Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (89 page)

Netherlands, it was seen in the demands of the RSHA to start the deportation of

Jews with Belgian citizenship, and it lay behind Himmler’s call on 8 June to deport

French Jews who were due to be denaturalized by 15 July. But the radicalization

can also be observed in German Judenpolitik in Croatia in May 1943, when the

Germans were urging that the deportations be taken to their conclusion; and it

was also apparent in Slovakia, where a new initiative was introduced in the spring

of 1943, to spur the government there to resume deportations.

A further burst of radicalization began in September 1943, after Italy’s secession.

On the one hand, Judenpolitik now had the new function just referred to, on the

other hand, as was seen in Denmark, the German deportation machinery lacked

the power to implement further deportations on its own; it was forced more than

ever to rely on the collaboration of local forces. Where that collaboration worked,

the murder machine was horribly effective.

Italy

After the ceasefire in September 1943, the invasion of the Wehrmacht, and the

formation of a new Fascist government in the northern half of the country, the

RSHA was resolved ruthlessly to deport the Jews living in that part of the country,

numbering between around 33,000 and 34,000.
163

In October, Dannecker was sent to Rome as leader of a small Einsatzkom-

mando.
164
Two days after a large-scale raid on 16 October, more than 1,000 Jews were deported from the Italian capital to Auschwitz. Dannecker’s commando

went on to organize further raids in other Italian cities, so that by the end of the

year almost 1,400 people had been deported to Auschwitz in four transports. But

the RSHA reached the view that this approach had not produced ‘any noteworthy

result’, as the great majority of Jews living in Italy had by now gone into hiding.
165

At the beginning of December, representatives of the Foreign Ministry and the

RSHA therefore agreed to involve the Italian authorities in the persecution.
166

To achieve this, they exploited the fact that the government of the ‘Social Italian

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Republic’ had independently ordered the internment of all Jews in late November,

without at first officially informing the Italians about the final goal of the perse-

cution, deportation, and mass murder. The Fascist state was thus to be enmeshed

in a murderous complicity with the ‘Third Reich’.

In accordance with this new persecution strategy Dannecker’s mobile com-

mando was replaced early in 1944 by a special Jewish department attached to the

commander of the Security Police, led by Friedrich Bosshammer, also a colleague

of Eichmann. With the help of the apparatus of the BdS, Bosshammer had the

chance to deploy the Italian police as an auxiliary organization for systematic

persecution. Beginning in January, the office of the BdS demanded that the Italian

police hand over the interned Jews. Bosshammer ignored Italian laws forbidding

the arrest of certain groups (the elderly, those married to non-Jews, etc.). In mid-

March Bosshammer took over the Fossoli camp from the Italian authorities and

made it the central collection camp for the Jews arrested by the Italian police and

the branch commandos of the BdS. In August 1944, given the approaching front,

the central collection camp was transferred to Bolzano.

Overall, throughout 1944 at least fifteen transports carrying more than 3,800

Jews left Italy for Auschwitz, where the great majority were murdered. Meanwhile

over 80 per cent of the Jews living in Italy managed—thanks to the solidarity of the

Italian population—to escape the clutches of their persecutors.
167

Since September 1943, Odilo Globocnik, himself originally from Trieste, and

one of the men chiefly responsible for the extermination of the Polish Jews, had

been appointed HSSPF to the ‘Operation Zone of the Adriatic Coastal Region’,

along with part of the Einsatzkommando Reinhard. This was the area around

Trieste which had been directly incorporated into the territory of the Greater

German Reich. The Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice mill, served as a collection

camp for the Jews arrested in this area. From December 1943 until February 1943,

twenty-two transports carrying more than 1,100 Jews left Trieste for Auschwitz,

the last one reaching Bergen-Belsen. Over 90 per cent of the deportees were

murdered.
168

Former Italian Zones of Occupation in Greece and Croatia

After the Wehrmacht had taken over the Italian zones of occupation in Greece as

well as Albania, Montenegro, and the Dodecanese (the eastern Aegean group of

islands, Italian since 1912), in response to Italy’s departure from the war, a further

(approximately) 16,000 Jews came under German control.
169

After an ‘action’ in March 1944 against the Jews living in the former Italian zone

of occupation on the Greek mainland, on 2 April a transport carrying a total of

5,000 people left Athens for Auschwitz, reaching the camp nine days later after

unimaginable hardships.
170
Between May and August 1944 the members of the Jewish communities on the Greek islands (Corfu, Rhodes, Crete) were arrested by

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

403

the Wehrmacht, transported to the mainland, and deported to Auschwitz in two

transports.
171

When the Italian occupation of Croatia ended in September, the majority of the

Jews who had by now been rounded up in an internment camp on the island of

Rab were able to escape to a zone controlled by the People’s Liberation Army;

around 200 Jews were captured by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz in the

second half of March. The same fate awaited several hundred Jews in other parts

of the formerly Italian-occupied zone.
172

Further Radicalization of the Persecution in France

Immediately after the German troops marched into the Italian-occupied zone of

southern France on 8 September, following the ceasefire between Italy and the

Allies, Brunner’s Sonderkommando began to hunt down those Jews who had so far

been left unmolested.
173

Brunner concentrated particularly on Nice, where about 20,000–25,000 Jews,

mostly refugees, were living. Without French support, however, he managed only

to deport 1,800 people to Drancy within three months.
174

The security police had always seen the Italian resistance to the German

persecution of the Jews as a significant hindrance to a radical ‘solution’ of the

Jewish question across the whole of France. From the point of view of the Security

Police, the removal of this factor opened up the possibility of radicalizing the

persecution of the Jews across France on the massive scale sketched out by

Eichmann and Röthke in the summer of 1943
,175
and deporting, where possible, all Jews living in France regardless of their nationality.

Since as early as August 1943, the Gestapo had stepped up their arrests of French

Jews across the whole of France for alleged infringements of the French anti-

Jewish laws.
176
After the head of the militia, Darmand, had replaced Bousquet as general secretary of the police, on the orders of the Security Police the French

police increasingly participated in the arrest of French Jews in the provinces.
177

But after the French government had been reshuffled to the right in March

1944
,178
there was no further reason for the Germans to take into consideration French objections and reservations about the deportations. For the French government’s support among the population was in any case so weak that the country

could only be kept under control by means of a rule of terror.

On 14 April 1944, Brunner and Knochen ordered all Jews, regardless of their

nationality, to be arrested, with the exception of people living in ‘mixed mar-

riages’. Rewards were offered for denunciations. In the four months leading to the

cessation of the deportations in August 1944 more than 6,000 people were

deported.
179
By then a total of almost 76,000 Jews had been deported from France, a further 4,000 had died in camps or been murdered in the country. This meant

that, as a whole, a quarter of the Jews living in France had become victims of the

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Holocaust. Among the deportees were around 24,000 French nationals, including

8,000 children of foreign parents who were born in France, and 8,000 naturalized

Jews.
180
Around two-thirds of the deportees were deported from occupied France, and about a third from southern France, unoccupied until 1942.
181

Slovakia

By the time of the temporary cessation of the deportations from Slovakia in

October 1942, around 58,000 people had been deported from the country to

occupied Poland.
182
Around 24,000 Jews had been excluded from the deportions by so-called ‘writs of protection’ issued by the Slovakian authorities. The Germans

repeatedly stressed their demand for the resumption of the deportations, but

could not impose their will on Slovakia.

After a German initiative in early summer 1943—clearly in the context of the

general radicalization after the Warsaw ghetto uprising (the parallel with the

German initiatives in France and Croatia is plain)—in June, the ambassador,

Hans Ludin, had to report to the Foreign Ministry that the ‘implementation of

the evacuation of the Jews from Slovakia’ had ‘presently reached a dead end’. The

Prime Minister, Vojtech Tuka, wanted to continue the ‘resettlement’ and was

requesting ‘the diplomatic support of the Reich’. The Secretary of State,

Weizsäcker, advised him to inform President Tiso that the halt to the deportations

was causing surprise in Germany.
183

At this point there were more than 18,000, possibly up to 25,000 Jews, living in

Slovakia.
184
More than 15,000 of these were claimed to be indispensable by the Slovakian authorities; a few thousand were imprisoned as forced labourers in

concentration camps within Slovakia.

In July 1943, the head of department Inland II of the Foreign Ministry, Horst

Wagner, informed the ambassador, Ludin, on Ribbentrop’s instructions, that

‘there were not at present any plans to approach the Slovakian government

concerning the final stage of the cleaning up of the Slovakian Jewish question’.

However, the Foreign Ministry’s South-Eastern Europe expert, Edmund Veesen-

mayer, would soon informally tell President Tiso, in the course of a visit to

Pressburg, of ‘the continuing interest in the cleaning up of the Jewish question

in Slovakia’.
185

After an initial visit in July, in December 1943 Veesenmeyer began negoti-

ations with Tiso, and won his agreement that the remaining Jews still living in

Slovakia, whose numbers were estimated as between 16,000 and 18,000, were

to be ‘taken to Jewish camps’ by 1 April 1944 at the latest.
186
In fact the Slovaks did not keep their part of the agreement. Efforts by Veesenmeyer, by

now the German ambassador in Hungary, to organize the deportation of the

Slovakian Jews in the wake of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, were

unsuccessful.
187

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

405

The refusal of the Slovakian government to comply with German demands

has much to do with the change of political climate that had occurred in

Slovakia since early in 1942, but increasingly since early 1943, with the defeat

at Stalingrad. The deportations had encountered opposition among influential

circles of the Slovakian population, and that attitude of opposition became more

marked after details of the fate of the deportees leaked out and, with the Red

Army’s advance towards the national border, it became increasingly likely that

this blatant crime would be punished.
188

Given the delaying response of the Slovakian government towards its German

ally, the last phase of the persecution of the Jews in the country only started after

the beginning of the popular uprising in Slovakia in August 1944 and the occu-

pation of the country by German troops. Himmler appointed his close confidant

Gottlob Berger, head of the SS Main Office, ‘commander of German troops

in Slovakia’ and Hermann Höfle, who had played a central part in ‘Aktion

Reinhardt’, as HSSPF. He also appointed a commander of the Security Police

(BdS) for the territory, which was not treated as an occupied country, but as an

ally. However, the BdS was also assigned its own Einsatzgruppe, H, assembled

from five Einsatzkommandos. These commandos erected a system of bases around

the country, and began hunting Jews living in Slovakia, most of whom were

imprisoned in the camp at Sered. In the face of opposition from the Slovakian

government, the SS imposed the resumption of the deportations: between

September 1944 and March 1943 eleven transports left Slovakia. Almost 8,000

people were deported to Auschwitz, more than 2,700 to Sachsenhausen, and over

1,600 to Theresienstadt.
189
An unknown number of these deportees lost their lives during the transports, as a result of their conditions of imprisonment and the