Assimilation, that much abused word, was a sober fact in Italy, which had a community of not more than fifty thousand native Jews, whose history reached back into the centuries of the Roman Empire. It was not an ideology, something one was supposed to believe in, as in all German-speaking countries, or a myth and an obvious self-deception, as notably in France. Italian Fascism, not to be outdone in “ruthless toughness,” had tried to rid the country of foreign and stateless Jews prior to the outbreak of the war. This had never been much of a success, because of the general unwillingness of the minor Italian officials to get “tough,” and when things had become a matter of life and death, they refused, under the pretext of maintaining their sovereignty, to abandon this part of their Jewish population; they put them instead into Italian camps, where they were quite safe until the Germans occupied the country. This conduct can hardly be explained by objective conditions alone— the absence of a “Jewish question”—for these foreigners naturally created a problem in Italy, as they did in every European nation-state based upon the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of its population. What in Denmark was the result of an authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the requirements and responsibilities of citizenship and independence—“for the Danes… the Jewish question was a political and not a humanitarian question” (Leni Yahil)— was in Italy the outcome of the almost automatic general humanity of an old and civilized people.
Italian humanity, moreover, withstood the test of the terror that descended upon the people during the last year and a half of the war. In December, 1943, the German Foreign Office addressed a formal request for help to Eichmann's boss, Müller: “In view of the lack of zeal shown over the last months by Italian officials in the implementation of anti-Jewish measures recommended by the Duce, we of the Foreign Office deem it urgent and necessary that the implementation… be supervised by German officials.” Whereupon famous Jew-killers from Poland, such as Odilo Globocnik from the death camps in the Lublin area, were dispatched to Italy; even the head of the military administration was not an Army man but a former governor of Polish Galicia, Gruppenführer Otto Wachter. This put an end to practical jokes. Eichmann's office sent out a circular advising its branches that “Jews of Italian nationality” would at once become subject to “the necessary measures,” and the first blow was to fall upon eight thousand Jews in Rome, who were to be arrested by German police regiments, since the Italian police were not reliable. They were warned in time, frequently by old Fascists, and seven thousand escaped. The Germans, yielding, as usual, when they met resistance, now agreed that Italian Jews, even if they did not belong to exempted categories, should not be subject to deportation but should merely be concentrated in Italian camps; this “solution” should be “final” enough for Italy. Approximately thirty-five thousand Jews in northern Italy were caught and put into concentration camps near the Austrian border. In the spring of 1944, when the Red Army had occupied Rumania and the Allies were about to enter Rome, the Germans broke their promise and began shipping Jews from Italy to Auschwitz—about seventy-five hundred people, of whom no more than six hundred returned. Still, this came to considerably less than ten per cent of all Jews then living in Italy.
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XI: Deportations from the Balkans—Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania
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To those who followed the case for the prosecution and read the judgment, which reorganized its confused and confusing “general picture,” it came as a surprise that the line sharply distinguishing the Nazi-controlled territories to the east and southeast from the system of nation-states in Central and Western Europe was never mentioned. The belt of mixed population that stretches from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic in the south, the whole area most of which today lies behind the Iron Curtain, then consisted of the so-called Successor States, established by the victorious powers after the First World War. A new political order was granted to the numerous ethnic groups that had lived for centuries under the domination of empires—the Russian Empire in the north, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the south, and the Turkish Empire in the southeast. Of the nation-states that resulted, none possessed anything even approaching the ethnic homogeneity of the old European nations that had served as models for their political constitutions. The result was that each of these countries contained large ethnic groups that were violently hostile to the ruling government because their own national aspirations had been frustrated in favor of their only slightly more numerous neighbors. If any proof of the political instability of these recently founded states had been needed, the case of Czechoslovakia amply provided it. When Hitler marched into Prague, in March, 1939, he was enthusiastically welcomed not only by the Sudetendeutschen, the German minority, but also by the Slovaks, whom he “liberated” by offering them an “independent” state. Exactly the same thing happened later in Yugoslavia, where the Serbian majority, the former rulers of the country, was treated as the enemy, and the Croatian minority was given its own national government. Moreoever, because the populations in these regions fluctuated, there existed no natural or historical boundaries, and those that had been established by the Treaties of Trianon and St. Germain were quite arbitrary. Hence, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria could be won as Axis partners by generous enlargements of their territories, and the Jews in these newly annexed areas were always denied the status of nationals; they automatically became stateless and therefore suffered the same fate as the refugees in Western Europe—they were invariably the first to be deported and liquidated.
What also came crashing down during these years was the elaborate system of minority treaties whereby the Allies had vainly hoped to solve a problem that, within the political framework of the nation-state, is insoluble. The Jews were an officially recognized minority in all Successor States, and this status had not been forced upon them but had been the outcome of claims entered and negotiations conducted by their own delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference. This had marked an important turning point in Jewish history, because it was the first time that Western, or assimilated, Jews had not been recognized as the spokesmen for the whole Jewish people. To the surprise, and also sometimes to the dismay, of the Western-educated Jewish “notables” it had turned out that the large majority of the people desired some sort of social and cultural, though not political, autonomy. Legally, the status of the Eastern European Jews was just like that of any other minority, but politically—and this was to be decisive—they were the only ethnic group in the region without a “homeland,” that is, without a territory in which they formed the majority of the population. Still, they did not live in the same kind of dispersion as their brethren in Western and Central Europe, and whereas there, prior to Hitler, it had been a sign of anti-Semitism to call a Jew a Jew, Eastern European Jews were recognized by friend and foe alike as a distinct people. This was of great consequence for the status of those Jews in the East who were assimilated, making it utterly different from that in the West, where assimilation in one form or another had been the rule. The great body of middle-class Jews, so characteristic of Western and Central Europe, did not exist in the East; in its stead we find a thin layer of upper-middle-class families who actually belonged to the ruling classes and the degree of whose assimilation—through money, through baptism, through intermarriage—to Gentile society was infinitely greater than that of most Jews in the West.
Among the first countries in which the executors of the Final Solution were confronted with these conditions was the puppet state of CROATIA, in Yugoslavia, whose capital was Zagreb. The Croat government, headed by Dr. Ante Pavelic, very obligingly introduced anti-Jewish legislation three weeks after its establishment, and when asked what was to be done with the few dozen Croat Jews in Germany, it sent word that they “would appreciate deportation to the East.” The Reich Minister of the Interior demanded that the country be judenrein by February, 1942, and Eichmann sent Hauptsturmführer Franz Abromeit to work with th
e German police attaché in Zagreb. The deportations were carried out by the Croats themselves, notably by members of the strong Fascist movement, the Ustashe, and the Croats paid the Nazis thirty marks for each Jew deported. In exchange, they received all the property of the deportees. This was in accordance with the Germans' official “territorial principle,” all European countries, whereby the state inherited the property of every murdered Jew who had resided within its boundaries, regardless of his nationality. (The Nazis did not by any means always respect the “territorial principle”; there were many ways to get around it if it seemed worth the trouble. German businessmen could buy directly from the Jews before they were deported, and the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, initially empowered to confiscate all Hebraica and Judaica for German anti-Semitic research centers, soon enlarged its activities to include valuable furnishings and art works.) The original deadline of February, 1942, could not be met, because Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory, but after the Badoglio coup Hermann Krumey, another of Eichmann's men, arrived in Zagreb, and by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers.
Only then did the Germans realize that the country was still not judenrein. In the initial anti-Jewish legislation, they had noted a curious paragraph that transformed into “honorary Aryans” all Jews who made contributions to “the Croat cause.” The number of these Jews had of course greatly increased during the intervening years. The very rich, in other words, who parted voluntarily with their property were exempted. Even more interesting was the fact that the S.S. Intelligence service (under Sturmbannfühhrer Wilhelm Höttl, who was first called as a defense witness in Jerusalem, but whose affidavit was then used by the prosecution) had discovered that nearly all members of the ruling clique in Croatia, from the head of the government to the leader of the Ustashe, were married to Jewish women. The fifteen hundred survivors among the Jews in this area five per cent, according to a Yugoslav government report—were clearly all members of this highly assimilated, and extraordinarily rich, Jewish group. And since the percentage of assimilated Jews among the masses in the East has often been estimated at about five per cent, it is tempting to conclude that assimilation in the East, when it was at all possible, offered a much better chance for survival than it did in the rest of Europe.
Matters were very different in the adjoining territory of SERBIA, where the German occupation army, almost from its first day there, had to contend with a kind of partisan warfare that can be compared only with what went on in Russia behind the front. I mentioned earlier the single incident that connected Eichmann with the liquidation of Jews in Serbia. The judgment admitted that “the ordinary lines of command in dealing with the Jews of Serbia did not become quite clear to us,” and the explanation is that Eichmann's office was not involved at all in that area because no Jews were deported. The “problem” was all taken care of on the spot. On the pretext of executing hostages taken in partisan warfare, the Army killed the male Jewish population by shooting; women and children were handed over to the commander of the Security Police, a certain Dr. Emanuel Schäer, a special protégé of Heydrich, who killed them in gas vans. In August, 1942, Staatsrat Harald Turner, head of the civilian branch of the military government, reported proudly that Serbia was “the only country in which the problems of both Jews and Gypsies were solved,” and returned the gas vans to Berli. An estimated five thousand Jews joined the partisans, and this was the only avenue of escape.
Schäfer had to stand trial in a German criminal court after the war. For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison. The military governor of the region, General Franz Böhme, committed suicide, but Staatsrat Turner was handed over to the Yugoslav government and condemned to death. It is the same story repeated over and over again: those who escaped the Nuremberg Trials and were not extradited to the countries where they had committed their crimes either were never brought to justice, or found in the German courts the greatest possible “understanding.” One is unhappily reminded of the Weimar Republic, whose specialty it was to condone political murder if the killer belonged to one of the violently anti-republican groups of the Right.
BULGARIA had more cause than any other of the Balkan countries to be grateful to Nazi Germany, because of the considerable territorial aggrandizement she received at the expense of Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. And yet Bulgaria was not grateful, neither her government nor her people were soft enough to make a policy of “ruthless toughness” workable. This showed not only on the Jewish question. The Bulgarian monarchy had no reason to be worried about the native Fascist movement, the Ratnizi, because it was numerically small and politically without influence, and the Parliament remained a highly respected body, which worked smoothly with the King. Hence, they dared refuse to declare war on Russia and never even sent a token expeditionary force of “volunteers” to the Eastern front. But most surprising of all, in the belt of mixed populations where anti-Semitism was rampant among all ethnic groups and had become official governmental policy long before Hitler's arrival, the Bulgarians had no “understanding of the Jewish problem” whatever. It is true that the Bulgarian Army had agreed to have all the Jews—they numbered about fifteen thousand—deported from the newly annexed territories, which were under military government and whose population was anti-Semitic; but it is doubtful that they knew what “resettlement in the East” actually signified. Somewhat earlier, in January, 1941, the government had also agreed to introduce some anti-Jewish legislation, but that, from the Nazi viewpoint, was simply ridiculous: some six thousand able-bodied men were mobilized for work; all baptized Jews, regardless of the date of their conversion, were exempted, with the result that an epidemic of conversions broke out; five thousand more Jews—out of a total of approximately fifty thousand—received special privileges; and for Jewish physicians and businessmen a numerus clausus was introduced that was rather high, since it was based on the percentage of Jews in the cities, rather than in the country at large. When these measures had been put into effect, Bulgarian government officials declared publicly that things were now stabilized to everybody's satisfaction. Clearly, the Nazis would not only have to enlighten them about the requirements for a “solution of the Jewish problem,” but also to teach them that legal stability and a totalitarian movement could not be reconciled.
The German authorities must have had some suspicion of the difficulties that lay ahead. In January, 1942, Eichmann wrote a letter to the Foreign Office in which he declared that “sufficient possibilities exist for the reception of Jews from Bulgaria”; he proposed that the Bulgarian government be approached, and assured the Foreign Office that the police attaché in Sofia would “take care of the technical implementation of the deportation.” (This police attaché seems not to have been very enthusiastic about his work either, for shortly thereafter Eichmann sent one of his own men, Theodor Dannecker, from Paris to Sofia as “adviser.”) It is quite interesting to note that this letter ran directly contrary to the notification Eichmann had sent to Serbia only a few months earlier, stating that no facilities for the reception of Jews were yet available and that even Jews from the Reich could not be deported. The high priority given to the task of making Bulgaria judenrein can be explained only by Berlin's having received accurate information that great speed was necessary then in order to achieve anything at all. Well, the Bulgarians were approached by the German embassy, but not until about six months later did they take the first step in the direction of “radical” measures—the introduction of the Jewish badge. For the Nazis, even this turned out to be a great disappointment. In the first place, as they dutifully reported, the badge was only a “very little star”; second, most Jews simply did not wear it; and, third, those who did wear it received “so many manifestations of sympathy from the misled population that they actually are proud of their sign”—as Walter Schellenberg, Chief of Counterintelligence in the R.S.H.A., wrote in an S.D. report transmi
tted to the Foreign Office in November, 1942. Whereupon the Bulgarian government revoked the decree. Under great German pressure, the Bulgarian government finally decided to expel all Jews from Sofia to rural areas, but this measure was definitely not what the Germans demanded, since it dispersed the Jews instead of concentrating them.
This expulsion actually marked an important turning point in the whole situation, because the population of Sofia tried to stop Jews from going to the railroad station and subsequently demonstrated before the King's palace. The Germans were under the illusion that King Boris was primarily responsible for keeping Bulgaria's Jews safe, and it is reasonably certain that German Intelligence agents murdered him. But neither the death of the monarch nor the arrival of Dannecker, early in 1943, changed the situation in the slightest, because both Parliament and the population remained clearly on the side of the Jews. Dannecker succeeded in arriving at an agreement with the Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs to deport six thousand “leading Jews” to Treblinka, but none of these Jews ever left the country. The agreement itself is noteworthy because it shows that the Nazis had no hope of enlisting the Jewish leadership for their own purposes. The Chief Rabbi of Sofia was unavailable, having been hidden by Metropolitan Stephan of Sofia, who had declared publicly that “God had determined the Jewish fate, and men had no right to torture Jews, and to persecute them” (Hilberg)—which was considerably more than the Vatican had ever done. Finally, the same thing happened in Bulgaria as was to happen in Denmark a few months later—the local German officials became unsure of themselves and were no longer reliable. This was true of both the police attaché, a member of the S.S., who was supposed to round up and arrest the Jews, and the German Ambassador in Sofia, Adolf Beckerle, who in June, 1943, had advised the Foreign Office that the situation was hopeless, because “the Bulgarians had lived for too long with peoples like Armenians, Greeks, and Gypsies to appreciate the Jewish problem”—which, of course, was sheer nonsense, since the same could be said mutatis mutandis for all countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It was Beckerle too who informed the R.S.H.A., in a clearly irritated tone, that nothing more could be done. And the result was that not a single Bulgarian Jew had been deported or had died an unnatural death when, in August, 1944, with the approach of the Red Army, the anti-Jewish laws were revoked