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X: Deportations from Western Europe—France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy
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“Ruthless toughness,” a quality held in the highest esteem by the rulers of the Third Reich, is frequently characterized in postwar Germany, which has developed a veritable genius for understatement with respect to her Nazi past, as being ungut—lacking goodness—as though nothing had been wrong with those endowed with this quality but a deplorable failure to act according to the exacting standards of Christian charity. In any case, men sent by Eichmann's office to other countries as “advisers on Jewish affairs”—to be attached to the regular diplomatic missions, or to the military staff, or to the local command of the Security Police—were all chosen because they possessed this virtue to the highest degree. In the beginning, during the fall and winter of 1941–42, their main job seems to have been to establish satisfactory relations with the other German officials in the countries concerned, especially with the German embassies in nominally independent countries and with the Reich commissioners in occupied territories; in either case, there was perpetual conflict over jurisdiction in Jewish matters.
In June, 1942, Eichmann recalled his advisers in France, Belgium, and Holland in order to lay plans for deportations from these countries. Himmler had ordered that FRANCE be given top priority in “combing Europe from West to East,” partly because of the inherent importance of the nation par excellence, and partly because the Vichy government had shown a truly amazing “understanding” of the Jewish problem and had introduced, on its own initiative, a great deal of anti-Jewish legislation; it had even established a special Department for Jewish Affairs, headed first by Xavier Vallant and somewhat later by Darquier de Pellepoix, both well-known anti-Semites. As a concession to the French brand of anti-Semitism, which was intimately connected with a strong, generally chauvinistic xenophobia in all strata of the population, the operation was to start with foreign Jews, and since in 1942 more than half of France's foreign Jews were stateless—refugees and émigrés from Russia, Germany, Austria, Poland, Rumania, Hungary—that is, from areas that either were under German domination or had passed anti-Jewish legislation before the outbreak of war—it was decided to begin by deporting an estimated hundred thousand stateless Jews. (The total Jewish population of the country was now well over three hundred thousand; in 1939, before the influx of refugees from Belgium and Holland in the spring of 1940, there had been about two hundred and seventy thousand Jews, of whom at least a hundred and seventy thousand were foreign or foreign-born.) Fifty thousand each were to be evacuated from the Occupied Zone and from Vichy France with all speed. This was a considerable undertaking, which needed not only the agreement of the Vichy government but the active help of the French police, who were to do the work done in Germany by the Order Police. At first, there were no difficulties whatever, since, as Pierre Laval, Premier under Marshal Pétain, pointed out, “these foreign Jews had always been a problem in France,” so that the “French government was glad that a change in the German attitude toward them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.” It must be added that Laval and Pétain thought in terms of these Jews’ being resettled in the East; they did not yet know what “resettlement” meant.
Two incidents, in particular, attracted the attention of the Jerusalem court, both of which occurred in the summer of 1942, a few weeks after the operation had started. The first concerned a train due to leave Bordeaux on July 15, which had to be canceled because only a hundred and fifty stateless Jews could be found in Bordeaux—not enough to fill the train, which Eichmann had obtained with great difficulty. Whether or not Eichmann recognized this as the first indication that things might not be quite as easy as everybody felt entitled to believe, he became very excited, telling his subordinates that this was “a matter of prestige”—not in the eyes of the French but in those of the Ministry of Transport, which might get wrong ideas about the efficiency of his apparatus—and that he would “have to consider whether France should not be dropped altogether as far as evacuation was concerned” if such an incident was repeated. In Jerusalem, this threat was taken very seriously, as proof of Eichmann's power; if he wished, he could “drop France.” Actually, it was one of Eichmann's ridiculous boasts, proof of his “driving power” but hardly “evidence of… his status in the eyes of his subordinates,” except insofar as he had plainly threatened them with losing their very cozy war jobs. But if the Bordeaux incident was a farce, the second was the basis for one of the most horrible of the many hair-raising stories told at Jerusalem. This was the story of four thousand children, separated from their parents who were already on their way to Auschwitz. The children had been left behind at the French collection point, the concentration camp at Drancy, and on July 10 Eichmann's French representative, Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, phoned him to ask what was to be done with them. Eichmann took ten days to decide; then he called Dannecker back to tell him that “as soon as transports could again be dispatched to the General Government area [of Poland], transports of children could roll.” Dr. Servatius pointed out that the whole incident actually demonstrated that the “persons affected were determined neither by the accused nor by any members of his office.” But what, unfortunately, no one mentioned was that Dannecker had informed Eichmann that Laval himself had proposed that children under sixteen be included in the deportations; this meant that the whole gruesome episode was not even the result of “superior orders” but the outcome of an agreement between France and Germany, negotiated at the highest level.
During the summer and fall of 1942, twenty-seven thousand stateless Jews—eighteen thousand from Paris and nine thousand from Vichy Franc—were deported to Auschwitz. Then, when there were about seventy thousand stateless Jews left in all of France, the Germans made their first mistake. Confident that the French had by now become so accustomed to deporting Jews that they wouldn't mind, they asked for permission to include French Jews also—simply to facilitate administrative matters. This caused a complete turnabout; the French were adamant in their refusal to hand over their own Jews to the Germans. And Himmler, upon being informed of the situation —not by Eichmann or his men, incidentally, but by one of the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders—immediately gave in and promised to spare French Jews. But now it was too late. The first rumors about “resettlement” had reached France, and while French anti-Semites, and non-anti-Semites too, would have liked to see foreign Jews settle somewhere else, not even the anti-Semites wished to become accomplices in mass murder. Hence, the French now refused to take a step they had eagerly contemplated only a short time before, that is, to revoke naturalizations granted to Jews after 1927 (or after 1933), which would have made about fifty thousand more Jews eligible for deportation. They also started making such endless difficulties with regard to the deportation of stateless and other foreign Jews that all the ambitious plans for the evacuation of Jews from France did indeed have to be “dropped.” Tens of thousands of stateless persons went into hiding, while thousands more fled to the Italian-occupied French zone, the Côte d‘Azur, where Jews were safe, whatever their origin or nationality. In the summer of 1943, when Germany was declared judenrein and the Allies had just landed in Sicily, no more than fifty-two thousand Jews, certainly less than twenty per cent of the total, had been deported, and of these no more than six thousand possessed French nationality. Not even Jewish prisoners of war in the German internment camps for the French Army were singled out for “special treatment.” In April, 1944, two months before the Allies landed in France, there were still two hundred and fifty thousand Jews in the country, and they all survived the war. The Nazis, it turned out, possessed neither the manpower nor the will power to remain “tough” when they met determined opposition. The truth of the matter was, as we shall see, that even the members of the Gestapo and the S.S. combined ruthlessness with softness.
At the June, 1942, meeting in Berlin, the figures set for immediate deportation
s from Belgium and the Netherlands had been rather low, probably because of the high figure set for France. No more than ten thousand Jews from Belgium and fifteen thousand from Holland were to be seized and deported in the immediate future. In both cases the figures were later significantly enlarged, probably because of the difficulties encountered in the French operation. The situation of BELGIUM was peculiar in some respects. The country was ruled exclusively by German military authorities, and the police, as a Belgian government report submitted to the court pointed out, “did not have the same influence upon the other German administration services that they enjoyed in other places.” (Belgium's governor, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, was later implicated in the July, 1944, conspiracy against Hitler.) Native collaborators were of importance only in Flanders; the Fascist movement among the French-speaking Walloons, headed by Degrelle, had little influence. The Belgian police did not cooperate with the Germans, and the Belgian railway men could not even be trusted to leave deportation trains alone. They contrived to leave doors unlocked or to arrange ambushes, so that Jews could escape. Most peculiar was the composition of the Jewish population. Before the outbreak of war, there were ninety thousand Jews, of whom about thirty thousand were German Jewish refugees, while another fifty thousand came from other European countries. By the end of 1940, nearly forty thousand Jews had fled the country, and among the fifty thousand who remained there were at the most five thousand native-born Belgian citizens. Moreover among those who had fled were all the more important Jewish leaders, most of whom had been foreigners anyway, so that the Jewish did not command any authority among native Jews. With this “lack of understanding” on all sides, it is not surprising that very few Belgian Jews were deported. But recently naturalized and stateless Jews—of Czech, Polish, Russian, and German origin, many of whom had only recently arrived were easily recognizable and most difficult to hide in the small, completely industrialized country. By the end of 1942, fifteen thousand had been shipped to Auschwitz, and by the fall of 1944, when the Allies liberated the country, a total of twenty-five thousand had been killed. Eichmann had his usual “adviser” in Belgium, but the adviser seems not to have been very active in these operations. They were carried out, finally, by the military administration, under increased pressure from the Foreign Office.
As in practically all other countries, the deportations from HOLLAND started with stateless Jews, who in this instance consisted almost entirely of refugees from Germany, whom the prewar Dutch government had officially declared to be “undesirable.” There were about thirty-five thousand foreign Jews altogether in a total Jewish population of a hundred and forty thousand. Unlike Belgium, Holland was placed under a civil administration, and, unlike France, the country had no government of its own, since the cabinet, together with the royal family, had fled to London. The small nation was utterly at the mercy of the Germans and of the S.S. Eichmann's “adviser” in Holland was a certain Willi Zöpf (recently arrested in Germany, while the much more efficient adviser in France, Mr. Dannecker, is still at large) but he apparently had very little to say and could hardly do more than keep the Berlin office posted. Deportations and everything connected with them were handled by the lawyer Erich Rajakowitsch, Eichmann's former legal adviser in Vienna and Prague, who was admitted to the S.S. upon Eichmann's recommendation. He had been sent to Holland by Heydrich in April, 1941, and was directly responsible not to the R.S.H.A. in Berlin but to the local head of the Security Service in The Hague, Dr. Wilhelm Harsten, who in turn was under the command of the Higher S.S. and Police Leader Obergruppenführer Hans Rauter and his assistant in Jewish affairs, Ferdinand aus der Fünten. (Rauter and Fünten were condemned to death by a Dutch court; Rauter was executed and Fünten's sentence, allegedly after special intervention from Adenauer, was commuted to life imprisonment. Harsten, too, was brought to trial in Holland, sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, and released in 1957, whereupon he entered the civil service of the Bavarian state government. The Dutch authorities are considering proceedings against Rajakowitsch, who seems to live in either Switzerland or Italy. All these details have become known in the last year through the publication of Dutch documents and the report by E. Jacob, Dutch correspondent for the Basler Nationalzeitung, a Swiss newspaper.) The prosecution in Jerusalem, partly because it wanted to build up Eichmann at all costs and partly because it got genuinely lost in the intricacies of German bureaucracy, claimed that all these officers had carried out Eichmann's orders. But the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders took orders only directly from Himmler, and that Rajakowitsch was still taking orders from Eichmann at this time is highly unlikely, especially in view of what was then going to happen in Holland. The judgment, without engaging in polemics, quietly corrected a great number of errors made by the prosecution—though probably not all—and showed the constant jockeying for position that went on between the R.S.H.A. and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders and other offices—the “tenacious, eternal, everlasting negotiations,” as Eichmann called them.
Eichmann had been especially upset by the arrangements in Holland, because it was clearly Himmler himself who was cutting him down to size, quite apart from the fact that the zeal of the gentlemen in residence created great difficulties for him in the timing of his own transports and generally made a mockery of the importance of the “coordinating center” in Berlin. Thus, right at the beginning, twenty thousand instead of fifteen thousand Jews were deported, and Eichmann's Mr. Zöpf, who was far inferior in rank as well as in position to all others present, was almost forced to speed up deportations in 1943. Conflicts of jurisdiction in these matters were to plague Eichmann at all times, and it was in vain that he explained to anybody who would listen that “it would be contradictory to the order of the Reichsführer S.S. [i.e., Himmler] and illogical if at this stage other authorities again were to handle the Jewish problem.” The last clash in Holland came in 1944, and this time even Kaltenbrunner tried to intervene, for the sake of uniformity. In Holland, Sephardic Jews, of Spanish origin, had been exempted, although Jews of that origin had been sent to Auschwitz from Salonika. The judgment was in error when it ventured that the R.S.H.A. “had the upper hand in this dispute” —for God knows what reasons, some three hundred and seventy Sephardic Jews remained unmolested in Amsterdam.
The reason Himmler preferred to work in Holland through his Higher S.S. and Police Leaders was simple. These men knew their way around the country, and the problem posed by the Dutch population was by no means an easy one. Holland had been the only country in all Europe where students went on strike when Jewish professors were dismissed and where a wave of strikes broke out in response to the first deportation of Jews to German concentration camps—and that deportation, in contrast to those to extermination camps, was merely a punitive measure, taken long before the Final Solution had reached Holland. (The Germans, as de Jong points out, were taught a lesson. From now on, “the persecution was carried out not with the cudgels of the Nazi storm troops…, but by decrees published in Verordeningenblad…, which the Joodsche Weekblad was forced to carry. Police raids in the streets no longer occurred and there were no strikes on the part of the population.) However, the widespread hostility in Holland toward anti-Jewish measures and the relative immunity of the Dutch people to anti-Semitism were held in check by two factors, which eventually proved fatal to the Jews. First, there existed a very strong Nazi movement in Holland, which could be trusted to carry out such police measures as seizing Jews, ferreting out their hiding places, and so on; second, there existed an inordinately strong tendency among the native Jews to draw a line between themselves and the new arrivals, which was probably the result of the very unfriendly attitude of the Dutch government toward refugees from Germany, and probably also because anti-Semitism in Holland, just as in France, focused on foreign Jews. This made it relatively easy for the Nazis to form their Jewish Council, the Joodsche Raad, which remained for a long time under the impression that only German and other foreign Jews would be vic
tims of the deportations, and it also enabled the S.S. to enlist, in addition to Dutch police units, the help of a Jewish police force. The result was a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country; it can be compared only with the extinction, under vastly different and, from the beginning, completely desperate conditions, of Polish Jewry. Although, in contrast with Poland, the attitude of the Dutch people permitted a large number of Jews to go into hiding—twenty to twenty-five thousand, a very high figure for such a small country—yet an unusually large number of Jews living underground, at least half of them, were eventually found, no doubt through the efforts of professional and occasional informers. By July, 1944, a hundred and thirteen thousand Jews had been deported, most of them to Sobibor, a camp in the Lublin area of Poland, by the river Bug, where no selections of able-bodied workers ever took place. Three-fourths of all Jews living in Holland were killed, about two-thirds of these native-born Dutch Jews. The last shipments left in the fall of 1944, when Allied patrols were at the Dutch borders. Of the ten thousand Jews who survived in hiding, about seventy-five per cent were foreigners—a percentage that testifies to the unwillingness of Dutch Jews to face reality.