The Third Reich at War (65 page)

But as Germany’s military fortunes began to decline, acts of resistance in Denmark began to multiply. Sabotage, strikes and various kinds of unrest had become widespread by the summer of 1943. Hitler ordered the declaration of martial law, and this was followed shortly afterwards by the withdrawal of co-operation by the Danish government. There was clearly no possibility of an alternative, more willing administration being formed to take its place, although this was the course favoured by the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. Best now moved to assume total power himself, using the Danish civil service to implement his own personal rule. For this he needed a massive increase in police powers, and the means to this seemed obvious to him: the implementation of the long-delayed deportation of the Danish Jews. On 17 September 1943 Hitler gave his approval, confirming the deportation order on 22 September 1943. In his mind, the Jews were in any case responsible for the growth of Danish resistance, and their removal would be crucial in putting an end to it. Swiftness and surprise were vital. But news of the impending arrests began to leak out. The Swedish government, which had been told the date by its ambassador in Copenhagen, issued a public offer to grant asylum to all Danish Jews, who now began to go into hiding. In a country where collaborationism was weak and there was little native antisemitism, a police action now seemed to Best to be counter-productive. A police sweep would probably take weeks and would arouse widespread public anger. Best tried to get Berlin to call off the action, but without results. So he himself now ensured that the planned date of the action, 2 October 1943, leaked out as widely as possible. On 1 October 1943, after a good deal of secret preparation, Danes everywhere and in every situation of life worked together to ship around 7,000 Jews across the straits to Sweden and safety. Only 485 were arrested in the following day’s ‘action’. Best intervened with Eichmann to ensure that almost all those arrested were taken not to Auschwitz but to Theresienstadt, where the great majority of them survived the war.
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Best presented this action as a triumph for German policy. ‘Denmark,’ he wrote to the German Foreign Office, ‘has been freed of Jews, since there are no more Jews active and living here legally who fall under the relevant decrees.’
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His action was motivated not by any moral considerations, but by power-political calculation, within the overall context of a virulent and murderous antisemitism propagated and implemented by the organization to which he himself belonged, the SS. It was already clear that martial law would soon come to an end, and, when it did, Best instituted a regime of what might be called behind-the-scenes terror, in which he proclaimed in public the continuation of a flexible approach, but - acting on Hitler’s orders to take reprisals - used clandestine armed bands, including on occasion SS men dressed as civilians, to kill those he believed were responsible for the growing campaign of sabotage against German military and economic installations. His policy met with little success; on 19 April 1944, indeed, his own chauffeur was assassinated. As the situation threatened to deteriorate into a state of unbridled civil war, and Copenhagen looked like becoming a European version of 1920s Chicago, Best backpedalled once more. Ignoring orders from Hitler and Himmler for show trials and on-the-spot killings of suspects, he carried out individual executions but, even after a mass strike in Copenhagen, refused to implement a policy of mass counter-terror. From the Danish perspective, however, there was little difference between the two policies. As Ulrich von Hassell noted on 10 July 1944, after meeting with a friend stationed in Denmark, Best was ‘a very sensible man’: ‘The murder of German soldiers or of Danes friendly to the Germans is not met by punishment or the shooting of a hostage. Instead a simple policy of revenge murder is carried out, that is some innocent Danes are killed. Hitler wanted a ratio of 5 to 1; Best reduced it to 2 to 1. The hatred created everywhere is boundless.’
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The effect was thus the same. Normal life continued in Denmark after a fashion, with the civil administration continuing to function, but the hold of the German occupiers on the country became steadily more shaky. And although Best had gone back on his instrumentalization of ‘Jewish policy’ for the scrapping of existing forms of collaboration and the introduction of a regime of naked terror, it was to be introduced in other countries to deadly effect.
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At the same time, the obsessive pursuit of the Jewish population all over occupied Europe continued, irrespective of the economic utility or otherwise of their extermination. A clear case in point was Greece, where there was a substantial Jewish community - 55,000 in the German occupation zone, 13,000 in the area controlled by the Italians, whose reluctance to co-operate in antisemitic measures frustrated the ambitions of the Reich Security Head Office until 1943. In 1942, however, the German army began to draft Jewish men into forced labour projects, and in February 1943 the wearing of the Jewish star was made compulsory. The large Jewish population of the northern city of Salonika was herded into a tumbledown district of the city as a preparation for deportation. Meanwhile, senior officials in Eichmann’s department had arrived in Salonika to prepare the action, including Alois Brunner. On 15 March 1943 the first train left with 2,800 Jews on board; others followed until, within a few weeks, 45,000 out of the city’s 50,000 Jewish inhabitants had been taken off to Auschwitz, where the majority were killed immediately on arrival. Taken by surprise, and poorly if at all informed about what was going on in Auschwitz, they offered no resistance; nor was there any Greek organization in existence that might have offered to help them. The leader of the religious community in Salonika, Rabbi Zwi Koretz, merely tried to assuage the fears of his congregation. Objections from the Red Cross’s representative in Athens, Ren’ Burckhardt, were met by a successful German request to the organization’s headquarters to have him transferred back to Switzerland. The Italian consul in Salonika, Guelfo Zamboni, supported by the ambassador in Athens, intervened to try to obtain as many exemptions as he could, but he could only save 320 of Salonika’s Jews in all. Meanwhile, the Germans razed the Jewish cemetery and used the gravestones to pave new roads in the area.
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Several months went by before the deportations could be extended to the capital, since the Jewish community’s list of members had been destroyed. On 23 March 1944, however, 800 Jews who had gathered in the main synagogue after the German authorities had promised to distribute Passover bread were arrested and deported to Auschwitz; and in the course of July 1944, the Germans rounded up the tiny Jewish communities living on the Greek islands, including ninety-six from Kos and 1,750 from Rhodes, who were shipped to the mainland and similarly deported to Auschwitz.
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As in the case of Finland, the obsessiveness with which the SS, aided by the local German civilian and military authorities, hounded the last Jews to their deaths, irrespective of any military or economic rationality, was a stark testimony to the primacy of antisemitic thinking in the ideology of the Third Reich.

IV

The situation of the Jewish populations of countries allied to Nazi Germany was complex, and altered with the changing fortunes of war. In some of them, native antisemitism was strong, and in the case of Romania, as we have seen, it led to pogroms and killings on an enormous scale. By the middle of 1942, however, the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu was beginning to have second thoughts about the extermination of the Romanian Jews, who formed a large proportion of the country’s professional classes. Interventions from the USA, the Red Cross, the Turkish government, the Romanian Queen Mother, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania and the Papal Nuncio all began to have an effect on the dictator. There is also some evidence that wealthy Romanian Jews had bribed Antonescu and some of his officials to postpone their deportation. Moreover, behind the scenes, Romanian intellectuals, professors, schoolteachers and others forcefully reminded Antonescu that Romania was the only European country apart from Germany to have carried out a large-scale extermination of the Jews on its own initiative. When the war was over, and the Germans, as now seemed increasingly likely to many leading Romanians, had been defeated, this would endanger Romanian claims over northern Transylvania, since in December 1942 Churchill and Roosevelt declared the punishment of countries that had persecuted the Jews to be an Allied war aim. Initially, Antonescu had acceded to the German request to allow the deportation to occupied Poland not only of Romanian Jews living in Germany or German-occupied Europe, but also of the 300,000 Jews left in Romania itself. But he was irritated by repeated German attempts to get him to surrender what were, after all, despite his record of reducing their civil equality and much more besides, Romanian citizens. Warned by the German Foreign Office that they were a serious threat, he still dithered. After playing for time, Antonescu first halted the deportation of Jews to Transnistria, then late in 1943 began repatriating the surviving deportees back to their Romanian homeland.
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Hitler did not give up trying to persuade him to resume the genocide, warning him as late as 5 August 1944 that, if Romania was defeated, it could not expect Romanian Jews to defend it or do anything but put a Communist regime in power.
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But Antonescu was no longer willing to listen to him.

Concerns about sovereignty were also decisive in Bulgaria, where King Boris refused to surrender the country’s Jews to the SS after widespread popular protest against the plan. There was still a functioning parliament in the country, imposing limits on the authoritarian monarch’s freedom of action, and deputies objected forcefully to the deportation of Bulgarian citizens, despite having bowed to German pressure earlier by introducing antisemitic legislation. 11,000 Jews in the annexed Thracian and Macedonian territories were deprived of their citizenship, rounded up and handed over to the Germans for killing. Yet there was little endemic antisemitism in Bulgaria, where the Jewish minority was small. There was widespread outrage when 6,000 Jews from the prewar Bulgarian kingdom were listed for deportation along with the others by an over-zealous antisemitic official. The Orthodox Church stepped in to protect the Jews, declaring that Bulgaria would remember the war with shame if they were deported. On a visit to Germany on 2 April 1943, King Boris explained to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop that the remaining 25,000 Jews in Bulgaria would be put in concentration camps rather than delivered to the Germans. Ribbentrop insisted that in his view only ‘the most radical solution was the right one’. But he was forced to admit that nothing more could be done.
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In similar fashion, the Hungarian government, which had nationalized Jewish-owned land and begun discussions with the German government about the deportation of Hungarian Jews, also began finding excuses for failing to co-operate with the increasingly insistent demands of the German Foreign Office. In October 1942 the Hungarian Regent and effective Head of State, Mikl’s H’rthy, and his Prime Minister, Mikl’s Kall’y, rejected a German request to introduce the wearing of the Jewish star for Hungarian Jews. While Hitler did not want to offend either Romania or Bulgaria, he became increasingly irritated with the failure of Hungary to deliver up its Jewish population of 800,000 for extermination and the confiscation of its assets. In addition, H’rthy was now pulling troops out of the German-led army on the Eastern Front, in the belief that Germany was on the way to losing the war. On 16 and 17 April 1943, therefore, Hitler met with H’rthy near Salzburg, in the presence of Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, to put some pressure on him on both these issues. Among other things, H’rthy made it clear during the first day’s discussion that any Hungarian solution of the ‘Jewish question’ would have to take the specific circumstances of Hungary into account. Dismayed by his reluctance to accede to their request, Hitler and Ribbentrop returned to the topic on the second day. Both sides now dropped the diplomatic circumlocutions. According to the interpreter’s minutes, Ribbentrop told H’rthy ‘that the Jews must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other way.’ Hitler weighed in with a lengthier series of arguments:

Where the Jews were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. They were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews there didn’t want to work, they were shot. If they couldn’t work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. This was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one any more spare the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.
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But H’rthy would not budge. He would soon pay the price for his intransigence.

The small and predominantly agricultural Catholic state of Slovakia, set up as an autonomous state after the Munich agreement in 1938, had been led since March 1939, when it had become nominally independent, by the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso as President and the extreme nationalist law professor Vojtech Tuka as Minister-President. The radical wing of the nationalist movement, which Tuka led, had moved steadily closer to National Socialism, and was able to rely on a paramilitary force known as the Hlinka Guard, named after the priest Andrej Hlinka, who had long encouraged the growth of Slovakian nationalism. At a meeting with Hitler on 28 July 1940, Tiso, Tuka and Interior Minister Mach had been told to put in place legislation to deal with Slovakia’s small Jewish minority - 80,000 people, making up 3.3 per cent of the country’s total population. They agreed to the appointment of the German SS officer Dieter Wisliceny as their official adviser on Jewish questions, and soon after his arrival in the Slovakian capital Bratislava, the government began a comprehensive programme of expropriating the Jewish population, driving them out of economic life, removing their civil rights and drafting them into forced labour schemes. Slovakian Jews were forced to wear the Jewish star, just as it was being introduced in the Reich. Within just a few months, the country’s Jewish population had largely been reduced to a state of destitution. Responding early in 1942 to a request from the German government for 20,000 Slovakian workers for the German arms industry, the government offered 20,000 Jewish workers instead. The matter thus passed into the hands of Eichmann, who decided they could be used to build the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He also offered to take their families, or in other words, to ensure, in a manner that was to become customary, that the men who could work would be drafted into labour schemes on arrival at the camp, and anyone who could not work would be taken straight to the gas chamber. On 26 March 1942, 999 young Slovakian Jewish women were loaded with blows and curses on to cattle-trucks by the Hlinka Guard, assisted by local ethnic German units, and taken to Auschwitz. More men, women and children swiftly followed. Unusually, the Slovakian government paid 500 Reichsmarks to the German authorities for each ‘unproductive’ Jew to cover the costs of transportation and as compensation for being allowed to keep their property. Eichmann assured the Slovakians that none of the deportees would ever return. And indeed by the end of June 1942 some 52,000 Slovakian Jews, well over half the country’s entire Jewish population, had been deported, the vast majority to Auschwitz; even those spared to work on construction projects at Birkenau did not live very long.
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