The Third Reich at War (63 page)

Many of these refugees had been opponents of the Nazi regime, and a good number were hunted down ruthlessly by the Gestapo. A special fate was reserved for one Jewish refugee in particular. In June 1940, a Gestapo unit arrived in Paris to secure the young Pole Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of a German diplomat there had been the pretext for the launching of the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938. Grynszpan had in fact been moved by the French prison authorities to Toulouse. En route he had actually escaped, perhaps with the connivance of his captors, or perhaps he had simply got lost, but, amazingly, he turned up at a police station not long afterwards to present himself to the authorities. The Gestapo were quickly on the scene. After interrogating him in their notorious cellars in the Prinz Albrecht Street in Berlin, no doubt about his supposed but in fact purely imaginary Jewish backers, they took him to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was admitted on 18 January 1941 and seems to have received relatively privileged treatment. In March 1941 he was transferred to Flossenbürg, and in October to the Moabit prison in Berlin to await trial by the People’s Court under Otto-Georg Thierack. Meanwhile a legal team had been sent to Paris to try to find evidence for the claim, put forward in 1938 as justification for the pogrom, that he had been acting as part of a Jewish conspiracy. It failed to find any. Worse still, it now became clear that the man he had shot, vom Rath, was homosexual, and rumours were circulating that the two had been involved in a sexual relationship. There was no truth in the allegations, but the danger of embarrassment was still considerable, so Goebbels decided to abandon the idea of a trial. Grynszpan was transferred to the penitentiary at Magdeburg in September 1942, where he seems to have died early in 1945, whether or not from natural causes is uncertain.
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Tensions meanwhile were mounting in Paris and other parts of the occupied zone of France. The senior army commander in the occupied zone, Otto von Sẗlpnagel, was replaced on 16 February 1942 by his cousin Karl-Heinrich von Sẗlpnagel, a hardline antisemite transferred from the Eastern Front. The new commander ordered that future reprisals were to take the form of mass arrests of Jews and their deportation to the east. Following an attack on German soldiers, 743 Jews, mostly French, were arrested by the German police and interned in a German-run camp at Compiègne; with another 369 Jewish prisoners they were eventually deported to Auschwitz in March 1942.
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On 1 June 1942, in addition, a new Chief of the SS and Police took over in Paris - another transfer from the east, Carl Oberg. Finally, in the Vichy zone, the return of Pierre Laval to head the government in April 1942 signalled an increased willingness to co-operate with the Germans, in the belief that this would lay the foundations for a Franco-German partnership in building a new Europe after the war. With the growing radicalization of German policy towards the Jews, Laval correspondingly appointed a radical antisemite, Louis Darquier (who called himself, somewhat pretentiously, ‘Darquier de Pellepoix’), to run Jewish affairs in the unoccupied zone, with the assistance of an effective and unscrupulous new chief of police, Ren’ Bousquet. It was Bousquet who asked Heydrich during the latter’s visit to France on 7 May 1942 for permission to transport another 5,000 Jews from the transit camp at Drancy to the east. By the end of June, 4,000 had already gone to Auschwitz.
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On 11 June 1942 a meeting was called by Eichmann in the Reich Security Head Office, with the heads of the Jewish Affairs departments of the SS Security Service in Paris, Brussels and The Hague. It was informed that Himmler demanded the transport of Jewish men and women from Western Europe for labour duties, together with a substantial number of those judged unfit for work. For military reasons it was not possible to deport more Jews from Germany during the summer. 100,000 were to be taken from both French zones (later reduced to 40,000 for reasons of practicality), 15,000 were to come from the Netherlands (a number subsequently increased to 40,000 to make up some of the shortfall from France), and 10,000 from Belgium.
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By this time, the wearing of the Jewish star had become compulsory in the occupied zone, calling forth many individual demonstrations of sympathy from French Communists, students and Catholic intellectuals.
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On 15 July 1942 the arrest of stateless Jews began. French police used previously compiled files to identify and begin the round-up of 27,000 Jewish refugees in the Paris region. The scale of the action was so large that it could scarcely remain a secret even in the planning stage, and many Jews went underground. Just over 13,000 had been arrested by 17 July 1942. After sending all the unmarried people or childless couples to the collection camp at Drancy, the police penned up the remaining 8,160 men, women and children in the bicycle-racing stadium known as the V’l d’Hiv. For three to six days they stayed there, without water, toilets or bedding, in temperatures of 37 degrees Celsius or above, subsisting only on one or two bowls of soup a day. Together with another 7,100 Jews from the Vichy zone, they were eventually sent via further collection centres to Auschwitz - a total of 42,500 altogether by the end of the year. Among them was a transport sent on 24 August 1942 consisting mainly of sick children and adolescents between the ages of two and seventeen who had been kept in hospital while their parents had been sent to Auschwitz; all 553 were gassed immediately on their arrival at the camp.
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The leading representatives of the French Jewish community did little to protest against these deportations of foreign Jews, still less to try to prevent them. Only when the majority had already been deported, and the Germans began to turn their attention to native French Jews, did their attitude begin to change.
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A similar evolution took place in the approach of the Catholic Church in France. Meeting on 21 July 1942, the French Cardinals and Archbishops resolved to do nothing to prevent foreign Jews being deported to what they now knew to be their death. Those who protested were, they noted, enemies of Christianity, especially Communists. It would be wrong to make common cause with them. The letter they sent to Marshal P’tain on 22 July 1942 merely criticized the maltreatment of the internees, especially at the V’l d’Hiv. Some prelates were less mealy-mouthed. On 30 August 1942 the Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-G’rard Saliège, issued a pastoral letter declaring roundly that both French and foreign Jews were human beings and should not be loaded on to trains like cattle. Others encouraged rescue attempts behind the scenes, particularly where Jewish children were the targets. But the Catholic Church in France as an institution had traditionally been deeply conservative, even monarchist in sentiment; and it stood broadly behind the ideas that underpinned the Vichy regime. Only when the regime came under pressure to reclassify as foreigners all Jews who had been naturalized as French citizens since 1927 did the Cardinals and Archbishops declare their opposition. It was clear, too, that this policy would encounter substantial popular criticism, and P’tain and Laval rejected the proposal in August 1943. Their reluctance was no doubt strengthened by their realization that Germany was on the way to losing the war by this time.
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On 11 November 1942, symbolically marking the anniversary of the armistice that had ended the First World War, German troops crossed the border from the occupied zone into the area controlled by Vichy and proceeded to take it over. The Vichy regime had failed to prevent the Allied invasion of the territories it controlled in North Africa, notably Algeria, and its ineffective fighting forces, which Hitler now ordered to be disbanded, clearly offered no prospect of a defence against Allied attacks on the southern French coast across the Mediterranean.
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This presaged a further dramatic worsening of the situation for France’s remaining Jewish population. On 10 December 1942 Himmler noted that at a meeting with Hitler the two men had agreed ‘Jews in France/ 600-700 000/do away with.’
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This was double the number of Jews actually in France. Nevertheless, on the same day, Himmler told his subordinates: ‘The Leader has given the order for the Jews and other enemies of the Reich in France to be arrested and taken away.’
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Deportations resumed in February 1943. But the German authorities’ efforts to arrest and deport French Jews ran into increasing difficulties. Popular willingness to protect or hide them was growing, and some 30,000 also found their way to relative safety in the Italian-occupied portion of south-eastern France. In the summer of 1943, determined that the French Jews should be exterminated, Eichmann sent Alois Brunner directly from carrying out similar work in Salonika with a staff of twenty-five SS officers to replace the French officials in charge of the transit camp at Drancy. Over the next few months, the Gestapo arrested most of the leaders of the French Jewish community and deported them to Auschwitz or Theresienstadt; the last trainload left for Auschwitz on 22 August 1944.
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Altogether, some 80,000 out of 350,000 French Jews, or just under a quarter, were killed; this was a far greater proportion than in other largely self-governing countries in Western Europe such as Denmark or Italy.
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The German takeover of the previously unoccupied area of France presaged the decline of the Vichy regime. P’tain now became little more than a figurehead for Laval, whose radical right-wing views had free rein. He shocked many French people by openly proclaiming his desire for Germany to win the war. But increasingly he had to rely on repression to impose his views. In January 1943 he set up a new police force, the French Militia (
Milice franc¸aise
) under Joseph Darnand, whose own Fascist paramilitary Legionaries formed its active and radical core. With nearly 30,000 members, all bound to a code of honour that obliged them to fight against democracy, Communism, individualism and the ‘Jewish leprosy’, the Militia bore more than a passing resemblance to Michael Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania. Darnand joined the SS and as a reward Himmler’s organization began to supply him with money and arms. Laval was being outflanked on the right, and in December 1943 the French Militia was authorized by the Germans to operate across the whole of France. These developments deepened the unpopularity of the occupation and the Vichy regime. Growing economic problems, a rapidly falling standard of living and ever more intrusive labour drafts all undermined its credibility still further. Waiting across the Channel in London was the Free French movement under Colonel Charles de Gaulle. By 1943 the Vichy regime had lost most of its power, and the idea of national regeneration on which it had based its appeal to the French people had been rendered meaningless by the German takeover of the unoccupied zone.
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II

In Belgium, the chaos that accompanied the German invasion was such that the majority of people were simply concerned to re-establish some kind of normality. Two million Belgians, a fifth of the entire population, had fled south to France when the German forces marched in, and despite the relative brevity of the conflict, the damage done to property by military action was considerable. Seen from Belgium, the situation looked very different from how it appeared across the Channel. King Leopold III, whose precipitate surrender had caused such anger in London, was seen by Belgians as a unifying figure, and his presence, albeit in confinement, in Brussels during the war provided a focal point for national unity. The government that had fled to London was blamed for the defeat, along with the parliament. The prewar order was unpopular even with the small groups on the far left and right who tried, without much success, to resist the German occupation. Given the importance of the Belgian coast as a jumping-off point for a possible invasion of Britain, either in 1940 or at some time in the future, Hitler decided to leave the military in charge, as they were also in the French departments of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais. This led to a different and to some extent milder form of occupation than it might have been had a civilian Nazi commissioner been in charge. From the German point of view, the role of Belgian heavy industry was also important to the war economy, so it was vital not to alienate the working population. The overall result was that the existing Belgian establishment, the civil service, lawyers, industrialists, the Church and those political leaders who had not gone into exile, worked with the German military administration to try to preserve peace and calm and maintain the existing social order. The vast majority of ordinary Belgians saw little alternative but to go along with this, making what accommodations with the occupying powers they thought necessary.
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The German occupiers also tended to view the Flemish inhabitants of Belgium as Nordic in their racial constitution, and held the same view of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Netherlands. In the long term, indeed, Holland was slated for incorporation into the Reich. In consequence, the German administration was relatively conciliatory, and took care not to alienate the population. In any case, as in Belgium, the prewar order was popularly blamed for the defeat, and the vast majority of Dutch people saw little alternative to coming to terms with the occupation, at least in the short-to-medium term. The best thing to do seemed to be to reach a modus vivendi with the Germans and wait and see what would happen in the long run. Queen Wilhelmina and the government had fled into exile in London, so a civil administration was imported under the Austrian politician Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who proceeded to appoint fellow Austrians to all the top civilian posts except one. For good measure, the head of the SS and the German police in Holland, Hanns Rauter, was also Austrian. The military administration, run by an air force general, was relatively weak. Thus Nazi Party appointees and the SS had far more room to impose extreme policies than did their counterparts in Belgium. In the absence of a Dutch government, Seyss-Inquart issued a stream of edicts and injunctions, and established comprehensive control over the administration. The consequences of this were soon to become apparent.
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