Part III
11 The New Order
12 Exploitation
13 Resistance
14 Revolution in the South-East
15 France
CHAPTER 11
FOR four years Germany dominated the greater part of Europe more completely than it had ever been dominated before. How far was this domination also purposeful? Every conqueror sets out with a complex of aims. On the one hand he has ideas, more or less precise, about what he wants to do with the lands he intends to conquer. On the other hand his attitude will be to conquer first and leave the rest till afterwards. Among the Nazis there were some who regarded the conquests of 1939–41 as a prelude and an opportunity: they had a Grand Design, even though this design was more of a vision than a plan and even though they could not always agree among themselves about what they wanted or how to achieve it. There were also others, more pragmatic, who treated the gains of these years as assets to be exploited in the war that was still going on: in so far as they had a Grand Design, it was one with a low priority for the time being. Hitler himself belonged rather to the pragmatic school. He was concerned first and foremost with winning the war and one of his keenest interests – perhaps his main interest – was in military equipment and military tactics. But he was hardly less preoccupied with the two great questions of Lebensraum and race, and his ideas and writing were the stuff out of which men like Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler, although often with different interpretations and opposing aims, began to create a New Order for Europe during the war years.
Politically the New Order was simple. German hegemony was to be extended by German arms and accepted by everybody else. Nazi values were to be exported from their German centre and the pattern of Nazi revolution and Nazi life repeated in other lands. The first pre-condition of the New Order was conquest: land had to be got. How much land was left vague. It adapted itself to circumstances. At the high tide of German successes the concept of the Grossraum, or Greater Germanic Estate, embraced Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, although a little earlier it had seemed to make do with rather less of Russia. The determining features of the Grossraum were not its borders but its nature. Instead of finding where people lived and then drawing permanent or semi-permanent frontiers to fit the ethnic facts, the Nazis began by designating an area and then moved people around in order to make demography fit the facts of power. The Grossraum therefore might be any size and in 1942 one writer envisaged it as covering one sixth of the globe. It was not a fixed area but a biological habitat like a nature reserve. It was where the German family lived.
The Germans themselves were to be the proprietors and directors of the Grossraum but not its only inhabitants. It would also contain the other Nordic races, who were only a little inferior to the Germans but would have no effective political or economic power; and non-Nordic peoples who, suitably regrouped and assigned to their economic functions, would be the helots of the Grossraum. (Hitler liked reading history books and admired Sparta.) These sub-human varieties would be kept in subjection by, among other devices, depriving them of education. As Hitler himself put it, they were to ‘know just enough to understand road signs, so as not to get themselves run over by our vehicles. For them the word “liberty” must mean the right to wash on holidays.’ His aim in the USSR was to ‘Germanize the country by the settlement of Germans and treat the natives as redskins’. An even more inferior variety of human being, too vicious to be allowed any place however menial, would be eliminated. Thus reordered, the Grossraumwould be made economically self-sufficient, independent of the other major areas in the world although specially linked, in some versions, with Africa in a Eurafrican super Grossraum which was partly just an even more grandiose vision, partly an extension designed to furnish Europe with the raw materials of which it had not got enough, and partly a way of finding an exciting but peripheral role for the Italians, whose position in a purely European Grossraum was, for obvious reasons, never spelled out.
Given these imaginings there were two main fields for action, the demographic and the economic. People had to be moved or removed; the work they did had to be reorganized to fit the plan for a Germano-centric autarkic Europe. During the war quite a lot was undertaken demographically, but the economic planning of the New Order was overshadowed by the exigencies of war economics.
The economic aspects of the New Order were never condensed into a single document or plan and it is to some extent misleading to propound any such plan by piecing together what was said about it by different people at different times. Nevertheless a general outline existed.
The Nazis were centralizers, but half-hearted ones. At one level they believed in the concentration of power. They converted federal Weimar Germany into a unitary state and they would have carried this centralizing process beyond Germany into Europe, making Berlin the political, economic and cultural – in sum, the totalitarian – capital of a super-state. But although they focused power on a single central capital, they also diffused it among the departments and agencies which were centred in the capital. This fragmentation was partly a reflection of Hitler’s policy and his character: he was not an administrator and he ruled by dividing. It was also a consequence of lack of foresight. Especially during the war new problems thrust themselves upon Germany’s rulers and the Nazi way of dealing with them was to create new agencies. In this respect they acted more like the Americans with their similar propensity for bureaucratic proliferation than like the British or French, who have characteristically preferred to accommodate new problems and new functions within the settled framework of the existing civil service and the existing machinery of government. The New Order, had it come into being, would have been controlled by a single but fissiparous and philoprogenitive machine.
This machine would have existed to serve Germany’s interests but it would have claimed incidentally to serve other interests too. The core of the Grossraum – a Germany which had engulfed Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, parts of Belgium and Silesia – would be to Europe what the Ruhr was to Germany. Here would be most of Europe’s heavy industry and all its arms industries. Beyond it industries would exist on sufferance only and their primary purpose would be the production of consumer goods for Germans. Each conquered area would be a tributary, judged and regulated in terms of the needs of Germany. Besides consumer goods these areas would produce food, and their agriculture would be re-planned to suit Germany: more arable in Denmark, for example, and less dairy farming. In return Germany would provide a guaranteed market for all Europe’s food production and abolish unemployment. The countries beyond the central core would, by virtue of centralized planning, become specialized producers knowing what they could export, how much credit they could have and how much labour they would need; an international labour pool would enable the planners to operate an effective international division of labour. This picture was neither entirely unfamiliar nor entirely unattractive to Europe. The notion of an economic entity larger than any existing political unity, and of the need for Europe to organize economically on a wider scale, had been propagated by various champions of European unity ranging from men in official positions like Aristide Briand in France and Paul van Zeeland in Belgium to the League of Nation’s Inquiry for European Union and private enthusiasts like Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. Europe moreover had had more than its fair share of economic instability between the wars and might therefore be persuaded that it was worth forgoing the freedom to choose for itself what it would make or grow if it could buy stability in exchange for economic sovereignty.
The German New Order was in this sense an attempt to construct an economy broader than a national economy and it suffered from the basic defect of most such schemes attempted in a nationalist world. Its scope was international but its purpose was national. Long-range planning, long-term agreements, guaranteed markets, fixed exchange rates, a European clearing system – plans to link the Baltic and the Black Seas by an Oder-Danube canal, the Rhine and the Po by another, plans to dam the Straits of Gibraltar in order to endow all Europe with cheap power – all these things could not conceal the fact that the basis of the New Order was German power and German requirements and not a European cooperative. The benefits to everybody else would be the crumbs from the rich man’s table. It could hardly look otherwise during a war.
Ideas of this kind were peace aims rather than war aims and when the war turned into a long war and a losing war they were inevitably submerged. Up to 1942 the New Order was proffered with a kind of open-handed exultation and in the belief that it would strike some response, but from 1942 onwards the voice of Germany turned from allurements to warnings, prophesying communist horrors to come rather than a new Eden. At the same time the New Order, such as it was, had to be applied to keeping Germany going in a painfully immediate present. Instead of enlarging and fertilizing Europe’s economy, it had to nourish Germany’s war effort.
The lengthening war also held up the demographic planning of the New Order but it did not do so entirely. Some movements of population were undertaken and horribly much was achieved in the way of extermination. Both these aspects of the matter fell primarily, though not entirely, within the province of the SS and they acquired from the SS their overriding characteristic of ferocious brutality.
The SS grew out of a small black-shirted bodyguard originally called the Stosstrupp Hitler and renamed Schutzstaffeln (SS) in 1925. Even more than the Nazi Party itself they were the instrument of Hitler’s personal will. They were drenched in Nazi ideology and they enjoyed a life of special licence which was nowhere better illustrated than on the very slopes of Hitler’s own Bavarian eyrie where they could revel off-duty in an efficiently organized orgiastic hedonism calculatingly and cynically proffered to them by their non-alcoholic and near-chaste Führer. They were the principal beneficiaries of the destruction of the SA in 1934 and from that time their power expanded as they absorbed the police forces of Germany, built up a well-equipped private army of thirty divisions, became an economic force in control of a large part of the Reich’s labour and of extensive factories, and duplicated their German functions and powers in occupied Europe. The SS became the rulers of Germany, the effective core within the amorphous mass of the Nazi Party. Their chief from 1929 (when their strength was under 300 men) was Heinrich Himmler, a man pre-eminent among the senior Nazi leaders for his mediocrity, a quality which ensured Hitler’s confidence almost – but not quite – to the end. He was said to be so obsessed by blondness that he could not bear to have dark-haired people around. He had a little knowledge of Germanic origins and runic inscriptions which he pursued with the unintelligent concentration of a man whose hobby is his life, but paradoxically he was also a visionary with ambition who throve in the struggle for power because of his enthusiasm for a purer Germanic world on Nazi principles – which he accepted wholesale and uncritically without any of the cynical reservations of the sharper-minded Hitler or the softer-living Goering. Himmler was also acute enough and lucky enough to rise to the top in the Nazi jungle and stay there. Before the war ended he was not only Reichsführer SS, Chief of the German Police and Minister of the Interior but also Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army and he had twice – on each occasion briefly, ineptly and for the most part at a distance – held command of an Army Group in the field. He had become a contender for supreme power in succession to Hitler, although Hitler himself said in 1945 that Himmler would not do as his successor because he had no culture.
The annexation of the police by the SS was the vital step in the transformation of the SS from its modest beginnings within the Nazi machine into the power which ruled Germany and terrorized a continent. In Weimar Germany each province had its own government and its own police force. The most important of these forces was the Prussian police controlled by the Prussian Minister of the Interior, who was a more influential personage than the shadowy Reich Minister of the Interior. As Minister of the Interior and then Prime Minister in Prussia, Goering was, before he exchanged cruelty for easefulness, the most powerful policeman in Germany. Himmler was chief of the Bavarian police in Munich. But Himmler also got himself a subordinate post in the Prussian system.
The Prussian police was a rambling system whose branches included the Schupo (traffic police and men on the beat), the Orpo (gendarmerie living in barracks), the Kripo or criminal detectives, the Gestapo or secret state security service, and special services like the fire brigades and railway police. Himmler became deputy head of the Prussian Gestapo and he also became Chief of Police in various other provinces besides Bavaria. In 1936 a unified German police force was created with Himmler at its head, and in 1943 he became also Reich Minister of the Interior, an office which, with the centralizing tendencies of the Third Reich, had by then outstripped its Prussian counterpart in importance.
After 1936 the next step was to incorporate the detective and intelligence functions of the police into the SS. The new German police was divided into two main branches, the Orpo on the one hand and on the other the Sipo or Security Police embracing the Kripo and the Gestapo. As head of the Sipo Himmler appointed Reinhardt Heydrich who was already head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) or security services of the SS. For a short time the Sipo under Heydrich remained with the rest of the police within the Ministry of the Interior, but shortly before the outbreak of war it was transferred to one of the main branches of the SS, the newly created RSHA – Reichssicherheitshauptamt or Reich Security Division. Departments III and VI of the RSHA were the SD (Home) and SD (Foreign); Department IV was the Gestapo and its sub-department IV 4b meant Jews. In personal terms the RSHA was Heydrich until his assassination in Prague in May 1942, when he was succeeded by Ernst Kaltenbrunner; Department IV was Heinrich Müller; IV 4b was Karl Adolf Eichmann.
The chain of command Heydrich-Müller-Eichmann exhibits the variety of the SS. Müller, the head of the Gestapo, was the type of the faceless professional policeman who knew his job and did it; he was for a long time not a member of the Nazi Party; his origins were obscure and probably lowly and he had a chip on his shoulder. It was in a sense fitting that in April 1945 he simply vanished after walking out of Hitler’s bunker to go back to his office and has never been heard of since. He has been suspected of being in Russian pay and of taking refuge in Moscow at the end of the war, where he is said to have died in 1948. Heydrich and Eichmann, his immediate superior and subordinate, were very different. Both had goals rather than jobs. Heydrich’s driving force came from ambition, Eichmann’s from obsession. Both were virulent anti-semites. Eichmann became in practice the principal agent in the destruction of the Jews, supervising and directing the application of Nazi racial policies first in Bohemia and Moravia and then in Poland and ultimately in Hungary. After the war he escaped to South America but in 1960 he was traced and kidnapped by a Jewish organization and delivered to Israel where he was tried, condemned and executed. Heydrich, a failed naval officer, was Hitler’s right-hand man in the massacre of June 1934 and it was he rather than Himmler who ensured that the victors should be the SS and not the army. He pursued his course by vigour harnessed to ability and by intrigue served by his intimate knowledge of the personal weaknesses of the senior Nazi chiefs and the skeletons in their cupboards. As head of the RSHA he was one of the most powerful men in Germany, although not in the top rank, and it has been conjectured that when he took the office of Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941 he did so with an eye to climbing higher by this circuitous route. He was as ruthless and violent as any of his colleagues and much more intelligent. (He also played the violin and at his funeral the cultivated, anti-Nazi Admiral Canaris wept.) His death removed Himmler’s most formidable rival.
Heydrich was still a little-known figure in the thirties. Müller and Eichmann were even less well known, and comparatively few members of the general public would have recognized them. But the SS itself was not difficult to recognize. First in Germany and then throughout Europe its members strode along the streets or hurtled along the roads in cars in the special costumes designed to make them look as terrifying as possible – the sinister uniformity of the black shirt, no jacket to impede the swing of the arm, the expensive breeches and the hard shiny boots, and on every cap the head of death as a memento mori to every living citizen. The complexity of the German SS and police added to the terror. In occupied Europe the men of the Orpo were the visible intimation of police rule and police brutality. They were the men who could be seen rounding up one’s neighbours and who might at any time of day or night come for oneself, while behind them in the recesses of buildings whose whispered addresses became household fears were the men of the Gestapo and the S D.
Himmler’s long-term plans for the re-ordering of Europe were based on reducing the Slavs by 30 million and planting a German upper crust in selected parts of Poland, the Baltic states and the USSR. In 1942 the SS produced a blueprint or Eastern Plan covering the next twenty-five years. It involved the establishment of temporary German strongpoints, partly garrisons and partly colonies, peopled by peasants under arms. These settlements would be at central points. At the same time permanent settlements were to be planted at the extreme edge of the Grossraum, where, at first under SS control, they would shield the Grossraum like the marcher principalities of feudal times. This Germanic population would reach 3.5 million at the end of twenty-five years. Among them would be a local population of landless poor. The plan was revised and re-issued but at the beginning of 1943 Hitler decreed that all these schemes must await the end of the war and so stopped Himmler from putting it into operation. At about the same time some Americans, including the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, were evolving a similar plan for turning Germany into an agricultural zone after the war.
Himmler was concerned not only to dispatch Reich Germans out into the Grossraum but also – and not without a degree of contradiction – to gather Volksdeutsche back into the Reich. (Hitler was more interested in the latter than the former programme.) As a first step Volksdeutsche in occupied territories were treated as a privileged class, given positions of minor authority where possible, allowed to use special shops and so on, but this policy, first adopted in Czechoslovakia and Poland, sharpened the Russians’ natural distrust of Volksdeutsche and led to large numbers of them being deported to the east before the Germans could reach them. Himmler’s plans were further confounded by disputes among the Germans themselves. While the SS started registering the Volksdeutsche whom they found round the Black Sea and elsewhere with a view to resettlement, for diverse reasons the army commanders, Rosenberg and Goering all wanted them left where they were. It also transpired that fewer of them still spoke German than had been expected. The only transfer of any consequence effected by the SS in the USSR was the eviction of a number of Ukrainians from the neighbourhood of Zhitomir and Kalinovka to make way for Volhynian Germans who did not want to go there. Significantly perhaps this single practical example had not been envisaged by the Eastern Plan. It created trouble in the German administration of the Ukraine and squabbling in Berlin and had no sensible purpose. Apart from this there was no considerable displacement of the Volksdeutsche of the USSR until the tide of war turned and about 300,000 of them were swept westward not as settlers but as refugees.
In other areas Himmler was less obstructed by rival authorities. One hundred and thirty-two thousand Volksdeutsche from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and’ another 32,000 from southern Bukovina and the Dobrudja were earmarked for Germany and about 46,000 of them were settled in annexed territories; the rest probably spent the war in transit camps. Another 9,000 Germans from Warsaw and 14,000 from Slovenia had a similar fate. Poland was to be sorted out by moving 164,000 Germans westward from what had been the Russian zone in 1939 and an equivalent number of Ukrainians and White Russians from the original German zones eastwards. In addition 80,000 Baltic Germans were to find new homes in Poland. In the west Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg were prepared for Germanization by removing 105,000 inhabitants (’foreign elements’) from the former and 7,000 from the latter. In practice these schemes produced chaos and a degree of incidental economic disruption which led to complaints about the damage done to the war effort by the SS. Some of the Baltic Germans found themselves moved back to where they had come from after only a few months, while the fate of the German-speaking Tyrolese was like a scene from Dante. In a plebiscite in 1939, 185,365 opted for the Reich; by 1941 this figure had somehow grown to 220,000 and the next year it was even bigger; but while somebody was apparently persuading more and more Tyrolese to ask to be moved to the Reich, nobody was making adequate arrangements for them to get there and it seems unlikely that more than 80,000 did so. At one time Himmler toyed with the idea of sending them all to the Crimea and many spent the war in camps waiting to be moved to nobody quite knew where. Few Volksdeutsche actually reached the Reich. A number were settled in the annexed territories and a greater number simply got lost.
These movements of population were only a part of the plan. There was also the elimination of undesirables, notably Jews and Slavs.
The attempt to exterminate whole peoples was a logical consequence of Nazi ideology, and the degree to which it succeeded was a result of the military conquests which placed millions of Jews within the Nazi grasp and of the reiterated propaganda which so transformed thousands of Germans that they were able to perform the cruellest obscenities. Many thousands more witnessed them or were otherwise aware of them.
The purity of the Aryan race did not require mass murder. It required the prevention of inter-breeding, but the prevention of inter-breeding required also the prevention of all human contact since even the strictest laws and the most intense propaganda cannot guarantee correct responses of the heart and the flesh. Moreover, in Nazi mythology the purity of the Aryan race was linked with the salvation of the human race, and since both doctrines posited a Jewish enemy, they together bred a hatred of Jewry and a determination to exterminate it. The discrimination against Jews, which was first prescribed by law immediately after the Nazis took power, led on to degradation, outlawry, pillage and murder; mass murder was methodically organized after the war began. By the laws of the first phase, culminating in the Nuremberg decrees of September 1935, not only were marriage and fornication between Jews and Gentiles condemned but also the slightest physical touch. Yet the accompanying pathological ravings of some Nazi zealots and a part of the press were not seen as a prelude to anything worse. There was some emigration and a few suicides, but even when a special Jewish Bureau was established without any concealment in 1936 (Eichmann was its chief) hope and incredulity were still allowed to prevail over desperation. Emigration moreover was baulked by prohibitions on the export of property and by the inaccessibility of the obvious haven, Palestine, where the British, caught between the irreconcilable promises given to Jews and Arabs in the First World War, refused to admit more than 1,500 Jews a month unless they brought £1,000 apiece with them.
But persecution was already grievous and in November 1938 a young seventeen-year-old Jew called Herschel Grynszpan decided to force it upon the attention of an unwilling world by a desperate deed. He murdered a German diplomat in the Paris embassy, Ernst vom Rath (whom he mistook for the Ambassador). Retaliation took the form of a pogrom which the Nazis were able to organize in advance because vom Rath lingered in hospital before dying. News of his death reached Hitler in Munich where he had gone to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of his 1923 putsch. Local party and SS authorities had already been warned of what was coming and of the need to conceal the fact that it was prearranged. Traffic in selected areas was diverted, the telephone lines of Jewish subscribers were cut and at 2 a.m. organized squads wrecked 200 synagogues and other Jewish property (including a Jewish sanatorium), murdered seventy Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp and arrested 20,000 Jews. So much plate glass was broken that the outburst of this one night was given the name of the Kristallnacht. In addition the Jewish community was collectively condemned to pay twenty-five million marks for the repair of damaged property and also a fine of one billion marks – which practically dispossessed it of the goods and enterprises which had not already been taken from it. Jews were expelled from hospitals, old folks’ homes and schools, and public places were put out of bounds to them. A proposal to take away their driving licences was discussed but dropped. No foreign government protested. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, ruled that a protest would constitute unjustifiable interference in the internal affairs of another state and warned his subordinates against giving unnecessary offence to Hitler. In this last year before the war the German Jews began to flee their fate, but the acquisition of Austria and Bohemia and Moravia added to the Reich as many Jews as left it. From the Nazi point of view the problem remained the same size – about 357,000. Then the conquest of Poland enormously increased that number, multiplying it by ten.
In 1938 Hitler discussed with Himmler the killing of whole sections of the population of Czechoslovakia and a year later similar discussions took place as a prelude to the Polish campaign. SS chiefs conferred with army chiefs about the modalities of this first instalment of the New Order. The ruling class, the intelligentsia, the Jews were to be collected and killed. The German Jews were not thrown into the programme at this stage partly because the Nazis had not finally made up their minds between deportation and extermination, and partly for logistical reasons: there was so much to be done first in Poland and later in the USSR that the mills of destruction could not grind fast enough.
The last serious attempt to purge Germany of Jews without killing them was the Madagascar plan. This plan had been adumbrated before the war and was revived after the fall of France, whose colony Madagascar was. The plan was to send all European Jews to this island in the Indian Ocean where they could be autonomous under German sovereignty and would, as Hitler put it, be hostages against the ‘good behaviour of their co-racialists in America’. Problems of transport and the like were examined in some detail but the war did not end with the fall of France and so the Germans could not get hold of Madagascar or send Jews there. Instead they kept the German Jews in Germany until they could be sent to Poland to be killed along with Jews from other parts of Europe.
In the interval between the defeat of Poland and the attack on the USSR, Hitler set up a new agency, Operations Staff Rosenberg, which began as a research body for the collection of material about Jews, communists and Freemasons and the formulation of a policy for combating these pests. With a hideous simulation of scholarly application it assembled a huge library and, by combining pillage with study, amassed incidentally a fabulous art collection. It was expanded into a Ministry for the East, in which thousands of industrious, ingenious and even learned Germans worked away at schemes which had no relevance to the war going on around them; their activities were viewed with irritated scorn by the professional staff of the German Foreign Ministry and with even more irritated jealousy by Ribbentrop who considered that Rosenberg was being allowed to poach on his own preserves as Foreign Minister. Since the East meant the Baltic states and the USSR, Rosenberg became on paper the potential disposer of the Russian empire. His aim was to destroy the Russian state in perpetuity by fragmenting and pastoralizing it and by creating new separatist states out of the debris. Hitler had decided to give Leningrad to Finland and Bessarabia and Odessa to Rumania. From what remained Rosenberg intended to fashion at least four states: a Russian rump, renamed Muscovy, stretching from the Arctic to Turkestan and containing 60 million inhabitants; a Caucasian state; the Ukraine; and the Ostland, consisting of the three Baltic states and White Russia. All these states would be ruled by German Commissioners of proconsular dignity and two of them actually began to take shape in the Ostland and the Ukraine under Commissioners whose functions were similar in partibus infidelium to those of the Gauleiters of the Reich.
The Ostland was a hybrid. White Russia’s function was to be a dump for undesirables who had not been murdered and could not yet be transported to Siberia. The fate of the three Baltic states was peculiarly poignant. These singularly well governed and civilized communities were first shackled by the USSR in 1939 and then absorbed in the next year. On the approach of war in 1941 the Russians started deporting and massacring the inhabitants, and they continued to do so as they slowly retreated before the Germans. The Germans began by treating the three states comparatively lightly and even accorded them a degree of administrative autonomy, but in 1942–3 they introduced their full programme of concentration camps, slave labour and the murder of Jews – to the accompaniment of public lectures on the superiority of German culture. (When the Germans were again evicted by the Russians, the killings went on none the less. A number of refugees, mainly Estonians, escaped to Sweden, though many died on the way. Depopulation was continued by deportations into the USSR after the war.)
In the Ukraine Rosenberg was encouraged by signs of welcome for the Germans (an autonomist, anti-Soviet movement raised false German hopes) and by the surrenders of Russian troops in the first weeks of the campaign (which he exaggeratedly ascribed solely to political rather than military causes). But his schemes never came to anything. Hitler was not interested in separatist vassal states. He told Rosenberg that the Baltic states, the Crimea, Baku and its neighbourhood, the Volga region and the Kola peninsula in the far north were to be entirely German. Erich Koch too, Rosenberg’s Commissioner in the Ukraine, regarded his bailiwick simply as a source of food and labour for the Reich and derided his chief’s political vision of a Ukrainian state as a stepping stone on the way to the Caucasus and a fender hung out to keep Russians and Poles at a safe remove. For Koch, as for Hitler, the Commissariat was a prelude to colonization. But Koch was a cleverer man than his chief Rosenberg. He soon sensed that this prelude had no sequel and he rarely visited the Ukraine. Rosenberg himself had to witness all his plans set on one side even before the turn of the military tide extinguished them. He experienced complete failure earlier than his equals in the Nazi hierarchy.
Rosenberg’s activities provided a cloak for the operations of the SS. Although Rosenberg’s Ministry, like the government of Hans Frank in Poland, was regarded by the SS as a nuisance and there was a good deal of friction between these different authorities, they became in effect collaborators in measures designed to kill even more people than the regular armed forces. They dealt death in the open and death in the camp.
Death on a grand scale by one or other of these methods was resolved upon in 1941 before the invasion of the USSR. A massacre programme was discussed between SS and army chiefs in May and four special squads or Einsatzgruppen were formed by the SS to round up and kill ideological opponents such as communist officials, political commissars and Jews. A special order for the murder of political commissars was issued by Hitler and transmitted through army channels at the beginning of June. A commissar was not defined, and, whether or not the vagueness was intentional, its effect was to license indiscriminate killing. Not only were suspected commissars shot out of hand or delivered by the army to the SD (which came to much the same thing): in addition recalcitrant or awkwardly sick prisoners could be dubbed commissars and summarily disposed of. The trigger-happiness of army officers and other ranks was encouraged by a further order, issued on the eve of the invasion, which did away with judicial proceedings in the military area and empowered battalion commanders and upwards to hear cases and impose penalties (including death) without the formality of assembling a court.
The four Einsatzgruppen were quite small – each was 500–800 strong – but their importance was shown by the choice of their commanders, who included the heads of Departments III, V and VIa of the RSHA. These men expected to end up in the four principal cities of the USSR where they would blossom into the local tsars of the New Order. Meanwhile their business was simply to kill. They began by inciting pogroms but were disappointed by the unenthusiastic response and were obliged to set to work more systematically. Leading Jews were required to assemble their fellows at given points, whereupon all were driven off to a nearby open space, stripped and shot. The dead and half dead were tumbled into trenches. Others were drowned or burned alive wholesale. No concealment was attempted or possible. The razzias were witnessed by thousands, talked about and even photographed. The executioners had to be kept up to their task by being made half drunk (which did not improve their aim), by treble pay and long holidays. A typical operation involved several hundred victims and took several hours. The largest single operation was the killing of over 33,000 Kievan Jews in two days in September 1941 as a reprisal for the blowing up of a hotel – the fearful inspiration of Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar and the basis for Anatoly Kuznetsov’s novel of the same name; the mass grave of these dead and dying Jews continued to be used as a dump for what the Nazis regarded as human refuse until it contained at least 100,000 corpses. A year later about 16,000 Jews were killed in a single day at Pinsk with the help of grenades, axes, dogs and SS cavalry. On the only occasion on which Himmler attended a massacre, it turned his stomach and made him order a change in technique: there was to be less shooting and more gassing.
Each of the Einsatzgruppen tended to magnify its achievements, so that it is impossible to take at its face value the boast by one commander, Erich Ohlendorf, that he had been personally responsible for the death of 90,000 people, most of them Jews, before he relinquished his command in June 1942, but it is probable that the number of Jews killed by Germans in the east was about two million. The disposal of the bodies was so rudimentary that the gases generated by decomposition betrayed the places of burial by a continuous barrage of small explosions, and a special squad had to be formed to open the graves and lay this ghastly evidence by chemical action, bonfires or mechanical pulverization.
The Jews of the rest of Europe were meanwhile being driven to their principal graveyard, the extermination camps of Poland. These camps were a specialized variety of the concentration camps which the Nazis had established in Germany immediately after coming to power.
A concentration camp is essentially a guarded area where people are sent and kept against their will, as though in prison. But a concentration camp is something different from a prison. A camp may be established because the prisons are full, but this is not why the Nazi camps were established. A man is sent to prison because he has been accused and convicted of a crime, and he is sent by a court. The men and women who were sent to the concentration camps were not accused or convicted of crimes; they were simply obnoxious to the régime, either because they were opposed to it or because they were – like the Jews – obnoxious by definition. And they were not committed to the camps by a court. They were sent there by party functionaries exercising a whim like an absolute monarch signing lettres de cachet. Further, the men and women in the camps were not meant to come out again. They were meant to rot and die there, and usually they did. Finally, the concentration camps were not created, like prisons, to hold men in durance and no more. They were also intended to intimidate those who remained outside them, and they did so by the cruelty of those who ran them and whose behaviour was no secret, and by the doubts which were allowed to circulate about citizens who abruptly disappeared from normal life.
The first concentration camp was established in March 1933, within a few weeks of the Nazis taking power. It was at Dachau, near Munich. Others were established in the years that followed, and the camp business received a boost when the Anschluss with Austria and the subjection of Bohemia-Moravia opened up new areas for the Nazi press gangs. With the beginning of the war the nature of the camps as well as their scale changed, for they became the scene of the Nazi policy of mass extermination. In the next few years millions were killed in them, perhaps seven millions – by hard labour, privation, epidemics, medical experiments on their bodies, fusillade, bastinado or asphyxiation.
During this period the camps were divided into two main categories. Most of them were labour camps, in which people from all over Europe toiled for Germany for a certain number of months until they dropped dead or were killed off because they had become useless. Some of these camps were near important factories and were run by the captains of big industry. In a different category were the death camps, whose business was extermination. There were five of these, all of them in Poland. The first was established at Auschwitz (Oswiecim), near Katowice in Silesia, soon after the defeat of Poland in 1939. Auschwitz developed into a complex of camps, one of which was the showpiece of modern technical killing by means of the gas called Cyclon B (guaranteed to kill within ten minutes) and of modern technical disposal in the ovens of its crematorium. After the invasion of the USSR four more extermination camps were established in Poland at Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belsec (not to be confused with Bergen-Belsen which was partly a Wehrmacht hospital camp and partly an SS internment camp near Hanover in Germany).
The Polish Jews had priority because they were on the spot. There were in Poland in 1939 over three million Jews. Their numbers made them a special case. Nowhere except in Palestine did Jews constitute so large a proportion of the population. Nowhere except in the United States were so many Jews to be found. Nowhere at all, probably, was anti-semitism so potent or the extermination of Jews so readily acceptable to Gentiles. The first German plan was to concentrate all Jews from the German zone of Poland in an area in the east of the zone, but the attempt to do this created such chaos on the railways that the plan had to be abandoned. Instead ghettos were established in the principal towns. A Jew found outside a ghetto could be executed. Those inside were starved and overcrowded. Epidemics developed fast. Jew-baiting was encouraged with the inevitable results of torture and private-enterprise murder. The Warsaw ghetto, whose sealing walls were completed in October 1940, contained about half a million Jews. The extermination camps began functioning at the end of 1941 with Chelmno destroying about a thousand human beings a day, and during 1942 the Polish ghettos were gradually emptied into them. At one time Treblinka alone was taking 6,000 a day, and Auschwitz, which killed well over one million people in less than three years, could take twice as many in its stride. The disposal of the Warsaw ghetto began in July 1942 when there were probably still about 380,000 Jews in it. By the beginning of October there remained only 50–60,000 hiding and starving in insanitary cellars and sewers (built to British design in the previous century). They were governed by a suborned Jewish police and a half honest Judenrat until, driven beyond the limits of endurance and faced with the extinction of all hope, an enfeebled residue staged in April 1943 a desperate and doomed rising. They fought alone: most Polish Gentiles were indifferent to their fate or worse. Yet their struggle lasted seven weeks before all were either killed or taken and shipped to the gas chambers. Their enduring memorial is Schoenberg’s threnody for speaker, chorus and orchestra, A Survivor from Warsaw. A commemorative volume with some fifty illustrations was prepared by the SS and presented to Himmler.
By this time the stench of the camps had become so horrible and the danger of epidemics so great that mass burials and mass pyres had been largely superseded by cremation in specially designed ovens which would take half a dozen bodies at a time. The congestion in the extermination camps (sometimes aggravated by technical breakdowns which obliged trainloads of living victims to wait unloaded in sidings for several days) was caused by the international character of the Polish camps. Deportations from Germany itself and occupied countries swelled the traffic from the end of 1941.
In this year the Nazis finally decided to rid Germany of all its Jews. A plan to deposit them in the USSR having been frustrated by transport difficulties, they were routed instead to Auschwitz and eastern Poland for extermination. A conference on the Wannsee in January 1942 decided also to kill all Croat, Slovak and Rumanian Jews in occupied territory and to inform the governments of Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria that the Germans were ready to deal with their Jews too. Jews from Austria and Bohemia-Moravia were treated as German Jews. Technically this extermination programme was based on an earlier programme for the ‘euthanasia’ of alleged incurables which accounted for some 90,000 victims of Nazi distemper before unwelcome disclosures in 1941 brought it to a halt and subsequently transferred its apparatus outside the Reich where its catchment was extended from ‘incurables’ to Jews, gipsies and Russian prisoners of war. (Of the many millions of Russian war victims two million were murdered prisoners of war.) The Wannsee conference made concrete Hitler’s proclaimed aim to destroy the Jews, but action had already begun in the previous year when the Einsatzkomandos killed a million Jews.
The Wannsee conference came up against the problem which had been worrying Nazi racists for years: what to do about Germany’s half-Jews and quarter-Jews. Heydrich proposed that the former should be sterilized instead of being deported, but Hitler objected, mainly because at bottom he opposed any solution except their removal from German soil. The problem of the half-Jew continued to be debated but was never settled one way or another. Quarter-Jews, who were exempt from the Nuremberg laws, were to remain unmolested unless they were too obviously Jewish in appearance or – sinister opening for blackmail – there were special circumstances. There was a special category of privileged Jews. These included war veterans, Jews over sixty-five, holders of the Iron Cross First Class, senior civil servants, Jews with foreign connections or an international reputation, and others who still had the means to bribe the police. Their fate depended very much on the personal whim of the local Gauleiter and other officials. Privileged Jews remained subject to blackmail, often crudely expressed in such terms as ‘going up the chimney’ or ‘making compost’. They had no legal status or redress and might suddenly find themselves dispatched to a concentration camp for talking in a tram or smoking in the street or receiving a food parcel. The camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Czechoslovakia was reserved for them and was from time to time opened to representatives of the Red Cross. Privileged Jews died in Theresienstadt instead of in other camps, until the confusion of the last stages of the war caused them to be dispersed for extermination. When the war ended Theresienstadt had a residue of 20,000 inmates, one third of them not Jews.
The Greater German Reich was declared purged of Jews in November 1943. This was not strictly true. Many Jews who had married Gentiles, as well as half-Jews and quarter-Jews, survived. There were about 33,000 of them in Germany at the end of the war.
In western occupied countries Jews were removed immediately from public office and subjected to petty inhumanities such as being forbidden to eat in cafés or restaurants, use public transport or (in Holland) ride a bicycle. Next a census would be taken, property confiscated, segregation enforced. During 1942 many western Jews were driven into labour camps in their own countries and in the following year deportation began. It was substantially completed before the end of 1943. At first certain categories were exempted – for example, childless Jews married to Gentiles were given the alternative of sterilization – but these were administrative measures designed to ease the logistics of mass transport and mass murder and keep sections of Jewry quiet until their turn came. In 1943 Auschwitz was so busy that Jews from Holland and Luxembourg had to be sent all the way to Sobibor and Treblinka respectively. French Jews on the other hand went mainly to Auschwitz. Preparations for their deportation began in March 1942 and were extended in June to include the unoccupied zone: 100,000 Jews were to be collected and sent east. After the biggest single round-up – in July when 13,000 men, women and children were crammed into the concentration camp at Drancy and the Vélodrome d’Hiver in hideous conditions – French Jews were being transported to Poland at the rate of a thousand a day. The total was aggravated by Switzerland’s refusal to admit or harbour Jewish fugitives. By a curious twist, however, a number of French Jews were saved by French anti-semitism. France had an anti-semitic strain of its own hardly less pronounced than Germany’s. Even today, after the Nazi holocaust, no Jew has replaced the French Jew Alfred Dreyfus as the principal symbol of European anti-semitism. French anti-semites were given their heads by Vichy and at Laval’s direction the French police helped the SD to round up the Jews in France, but Laval’s perverted nationalism insisted that French Jews, as opposed to Jews of different nationality who had fled to France, should be dealt with by the French authorities instead of being sent to Germany or Poland. Some of them survived and after the extension of the German occupation to the whole country in November many escaped to the Italian zone and Monaco. Thus the Germans contrived to kill only about a quarter of French Jewry as compared with half the Belgian Jews and over three quarters of the Dutch. (The last were specially vulnerable in a small country in which it was difficult to hide. They had nowhere like the Ardennes, where many Belgian Jews and other refugees congregated, and as a community they had had little contact with the Gentiles who alone could have concealed large numbers of them.) In the west as a whole the 7,500 Danish Jews fared least badly. An attempt was made to round them up after the Germans took over in 1943, but all save a few hundred were saved. A German official leaked a warning of the plan and practically the entire Jewish community was first hidden and then transported in small vessels to Sweden, where they were looked after until the end of the war. When the Germans came to round up their victims, they found that the birds had flown. Of Norway’s small Jewish community of about 2,000 some 750 were caught. Italian Jews were deported to Auschwitz and other camps by the Germans after the fall of Mussolini.
South-eastern Europe also provided its share of victims – about one million. In Rumania, with its large Jewish community of nearly three quarters of a million, pogroms were initiated without German encouragement and two thirds of Rumanian Jewry perished during the war in one way or another. In Bulgaria on the other hand the government’s agreement to fall in with German plans by surrendering its Jews for deportation was thwarted by demonstrations of public disgust. In Serbia and Croatia most Jews were killed without being deported. A number of Croatian Jews escaped from the German to the Italian zone of occupation and thence later to the partisans. Of the 75,000 Greek Jews in Salonica at least two thirds were sent to Auschwitz in 1943.
In Slovakia the work of deportation and extermination was begun in 1942 with the cooperation of the puppet government but then suspended; it was resumed and completed after the” Slovak rising of 1944. The Hungarian Jews were the last to go. Up to July 1944 they were persecuted but not exported for extinction. They numbered at this date about 440,000 of whom nearly half were in the Hungarian capital. The arrival of Eichmann heralded a grim turn but the Regent Hörthy (until the abolition of his régime by the Germans in October) was willing to offer an escape route and after some hesitations the American and British governments consented to discuss ways and means. A section at least of the SS seemed to be privy to these manoeuvres and two Hungarian Jews (Joel Brand and another) who arrived in Istanbul in July were thought to be instruments of an SS plan to secure from the allies food, soap and 10,000 lorries – the last for use on Russian fronts only – in return for allowing Hungarian Jews to escape their coming fate. Although Jewish leaders realized that western belligerents would not agree to help the German effort against the Russians, some of them hoped that the negotiations might be spun out in such a way as to stave off the killing of surviving Jews or to organize their ransom for money instead of lorries. But the offer was not taken seriously by the outside world and Brand was even put in prison by the British in the Middle East with whom he was supposed to negotiate. The Hungarian Jews were pawns whom the allies refused to buy on the terms proposed, while in Hungary Eichmann, more intent on the genocide of the Jews than on the provision of food and transport for the German armies, proceeded to round up and dispatch for extermination those Jews whom the fanatics of the post-Hörthy régime did not shoot, club or starve to death. Discussions with the Americans and British dragged on unrealistically until February 1945 when Hitler, perhaps previously unaware of them, put an end to them.
The separateness of the Jews militated against their survival. Cut off and marked out by their history and their circumstances, they were exposed to separate destruction in a way in which no other groups were exposed. Their alternatives were to resist in isolation or just wait. They did both: many waited but others, belying the passivity which had marked their people between their risings against the Romans and the outrages of the twentieth century, rebelled in arms as well as in spirit. Flight from the community was inhibited by family loyalties. It tended to be postponed from month to month in the desperate hope that, as in the past, the Jew would be saved because he was useful: in the Ostland a Jew’s most precious document was his work certificate. In Germany a number of Jews passed themselves off as bombed-out refugees, resorting to every kind of disguise and desperate expedient to save themselves and their families; in Vienna this was called ‘doing a U-boat’ – that is to say submerging. Gentiles were sometimes faced with the harrowing dilemma of taking them in or turning them away for fear that they might, by giving asylum to the outcasts, be consigning themselves and their own children to torture and death.
Many Jews resisted. In France Jews amounted to about a quarter of active resisters, many of them being Polish Jews who had left Poland during the pre-war period of anti-semitic, right-wing rule. In Poland several thousands of Jews took to the woods, formed bands of their own and fought, often in cooperation with escaped Russian prisoners. In Galicia they bought or took weapons from Italians who had been fighting on the Russian front but were on their way back to Italy. There were even risings inside the concentration camps, which were all the more remarkable in view of the utter exhaustion of most of the inmates. (Russian prisoners, for example, were driven on foot for hundreds of miles after the commissars among them had been shot and arrived in no condition to do anything except fall down.) The end of the extermination camp at Sobibor was highly dramatic. In September 1943 a first contingent of 1,750 Russian Jews arrived there, some of them former soldiers of the Russian army. All but eighty were immediately gassed but these eighty were kept alive to help build an extension of the camp and a few weeks after their arrival these and other Jews rose and attacked their guards with axes, knives and their bare hands. After ten SS guards had been killed about 400 prisoners escaped from the compound. Many of them ran into minefields and were killed. Others were rounded up again during the next few days in a hunt organized by the local SS command and yet others were killed by anti-semitic members of Polish right-wing bands. A few joined partisan groups and some eventually rejoined the Russian army. But Sobibor itself was destroyed by this act. Himmler ordered it to be abandoned and all traces of it to be expunged.
There were risings at Auschwitz too. The first, by a handful of surviving Russian prisoners of war in the summer of 1942, was largely a failure. Some were shot trying to escape, others were recaptured later; a few got away. Two years later a second attempt, organized by Jews in the Auschwitz extermination camp, was also unsuccessful. Four SS guards were killed but so were 455 prisoners.
As the war neared its end and the Russian armies approached Poland the surviving inmates of the extermination and labour camps were hurriedly destroyed by lethal injections or by being mowed down by gunfire. Some were removed to camps farther west, but although Himmler ordered the killing to stop in October 1944, a mere two or three per cent of all the Jews abducted during the war survived it. The number of deaths is incalculable. It lies somewhere between four and six million. The gipsies, who were also marked down for total destruction, lost perhaps 200,000 lives; the evidence about their sufferings is vague, but on one occasion at Auschwitz 4,000 of them seem to have been gassed in a single, if prolonged, operation. Gentiles too were killed in droves, including Germans for whom the first concentration camps were originally instituted: at least half a million men and women died in the German concentration camps during the war from illness and ill-treatment. Himmler’s aim of reducing the world’s Slav population by 30 million was not attained, although the losses suffered by the Russians in battle and at the hands of the SS went some way towards realizing this abominable ambition. The apostles of the New Order showed that, given time, their destructive plans were not beyond the compass of human techniques and human will.
The massacre of millions of European Jews was a culminating act in the history of the relations between Jew and Gentile. Hitler did not invent anti-semitism. It was wrapped up in Europe’s inheritance from Christendom. It lay ready to Hitler’s hand and he used it with a pitiless thoroughness which made him a special kind of anti-semite. The myth of a Jewish conspiracy to pervert the world is a Christian myth which has been propagated by Christian writers of eminence and authority almost as far back as the origins of their religion and right up to the present century, and the same writers have also been responsible for the odious slanders against the character and practices of the Jew which Hitler and other modern anti-semites were able to cite and endorse. (One of the commonest of these myths is the charge that Jews murdered non-Jewish children for ritual purposes. The first child alleged to have been killed in this way, William of Norwich, who died in 1144, is still officially venerated by Roman Catholics as a saint and martyr although there is no particle of evidence about the manner of his death. Nor is there any better evidence about any of the other cases of this kind.)
In the eighteenth century opponents of Christianity, such as the leaders of the Enlightenment, who might have been expected to defend the Jews, had their own kind of anti-semitism since they reprobated Jewry as the forerunner of Christianity, while in the nineteenth century racist theories sharpened the persecution of the Jews by making their offence inexpiable. So long as the Jew was persecuted on account of his religion he might escape its worst consequences by baptism, but when he was persecuted on account of his race he had no way out except death. Whether Hitler, who called himself a Roman Catholic, believed Christianity’s anti-semitic inventions or those of the racists is a question which he himself would have regarded as senseless. The point was not whether they were true but whether they were useful, and, as he once said to Rauschning, anti-semitism was an essential tool for spreading Nazism in Germany and beyond. On this issue his political cynicism fitted nicely with his deeper emotions, since besides using anti-semitism he hated Jews.
The enormity of what was done in the forties has led to a search for an explanation: what are the origins of this conflict and its Hitlerian solution? This is one of the most complex problems in the history of Europe, to which much learning and ingenuity have been devoted. Certain general factors appear at first sight: the religious differences, accentuated by Christendom’s condemnation of the Jewish race for deicide; the recognizable physical features of many Jews; their own insistence on their religious and national identity, accentuated by their dispersal; the special functions which, historically, they filled in European societies, often unpopular ones such as money lending. At a deeper level theories about the vulnerability of the Jews have been advanced. One of the more interesting of these attaches importance to the fact that the special services which they once provided came to be no longer needed; for example, their function as the financiers of the state was essential so long as the state was financed through personal borrowing by monarchs but became otiose when this method was replaced by government taxation of the whole community. But the more that Jewish-Gentile relations are probed the more dangerous does it appear to generalize beyond a certain point, for it becomes clear that the position of the Jews in Christendom has varied greatly from time to time and from place to place, so that an explanation of the plight of the Jews in Poland in the twentieth century, for example, will not – except superficially – fit their circumstances in France at the same or any other date.
The premeditated execution of five to six million people by methods of singular barbarity should, one hopes, be difficult to explain. Part of the explanation is to be found in the fact that anti-semitism is ancient, widespread and irrational; yet this is no explanation, since it merely shifts the question back into the past and, by raising it again in a remoter historical context, makes it even more difficult to answer. The emotions which anti-semitism produces are fierce, and the ends which these emotions have compassed have been tacitly approved by thousands or millions of people who would themselves recoil from the methods used. Schemes for saving Jews from Nazi Germany were half-hearted at best. Before the war the Nazis would promise only a small annual exodus of workers without families or capital and tried to link this exodus with a boost to German exports by getting the receiving countries to undertake to increase their purchases of German goods. No country could be found willing to take substantial numbers of Jews; the British barred Palestine to them except in small numbers and on stringent terms; the Americans were so unimaginative as to require certificates of birth which few German Jews possessed and none could ask for from a German official (but a number of Christian priests forged baptismal certificates for them); a Bill to permit 20,000 Jewish children to enter the United States was killed by a ‘patriotic’ lobby in the Congress on the grounds that it offended against the sanctity of family ties and in spite of the fact that the immigration quotas from Germany were regularly underfilled. Hitler was able to exult that nobody wanted the Jews and so, since there was nowhere for them to go, he had no option but to destroy them.
Hitler’s personal commitment to the wholesale murder of the Jews is incontrovertible. He himself proclaimed it more than once. He believed in it; he devoted considerable resources to its accomplishment in the middle of war; and Himmler, Canaris and others stated that it was ordered by Hitler and was therefore not to be questioned. The lack of any written order signed by Hitler is neither weighty nor surprising.
Allied leaders have not escaped some share of the responsibility for these terrible murders. Their culpability is at an altogether lower level but by the winter of 1942 – 3 at the latest the purpose of Auschwitz and its four companion outfits in Poland was known and published. The facts were so appalling and so unwelcome that most of those who became aware of them contrived to disbelieve or dismiss them. But in 1944 the truth became inescapable when two Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz arrived in the west to tell their tale. Jewish organizations pressed for action such as the bombing of access routes or the bombing of the gas chambers themselves. Allied governments tried to sidestep the issue, alleging that the camps were beyond acceptable bombing range. Yet Auschwitz was within range by August 1944 since a synthetic oil plant, adjacent to the camp and revealed by photographic reconnaissance in April, was bombed in that month and the camp itself was accidentally bombed in September in the course of an American raid on a target a few miles further east. One excuse for inaction against the camps – that the inmates might get killed or be put the more quickly into the gas chambers – seems peculiarly inappropriate in the light of the knowledge that 12,000 were being gassed daily at Auschwitz alone. While the greater number of the victims had been killed by this time, the minority who died later were nevertheless very many. The charge of moral myopia will not go away.
The Roman Catholic church had, it may be thought, a special obligation to do something for the Jews both because of its special contribution to anti-semitism over nearly 2,000 years and because of its own teaching on brotherly love. Very many churchmen were compassionate men horrified by Nazi crimes but the church as a body was caught in the toils of its own propaganda, old and new. In modern times Jewry, besides being collectively charged with the judicial murder of Jesus, was associated with a special kind of ungodliness. The French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution were both blamed, again by professed Christian writers, on the Jews, who were made the scapegoats for whatever was alarming to the established order, and especially to the established ecclesiastical order, in a world which had begun to change faster than seemed desirable to those who were used to running it. Again, Hitler did not invent the equation of communism with Jewry; but he was able to profit from it. The more sophisticated and honest enemies of communism knew that the government of the USSR was very far from being run by Jews, but, because they detested and feared communism, they hesitated to speak out against Nazism for fear of undermining the German state and so helping Russian communism to advance into the centre of Europe and join hands with powerful communist parties in the west. The Jews – and the Christian conscience – were sacrificed to this dilemma.
The Roman Catholic church in Germany was persecuted by Hitler. It also came to terms with him and in 1933, on orders from the Vatican, the Centre Party, which was the political face of the church, voted for the Enabling Act which gave Hitler full authority to destroy the German constitution and society. Most of the Roman Catholic bishops then made haste to take back all that they had been saying about the beastliness of the Nazis, Roman Catholic theologians set themselves the task of demonstrating the essential compatibility of Christian and Nazi doctrine, and pulpits which had been used to denounce the latter emitted a new view of the Führer as a man of God. The church so far attuned itself to Nazism as to overlook the concentration camps and endorse Hitler’s foreign policy. When war came the German Roman Catholic clergy broadly supported it and continued to do so in spite of the murder of their Polish colleagues, officially reported, and in spite of Hitler’s unwarranted attacks on small, helpless neutrals; his attack on the USSR evoked a crusading enthusiasm. But many Christians, priests and laymen, exerted themselves and risked their lives to succour Jews. The Dominican and Jesuit orders were specially mindful of their Christian duty.
In the Vatican two Popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, had to contend with the spiritual and practical crises occasioned by the rise of Fascism and Nazism. Pius XI, who became Pope in 1922, was faced with the problem of the relations between the Vatican and first Italy and then Germany. Pius VIII had faced a similar problem in his dealings with Napoleon. Mussolini and Hitler, like Napoleon, wished to establish treaty relations with the Vatican and both succeeded. In the case of Hitler, Pius XI and his nuncio in Berlin and eventual successor, Eugenio Pacelli, believed that a concordat with Hitler would do more good than harm because it would give the Vatican a stronger claim to interfere on behalf of persecuted priests. A concordat was concluded in July 1933. Its effects were disappointing since Hitler persecuted the German clergy more than ever once he had got it, but the motives of Pius and Pacelli were sincere and their reasoning could not be definitely condemned before the event. Both men were disgusted by the Nazis and by anti-semitism. In March 1937 Pius XI issued, in German, the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which was read from all Roman Catholic pulpits in Germany and, although it contained no explicit reference to anti-semitism, was understood as a clear and sharp, if belated, attack on Nazi policies; but again the effects were very limited. Pacelli, who was consulted by the Pope before the encyclical was issued, toned up its language. He himself more anti-Nazi than many western conservatives and diplomats, delivered in the same year an openly anti-Nazi speech at Lisieux and upon his accession to the Papacy was condemned by the Nazis as even worse than his predecessor.
Despite the ritual mystery surrounding the election of a Pope the elevation of Pacelli to the Papal see on the death of Pius XI in 1939 was a foregone conclusion. Pius XI, departing from all precedent, had practically designated Pacelli as his successor, and one of the shortest conclaves on record sufficed to fill the vacancy. Pius XII had served as nuncio in Munich and then in Berlin and had other special connections with Germany, but he was also at that date the most widely travelled Cardinal in Europe and beyond ever to become Pope. The breadth of his experience and of his intelligence were alike unusual. His opposition to inhumanity and aggression were beyond question. Yet he has been assailed for failing in his human and Christian duty. This supreme accusation against a supreme pontiff relates to his conduct in relation to both Christians and Jews. Directly and by his example he did much for thousands of Jews who were saved from death and given money, food, clothing and even employment in Roman Catholic institutions. But he made no public protest against the murders of Jews, did not use his awful weapon of excommunication against the murderers, refused to speak out against Vichy’s anti-semitic laws (even when the French bishops did) and refused to intervene when, in October 1943, the Germans carried off over a thousand Jews from Rome itself to be gassed.
The Pope adopted one standard when he protested against the Russian invasion of Finland and another when he failed to protest against the German invasion of Poland. Although copiously informed about the Germans’ treatment of the Poles he kept silent. He was chided by Cardinal Tisserant for even more unbecoming reticence over the misdeeds performed in his name by the ustachi in Croatia. This new state, which emerged from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1941, was placed under the rule of Ante Pavelič, an Italian protégé since the twenties and a rabid Roman Catholic who was intent on destroying the two million Orthodox Christian Serbs in Croatia and on reviving the temporal sovereignty of the Papacy. Pavelič introduced a religious reign of terror, demanding wholesale conversions to Roman Catholicism, perpetrating atrocities which were ghastly even by the standards of these ghastly years, and encouraging his ustachi bands (often led by priests) to run amok. Roman Catholic bishops were appalled by his barbarity but judged it wiser to say little and accept compensation for their injured feelings in redeemed souls and enhanced church property. The Pope himself said nothing in public.
Pius XII could have argued, and perhaps did, that he must avoid the charge levelled against Benedict XV in the First World War of taking sides against Germany, that excommunication was no longer an incisive weapon (though he used it against communists after the war) and that public protest could do the victims more harm than good, but his posture in his dilemma was an unheroic one and contrasted unfavourably with that of some of his own nuncios and other Roman Catholic notabilities who were stirred to an open opposition which was often effective. He was in the uncomfortable dilemma of occupying an office whose pretensions were greater than its capacities and, in preferring the cautious to the outspoken course, he seemed to neglect his obligation to re-state the violated canons of human behaviour. Although he might not be able to save the victims, he could have pointed the finger of divine anger against the criminals. By keeping silent, he sanctioned the unheroic frailty of all those lesser men who prefer, unless exhorted and inspired, to pass by on the other side. He invited the charge of failing to keep the Christian conscience sharp and clean. That charge has since been laid. The record is mixed.