handsome profits from denouncing Jews in hiding came from their ranks.²²

The German staff in charge of the “Final Solution” in Holland was small. According to Harster’s testimony in 1966, “Some 200 employees worked for Section IV [the Security Police] in the whole country.” The Jewish section at The Hague headquarters, under the command of Willi Zöpf, employed no more than thirty-six officials.²³ In his computation Harster did not include the Amsterdam “annex” of Zöpf ’s IVB4 office. This “annex,” the Zentralstelle, headed by Willi Lages and Aus der Fünten, steadily grew in importance until, in July 1942, it was put in charge of organizing all the deportations from Amsterdam to Westerbork. By then its staff, partly German but mainly Dutch, had grown to about one hundred employees.²⁴

According to historian Louis de Jong, the Germans had informed the Jewish Council as early as March 1942 that Jews would be sent to labor camps in the East. The council believed that the deportees would be German Jews only and thus “took no action; it even refrained from warning those representatives of the German Jews with whom it was in touch.”²⁵ It was shocked in late June when informed that Dutch Jews would be included in the deportations.²⁶ Lages and Aus der Fünten then chose the usual method: Some Dutch Jews would not be sent away (for the time being), and the council was allowed to distribute exemption certificates that, quite naturally, offered the hope of reprieve. The Germans knew they could rely on the docility of the people not immediately threatened.

The general secretary of the council, M. H. Bolle, established several categories of Jews (identified by numbers) and compiled the list of the 17,500 privileged ones whom the council could exempt: These Jews had special stamps affixed to their identity cards, the “Bolle stamps.” According to a member of the council, Gertrud van Tijn, when the first exemption stamps were issued, the scenes at the Jewish Council were quite indescribable. Doors were broken, the staff of the council was attacked, and the police had often to be called in…. The stamps quickly became an obsession with every Jew.”²⁷ More often than not the decisions of the “exemptions’ committee” were influenced by favoritism and corruption.²⁸

“The Jews here are telling each other lovely stories: They say that the Germans are burying us alive or exterminating us with gas. But what is the point of repeating such things, even if they should be true?”²⁹ This July 11 entry in Etty Hillesum’s diary shows that ominous rumors about “Poland” were circulating in Amsterdam as the deportations started; it also shows that neither Hillesum nor most of the other Jews really believed them. Etty had been advised to seek a job with the council as a possible way of escaping immediate danger. “My letter of application to the Jewish Council…has upset my cheerful yet deadly serious equilibrium,” she noted on July 14, 1942, “as if I had done something underhanded. Like crowding onto a small piece of wood adrift on an endless ocean after a shipwreck and then saving oneself by pushing others into the water and watching them drown. It is all so ugly. And I don’t think much of this particular crowd either [the council].”³⁰ The next day she was hired as a typist at the Cultural Affairs department of the council; she became (briefly) one of the privileged Amsterdam Jews.

A few days later Etty wrote the most concise and damning two sentences about what she perceived as the council’s overall 'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:black'>31 On July 29, shortly after her guru and lover, Hans Spier, suddenly fell ill and died, Etty volunteered to work for the council at Westerbork.³²

Immediate deportation threatened foreign refugees such as the Franks. On July 5, Margot, Anne’s elder sister, received a summons to report to the assembly center. On the next day, assisted by the faithful Dutch couple Miep and Jan Gies, the Franks were on their way to a carefully prepared hiding place, an attic in the building where Otto Frank’s office was located. Margot and Miep left first, on bicycles. Anne made sure that her cat would be taken in by neighbors, and on July 6, at seven-thirty in the morning, the Franks left their home. “So there we were,” Anne noted on July 9, “Father, Mother, and I, walking in the pouring rain, each of us with a schoolbag and a shopping bag filled to the brim with the most varied assortment of items. The people on their way to work at that early hour gave us sympathetic looks; you could tell by their faces that they were sorry they couldn’t offer us some kind of transportation; the conspicuous yellow star spoke for itself.”³³

The relations between council members and Aus der Fünten seem to have been almost cordial at times, and the Hauptsturmführer did apparently convince David Cohen, council official Leo de Wolff, and others that he was fulfilling his task against his will.³⁴Jacob Presser believed that the SS officer’s protests were genuine, and yet, in his postwar history of the destruction of Dutch Jewry, he described an event in which he was involved, when Aus der Fünten—obsequiously attended by de Wolff—displayed prime sadism.

On August 5, 1942, a hapless crowd of some 2,000 Jews had been kept overnight in the yard of the Zentralstelle. The following day, after a short interview, individuals would be waved to the left (reprieve) or to the right (Westerbork). Aus der Fünten intentionally kept the majority waiting almost to the end of the selection (five p.m.). Those who had not been interrogated by then were automatically sent to Westerbork: “The tension became unbearable in the afternoon,” Presser wrote. “There we were, hundreds of us, anxiously watching the clock.” At ten to five, at what turned out to be the last muster, the writer and his wife came face-to-face with Aus der Fünten, who looked at their papers, waved him to the left and then, turning to de Wolff, said: ‘She’s still very young.’ What de Wolff replied, I cannot say, but my wife was waved to the left as well. A moment later we were in the street with ordinary people and children playing…. Some 600 were sent to Westerbork and on.”³⁵

On September 18, 1942, at a special meeting of the council, both Cohen and Asscher expressed their belief that cooperation with the authorities was necessary. According to the minutes of the meeting, David Cohen affirmed that, “in his opinion, it was the bounden duty of community leaders to stay at their post; indeed it would be criminal to abandon the community in the hour of its greatest need. Moreover, it was imperative to keep at least the most important men back [in Amsterdam] for as long as possible.”³⁶At the end of that same meeting Cohen made a terse announcement: “Finally, the first report of a case of death in Auswitz [sic] is received by the meeting.”³⁷

While transports of Jews were leaving Amsterdam for Westerbork, Jews from the provinces were steadily being moved to Amsterdam. The Wessels family, who lived in the village of Oostvoorne, was transported to Amsterdam in October 1942 (the eldest son had already been deported to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz, in August); they remained in the city for almost a year. The younger son, Ben—whose letters to Oostvoorne friends have been saved—was sixteen in October 1942: He was first employed as a “courier” for the Jewish Council, then as an elevator boy in the building of the German police.

One of Ben’s initial letters from Amsterdam indicates how thoroughly the Wehrmacht officer and the soldiers who arrested him in Oostvoorne took care of every small detail. “I guess you mustn’t mind the pencil writing,” Ben informed his friends on October 15, 1942. “My fountain pen was taken away…. My entire equipment with backpack and six woolen blankets is gone…. That pocket flashlight, the one with the battery they also took from us, there, opposite the bandstand in Oostvoorne. We were frisked completely, and whatever they could use, money, in fact everything, they took from us. That day, Mother had already been picked up in the afternoon. That night was frightful…. The family van Dijk [the only other Jewish family in Oostvoorne], we were with them, they are going on to Poland….”³⁸

Much of the outrage expressed by the Dutch population at the German persecution of the Jews during the first year of the occupation had turned into passivity by 1942. The Dutch government-in-exile did not exhort its countrymen to help the Jews when the deportations started, although on two occasions, at the end of June and in July 1942, “Radio Oranje” did broadcast information previously aired by the BBC about the exterminations in Poland. These reports did not make any deep impression on either the population or even the Jews. The fate of Polish Jews was one thing; the fate of the Jews of Holland quite another; this was common belief even among the leaders of the council.³⁹

Two young Dutch political prisoners who had witnessed the earliest gassings in Auschwitz (those of Russian prisoners and small groups of Jews) were released from the camp and, on their return to Holland, attempted to convince the leadership of the Dutch churches of what they saw: to no avail.⁴⁰ Letters sent home by members of the Dutch Waffen SS described in detail and with pride their participation in the massacre of Jews in the Ukraine, but the information was either taken in stride or, as one of the authors intimated, considered as a portent of things to come once men like himself returned to the home country.⁴¹

Some protests against the deportations nonetheless did take place. On July 11 all major church leaders signed a letter addressed to Seyss-Inquart. The Germans tried conciliation first: They promised exemptions for some baptized Jews (but not for the Jews baptized after the occupation of the country). At first the churches did not give in: The main Protestant church (Herformde Kerk) proposed having the letter publicly read on Sunday, July 26. The Catholic and Calvinist church leaders agreed. When the Germans threatened retaliation, the Protestant leadership wavered; the Catholic bishops, led by the archbishop of Utrecht, Jan de Jong, decided to proceed nonetheless, and they did. In retaliation, during the night of August 1–2, the Germans arrested most Catholic Jews and sent them to Westerbork. According to Harster’s postwar testimony, Seyss-Inquart’s retaliation stemmed from the fact that the bishops had protested against the deportation of all Jews, not that of converted Jews only. Ninety-two Catholic Jews were ultimately deported to Auschwitz, among them the philosopher, Carmelite nun, and future Catholic saint, Edith Stein.⁴²

As months went by, the Germans had every reason to be satisfied. On November 16, Bene, Ribbentrop’s representative in The Hague, sent a general report to the Wilhelmstrasse: “The deportation has been going on without difficulties and incidents…. The Dutch population has gotten used to the deportation of the Jews. They are making no trouble whatsoever. Reports from Rauschwitz [sic] camp sound favorable. Therefore the Jews have abandoned their doubts and more or less voluntarily come to the collecting points.”⁴³

Generally speaking Bene wasn’t wrong, as we know, although some details of the overall picture manifestly escaped him, as they escaped Harster’s and Tulp’s men. Soon after the beginning of the deportations, children were moved from the main assembly and processing hall, the Hollandsche Schouwburg (renamed Joodsche Schouwburg), to an annex on the opposite side of the same street (the Crèche), a child-care center mainly for working-class families. At that point two members of the Jewish Council, Walter Süskind and Felix Halvestad succeeded in gaining access to some of the children’s files and destroying them.⁴⁴ Thus bereft of administrative identity, children were sporadically smuggled out of the Crèche with the help of the Dutch woman director, Henriette Rodriguez-Pimental; they were passed on to various clandestine networks that usually succeeded in finding safe places with Dutch families.⁴⁵ Hundreds of children—possibly up to one thousand—were saved in this way.⁴⁶

Jewish adults encountered much greater difficulties in hiding among the population. The refusals (or the inaction) they encountered could have resulted from fear, distaste for Jews, traditional anti-Semitism and “civic obedience,” although—regarding the last—when in the spring of 1943, the Germans used utter brutality against any assistance to Dutch men hiding from work in the Reich, the readiness for illegal initiatives grew all around. From the outset, however, small networks of people who knew and trusted one another and mostly shared a common religious background (Calvinist and Catholic) did actively help Jews, notwithstanding the risks. The limited scope of the grassroots actions has been attributed to the absence of hands-on leadership from the hierarchy of all Dutch Christian churches, despite some of the courageous protests, particularly of Archbishop de Jong.⁴⁷

At the beginning of 1943 the Germans started rounding up the approximately eight thousand Jewish patients in various hospitals, and among them the psychiatric inmates of Het Apeldoornse Bos. The raid on this largest Jewish mental institution was conducted on the night of January 21 by a Schutzpolizei unit under the personal command of Aus der Fünten. The patients were ferociously beaten and pushed into trucks. “I saw them place a row of patients,” an eyewitness declared, “many of them older women, on mattresses at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human bodies on top of them. So crammed were these trucks that the Germans had a hard job to put up the tail-boards.”⁴⁸ The trucks carried the patients to the cordoned-off Apeldoorn railway station.

According to the station master’s report, when he tried to activate the ventilation system in the wagons, the Germans closed them. The report then continued: “I remember the case of a girl of twenty to twenty-five, whose arms were pinioned [in a straightjacket] but who was otherwise stark naked…. Blinded by the light that was flashed in her face, the girl ran, fell on her face and could not, of course, use her arms to break the fall. She crashed down with a thud…. In general, the loading was done without great violence. The ghastly thing was that when the wagons had to be closed, the patients refused to take their fingers away. They simply would not listen to us and in the end the Germans lost patience. The result was a brutal and inhuman spectacle.”⁴⁹ Some fifty (Jewish) nurses accompanied the transport.

A Dutch Jew described the arrival of the transport in Auschwitz: “It was one of the most horrible transports from Holland that I saw. Many of the patients tried to break through the barrier and were shot dead. The remainder were gassed immediately.”⁵⁰ There are diverging accounts of the fate of the nurses, none of whom survived. Some declare that they were sent to the camp; others that they were gassed; according to another witness “some of them were thrown into a pit, doused with gasoline, and burned alive.”⁵¹Aus der Fünten had promised them that they could return immediately after the trip or work in the East in a thoroughly modern mental institution.⁵²

In early 1943 the Germans established the Vught labor camp, which supposedly would allow Jews to remain as forced laborers in Holland. It was a sophisticated “legal” option to avoid deportation; the council strongly encouraged it, and the obedient Dutch Jews went along. Of course it was one further German scam, and the Vught inmates were systematically transferred to Westerbork or, on several occasions, deported directly to the East.⁵³

Between July 1942 and February 1943, fifty-two transports carrying 46,455 Jews left Westerbork for Auschwitz. Some 3,500 able-bodied men were redirected to the hydrogenation plant in Blechhammer (later Auschwitz III–Monowitz and Gross Rosen). Of the workers’ group, 181 men survived the war; of the remaining 42,915 from the 1942 and early 1943 transports, 85 remained alive.⁵⁴ The deportations went on.

III

“The papers announce new measures against the Jews,” Jacques Biélinky recorded on July 15, 1942: “They are forbidden access to restaurants, coffeehouses, movie theaters, theaters, concert halls, music halls, pools, beaches, museums, libraries, exhibitions, castles, historical monuments, sports events, races, parks, camping sites and even phone booths, fairs, etc. Rumor has it that Jewish men and women between ages eighteen and forty-five will be sent to forced labor in Germany.”⁵⁵ That same day the roundups of “stateless” Jews started in the provinces of the occupied zone, on the eve of the operation in Paris.

According to a July 15 report from the police chief of the Loire-Inférieure, French gendarmes were accompanying German soldiers on their way to arrest Jews in the department; according to another report of the same day, the French authorities were providing police officers to guard fifty-four Jews on the request of the SS chief of Saint-Nazaire. Jews arrested throughout the west of the country—among them some two hundred arrested in Tours, again on July 15—were taken to an assembly point in Angers (some were selected from French camps in the region) and, a few days later, a train carried 824 of them directly from Angers to Auschwitz.⁵⁶

On July 16, at 4:00 a.m., the Germano-French roundup of 27,000 “stateless” Jews living in the capital and its suburbs began. The index cards prepared by the French police had become essential: 25,334 cards were ready for Paris, and 2,027 for the immediate suburbs.⁵⁷ Every technical detail had been jointly prepared by French and German officials in their meetings on July 7 and 11. On the sixteenth fifty municipal buses were ready, and so were 4,500 French policemen.⁵⁸ No German units participated in the arrests. The manhunt received a code name: Vent printanier(Spring Wind).

As rumors about the forthcoming raids had spread, many potential victims (mostly men) had gone into hiding.⁵⁹ The origins of these rumors? To this day they remain uncertain, but as historian André Kaspi noted, “a roundup such as had never taken place in France, could not remain secret for long.”⁶⁰ UGIF employees, resistance groups, police personnel must all have been involved in some way in spreading warnings.

Nine hundred groups, each including three police officials and volunteers, were in charge of the arrests. “Suddenly, I heard terrible banging on the front door…,” Annette Müller, then nine years old, recalled. “Two men entered the room; they were tall and wore beige raincoats. ‘Hurry up, get dressed,’ they ordered, ‘we are taking you with us.’ I saw my mother get on her knees and embrace their legs, crying, begging: ‘Take me but, I beseech you, don’t take the children.’ They pulled her up. ‘Come on, madam, don’t make it more difficult and all will be well.’ My mother spread a large sheet on the floor, and threw in clothes, underwear…. She worked in a panic, throwing in things, then taking them out. ‘Hurry up!’ the policemen shouted. She wanted to take dried vegetables. ‘No, you don’t need that,’ the men said, ‘just take food for two days; there, you will get food.’”⁶¹

By the afternoon of July 17, 3,031 Jewish men, 5,802 women, and 4,051 children had been arrested; the number of Jews finally caught in Vent printanier totaled 13,152.⁶² Unmarried people or childless couples were sent directly to Drancy; the others, 8,160 men, women, and children, were assembled in a large indoor sports arena known mainly for its bicycle races, the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel d’Hiv).⁶³

At the Vel d’Hiv, nothing was ready—neither food, water, toilets, nor beds or bedding of any sort. For three to six days, thousands of hapless beings received one to two portions of soup per day. Two Jewish physicians and one Red Cross physician were in attendance. The temperature never fell below one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Finally, group after group, the Vel d’Hiv Jews were temporarily sent to Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps just vacated by the inmates deported in June.⁶⁴

Vent printanier had not achieved the expected results. In order to keep Drancy stacked with Jews ready for deportation, the arrests of stateless Jews had to extend to the Vichy zone, as agreed by the French government. The major operation, again exclusively implemented by French forces (police, gendarmes, firemen, and soldiers), took place from August 26 to 28; some 7,100 Jews were seized.⁶⁵ Although Laval had promised in early September to cancel the naturalization of Jews who had entered the country after January 1933, the roundups in the Vichy zone were aimed at filling the German quotas without having to start denaturalizing French citizens.⁶⁶ By the end of the year 42,500 Jews had been deported from France to Auschwitz.⁶⁷ On July 22 Biélinky noted: “My shoemaker of the rue Broca, a Polish Jew, has been arrested with his wife. The pair of shoes that I left with him for repair remained at his home. And, his house is closed as he had neither children nor parents.”⁶⁸

Until mid-1943 Drancy remained under French authority. The main goal for the camp administration remained filling the quotas imposed by the Germans for each departing transport. “Under our current obligation to come up with one thousand deportees on Monday,” a French police officer noted on September 12, 1942, “we must include in these departures, at least in reserve, the parents of sick [children] and advise them that they could be deported without their children remaining in the infirmary.”⁶⁹

On August 11 Untersturmführer Horst Ahnert, from Dannecker’s office, informed the RSHA that due to the temporary halt in the roundups, he planned to send the children assembled in the camps Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers to Drancy, and asked for Berlin’s authorization.⁷⁰ On the thirteenth, Günther gave his approval but warned Ahnert not to send transports filled with children only.⁷¹

It was probably the arrival of these children, aged two to twelve, that Drancy inmate George Wellers described after the war: “They were disembarked from the buses in the midst of the courtyard like small animals…. The elder children held the younger ones and did not let go of them until they reached their allocated places. On the stairs the bigger children carried the smaller ones, panting, to the fourth floor. There, they remained fearfully huddled together…. Once the luggage had been unloaded the children returned to the courtyard, but most of the younger ones could not find their belongings; when, after their unsuccessful search they wished to get back to their rooms, they could not remember where they had been assigned.”⁷²

On August 24, transport number 23 left Drancy for Auschwitz with its load of 1,000 Jews, including 553 children under age seventeen (288 boys and 265 girls). Among the children, 465 were under twelve, of whom 131 were under six. On arrival in Auschwitz, 92 men aged from twenty to forty-five were selected for work. All the other deportees were immediately gassed. Three Jews from this transport survived the war.⁷³

As a result of the only petition sent to Vichy by UGIF-North shortly after the Paris roundup, some relatives of war veterans and some “French children of foreign parents” (these were the words used in the petition) were released. André Baur, the president of UGIF-North, thanked Laval for his gesture.⁷⁴

On August 2 Lambert met Helbronner. Despite the ongoing roundups and deportations, the head of the Consistoire was not ready to share his contacts at Vichy with any member of UGIF nor to tell Lambert that in fact Laval was refusing to see him. In the course of the conversation, Helbronner declared to a stupefied Lambert that on August 8 he was going on vacation and that “nothing in the world would bring me back.”⁷⁵ This declaration, quoted by Lambert only, has to be taken guardedly given the tense relations between the author of the Carnet and the Consistoire. “The president of the Consistoire seems to me to be more deaf, more pompous and older than ever. The fate of the foreign Jews does not touch him at all,” Lambert added on September 6, describing another meeting with Helbronner, on July 30.⁷⁶ The remark about Helbronner’s attitude toward les juifs étrangers was probably on target.

In August the Consistoire prepared two drafts of a protest letter. The milder version, not alluding to “extermination” (mentioned in the other draft) or to the participation of the French police or to that of the Germans, was delivered in Vichy on August 25, not to Laval to whom it was addressed and who once again refused to meet with the delegate of French Jewry, but to some low-ranking official.⁷⁷ That was all.

UGIF-North was embroiled in endless debates with officials of the Commissariat about the payment of the one-billion-franc fine, and its regular budget was collapsing under the growing burden of welfare assistance, mainly for destitute foreign Jews. UGIF-South attempted, with the help of the Consistoire and of foreign, mainly American organizations (the Quakers, the Nîmes committee, among others, and of course the Joint) to convince the Vichy authorities to allow the emigration of one thousand Jewish children to the United States. After weeks of negotiation and slow bureaucratic moves on both the French and the American sides, an agreement was almost wrapped up. Then, however, as the Allied forces landed in North Africa, the Germans occupied the southern zone, Vichy broke off diplomatic relations with Washington, and the project came to naught.⁷⁸

The cooperation of UGIF-South with the Consistoire in the rescue attempt of the Jewish children indicated that the relations between the two organizations (and their leaders) were changing from sharp antagonism to growing and unavoidable cooperation. The German occupation of the southern zone and the common fate threatening all Jews living in France contributed to the change in relations. The leaders of French Jewry were losing faith in their privileged status and in the protection French Jewry could expect from Vichy. Major roundups in Marseilles and Lyons in early 1943 would confirm their suspicions and reinforce the links with UGIF-South during the months to come.⁷⁹

In both Rivesaltes and Drancy the Germans tried to persuade inmates that family members in hiding should be persuaded to report in order to avoid separation. In Rivesaltes the German enticements were mainly addressed to parents of hidden children. Jewish social workers, aware of the trap, either had to inform the parents that deportation meant death for them and their children or shield them from what was in store. Some detainees understood the indirect warnings; others did not: More than a hundred additional children joined their parents.⁸⁰

Then, as in early 1943 the number of foreign Jews in France was rapidly dwindling and the weekly quotas of deportees were no longer met, the Germans decided to move to the next step: Pétain and Laval were now prodded to cancel the naturalizations of Jews that had taken place after 1927. It was at this point, as we shall see, that unexpectedly, after first agreeing, Laval changed his mind.

The immediate reaction of the majority of ordinary French people to the roundups was unmistakably negative in both zones.⁸¹ Although it did not lead to any organized protest, it did enhance readiness to help Jews on the run. Feelings of pity at the sight of the unfortunate victims, particularly women and children, spread, albeit briefly; but, as already mentioned, basic prejudice towards the Jews did not disappear.

“The persecution of the Jews,” a February 1943 report from a Resistance agent stated, “has profoundly wounded the French in their humane principles; it has even, at times, made the Jews almost sympathetic. One cannot deny, however, that there is a Jewish question: the present circumstances have even helped plant it firmly. The Blum ministry, which was overflowing with Jewish elements, and the penetration of tens of thousands of foreign Jews into France, provoked a defensive mechanism in France. People would pay any price not to see a similar invasion repeated.”⁸² A March report from another agent was almost identical in its main assessment. “The persecutions directed against the Jews have not stopped stirring and angering the population. Public opinion is nevertheless somewhat suspicious of them. It is feared that after the war some leading professions (banking, broadcasting, journalism, cinema) will be invaded again and in some fashion controlled by the Jews. Certainly, no one wants the Jews to be victimized and even less that they be molested. People sincerely want them to be as free as possible, in possession of their rights and property. But no one wants them to be supreme in any domain.”⁸³

Within the Resistance itself, the same kind of low-key anti-Semitism was present, even explicitly so. In June 1942 the first issue of Cahiers, published by the central body of the French underground, the OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire), carried a study on ethnic minorities in France. The author, Maxime Blocq-Mascart, singled out the Jews as the group that caused “ongoing controversies”: “Antisemitism in its moderate form was quasi universal, even in the most liberal societies. This indicates that its foundation is not imaginary.” Blocq-Mascart ‘s analysis brought up the usual repertory of anti-Jewish arguments and suggested the usual measures: “stopping Jewish immigration, avoiding the concentration of Jews in a small number of cities, encouraging complete assimilation.” The article was widely debated and denounced by some high-ranking members of the underground; it nonetheless represented the opinion of a great majority of the French people.⁸⁴

The Assembly of French cardinals and archbishops met in Paris on July 21, 1942, less than a week after the raid. A minority was in favor of some form of protest, but the majority, headed by Archbishop Achille Liénart of Lille and Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard of Paris, opposed it. Unsigned notes, drafted after the assembly, most probably by Liénart, indicate the main points of the discussion and the views of the majority. “Fated to disappear from the Continent. Those who support them are against us. The expulsions have been ordered. The answers: some belong to us; we keep them; the others, foreigners—we give them back. No, all have to leave by the action of our agencies, in both zones. Individualist project. Letter to our government out of sense of humanity. Help of social services to children in centers. They themselves ask only for charity from us. Letter addressed in name of humanity and religion.”⁸⁵

In other words the notes indicated that the French episcopate knew (probably on information received from the government or the Vatican) the Jews were fated to disappear from the Continent; whether this disappearance was understood as extermination is unclear. Support for the Jews, the note further mentioned, came mainly from segments of the population that were hostile to the church (communists? Gaullists?). The deportations have been ordered by the Germans; Vichy wants to keep the French Jews and have the foreigners expelled; the Germans insist on generalized deportation from both zones and demand the help of French agencies (mainly the police). The meaning of the words “individualist project” (Projet individualiste) are unclear but it could be that assistance to individuals was discussed. The bishops apparently believed that the caretaking of children would be implemented by French welfare agencies. The Jews, according to the notes, did not ask for anything else but charitable help (not for political intervention or public protest). A letter would be sent to the government in the spirit of the declaration issued by the assembly.⁸⁶

On July 22 Cardinal Suhard, in the name of the assembly, sent the letter to the maréchal. It was the first official protest of the Catholic church of France regarding the persecution of the Jews: “Deeply moved by the information reaching us about the massive arrests of Israelites that took place last week and by the harsh treatment inflicted upon them, particularly at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, we cannot suppress the call of our conscience. It is in the name of humanity and of Christian principles that our voice is raised to protest in favor of the unalienable rights of human beings. It is also an anguished call for pity for this immense suffering, mainly for that of mothers and children. We ask you, Monsieur le Maréchal, to accept to take [our call] into account, so that the demand of justice and the right to charity be respected.”⁸⁷

The papal nuncio in Vichy, Monsignor Valeri, considered the letter as rather “platonic.”⁸⁸ Helbronner thought so as well and beseeched his friend Gerlier to intervene personally with Pétain. After obfuscating for a while, the cardinal of Lyons (also prodded by Pastor Boegner) agreed to send a letter to the maréchal, and did so on August 19. But, like Suhard before him, Gerlier wrote in convoluted terms that could only indicate to Pétain and Laval that the French church would ultimately abstain from any forceful confrontation. Despite his promise to Helbronner, the cardinal did not ask for a meeting with Pétain.⁸⁹ A few months beforehand, however, Gerlier had allowed the establishment in his diocese of an association to help Jews (Amitiés Judéo-Chrétiennes), led by Abbé Alexandre Glasberg and the Jesuit priest Pierre Chaillet; in August 1942 he intervened in favor of the same Father Chaillet, arrested for having hidden eighty-four Jewish children.⁹⁰

It is in this context that, on August 30, 1942, Jules-Gérard Saliège, archbishop of Toulouse, had a pastoral letter denouncing the roundups and deportations read in the churches of his diocese: “It has been reserved to our time to witness the sad spectacle of children, of women, of fathers and mothers being treated like a herd of animals; to see members of the same family separated from one another and shipped away to an unknown destination…. In our diocese, scenes of horror have taken place in the camps at Noé and Récébédou. Jews are men. Jewesses are women. Foreigners are men, foreign women are women. They cannot be mistreated at will, these men, these women, these fathers and mothers of families. They are part of the human race….”⁹¹

Saliège’s pastoral letter found an echo well beyond the Southwest of France, but as suggested by historian Michèle Cointet, it has to be set in its context. The letter was not only, so it seems, the expression of an impetuous and immediate moral reaction to the roundups of foreign Jews in the Vichy zone. It was apparently suggested to the Toulouse prelate by emissaries from Lyons. In other terms, as the Assembly of French Cardinals and Archbishops was paralyzed, Saliège became its voice, as shortly afterward, did Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas of Montauban. The Episcopal Assembly probably knew that these individual protests would be considered too marginal to cause official retaliation, yet they would allow to save face: The church of France had not remained silent.⁹²

Saliège’s protest may have been partly tactical, but it must also have expressed his feelings, as demonstrated by the very tone of the appeal and, more concretely, by the help he extended to various Jewish rescue operations in the Southwest of France. The same practical help was offered by a number of other prelates, including Bishop Paul Rémond in Nice or, indirectly, Gerlier himself. Throughout the Continent—and we shall return to this issue—Christian institutions did hide Jewish children and, at times, Jewish adults. Occasionally assistance was collective, remarkable in its scope, and no less so in the absence of any proselytizing aims, such as in the French Protestant community Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village in the mountainous Cévennes region, guided by its pastor, André Trocmé and his family. The entire village took part in this extraordinary venture and ultimately did hide hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jews at one moment or another throughout the entire period.⁹³ It took a Protestant police officer sent by Vichy to uncover part of the hiding operation and to ensure the deportation of all the young Jewish charges of the children’s home, Maison des Roches, and that of its director the pastor’s cousin Daniel Trocmé, gassed at Majdanek.⁹⁴

The usual German decrees had been applied in Belgium as they had in France and in Holland, and approximately at the same time. Yet the commander in chief, General Falkenhausen, and the all-important head of the military administration, Eggert Reeder, were concerned lest the deportations, also scheduled for July, cause unrest among the population. Reeder took the matter directly to Himmler.

A report sent to the Wilhelmstrasse on July 9, by Werner von Bargen, the Foreign Ministry representative with the military high command in Brussels, gave a faithful picture of the situation: “The military administration intends to implement the requested deportation of 10,000 Jews. The head of the military administration is presently at [Hitler’s] headquarters to discuss the matter with the SS Reichsführer. Considerations against the measure could stem, first, from the fact that understanding of the Jewish question is not yet very widespread here and that Jews of Belgian nationality are considered by the population as Belgians. Therefore the measure could be interpreted as the beginning of general forced evacuations [for labor in Germany]. Moreover the Jews here are integrated in economic life, so that one could be worried about difficulties in the labor market. The military administration expects, however, to overcome these considerations, if the deportation of Belgian Jews is avoided. Thus, to start with, Polish, Czech, Russian and other Jews will be chosen, which should allow, theoretically, reaching the target number” [das Soll].⁹⁵

Himmler had no qualms in agreeing to postpone the deportation of Belgian Jewish nationals, as he knew that they represented barely 6 percent of the 57,000 Jews registered by the Security Police. On August 4, 1942, the first transport of foreign Jews left Malines (Mechelen, in Flemish) for Auschwitz. Yet the events in Belgium would, paradoxically, take a somewhat different course from those in neighboring Holland, for example.

The beginning of the German onslaught caught both Jews and non-Jews by surprise, and it was during the first two months of the operation that one-third of Belgian Jewry was sent to its death. However, while approximately 15,000 Jews were deported until November 1942, the German roundups became rapidly less successful during the following months: Some further 10,000 Jews were deported before the liberation of the country. Approximately half the Jewish population survived the war.

Despite strong prejudice against Jews and particularly against the vast number of foreign Jews, two factors led to a far higher rescue percentage in Belgium than in neighboring, relatively non-anti-Semitic Holland, home to a vast majority of native Dutch Jews: The spontaneous reaction of the population and the involvement of Belgian resistance organizations.

There is no question that large-scale rescue operations initiated by “ordinary Belgians” took place at all levels of society. The issue that remains unresolved—and probably unresolvable—is the degree of influence of the Catholic Church and its institutions on this surge of compassion and charity. That Catholic institutions did hide Jews, particularly Jewish children, is well documented; whether these institutions, and mainly the rank-and-file Catholic population, responded to the encouragements and instructions of the church hierarchy or merely to their own feelings remains unclear, as does the degree of the memory of German brutality in World War I.⁹⁶

Active cooperation between a rapidly established Jewish underground (Comité de Défense des Juifs, or CDJ) and Belgian resistance organizations led to the hiding of about 25,000 Jews.⁹⁷ This cooperation was facilitated by the fact that, from the outset, a significant number of foreign Jewish refugees were affiliated, one way or another, with the Belgian Communist Party or with left-wing Zionist organizations—particularly with the Communist organization for foreign workers, MOI (Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée, or “Immigrant Labor Organization”);⁹⁸ the communists were highly influential moreover in the Belgian Resistance.

IV

While Jews were rapidly disappearing from the Reich, the “Jewish question” remained as present as ever not only in official propaganda but also in everyday life. In early December 1942, for example, as the issue was about to reach the courts, “Katag A.G.,” a textile firm in Bielefeld, decided to consult the Reich Justice Ministry. “Katag,” the firm’s petition read, “was ‘aryanized’ in the years 1937–38. The name “Katag,” an abbreviation for Katz & Michel Textil A.G., was changed in the course of the ‘aryanization’ insofar as we registered it as fantasy identification and added ‘A.G.’ [Aktien Gesellschaft], so that now the business registry in Bielefeld carries the name ‘Katag A.G.’ Recently, however, the German Labor Front objected to the identification of our company as ‘Katag’ because it still carries a syllable of the Jewish name Katz. We hold to the point of view that in the name ‘Katag A.G.’ the first two letters Ka cannot in any way be recognized as the components of a Jewish name.”…⁹⁹

There was no easy resolution to the problem; the Justice Ministry asked for the opinion of the Party Chancellery, and after much debate, on March 23, 1943, Bormann’s office reached a Solomonic decision, if one dare say: “Katag A.G.” would be allowed to keep its name temporarily for the duration of the war.¹⁰⁰

During the same fateful days of December 1942, the Reich Ministry of Education decided that Mischlinge of the second degree could, under certain conditions, enroll as students of medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy, but not veterinary medicine. The decision was based on the assumption that mixed breeds of the second degree did not have the slightest chance of finding employment as veterinarians on completion of their studies.¹⁰¹ In other words Mischlinge of the second degree could eventually take care of sick people, but no good German would wish them to attend to sick animals.

Completing the deportations from Germany was, of course, only a matter of logistics and of time. As we previously saw, from the early summer of 1942 onward, probably as a consequence of the attempt by the “Baum group” to set fire to the “Soviet Paradise” exhibition, no Jewish laborers were to be kept in the Reich, even in war-essential jobs. A letter sent by Sauckel on November 26, 1942, to the heads of labor exchanges stated this in the clearest terms: “In agreement with the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, Jews still employed will now be evacuated from the territory of the Reich and replaced by Poles, who are being deported from the General Government…. Poles…if fit for labor, will be transported without their families to the Reich, particularly to Berlin; there they will be put at the disposal of the labor exchange offices to serve as replacements for Jews to be eliminated from armament factories. The Jews who will become available as a result of the employment of Polish labor will be deported at once. This will apply first to Jews engaged in unskilled labor since they can be exchanged most easily. The remaining so-called qualified Jewish laborers will be left in the industries until their Polish replacements become sufficiently familiar with the work process after a period of apprenticeship to be determined for each case individually. Loss of production in individual industries will thus be reduced to the absolute minimum.”¹⁰² As we shall see further on, this was the exact expression of Himmler’s policy as stated in a letter of October 1942 to the OKW.

On February 27, 1943, the deportation of the “Jews employed in industry” (the Fabrikaktion) began. It had a double aim: to seize and deport all full Jews working in industry in the Old Reich and to expel any Jewish partners of mixed marriages from these workplaces.¹⁰³ In fact the roundups included not only the Jewish laborers but also their families and, more generally, any full Jews still remaining anywhere in the Reich.¹⁰⁴ In Berlin, where more than 10,000 Jewish forced laborers had still been employed, the operation lasted almost one full week. On March 1, the first transport departed for Auschwitz. Within a few days some 7,000 Jews were deported from the capital, and 10,948 from all over the Reich.¹⁰⁵

Some 1,500 to 2,000 Berlin Jews who had been seized but excluded from deportation (mainly mixed-marriage partners) were assembled in a building on 2-4 Rosenstrasse, for identification and work selection in remaining Jewish institutions (such as the one remaining Jewish hospital). Most of these internees were released by March 8.¹⁰⁶ During these few days scores of spouses, other relatives, and friends did gather on the opposite sidewalk and at times called for the prisoners; they mainly waited for information or tried to get food parcels into the building. Such unusual gatherings certainly demanded a measure of courage, but they were relatively modest and completely nonaggressive. They did not bring about the release of the detainees, as deportation had not been planned at any time for these Jews. The event turned into legend, however: A demonstration of thousands of German women brought about the liberation of their Jewish husbands. It is an uplifting legend, yet a legend nonetheless.¹⁰⁷

The Fabrikaktion had been preceded, in late 1942, by the deportation of Jewish concentration camp inmates from camps in the Reich to camps in the East;¹⁰⁸ on October 20, 1942, the Gemeindeaktion (the “community operation”) had led to the deportation of most of the staff of the Reichsvereinigung and of the Berlin community.¹⁰⁹ Several transports followed at the end of 1942 and in early 1943. After the Fabrikaktion another transport carried half of the remaining Berlin Jewish hospital staff to Auschwitz;¹¹⁰ in May and June transports of bedridden patients followed from the Jewish hospital to Theresienstadt.¹¹¹ In the meantime, however, 10,000 elderly inmates were deported from Theresienstadt to Treblinka. According to a report from Müller to Himmler, it would ease the overpopulation in the “ghetto.”…¹¹²

Leo Baeck and other leaders of the Reichsvereinigung were deported to Theresienstadt in January 1943, and in June the Reich association de facto ceased to exist. The one-thousand-year-old history of the Jews in Germany was coming to an end.

Hertha Feiner was among the last employees of the Berlin community to be deported. She did not wait for the Gestapo in her apartment but, warned by neighbors, moved to the community building; there she was arrested on March 9, 1943. A non-Jewish acquaintance tried without success to have her released, as mother to two Mischling daughters. On March 12 she was put on the transport to Auschwitz. She poisoned herself in the train.¹¹³

A few months earlier, it seemed that the Kleppers would be able to escape the worst. On December 5, 1942, the Swedish legation informed them that their daughter Renate had been granted a visa.¹¹⁴ Would Hanni be able to join her daughter? On the eighth Jochen Klepper was in the office of his protector, Interior Minister Frick. The minister, apparently quite distressed, informed Klepper that he couldn’t do a thing to facilitate the mother’s departure: “Such matters cannot be kept secret; the Führer hears of them and a terrible outburst takes place.”¹¹⁵ Frick arranged for Klepper to meet Eichmann. The head of IVB4 didn’t even promise that Reni would be allowed to leave; in any case the mother would not be authorized to follow.¹¹⁶ The next day, December 10, Eichmann definitively rejected Hanni’s departure. Jochen, Hanni, and Renerle did not hesitate: They would die together. That same night all three committed suicide.¹¹⁷

V

On June 18, 1942, Wehrmacht private HK wrote home from Brest-Litowsk: “In Bereza-Kartuska, where I stopped for lunch, 1,300 Jews had just been shot on the previous day. They had been brought to a pit outside of the town. Men, women and children had to undress completely and were then liquidated with a shot in the back of the neck. The clothes were disinfected and used again. I am convinced that if the war goes on much longer, the Jews will be turned into sausage and served to Russian war prisoners and to the Jewish specialized workers….”¹¹⁸

That same day a meeting of district governors and SS commanders in the General Government reviewed the progress of the extermination: “Oberregierungsrat Engler: The Jewish question has been solved in the city of Lublin. What was the Jewish quarter has been evacuated…. SS and Police Leader Katzmann presented the security situation in the district of Galicia…. Jews have already been evacuated in rather large numbers…. In the next few weeks further Jews are to be resettled…. Amtschef Dr. Hummel reports on conditions in the Warsaw District…. He hopes that the city of Warsaw will be freed of the burden of Jews unable to work in a reasonable period of time…. To the question of State Secretary Dr. Bühler whether there was a chance of decreasing the ghetto population more quickly, State Secretary Krüger responded that a better overview would be possible in the course of August…. Deputy Amtschef Oswald spoke about the current situation in the Radom District: The Radom District had fallen behind in resettling the Jews…. This resettlement of the Jews now depended only on the problem of transport…. State Secretary Krüger indicated that as far as the police were concerned, the Jewish operation had been prepared down to the last detail and that implementation was only dependent on transport.”¹¹⁹

In mid-July, Höfle arrived in Warsaw from Lublin with a group of “specialists.” SS units in the city would in due time be reinforced by Polish “police,” and by Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian auxiliaries. On July 20 Czerniaków, aware of widespread rumors about pending deportations, decided to get some information from his longtime German “interlocutors”: “In the morning at 7:30 at the Gestapo. I asked Mende how much truth there was in the rumors. He replied that he had heard nothing. I turned to Brandt; he also knew nothing.” And so it went. Czerniaków continued his tour of German officials and was repeatedly told that the rumors were Quatsch and Unsinn [utter nonsense]. “I ordered Lejkin [the acting Jewish police chief] to make the public announcement through the precinct police stations.” The chairman then proceeded to Auerswald to discuss the fate of children held in detention centers: “He [Auerswald] ordered me to write him a letter for their release, on condition that they be placed in reformatories and that a guarantee would be given that they would not escape…. It appears that about 2,000 children will qualify for reformatories.”¹²⁰

On July 21 several members of the council were arrested as hostages and so were other prominent Jews in the ghetto administration and beyond (Czerniaków’s wife was also on the list but managed to remain with him in his office).¹²¹ The next morning, July 22, the entrance to the council building was blocked by a few SS cars; the council members and the heads of all departments assembled in Czerniaków’s office, and Höfle arrived with a small retinue. Reich-Ranicki was called in to take down the minutes of the meeting in the conference room. The windows were wide open on that sunny day, and in the street the SS were playing Strauss waltzes on a portable phonograph.¹²²

Höfle announced that the deportations would start within a few hours, and, according to Reich-Ranicki, read out the German instructions, “awkwardly and with some difficulty,” as if he had hardly glanced at the text beforehand: “There was a strained silence in the room, made even more tense by the rattle of my typewriter, the clicking of the cameras of some SS officers, who kept taking pictures, and the gentle melody of the ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ wafting in from the street…. From time to time Höfle looked at me to make sure I was keeping up. Yes, I was keeping up all right…. The final section of the ‘Instructions and Tasks’ set out the penalties for those who attempted to evade or disrupt the resettlement measures! There was but one punishment and it was repeated at the end of each sentence like a refrain: ‘…will be shot.’” 123

Czerniaków tried to negotiate some exemptions (he was particularly worried about the fate of many orphans) but received no assurances whatsoever. On the twenty-third, he noted in his diary: “In the morning at the Community. SS 1st Leut. [Lt.] Worthoff from the deportation staff came and we discussed several problems. He exempted the vocational school students from deportation. The husbands of working women as well. He told me to take up the matter of the orphans with Höfle. The same about craftsmen. When I asked for the number of days per week in which the operation would be carried on, the answer was seven days a week. Throughout the town a great rush to start new workshops. A sewing machine can save a life. It is 3 o’clock. So far 4,000 are ready to go. The orders are that there must be 9,000 [at the Umschlagplatz, the assembly square] by 4 o’clock.”¹²⁴ In the afternoon of the twenty-third, as the Jewish police were unable to fill the quota, the auxiliary police units launched their own roundup without taking any exemptions into account. Czerniaków’s “negotiations” had been in vain.

That same evening the SS called Czerniaków back from home; he was told that the next day 10,000 Jews had to be sent to the Umschlagplatz. The chairman returned to his office, closed the door, wrote one farewell note to the council informing it of the new German demands, another to his wife, and took poison.¹²⁵ Kaplan, no friend of Czerniaków, noted on July 26: “The first victim of the deportation decree was the President, Adam Czerniaków, who committed suicide by poison in the Judenrat building…. There are those who earn immortality in a single hour. The President, Adam Czerniaków, earned his immortality in a single instant.”¹²⁶

On July 22 Treblinka had opened its gates. Every day thousands of terrified ghetto inhabitants were driven to the assembly point and from there, a freight train carried five thousand of them to Treblinka.¹²⁷ At first most of the Jews of Warsaw did not know what fate awaited them. On July 30 Kaplan mentioned “expulsion” and “exile”: “The seventh day of the expulsion. Living funerals pass before the windows of my apartment—cattle trucks or coal wagons full of candidates for expulsion and exile, carrying small bundles under their arms…rosters promising 3 kgs of bread and 1 kg of marmalade drew many a famished Jew to the assembly square.”¹²⁸

On August 5 the deportations engulfed all institutions for children, including all orphanages. Since May of that year, Korczak had been keeping his “ghetto diary”—a record of thoughts, reminiscences, even dreams, more than actual events. Yet every line reflected, to varying degrees, the anxiety that the “old doctor” felt about the fate of his charges and that of the ghetto. His imprisonment by the Gestapo in the dreaded Pawiak jail, at the end of 1940 and in early 1941 (following his insistence on transporting potatoes for his orphanage during the transfer to the ghetto, his wearing a Polish officer’s uniform—he had been an officer in the Polish army, but such a display was of course forbidden—and his steady refusal to wear the mandatory armband with the Jewish star), left him shaken and ill. Vodka soothed his anxiety but not sufficiently to keep his mind off macabre ruminations, even when he joked.¹²⁹ Thus sometime in late May or early June of 1942, he wrote:

“All is fine, I say, and it’s my wish to be merry. An amusing reminiscence: Five decagrams of so-called smoked sausage now costs 1 zloty 20. It used to cost only 80 grosze (and bread a bit more). I said to a saleswoman: ‘Tell me, dear lady, isn’t that sausage by chance made of human flesh? It’s rather too cheap for horsemeat.’ And she replied: ‘How should I know? I wasn’t there when it was being made.’” Leaving his peculiar sense of humor at that, Korczak turned again to his single overwhelming concern: the orphans. “The day began with weighing the children,” he noted in the same entry. “The month of May has brought a marked decline [in their weight]. The previous months of this year were not too bad and even May is not yet alarming. But we still have two months or more before the harvest. No getting away from that. And the restrictions imposed by official regulations, new additional interpretations and overcrowding are expected to make the situation still worse.”¹³⁰

During these same days, Korczak noted a street scene: “The body of a dead boy lies on the sidewalk. Nearby, three boys are playing horses and drivers. At one point they notice the body, move a few steps to the side, go on playing.”¹³¹

On August 4 Korczak described another minute episode: In the early-morning light he was watering the flowers on his windowsill while in the street an armed German soldier stood watching him. “I am watering the flowers. My bald head in the window—What a splendid target. He has a rifle. Why is he standing and looking on calmly? He has no orders to shoot. And perhaps he was a village teacher in civilian life, or a notary, a street sweeper in Leipzig, a waiter in Cologne? What would he do if I nodded to him? Waved my hand in a friendly gesture? Perhaps he doesn’t even know that things are as they are? He may have arrived only yesterday, from far away.”¹³²

The following day the whole orphanage, like all Jewish orphanages in the ghetto, was ordered to proceed to the Umschlagplatz. Korczak walked at the head of the column of children marching to their death. On August 6 Lewin noted: “They emptied Dr. Korczak’s orphanage with the doctor at the head. Two hundred orphans.”¹³³ Kaplan was no longer alive to describe the deportation of Korczak’s children. His ultimate diary entry had been written on August 4; the last line read: “If my life ends—what will become of my diary.”¹³⁴

By September 21 the great Aktion was over: 10,380 Jews had been killed in the ghetto during the deportations; 265,040 had been deported to Treblinka and gassed.¹³⁵

Capt. Wilm Hosenfeld, head of sports facilities for Wehrmacht officers in Warsaw, knew quite a lot about what was happening to the Jews—although he refused to believe in systematic murder—as his diary throughout the Aktion indicates. “If what they are saying in the city is true,” he noted on July 25, 1942, “and it does come from reliable sources—then it is no honor to be a German officer, and no one could go along with what is happening. But I can’t believe it. The rumors say that thirty thousand Jews are to be taken from the ghetto this week and sent east somewhere. In spite of all the secrecy people say they know what happens then: Somewhere near Lublin, buildings have been constructed with rooms that can be electrically heated with strong current, like the electricity in a crematorium. Unfortunate people are driven into these heated rooms and burned alive, and thousands can be killed like that in a day, saving all the trouble of shooting them, digging mass graves and then filling them in. The guillotine of the French revolution can’t compete, and even in the cellars of the Russian secret police they hadn’t devised such virtuoso methods of mass slaughter. But surely this is madness. It can’t be possible. You wonder why the Jews don’t defend themselves. However, many, indeed most of them, are so weak from starvation and misery that they couldn’t offer any resistance.”¹³⁶

In brief notes jotted down at the end of 1942, Ringelblum established a clear distinction between the previous period and the one that had started during the last few months: “The latest period. The time of atrocities. Impossible to write a monographic study because—the shadows of Ponar, 9,000 from Slonim, expulsions—the tragedy of Lublin…Chelmno—gas. Treblinki [sic]…. Time of persecutions, and now the time of atrocities.”¹³⁷

Treblinka, the last and deadliest of the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps, had been built to the northeast of Warsaw, close to the Warsaw-Bialystok railway line, on sandy terrain stretching to a bend in the river Bug. The closest station was Malkinia, from which a single-track line led to the camp. The “lower” or first camp extended over the larger area; it included the assembly and undressing squares and, farther on, workshops and barracks. The second or “upper” camp was isolated from the first by barbed wire and thick foliage fences that hindered unwelcome observation. A heavy brick building concealed the three gas chambers linked to a diesel engine by a system of pipes (a larger building with ten gas chambers would be added in October 1942). As in Chelmno, Belzec, or Sobibor, on arrival the deportees had to undress and leave all clothes or valuables for the sorting squads. From the “undressing square” the victims were driven to the gas chambers along “the road to heaven” (Himmelstrasse), a narrow corridor also hidden from the surroundings by thick branches. A sign pointed “to the showers.”¹³⁸

SS Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla had been in charge of the construction of the camp. Euthanasia physician Dr. Irmfried Eberl was appointed first commandant, and on July 23, 1942, the exterminations began. According to SS Unterscharführer Hans Hingst’s testimony, “Dr. Eberl’s ambition was to reach the highest possible numbers and exceed all the other camps. So many transports arrived that the disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled.”¹³⁹ Within days Eberl completely lost control of the situation. By the end of August some 312,000 Jews, mainly from Warsaw but also from the districts of Radom and Lublin, had been gassed at the new camp.¹⁴⁰

Eberl’s “incompetence” was compounded by widespread corruption: The money and valuables carried by the victims found their way into the camp staff ’s pockets and also into those of the commandant’s euthanasia colleagues in Berlin.¹⁴¹ When Globocnik became aware of the situation in Treblinka in August, he traveled to the camp with Wirth and Josef Oberhauser. Eberl was relieved of his position then and there, and Wirth was ordered to move in and tidy up the chaos so that Stangl, the Sobibor commandant, could take over, which he did in early September.¹⁴²

In his prison interviews with Sereny, Stangl described his first visit to Treblinka while Eberl was still in charge: “I drove there, with an SS driver…. We could smell it kilometers away. The road ran alongside the railway. When we were about fifteen, twenty minutes’ drive from Treblinka we began to see corpses by the [railway] line, first just two or three, then more, and as we drove into Treblinka station, there were what looked hundreds of them—just lying there—they’d obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive…that too, looked as if it had been there for days…. When I entered the camp and got out of the car on the square I stepped knee-deep into money; I didn’t know which way to turn, where to go. I waded in notes, currency, precious stones, jewelry, clothes…. The smell was indescribable; the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. Across the square, in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the barbed-wire fence and all around the perimeter of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls—whores, I found out later, from all over the countryside—weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music.”¹⁴³

VI

In Lodz in the fall of 1942, as had been the case in Warsaw, the Germans established priority rules of their own. On September 1 the deportations started. The patients of the ghetto’s five hospitals were “evacuated” within two hours; whoever protested was shot on the spot. In all 2,000 patients, including 400 children, were carted away. Once the Germans had arrested most of the patients, they checked the hospital registry, and if anybody was missing, most of the time family members were taken instead.

According to Josef Zelkowicz, one of the ghetto chroniclers and a Yiddish writer of some renown, who apart from his “official” contributions to the “Chronicle” also kept a private diary, the procedure was in fact more tortuous: “The authorities insisted that all patients who escaped from the hospitals be turned in,” he recorded on September 3. “However, since some were missing and many others could not be handed over because they had ‘backing’ and connections in the ghetto, it was agreed with the authorities that the kehilla would transfer two hundred other people in their stead. Those to be sacrificed would be sought not only among the escapees but among people who had been hospitalized at some other time, for any illness and had long since been discharged but lacked [protectors]. Even those who had never been hospitalized but who had applied for hospitalization on the basis of a doctor’s recommendation would be included.”¹⁴⁴

The deportation of the sick was immediately followed by an order to evacuate some further 20,000 Jews, including all children under ten and all the elderly above sixty-five. As these categories totaled only 17,000 people, 3,000 unemployed or unemployable inhabitants were added.¹⁴⁵ “In the evening,” Sierakowiak recorded on September 3, “disturbing news spread that the Germans had allegedly demanded that all children up to the age of ten must be delivered for deportation and, supposedly, extermination.”¹⁴⁶

On September 5 Sierakowiak’s mother was taken away. “My most sacred, beloved, worn-out, blessed, cherished Mother has fallen victim to the bloodthirsty German Nazi beast!!! Two doctors, Czech Jews, suddenly arrived in the Sierakowiaks’ apartment and declared the mother unfit for work; throughout the doctors’ visit, the father continued to eat the soup left by relatives in hiding and was also “taking sugar out of their bag.” The mother left, with some bread in her bag and some potatoes. “I couldn’t muster the willpower to look through the windows after her or to cry,” Sierakowiak went on. “I walked around, talked and finally sat as though I had turned to stone…. I thought my heart was breaking…. It didn’t break, though, and it let me eat, think, speak and go to sleep.”¹⁴⁷

On September 4 Rumkowski addressed a crowd of some 1,500 terrified inhabitants assembled on “Fireman’s Square”: “The ghetto has been dealt a grievous blow. They ask that we give them that which is most precious—the children and old people. I was never privileged to have a child of my own and therefore I devoted my best years to children…. In my old age I am compelled to stretch out my hand and beg: ‘My brothers and my sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!’…I must carry out the grim bloody surgery, I must amputate limbs to save the body! I must take away children and if I do not, others too may be taken…. I wanted at least to save one age group—from age nine to ten. But they would not relent…. We have in the ghetto many tuberculosis patients; their days or perhaps weeks are numbered. I do not know—maybe it is a satanic plot, maybe it is not—but I cannot refrain from presenting it: Give me these patients and it may be possible to save healthy people in their stead.”¹⁴⁸ “The President cries like a little boy,” Zelkowicz added.¹⁴⁹

After describing the deportations, the chroniclers added a highly significant postscript conveying, as Sierakowiak had confessed about himself, the prevailing emotional numbness of the ghetto population: “The populace’s strange reaction to the recent events is noteworthy. There is not the slightest doubt that this was a profound and terrible shock, and yet one must wonder at the indifference shown by those…from whom loved ones had been taken. It would seem that the events of recent days would have immersed the entire population of the ghetto in mourning for a long time to come, and yet, right after the incidents, and even during the resettlement action, the populace was obsessed with everyday concerns—getting bread, rations and so forth—and often went from immediate personal tragedy right back into daily life.¹⁵⁰

Zelkowicz, who had written the chronicle entry about emotional numbness, offered some explanation for it in his private diary on September 3; it could have been called “the psychology of starvation.” While mentioning how death had become “a daily event that surprised and frightened no one,” the diarist noted that a distribution of potatoes had been announced on that same day; that had become the real event. “As long as a ghetto inhabitant lives, he wants at least once, if only for the last time, to experience the sense of satisfaction, to gorge himself. Afterward, whatever will be, will be…. So whenever there is talk about handing out potatoes, everything that has happened till now is shunted aside…. Yes, potatoes will be given out; it’s a fact. Starting tomorrow, Friday, September 4…. The crowd is elated…. The people can only wish one another: may we be the privileged to eat these potatoes while we are still alive.”¹⁵¹

Between August 10 and 23, 1942, many of the Jews of Lwov were deported to the Janowska Road slave labor camp and, after a further selection, from there to Belzec. Some 40,000 of the victims arrested during the August roundup were exterminated.¹⁵² The remaining Jews of the city were driven into a ghetto, soon surrounded by a wooden fence. The Judenrat office was relocated to the ghetto area, but the Judenrat officials and among them the chairman, Henryk Landesberg, were not to resume their functions. According to the Germans, Landesberg had been in touch with the Polish underground.¹⁵³ The chairman and twelve other Jewish officials were to be publicly hanged from the roof of the building and from lampposts.

The executions took some time, as the ropes used for the hangings broke; the victims who fell to the pavement were compelled to climb the stairs leading to the roof and were hanged again. The highest spot was kept for Landesberg, as chairman. He fell to the pavement three times and three times was brought back to his balcony. The bodies were left on display for two days. A survivor from the ghetto described the scene. “I went with my mother to the office of the Jewish community regarding an apartment and there in the light breeze, dangled the corpses of the hanged, their faces blue, their heads tilted backward, their tongues blackened and stretched out. Luxury cars raced in from the center of the city, German civilians with their wives and children came to see the sensational spectacle, and, as was their custom, the visitors enthusiastically photographed the scene. Afterward the Ukrainians and Poles arrived by with greater modesty.”¹⁵⁴ The Germans sent the bill for the ropes to the new Judenrat.¹⁵⁵ As for the Jews of the Lwov ghetto, they did not survive long: Most were liquidated in sporadic Aktionen and the remnant transferred to the Janowski camp in early 1943. When Lwov was liberated at the end of July 1944, out of a community of some 160,000 Jews in June 1941, some 3,400 were still alive.¹⁵⁶

In nearby Drohobycz, the writer Bruno Schulz, who, as will be remembered, was painting the walls of SS Felix Landau’s mansion and of the local Gestapo offices, was still alive in the autumn of 1942, protected by his “patron.” In the meantime he had had to move into the ghetto and was by then mainly employed in cataloging the approximately 100,000 books seized by the Germans in the town and assembled at the old-age home.¹⁵⁷

Schulz sensed that his end was near. “They are supposed to liquidate us by November [1942],” he told a Polish ex–fellow teacher of the local gymnasium.¹⁵⁸ And indeed on November 19 a shooting incident in the ghetto triggered wild reprisals against the population. Landau was away; the Gestapo man’s personal enemy, SS Scharführer Karl Günther, seized the occasion of the “wild action,” tracked Schulz on one of the ghetto streets, and killed him. About one hundred Jews were murdered in the action: On the next day their bodies were still lying on the streets.¹⁵⁹

In July 1942 the chief of the Vilna Jewish police, Jacob Gens, became the sole head of the Vilna ghetto. Among community leaders he was in many ways atypical. Born in Kovno, he fought as a volunteer in the Lithuanian war of independence in the aftermath of World War I and was promoted to officer rank. He married a Christian and was well regarded by Lithuanian nationalists (he himself was a right-wing Zionist, a member of Wladimir Jabotinski’s Revisionist Party). In Philip Friedman’s words “it remains something of a mystery why Gens had accepted the position [of chief of the ghetto police].”¹⁶⁰ His wife and daughter remained on the Aryan side of the city. He possibly felt a moral obligation to take the position offered by the Germans. In the first letter Gens sent his wife from the ghetto, he wrote. “This is the first time in my life that I have to engage in such duties. My heart is broken. But I shall always do what is necessary for the sake of the Jews in the ghetto.”¹⁶¹

During the selections of late November 1941, Gens succeeded in saving some lives in particularly difficult circumstances; his standing among the inhabitants grew and the Germans also kept adding to his tasks. But in mid-October 1942 the almost legendary “kommandant” was confronted with a grim challenge: the order to kill Jews.

Gens and his policemen were sent to a nearby town, Oszmiana, where about 1,400 Jews had been assembled for extermination. The police chief negotiated with the Germans, who finally agreed that only 400 Jews were to be murdered. Gens’s men and some Lithuanians carried out the executions. Somehow news of the approaching operation had spread in the ghetto as the policemen got on their way. Rudashevski was outraged by the very idea of such participation: “…Jews will dip their hands in the dirtiest and bloodiest work. They wish simply to replace the Lithuanians…. The entire ghetto is in uproar about this departure [of the Jewish policemen to Oszmiana],” he recorded on October 19. “How great is our shame, our humiliation! Jews help the Germans in their organized, terrible work of extermination.”¹⁶²

In fact the ghetto was not in an uproar, contrary to what Rudashevski intensely hoped for and reported. It seems rather that the inhabitants accepted Gens’s reasoning and his justifications: Saving some by sacrificing others. “The tragedy is that the…public mostly approves of Gens’s attitude,” Kruk wrote on October 28. “The public figures that perhaps this may really help.”¹⁶³

It was not only the ordinary population of the ghetto that supported Gens’s decision; on October 27 the highly respected YIVO founder and linguist Zelig Kalmanovitch noted in his diary. “The rabbi [of Oszmiana] ruled that the old ones should be handed over. Old ones who asked that they should be taken…. If outsiders [the Lithuanians or the Germans] had done the job—there would have been more victims and all the property would have been stolen.”¹⁶⁴ These lines do not reveal if Kalmanovitch was merely recording Gens’s arguments or expressing his own agreement. But he did so at length a few days later when Gens was again ordered to participate with his policemen in an Aktion in ´

Swi¸eciany: “In truth,” Kalmanovitch wrote in November 1942, “we are in any case not innocent…. We have bought our lives and our future with the death of tens of thousands. If we have decided that we must continue with this life despite everything, then we must go on to the end. May the merciful Lord forgive us…. That is the situation and it is not in our hands to change it. Of course delicate souls cannot bear such acts, but the protest of the soul has no more than psychological value, and there is no moral value to it. Everybody is guilty or, more correctly, all are innocent and holy, and most of all those who take real action, who must overcome their spirit, who must overcome the torture of the soul, who free others of this task, and save their souls from pain.”¹⁶⁵

A few weeks later a briefly oblivious community celebrated a significant achievement: “100,000 books in the ghetto.” Kruk was in charge: “In November the ghetto library went beyond the figure of a hundred thousand books distributed to readers. Because of this, the library is organizing a big cultural morning event, which will take place in the Ghetto Theater on Sunday, the 13^th of this month [December], at noon. On the program: Opening by G. Yashunski, welcome from the ghetto chief [Gens], writers, scientific circles, teachers and the Youth Club. Dr. Ts. Feldstein will speak on “The Book and Martyrdom,” then a lecture by H. Kruk “100,000 Books in the Ghetto.” The second part will be a concert of words and music. The finale: distribution of gift books to the first reader in the ghetto and the youngest reader of the library.”¹⁶⁶

VII

During the last months of 1942 a small minority of European Jews understood their common fate; the vast majority remained tossed to and fro among momentary insight, disbelief, despair, and, as we saw, ever new hope.

Hidden in her Amsterdam attic, Anne Frank seemed to know what was happening to the Jews of the outside world. “Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves,” she noted on October 9, 1942. “The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they are sending all the Jews.” After adding some horrible details about Westerbork, apparently based on rumors that had reached Miep Gies, Anne went on. “If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places to which the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.”¹⁶⁷

A few weeks later Anne described the arrests in Amsterdam as reported to the inhabitants of the attic by a new tenant, Mr. Dussel, and again she seemed to reach the same conclusion: “Countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate. Night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there…. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children and babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death.”¹⁶⁸

During those very same days Rudashevski was recording events and incidents of everyday life in the ghetto. In Vilna, as we saw, the end of 1942 was a relatively quiet period. On October 7, 1942, Rudashevski’s voice was almost that of a happy and carefree youngster. “The club work has begun. We have groups for literature and natural science. After leaving class at 7:30, I go immediately to the club. It is gay there, we have a good time and return home evenings in a large crowd. The days are short, it is dark in the street when our bunch leaves the club. [Jewish] policemen shout at us but we do not listen to them.”¹⁶⁹

Did Anne, in her faraway hiding place, understand the situation more thoroughly than Rudashevski in his decimated Vilna ghetto? It is doubtful. At times both recorded the most ominous information, then appeared to forget about it while turning their minds to the more immediate issues of their teenage lives.

Etty Hillesum, as an employee of the Jewish Council, had already stayed briefly in Westerbork. On her return to Amsterdam in December 1942, she tried to describe the camp and the ultimate fate of the deportees in a letter to two Dutch friends: “Finding something to say about Westerbork is difficult…it is a camp for a people in transit…to be deported a few days later to their unknown destiny…deep within Europe, from where only a few indistinct sounds have come back to the rest of us. But the quota must be filled; so must the train, which comes to fetch its load with mathematical regularity.”¹⁷⁰

How could Etty have known the exact meaning of the deportations when Gonda Redlich in Theresienstadt, so intent on saving children and youngsters from the transports to the East, and so often alluding to the fact that the deportees were being carried to their death, was making plans for the postwar years? In one and the same diary entry, on June 14–15, 1942, for example, Redlich recorded both his fears about the transports and his plans for the future: “I fear that the transports will not stay in one place in the East. What will happen when we go to our land after the war? What will our position be toward the others? I already feel that for me Aliyah [emigration to the land of Israel] will be an escape, an escape from people here in Europe, an escape because of life here in the Goluth [exile], an escape when you compare the old life to the new.”¹⁷¹

The total confusion about what was happening to the deportees, from whom nothing was heard directly once they had boarded the transports, reappears in Paris at the end of 1942. Although on August 18 Biélinky had emphasized that “one never had news from the deportees,”¹⁷² on December 2 he reported: “It is said that the Jews deported from France, Belgium, etc. have been found—about 35,000 of them—in a town in Russia, where they have been well received by the population.”¹⁷³ December 17 Biélinky recorded his last diary entry. He was arrested on the night of February 10, 1943, by the French police and deported from Drancy to Sobibor on March 23.¹⁷⁴

On December 9, 1942, Lambert was ordered by the Commissariat Général to dismiss all foreign Jews still working for the UGIF (approximately one-quarter of the staff) and told that—at that price—the French employees would be spared from deportation. Did he believe it? Even when he heard the Allied governments’ declaration about the extermination of the Jews of Europe later the same month, he wrote that he still believed in his “star.”¹⁷⁵

Thus in almost all the diaries written by Jews in Western Europe, in Germany, and even in Theresienstadt, the entries during the second half of 1942 indicate both sporadic intimations about Nazi intention to exterminate all of them and, often simultaneously, contrary information and personal plans for the postwar period. Lambert, like Redlich, dreamed of the future: He hoped to own “a house on a hill” in his old age, although he immediately added that he knew this to be impossible.¹⁷⁶

As for Klemperer, after noting on October 23, 1942, how the German military situation was worsening, he added: “But all conversations among Jews again and again lead to the same reflection: ‘If they have the time, they will kill us first.’ One said to Frau Ziegler yesterday: He felt like a calf at the slaughterhouse, looking on, as the other calves are slaughtered, and waiting for his turn. The man is right.”¹⁷⁷ And yet, a day later, as though what he had just written was meaningless, Klemperer mused about his future projects “after Hitler’s fall:” “With what shall I start? I very certainly do not have so much more time [Klemperer had a heart condition]. The 18ème [a book project on eighteenth-century literature] has slipped into the background for me. Tackle a supplement of my Modern Prose? Continue with the Curriculum?”¹⁷⁸ and the like.

Even close to the killing sites, Jews at times did not know what happened to the deportees, nor did they believe the information that reached them. Jews in Warsaw and in London knew the details about Chelmno, while the inhabitants of Lodz dismissed them. Thus a little-known Lodz ghetto diarist, Menachem Oppenheim, a native of the city and apparently an Orthodox Jew, recorded his reaction after the great deportations of September 1942. Oppenheim, like everybody else, was wondering about the use of small children, the elderly, and hospital patients in labor camps in places unknown, and yet he recorded—probably on October 16, 1942: “People say that they were taken to Chelmno near Kolo and there is a gasworks where they are gassed. But I believe that something else happened with the Jews of Warsaw and Kielce Cracow. For when I remember my beloved wife child mother sister brother brothers-in-law with their children I hope that they are alive and that soon I’ll rejoice with them…. If not then why am I tormenting myself.”¹⁷⁹

By mid-August 1942, on the other hand, Abraham Lewin was no longer fooled about what was happening to the deportees from Warsaw: “When people get out of the train, they are beaten viciously. Then they are driven into huge barracks. For five minutes heart-rending screams are heard, then silence. The bodies that are taken out are swollen horribly…. Young men from among the prisoners are the gravediggers, the next day they too are killed.”¹⁸⁰ On August 28, the information was brought by a Jew who escaped from Treblinka and returned to the ghetto: “His words confirm once again and leave no room for doubt that all deportees, both those who have been seized and those who reported voluntarily, are taken to be killed and no one is saved,” Lewin wrote. “In the last weeks at least 300,000 Jews have been exterminated, from Warsaw and other towns…. God! Now it is certain that all those deported from Warsaw have been killed.”¹⁸¹ Very soon Lewin’s turn would come.

In Western Europe the situation of the Flinkers was not an unusual one in the summer of 1942. At the beginning of the deportations from Holland, Eliezer Flinker, a Polish-born Orthodox Jew and a successful businessman residing in The Hague with his wife and seven children (six girls and a boy), paid what it took and the family crossed the border to Belgium. In Brussels further payments to the right intermediaries ensured an Aryan residence permit. The son, Moshe, whom we already encountered as a high school student in Holland, was sixteen years old when the Flinkers settled in the Belgian capital.

Moshe’s diary, started on November 24, 1942, not only provides insight into the daily life of a Jewish family hiding in the open, so to speak, in a Western European city, but also gives us a glimpse of the inner turmoil of a profoundly religious Jewish boy in the face of the extraordinary persecution befalling his people. “Our sufferings have by far exceeded our wrongdoings,” Moshe wrote on November 26, 1942. “What other purpose could the Lord have in allowing such things to befall us? I feel certain that further troubles will not bring any Jew back to the paths of righteousness; on the contrary, I think that upon experiencing such great anguish they will think that there is no God at all…and indeed what can God intend by all these calamities that are happening to us in this terrible period? It seems to me that the time has come for our redemption, or rather, that we are more or less worthy of being redeemed.”¹⁸² On December 3, however, he was uncertain. “Today is the eve of Hanukkah, but I have the feeling that this Hanukkah will pass, as have so many others, without a miracle or anything resembling one.”¹⁸³

More often than not the Flinkers quarreled: The mother wanted the father to find some work; she wanted them to move on to Switzerland, despite the fact than an acquaintance who had attempted to cross the Swiss border had been betrayed by the guides and had barely escaped with his life.¹⁸⁴ The father was wary: Both looking for work and attempting the journey and passage to Switzerland were too dangerous; better to stay where they were and remain as unobtrusive as possible. Yet, when it was not school time [during which children out on the street would have looked suspicious], Moshe could venture out of the house, even go to see a film, although cinemas were forbidden to Jews.

On December 13 Moshe saw Jud Süss. “What I saw there,” he recorded on the following day, “made my blood boil. I was red in the face when I came out. I realized the wicked objectives of these evil people—how they want to inject the poison of anti-Semitism in the blood of the gentiles. While I was watching the film I suddenly remembered what the evil one [Hitler] had said in one of his speeches: Whichever side wins the war, anti-Semitism will spread and spread until the Jews are no more” [Moshe was probably paraphrasing Hitler’s speech of April 1942]. “In that film I saw the means he is using to achieve his aim…. The way in which jealousy, hatred and loathing are aroused is simply indescribable…. The Jews are being made so hateful to the world that nothing that anyone can do will be able to undo his work.”¹⁸⁵

The smallest incident triggered the worst fears. “Last night my parents and I were sitting around the table,” Moshe noted on January 7, 1943. “It was almost midnight. Suddenly we heard the bell: we all shuddered. We thought that the moment had come for us to be deported…. My mother had already put her shoes on to go to the door, but my father said to wait until they ring once more. But the bell did not ring again. Thank heaven it passed quietly. Only the fear remained, and all day long my parents have been very nervous. They can’t stand the slightest noise, and the smallest thing bothers them.”¹⁸⁶

Deportation from Brussels, as halting as it was, continued nonetheless. On January 21, 1943, Moshe was sent to the [former] synagogue beadle to buy some clothing and bread coupons. The beadle was gone; his door had been sealed with a swastika sign: “When I stood in the street, I saw that the shutters were closed. I thought: This man [the beadle] took so much trouble in hiding from the Germans, and now, despite all his labor, he is taken away—he, his wife, and his two children. The younger child was a four-year-old girl.”¹⁸⁷

At the end of that fearsome day, Moshe wanted to pray: “I do not know in whose name to pray. Our forefathers are too far from us. Our people? It looks as though they have no merit at all, otherwise so many troubles could not have befallen them. Maybe the prayer that will be most effective will be about the magnitude of our pain. As great as our sins have been, our troubles have already surpassed them. A little more and we shall perish.”¹⁸⁸

VIII

It was in this atmosphere of total uncertainty that, on September 20 and 21, 1942, the Jews of Europe had tried—as much as each community could or each individual wished—to observe Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There were places where the “Kol Nidre” service, on the eve of Yom Kippur, could not take place at all. In Paris, for example, the Germans had imposed a curfew from three p.m. on that day (a Sunday) in response to renewed attacks on members of the Wehrmacht. But according to Bielinky, there were many people in the synagogues on the twenty-first.¹⁸⁹ Sebastian’s diary entry of September 22 was laconic: “Yesterday was Yom Kippur. A day of fasting—and of trying to believe and hope.”¹⁹⁰ The key word was “trying,” trying against all odds, in spite of the events of the past months, and in the face of “God’s silence.”

Klemperer’s entry on the twenty-first was, formally speaking, that of a converted Jew. Much had changed, however, in terms of self-perception, for this “Protestant” who, as we saw, had explicitly declared at the outset of the war that he did not want to have anything to do with the Jewish community. “Today is Yom Kippur,” he noted, “and this very day the last 26 ‘old people’ are sitting in the Community house, from where they will be transported early tomorrow.” The Klemperers went on “farewell visits” to the friends slated for deportation. Victor mentioned, among others, the reaction of the Neumanns, “who were defiantly merry: ‘Yes and no.’ On the one hand the corpses themselves were there. On the other hand they were really going into a beyond, from which, as yet there had been no reliable news. Because what had been reported was no more than supposition. He gave me a prayer book with Hebrew and German text. I: ‘How was it possible to forgive one’s enemies on the Day of Atonement?’ He: ‘The Jewish religion does not require it. The relevant prayer says Atonement for all Israelites and for the stranger in our midst, that is only for the peaceful guest among us. Judaism nowhere requires love of one’s enemy.’ I: ‘Love of one’s enemy is moral softening of the brain.’”…At the end of his visits, Klemperer summed up his impression: “The mood of all Jewry here is without exception the same: The terrible end is imminent. They will perish, but perhaps, probably, they will have time to annihilate us first.”¹⁹¹

In Theresienstadt, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Redlich recorded an extraordinary scene: “The attics. A blind woman has been registered for a transport. She has been sitting without help for many hours. They are bringing her to the attic. A small child, ten years old, helps her. A spectacle not to be believed.”…On the Day of Atonement, the usual was recorded: “A transport from Berlin arrived. They traveled all day Yom Kippur. Nevertheless, some women fasted all day.”¹⁹²

In Warsaw the Aktion went on until September 21. That day the last transport left for Treblinka with 2,196 Jews.¹⁹³ A member of Globocnik’s staff must have scrutinized the Jewish calendar: The day the deportations began, July 22, was the eve of the Ninth of Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple, and the last day of the Aktion was Yom Kippur.

Not much, of course, was recorded by the Warsaw diarists about Yom Kippur as such, but the coincidence was not missed by some. “The SS men—as is their wont—had prepared a surprise for the Jews on the Day of Atonement,” Peretz Opoczynski, whose fragmentary diaries were found in the Oneg Shabbat archives, noted on September 21…. “In honor of the Day of Atonement the factories were not working, to make believe that the Jewish religion was tolerated. In return, however, new sorrow was being added to the Jewish cup of woe. The SS men are alleged to have finally left Warsaw yesterday. The fact that today’s action has been carried out by the ‘shop-commissars,’ Jewish policemen and ‘shop guards’ [Werkschutz], and not by the German soldiers, seems to fully confirm the rumor. The Day of Atonement has brought us plenty of fear and shattered nerves.”¹⁹⁴ And yet, on September 21, Lewin noted: “In our courtyard Jews are praying, pouring out their cares to the Creator.”¹⁹⁵

In Kovno, Rabbi Shapiro did inform the inhabitants that workers had to go to work and he allowed those in poor health to eat, according to Tory’s diary entry of September 20. “Despite the ban on praying in public,” Tory further recorded, “many minyanim[prayer quorums of ten Jewish men] assembled in the ghetto. The wording of ‘Hazkarat neshamot ’ [remembrance of souls] had been printed on a typewriter by the council because of the shortage of prayer books…for the Holy Days.” The next day Tory recorded that many workers fasted at their workplaces. Two [German] officials were inspecting the ghetto on that day: “They went in the direction of the hospital where a prayer meeting was taking place. The praying Jews were warned only at the last moment, but succeeded in dispersing before the Germans came.”¹⁹⁶

None of this secretiveness was necessary in Vilna. Apart from smaller services, an official prayer service was organized in the hall of the ghetto theater, with a cantor and a choir. Gens attended, and so did all the Jewish officials of the ghetto. “After Kol Nidre,” Kruk noted, “[Tsemakh] Feldstein announces that Mr. Gens will speak. Gens says: let us begin with a kaddish [prayer for the dead] for those who are gone. We have gone through a hard year; let us pray to God that next year will be easier. We must be hard, disciplined, and industrious. At the beginning of Gens’s speech, a great lament broke out. It was the wind of Ponar, of death of the children, women, and men who were torn away. Even Gens was strongly moved.”¹⁹⁷

There was of course no place for young Rudashevski at the main prayer meeting. “It is Yom Kippur eve,” he noted on the twentieth. “A sad mood suffuses the ghetto. People have had such a sad Holy Day feeling. I am as far from religion now as before the ghetto. Nevertheless, this holiday, drenched in blood and sorrow, which is solemnized in the ghetto, now penetrates my heart…. People sit at home and weep. They remind themselves of the past…. The hearts which have turned to stone in the grip of the ghetto woes and did not have time to weep their fill have now on this evening of lamentation poured out all their bitterness.”¹⁹⁸

In Kovno and Vilna the memory of the massacres of the previous year rekindled the sorrow in the September days of 1942. In Lodz, as in Warsaw, the inhabitants were barely reaching the end of a period of unequaled extermination and, of course, the chroniclers abstained from any comment. Yom Kippur was a workday like any other. Yet it was not an entirely ordinary day: “Great appreciation and gratitude were felt for the especially good and substantial midday meal—a potato and pea dish cooked with bones—that was served to mark the holiday. The midday meal was the sole evidence of the holiday, which is normally celebrated so solemnly. Only a few private stores were closed.”¹⁹⁹

Such lack of loftier feelings angered Rosenfeld, although he could not have forgotten the events of the past weeks and, more generally, the utter misery of the ghetto population. Yet, on September 23, he did not restrain his feelings: “In shirts, gloves—in the ghetto workshops, hundreds of Eastern Jews were shopping on YK [Yom Kippur], no Western Jew was to be seen. Hardening of the human spirit, deafness to the heart, alienation. Basest mentality doesn’t matter. What kind of human beings are these? Terrible, downcast, melancholy, sobering.”²⁰⁰

IX

While, during the second half of 1942, the hunting down of Jews and their wholesale murder had spread to every country and territory in Germany’s direct grip, for some segments of European Jewry the attitudes of a few governments, either allied with the Reich or neutral, were becoming a matter of life and death.

Crossing the Spanish border was relatively easy following the defeat of France, as we saw, provided the (mainly Jewish) refugees had visas for a further destination. Once the deportations from France started, escape via Spain became a chance of survival. By then, however, Spanish border guards were sending the fleeing Jews back to France. A few months later, after the Allied landing in North Africa and the occupation of the whole of France by the Germans, refugees—Jewish and others—also tried to cross into Spain in order to join the Allied forces in North Africa. The Spaniards soon found themselves caught between the contrary pressures of Germany and of the Anglo-Saxon powers. It took a direct threat from Churchill, in April 1943, to convince Franco that, at that stage of the war, Spain’s frontiers could not be fully closed.²⁰¹

No such problems arose between Germany and Switzerland. Authority over the foreigners living in Switzerland and over immigration was in the hands of the Federal Department of Justice and Police (headed since 1940 by Federal Councillor Eduard von Steiger) and, more specifically, in the hands of Heinrich Rothmund’s Police Division. During 1942 Swiss border police and customs officials were steadily reinforced by army units whose main task became to hunt down Jewish refugees. On the other side of the border, well remunerated but often unreliable guides (including at times outright criminals who defrauded their hapless charges and in some cases even murdered them for their money and valuables) tried to slip through the blockade.

On July 16, 1942 (the day the mass roundups started in Paris), the Intelligence and Security Division of the Swiss army warned Rothmund’s deputy, Robert Jezler. “We have noticed that for some time now the number of Jewish, Dutch and Belgian civilian refugees, as well as that of Polish refugees living in these countries, had been increasing in an alarming manner. All of them leave their own country for the same reason: to avoid the work camps to which they are sent by the occupying power…. Urgent measures would seem to be needed to prevent whole groups of refugees from entering our country, as has been the case recently…. In our opinion certain elements should be turned back; the relevant organizations would then no doubt hear about the measures taken, and this would put an end to their activities.”²⁰² Identifying these “certain elements” did not demand much imagination.

The Police Division faced a decision whose full consequences it knew: “We have not been able recently to decide about sending these people back,” Jezler wrote on July 30. “Reports confirming each other and entirely reliable about the way the deportations are taking place and about the situation in the Jewish areas in the East are so horrible that one has to understand the desperate attempts of the refugees to escape such a fate; one cannot anymore take the responsibility of sending them back.”²⁰³

Rothmund thought otherwise. A decree of October 17, 1939, ordered the sending back of refugees who entered Switzerland illegally. Until the summer of 1942 it had not been strictly applied by all cantonal authorities (which often sent the refugees to internment camps); from then on it was to be enforced. On August 4, Steiger signed the directive. In a circular sent on August 13 to all relevant civilian and military authorities, the police division, after indicating that the number of refugees, “mainly Jews of various nationalities,” arriving at the border had grown to an average of twenty-one persons a day over the previous two weeks, explained that both for security and economic reasons, these refugees had to be sent back. Political refugees were not to be sent back but “persons who have fled purely on racial grounds, for example Jews, cannot be considered political refugees” (emphasis in original).²⁰⁴ At the first attempt to cross the border the refugee was to be sent back; if a further attempt took place, the refugee was to be delivered to the army or the relevant authorities on the other side despite all the risks involved.”²⁰⁵

From the minutes of a police directors’ conference that took place on August 28, 1942, it becomes amply clear that everyone knew that excluding Jews from the status of political refugees was “a farce” in Rothmund’s own words. Even Steiger admitted as much: “Political Refugees. Theory is no good,” the federal councillor declared. “Jews are also in a way political refugees.”²⁰⁶ Notwithstanding some exceptions, Swiss policy of sending Jews back remained unchanged until late 1943 and, more selectively, even beyond that date.

Throughout the first years of the war Sweden had been no less restrictive than Switzerland. Yet, as information about the exterminations accumulated in Stockholm (as it did in Bern), and once the deportations reached Scandinavia, the attitude of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, and particularly of the undersecretary in charge of immigration, Gösta Engzell, changed. When, in November 1942, the deportations from Norway started, the Swedes reacted: Jews from Norway—and not only those who were Norwegian citizens—who managed to flee to Sweden were given asylum. From then on Swedish help to Jews was extended not only to the whole of Scandinavia but also in other rescue operations on the Continent.²⁰⁷ Whether Sweden’s about-face was induced by humanitarian feelings or by a more prosaic assessment of the course of the war is a moot question. Both incentives were probably at work in Engzell’s mind and in those of his colleagues from the Foreign Ministry.²⁰⁸

Himmler’s attempt, during his visit to Helsinki in July 1942, to persuade the Finns to deliver the foreign Jews living in the country (about 150 to 200 people at that time) to Germany offers a telling example of the relentlessness of the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign.²⁰⁹ No colonization in the East was at stake, or any economic benefit for the Volksgemeinschaft, or any other political or economic advantage so often adduced to explain the Nazi anti-Jewish drive—nothing except mere ideological fury.

Although we do not know Prime Minister Johan Rangell’s answer to Himmler’s request, we know of the Reichsführer’s demand as such.²¹⁰ The Finnish secret police started drawing lists of foreign Jews who could be deported (thirty-five persons according to some estimates) and delivered to the Germans in Estonia.²¹¹ The rumor spread; protests erupted in the government and in public opinion. Finally the number of deportees was reduced to eight. On November 6, 1942, they were deported to Tallinn: One survived the war.²¹²

The Jewish communities of Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria represented a prize of quite different magnitude. No sooner had the Germans launched their major extermination campaign in the General Government and in Western Europe than pressure to deliver the Jews of southeastern Europe started. On September 24, 1942, Luther noted that Ribbentrop had asked him “to accelerate as much as possible the evacuation of Jews from the most diverse European countries, “as it is proven that everywhere the Jews incite against us and have to be considered responsible for sabotage acts and assassination attempts.”²¹³

The Germans did score an initial success in Romania when Antonescu authorized the deportation of Romanian Jews living in Germany or in German-occupied countries.²¹⁴ In principle Bucharest had promised that the deportation of the approximately three hundred thousand Jews still living in Romania as such would follow. At the end of July 1942 Eichmann had no doubts whatsoever: “From September 10, 1942, the Jews of Romania could foreseeably be transferred to the Lublin district in ongoing transports; there, those able to work will be allocated for labor while the remaining part will be subjected to special treatment.”²¹⁵ What followed came as a complete surprise: The Romanians changed their mind.

The reasons for the turnabout in Bucharest have been attributed to the whole array of reasons: repeated interventions by Jewish personalities, by the papal nuncio, Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, and the Swiss minister, René de Weck; the bribing of officials and of Ion Antonescu’s family by wealthy Romanian Jews and, also, Antonescu’s resentment of German interference in an essentially internal matter.²¹⁶ By October it became clear that the Romanians were stalling. On October 11 Antonescu ordered the postponement of the deportations until the spring, and on November 11 Mihai Antonescu told Himmler’s delegate in Bucharest, Gustav Richter, to his face that the Germans were behaving barbarically toward the Jews.²¹⁷

Although by the end of 1942, the Romanian Jewish policy had obviously shifted and although there were even rumors that Bucharest would allow Jews from Transnistria to leave for Palestine (for adequate per capita remuneration)—a move the Germans tried to stop by all means—Luther, increasingly spurned by Ribbentrop and in dire need of proving commitment for all to see, hurled another desperate exhortation at Ambassador Manfred von Killinger on January 23, 1943. The ambassador was ordered to inform the Romanians that the Italians would be brought to heel regarding the deportations from Western Europe. All European states were being made aware of the principles announced by the Führer in his latest speech [presumably the speech of November 8, 1942, in which Hitler again dwelled on his prophecy and its ongoing vindication]. “Please inform Romanian government,” Luther went on “that Jews are elements of disintegration, that they perpetrate sabotage and help enemy intelligence activities. The German government has many proofs of the above. The evacuation of the Jews from Europe is therefore a compelling necessity for the security of the continent. The positive attitude adopted until now by the Romanian government regarding the Jewish question justified our hope that it would continue to offer its exemplary support to the common cause.”²¹⁸

Luther’s rhetoric did not help. And at the end of January, Himmler ordered Richter back to Berlin.²¹⁹ In the meantime, it should be kept in mind, the Romanian forces near Stalingrad had been destroyed, the German Sixth Army was on the brink of surrender, and in North Africa, the Allies were gaining control of much of the area stretching from the Atlantic to the Egyptian border.

In Hungary events would ultimately take a different course, but, in early 1943, the situation still looked similar to that in Romania. A year before, in March 1942, as we saw, the ultraconservative and pro-German prime minister Laszlo Bardossy had been dismissed by Horthy and replaced by the more moderate Miklós Kallay. During the first six months of Kallay’s premiership, however—that is, during the phase of German military successes—no change occurred in Hungarian policies. In the spring of 1942, in response to German pressure, one-third of the Hungarian armed forces, the Second Hungarian Army, was sent to the Eastern front and positioned along the Don River. At the same time Horthy and Kallay allowed widespread volunteering of German Hungarians (mostly belonging to the pro-Nazi Volksbund) for the SS, although the volunteers had to give up their Hungarian citizenship. A new law ordered the nationalization of land belonging to Jews. The treatment of Jews conscripted into labor battalions on the Eastern Front was so harsh that thousands died.

More ominously, radical anti-Jewish initiatives were planned at the same time by the Hungarian military, apparently with the knowledge and even support of Kallay’s staff: The deportation of Hungarian Jews, first of one hundred thousand of them, was discussed with the Germans. It remains unclear to this day whether Horthy or even Kallay himself knew of these contacts. As historian Yehuda Bauer has pointed out, the entire episode remains something of a mystery.²²⁰

In the fall of 1942 the change in policy started, obviously as a result of the shift in the global strategic balance. In October, when the Germans demanded that the Jews of Hungary be compelled to wear the yellow star as a first step toward their deportation, Kallay refused. At the same time efforts were undertaken by the defense minister to alleviate the fate of the Jewish conscripts in the labor battalion.²²¹ The change found its expression on October 5, when Luther met the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin, Döme Sztójay, and demanded that the deportation of Hungary’s eight hundred thousand Jews should start. The ambassador mentioned rumors about the fate of deported Jews: Prime Minister Kallay did not want to reproach himself later with having delivered Hungarian Jews to misery or possibly even worse. Luther replied that the Jews were employed in road building and that later they would be settled in a reservation.²²² The Hungarians were not convinced. The German demand was rejected. In April 1943, as we shall see, Hitler would personally intervene with Horthy, to no immediate avail. In January 1943 the Second Hungarian Army had been completely destroyed near Voronezh.

In Bulgaria, Jewish policy also moved from cooperation with Germany to an increasingly independent stance. In June 1942 the Bulgarian parliament had authorized the government “to implement a solution of the Jewish problem:” A notorious anti-Semite, Alexander Beleff, was appointed commissar for Jewish affairs in the Ministry of the Interior. The first victims of King Boris’s policies of collaboration were the Jews of Thracia (a former Greek province) and Macedonia (a formerly Yugoslav province), areas Bulgaria had received as a reward for joining the German campaign against its two neighbors, in April 1941. These eleven thousand foreign Jews (from Sofia’s standpoint), were rounded up by the Bulgarian police, delivered to the Germans, and shipped to their death in Treblinka, in March and April 1943. The deportation of native Bulgarian Jews would, as we shall see, become a different matter altogether.

Italy was certainly not setting the right example for these countries of Southeastern Europe. Of course Mussolini was not fooled by Himmler’s account about the fate of the Jews during the Reichsführer’s visit to the Duce on October 11, 1942. The SS chief admitted that in the eastern territories the Germans had to shoot a “not unmeaningful number” of Jews, including women and youngsters as even these were messengers of the partisans; according to Himmler, Mussolini’s response was that “this represented the only possible solution.” Otherwise Himmler spoke of labor camps, of road work, of Theresienstadt—and of the many Jews shot by the Russians whenever the Germans tried to chase them to the Soviet side through gaps in the front lines.²²³ The Italians had their own sources of information.

As indicated by historian Jonathan Steinberg, the head of the occupied territories division at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recorded at the end of November 1942: “The Germans continue imperturbably to massacre Jews.” He further mentioned foreign radio reports according to which six to seven thousand Warsaw Jews were deported each day and exterminated. The Germans, according to him, had already murdered one million Jews. King Vittorio Emmanuele III, it seems, knew as well. Thus with the implicit support of the highest levels of the state, wherever it could, in Croatia, in Greece, and in France, Italy was protecting the Jews. The Germans, as Goebbels’s diaries show, were fuming but there was little they could do.²²⁴

In Croatia, as the Germans were busy deporting the very last Jews under their control, the Italians, despite Hitler’s promise to Pavelic and an order from Mussolini to arrest the 5,000 Jews of their zone, did not act. In France matters came to a head. Not only did the Italian consul general in Nice, Alberto Calisse, refuse to have the identity papers of Jews marked, but during the last days of December 1942 he forbade the transfer of Jews from the Italian zone to the German-occupied areas, in the face of an order from Vichy (which, in principle, had jurisdiction over Jewish affairs on all of French territory). Calisse’s stand was backed within days by the Foreign Ministry in Rome.²²⁵

There was true refinement in the Italian response: The French were told that the Italians would agree to the transfer of French Jews but not to that of foreign Jews; Vichy was paralyzed.²²⁶ When, in January 1943, the German ambassador in Rome, Hans Georg von Mackensen, demanded of Ciano that these decisions be rescinded, Mussolini’s minister put the Germans on the spot: As the matter was complex, Ciano argued, Berlin had to formulate its demands in a detailed written memorandum that would be duly studied.²²⁷

In early 1943 Ciano was appointed ambassador to the Vatican and the Duce himself took over foreign affairs. A few days beforehand Mussolini and Ciano had seen the cable sent on January 3 by the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri: “Regarding the fate of [deported German Jews], like that of Polish, Russian, Dutch and even French Jews, there cannot be much doubt…. Even the SS talk about the mass executions…. A person who was there recalled with horror some scenes of executions by machine guns of nude women and children lined up at the mouth of a common ditch. About the tales of torture running the gamut I will limit myself to the one told to my colleague by an SS official who confided that he hurled babies of six months against a wall, shattering them, to give an example to his men, tired and shaken by an execution that was particularly horrible because of the number of victims.”²²⁸

Italian obstruction of German anti-Jewish measures would continue, as we shall see, during the spring and summer of 1943, until the German occupation of the country.

At the other end of the Continent, in Norway, the German anti-Jewish campaign had started in the fall of 1942. The usual decrees turned the small Jewish population into a group of pariahs. On November 20 the deportations began by ship from Oslo to Stettin, then by train on to Auschwitz. By the end of February 1943 the Jewish community of Norway had ceased to exist: More than 700 Jews had been murdered and some 900 had fled to Sweden.²²⁹

X

Whereas during the summer and autumn of 1942, information about the “Final Solution” was accumulating in the Allied capitals, hesitations about its publication came from some unexpected quarters, such as the Polish government-in-exile. Within days of the beginning of the deportations to Treblinka, the Polish underground was informed of details about the camp and the fate of its victims by a member of the Home Army working at the Treblinka railway station. Although the information was immediately transmitted to London, the government-in-exile kept it to itself until mid-September.²³⁰

The government-in-exile comprised representatives of the main political parties in the homeland; thus as far as possible it remained attuned to the attitudes of its constituency. And, as beforehand, the constituency itself may well have found the right expression of its feelings in the article published on August 15, 1942, at the peak of the exterminations in Treblinka, in the already mentioned Narod, the periodical of the mainstream Christian Democratic Party of Labor.

“At this moment,” Narod wrote, “from behind the ghetto walls, we can hear the inhuman moans and screams of the Jews who are being murdered. Ruthless cunning is falling victim to ruthless brutal power and no Cross is visible on this battlefield, since these scenes go back to pre-Christian times. If this continues, then it will not be long before Warsaw will say farewell to its last Jew. If it were possible to conduct a funeral, it would be interesting to see the reaction. Would the coffin evoke sorrow, weeping or perhaps joy?…For hundreds of years, an alien, malevolent entity has inhabited the northern sections of our city. Malevolent and alien from the point of view of our interests, as well as our psyche and our hearts. So let us not strike false attitudes like professional weepers at funerals—let us be serious and honest…. We pity the individual Jew, the human being and, as far as possible, should he be lost or trying to hide, we will extend a helping hand. We must condemn those who denounce him. It is our duty to demand from those who allow themselves to sneer and mock to show dignity and respect in the face of death. But we are not going to pretend to be grief-stricken about a vanishing nation which, after all, was never close to our hearts.”²³¹

Finally the Polish Directorate of the Civilian Struggle (the delegatura) published a declaration on September 19, 1942, in agreement with the government-in-exile: “Without being able to actively oppose what is being done,” the directorate declared, “the leadership of the Civilian Struggle in the name of the entire Polish people protests against the crimes being committed against the Jews. All the political and social organizations in Poland are united in this protest.”²³² No help was promised, however, nor was any encouragement given to the Jews to flee Warsaw and hide among the Polish population.

The same policy of delayed and reluctant sharing of information was noticeable in the “mission to the West,” undertaken in the fall of 1942 by the Polish courier and underground militant Jan Karski (who, it will be recalled, reported on the anti-Jewish attitude of the Polish population at the beginning of the war).²³³ The underground sent Karski to the West to report on the situation in Poland but without any importance being given to the fate of the Jews. It was only after two leaders of Jewish clandestine organizations became aware of Karski’s impending mission that he was allowed to meet with them, to enter the Warsaw ghetto and probably the Belzec slave labor camp. Moreover, the names of two Polish Jewish political individuals in London (Ignacy Schwarzbart and Szmuel Zygielbojm) were added to the list of people the envoy had to contact, but only as a last priority. At that stage Karski followed the line dictated to him and, acting on instructions, waited for several weeks before meeting his Jewish contacts in the British capital.²³⁴ Yet he was apparently taken aback by the minimal importance given to the Jewish issue by both the delegaturaand the government-in-exile.²³⁵ He finally met Zygielbojm at the end of December 1942.²³⁶

The government-in-exile’s position was shaped, in fact, by an array of considerations.²³⁷ First, any emphasis put on the Jewish tragedy could deflect Western attention from the Polish tragedy per se. Thus declarations about German war crimes in Poland usually conveyed the impression that the victims were Poles in general and that there was no specificity to the fate of the Jews. In the fall, as ever-more-precise news reached Great Britain and the United States, the Polish government (hesitantly) revised its policy, in order to draw sympathy for the Polish plight, in view of what the Germans were capable of perpetrating on Jews—and on Poles.

The Polish struggle to mobilize Western public opinion was itself dominated by a major political goal: support of Poland against Soviet demands regarding the postwar eastern borders of the country. Stalin insisted on returning to the “Curzon line” of 1920, which was almost identical to the Ribbentrop-Molotov line of September 1939, whereas the Poles were adamantly demanding a return to the international border that had been recognized until the beginning of World War II.²³⁸ In the desperate Polish campaign for political support, the Jews played an important role, and not only as competitors in the struggle for sympathy.

For the Polish leadership, Jewish influence in London and Washington was axiomatic; moreover the Poles assumed that in the conflict over the postwar borders, the Jews would be readier to side with the Soviet Union than with Poland: Hadn’t their pro-Soviet sympathies been amply demonstrated during the occupation of eastern Poland between September 1939 and June 1941? In the late fall of 1942, Stanislaw Kot, a former minister of the interior and ambassador to the Soviet Union, as well as a close political ally of Prime Minister Sikorski, arrived for an extended visit to Palestine.

Given the contrary agendas of the Polish government-in-exile and the Jewish leadership in Palestine, their negotiations did not turn into helpful exchanges between the victims of a common enemy. Kot accused the Jews of Poland of lacking loyalty to their homeland and at some point threatened that if the issue of Polish anti-Semitism was not dropped, the Poles would publicize the brutal behavior of the Jewish police and possibly the callousness of the councils toward their fellow Jews.²³⁹

The fundamental issues remained unresolved. Although they asked Kot for a stronger Polish commitment to help the hounded Jews, the Yishuv leaders were not ready for a clear quid pro quo in support of Poland’s position regarding its postwar borders. Presumably, as the Poles had surmised, their assessment of Soviet influence in the postwar world, and of the importance of Soviet political support for Zionist demands, played a major role. Morever Ben-Gurion and his companions hoped that Moscow would allow the emigration to Eretz Israel of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the USSR, particularly the refugees from Poland.²⁴⁰ Finally the leaders of the Yishuv might have been skeptical about concrete Polish readiness to rescue Jews or about the Poles’ ability to do so.

In the meantime the Zionist leadership itself did not demonstrate any major commitment to alleviating the fate of the Jews in Europe, nor did it seem to devote much attention to the unfolding of the ever-more-manifest catastrophe. During the historic conference that took place at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942, which led to a resolution demanding the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the assumption, voiced by several of the main speakers, was that two to three million European Jews would no longer be alive at the end of the war; it did not cause any particular stir. In the months that followed, Ben-Gurion’s main political agenda kept his attention away from the events in Europe and focused on the local political scene: He needed to convince part of Mapai to support the Biltmore program (which implied the partition of Palestine). He failed, and on October 25, 1942, at a meeting in Kfar Vitkin, the “B faction,” opposed to partition, left the party. In the words of Tuvia Friling, the historian most supportive of Ben-Gurion’s role in those years, when addressing the assembly about the situation in Europe, the Mapai leader found nothing better than the terminology commonly used until then: “Everything is at risk. The liberty of mankind, the physical existence of our people, the beginnings of our new homeland, the soul of our own movement—it is all at risk.”²⁴¹ Or, as Ben-Gurion put it on several occasions in 1942 and 1943: “There has never yet been a time like today when we have all been threatened with destruction…. The destruction of the Jews of Europe is ruinous for Zionism for there will be no one left to build the state of Israel.”²⁴²

On November 16, 1942, a group of Polish Jews who carried passports of the British mandate and were exchanged for German citizens living in Palestine brought firsthand information about the fate of the local Jews and about deportations from Western Europe to the killing sites in the General Government. The news shocked the Yishuv and would soon be confirmed by official Polish and Allied announcements.

In the summer of 1942 three German sources also confirmed the most horrendous information available until then about the systematic and all-encompassing aspect of the exterminations. The impact of the first two reports remained limited, as their addressees did not forward them to London or Washington; the third report, however, would have major consequences within a few months.

Kurt Gerstein, a deeply religious Protestant, was a disinfection expert in the hygiene service of the Waffen SS when, in late July 1942, he was ordered by “SS Officer Günther of the RSHA,” as he later wrote, to obtain about 100 kg (220 pounds) of prussic acid (Zyklon B) and deliver it to Lublin.²⁴³ After meeting with Globocnik, Gerstein proceeded to Belzec on August 2, possibly in the company of Globocnik and certainly in that of SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Pfannenstiel, professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg, who had accompanied him on his trip.

In the camp Gerstein witnessed the arrival of a transport from Lwov. He saw how Ukrainian auxiliaries drove the Jews out of the freight cars, how the deportees were forced to strip naked, and how, told they would undergo disinfection, they were pushed into the gas chambers. Gerstein timed the asphyxiation: The engine did not work at first. The Jews cried and wailed: “like in a synagogue,” said Pfannenstiel, his eye glued to the peephole. After two and a half hours, the engine started; thirty-two minutes later all the Jews were dead.²⁴⁴ In June 1950 Pfannenstiel’s deposition confirmed the gist of Gerstein’s report.²⁴⁵

On the train journey from Warsaw to Berlin, Gerstein, without any SS travel companion this time, started a conversation with a Swedish diplomat, Göran von Otter, attaché at the embassy in Berlin. Gerstein identified himself, gave references (among them, the Evangelical bishop in Berlin, Otto Dibelius), and told Otter what he had witnessed. Back in the capital, the diplomat checked the SS officer’s credentials and, convinced of his reliability, sent a report to Stockholm. The Swedish Foreign Ministry did not respond and did not inform the Allies. After the war Otter repeatedly confirmed his conversation with Gerstein, and the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs admitted having received the report and having kept it undisclosed till the end of the war.²⁴⁶

During the weeks that followed his return to Berlin, Gerstein attempted to inform the nuncio and the Swiss legation. He also informed Preysing’s coadjutor, one Dr. Winter, as well as Bishop Dibelius and others: to no avail.²⁴⁷ Gerstein continued to play his double role to the end. He delivered Zyklon B shipments to the camps and unsuccessfully attempted to arouse German and foreign awareness of the events. At the end of the war he wrote three reports on what he had seen and otherwise knew, and handed them to the Americans to whom he had given himself up. He was transferred to the French occupying forces and jailed in Paris as a potential war criminal. On July 25, 1945, he hanged himself in his cell.²⁴⁸

Almost exactly at the date on which Otter’s report reached Stockholm, a similar report was forwarded by the Swedish consul in Stettin, Karl Ingve Vendel.²⁴⁹ Vendel was in fact a Swedish intelligence agent monitoring German troop movements under the guise of consular activities and thus was also secretly in touch with some members of the German military opposition to the regime. After visiting a friend on an estate in East Prussia, Vendel, on August 9, 1942, filed a lengthy report on the situation in the General Government, which included a section on the extermination of the Jews:

“In a city, all the Jews were assembled for what was officially announced as ‘delousing.’ At the entrance they were forced to take off their clothes; the delousing procedure, however, consisted of gassing and, afterward, all of them would be stuffed into a mass grave. The source from which I obtained all this information on the conditions in the General Government is such that not the slightest shade of disbelief exists concerning the truthfulness of my informant’s descriptions.”²⁵⁰

According to historian Jozef Lewandowski’s inquiry, Vendel was given the information by his friend, Count Heinrich von Lehndorff, a reserve lieutenant at Army Group Center, and by a guest who joined them at Lehndorff ’s estate, “Gross Steinort,” in East Prussia. The guest was probably Lt. Col. Henning von Tresckow, whom we already encountered, the most active organizer of the military conspiracy against Hitler.²⁵¹ Vendel’s report wasn’t forwarded to the Allies either.

Again at approximately the same time, a third German source conveyed information that, in due time, put an end to Allied disbelief. In the last days of July 1942, a German industrialist, Eduard Schulte, well connected to high Nazi officials, traveled to Zurich and informed a Jewish business friend of a plan “prepared at Hitler’s headquarters” for the total extermination of the Jews of Europe by the end of the year. The information was conveyed to Benjamin Sagalowitz, the press attaché of the Jewish community in Switzerland, who, in turn, alerted Gerhart Riegner, the director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress. Riegner asked to send a cable to World Jewish Congress headquarters in New York and London via the American and British legations in Bern. Both the American and the British diplomats agreed.

The identically worded text sent to Washington and to London read as follows. “Received alarming report that in Führer’s headquarters plan discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering three and a half four million should after deportation and concentration in East be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe stop Action reported planned for autumn methods under discussion including prussic acid stop We transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed stop Informant stated to have close connections with highest German authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable.”

The State Department and the Foreign Office remained skeptical, and Washington did not forward the cable to Stephen Wise, its main addressee. However, as the same cable had been received by the head of the British section of the World Jewish Congress, it was transmitted to Stephen Wise from London, notwithstanding some initial difficulties. On September 2 U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles phoned Wise and asked him to avoid publicizing the contents of the report before it could be independently confirmed. Wise accepted.²⁵²

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with headquarters in Geneva, included Swiss members only, and the Bern government’s directives regarding major decisions went generally unchallenged. According to Jean-Claude Favez, the foremost historian of the ICRC and the Holocaust, Riegner insisted [in 1998] that in August or September 1942 he had informed three key members of the committee, Carl J. Burckhardt, Susanne Ferrière, and Lucie Odier, of the information that had been imparted to him. Burckhardt confirmed the facts reported by Riegner to the American consul in Geneva, Paul C. Squire, and to Riegner’s colleague, Paul Guggenheim, from his own sources, sometime at the end of October 1942 and again to Riegner himself in November.²⁵³

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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