Global Perspectives on the Holocaust: History, Identity, and Legacy [Unabridged edition] 1443876062, 9781443876063

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Part I
Chapter One
Part II
Chapter Two
Part III
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part IV
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part V
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Contributors

Citation preview

Global Perspectives on the Holocaust

Global Perspectives on the Holocaust: History, Identity, Legacy Edited by

Nancy E. Rupprecht and Wendy Koenig

Global Perspectives on the Holocaust: History, Identity, Legacy Edited by Nancy E. Rupprecht and Wendy Koenig This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Nancy E. Rupprecht, Wendy Koenig and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7606-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7606-3

DEDICATION

We dedicate this book to the memory of the late Dr. Susan Lee Pentlin, who served as a peer reviewer and expert on Holocaust denial for all three of our Cambridge Scholars Publishing Holocaust volumes. She was deeply committed to higher education, particularly to Holocaust education. Her life, like her work, was devoted to discovering, publishing, and preserving truth by exposing malfeasance, prejudice and hate as a teacher, scholar and concerned citizen. She loved and respected her husband, family, colleagues and friends; made important contributions to her profession; and made her University, her community and her state better places in which to live and work. All who knew her and many who did not but benefitted from her intelligence, vigor, kindness and honor will mourn her passing. Susan Pentlin’s was a life well lived.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Part I: Introduction Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Introduction Nancy E. Rupprecht and Wendy Koenig Part II: The Holocaust: A Brief History Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 18 The Holocaust: A Brief History Nancy E. Rupprecht Part III: History Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 58 A Worldwide Holocaust Project Gerhard L. Weinberg Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 66 Reconciling History: The Holocaust in Scandinavia Paul Lubotina Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85 Shanghai Jewry: A Story Less Well Known and Little Told Steven L. Jacobs Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 93 The Glass House as an Embodiment of the Changing Fate of Jews in Budapest from 1848 to the Present Naomi R. Robertson

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 116 Alabama’s Jews and Refugee Resettlement, 1938-1941 Dan J. Puckett Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 136 International Hierarchy and the Final Solution Ethan Hollander Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 160 Local Collaborators and the Murder of the Jews of Galicia, 1941-1944: Two Case Studies Joel David Cameron Part IV: Identity Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 180 Rywka Lipszyc: Coming of Age in the Lodz Ghetto Alexandra Zapruder Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 203 German Victims of Auschwitz Joachim Neander Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 232 “Bending the Bars of Their Cage”: Identity and Survival by Subterfuge in Hitler’s Germany David Chrisinger Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 252 Prelude to the Holocaust in Romania: The Significance of Eugenics, Ethnicity and Race in the Development of Romania’s National Identity Ronit Fisher Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 272 The Holy Ghost, the Sleeping Beauty and the Prince Charming: Narratives of Sexual Discontent in World War II Germany Vandana Joshi

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Part V: Legacy Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 294 Considering the Holocaust and Genocide: Is There A Difference, And Does It Matter? Paul R. Bartrop Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 305 La Rafle & Elle s’appelait Sarah: Memory-Work and Mediality Audrey Brunetaux Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 321 Public Memory and Empathy in Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine Project Matthew Cook and Derek H. Alderman Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 349 For the Sake of an Encounter: Oral Testimony in Holocaust Museums Wendy Koenig Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 366 European Holocaust Memory versus Local Practice in Western Ukraine: Dealing with the Holocaust in the Town of Sambir Nadja Weck Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 391 Fighting Atrocity: Rethinking the Connections between Gross Violations, Civil Resistance and Humanitarian Interventions Christopher Davey Chapter Twenty One................................................................................ 412 Contextualizing the Holocaust as a Human Event Elizabeth Propes Contributors ............................................................................................. 426

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the following people and organizations that contributed substantially to this book. First, we would like to recognize the very important work done by Andrew C. Attalai, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christoph Rosenmüller and the late Susan Lee Pentlin for serving as peer reviewers for articles in this volume. Second, we would like to recognize Christine Badowski Koenig for her valuable technical support in preparing this manuscript. We also would like to thank Middle Tennessee State University for financially supporting the MTSU International Holocaust Studies conferences in particular and the work of the MTSU Holocaust Studies Program in general. Finally, we would like to thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing for providing us with valuable advice, help and the opportunity to publish these books.

PART I: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION NANCY E. RUPPRECHT AND WENDY KOENIG

This volume of articles, based on papers originally presented at the Tenth International Holocaust Studies Conference at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is a useful contribution to scholarship insofar as it expands the coverage of Holocaust and Genocide issues from their traditional focus on Europe to a worldwide perspective. The theme of the conference, “Global Perspectives on the Holocaust,” reflected this international orientation. In the 21st century, the process of globalization not only affects developments in science, politics, technology and industry, but also must be reflected in the work of scholars as nations, philosophers and artists reframe their perspectives in international terms. The volume is interdisciplinary in terms of subject, perspective, and content. It also explores a variety of methodological approaches to supplement traditional historical research and argumentation. For example, the disciplines represented by the authors whose work is included in this book encompass history, psychology, religious studies, film, human development, international relations, literature, education, geography, gender studies, political science, global studies, and museum studies. More than 100 papers were submitted for consideration by the conference selection committee: Approximately a third of them were proposed by scholars from fifteen different countries outside the United States representing every inhabited continent on the globe except for South America. After this introductory essay, a brief history of the Holocaust focuses on its international character. Written by Nancy Rupprecht, Professor of History and Chair of the MTSU Holocaust Studies Program, this Holocaust overview is included primarily for the benefit of general readers, students and scholars who are not Holocaust specialists. The major segments of this volume will be structured around three thematic areas of content: History, Identity and Legacy. Each section of the book

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will begin with an article written by one of three prominent scholars invited to present their work in plenary sessions at the conference. The first major section focuses on the global history of the Holocaust. It includes papers submitted primarily by historians and political scientists as well as specialists in Holocaust education and religion. The featured speaker, internationally acclaimed historian Gerhard L. Weinberg, presented a radical new approach to the globalization of Holocaust Studies called “A World-Wide Holocaust Project” that several Holocaust scholars participating in the conference pronounced astonishingly new and brilliant. Weinberg argues that almost all scholarship on the Holocaust, including what was then the most recent synthesis of Holocaust research, the 776 page Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010), depicts the Final Solution (Endlösung) as designed to exterminate only the Jews of Europe and, therefore, is incomplete. He also maintains that this traditional approach is both short-sighted and wrong and argues that Hitler planned to kill not only all Jews in Europe but all Jews in the world as part of a demographic revolution he planned to impose on the entire globe. He bases his opinion primarily in archival sources and published documents and offers specific examples to document his assertions. Furthermore, Weinberg maintains that the discussion of both the Holocaust and the Second World War has been artificially truncated because scholars have failed to connect the Holocaust with the German military’s plans to win the war. In addition, he argues that they have underestimated the personal interests and mendacity of the perpetrators in connection with the global compass of the Shoah. The second major segment of the book discusses how persecution of individuals during the Holocaust had a profound and often disastrous impact on the development of personal identity. The lives of innocent and often apolitical people frequently were ruined or ended by factors relating to their personal identities, factors such as age, sexual orientation, gender and geography. Papers in this section represent the disciplines of gender studies, psychology, social science, and history. The featured speaker for this part of the conference was author Alexandra Zapruder. Her presentation “Rywka Lipszyc: Coming of Age in the Lodz Ghetto,” was based on her widely praised book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust that, in turn, was based on research compiled from the Holocaust diaries of 60 teen-aged boys and girls who survived the Shoah. Salvaged Pages won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category and subsequently was made into a major documentary film titled “I’m Still Here: Real Diaries of Young People Who Lived through the Holocaust”. With the exception of Anne Frank, scholars have

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neglected or slighted the suffering of children and teens during the Shoah as well as the psychological impact of the Holocaust on young people. Zapruder’s work has given them back their voices and preserved a wealth of the primary sources they created in readable form. It is almost impossible to read these diaries without being changed and enriched by them. The third major segment of the book will focus on the legacy of the Holocaust insofar as it includes lessons learned or not learned. The first part of this section will consider the implications and consequences of the Shoah that have been successfully incorporated into new forms of expression. These are designed not only to commemorate and preserve the various types of Holocaust experiences but also to actively transmit those experiences through new cultural approaches to inject the reality of the historical Holocaust into contemporary terms in order to make the Shoah more relevant, important and instructional for the 21st century. The second part of this section will focus on the failure of the post-war generation to learn the most important lesson that the Holocaust experience offered— that of tolerance. This failure has resulted most horribly in the legacy of late 20th and early 21st century genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as the current resurgence of antisemitism in Europe. The papers in this segment represent the disciplines of political science, international relations, geography, film, literature, art history and human development. The contribution of our third featured plenary speaker, widely acclaimed Australian historian Paul R. Bartrop, expounds on the fundamental connection between the Holocaust and modern genocide. His conference presentation was titled “Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies: Is there a Difference? And if so, Why?” Bartrop, the author of over a dozen books on Holocaust and Genocide Studies, recently was honored with the prestigious appointment as the King Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and he currently serves as the Director of the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Human Rights Studies at Florida Gulf University. His article seamlessly explores the connection between Holocaust and Genocide studies that vitally documents the imperative influences—for better and for worse— that the past always imposes on the future. The final segment of the volume warns of the peril that accompanies the failure to learn from mistakes made before, during and after the Holocaust in order to enable contemporary governments to intervene in time to prevent similar catastrophes. The section also discusses the necessity to develop new disciplinary approaches to analyze, evaluate and

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compare genocides as well as to investigate the impact of various forms of potentially lethal persecution on human beings and human behavior. The remainder of this Introduction will preview each of the three major segments of the book.

History Featured Article: Gerhard L. Weinberg, Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina, “A Worldwide Holocaust Project" Paul Lubotina, Austin Peay University, Clarksville, Tennessee, “Reconciling History: The Holocaust in Scandinavia” Paul Lubotina’s article examines the changing interpretations of Finnish and Norwegian collaboration with Nazi political and military officials during WW II up to and including admissions of culpability by the governments of Finland and Norway in 2012. Until the late 1970s, historians and politicians in both countries rejected any suggestion that Scandinavians willingly participated in the Holocaust except for the fact that the Finnish government fought as “Brothers in Arms” with the Germans and the undeniable culpability of Vidkun Quisling’s government in Norway. Lubotina maintains that after the defeat of Germany, the Soviet Union wielded a great deal of political pressure in Scandinavia, which prevented both Norway and Finland from admitting any collaboration with Nazis for fear of political repercussions. However, as the USSR’s power declined, historians began to reassess the role Scandinavians played in the Holocaust, increasing the estimate of the number of Finnish Jews, Jewish refugees and prisoners of war sent from Finland to extermination camps, from seven to over 3500 individuals. Lubotina’s article discusses the direct cooperation among the German, Finnish, and Norwegian governments during the Holocaust as well as provides information concerning ideological and economic reasons for Finland’s cooperation with Germany and Norway during the war years. Steven Leonard Jacobs, University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa Alabama, “Shanghai Jewry: A Story Less Well Known and Little Told” On the occasion of his 25th anniversary as Rabbi of Temple Emanuel of Kensington, Maryland, the late Leon M. Adler (1921-1988) commented during a newspaper interview:

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Chapter One …I was sent to China and stationed in Shanghai. There, to my surprise, I found about 25,000 Jewish refugees. They were primarily from Germany and Austria, but there were also some rabbinical groups, remnants from the Mirer and Lubavitcher Yeshivas, from Poland and Russia. The Shanghai refugees were the very last group to escape the Nazis. It was too late for them to go to any other country. Russia only allowed them transit. So they crossed Russia in sealed trains to Vladivostok. From Vladivostok they went to Japan, which let them stay only for a while, then sent them to Shanghai, one of the few open ports in the Far East.

This comment from his Rabbi sparked Jacob’s interest in the fate of the Jews of Shanghai, especially those in the Shanghai ghetto. Formally known as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, the ghetto occupied one square mile in Japanese occupied Shanghai in which approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees were located by the Japanese government. These Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe were settled in the poorest and most crowded area of the city. However, because the ghetto was not walled, local Jewish families and a variety of charities were able to supply them with basic shelter, food and clothing. Jacobs believes that the fate of these Shanghai Jews, including their human resiliency in adapting to a new country with a different culture, is underrepresented in Holocaust research and publication. Naomi J. Robertson, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, “The Glass House as an Embodiment of the Changing Fate of Jews in Budapest from 1848 to the Present” Naomi Robertson’s article presents a fascinating collective history of residents of The Glass House, 29 Vadasz Street in Budapest. Their experiences are preserved through historical records and illustrated by the oral history of one of its residents, Irena Braun Lefkovicova, who lived there from October 1944 until its liberation in January 1945. The house itself was a glass factory owned by industrialist Arthur Weiss until the last years of the Second World War. The occupation of Hungary began in March 1944 and was quickly followed by the concentration of urban Jews in a ghetto where soon they were joined by Jews from Hungary’s provinces. These deportations, engineered by Adolf Eichmann, began in May 1944, and by July 350,000 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. As Eichmann consolidated his stranglehold on Hungary’s Jewish population, Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz worked behind the scenes issuing Swiss temporary protective visas to several thousand Jews. He worked

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with Moshe Krausz, of the Palestine Office, to arrange travel documents and transport for Jews to the safety of Palestine. Because this work required office space, Lutz and Krausz were pleased to accept Weiss’ offer of the glass factory offices, which, through Lutz’s influence, came under the protection of the Swiss consulate. Members of the Zionist Resistance movement also resided in the Glass House. These men and women engaged in various acts of subterfuge and sabotage, including providing forged passports, operating an underground network to provide safe passage for young Jews to Palestine, and rescuing many inhabitants of the ghetto. By the end of 1944 some 3,000 people had found refuge in the Glass House. Robertson applied the research technique of prosopography to a study of the inhabitants of the Glass House in 1944-45, a group of people that shared one common objective: survival. Their efforts toward this goal were not always harmonious, and while most were young, they varied in their other attributes. The Hungarian National Committee for Attending Deportees (DEGOB) compiled a sociological profile of Hungarian Jewish survivors, and chronicled the biographies of some 5,000 of them. Crossreferencing the list of Glass House survivors with records from DEBOG, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provides a rich source of information on this extraordinary place that is supplemented by oral history interviews with Irena Braun Lefkovicova. Dan J. Puckett, Troy University, Montgomery, Alabama, “Alabama’s Jews and Refugee Resettlement, 1938-1941” Because of the tremendous threat that Nazi antisemitic policy posed to European Jews, Alabama’s Jews organized themselves at both the local and state levels to work for the rescue of Jews who remained in Nazidominated Europe. These efforts included both lobbying for relaxed immigration policies and opening Palestine as refuge for persecuted European Jews, but Alabama residents also sponsored refugees who had managed to flee from Central Europe. Although their lobbying efforts had little effect on the policies of the United States or Great Britain, their sponsorship of refugees had a profound effect both on the refugees and on Alabama’s Jewish communities. Throughout the decade, individual Jews or Jewish families sponsored relatives and friends to enable them to flee Europe and begin a new life in the United States. In 1938, Alabama’s Jewish communities began to work with the National Coordinating Committee and the National Refugee

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Service to resettle German, Austrian, and Czech Jews in communities throughout the state. Puckett’s article examines three issues: how the antisemitic persecution in Nazi Germany energized Alabama’s Jewish community to aid European Jews; how Alabama’s Jews organized themselves, at both the state and local levels, to ameliorate the refugee crisis; and how these organizations cooperated with the NCC and NRS to resettle Jewish refugees. Ethan Hollander, Political Science, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, “International Hierarchy and the Final Solution” Ethan Hollander crafted an argument that some scholars who attended this conference pronounced both new and startling. Based on archival research and using methodology employed by scholars in international relations and comparative political science, he concludes that, ironically, Jewish survival was more likely in countries that collaborated with Nazi Germany than in those that did not. In countries and areas where local leaders resisted German demands or refused to cooperate with what they considered to be an evil regime, they often were bypassed entirely or removed from office, leaving Germany to implement the Final Solution without hindrance. The irony is that resistance to German rule often had deleterious consequences for a country’s Jewish population, whereas collaboration with Germany frequently had beneficial ones. Hollander explains that most collaborators who helped local Jews did so for reasons of Realpolitik or crass political opportunism. Nevertheless, the correlation between political administration and victimization rates is an interesting one because it forces scholars to reconsider the influence of antisemitism, geography, or other local factors in comparative perspectives when considering rates of Jewish survival. Joel David Cameron, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, “Local Collaborators and the Murder of the Jews of Galicia, 1941-1944: Two Case Studies” Cameron’s article examines the implementation of the Holocaust in Galicia, with particular attention to the role of local collaborators and the local police forces created by the German occupiers and staffed by local collaborators during 1941-44. His article is based on research conducted in the State Archive of the L’viv Oblast’ and the Bundesarchiv, Ludwigsburg, Germany.

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The murder of the Jews of Galicia can be divided into four distinct phases. In the first phase, the summer and fall of 1941, Jewish persecution was characterized by pogroms and other acts of violence. The second phase, the summer and fall of 1942, is when most of Galicia’s Jews were killed in mass shootings or via deportations to Belzec. During the third phase, the spring and summer of 1943, Jewish ghettoes in Galicia were liquidated. The fourth phase ended with the liberation of Galicia in the summer of 1944. It is characterized by ‘Jew Hunts’ during which the Germans sought to murder those Jews who had eluded them. During all of these phases local collaborators, including local police forces, participated in pogroms and other atrocities, guarded Jewish ghettoes, hunted Jews, and participated in mass shootings and deportations. Cameron argues that the role of local collaborators throughout Europe merits further study in Holocaust research.

Identity Featured Article: Alexandra Zapruder, “Rywka Lipszyc: Coming of Age in the Lodz Ghetto” Joachim Neander, Independent Scholar, Krakow, Poland, “German Victims of Auschwitz” Neander argues that because Germans were undoubtedly the primary perpetrators during the Holocaust, the suffering of approximately 100,000 German prisoners at Auschwitz has been almost totally ignored. In addition to the 67,000 German Jews deported to Auschwitz, about 9,000 German Romani, and 10,000 “Aryan” Reich citizens were committed there. For these individuals, who defined themselves as Germans, persecutions by their fellow countrymen and women forced them to confront and perhaps to question their sense of national identity. Regardless of “race’, many of those who were liberated in January, 1945 faced further hardship and discrimination in the post-war world. This is particularly true of Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, those labeled “asocials” or criminals and gypsies. Many of them were interrogated by the same policemen and sent to prison by the same judges who committed them to a concentration camp during the war. Finally, only those who were Jewish or Romani were permitted to organize themselves to plead their cases. Moreover, those who were neither Jews nor gypsies, were excluded from both recognition as victims and from material compensation for their losses in the post-war world.

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David Chrisinger, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, “’Bending the Bars of Their Cage’: Identity and Survival by Subterfuge in Hitler’s Germany” Historians of Nazism and the Holocaust have only recently begun to focus intensely on German treatment of homosexual men during the Third Reich. Many have come to believe that the Nazi totalitarian state completely dictated the conditions of everyday life and was successful in creating a marked division between those who belonged (“Aryan” Germans) and those who did not belong (homosexuals, among many others) to the German Volksgemeinschaft, or “national-racial community.” Postwar scholarship has institutionalized this ideologically imposed perception. However, Chrisinger argues that these observations lack intellectual rigor and inadvertently obscure historical reality. Although they undoubtedly characterize the everyday experience of some homosexual men, they fail to account for the everyday experience of those gay men who were able to maintain their gay lifestyles in the face of state persecution by emphasizing their “Germanness” and concealing their “gayness.” Chrisinger’s article adds previously silenced gay voices to the discussion of the lives of homosexual men in the Third Reich and also forces scholars to rethink German history from the margins to reevaluate established conceptions of what it meant to be German in Hitler’s Reich. Ronit Fisher, University of Haifa, Israel, “Prelude to the Holocaust in Romania: The Significance of Eugenics, Ethnicity and Race in the Development of Romania’s National Identity” "Blood is the Biological substrate of heredity; consanguinity, on the intellectual, emotional and social level, means the same sentiments, ideas and tendencies. Race is therefore the condition of a nation's existence; it is its conception of life itself. The nationality principle is based on this fundamental truth..."

These words, written by Romanian author Nicolae Rosu, in 1935, emphasize the important role of eugenics for state formation in inter-war central Europe. The “nationalization” of eugenics in these countries resulted from a prevalent belief that the fate of a nation was determined by the improvement of its racial qualities. The primary focus of this article is how the Eugenics movement in interwar Romania combined the general European elements of the Eugenics phenomenon with specific responses to local conditions.

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Eugenicists in interwar Romania strongly advocated the implementation of a professionally controlled and biologically based form of national identity. In turn, eugenics transformed the Romanian state from an indistinct entity governed by impersonal laws to a nation governed by biological laws. This transformation is carefully examined through the two perspectives that Fisher argues provide the key for understanding the Romanian Holocaust: antisemitism and gender. Vandana Joshi, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India “The Holy Ghost, the Sleeping Beauty and the Prince Charming: Narratives of Sexual Discontent in World War II Germany” Forbidden sexual relations between Jews and Germans in Nazi Germany have been studied extensively by scholars, but forbidden relations between Aryan women and prisoners of war have received little attention in the academic community. Vandana Joshi’s article demonstrates that, in spite of criminal sanctions against sexual relations between Germans and POWS, forbidden sex became an embarrassing and frequent reality during WW II. She relies on Gestapo and judicial records to argue that women’s subjective experiences and lived realities did not synchronize with the state’s claims of an insulated utopian Volksgemeinschaft’ (national-racial community) during the war years. The more the regime sponsored marriage for ‘racially pure’ citizens in forms such as wartime, long distance and post-mortem marriages, the more marriage lost its traditional meaning. The physical absence of husbands and the relative autonomy enjoyed by soldiers’ wives often led to racial and sexual transgressions, even though discovery could lead to denial of state maternal benefits, loss of citizenship and penal servitude for guilty soldiers’ wives. Nonetheless, many women entered into sexual liaisons with POWs of various ethnicities and racial backgrounds and thereby lost the legal right to their children and families. If a wife was found legally guilty of adultery with a POW and or Rassenschande (racial defilement), both legal custody of her children and the responsibility for home making was transferred from the wife to her soldier husband. Only if her husband appealed for mercy and professed his continued faith in his wife, was there any possibility for his wife to be “rehabilitated” and, therefore, have her maternal relationship with her children restored. This reallocation of the legal right to define legitimate marriages and paternal relationships from the married couple to the state demonstrates that the German state claimed the ultimate right to control the bodies and behavior of the wives of German soldiers. Joshi’s article

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provides important new information concerning the topics of wartime citizenship, sexuality, maternity, morality, paternity, gender and race relations in Nazi Germany.

Legacy Featured Article: Paul R. Bartrop, “Considering the Holocaust and Genocide: Is There A Difference, and Does it Matter?” Audrey Brunetaux, Colby College, Waterville, Maine, “La Rafle & Elle s’appelait Sarah: Memory-Work and Mediality” Brunetaux’s article confronts the legacy of the Vél d’Hiv round-up, which led to the deportation of 13,000 Jews in Paris in July 1942, by analyzing two recent French films: Roselyne Bosch’s La Rafle (The Round Up) and Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Elle s’appelait Sarah (Sarah’s Key). She argues that the films renegotiate French guilt regarding the events through unconventional portrayals of the round-up, their computerized recreation of the actual site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and their depiction of the French internment camps from which Jews were transferred and deported to concentration, work and death camps in the East. Although the sites themselves were destroyed and erased from the French landscape after World War II, the recreations in the films allow viewers to recapture and re-appropriate the historical events while bridging the gap between past and present. Through their aesthetics and their mise-en-scène, these fictional films do not supplant historical events but rather challenge viewers to reconsider the complexities inherent in Vichy France. Brunetaux argues that the films succeed in imaging the Holocaust aesthetically without trivializing it. Matthew Cook and Derek H. Alderman, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “Public Memory and Empathy in Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine Project” Cook and Alderman’s article examines German artist Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) project as part of his discussion of how the Holocaust past has become embedded in the landscape of Germany through memorials. The Stolpersteine are 10.16 by 10.16 centimeters (4by 4-inch) memorial stones placed in sidewalks in front of homes or businesses that were the last known locations of Holocaust victims. Demnig has explained that his project personalizes the memorialization of

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the Holocaust by pointing to individuals rather than focusing on the sheer number of victims. Cook’s fieldwork investigates the range of meanings that people derive from the Stolpersteine in Berlin. By investigating a smaller scale of memorial and placing it within the national and international context, Cook’s research offers insight into the processes involved with Holocaust memorialization and the local, national and international struggles over meaning. Wendy Koenig, Long Beach City College, Long Beach, California, “For the Sake of an Encounter: Oral Testimony in Holocaust Museums” Koenig’s article examines the history of audio and video collection of survivor testimony as well as strategies employed for the presentation of such testimonies within the exhibition spaces of Holocaust museums in the United States. She explores the ramifications of particular “listening” situations, including the use of headphones, iPod Touch audioguides, and controlled collective encounters. In addition, Koenig considers whether current approaches allow for the sustained engagement necessary for the visitor to differentiate the experience of listening to Holocaust testimony from other types of acoustic and/or verbal encounters. Koenig concludes by examining selected examples of innovative acoustic strategies as a means to explore alternatives to conventional exhibition design. Nadja Weck, Vienna University, Austria, “European Holocaust Memory versus Local Practice in Western Ukraine: Dealing with the Holocaust in the Town of Sambir” Weck’s article discusses the manner by which the west Ukrainian town of Sambir attempts to represent its past in relation to the Holocaust. The town drew attention when local residents blocked the construction of a memorial park commemorating Jewish inhabitants who were murdered in the Holocaust. Instead of the park, three metal crosses were erected on the town’s old Jewish cemetery and they were labeled as commemorating the “Victims of Fascist and Communist Terror 1939-1950.” By examining interviews with local residents, works of popular history and other memorial sites, Weck investigates why the town’s Jewish history was swept under the rug. One decisive feature of Ukrainian memory discourse is the attempt to distance the country from Soviet conceptions of history, even as the aesthetics associated with Soviet memorials are often maintained. The town of Sambir emerges as an unusual case, given that the nearby town of Stary Sambir openly acknowledges and commemorates

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the mass murder of local Jews. Through this comparison, Weck reveals the complex negotiations involved in Ukrainian treatments of the past and its relationship to Holocaust memory. Christopher P. Davey, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, “Fighting Atrocity: Rethinking the Connections between Gross Violations, Civil Resistance and Humanitarian Interventions” Davey considers historical moments when campaigns of non-violence and human rights have emerged as civic, non-violent responses to gross violations of these human rights. In Kosovo and East Timor in the 1990s, these social dynamics coalesced into campaigners enticing international humanitarian intervention through strategic use of nonviolence. Using primary sources from participants engaged in the non-violent struggle for human rights, Davey establishes new lines of questioning about the role of civil resistance in responding to the trajectory of genocide before such acts unfold beyond the responsiveness and current limits of humanitarian action. C. Elizabeth Propes, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, Tennessee, “Contextualizing the Holocaust as a Human Event” Scholars and institutions dedicated to the remembrance of the Holocaust frequently link teaching about the Holocaust with the goal of further genocide prevention, but popular education seems to fail at making this connection. Propes argues that Holocaust education needs to embrace a greater contextualization of the Holocaust by incorporating materials from other genocides and by embracing a more fundamental theoretical approach to understanding genocide in general. She focuses upon identifying characteristics that link genocides and, in that process, identifies specific materials from other historical events that can be used to help students comprehend specifics of the Holocaust as well as understand how any culture might descend into such genocidal activities. Her approach forces students to consider the ideologies and processes that allow so-called ordinary people to become capable of genocide. Global Perspectives on the Holocaust: History, Identity, Legacy features innovative scholarship that provides both scholars and students with new perspectives and methodologies that will allow them to study the Holocaust and genocide in new ways that will encourage them to evaluate and project the lessons of the past into the present through a world-wide

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perspective. We believe that the future of Holocaust scholarship must become both increasingly global and interdisciplinary and that this volume contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the events and legacy of the Holocaust.

PART II: THE HOLOCAUST: A BRIEF HISTORY

CHAPTER TWO THE HOLOCAUST: A BRIEF HISTORY NANCY E. RUPPRECHT

“. . . So then, to tell my story, here I stand. . . You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?”1

When Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party seized power on January 30, 1933, there were approximately 525,000 Jewish people living in Germany, less than one percent of the population. Using a combination of force and terror, Hitler quickly destroyed the Weimar Republic and created a totalitarian state based on racial ideology in theory, in law and in practice.2 The Holocaust or Shoah,3 the genocide directed primarily against the Jews of Europe, developed gradually and inexorably with small discriminatory 1

Written by German/Jewish poet Gertrud Kolmar who was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. These lines are from the poem Die Dichterin (“The Woman Poet”) from Dark Soliloquy, a book of selected poems by Kolmar. 2 This brief history was composed from a variety of sources written, primarily but not exclusively, by historians. I want to acknowledge my intellectual debt to those upon whom I relied in writing this essay. They include Marion Kaplan, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Raul Hilberg, Martin Gilbert, Christopher Browning, Michael Marrus, Deborah Dwork, and the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Older versions of this essay also may be found under the title “Holocaust Overview” on the website of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans and that of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission. 3 For many years scholarship on the Holocaust focused on the German perpetrators rather than their victims, primarily because the Germans created most of the written official records. However, in the recent past more emphasis has been placed on Holocaust victims; new methodologies and categories of analysis, such as questions of gender and class, have been developed, and projects to videotape the testimony of Holocaust survivors have broadened the scope of Holocaust scholarship.

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measures, such as university quota limits for Jews and the prohibition of Jewish ownership of German land (both in 1933), and escalated with the Nuremberg laws of 1935 that defined what it meant to be a Jew,4 deprived Jews of German citizenship and legally prohibited them from a variety of occupations. At this time laws also were passed making sexual relations between Germans and those of unacceptable race into a new crime called Rassenschande (racial defilement or racial pollution) that was punishable by a variety of sanctions up to and including the death penalty for both participants.5 Virulent antisemitism was a core belief of Hitler’s ideology (Weltanschauung) from the very beginning. According to Hitler, the allegedly alien racial stock represented by the Jews was particularly dangerous to Germany because of their wide distribution and imagined influence as well as the fact that they had assimilated successfully into German society. As early as April 6, 1920, Hitler promised a cheering crowd that he was determined “to pull up the [Jewish] evil by its roots and exterminate it completely.” (“das Uebel an der Wurzel zu packen und mit Stumpf und Stiel auszurotten.”) Antisemitism was not a new experience for German Jews or, for that matter, for Jews anywhere in Europe, North America or the rest of the world in the early 20th century. Probably because it is tempting to view history backwards through the lens of the present, much of our media and Although some scholars prefer the Hebrew word Shoah (catastrophe) to the term Holocaust, this history will use Holocaust. 4 The Nuremberg laws defined “full Jews” as having three or four Jewish grandparents or those with two Jewish grandparents who were married to Jews and/or belonged to a Jewish community. All other people who had two Jewish grandparents were defined as First Degree Mischlinge, people of mixed racial ancestry. Second Degree Mischlinge were defined as people with one Jewish grandparent and Aryans were defined as people with no Jewish grandparents. The term Mischling frequently was used in a much more pejorative connotation than my translation implies. In some contexts it is more accurately translated into English as “half-breed” with all the negative implication that term connotes. 5 Rassenschande prosecutions for sexual intercourse between Jews and German gentiles were much more common than prosecutions for sexual relations between gentiles and Afro-German Mischlinge or gentiles and Gypsies (Senti and Roma). Although there were a relatively small number of Afro-Germans in the Third Reich, approximately 385 of them were sterilized to preclude their further procreation and, during the war, some were conscripted for forced labor. On the other hand, some black German Mischlinge joined the Hitler Youth and/or fought in the German army during WW II.

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some historians who ought to know better imply that Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism struck a responsive chord in Germans because it was based on a deep reserve of antisemitic hatred. However, this type of argument distorts historical reality in three important ways. First, it equates Hitler’s rabid “racial” antisemitism with traditional religious antisemitism and conflates the two. Second, this conflation leads students and scholars to underestimate the radical, virulent, perpetual and all-consuming nature of Hitler’s antisemitism. Third, it isn’t true. It is not difficult to demonstrate that 20th century Germans were not rabidly antisemitic before Hitler’s seizure of power. When the German empire was created in January 1871, Jews were granted almost complete legal equality with gentiles on the national level. There were some iniquities on the state level that remained in place until 1919 when the Weimar constitution established universal legal equality for Jews—more than a dozen years before Hitler’s seizure of power. However, even before 1919, when some state antisemitic restrictions remained on the books, those restrictions were significantly less onerous than the iniquities of the pre-imperial era. Most Jews understood this, assimilated into German society and considered Germany their homeland. Moreover, considering the pogroms6 and the active persecution of Jews in Russia and eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as the political storm that erupted in France over the maltreatment of Alfred Dreyfus, the first Jewish officer assigned to the French general staff, it is not surprising that most Jews in Imperial Germany believed that they were in a much better position than Jews in much of Europe and also better off than Jews had been in the German past. Disproportionately large numbers of German Jews served their fatherland in front-line combat during the Great War, many as volunteers, because they felt at home in their fatherland. 7 6

Pogrom is a Yiddish word, derived from Russian, meaning a violent attack on a specific community of people. Historically, the word has been applied to attacks on Jews, especially in late 19th and early 20th century Russia. 7 On October 11, 1916 the German military ordered a Judenzählung (Jewish or Jew census) in the German army to determine how many Jewish soldiers were fighting in the front line as opposed to serving in the rear echelons and/or in administrative jobs. The expectation was that it would indicate that a disproportionate number of Jews were serving in the rear but it showed exactly the opposite--compared to gentile Germans, Jews were proportionately over-represented in the front lines. The military suppressed the findings of the census because it did not document their expected results. In Germany in the 1930s Jewish WW I soldiers who had been decorated for valor sometimes were spared roundups and minor harassment, but it did not exempt them from the final solution.

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Before Hitler turned antisemitism into state policy, the hatred directed toward Jews was primarily religious, although visceral hatred of Jews as a group also had political and economic overtones. The major justification for this type of antisemitism was the Christian tenet that the Jews killed Jesus Christ, a viewpoint that the Roman Catholic Church did not repudiate until the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (19621965).8 Hitler’s antisemitism was different. He justified his discriminatory legislation by incorrectly declaring that Jews were a separate race rather than a religious and an ethnic group, and argued that Jews use their religion as a shield to mask their supposedly nefarious racial, political and economic goals. As Hitler explained in Mein Kampf (1924), Jews adopt this tactic in order to assure them: …of the tolerance that the Aryan is always ready to accord a religious creed. For actually, the mosaic religion [Judaism] is nothing other than a doctrine for the preservation of the Jewish race…. A Jew is and remains a typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people die out. The Jew today is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany.9

From 1933 on, beginning with German Jews, there was slow, steady progress toward the destruction of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War, from discrimination, to expropriation, to degradation, to persecution, to pogrom, to mass deportations, to forced or slave labor, and finally to genocide.10 Also in Mein Kampf, Hitler had predicted that a general European war would result "in the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe," a prediction he repeated in a Reichstag speech in January 1939 8

The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate stated that the Jews during Christ’s lifetime as well as all contemporary Jews are no more responsible for the death of Christ than Christians. Perhaps the most scurrilous secular document is the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” that first was circulated in Russia shortly after the turn of the 20th century. It cobbles together a spider web of lies that charge Jews with having secret plans to dominate the globe through economic, political and religious machinations. It has been in circulation continuously since it first was issued. 9 Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, Volume I, Chapter 4. 10 An extensive, though not complete, list of these discriminatory measures—such as the loss of the right to use public telephones, swim in public pools or own dogs and cats—is included in Appendix I to this chapter.

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and three times during World War II. It was, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy despite the fact that few people interpreted his warnings literally. Frequently it has been argued that Germany’s Jews should have anticipated what the German state had in store for them and emigrated abroad long before the exterminations began. However, the unprecedented genocide that was to become reality during the Second World War would have seemed, to most gentile and Jewish Germans, unimaginable in the mid-1930s. Most German Jews thought Hitler’s antisemitic measures were a return to the type of discriminatory policies of the pre-imperial era, not as the first steps on the road to death camps. Because most Jews considered themselves assimilated into German and Austrian politics, culture and society, many were shocked, despairing, and desperate when extreme persecution began to be directed toward them after 1938. Rose Ausländer’s poem “Motherland My Fatherland!” illustrates this disillusionment in six short lines. My Fatherland is dead they have buried it in fire. I live in my Motherland Word 11

Moreover, in the years immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power the most virulent forms of persecution were levied against non-Jewish Germans whom he considered to be enemies of the new German state. These included but were not limited to homosexuals, communists, social democrats and other political opponents. The persecution of Hitler’s political enemies occurred for self-evident reasons; discrimination against gentile German women, gay men and lesbians is not immediately obvious. The antifeminist and homophobic aspects of National Socialist persecution were linked through Hitler’s 11 Rosa Ausländer was born in 1901 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of AustroHungarian Empire and today part of Ukraine. Because she was a Jew, in 1941 she was forced to move into the Cernauti ghetto. After two years, when rumors of deportations abounded, she went into hiding and survived the Holocaust. The text and an English translation of this poem and “My Nightingale” is available on line at: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/2005-May/035019.html One possible interpretation of these lines argues that because she had been betrayed by her Fatherland, which she had considered her national identity, Ausländer had to escape into her individual identity, her Motherland, one created by language and the Word, as given to the Jews by (their) God.

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ideology that demanded that each generation of “racially healthy” Germans procreate ever larger numbers of mothers and soldiers to secure the German future of Hitler’s ideological vision. Like so much else that Hitler thought repugnant, he attributed women's emancipation to an international Jewish conspiracy and he considered it to be “a symptom of depravity on a par with parliamentary democracy and jazz. . .opera."12 He believed there was an unpatriotic connection between feminism and lesbianism that was detrimental to his goal of raising the German birth rate. Gentile German women who were not lesbians were discriminated against by being excluded from almost all aspects of political and economic power, but they were not actively persecuted. It was against homosexual German men that the Nazis concentrated their most severe gender-defined persecution. Paragraph 175 of the Imperial German Criminal Code of 1871 punished “acts of indecency between men.” When the Nazis came to power they strengthened this law and increased the penalties for male homosexuality. Some gay men were arrested and sentenced legally while others were simply rounded up, put in concentration or death camps and forced to wear a pink triangle denoting their “crime.” In prisons, concentration, labor and death camps, homosexual men frequently were singled out for extremely harsh treatment. In the camps they regularly were mistreated, tortured, gratuitously degraded and sexually humiliated by both SS guards and camp Kapos. According to Joachim Neander, along with non-German Jews and Catholic priests, gentile German homosexual men were the most reviled prisoners in the camps. Moreover, at Auschwitz, among all German gentiles they had the highest death rate, an astronomical eightly percent.13 The laws forbidding homosexuality did not even mention women. That omission is deeply misogynistic because it implies that women’s desires and personal inclinations were unimportant. Lesbians could have a baby for Germany whether or not they were interested in the process of conception; most gay men could or would not father children. Male homosexuals were racial traitors when they squandered their precious 12

Richard Gruenberger, The Twelve Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-1945 New York: Da Capo Press, 1995, 253. 13 Joachim Neander, “German Victims of Auschwitz” in Nancy E. Rupprecht and Wendy Koenig, eds. Global Perspectives on the Holocaust: History, Identity, Legacy, (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 220. For more information on German homosexuals in the aforementioned book, see David Chrisinger, “Bending the Bars of Their Cage: Identity and Survival by Subterfuge in Hitler’s Germany,” 230-249.

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German sperm where no child could be produced whereas lesbians betrayed their race if they did not bear children to secure the German future. Compared to gay men, fewer lesbians were incarcerated in the camps, but most of those who were did not wear the pink triangle denoting their homosexuality. Instead most of them wore a black triangle that branded them as “asocial.” Sexuality also was a concern for the National Socialist state in terms of its racial policies. In July 1933, eugenic laws were enacted permitting the involuntary sterilization of those Germans who physicians thought might transmit serious physical or mental diseases to the next generation. In October 1939, physicians sorted out patients at hospitals and nursing homes to send those believed to be suffering from specified incurable conditions, handicaps, injuries and diseases to special facilities to be put to death. This so-called euthanasia program, often referred to by its code name T-4,14 offered a practical opportunity for the Third Reich to experiment with the quickest, cheapest, and most professional methods to kill large numbers of people using a variety of lethal gasses and poisons. It also gave them experience in recruiting people who were willing to kill other people for a living, and enabled them to find efficient methods of disposing of huge numbers of corpses. Although the number of people killed in the T-4 program is small in comparison with the number of people murdered during the Holocaust, it was an intimation of atrocities to come. By August 1941, there had been approximately 70,000 victims of the euthanasia program. Word of this program leaked out and an outcry of public indignation managed to reduce it in the Reich. However, it was replaced by a decentralized program that continued until 1945.15 The first steps on the path to genocide were designed to subject the German-Jewish population to what historian Marion Kaplan has described as “social death.” By examining the everyday lives of German Jews using methodologies developed to investigate women’s history, Kaplan explains how state policies designed to isolate, disenfranchise, denigrate and demean them led to what she calls “secular excommunication,” a form of social ostracism that separated them from non-Jewish Germans. This enabled the Nazi state to define Jews as an alien race living among Germans and encouraged gentile Germans to become desensitized to what 14

The euphemism T-4 was chosen because the program’s headquarters were located at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin. 15 This decentralized program, in which hospital personnel continued to kill patients, existed until the end of the war and, in some places, these murders were not ended until Allied occupation forces discontinued them. Approximately 100,000 people were put to death after August 1941.

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was happening to them. For Kaplan, the “social death” of Jews and German indifference were prerequisites for the ‘”final solution.”16 The turning point from social death to active persecution in the pre-war Third Reich was Reichskristallnacht or Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”), the horrendous pogrom of November 9, 1938 that resulted in the murder of approximately 100 Jews and the destruction of 101 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses. An additional 75 synagogues and countless Jewish stores and shops were damaged. About 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps. 17 After Kristallnacht, it was clear to almost every German Jew that the best way to survive was to emigrate. Some Jews with financial resources and/or connections abroad were able to obtain passports that permitted them to emigrate. Undoubtedly many more would have left if they had found any country in the world willing to accept them. The plight of refugees from the Third Reich and German dominated Europe is one of the most poignant stories of the Holocaust era. Most national quotas did not specifically distinguish among various ethnic and religious groups. There is little doubt, however, that the greatest difficulties were put in the path of European Jews trying to escape Nazi control. Approximately 340,000 German and Austrian Jews managed to leave legally until 1941, when Jewish emigration was forbidden by the Third Reich. It is important to remember that emigration was not an option for the vast majority of European Jews. Even those Jews who had the money to flee often were unable to satisfy the other requirements mandated of potential immigrants. Moreover, many countries such as the United States obliged potential immigrants to have at least a quota number, a visa and an affidavit of responsibility from a citizen living in the country the emigrant

16

Marion Kaplan. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 5, 229. Kaplan’s term is not meant to imply that this was the only form of antisemitism in the pre-1938 Third Reich. 17 There were a few instances of domestic and international protest against Kristallnacht. Oberleutnant Wilhelm Kruetzfeld, commander of Berlin Police Precinct 16, saved a Jewish synagogue that day by brandishing a historical building certificate in the face of the political marauders. Immediately thereafter he took early retirement rather than serve the Nazi government. Such instances of moral courage were few and far between both in Germany and abroad. For example, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only head of state to withdraw his ambassador from Germany as a protest against Kristallnacht.

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wished to enter. American entrance requirements were extremely stringent and many European Jews were unable to fulfill them.18 The difficulty for Jews and others who wanted to escape was finding somewhere in the world that would allow them to enter as immigrants. At the instigation of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an international conference was convened at Evian-sur-Bains, France, July 615, 1938 to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees. Not only did the 32 countries’ representatives in attendance refuse to amend immigration laws to permit more immigration, they failed even to pass a resolution condemning National Socialist Germany’s brutal treatment of the Jews. Historian Martin Gilbert observed, “It was a neutral stance, not a hostile one, but this neutral stance was to cost a multitude of lives.”19 A few small countries such as the Dominican Republic and Bolivia offered to accept some Jewish refugees but most countries were unwilling to do so. The United States had a small number of immigration slots available each year but the number of applicants was far greater than visa numbers. Moreover, some American officials, such as Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of the Visa division of the State Department, actively attempted to put bureaucratic roadblocks in the paths of Jews trying to immigrate into the United States. As a result, many available visa slots remained unused. There are many poignant stories of failure and frustration recounted by Jews and others who tried unsuccessfully to emigrate from Europe. For example, in the spring of 1939, the famous case of the St. Louis drew international attention to the refugee’s plight. The ship, loaded with German Jews, left Germany for Cuba. When it arrived, the Cuban government refused to honor the refugees’ transit visas and denied almost all of them entry into Cuba. The United States and Canada both declined to offer safe haven to any of the St. Louis passengers, and the ship was forced to return to Europe. 20 The difficulty of getting a visa to the United States for Jews was summed up in a popular Fluesterwitze or whispered joke that was illegal to tell in the Third Reich: a teacher asked a student, “Do you know why

18

For a full list of the documents necessary for emigration to the United States see Appendix I below. 19 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, New York: Macmillan, 1987, 65. 20 France, Belgium and the Netherlands each accepted approximately 200 passengers and Neville Chamberlain’s government in Great Britain offered safe haven to almost 300 of them.

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Christopher Columbus is so famous?” “Yes,” he answered, “because he went to America without a visa.” A large number of German Jews immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine during the 1930s until 1939, when the British government sharply curtailed legal emigration to Palestine. While some European Jews managed to enter the Mandate illegally, it was another source of egress sharply curtailed by governmental actions. Nonetheless, Great Britain was one of the few countries that did anything positive to offer refuge to European Jews. Shortly after the pogrom of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, a delegation of Jewish and non-Jewish leaders united to petition Neville Chamberlain’s government to suspend British immigration requirements and permit an unspecified number of unaccompanied refugee Jewish children under the age of 17 to enter Great Britain. Subsequently, a bill was passed through Parliament that enabled nearly 10,000 Jewish children to enter Britain on the so-called Kindertransports (Refugee Children’s Movements or RCM). Groups such as the Quakers, as well as some committed individuals, organized efforts to transport children to safety in Britain on the Kindertransports. British stockbroker Nicholas Winton, for example, is credited with saving 669 Czechoslovak Jewish refugee children in less than a year. In addition, also after Kristallnacht, the Chamberlain government loosened its immigration rules in order to allow Jewish Germans whose immigration quota numbers to enter the United States and other countries were pending, to be allowed to travel to England. This enabled them to wait for their turn to immigrate abroad in the safety of the UK. Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands offered safe haven to some Jews, as did Spain. Some Jews who crossed into the Iberian Peninsula moved on to Lisbon, Portugal to wait until they could obtain a visa to emigrate somewhere and to find transportation to get them to their final destinations. With the outbreak of World War II, emigration became even more difficult. However, if Jews could find the financial means to get there, the International Settlements Quarter of Shanghai, China–although under Japanese control—agreed to admit European Jews without a visa until 1939. Before the first German Jews arrived in Shanghai, a large contingent of Russian Jews, who had fled from their motherland because of Czarist pogroms or disillusion with the Bolshevik regime, already had settled there.21 In addition, more than 2000 Polish Jews fled to Shanghai by way 21 As had a smaller contingent of wealthy Baghdadi Jews, including the Sassoon family.

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of Lithuania in the wake of the German invasion of Poland. Many of these Jews were aided in reaching their destination by Chiune Sugihara, the Imperial Japanese Council in Lithuania, who issued thousands of needed travel visas to the Polish refugees. The 2000 Polish Jews, together with 4,000 Russian Jews and approximately 17,000 German and Austrian Jews, formed a substantial Jewish community made up of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. They found safety in Shanghai, albeit under very crowded, dangerous, and unsanitary conditions as well as the necessity to acclimate to an extremely unfamiliar culture. Despite the difficult living conditions in Shanghai, they were able to escape the final solution Hitler planned for all Jews under his control. In January 1944 at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau, Jr. and others, President Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board (WRB) to provide aid for refugees attempting to flee Europe and to rescue as many Jews as possible. WRB rescue work will be considered below, but it is important to discuss the WRB’s attempt to provide a safe haven for primarily Jewish European refugees in the United States. In June 1944, using his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, President Roosevelt ordered that such a haven be established: the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter was built in Oswego, New York to accommodate over 900 refugees. Because the refugees were brought to the U.S. under the rubric of “prisoners of war” who were to be sent home after the conflict ended, they were housed in a camp. Opposition from the U.S. Congress, including discussion of impeaching President Roosevelt, resulted in an announcement from the White House that there the President would issue no additional executive orders concerning refugees. Not coincidentally, all discussion of impeachment ceased. Nonetheless, for the camp residents, the Oswego refugee shelter was a godsend. Most of them were Jews who were transported from Italy on an American military ship to the United States in August 1944. One of them, Eva Rosenfeld, described herself as a “guest” of President Franklin Roosevelt, although one who had been severely traumatized by her experiences in Europe.22 For Rosenfeld and the other Oswego residents, the refugee shelter meant salvation, hope and life. The Oswego refugees had entered the United States under American protection but not within the legal quota system. Therefore, their legal status was by no means 22

Eva Rosenfeld’s oral history is in “Living On” a collection of oral histories available on the website of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission, http://www.tennesseeholocaustcommission.org/bio.php?id=55

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certain. Nonetheless, in the postwar era President Harry S Truman arranged for those Oswego refugees who wanted to do so to remain in the United States. The frustration the majority of European Jews attempting to emigrate must have felt after being turned down by country after country is well illustrated by another whispered joke (Fluesterwitze) that is characteristic of ironic Jewish humor. It recounts the plight of an Austrian Jew who went to a travel agent to find out what options he had for emigration. The agent took out a large globe to choose a country, but it became clear that almost no options were available. Finally, in desperation, the Jew asked, “Haven’t you got another globe?” Obviously, those refugees who managed to find safe haven were the lucky ones and, undoubtedly, they considered themselves very fortunate. It is important, however, to remember that although they were alive, their lives had been significantly disrupted to the point that some of them were unable to fully recover from the experience of exile. German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, an outspoken opponent of Hitler, summed up the bittersweet experience of exile in “Envoi,” a 1940 verse: This is all there is. It’s not enough but At least I’m still alive. I’m like the man who carried a brick around to Show people the way his house used to look. 23

After Kristallnacht, the Nazi persecution of Jews escalated dramatically, but it was only after World War II began that genocide became state policy and the possibility of escape became almost impossible. Jews who were married to Aryans had the best chance to survive. Kaplan estimates that of the Jewish German survivors who did not emigrate, only 1 percent were not in mixed marriages. Jews remaining in 23 Tabori, George, Brecht on Brecht, London: Samuel French, 1967, 96. This verse is sometimes cited as “Motto.” The translation is mine but is only slightly different from the Tabori version. Brecht fled Germany the month after Hitler took power, spent short periods of time in Prague, Zurich and Paris before moving to Denmark for six years. When it looked as if war was imminent, he moved to Sweden where he remained for a year while waiting for his visa to the United States. In 1941 he fled to the U.S. where he remained for several years until an encounter with the House on Un-American Activities Committee led him to return to Europe. Although he was not Jewish, his overt sympathy with Jews has made him a target of antisemites who, to this day, routinely desecrate his grave with swastikas and other symbols of hate. “Envoi” was included in both the book version and the Broadway play “Brecht on Brecht.”

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Germany who went into hiding were called “submarines” (U-Boote) because they had to live below the surface of life. Only about 25 percent of the Jews who went into hiding survived and the majority of these were women.24 The fact that women were more likely to survive underground than men is only one of the many ways in which the Holocaust experiences of male and female Jews differed. These differences are now being studied by scholars because, as Myrna Goldenberg explains, “the hell may have been the same for women and men during the Holocaust but the horrors were different.” 25 The outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 gave Hitler the opportunity to achieve the demographic transformation of the globe he envisioned by annihilating all of those people he considered to be “life unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben). Moreover, the persecution of German and European Jews escalated, at least partially because military exigencies permit governments to employ more ruthless measures than normally are considered permissible. In addition, during the war, tighter secrecy could be employed to shield the details of the exterminations under the guise of national security. The euthanasia program taught Hitler the necessity for absolute secrecy when carrying out programs that he knew many Germans would consider immoral. He was determined not to be stopped or slowed down by people he considered to be misguided idealists. Until 1940 most Germans, even high-ranking National Socialist officials, thought the forced emigration of the Jews was the final goal of the German state. In 1939, racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg developed a plan to send European Jews to Madagascar and put them on reservations much like those Native Americans had been confined to in the United States. Official state papers dated as late as June 1940 in the bureau of Franz Rademacher, under secretary in the German Foreign Office, document that the Madagascar plan was considered to be state policy. 24

Jews who lived underground in German society not only had to avoid the Gestapo (secret police) and other state functionaries; they also had to elude the Greifer (snatchers, catchers.). These were Jews, such as the notorious Stella Goldschlag, who were used by the Gestapo to locate and help entrap underground Jews. Nearly all those Jews who went underground lived in mid-sized to large cities because in rural areas where everyone knew one another it was not possible to survive in hiding. 25 Goldenberg quoted in Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., “Prologue: Women and the Holocaust” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, New York: Paragon House, 1993, 3.

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However, Germany’s failure to defeat Great Britain and gain control of the seas made the Madagascar plan unworkable. The Second World War made the Holocaust possible in two ways: first, it was much more difficult for Jews and other victims to flee from Hitler’s persecution and, second, German military victories brought millions of non-German Jews, more than ninety percent of those who would be murdered, under National Socialist control. Unfortunately, much of both scholarly and popular literature on the Holocaust ignores or devotes little attention to the important interdependent connection between World War II and the Shoah. The Second World War provided the secrecy necessary for Germany to set up a sophisticated program of mass murder and it also supplied the program with the vast majority of its victims, especially central and eastern European Jews. Shortly after the war began in 1939, special units of the SS (Schutzstaffel) rounded up Jews in Poland and shot them in ditches in outbreaks of largely random and sometimes spontaneous violence.26 By 1940, techniques of mass murder had become much more sophisticated with the introduction of mobile killing vans that were developed and tested in the east. The death vans were simply trucks that had been rigged to feed carbon monoxide from the engine back into the cargo area. These vehicles were far too inefficient to handle the millions of murders envisioned by Hitler and Himmler both because they took too long to kill and because they wasted valuable gasoline due to the fact that they had to leave their motors running until all of the victims inside died. Moreover, Himmler considered these forms of killing too emotionally taxing for the Germans who carried them out. Therefore, before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, special SS units (Einsatzgruppen) under the command of SS officers of the German Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei or Sipo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) were supplemented with police battalions. These units were instructed to kill all Hitler’s racial and political enemies—Jews, Gypsies, officials of the Soviet state and the Communist party and thousands of patients in facilities for the mentally and physically disabled. During the second half of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen and police battalions murdered several hundred thousand Jews and others, primarily by shooting

26 At least one notable example of racial annihilation occurred on the Western front between May-June 1940 when German forces massacred approximately 3,000 black West African troops fighting in the French army. According to historian Raffael Scheck, most of these soldiers were executed immediately after they surrendered, but some also were murdered after they had become prisoners of war.

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them. The German army provided logistical support to these units and, on occasion, soldiers to guard the prisoners. Not only did special units and police battalions attached to the military have orders to murder these groups of victims, but the German decision to export local food and produce to Germany and Austria was made with the full knowledge that it would result in the starvation deaths of over 30 million Soviet men, women and children. In addition, German figures document the fact that during the first seven months of 1942, more than two million Russian prisoners of war either were murdered outright or starved to death. These facts were keenly appreciated by the Soviet populace who realized that they were literally in a life and death struggle to survive. On July 31, 1941, a directive was sent from Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich instructing him "to prepare a solution to the Jewish question in the form of emigration or evacuation which favorably fits existing conditions."27 As the head of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), Heydrich was charged with implementing this directive to "purify" Europe by eliminating the Jews in what would become the most horrific example of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century. He began to deport Jews from Germany, Austria, and Bohemia to the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz as well as the Opole ghetto and Bochnia near Krakow in Poland. World War II ghettos established by the Germans were not sub-standard neighborhoods in the American sense of the word “ghetto,” but rather, extremely brutal urban prisons. From 1940-1942 the Jewish “deportees” to these ghettoes were permitted to take along 50 kilos (ca 110 lbs.) of luggage and 100 German marks. The remainder of their property was confiscated by the state or taken by neighbors. Until early 1942 most Jews were sent to the ghettos; after 1942 they no longer were destined for eastern ghettos, but for the extermination or death camps (Vernichtungslager) created specifically to murder Jews and other enemies of national socialism: AuschwitzBirkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, or Treblinka.28 There is no doubt that it was Hitler’s decision to implement genocide as a state policy and in the fall of 1941, the “final solution” (Endlösung), the final mass deportation of German Jews, began. On the pretext that they were being resettled in the east, they were transported in cattle and boxcars to the death camps. 27

The full text of this document is available in English translation at http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/order1.htm 28 Some sources classify Majdanek as a sixth extermination camp, but that was not its major function.

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Although Hitler sometimes referred publically to these systematic killings in general terms, the extermination or death camps (Vernichtungslager) were kept as secret as possible. The existence of the concentration camps (Konzentrationslager or KZ) that first were established in 1933 to incarcerate Hitler’s political enemies, such as Dachau in Bavaria, was common knowledge in the Third Reich. The German government hoped and expected that knowledge of their existence, combined with rumors about what was happening in them, would act as a deterrent to resistance. Although many people were murdered in these camps, they were not established specifically for that purpose.29 Although historians disagree about the exact date that the decision to eliminate the Jews was reached irrevocably, most agree that it was decided no later than mid-1941 and probably before that. In January 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, a conference of top party, state and SS leaders took place to coordinate the policy and practice of mass murder. The major purpose of this meeting was to draw additional German government agencies into implementing the final solution because the task was far too large and complex to be completed by the SS and the Wehrmacht. At this meeting, the European portion of the final solution was discussed thoroughly, including methods of implementing it. Thereafter, orders for and regarding the final solution almost always were transmitted verbally from Hitler and Himmler through Heydrich and his successor, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei or state secret police) chiefs Heinrich Müller and Adolf Eichmann, who were in tactical charge of executing these directives. Eichmann and Müller refined and transmitted the orders for genocide through the bureaucratic apparatus of the Third Reich to the local officials in charge of implementing genocide. After the Wannsee Conference, the job of organizing and enacting plans for cost-efficient genocide began in earnest. The first task was to sift through Europe from west to east picking up Jews and transporting them to eastern ghettos and then moving them by stages to the death camps to be killed. The quasi-aborted German euthanasia program, begun in the fall of 1939, served as a pilot program for the Holocaust. It provided SS extermination camp functionaries with valuable information about effective methods of mass murder, models for the efficient implementation of genocide and a cadre of personnel experienced in murdering large numbers of people. 29 Most camps were intended for both genders, but one KZ, Ravensbrück, was established inside Germany for female prisoners.

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Despite their relatively small numbers, Gypsies (Sinti and Roma or Romani) also were singled out for maltreatment largely similar to that suffered by the Jews. Gypsies were defined as a race by Hitler, and relentlessly persecuted. Because there are no precise figures concerning the number of Gypsies who lived in pre-Holocaust Europe, it is difficult to estimate the percentage of Romani who were murdered by the German state. However, most historians estimate that there were at least 200,000 Gypsies persecuted during the Holocaust. Although there supposedly were exceptions for certain categories of Gypsies,30 German authorities frequently ignored them. In some cases what amounted to press gangs even deported Gypsies serving in the German military when they were home on leave. Like European Jews, Romani were discriminated against by law, arbitrarily arrested, interned, subjected to slave labor and murdered in the death camps. Memoirs of Auschwitz-Birkenau, such as Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys, agree that after mid-1943 the gas chambers were reserved almost exclusively for Jews and Romani. Like the Jews, Gypsies were incorrectly defined racially and deemed to be “life unworthy of life.” However, Jews and Gypsies were not the only ones to be targeted. In January 1941, SS commandant Heinrich Himmler told a gathering of SS officials that the "destruction of 30 million Slavs was prerequisite for German planning in the east." Special SS task forces set up for that specific purpose (Einsatzkommando) were instructed to round up European Jews and Gypsies as well as many communists, Slavs, Soviet officials, homosexuals, socialists, political opponents and Jehovah’s Witnesses for extermination. The invasion of the USSR in June 1941, and the increased power that devolved on to the ideologically fanatical wing of the National Socialist party, was complemented by Alfred Rosenberg's grandiose dream of colonizing the east with ethnic Germans. As a bonus, eliminating the Jews, Gypsies and Slavs would provide more and better living space (Lebensraum) for Germans to settle in the east. Jews, Gypsies, and others considered to be “life unworthy of life” were transported to the death camps where they were sorted and classified— usually by a camp physician. The young and the old were murdered immediately while healthy adults were worked nearly to death and fed less

30

These exceptions included those of absolutely “pure” ancient gypsy blood, some categories of Gypsies who assimilated completely into traditional society and no longer lived a gypsy lifestyle and Gypsies who served or had served Germany in the armed forces along with their immediate families.

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than enough to survive.31 Eventually even strong men and women grew weak and then were gassed. Only those with special talents—such as accountants, musicians, tailors, cobblers and physicians—had even a small chance to survive. Many Holocaust scholars maintain that by murdering Jewish women and children, the Third Reich was taking proactive measures to preclude a Jewish future in Europe in the event of military reversals. Some of them also argue that preferential extermination of women and children was a crime unique in its cruelty and purpose. There are few episodes in history as barbaric as the Holocaust, but, unfortunately, killing women and children to attempt to wipe out an entire population group is not unique.32 Wherever possible, the Germans used prisoners called Sonderkommando (special commandos) who soon were scheduled to die to work in the crematoria and to collect the victims' hair, eyeglasses, shoes, and other possessions. The lifespan of Sonderkommando teams was short in order to keep the extermination process as secret as possible. The Germans employed the latest in European and American technology and techniques in order to increase the efficiency of murder. Adolf Hitler did not invent genocide, but he did industrialize the process of mass murder. The goal for Eichmann, Müller and their subordinates was to do their jobs in the most economical way possible. Treblinka and some of the other death camps used carbon monoxide gas, but it was far less efficient than the Zyklon-B (prussic acid) used at Auschwitz-Birkenau because it could kill large numbers of people in three to 15 minutes, thereby substantially increasing the daily death totals. A secret meeting between Himmler and the SS generals took place on October 4, 1943, in Poznan, in order to increase killing efficiency by updating extermination procedures. Here Himmler observed, concerning the murder of European Jews, "we have never spoken, and never will speak again. [It] is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned... . . . But we have fulfilled this most difficult task out of love 31 Some prisoners literally were worked to death. The extermination of “useless mouths” (i.e. those people who were unable to work or whose labor was not profitable for the state) was the major reason for dispatching children and the elderly to the gas chambers as soon as they arrived at the death camps 32 For example, in November 1864, on the order of territorial governor John Evans, American troops of the Colorado Volunteer Militia under command of Colonel John Chivington massacred a colony of Native Americans at Sand Creek because the governor wanted land the tribe refused to sell. At a subsequent military hearing, soldiers under his command testified that when asked why he had ordered the murder of children, Chivington replied, “Nits make lice.” (Nits are lice eggs.)

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for our people."33 In line with directives issued after this meeting, in 194344 most death camps switched to Zyklon-B gas for greater efficiency. Eichmann and lower-level officials tried to cover the cost of transporting and gassing their victims by getting a significant amount of free labor from the condemned prisoners before exterminating them. They obtained additional revenue by extracting whatever profit could be obtained from the prisoners' possessions, bodies, teeth and hair. German submarine crews who contributed greatly to the Axis war effort by sinking allied shipping, were issued felt slippers made from human hair shorn from the victims of the extermination camps and were rewarded with gifts of watches that had been confiscated from them. In the summer of 1942, when it looked as if field marshal Erwin Rommel might conquer the Middle East, a special murder commando unit was attached to his headquarters to kill the Jews in Palestine and elsewhere in the vicinity. Eventually, as Rommel faced defeat, this unit was turned over to the Italians.34 During the war, the German army sometimes tried to stop the liquidation of some Jews primarily because they could be used as slave laborers and/or to produce materials necessary for the military. Those prisoners who remained alive within the conquered areas of Europe owed 33

The entire text of Himmler’s speech is available in English translation at http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml. A phonograph recording of Himmler’s speech is now housed at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. It also is available in English translation in International Military Tribunal. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, PS-1919, IV: 559, 563. 34 Ironically, this German military defeat enabled the United Nations to create the state of Israel in 1948, the homeland for Jews in Palestine, Eretz Yisra’el, that had been the political dream of European Zionists since 1896 when that goal was articulated by Theodor Herzl in The Jewish State. Although the British had promised to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, they also promised Palestine to the Arabs as an incentive for them to rebel against the Ottoman Empire. As Gerhard L. Weinberg explains, the defeat of the Axis forces in North Africa in 1942 was a necessary prerequisite for the creation of the state of Israel because it precluded Hitler’s army from occupying the British Mandate of Palestine. Before the German defeat at ElAlamein, Hitler had promised the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (Haj Amin elHusseini) that he would slaughter the entire Jewish population of Palestine. Because the British had no plans to evacuate the Jews from their Mandate, there would have been no core Jewish population in Palestine on which to build the foundations of the state of Israel. Gerhard L. Weinberg, “The Final Solution and the War in 1943”, Germany, Hitler and World War II, New York: Cambridge University Press, 220.

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their survival almost entirely to their continued usefulness to the German war machine. Slave labor camps varied greatly in severity. Some were simply forced labor satellite annexes of concentration and death camps where labor was performed under stringent conditions, while others were among of the most brutal environments of the Holocaust. Some forced labor facilities either worked their victims literally to death or worked them until they were so weakened that their labor no longer was productive. At that point they usually were sent to one of the death camps to be murdered. Hundreds of these forced labor facilities existed in Germany and occupied Europe. One example of this is Dora-Mittelbau, originally a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp that consisted of a series of secure underground tunnels in which V2 rockets and other missiles that the Germans called weapons of retaliation (Vergeltungswaffen) were made and stored. Once full V2 production was instituted in 1944 the camp had a permanent population of approximately 1,200 forced laborers. Almost all slave laborers unfortunate enough to be confined at Dora-Mittelbau were worked to death in the tunnels. With a few other exceptions, the only prisoners who saw sunlight again were those who were taken to the death camps to be murdered, and those who were rescued at the end of the war. Towards the end of the war there was active competition between the military, who needed slave laborers, and the SS, who wanted to accelerate the final solution. At first, decisions about whether prisoners should be given to the military or exterminated were split almost equally between these two alternatives. However, by late 1943, when it must have been clear even to Hitler that it was possible that Germany might lose the war, he became convinced that his great legacy to the world was to be the elimination of the Jews. Therefore, as the war wound down, more and more Jews and other categories of condemned people were included in the transports to the death camps despite their usefulness to the remnants of the German military machine. However, even long before this decision was made, the German military often was seriously handicapped by the fact that had Hitler not allocated so many trains for the purpose of transporting Jews and others to be murdered, those railroad cars would have been carrying guns, troops, ammunition, warm clothing, medicine, vehicles and other commodities necessary to conduct successful military operations. While additional military transports probably would not have changed the course of the war on the eastern front, they might have mitigated or delayed the reversals suffered by German armies in the USSR. This example illustrates just one

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of the many ways that Hitler was severely crippled as a military commander because he was in thrall to his own racist ideology. It is probable that if Hitler had won the war and managed to murder all of the Jews, handicapped people, and Gypsies of Europe, the killing would not have ended. As early as November 1941, Hitler told Haj Amin ElHusseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, that he planned to annihilate all Jews throughout the world. Not only were there Jews and other groups of individuals whom he considered to be “life unworthy of life” on other continents to kill, but it is probable that Slavs and people of mixed ancestry (Mischlinge) would have been the next categories of people to be murdered, both in Europe and elsewhere.35 One myth about the Holocaust that shows little sign of disappearing is the idea that the Jews of Europe went “without protest like lambs to the slaughter.” While the overwhelming presence of the Nazi death machine made Jewish resistance very difficult, it did occur: Jews were active in resistance and partisan groups throughout occupied Europe. Both successful and unsuccessful resistance activity usually resulted in massive reprisals by the Germans in the form of murdering disproportionately large numbers of innocent civilians, but there are many examples of resistance operations that were undertaken with the knowledge that retribution for these acts would be swift and terrible. The most important of these actions was an uprising in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw that began in January 1943 and was not completely subdued until July of that year.36 It is no coincidence that other major rebellions of European Jews took place after this time, since they had an actual example to show them that resistance was possible. For example, when individuals in the Auschwitz Gypsy family camp were warned that it was to be liquidated the next day, the inmates armed themselves with knives, tools, stones and a variety of bludgeons to defend themselves. When, on May 16, 1944, approximately 60 members of the SS armed with automatic rifles invaded the camp, they were met with what obviously would be determined resistance from the inmates who probably had been organized by prisoners who were former Wehrmacht officers. Surprised by the unexpected resistance, the SS retreated without a shot being fired or a stone thrown. Although this reprieve was temporary, it is an important example that limited resistance 35

Because Hitler considered the Dodecanese Islands part of Asia, he probably thought he had begun his worldwide campaign to exterminate Jews when those Jews who lived there were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be murdered in 1944. 36 These dates represent the day that the Germans first entered the ghetto after the summer deportations of 1942 until the ghetto lay in rubble. The dates usually given for the active phase of the uprising are April 23-May 16, 1943.

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was possible, even in a death camp. Effective resistance was possible in German civilian society. For example, German women staged a successful protest against the decision made by their state to round up their Jewish husbands and deport them to the death camps. For several days beginning on February 28, 1943, these women marched to the prison in the Rosenstrasse in Berlin where their husbands were being held and staged a public demonstration that resulted in their release.37 There also were a few instances of spontaneous resistance by groups of prisoners in the camps because they were ordered to act against their personal moral codes. German retribution usually was swift and final. For example, in 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau a contingent of 400 Jewish Greek prisoners from Salonika refused to be assigned to the Sonderkommando because they would have been required to murder a group of Hungarian Jews. This refusal resulted in summary punishment: they were taken almost immediately to the gas chambers to be murdered. Olga Lengyel’s memoir of Auschwitz, Five Chimneys, documents the admiration the other prisoners felt for them. Some inmates in slave labor camps also engaged in a quiet kind of personal resistance, although some resistance groups—such as the network at Dora-Mittelbau—were more active and significant. Sometimes, when it was possible to do so, individual or group sabotage was practiced either by slowing down production or by producing sub-standard or defective products. While the impact on the German war effort was miniscule, it afforded the captive victims a modicum of pride and a small sense of selfassertion. Although the work of partisan units and resistance groups was, in the final analysis, militarily insignificant in the conduct of the war, it was extremely important for the morale and self-esteem of both those who resisted and those who did not.38 Although there were uprisings in many of the ghettos and killing centers of Europe after the Warsaw ghetto rebellion, perhaps the two most spectacular examples of these are the temporary escape of approximately 150 prisoners from Sobibor in 1943, 37

There also were a few men who stood outside with these women and some women who were being held inside the prison. For example, both Gad Beck and his twin sister Miriam were incarcerated in the Rosenstrasse prison. Beck’s memoir discusses seeing a number of men in the crowd outside protesting their imprisonment. If Hitler had won the war this reprieve would have been temporary. 38 Although many books and films emphasize the resistance and partisan movements in France, small pockets of resistance flourished throughout German occupied Europe, such as the Jewish partisan unit led by the Bielski brothers in Poland.

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and the explosion that destroyed one of the crematory ovens at AuschwitzBirkenau in 1944.39 Also in 1945, Adolf Eichmann supposedly boasted that if he were called upon to die for what he had done, he would "leap laughing into my grave” because of the great satisfaction he had derived from the 5 million Jews he had helped to exterminate.40 The final total of all Holocaust victims numbered well over 6 million lives. It was only with the liberation of the death and concentration camps by Allied troops during the final days of the war that the gruesome German genocide machine finally was dismantled. The finality of the military defeat of the Third Reich precluded Hitler from achieving his objective of murdering all of the Jews and all other peoples whom he considered to be racially worthless. Another aspect of Holocaust history that needs to be stated explicitly is that the governments of the world, including the United States and Great Britain, clearly knew about what was happening in the killing centers of Europe. Although many political leaders expressed sympathy for European Jews, almost nothing was done to help them. The same is true of Pope Pius XII. As Gerhard L. Weinberg explained, the Pope, “having declined to denounce publicly the mass killing of Catholic priests in Poland in the winter of 1939-40. . .was not about to voice any explicit public disapproval of the mass killing of non-Catholics.” While more active support from governments and religious leaders would not have deterred the Nazis, it might have given courage to good people all over Europe to join a resistance group or to take active steps to hide or otherwise aid victims of genocide. Perhaps the most difficult fact to accept about the Holocaust is that it was carried out not by monsters but by those who historian Christopher Browning describes as “ordinary men.” The chilling realities and calculating nature of the Holocaust document what philosopher Hannah Arendt characterized as the “banality of evil.” 39

Some people have argued that violent resistance was morally questionable given the certainty of reprisals against innocent civilians. French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir, a member of a French resistance network, stated the moral dilemma clearly when she asked the metaphorical question: does one ever have the right to pay with “the blood of others?” Although she argued that in the case of German-occupied Europe such resistance was both moral and justified, some people, such as Holocaust survivor and forensic psychiatrist Dr. Emanuel Tanay, disagree. 40 Gideon Hausner, Chief Prosecutor at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, supposedly produced this quote from Eichmann in cross-examination but there is some scholarly controversy about its veracity. Whether the quote is exact or not, the fact of the murders is incontrovertible.

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Most Germans claimed they knew nothing about the final solution and some of them were telling the truth. However, nearly all German adults knew that Jews were being deported and most of them must at least have suspected that they were being murdered. Some Germans admitted hearing reports about genocide while listening illegally to the BBC or hearing about what was going on in the east from returning soldiers and civilian workers. Nonetheless, many of them claimed they discounted this information because they had heard equally scandalous rumors during World War I, many of which had turned out to be propaganda that was manufactured or embellished by the Allied powers. Moreover, in order to help maintain the fiction that nothing more insidious than deportation was happening to the Jews, the German government was careful to locate most of the extermination camps outside the Reich itself. This enabled many Germans to rationalize what they could not ignore and to ignore much of what they saw and heard. Some of what they saw and heard came directly from the mouths of eyewitnesses because the German army, unlike other WW II armies, permitted home leave from the front for German soldiers. Since some of those soldiers had cameras, many Germans on the home front heard stories of the killings and even saw photographs of atrocities during the war. Nonetheless, wishful thinking, rationalization and convenient historical memory have made it possible for countless Germans to maintain that they were "apolitical" during the Third Reich. Although great efforts were made to hide the genocide from the general public, there is little doubt that many leaders of German business and industry not only knew about the genocide, but were actively involved with subsidiary aspects of it. German railroads transported Jews from collection sites to the death camps.41 German industry co-operated with the SS in running the camps in order to utilize slave labor, to collect the clothing, possessions and hair of the victims, and to use their bones for fertilizer. German bankers received the jewelry and gold fillings of victims and deposited them in vaults of the Reichsbank. German scientists and physicians carried out gruesome medical experiments upon the helpless victims of genocide and, toward the end of the war, Himmler and Eichmann actually offered to barter Jewish lives for war material. There were some brave individuals in Europe, Asia and North Africa who, working alone, risked their lives to try to shelter or otherwise aid and 41

Stella Goldschlag’s biographer, Peter Wyden, observed that in the post-WW II world not a single German railroad executive was tried for genocide-related crimes, a fact that he ascribes to shameful motives of expediency on the part of the Allied powers.

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protect Jews, with some success. However, the most significant rescue work was undertaken by organizations such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid society (HIAS or HICEM). It conducted many dangerous operations in German occupied Europe that saved thousands of Jews at great risk to the HIAS agents who carried them out. Twenty-two HIAS employees in France alone were arrested, deported and/or killed by the Germans. In addition, some courageous, well-funded and compassionate people with organizational and administrative ability were able to put together small groups capable of rescuing a significant number of people. For example, as discussed above, British stockbroker Nicholas Winton established an organization that rescued 667 Czech children; American Varian Fry, with the assistance of a handful of individuals, rescued more than 2,000 Jews and anti-Nazis from Vichy France, including a number of famous people such as Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Heinrich Mann and others. These and other small groups of people did significant work, but the largest number of Jews were saved by larger organizations, especially those with government connections. For example, individual Danish citizens, boat owners, fishermen, and members of the Danish resistance, with the aid of Danish officials and police, managed to transport more than 7,000 Danish Jews by boat to safety in neutral Sweden. Perhaps the most spectacular of these rescue operations, to be discussed below, was jointly undertaken by an American rescue organization working with an official of the Swedish government. Also significant in saving European Jews was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT or JDC). Founded at the urging of Henry Morgenthau Sr. in 1914 to save Palestinian Jews from starvation, JOINT helped thousands of German and Austrian Jews emigrate from the Third Reich in the 1930s. During the Holocaust, JOINT, like HIAS, enabled many European Jews to escape with their lives and it also aided others attempting to survive underground. In addition, more than a year after he received incontrovertible evidence that the Jews of Europe were being systematically murdered, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board (WRB) on January 22, 1944. The WRB’s work with refugees has been discussed above. In terms of rescue, historians estimate that the WRB was instrumental in saving as many as 200,000 Jewish lives, despite the late date of its creation. The WRB sent approximately $20,000,000 to fund a variety of relief and rescue projects working with several established organizations including JOINT and the World Jewish Congress (WJC). It also provided intelligence information to rescue groups, used its influence to encourage foreign governments to offer protection to any person

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holding or claiming to hold their citizenship documents, and encouraged neutral nations to open their borders to any refugee who could escape to them. However, the most spectacular operation undertaken by the WRB was its part in saving the lives of as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews. Because the United States was at war with Hungary, it could not send a WRB representative to Budapest. Its representative in neutral Sweden, Iver Olsen, convinced the Swedish Foreign Office to assign Raoul Wallenberg to the Swedish legation in Budapest in July 1944. Wallenberg was an excellent choice. He was the a citizen of a neutral nation, the scion of one or the wealthiest families in Sweden and he had studied in the United States for several years, earning a degree in architecture with honors from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1935. Wallenberg quickly set up an organization working with diverse rescue groups. With the assistance of other diplomats in Budapest--most notably Carl Lutz of the Swiss Legation--and dedicated individuals such as Elisabeth Kemény, the Jewish wife of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Foreign Minister, Gábor Kemény,42 Wallenberg worked to save as many of the over 200,000 remaining Hungarian Jews as possible. He showed great personal courage, including intervening personally to stop Jewish deportations, but his diplomatic status was a major factor in his success. With the backing of the Swedish government and the cooperation of the WRB and the WJC, Wallenberg provided Swedish certificates of protection to Hungarian Jews and established dozens of “safe houses,” medical services, soup kitchens and other facilities to keep as many Jews alive as possible. These expensive facilities and his other ventures were well funded by Swedish and American money, the latter distributed by the WRB.43 Even after the capitulation of Germany on May 7, 1945, some Jews, especially those of Polish nationality, continued to suffer. Many Polish Jews who tried to return home were mistreated, discriminated against and 42

The Arrow Cross Party (Nyilaskeresztes Párt) was the Hungarian equivalent to the National Socialist party in Germany. It was led by by Ferenc Szálasi, who created a so-called Government of National Unity under German tutelage from October 1944 until the end of the war. Both Szálasi and Gabor Kemény were executed for war crimes. 43 JOINT, HIAS and the WJC still exist as Jewish aid and advocacy organizations. Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviets at the end of the war and most scholars believe he died in a Soviet prison. Among others, he has been honored by Yad Vashem in Israel, the USHMM and twice by the American Congress. He was, posthumously, made an America citizen in 1981 and in July 2014 Raoul Wallenberg was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

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some even were murdered by their gentile Polish neighbors. As a consequence, a number of these unfortunate men and women fled to the American zone of occupation for aid. Most of them joined the ranks of displaced persons—usually in DP camps—because unlike non-Jewish displaced persons, they were unable to return to their homeland. Unfortunately, the ordeal to which Hitler originally subjected these people did not end with his defeat and suicide or with the end of hostilities. The capitulation of Germany also had a serious impact on many of Hitler’s military and civilian leaders. Initially, there was no general agreement among the allies as to what course of action should be taken concerning war criminals after the defeat of the Axis forces. Following President Roosevelt’s lead, new American President Harry S Truman insisted on convening an international military tribunal to deal with the murderers and establish international policies to prevent similar war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in the future. At first, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, representing Great Britain, was opposed to the trials, preferring to carry out summary executions of much of the German military and civilian leadership while Josef Stalin originally favored “show trials” in the manner of the purge trials he conducted in the in the USSR in the 1930s. However, after the French and then the Soviets supported President Truman, Great Britain agreed to establish an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. After protracted discussion among the four allied powers, 22 German leaders were put on trial at Nuremberg before judges representing the American, British, Soviet, and French governments. Each man was charged under one or more of the four counts enumerated in the indictment: crimes against the peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit crimes covered by one of the other three categories of the indictment. Less important Nazi functionaries were divided among the four allied governments and tried by courts presided over by one of the four allied powers. Although some people have argued that the allies implicitly were charging the German nation with collective guilt, that was the exact opposite of their intent. Not only were each of the twenty-two named defendants tried individually, membership in one of the six organizations charged as criminal in the indictment did not suffice to condemn a defendant. All persons accused of crimes under one or more of the counts of the indictment were given individual trials under strictly regulated conditions. Of the 22 men charged at the main Nuremberg trial, two

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committed suicide, ten were hanged, three were acquitted and seven were sentenced to prison terms.44 Furthermore, the Tribunal established important precedents in international jurisprudence that stated clearly and firmly that there are moral and legal boundaries that may not be crossed even when waging a modern war with terrible weapons of mass destruction. These precedents have subsequently been used to try individuals accused of genocide and crimes against humanity such as Slobodan Miloševiü and Charles Taylor. The massive amount of documents, interview transcripts, filmed and tape-recorded evidence, oral testimony, and exhibits gathered for and presented at the trials clearly demonstrate the enormity of the crimes committed by German leaders. Most of the materials assembled by both the prosecution and the defense are easily accessible to historians and students of history. Only the most irrational of ideologues can deny the existence of the Holocaust given the massive number of documents and other materials collected for the trials and subsequently made public. Nonetheless, despite the overwhelming evidence to document its existence, there are some benighted individuals who eschew reason and persist in denying the fact that the Holocaust happened. One can only surmise how much more credence Holocaust deniers might be given had Churchill’s program of summary executions been followed. If the literally tons of official documents, depositions and oral testimonies had not been collected to enable the Allies to convene the Nuremberg tribunals, they would not have been available to refute the screed propagated by the Holocaust deniers who often mask their true intent under benign sounding names such as “historical revisionists.” Although most Holocaust deniers are both resistant to rational arguments and human empathy, historian Gerhard L. Weinberg suggests that the documents collected at Nuremberg might help change the minds of those individuals who have not closed them irrevocably. He explains, “There remain individuals and even government leaders who assure the public that the events of the Holocaust never took place. Perhaps they could be provided with a copy of [Otto] Ohlendorf’s testimony at the main trial at Nuremberg or his explanation at his own trial of why all Jewish children had to be killed.”45 44

There were six organizations indicted: The SS, The Gestapo, the Corps of Political Leaders, the SA, the Reich Cabinet and the General Staff/High Command. The first three organizations were found guilty, the last three were found not guilty. 45 Gerhard L. Weinberg, “The Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials”, Holocaust Persecution: Responses and Consequences “, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars

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Despite the horrific crimes perpetrated by the German state, it is important to remember that some individual Germans risked their own lives to save Jews and others enemies of Hitler’s regime. There also were Germans who were active in resistance movements that unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the National Socialist government. Countless other Germans despised Hitler but were unable to find the inner strength to oppose their government when the rumors of genocide surfaced. While such people were not resisters, they also were not enablers. Nonetheless, it was these ”apolitical” Germans who were not criminals but who did not question their leaders or attempt to find out what was happening that allowed the genocide to continue. While such people were not legally guilty, some historians have suggested that they were morally guilty of complicity by their silence. As historian Ian Kershaw explains, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference.”46 It is difficult for those of us who never have been forced to live in a totalitarian state to know how we would react in a parallel situation or to judge others who have had to face it. Nonetheless, Edmund Burke’s dictum that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” never has been as chillingly illustrated as it is by the history of National Socialist Germany. In the post-war world, some so-called apolitical Germans later were to lament that although he did some good things, on the whole Hitler was a misfortune for Germany. Exiled German playwright Bertolt Brecht had correctly interpreted the hypocrisy behind such attitudes when he wrote, "let's not talk about misfortune, let's talk about shame!"47

Press, 2010, 141. Ohlendorf testified as a witness at the main Nuremberg tribunal but he was tried by the United States under Control Council Law No. 10. Case 9, the one with the official name of “The United States of America versus Otto Ohlendorf et al.” This case, which dealt primarily with the murder of Jews, often is referred to as the Einsatzgruppen Case. Also see Earl, Hilary, The Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History. 46 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 5. 47 These lines are included in a scene titled ”The Jewish Wife“ from Brecht’s play Furcht und Elend des III. Reiches that was completed in 1938. This title of the play translates as Fear and Misery in the Third Reich and it was published under that title in England. It was published as The Private Life of the Master Race in the United States.

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Appendix I According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the following documents were required to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. •Five copies of the visa application •Two copies of the applicant's birth certificate •Quota number (establishing the applicant's place on the waiting list) Two sponsors: •Close relatives of the prospective immigrant were preferred •The sponsors were required to be US citizens or to have permanent resident status, and they were required to have completed and notarized six copies of an Affidavit of Support and Sponsorship Supporting documents: •Certified copy of most recent federal tax return •Affidavit from a bank regarding applicant's accounts •Affidavit from any other responsible person regarding other assets (affidavit from sponsor's employer or statement of commercial rating) Certificate of Good Conduct from German Police authorities, including two copies of each: •Police dossier •Prison record •Military record •Other government records about individual •Affidavits of Good Conduct (after September 1940) from several responsible disinterested persons •Physical examination at US consulate •Proof of permission to leave Germany (imposed September 30, 1939) •Proof that prospective immigrant had booked passage to the Western hemisphere (imposed September 1939) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Documents Required to Obtain a Visa.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007456, accessed on July 18, 2014.

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Appendix II This Appendix is a partial list of the discriminatory measures enforced against the Jews by the National Socialist state before the implementation of the policy of genocide. Although only a few dates are included below as bench marks, the list is compiled in approximate chronological order. Most of this information is taken from Marion Kaplan’s Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. ƒ Jews are forbidden to purchase German land. (1933) ƒ Quotas established for Jews applying for university admission. ƒ Books by Jews and German political opponents are publicly burned. ƒ Jewish stores are boycotted. Signs appear on Aryan businesses forbidding Jews to enter (Juden nicht erwuenscht!) and are marked Judenfrei to assure gentile customers that no Jews would be admitted. ƒ Jews are forbidden to swim in public pools. ƒ Nuremberg Laws formally deprived Jews of rights as citizens and established racial segregation. Aryan Germans are legally defined as citizens, Jews as subjects. (1935) ƒ Racial pollution or defilement (Rassenschande) was defined as a felony. ƒ Jews could no longer hire "Aryan" household help. ƒ “Nur fuer Arier! (Only for Aryans) signs appear on various types of public conveniences such as public benches and restrooms forbidding Jews to use them, ƒ Jewish men lose jobs and Germans destroy the patriarchal Jewish family ƒ Divorce law changed to encourage German women married to Jewish men to annul the marriage and re-claim their citizenship rights. ƒ Kristallnacht--violence and increased persecution. (1938) ƒ Jews were forbidden to own domestic animals such as dogs. ƒ German state expropriated all valuable metals and stones from Jews. ƒ All Jewish emigration was banned. (1941) ƒ All Jews were required to add Israel or Sarah to their names. ƒ Jews are forbidden to use public telephones. ƒ Jewish food rations are cut, completely eliminating legumes, fruit and most meat.

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ƒ Shopping hours were restricted for Jews. ƒ Jewish rations cut again. ƒ Jews restricted to poor housing and were forbidden to buy clothing, cloth, etc. ƒ All Jews over age 6 were required to wear a yellow star marked “Jude” (Jew) on their clothing. (1941) ƒ Jews were forbidden to ride trains, busses and all public transportation. ƒ All able-bodied Jews were required to report for forced labor. ƒ The homes of Jews were required to display a yellow star on the front outside wall. ƒ Genocide.

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Appendix III Suggestions for Further Reading I have included a short list of non-fiction works below. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are those I relied on in writing this brief synopsis. For those unable to read extensively on this topic, I would recommend the book by Marion Kaplan on Jewish life in the Third Reich and, for a short general work, the books by Michael Marrus or Doris Bergen listed below.

General Works Allen, Michael Thad. The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps. Allen, William A. The Nazi Seizure of Power. Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust Bankler, David, ed. Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust Bergen, Doris. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know. Breitman, Richard, and Kraut, Alan American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945. *Breitman, Richard and Lichtman, Alan J. F.D.R. and the Jews. *Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Burleigh, Michael and Wippermann, Wolfgang, The Racial State, Germany 1933-1945 Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 19001945. Campt, Tina M. Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich. Davidowicz, Lucy S. The Holocaust and the Historians Delbo, Charlotte. Convoy to Auschwitz Dwork, Deborah and van Pelt, Jobert Jan. Holocaust: A History. Earl, Hilary, The Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. Fleming, Gerald Hitler and the Final Solution. Friedlander, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vols. I and II: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and The Years of extermination Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution *Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust, The Jewish Tragedy.

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Giles, Geoffrey J. “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler's SS and Police.” Journal of the History of Sexuality;Jan-Apr 2002, Vol. 11 Issue 1/2, 256. Hallie, Philip. Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. Herf, Jeffrey. The Jewish Enemy. Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. *Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945. *Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf. Jensen, Erik N. “The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians and the Memory of Nazi Persecution.” Journal of the History of Sexuality; Jan-Apr 2002, Vol. 11 Issue 1/2, 319. *Kaplan, Marion. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. *Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, Kershaw, Ian “Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933-1945” German Studies Review, 7, no. 2 (May,1984), 370-371. Laqueur, Walter. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution” Lewy, Guenter, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Lybeck, Marti, "Gender, Sexuality and Belonging: Female Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933" in the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, #44, Spring 2009, 29-43. Mallmann, Klaus-Michel and Cüpper, Martin, Nazi Palestine. The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine. *Marrus, Michael. The Holocaust in History McKale, Donald. Hitler’s Shadow War. Plant, Richard, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. Schmidt, Ulf. Karl Brandt The Nazi Doctor: Medicine and Power in the Third Reich. Tec, Nechama. Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. Tec, Nechama. When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi Occupied Poland.

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For the Connection Between World War II and Genocide Bartov, Omar. Hitler’s War and the Holocaust Rotfels, Hans, ed. “Ausgewaehlte Briefe von General Major Helmuth Steiff,” Vierteljahreshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte 2 (1954) 291-305. Scheck, Raffael. Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. *Weinberg ,Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II Or for a more compact analysis see: *Weinberg, Gerhard L. “The Final Solution and the War in 1943” in his shorter work, Germany Hitler and World War II.

For A Discussion of Gender during the Third Reich and Holocaust Baer, Elizabeth and Goldenberg, Myrna eds.,Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis and the Holocaust. Baumel, Judith. Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust *Benedict, Susan, “Killing while caring: the nurses of Hadamar” Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 24,1(January-February 2003):59. Delbo, Charlotte. Convoy to Auschwitz. Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna, eds. and trans. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies. *Goldenberg, Myrna. “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, Roger Gottlieb, ed. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland Lower, Wendy, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Grossman, Atina, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Soviet Occupation Soldiers” in Nicole Dombrowski ed., Women and War in the Twentieth Century Ofer, Dalia and Weitzman, Lenore eds., Women in the Holocaust Raphael, Melissa. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust Littell, Marcia Sachs, ed. Women in the Holocaust: Responses, Insights and Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches 1990-2000.

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*Rittner, Carol and Roth, John K. eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust Saidel, Rochelle. The Jewish Women of Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp Stephenson, Jill. Women in Nazi Germany Stibbe, Matthew. Women in the Third Reich. Tec, Nechama. Resilience: Women, Men and the Holocaust Von Saldern , Adelheid, “Innovative Trends in Women's and Gender Studies of the National Socialist Era,” German History; Jan 2009, Vol. 27 Issue 1, 84-112 *Von Saldern, Adelheid. “Victims or Perpetrators: Controversies about the Role of Women in the Nazi State” in David F. Crew, Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945.

Autobiographical Works Adler, Stanislav. In the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1943. *Anthonioz, Geniviev De Gaulle. The Dawn of Hope : A Memoir of Ravensbruck Bauman, Janina. Winter in the Morning, A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond 1939-1945. *Beck, Gad. An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin. *Berg, Mary. Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, ed. S. L. Shneiderman. 1945. Reissued in 2007 with a forward by Susan L. Pentlin. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After Donat, Alexander. The Holocaust Kingdom, A Memoir. Eichengreen, Lucille. From Ashes To Life: My Memories of the Holocaust. (Lodz ghetto). Frank, Anne. Diary of a Young Girl. Heilman, Anna. Never Far Away: The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman Jacobs, Benjamin. The Dentist of Auschwitz: A Memoir Kaplan, Chaim. Scroll of Agony, The Warsaw Diary of Chaim Kaplan revised and translated by Abraham I. Katsch, 1973. Klein, Gerda Weissmann. All but my Life. Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered Koehn, Ilse. Mischling Second Degree: My Childhood in Nazi Germany Leitner, Isabella. Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz *Lengyel, Olga. Five Chimneys, A Woman’s True Story of Auschwitz. *Massaquoi, Hans. Destined To Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany Milu, Lians. Smoke Over Birkenau

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Nir, Yahuda, The Lost Childhood. Perechodnik, Callel. Am I a Murderer? The Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman. Ringelblum, Emanuel. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, The Journal of Emanuel Ringelblum, trans. and ed. Jacob Sloan *Tanay, Emanuel. Passport to Life Tec, Nechama. Dry Tears, The Story of a Lost Childhood. Toll, Nelly, Behind the Secret Window. *Tillion, Germaine. Ravensbrück. Wiesel. Elie, Night and Dawn. *Wyden, Peter. Stella. (This is a biography of the notorious Greifer (catcher, snatcher) Stella Goldschlag written by her childhood friend and fellow pupil at a Berlin Jewish school in the 1930s. It also is a partial autobiography of Wyden, then Weidenreich.) Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. Salvaged Pages: Young Writer's Diaries of the Holocaust Zuckerman, Yitzhak. A Surplus of Memory. Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Works of Philosophy and Literature Used in this History *Arendt, Hannah. On Totalitarianism *Beauvoir, Simone de. The Blood Of Others *Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity *Brecht, Bertolt. “The Jewish Wife” in The Private Life of the Master Race. Brecht, Bertolt. “Envoi” in George Tabori, Brecht on Brecht. *Kolmar, Gertrud, “Die Dichterin” (“The Woman Poet”) Dark Soliloquy: Selected Poems of Gertrud Kolmar. Also see “Wir Juden” (“We Jews”) from this dual language volume.

Holocaust Studies Websites United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org Middle Tennessee State University Holocaust Studies Program: http://www.mtsu.edu/holocaust_studies/

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Note about other Holocaust Websites Because there are many websites run by Holocaust deniers, etc. that have very plausible sounding academic titles (such as the pseudo-academic organization known as the “Institute for Historical Review,” founded in 1978 by Willis Carto), I recommend that readers use only websites found on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. The USHMM posts references to many excellent Holocaust websites and also provides links to other organizations, such as state Holocaust Commissions and academic institutions that include reputable Holocaust links on their websites. I also recommend the Middle Tennessee State University website because it has been vetted by three nationally known Holocaust Studies scholars including Dr. Susan Lee Pentlin, an expert on Holocaust denial.

PART III: HISTORY

CHAPTER THREE A WORLDWIDE HOLOCAUST PROJECT GERHARD L. WEINBERG

This article will engage the misleading aspect of almost all discussion of what the Germans called the “Final Solution” of the so-called Jewish Problem by describing that project as limited to the European continent. Almost invariably the German effort to kill Jews is described in the literature as the attempt to kill the Jews of Europe. A recent synthesis of Holocaust research, The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010), serves as an example. Nowhere in its 776 pages is there the slightest awareness of the actual nature and scope of the final solution. While killing all Jews in Europe was certainly a part of German plans, hopes, and actions, describing the intention that led to these events as limited to this objective both ignores the reality of the time and obscures one of the critical ways in which the Holocaust differs from other genocides. Obviously the systematic killing of Jews had to begin somewhere; that is, in specific localities. The evidence seems reasonably clear that the spring of 1941 was the time when a general concept of killing Jews was decided on as part of the planning of the war for Lebensraum (living space) in the East by the destruction of the Soviet Union that was initiated on June 22, 1941. Jewish Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans were to be killed. Jewish civilians living in the land that was to be overrun by the German army and who had not fled in time were to be killed as well. It was assumed that the forty to fifty thousand men included in the Einsatzgruppen (Special Employment Units), Order Police battalions, and the units of the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS (SS Military units directly commanded by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler) who had this massive killing project assigned to them could accomplish this mission with the cooperation of the German army and, it was hoped, some members of the local non-Jewish population. In the first stages of the invasion of the Soviet Union this would be technically a very difficult task because the initial rapid onrush of the

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German army would be through precisely the area of the densest Jewish settlement in Europe. That is just another aspect of the interrelation of the war and the Holocaust that most scholars have neglected in their focus on one or the other of these two integrally related subjects. This unprecedented procedure of systematic killing needed careful monitoring. It appeared to work successfully in the early weeks of the campaign with constant personal direction by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the German police, and SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), whom Himmler had put in tactical charge of implementing mass killing without any serious opposition from within the German military. Therefore, the decision to extend the killing program to the rest of German-controlled Europe was made in July1941. Adolf Hitler’s discussion of this program, now described as a Europewide effort, with Slavko Kvaternik, the visiting Croatian Minister of War, during the evening of July 21-22, 1941, has long been published in English and German but is rarely mentioned in works on the Holocaust.1 However, the important implications for the intended nature of the Holocaust that emerged in the November 28, 1941, discussion of the subject by Hitler with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, almost invariably are ignored.”2 Though the record of this meeting was published decades ago, the event is generally referred to only in discussions of the Mufti and his role as a significant collaborator of the Nazis but without any serious attention to Hitler’s own recorded detailed views on the intended scope of the Holocaust. In his description of what was already under way and would be done as German forces advanced into the Middle East and elsewhere, the German leader not surprisingly gave special attention to the Middle East just as in his talk with Kvaternik he had paid special attention to Hungary, the portion of the AustroHungarian empire in which Kvaternik had been born. Hitler did this on the assumption that this was the portion of the broader subject in which his guest was most interested: Kvaternik would not much care about Norway or Portugal, and the Mufti would not be greatly interested in the future of Bolivia and Tasmania. But after promising to have all Jews in the Middle East killed, Hitler also explained on this later occasion that all Jews living among what he called “non-European peoples” also had to be killed. From the common European perspective of the time, Europe was the center of the globe and the rest of the world was by definition non-European. What 1

The German text is in Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik, Serie D, Band XIII, 2, Anhang III (Göttingen, 1970). 2 Ibid., No. 515.

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Hitler thus described was, in other words, the need for a worldwide program of the systematic killing of all Jews everywhere on earth. It is known that Hitler carefully reviewed accounts of his meetings with foreign leaders, so it can be assumed that the record reflects what Hitler wanted recorded as his views at that time. This leads to some obvious questions. Why would he want a killing program that covered the globe? Was anything done to implement such a program? What does this tell us about the Holocaust as an event in history? Why a worldwide program? Two possible explanations deserve examination. The first draws on Hitler’s own endless insistence on the evil character of Jews and the existential threat they posed for Germany. His belief that only total extermination was the way to deal with the subject goes back chronologically at least as far back as his publicly expressed views on April 6, 1920. His greatly applauded phraseology for what to do with the Jews was at that time “to pull up the [Jewish] evil by its roots and totally exterminate it.”3 Please note that he did not mean deprive of civil rights, deport from the country, or confine his plans to Germany. This obsessive fixation with the Jewish question as Hitler saw it would remain with him in the years before he became chancellor in 1933, and during his tenure as Germany’s leader until the time came to dictate his last will at the end of April 1945, twenty five years after the quoted speech. As that document’s text shows, even then the issue was high on his agenda. A second explanation is necessarily a little more speculative. We know from his building program, as entrusted to his architect Albert Speer, that the large monumental buildings of the Third Reich were to be of stone, not reinforced concrete, so that in the millennia after the thousand year Reich had vanished, their ruins would dazzle and inspire onlookers of subsequent millennia the way the ruins of Roman buildings still impressed people in Europe and elsewhere. A man who looked that far into the future, and drew practical conclusions for current policy and actions from that vision, may well have applied the same perspective to the Jewish question. If Germany was successful in conquering the world as Hitler hoped and expected, all Jews would be killed as a matter of course. But if there were in the future any territorial limits to German control, how could the reentry of Jews into a future Germany be precluded? He knew in a general way, as did others in the regime, that in prior centuries Jews had been driven out of whole countries and some cities only to be readmitted to them decades or centuries later. In order to prevent such a calamity from ever happening to 3

See the report on Hitler’s speech of April 6, 1920, in Eberhard Jäckel (ed.), Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924 (Stuttgart, 1980), 119-20. “. . . das Uebel an der Wurzel zu packen und mit Stumpf und Stiel auszurotten.”

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Germany in the far distant future, it clearly was necessary to kill all Jews on earth. Were any steps taken to implement a project of worldwide killing? It is only in recent years that there has been some – but very little – serious scholarship on issues relating to the extension of the Holocaust outside Europe. As I tried to call to the attention of scholars at a conference in 2004, the significance of the exclusion of the Dodecanese Islands (unlike Albania) from the listing of places under Italian control from which Jews were to be killed in the annex to the protocol of the Wannsee Conference must be seen – as it almost never is – in this context.4 The Germans, not unreasonably, considered these then Italian owned islands in the Aegean Sea off the western coast of Turkey as being in Asia and hence not appropriate for inclusion in a listing of European countries and territories whose Jews were to be killed, just as the listing included only statistics for Jews in the European portion of Turkey. This last rather peculiar point in the document also has not been subjected to careful scholarly scrutiny. After the German setbacks on the Eastern Front in November-December 1941, it is hardly surprising that the immediate focus of a late January 1942 conference drawing additional German agencies into the systematic killing of Jews would be limited to Europe and not include all territories of the global project Hitler had just outlined. As has long been known, however, their being outside of Europe in the eyes of the Germans did not save the lives of the Jews of Rhodes and other Dodecanese Islands after the Germans had occupied them following the Italian surrender of September 1943. They were rounded up, transported to the mainland, and placed on trains headed for Auschwitz so that they too could be killed.5 In 2006 Klaus-Michael Mallmann published a careful study of the Einsatzkommando attached to Erwin Rommel’s headquarters in the summer of 1942 to organize the killing of the Jews of Egypt, the Palestine Mandate, and any other portion of the Middle East that German forces could reach before the area, as planned, was turned over by Germany to

4

See Gerhard L. Weinberg, “’Gray Zones’ in Raul Hilberg’s Work,” in Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (eds.), Gray Zones: Ambiguities and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New York, 2005), 70-80. The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of fifteen top level German officials that took place on January 20, 1942. Their purpose was to discuss and organize the implementation of the so called final solution (Endloesung ) for what they called the “Jewish question.” Wannsee is a suburb of Berlin. 5 There is an account in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third ed. (New Haven, 2003), Vol. II, 754-55.

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Italy.6 The promise Hitler had made to the Grand Mufti was to be implemented in practice by Germans since Hitler did not trust the Italians to do as thorough a job as he could expect his good friend Rommel to supervise. Whatever arguments might be made about the Dodecanese Islands, there cannot be any debate about the fact that Egypt is not in Europe. When Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference limited discussion and listing of Jews to be killed to what the Germans considered Europe, he was not contradicting Hitler’s promise and description of a world wide killing program a few weeks earlier; he was adjusting the scope of the immediately to be implemented killing procedure to what the military situation at the time appeared to allow. That should in no way be taken as the Holocaust’s intended outer limit. As the assignment of a killing squad to Rommel in the summer of 1942 clearly shows, Himmler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the successor of the assassinated Heydrich, understood quite clearly what was intended by their leader. The moment that the military situation after the German victory at Gazala and the surrender of Tobruk in Libya appeared to allow the extension of the killing program to parts of North Africa and Western Asia, they took what they considered appropriate steps to implement it. Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have provided considerable additional material on the broader subject of German projects in the Middle East and North Africa.7 The English language edition of the Himmler biography by Peter Longerich quotes Himmler’s description to Hitler on December 10, 1942, of the Jewish presence in southern France and French North Africa and Hitler’s instructing Himmler to kill them.8 An Einsatzkommando was accordingly sent to Tunisia, another portion of the globe that no one would imagine to be in Europe.9

6 Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, “’Beseitigung der jüdischnationalen Heimstätte in Palästina’: Das Einstzkommando bei der Panzerarmee Afrika,” in Jürgen Matthäus and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.), Deutsche, Juden, Völkermord: Der Holocaust als Geschichte und Gegenwart (Darmstadt, 2006), 153-76. On the German intention to let Italy obtain its oil from control of the Middle East while Germany obtained oil from the Caucasus, see Gerhard L. Weinberg, Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders (New York, 2005), chaps. 1 and 2. 7 Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt, 2006). An English language edition has been published in 2010 by Enigma Books of New York with the title Nazi Palestine: The Plan for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine. 8 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life (New York, 2012), 648, and 926, n. 4. 9 Ibid., 663.

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The critical point is that the scholarly study of the planned and in a small way implemented extension of the Holocaust into non-European areas is in its infancy. Even the minimal quantity of such work should, however, put an end to the constant nonsense about a German killing project defined and discussed as a program limited to Europe. We know today that Rommel’s army was halted before he could supervise the slaughter of Jews in Egypt, Palestine, and other portions of the Middle East, but the assignment of the murder commando to his headquarters surely sheds light on what was planned. In this context of a realistic picture of what the Germans hoped to accomplish, the forces of the Allies saved two-thirds of the world’s Jews from the fate intended for them, but that fate cannot be understood unless it is faced clearly in the terms set by German expectations and efforts to implement them. Here too is an aspect of the interrelation between the war and the Holocaust that usually is overlooked. One further comment is necessary concerning why the false perception of the Holocaust as a purely European project is so misleading. All other genocides of which we know were designed by those who committed them to have a geographic limit that they themselves defined. A country, a region, some area defined as supposed to contain only those they considered the “right” people, was to be purged of any and all persons whom those in charge and those implementing the horror considered the “wrong” people. Persons similar to those killed who were living anywhere else in the world presumably would not like this if and when they learned about it; but they were not the objects of the genocidal campaign. When the Turks slaughtered Armenians during the First World War, they were not interested in killing Armenians who had moved to France or Argentina. Similarly, when the Ustasha, the terrorist group that took over the puppet state of Croatia under German and Italian auspices in part of World War II Yugoslavia, went about murdering Eastern Orthodox Serbs, they had no interest in those Serbs who had settled in Chicago. The horrendous events in the East African state of Rwanda belong into this list of horrors defined geographically. A critical difference between the Holocaust and all other genocides is that it was intended to be worldwide and not limited to a specific portion of the globe. All this is not to diminish the evil of other genocides or to establish some hierarchy of suffering. The critical point for any understanding of events is the necessary focus on their differences and similarities. The systematic murders perpetrated on the victims of genocides other than the Holocaust should in no way be considered as, in some measure, less evil or significant than they clearly were. The point that is generally

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overlooked is the difference between a geographically defined set of killings and one that was global in concept but halted only by the military defeat of those who were determined to implement that concept. It may be worth noting that the effort to arrange for the killing of Jews in Tunisia – an effort largely but not completely thwarted by the crushing of German and Italian forces there by British and American troops – coincided in time with the crisis created for the Germans by the Red Army’s first holding and then surrounding the German army in the battle of Stalingrad at the southern portion of the Eastern Front. No German transport plane could fly simultaneously from the Ukraine to Stalingrad and from Sicily to Tunisia. Earlier in the war, German military leaders had commented on the inability to find space on trains to ship warm clothing to their soldiers freezing in the Russian winter of 1941-42 when there were plenty of trains running on the same tracks in the same direction bringing Jews from Germany and other central European areas to be killed in the East. Later on, in the summer of 1944, German forces trying to throw back the American and British invasion of Normandy lacked reinforcements and munitions because there were not enough trains to carry them, but at the same time there were plenty of trains to take Hungarian Jews to the killing center at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The regime’s priorities surely are worth noting. The obvious converse of the Holocaust as a world-wide project is that its partial failure meant that refugees from it survived in portions of the world to which they had fled and which, unlike Holland and Czechoslovakia, did not end up occupied by the Germans before or during the war. Many escaped to the United States – myself included – and many survived in portions of Africa, South America, Palestine, and East Asia, especially in Shanghai. It is, however, essential for an understanding of what was intended that these places were never considered by German leaders to be true safe havens for the refugees or for the substantial numbers of Jews already living there. A revolution halted in its tracks cannot be understood unless one pays attention to the intended destination of those who conceived it. This global demographic revolution, for which the Germans initiated World War II, was expected eventually to produce a world controlled and inhabited only by Germans and those, such as the Norwegians and Dutch, supposedly racially closely aligned with them. Because of the belief of those in charge of Germany that the Jews were their most dangerous enemy,10 the Holocaust was a critical element in the vision of those who 10 This was primarily because the regime saw Jews as the biggest threat to their hopes of superior German culture dominating the globe,

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attempted to implement that demographic revolution; and it was, therefore, frequently accorded priority over all other demands on the state’s human and material resources. The Holocaust has to be seen through the eyes of those who expected to bring about that demographic revolution if its nature is to be comprehended rather than misunderstood. 11 This is not the proper place to review the many other German steps before and during the war that constituted preparations for the world that the Germans planned to create: multiple marriages for surviving German soldiers, medical experiments and research to find ways of increasing multiple births of the “right” people as well as procedures for the mass sterilization of the “wrong” people, surgical sterilization of Germans believed likely to give birth to defective babies, bonuses and medals for women having many of the “right” babies, encouragement of extra-marital intercourse by the “right” men, kidnapping of thousands of “Germanic looking” babies and small children in the occupied territories, killing of the handicapped and seriously injured inside and outside Germany— including the country’s own seriously injured war veterans—and a substantial number of other measures. At that point in time, it was this project that had the highest immediate priority for Germany’s leaders. Among those scheduled for death in the Holocaust were the two American doctors who succeeded in conquering the dreaded disease of polio and who both were Jewish. How many millions of people might then have been crippled by polio and subsequently killed in the so-called German euthanasia program because they were judged to be living lives “unworthy of life”? These are surely uncomfortable thoughts, but they may serve to enlighten us about events that otherwise could recede all too easily from our view or become minimized or distorted by those who find a global rather than a locally defined killing program too horrific to take seriously. The evidence is clear that those in charge of Germany in World War II took it seriously indeed.

11 The University Press of Kansas recently published a full study of the impact of the German efforts toward the "Final Solution" on the conduct of military operations in World War II by Yaron Pasher. See Pasher, Yaron. Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s “Final Solution” Undermined the German War Effort. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014. Also available as an ebook.

CHAPTER FOUR RECONCILING HISTORY: THE HOLOCAUST IN SCANDANAVIA PAUL LUBOTINA

During the Second World War, the issues of natural resources, geography and shared political ideologies combined to form one of the darker chapters in Scandinavian history in the modern era. These three issues inextricably linked elements of the German, Finnish, and Norwegian wartime governments, while also leading to their joint participation in the Holocaust. While the Holocaust took place years ago, the postwar governments of Finland and Norway waited until 2008 and 2010 before admitting any national culpability in genocide. The road to the truth was pitted with political and academic arguments over the nature of cooperation or collaboration among individuals in Risto Ryti’s Finnish, Vidkung Quisling’s Norwegian, and Adolf Hitler’s German governments. The similarities in the wartime activities of Ryti’s democratically elected government and Quisling’s occupational regime illustrate the universality of evil. Even in nations with sterling reputations for progressive administrations and staunch supporters of human rights, there exist individuals who willingly perpetrate inhumane crimes. Historically, most academic discussions about the role Scandinavian countries played in the Holocaust focused on how groups of defiant Danes and Norwegians deftly shuttled their Jewish populations to neutral Sweden, in order to escape certain death in German extermination camps. Among Swedes, the story of Raoul Wallenberg’s rescue of Hungarian Jews at the close of the Second World War has also garnered international acclaim.1 However, wartime histories of Norway and Finland also contain 1

Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), Richard Petrow, The Bitter Years: The Invasion and Occupation of Demark and Norway, April 1940 – May 1945 (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1974), and Alex Kershaw, The Envoy: The Epic Rescue

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stories of Nazi collaboration, Jewish persecutions, concentration camps, and, eventually, Jewish deportations to the Third Reich where individuals were murdered in death camps. 2 The origins of the collaboration predate the Second World War. As Hitler and the National Socialist Party gained strength in Germany during the economic upheavals of the 1930s, similar movements emerged in Norway and Finland. Vidkun Quisling formed his political ideology in the Norwegian military during the closing days of the First World War. In that period he spent a great deal of time in Russia and Eastern Europe during the wave of revolutions that swept the region. Quisling was appalled at the scenes of savagery perpetrated by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and subsequent Ukrainian famine. When Quisling returned to Norway, he served as Norway’s Defense Minister (1931-1933), under the leadership of the Agrarian Party’s Peder Kolstad. The defense minister gained fame by accusing the oppositions’ Labor and Communist Parties with treason for collaborating with the Soviet Union. After ending his tenure in the defense ministry, Quisling formed the National Unity Party [Nasjonal Samling or NS] in May, 1933 and garnered further popular support by exploiting the anti-Semitic work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which warned about the dangers that Jewish Bolshevism supposedly posed to societies. This translated into minor electoral victories in 1933-1934, when his party earned 2.2% of the vote and placed 41 members into local offices, but none in the national parliament [Storting].3 After the 1937 elections, the NS lost nearly all of their governmental seats, which Quisling blamed on Jews, communists, and socialists. In reality, most of the Norwegian population was put off by his rigid ideology, unwillingness to negotiate, and his extensive use of religion in politics.4 The national rejection of Quisling and his hatred of Jewish Bolshevism temporarily forced the movement to the political sidelines, but that would change as Europe moved closer to war.

of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2010). 2 Henrik Stenius, Mirja Osterberg, and Johan Osting eds., Nordic Narratives of the Second World War: National Historiographies Revisited (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011) and Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimaki eds., Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012). 3 Samuel Abrahamsen, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust: A Historical Perspective (New York: Holocaust Library, 1991), 46-47. 4 Paul M. Hayes, “Quisling’s Political ideas,” in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1966), 145-157.

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In Finland, the same political and economic upheavals that led to the rise of Quisling and the NS, helped to create the Lapua Movement [Lapuan liike] under the leadership of Vihtori Kosola. In contrast to the minimal popularity Quisling maintained after 1937, the Lapua Movement had widespread support among the middle-class, farmers, military officers, Civic Guards, clergy, and politicians in Finland’s rural communities. These individuals had just finalized their independence and established the border with Russia in the 1920 Treaty of Tartu. This came after fighting a war against Russian and Finnish Bolsheviks who had controlled the industrialized cities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Viipuri. General Mannerheim, commander of the White Army, recaptured Finland’s industrial cities, thereby preventing the creation of a communist state. After securing the nation’s independence, Mannerheim moved his forces to take the Russian cities of Petsamo, Olonets, Archangel, and Petrozavodsk. During the 19th century, Czar Alexander II had promised the Finns lands in Karelia as compensation for territory seized near St. Petersburg. Mannerheim and the Finnish government under Per Svinhufvud saw the upheaval caused by the Russian Bolshevik Revolution as an opportunity to make the unrequited land claims a reality.5 While the invasion of Russia territory failed, Finnish nationalists continued to call for the creation of “Greater Finland” by taking land in Soviet Karelia. Beginning in the 1920s, the Lapua Movement grew out of a grassroots reaction against the resurgence of communism in western farming districts in Finland. By the 1930s, the anti-communist ideas of the organization gained support among students and academics at universities in Turku and Helsinki. The situation led to the founding of ancillary groups that supported the Lapua Movement, such as Academic Karelian Society [Akateeminen Karjala-Seura] and Rising Finland [Nouseva Suomi], which also sought to expand the nation’s eastern borders to include large tracts of land in the Soviet Union. Lapua political patronage came from a gamut of officials such as Pehr Svinhufvud, former president and founding father of Finland, Agrarian Union leader Kyösti Kallio, President Lauri Relander, and General Carl Gustav Mannerheim, commander of the Finnish Army.6 In 1930, the local Lapua members embarked on a terror campaign where they murdered three suspected communists and kidnapped an additional 254 people, many of whom were dropped over the Soviet border. This included former president and leader of the Progressive Party, 5

C. Jay Smith, Jr., Finland and the Russian Revolution, 1917-1922 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 93-94, 98-103. 6 George Maude, Historical Encyclopedia of Finland (Lanham, Toronto, and Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2007), 147-148.

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Juho Stålberg, who opposed the activities of the Lapua Movement.7 The political fortunes of Vihtori Kosola and his Lapua Movement continued to rise until 1932, when members participated in a failed coup called the Mäntsälä Revolt, which was organized by Civic Guards, a regional militia from the area around Helsinki. They had planned to overthrow the government and place General Mannerheim in charge of a “patriot” government comprised of industrialists and loyal Finns. President Svinhufvud thwarted the coup by maintaining control over regular army units and officially disbanding the Lapua Movement, but also incorporating former members into the existing government, which helped to legitimize their political ideals. The remaining conservatives, including Kosola, formed the People’s Patriotic Movement [Isänmaallinen kansanliike or IKL] to replace the banned organization. Because Kosola was still in jail for his role in the Mäntsälä Revolt, Vilho Annala, a prominent civil servant, University of Helsinki professor, and newspaper publisher, assumed control of the organization. He led the IKL to more closely resemble the fascists dominating the politics of Italy and Germany.8 As a legitimate part of the government, the IKL continued to oppose Finnish labor, socialist, and communist movements, but did not take over the country. With support from the middle-class, the IKL and political conservatives maintained their positions within the government.9 Between 1936 and 1945, Vilho Annala functioned as the caucus chairman of the IKL, while also serving as Transportation Minister during 1941-1943, the peak years of FinnishGerman military cooperation. However, as part of a coalition government the IKL would still have to contend with liberals who remained in office. Within the Progressive Party during the 1920s, a talented banker named Risto Ryti would begin a rise to political prominence. In 1923, Ryti became the head of the Bank of Finland. This role placed him in a position to navigate the country’s financial institutions through the Great Depression. Ryti aligned the Finnish currency with British sterling, thereby facilitating Anglo-Finnish trade, while also stabilizing the economy. The close relationship between the Bank of Finland and the Bank of England marked Ryti as an Anglophile within the Finnish government. Furthermore, his widespread popularity resulting from saving the country’s economy, combined with his position as the national banker, 7

Risto Alapuro, State and Revolution in Finland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 210-211. 8 George Maude, Aspects of the Governing of the Finns (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 78. 9 Alapuro, 217-219.

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made Ryti a formidable politician, even as the Progressive Party continued to lose seats in the national parliament.10 International events that took place in 1939 and 1940 brought Quisling, Ryti, and Hitler together in both a political and a military alliance. Norway and Finland occupied strategically and economically important territory. Throughout the Second World War, German industrial production relied on Swedish iron ore shipments sent from the ports of Narvik in Norway and Luleå in Sweden.11 Finnish nickel, which was used to harden the iron into steel, could be shipped from mines near Petsamo to the port at Tornio, just across the Gulf of Bothnia from Luleå. The Petsamo nickel mines also sat astride the Soviet cities of Murmansk and Archangel, which the IKL and Academic Karelian Society wanted to annex into Greater Finland. Strategically, the Norwegian coastline offered numerous bases for German forces to launch attacks against British cities or ships. Finland’s position on the Soviet border would also allow the German army to attack Leningrad, Murmansk, and Archangel, a possibility that worried Soviet officials. Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin recognized the possibility of a German invasion from Finland. In November 1939 he ordered an invasion of Finland called the Winter War. This Soviet attack, combined with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, intensified both British and German interest in Scandinavia. The British wanted to cripple the German wartime economy by denying them Swedish ore, while the Germans fought to protect their industry and military production. The end result of the Winter War and the iron ore question was the 1940 German conquest of Norway. In Finland, President Kyösti Kallio, an IKL supporter, led the country to a negotiated peace with the Soviets, but Kallio suffered a series of strokes in the closing days of the war and died. In order to maintain their independence, the Finnish government ceded the city of Viipuri and a large section of Karelia to the Soviets. Stalin also demanded control of the Hanko, a city near Helsinki and transit rights for Soviet troops. Thus in 1940, Stalin and the Soviets posed a constant threat to the Finnish government. In a special election to replace Kallio, Risto Ryti became president, which meant that the IKL and Progressive Party would have to share power in Finland during the Second World War. After the German conquest of Norway in 1940, the interests and ambitions of Hitler, Quisling, Ryti, and Annala came together in a potent 10

Maude, Aspects of the Governing of the Finns, 83-89. Jukka Nevakivi, The Appeal That Was Never Made: The Allies, Scandinavia and the Finnish Winter War 1939-1940 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976), 62-63.

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mixture that would impact the lives of Jewish people in the region. As an occupied nation, Hitler’s subordinates had complete control over the country and could implement anti-Semitic policies at will. Despite Quisling’s desire to rule Norway, Hitler did not fully trust him and appointed a German functionary, Joseph Terboven, to become the Reich Commissioner of Norway. In April, 1940 Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler dispatched Senior Colonel [Oberführer] Franz Stahlecker to oversee police duties, including command of five Special Action or Death Squads [Einsatzkommandos] that would play a key role in rounding up Jews in Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim, and Tromsø. Terboven also received assistance from Lieutenant General [Obergruppenführer] Walter Redeiss who commanded both the Secret State Police [Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo] and Security Service [Sichererheitsdienst or SD], and Major [Sturmbanführer] Herman Reinhard who supervised the Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs.12 Within a few weeks of the invasion, Norwegian police officers, comprised mainly of Quisling’s NS men, confiscated all radios in Jewish possession and forbade foreign travel, while German officials demanded complete lists of Jewish people living in the country.13 During the same period, Quisling proclaimed himself Prime Minister of Norway after King Haakon and his government fled to England. Terboven did not want to share power with Quisling, but his experiences in Norwegian politics proved useful in organizing a pro-German occupation government. Quisling did not acquiesce to Terboven’s marginalization as he continued to help with the Nazification of Norway while he petitioned for the return of the NS to power. In early1941, Quisling began a reorganization of the various police agencies in Norway by unifying the State Police [STAPO], Border Police [GREPO], and Criminal Police [KRIPO] under the leadership of Jonas Lie. He then appointed Karl Marthinsen as Chief of the Security and State Police, which then coordinated anti-Semitic activities with the German occupying powers.14 Quisling also played a crucial role in recruiting Norwegians into Hitler’s SS [Schutzstaffel] with patriotic speeches about their vital role in fighting communism in Europe. During the course of the war, approximately 6,000 Norwegians joined the SS and fought in the Norwegian Legion, Viking, and Nordland Divisions.15

12

Abrahamsen, 74-76. Abrahamsen, 79-82. 14 Abrahamsen, 76-79. 15 Chris Bishop, Hitler’s Foreign Divisions: Foreign Volunteers in the Waffen SS, 1940-1945 (London: Amber Books Ltd., 2005), 50-54. 13

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In May, 1941, the combined German and Norwegian police forces began the systematic persecution of Norway’s Jewish population. Concentration camps were built in numerous locations across the country, with the largest in a former women’s prison named Grini, which was located west of Oslo. Other famous camps were located at Berg, Bredveit, and Falstad in central Norway. These camps held Norwegian political prisoners and foreign prisoners of war, along with Jewish populations from throughout the Baltic region. In June, 1941, as Hitler finalized preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, German officials began to round up Jews in northern Norway.16 This region was also where AOK Norway [Armeeoberkommando Norwegen] stood poised to enter northern Finland, which would protect the nickel mines in Petsamo and the port of Tornio, while also positioning the force to take the Soviet cities of Murmansk and Archangel. The activities of the German AOK Norway had already been sanctioned by the Finnish government. Between the end of the Winter War in 1940, and Operation Barbarossa in 1941, German and Finnish political and military officials began to collaborate in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union.17 In August 1940, Hitler first dispatched an intermediary to open negotiations between the two countries. Finland’s government, while democratically elected, operated under the control of six wartime leaders who worked outside of parliamentary law. While President Risto Ryti and Prime Minister Johan.W. Rangell belonged to the Progressive Party, Rangell also supported the right-wing Rising Finland movement.18 Defense Minister, General Rudolf Walden, Marshall C. G. Mannerheim, and his Chief of Staff, General Axel Heinrichs represented the military. Foreign Minister Rolf Witting of the Swedish People's Party was the leading Germanophile in the oligarchy. These individuals created, enacted and oversaw Finnish foreign and domestic policy by special powers granted to them in the Finnish Constitution concerning wartime emergencies. By sidestepping other politicians, Ryti, Mannerheim and the others could then restructure the reduced government for an alliance with Hitler. The Finnish officials improved their bargaining strength further by allowing the Germans to move troops into Norway through the port at Tornio, recruiting Finnish soldiers into the SS, and becoming part of the 16

Abrahamsen, 82-83. Michael Jonas, “The Politics of an Alliance: Finland and Nazi Foreign Policy and War Strategy,” in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimaki eds., Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 212. 18 Anthony Upton, Finland In Crisis 1940-1941 (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 201-202. 17

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German economic system.19 In return for Finnish support, Hitler offered the Finns modern weapons and large tracts of Soviet Karelia, which was one of the primary goals of the right-wing IKL and the Academic Karelia Society.20 During the winter of 1940 and 1941, Finnish and German General Staff officers made repeated visits to Berlin, Helsinki, and the proposed operational area in northern Norway and Finland, collectively known as Lapland. In December 1940, General Paavo Talvela, a hero of the Winter War, visited Germany, followed shortly after in January by General Heinrichs, the Finnish Army’s Chief of Staff and one of the six governmental leaders ruling Finland.21 Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1941, German staff officers under Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, General Alfred Jodl worked out the final preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union. In May and June 1941, Jodl met with Heinrichs and laid out the proposed German assault plan. General Mannerheim would command all Finnish troops that would be concentrated in southern Finland, poised to take back Karelian territory lost to the Soviets after the Winter War and threaten Leningrad. The German Lapland Army, renamed the 20th Mountain Army, under command of General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, would take over the northern half of Finland and attack Murmansk and Archangel. On June 14, President Ryti and the government approved the German plan and, three days later, the Finnish army began to mobilize. General Mannerheim, through intermediaries, asked the Germans for a time extension following the invasion, to allow the Finnish Army a few days before starting offensive operations. This was to provide the government and population the impression that the country was being pulled into the war by a Soviet attack.22 On June 22, 1941 the Germans began the invasion of the Soviet Union. German General Falkenhorst moved approximately 120,000 troops into Finnish Lapland and prepared to attack both Murmansk and further south toward the town of Kandalaksha, which would sever the Murmansk railroad.23 The isolation or capture of Murmansk would prevent the 19

Jonas, 101-103. Tehno Pimiä, “Greater Finland and Cultural Heritage: Finnish Scholars in Eastern Karelia, 1941-1944,” in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimaki eds., Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 398-401. 21 Earl F. Ziemke, The German Northern Theater of Operations, 1940-1945 (Washington: Department of the Army, 1959), 123-124. 22 Ziemke, 119-136. 23 Ziemke, 37-38. 20

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Western Allies from shipping supplies to the Soviet Union and was therefore vital to the German war effort. In the southern half of Finland, General Mannerheim mobilized 16% of the total population to field an army of 475,000 troops, plus auxiliaries to help with the roads and wounded soldiers.24 Mannerheim waited three days before opening offensive operations, blaming Soviet air raids for causing the war. German and Finnish troops began their attacks with mixed success. The German forces in the north failed to take Murmansk, Archangel, or Kandalaksha while suffering heavy losses. The Finns enjoyed much greater success as their forces recaptured the Finnish city of Viipuri, surrounded Leningrad, and took a large piece of Soviet territory in East Karelia. This included the cities of Olonets and Petrozavodsk, which Mannerheim and the Academic Karelia Society had wanted since the First World War. However, the failure of the main German armies to take Moscow in 1941 meant that Operation Barbarossa had failed and the war would last much longer than Finnish officials either hoped or expected. So, for the next three years, the German army would maintain military control over all of Norway and the northern half of Finland. During the period between 1941 and 1944, the German troops in the region would continue to receive assistance from Finnish military and police forces, along with Quisling’s men operating in Norway. Military and police forces from all three nations worked directly together during the period, diligently searching for leftists, arresting dissidents, and exchanging prisoners.25 Quisling even sent loyal NS laborers and political prisoners to Finland where they went to work on German fortifications in Lapland.26 It was activities during that same time period, especially the first two years, that would have the greatest impact

24

Pasi Tuunainen, “The Finnish Army at War: Operations and Soldiers, 19391945,”in in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimaki eds., Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 153. 25 Elina Sana, Luovutetut: Suomen Ihmisluovutukset Gestapolle (Helsinki: Werner Soderstrom Osakeyhtio, 2003), 164-207. 26 Paul G. Vigness, The German occupation of Norway (New York: Vantage Press, 1970), 199; Sec. of State to McClintock. January 30, 1943. Foreign Relations Vol. III. p.229; and Memorandum of Conversation. Under Sec. of State Welles and Minister Procope. March 22, 1943. 760 D.61/1650. In 1943, the Norwegian exiled government contacted the American State Department with information that the Germans had sent political prisoners to work in Finland, which removed the dissidents from their homeland and provided workers for the war effort. The Finnish representative in Washington, Minister Hjalmar Procopé quickly addressed American concerns in February, 1943 when he told Under Secretary of State Welles that Finland would have the prisoners out of the country in three weeks.

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on Jewish populations in the Scandinavian nations and occupied Soviet territories. During the winter and spring of 1942, as the Soviet army pushed the Germans back from the gates of Moscow, events began to rapidly unfold in Norway and Finland. Reich Commissioner Terboven sought to consolidate his control over Norway. In order to do so, he needed a sympathetic government, but had to contend with the remaining Norwegian politicians who represented all the major prewar political parties. A major obstacle to the plan came from the exiled King Haakon who still retained the loyalty of the majority of citizens in occupied Norway. Terboven pressured the remaining members of parliament into calling for King Haakon to abdicate, but he refused. That forced Terboven to demand additional action, resulting in the intimidated politicians yielding to the Reich Commissioner’s demands and declaring that the king ceased to reign over Norway for the duration of the war.27 While Terboven had cowed the members of parliament, he still needed additional support from Quisling. This had been problematic because of the widespread unpopularity of the NS movement. However by January 1942 the NS attained 40,000 members, thereby illustrating its growing power; Terboven asked Quisling to take part in the government.28 On February 1, 1942 Quisling was made Minister President of Norway. In this new position, Quisling immediately began to support Terboven by attacking the enemies of the occupation government. Norway’s teachers became an early target when they refused to indoctrinate Norwegian youths in Nazi ideology. The teachers’ resistance led to mass arrests and eventual deportation to concentration camps. However Norway’s Jewish population quickly supplanted teachers as the focus of Nazi and NS persecutions. Beginning in February 1942 the letter “J” was stamped in all Jewish paperwork, while questionnaires were sent to all Jewish families asking about their heritage. Furthermore, a 19th century law forbidding any Jewish residency in Norway was reinstated making any Jews remaining in the country illegal aliens.29 Quisling went on to pass laws that allowed the confiscation of Jewish property, including the country’s three Synagogues. Jewish savings also were transferred to the NS hjelpfond [Relief Organization] totaling more than 9 million

27 Richard Petrow, The Bitter Years: The Invasion and Occupation of Denmark and Norway, April 1940 – May 1945 (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1974), 103-104. 28 Petrow, 110. 29 Petrow, 115.

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Norwegian Crowns.30 By March, the first executions of Jews took place outside a fortress near Trondheim. The four Jews had been convicted of spreading propaganda and their deaths led to the first wave of mass Jewish evacuations from Norway to Sweden.31 In the summer of 1942, Berlin sent a message through the German Reich’s Security Headquarter [Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA] to resolve the “Jewish Question” in collaboration with the Norwegian authorities.32 Quisling responded in the fall by setting up an office in Oslo to comply with Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws concerning Aryan purity. This included specific rules that stated that anyone with three Jewish grandparents, two Jewish parents, or anyone married to a Jew could be subject to arrest and deportation.33 By fall, mass executions of suspected saboteurs became more commonplace. In late October 1942, German and NS officials began the final preparations for mass arrests. When they began, NS police officers took the lead, using information obtained in the earlier questionnaire. Almost exclusively, NS officials began the mass arrests without the aid of German troops. Quisling used the murder of a Norwegian border guard as an excuse for his actions.34 He would say of the deportations: There are many who say that a Jew cannot be expelled simply because he is a Jew. In my opinion, no such reasoning could be more superficial. A Jew is not Norwegian, not European, he is an Oriental. Jews have no place in Europe. They are an internationally destructive element. The Jews create the Jewish problem and cause active anti-Semitism. When the Eastern ghettos were opened, Germany was overrun by Russian and Polish Jews like grasshopper… It was the same in France, Hungary and Bulgaria. So one sees the depth of this problem, which stems from a world problem. For us, there can be no compromise.35

One problem that occurred during the period was a lack of shipping to bring the deportees to Germany. However a month later in November, the S/S Donau arrived in Norway, taking 760 Jewish prisoners to German concentration camps. In February, a further 160 Jews were sent to Germany aboard the S/S Gotenland, including people from Trondheim in the operational area of AOK Norway, which also controlled German 30

Abrahamson, 91-93. Abrahmson 85. 32 Vigness, 185. 33 Abramhamsen, 94-96. 34 Abrahamsen, 99-105. 35 Petrow, 116. 31

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troops fighting in Finnish Lapland.36 At the end of the Second World War, a final reckoning of mortality attributable to Hitler’s and Quisling’s forces included 1049 deaths in concentration and death camps, 366 individuals executed by the Germans, 43 suicides, and 38 people killed during torture.37 In Finland, events related to the Holocaust took a slightly different path because the Finnish government refused to pass any Nuremberg-style laws. However, the same officials claimed they did not have to follow the Hague Convention’s rules on the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) because the Soviets also disregarded the rules. In addition, the German commanders at AOK Norway formed a knot that helped to tie together the Quisling and Ryti administrations through the cooperation of the Norwegian State Police [STAPO], Finnish State Police [VALPO], Gestapo, SS, SD, and the Einsatzkommandos that operated in both Finland and Norway. Beyond the overall military cooperation between the German and Finnish forces in their war against the Soviets, the issue of POWs emerged as another area that brought the three countries together. As the Finnish government did not follow the Hague Convention rules, they could use Soviet prisoners to replace the large number of Finnish men fighting at the front. These prisoners were then subject to Finnish military law that allowed corporal punishment from 25 lashes by a whip, up to execution by a firing squad for major transgressions. While incarcerated the Soviets were expected to work on labor details such as cutting firewood, building roads, constructing fortifications, and performing agricultural tasks.38 Over the course of the war, the Finns took approximately 65,000 Soviet prisoners, with 21,000 from Finnish and German camps eventually working on similar tasks in AOK Norway’s area of operation.39 Because the Soviet prisoners could not fulfill all the labor requirements, in April 1943 the Germans imported an additional 300 Polish forced workers to Finland from various cities in Poland.40

36

Vigness, 180-181 and Abrahamsen, 131. Vigness, 268. 38 Oula Silvennoinen, “Limits of Intentionality: Soviet Prisoners-of-War and Civilian Internees in Finnish Custody,” in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimaki eds., Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 363-364. 39 Silvennoinen, 367, 372. 40 MicroFilm, Finnish Military Archives. Military Intelligence Service Film 92, roll 2. McClintock to Sec. of State. April 30, 1943. 37

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Another aspect of the prisoner question stemmed from shared ideas for the postwar occupation of Soviet territory. Both the Germans and the Finns wanted to ethnically cleanse Russians from the territories they conquered and replace the Slavs with German and Finnish populations. The Finnish government sought out individuals from the various Fennic language ethnic minority groups that traditionally lived in the Baltic region among the captured Soviet soldiers. Finnish officials grouped all prisoners by ethnic origins and set up Camp 21, to provide additional language training to individuals deemed fit to occupy Karelia after the war ended. In order to achieve their goals, Finnish and German officials routinely exchanged ethnic minority prisoners during the war.41 The issue of separating out prisoners for political and ideological reasons also emerged as an arena for collaboration. On June 28, 1941 the RSHA issued orders concerning German police operations in Finland. The order called for the cooperation of Einsatzkommando Finnland, SS, and SD units to work in prison camps to identify Communist Party officials, military officers, intelligentsia, Commisars and all Jews among Soviet prisoners. While conducting their own investigations, Finnish officials identified 47 suspected Jews, along with 521 political prisoners, who they handed over to the Germans.42 So far no official records have been uncovered to detail the fate of the transferred prisoners, but oral histories point to mass executions near the town of Salla, also the location Stalag 309, a German prison camp.43 Over the course of the war, the Finns also executed 1200 Soviets, while 19,000 died in prison camps from starvation, overwork, and disease. Among the prisoners, the highest numbers of death were Russian, while Finnic, Baltic, and Jewish prisoners had slightly higher rates of survival because of better treatment. In many cases, Finnish-Jews helped to feed their coreligionists, thereby helping them to survive the harsh conditions found in Finnish POW camps.44 However, not every Jewish person in Finland received the same special treatment as the Soviet prisoners. During the early days of the Second World War approximately 800 hundred refugees from areas controlled by Nazi Germany made their way to Finland, including many of Jewish origins.45 These individuals were expected to participate in the war effort, in the same way as citizens and prisoners in Finland. Among the refugees, 41

Silvennoinen, 366. Silvennoinen, 373. 43 Silvennoinen, 374. 44 Silvennoinen , 378-381. 45 Hannu Rautkallio, Finland and the Holocaust: The Rescue of Finland’s Jews (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987), 126. 42

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several committed crimes, others did not want to participate in manual labor and German refugee, Dr. Walter Cohen, sought to improve working and living conditions in Finnish concentration camps.46 The refugee’s actions brought them into contact with Arno Anthoni, head of the State Police [Valtiollinen poliisi or VALPO]. Anthoni and his deputy Bruno Aaltonen had already established a good rapport with Gestapo officials before hostilities began with the Soviets. During the war, Anthoni worked with [SS-Sturmbannführer] Major Gustav von Felde from AOK Norway and Chief of the Gestapo in Estonia Martin Sandberger on questions related to Jews, refugees, and prisoners. In April 1942 one of the architects of the Holocaust, SD Chief Reinhard Heydrich invited Anothoni to visit him. The meeting occurred just after the conclusion of the Wannsee Conference and included discussions of Finland’s Jewish population. 47By October, Finnish and German officials had worked out the details for deporting undesirable refugees and arrests began at the end of the month. Anothoni advised Sandberger that he had 27 refugees ready for shipment to Estonia and on November 7, 1942 a group of eight Jews and 19 other individuals were sent to the Gestapo.48 The October arrests and November deportations in Finland coincide with similar activities in Norway. The dates and activities of Finnish and Norwegian officials, plus their close cooperation with the Gestapo, point to a coordinated effort to address the Jewish Question in Scandinavia. Along with military prisoners and refugees, the Finns had to set up an administration for the 85,000 civilians left in the occupied portions of Karelia and prepared the area for its new Finnish speaking population.49 The government appointed a lumberman and former Minister of Trade and Industry, Colonel Väinö Kotilainen to oversee Karelia, with the administrative help of the 12 member Eastern Karelia Military Administration Staff, made up of people who fled the region during the Bolshevik Revolution.50 Many of these Karelian administrators were AKS members who wanted to Fennicize the former Soviet citizens, while also modernizing the region, 46

Rautkallio, 180-200. Rautkallio, 126-150. 48 Antero Holmila, “Varieties of Silence: Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Finland,” in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimaki eds., Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 525-526. 49 Tenho Pimiä, “Greater Finland and Cultural Heritage: Finnish Scholars in Eastern Karelia, 1941-1944,” in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimaki eds., Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 407. 50 Silvennoinen, 384-385. 47

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and searching for clues about the origins of Finnish culture.51 However, the ethnic cleansing had to proceed and Mannerheim signed an order that Russians in the area were to be rounded up and placed in concentration camps [keskitysleiri] prior to deportation, leading to 24000 civilians being interned. They also suffered from starvation and disease, leading to the deaths of 4279 civilians during the war.52 The twin issues of starvation and disease among prisoners and especially among Finnish civilians brought into question the sovereignty of the Ryti government. Between 1939 and 1941, Finland experienced serious economic troubles. Three and half million citizens had shouldered the cost of the 1939 Winter War, the relocation of 400,000 displaced civilians in 1940, and the 1941 modernization of the Finnish Army. With the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Finnish population had to feed an additional 65,000 prisoners of war, 475,000 active soldiers, and 140,000 civilians in occupied territories or in camps around the country.53 Government officials calculated that they could only sustain the army at maximum mobilization for four months before the economy would break down under wartime conditions.54 Germany’s unexpected failure to crush the Soviets during the 1941 summer campaign kept the Finnish Army in the field much longer than the economy could sustain. A partial demobilization in November 1941 helped the situation slightly, but Finland was unable to provide adequate foodstuffs for everyone in the country. During the winter of 1941-1942, soldiers, civilians, and prisoners all suffered from food deprivation. A report from the American Embassy in Helsinki revealed Finland’s critical food situation. Rationing had reduced the amount of food available for the population to eleven and a half ounces of fish over a sixty-day period, six and a quarter ounces of sugar a week, and seven ounces of bread a day.55 The situation became critical by March 1942 when severe ice conditions in the Baltic cut German food shipments. A bread crisis ensued and the Finnish population had to eat their seed crops in order to survive. By the end of 1942, Finnish grain imports rose remarkably from a pre-war yearly 51

Pimiä, 408-410. Silvennoinen, 387-389. 53 Eino Pietola, Sotavangit Suomessa 1941-1944 (Jyväskylä: Gummerus Oy Kirjapaino, 1987), 46-47. 54 Otto Manninen, “Political Expedients for Security During the “Interim Peace” at the Start of the Continuation War,” in Aspects of Security: The Security of Independent Finland (Vaasa: Vaasa Oy, 1985), 99-100. 55 OSS Confidential Economic Report, Feb 5, 1942, Microfilm, Finnish Military archives., Military Intelligence Service Film F92, role 2. 52

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average of nearly 900 tons to over 58,000 tons in order to meet the production shortfall.56 As early as November 1941, Hitler used Finnish dependence on German grain to force President Ryti to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, which pledged Finland to help defeat Bolshevism with the other Axis nations.57 In December, 1941 Minister Jarl Axel Wasastjerna, Finland’s representative to Sweden, confirmed American suspicions that the Finnish government had lost its sovereignty. Wasastjerna informed the American embassy staff that Hitler used the food situation to influence Finnish foreign policy. He stated that Hitler dominated Finland and that the only way the country could exit the war was for Allies to supply the country with food.58 If Finland strayed too far from German expectations, he explained, the Nazis could cut off food supplies until Finland complied with their wishes. For the rest of the war Hitler used threats of starvation or invasion to keep Finland’s foreign policy in line with German requirements. Military and political events changed rapidly in late 1944 and early 1945 as the Soviet Union pushed the German troops out of Scandinavia. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets launched a major attack against the German and Finnish troops in Karelia. As the military situation deteriorated, President Ryti resigned, leading Parliament to appoint Marshal Mannerheim to office and finalizing a peace agreement with the Soviets. Stalin demanded that the Finnish military support the Soviet army’s offensive to push the Germans out of Lapland, leading to a short war. By 1945, the Finnish and Soviet troops occupied all of northern Finland and Norway, bringing to a close the military operations in the region. After Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender, trials began for wartime leaders in Norway and Finland. Quisling’s trial lasted a short time, leading to a conviction for treason and murder, which ended with his 56

Tilastollinen Vuosikirja 1944-45. Sarja XLII, Helsinki, 1946, p.148. One possible explanation for the huge increase in imports during 1942 can be found in Suur-Suomen Kahdet Kasvot, by Antti Laine (Otava, 1982). The author points out on page 236, that the Finnish Army ruined a great deal of the crops in EasternKaralia, during the1941 summer campaign. The remaining population could only harvest 900,000 kilograms of grain, which lead to a severe food shortage in the area. The following year production rose 5,900,000 kg., which helped to relieve the food situation. The combination of figures suggests that a portion of Finland’s food problem can be traced to the occupation of Eastern-Karelia and Finland having to import food to feed the population. 57 Berry, Michael. American Foreign Policy And The Finnish Execption. Gummerus Oy Kirjapaino. Jyväskylä, Finland. 1987), 172. 58 Schoenfeld to Sec. of State. Dec 3, 1941, Foreign Relations. Vol. I., 111-112.

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execution by firing squad. The Soviets allowed the Finnish government to prosecute their own wartime leaders including Ryti, Rangell, and six others, plus Arno Anthoni, the police chief in charge of Jewish deportations. Each of the accused eventually was found guilty of various crimes, but all were either pardoned or had their convictions overturned. Several individuals who had a direct hand in collaboration with Germany or in the Holocaust never faced a court trial. These included Marshal Mannerheim who ordered the ethnic cleansing of Karelia, Foreign Minister Witting, the pro-German leader in the rump government, and Minister of Internal Affairs Toivo Horelli, the individual who sanctioned the deportation of Jews to Estonia. Moreover, the members of the rightwing organizations Rising Finland, IKL, and the Academic Karelia Society returned to their positions in business, government, and academic institutions around the country. This would have a chilling effect on interpretations of Finland’s wartime activities. The interrelated issues of Finnish collaboration with Nazi Germany and participation in the Holocaust have been controversial issues since the end of the war, leading to a protracted ideological battle over Finland’s history. In 1941, Ryti’s government claimed that it was fighting a separate war as “Brothers-in-Arms” with the Germans and not as Axis Satellite powers such as Hungary or Romania. This was a position that Finnish officials maintained throughout the Second World War, despite a declaration of war by England in 1941, and the skepticism expressed by the American government.59 After the war, Finnish academics have continued to argue that the Ryti administration was pulled into the war, did not collaborate with Nazi Germany, maintained its sovereignty, and did not participate in the Holocaust. Early examples such as John H. Wuorinen’s Finland and World War II: 1939-1944 (1948), Arvi Korhonen’s Planning Barbarossa and Finland: The Origins of the Continuation War (1961), and Hannu Rautkallio’s Finland and the Holocaust: The Rescue of Finland’s Jews (1987) contain the same basic narrative of events as modern works including Seppo Hentilä’s From Grand Duchy to a Modern State: A Political History of Finland Since 1809 (1999), Olli Vehviläinen’s Finland in the Second World War: Between Germany and Russia (2002), and Henrik Meinander’s A History of Finland (2011).60 These orthodox 59

Henrik Meinander, “A Separate War? Interpretations of Finland in the Second World War,” in Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg & Johan Östling eds., Nordic Narratives of the Second World War: National Historiographies Revisited (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 56-57. 60 John Henry Wuorinen, Finland and World War II: 1939-1944 (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1948), Arvi Korhonen, Barbarossa-suunnitelma ja Suomi:

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explanations of Finnish actions have been coming under increased criticism by foreign and domestic historians who espouse the same reservations about the arguments as American diplomats expressed during the Second World War. The 1957 release of Leonard Lundin’s Finland in the Second World War initiated the first round of the academic conflict over the veracity of the orthodox narrative of the war.61 Lundin refuted the Finnish assertions with a forthright statement that Ryti’s government collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. That argument was continued in 1964 with Anthony Upton’s Finland in Crisis, 1940-1941 that emphasized the burgeoning relationship between the two countries.62 Elina Suominen’s 1979 work, Death Ship S/S Hohenhörn: The Fate of Jewish Refugees in Finland, helped to revive discussions about Jewish refugees deported to Estonia and their death by Arno Anthoni.63 These works all met with scorn by established Finnish historians such Korhonen, Rautkallio, and Vehviläinen who each wrote works that refuted this allegation. In November 2003, Elina Sana (Suominen) published The Extradited: Finnish Deportations to the Gestapo, an updated version of her earlier research with new research. She demonstrated that from 1940-1944, the Finnish government and state police officials worked with the Gestapo to identify five hundred Jewish prisoners of war, refugees, and political dissidents held in Finland. Once identified, the unfortunate victims endured incarceration in Finland or transportation to German concentration camps where most met their deaths. This work ignited a new round of political and academic debates that resulted in more research on the subject. The 2010 release of Oula Siivennoinen’s Secret Brothers in Arms: The Security Police Cooperation between Finland and Germany, 1933-1944 expanded the scope of Sana’s research with an in-depth examination of Jatkasodan synty (Helsinki and Porvoo: Söderström, 1961), Hannu Rautkallio, Finland and the Holocaust: The Rescue of Finland’s Jews (New York: The Holocaust Library, 1987), Osmo Jussila, Seppo Hentilä, & Jukka Nevakivi, From Grand Duchy to a Modern State: A Political History of Finland Since 1809 (London: Hurst & Company, 1999), Olli Vehviläinen, Finland in the Second World War: Between Germany and Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), and Henrik Meinander, A History of Finland (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 61 Charles Leonard Lundin, Finland in the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957). 62 Anthony Upton, Finland in Crisis, 1940-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965). 63 Elana Suominen, Kuoleman laiva S/S Hohenhörn :juutalaispakolaisten kohtalo Suomessa (Porvoo: Söderström, 1979).

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German-Finnish-Norwegian military and police cooperation in northern Finland.64 The work identified the activities of Einsatzkommando Finnland, which operated behind German lines during the opening stages of the German-Finnish military operations against the Soviet Union. By illustrating the collaboration of Finnish and German military forces in Lapland, the work delivered a serious body blow to the orthodox historiography. Antero Holmila’s Reporting the Holocaust in British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945-1950 provides a comparison of popular interpretations of the Holocaust in democratic Allied, Axis, and neutral countries.65 By 2012, the first signs of an intellectual compromise appeared in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimäki’s Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations. For the first time, English readers had an opportunity to read both sides of the argument in the same book and the authors acknowledge the collaboration of Finland and Germany during the war. In Norway, debates about the war took a much less contentious path because the Nazis, Quisling, and the NS represented an easily identifiable enemy.66 Nevertheless, both Finnish and Norwegian historians recognize that further research must be done. One area that bears further consideration is whether the arrests and deportations of Jews in Norway and Finland were coordinated by their respective governments because of their similar timing. Did Quisling and Ryti know what the other administration had worked out with Nazi officials and, therefore, did they come to a three-way agreement on the Jewish Question? Was Finland’s policy concerning Jews, prisoners, and refugees based on ideological similarities between the IKL and National Socialists, or perhaps from wartime dependency on German grain. The roles played by Mannerheim, Witting, and Horelli also need further research. However, Mannerheim’s status as Finland’s hero probably will delay any serious research for another generation of historians, based on the length of time taken to admit any collaboration with Nazi Germany.

64

Oula Silvennoinen, Geheime Waffenbruderschaft: Die Sicherheitspolizeiliche Zusammenarbeit zwishen Deutschland und Finnland, 1933-1944 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2010). 65 Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945-1950 (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). 66 Synne Corell, “The Solidarity of a National Narrative: The German Occupation in Norwegian History Culture,” in Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg & Johan Östling eds., Nordic Narratives of the Second World War: National Historiographies Revisited (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 101-126.

CHAPTER FIVE SHANGHAI JEWRY: A STORY LESS WELL KNOWN AND LITTLE TOLD STEVEN L. JACOBS

On the occasion of his 25th anniversary as Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El of Kensington, Maryland, the late Leon Adler (1921-1988) made the following comment about his career in the Army: …I was sent to China and stationed in Shanghai. There, to my surprise, I found about 25,000 Jewish refugees. They were primarily from Germany and Austria, but there were also some rabbinical groups, remnants form the Mirer and Lubavitcher Yeshivas, from Poland and Russia. The Shanghai refugees were the very last group to escape the Nazis. It was too late for them to go to any other country. Russia only permitted them transit. So they crossed Russia in sealed trains to Vladivostok. From Vladivostok they went to Japan, which let them stay for awhile, then sent them to Shanghai, one of the few open ports in the Far East.

The story of the Jews of Shanghai is an intriguing one. Re-telling the story of both their journey and their re-settlement—fascinating in and of itself, and permitted, in large measure, because of the mistaken Japanese notion of supposed “Jewish power”—opens a larger door to discussion of the human resiliency of Holocaust victims, especially those displaced victims, and their ability to re-fashion life in a new country, one with a radically different cultural orientation. Thus, this article is, in part, a tribute to the infinite “plasticity” of the human spirit in the face of horrendous adversity. On April 4, 1940, my late grandmother Ella Jacob wrote to my late father Ralph, her only child who was already in the United States:

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Chapter Five …We would like to go to Shanghai like others. But they want RM (Reichsmarks) $400 per person…we are in a very sorry state. No income.

In another letter on July 26, 1940, she wrote: …Shanghai is not the proper place for us. It would be better in South America…Uncle Richard will have trouble to leave, since the trip over Russia to Yokahama is quite expensive.1

Thus, my grandparents, my great-uncle Richard, and other members of my family were victims of the Nazis because they were unable to afford passage to Shanghai. Accounts of those who did make the journey is a fascinating one,2 and a large number of memoir-accounts have been published that put a human face on what others could conceivably regard as a fictional adventure defying all manner of logic.3 In addition, I have discovered two works of fiction—one for adults4 and one for young people5—as well as a modern detective novel where the plight of Shanghai’s refugee Jews is the context for a case of a missing gemstone called the Shanghai Moon.6 Two DVDs

1

Steven Leonard Jacobs (1992), “Letters from Zerbst,” in G. Jan Colijn and Marcia Sachs Littell, eds., The Netherlands and Nazi Genocide: Papers of the 21st Annual Scholars’ Conference (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press), 514 & 516. 2 The most complete telling of the Shanghai Jewish refugee story is that of David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai 1938-1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976). 3 Examples would be the following: Irene Eber, ed., Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008); Antonia Finnane, Far From Where? Jewish Journeys from Shanghai to Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999); Berl Falbaum, ed., Shanghai Remembered: Stories of Jews Who Escaped to Shanghai from Nazi Europe (Royal Oak: Momentum Books, 2005); Ernest G. Heppner, Shanghai Refugee: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Vivian Jeanette Kaplan, Ten Green Bottles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002); James R. Ross, Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Sigmund Tobias, Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 4 Angel Wagnestein. Farewell Shanghai. New York: Other Press, 2004. Translated by Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova. Wagenstein is a prize-winning Bulgarian novelist. 5 Lois Ruby. Shanghai Shadows. New York: Holiday House, 2006. 6 S. J. Rozan. The Shanghai Moon. New York: Minotaur Books, 2009.

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have also been produced: “Shanghai Ghetto” (2005) and “Zuflucht in Shanghai: The Port of Last Resort” (2006). That Jews were willing to make the arduous journey from Germany or Austria to Shanghai is not surprising because they were fleeing for their lives. They were lucky in that, at least initially, they were able to take their families and some portions of their resources with them as European and other nations’ doors were closed to them, and US7 and Canadian8 barriers proved impenetrable for most Jews. Also, Palestine was closed to Jewish refugees because it was tightly controlled by the British under a League of Nations mandate. Jews who successfully immigrated to Shanghai also considered themselves lucky because the Japanese, who already controlled China, were notoriously brutal in many ways,9 but did not uniformly implement antisemitic policies. Rabbi Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus (1896-1995)10 often reminded his students that “No Jew is the first Jew anyplace!” Such was, indeed, the case with the refugees who fled to Shanghai. There were met by two already-established groups of Jews who themselves, while not constituting a socially-cohesive community, stepped up to their responsibilities and helped create a network of self-help institutions to aid newly arrived Jewish immigrants. The first, Baghdad Jews with names like Sassoon, Kadourie, Hardoon, Ezra, and Abraham, were wealthy Sephardim who already had acquired British citizenship. The second group, arriving in the 1920s, were Russian Ashkenazim following the Revolution of 1917 who fled their homeland both to escape the antisemitism of the Bolsheviks and to seek economic opportunities. Essentially, the Ashkenazi Jews became the “middle class” of established Shanghai Jewry. The refugees themselves arrived in two groups: (1) Middle- and upper-class German and Austrian Jews, perhaps 7

Steven Leonard Jacobs (2010), “Breckinridge Long and Coming to America,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, 2(1): 115-132. 8 Irving Abella and Harold Troper. None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948. New York: Random House, 1983. 9 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Erwin Wickert, Ed., The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Translated by John E. Woods). Rabe (1882-1950), cut perhaps somewhat in the mold of Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), was himself a Nazi and a German businessman in China for more than thirty years who was instrumental in saving the lives of many Chinese by the establishment of the “International Safety Zone.” 10 Dean of American Jewish historians and creator of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, OH, on the campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

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17,000 to 20,000 men, women, and children, many of whom came on Italian or German steamships with whatever resources they were able to take with them, and (2) Poorer, traditionally Orthodox Polish and Russian Jews, approximately 1,000 persons, many of them allied with the Mirer Yeshiva. Many of this group would, ultimately, continue their journey after the end of World War II, re-establishing their yeshivas in Brooklyn, New York, and Jerusalem, Israel. How was it possible, given the world at that time, for these two groups to make it to Shanghai? And here we turn to what, in hindsight, it is possible to describe as the ironic perversity of the Japanese. To briefly recapitulate, Japan opened its doors to the West with the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854. For most of the next one hundred years, both Britain and the United States enjoyed successful economic relations with Japan. Although there was a tradition of both Catholic and Protestant missionary activity in Japan, Japanese knowledge of Jews as a people and Judaism as a religious tradition was, by and large, non-existent. As Japanese scholars began studying Europe and the United States more intensively at the turn of the 20th century, they overestimated the political and economic clout and strength of the American Jewish community. This is primarily because they believed in the veracity of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, purporting to be the secret minutes of a rabbinic cabal planning world domination.11 Therefore, prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attempted to maintain positive relations with the United States because its leadership believed that, by doing so, it would benefit from supposed Jewish wealth, power, and influence in its own quest for potential capital and other financial and material resources. They also naively envisioned a Jewish emigration that would help bring industrialization to less settled parts of China, such as Manchuria. By 1937, Shanghai already was in the hands of the Japanese. According to Dr. Peter Vamos: The official Japanese policy toward Jews, formulated by the Five Ministers Conference held in Tokyo in December, 1938, stated that although Japan should avoid actively embracing Jews who were expelled by her allies, to

11

See both Steven L. Jacobs and Mark Weitzman, Dismantling the Big Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Los Angeles and Jersey City: Simon Wiesenthal Center and Ktav Publishing House, 2003); and Isaiah Ben-Dasan, The Japanese and the Jews (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1972).

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deny Jews entry would not be in the spirit of the empire’s long-standing advocacy of racial equality.12

Until 1939, Japan did not require visas, police certificates, affidavits, or assurances of financial independence on the part of those who sought refuge in Shanghai. Nonetheless, the Japanese as well as the resident Chinese and Jews were unprepared for the rapid influx of Jewish refugees who immigrated to Shanghai to escape German persecution. There were sporadic newspaper articles attesting to the relative openness of Shanghai to Jewish immigrants and this was underscored by word of mouth communication among European Jews. Those who were able to do so made plans for the journey to Asia and were, undoubtedly, relieved when visas were issued to those Jews attempting to flee Nazi persecution. Two Asian officials were particularly important for Jewish refugees because they readily supplied visas to these potential immigrants. Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara (1900-1986), the Japanese Consul General posted to Kovno, Lithuania, issued more than 2,000 transit visas through Japan for those who already had the required papers necessary for travel. Some of them settled in Shanghai.13 Sugihara continued this practice despite the reluctance and, at times, oppositions of his superiors in Tokyo.14 Less well known than Sugihara is Feng-Shan Ho (1901-1997), Chinese Consul General in Vienna 1938-1940 who issued visas to Shanghai but who also granted visas to fleeing Jews no matter where they wished to settle. He did so despite the instructions of his superior officer, the Chinese Ambassador in Berlin, who hoped to build closer ties between China and Nazi Germany. Estimates of the number of visas issued by Ho run into the thousands, perhaps as many as 18,000.15 Although visas were not required for admission to Shanghai, such official documents were, in truth, life-

12

Peter Vamos (2001), “Home Afar: The Life of Central European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai During World War II,” Pacific Rim Report, 23: 4. 13 Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma (Westport: Praeger, 1998). See especially Chapter 5, “Sugihara Chiune: Extraordinary Diplomat,” 101-130. 14 His superiors would later retire him in 1947 with a small pension. Yad Vashem would later honor him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1985, the year before his death. 15 He was denied a pension by the Nationalist Chinese in whose diplomatic corps he worked form 1949 to 1973, but who launched a smear campaign against him, arguing that he misappropriated funds prior to his retirement to San Francisco. He, too, would be honored by Yad Vashem in 2001 as a “Righteous Among the Nations.”

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affirming and meant more to those who possessed them than their actual legal value. Upon their arrival, German, Austrian, Polish, and Russian refugee Jews were herded into dilapidated housing in the industrial part of Shanghai known as Hongkew. Those with the financial wherewithal to do so, moved to better accommodations and quickly started their own businesses: some were able to transform various buildings into profitable ventures. Those without such resources remained in Hongkew. Organizations such as the International Committee for the Organization of European Refugees in China was established in 1938 and supported primarily by the wealthy Sassoon family. Other local charitable relief organizations also aided the newcomers as did the International Red Cross and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT). Cultural and religious life flourished, building upon that which had been previously established by the Sephardim and the earlier generation of Russian Jews. Newspapers and theatrical performances in German, Yiddish, and English flourished as well. The students and rabbis of the Mir Yeshiva “set up shop” in the Beth Aharon Synagogue established by the Sephardic community.16 With the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and America’s entry into the war in the Pacific, the plight of the Jews began to change. The Japanese began increasing restrictions on both resident Chinese and Jews. Increasing regulations coupled with economic restrictions and food rationing brought about near starvation conditions throughout Shanghai. Ultimately, Jews were forced to live in a loosely-restricted area of settlement that they themselves would call a ghetto, but which had neither barbed wire nor brick walls. Jews, however, were restricted in their travels outside the ghetto areas by a sadistic Japanese officer, Kanoh Ghoya. He arbitrarily issued passes, physically and verbally assaulted some Jews while standing on a table due to his short stature.17 Approximately 15,000 refugee Jews out of the total Jewish population were confined within this restricted area, and approximately 2,000 Jews died during this incarceration. In 1942, the Gestapo representative in Tokyo, Joseph Albert Meisinger (1889-1947), the so-called “Butcher of Warsaw” responsible for the murders of 2,000 Jews and Poles in his position as State Police Commander Warsaw District, met with Japanese officials in Shanghai to

16

It should be noted, however, that some tensions existed between this Orthodox community, other refugees and other Jews, quite possibly because of their strictly kosher lifestyle and the obligatory demands of their religion. 17 Ghoya later apologized for his behavior at war’s end.

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discuss the “Final Solution” and plans for its implementation. These plans were never implemented.18 In 1944, the Joint Distribution Committee began sending money to aid the refugee Jews in Shanghai. Though the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, the war in the Pacific did not, and on July 17, 1945, US bombers attacked Shanghai. Thirty-one refugee Jews lost their lives during this raid, as did hundreds of Chinese. The Japanese surrendered Shanghai on August 26, 1945. With their departure, the Nationalist Chinese and American international relief organizations moved in to provide aid and Jews, once again, experienced freedom to travel about and pursue unrestricted economic and personal possibilities. With the growing knowledge of what had happened to their families and communities in Europe, many of the refugee Jews of Shanghai sought to leave. However, most of Shanghai’s Jews did not to return to their previous countries of origin, but, once again immigrated, to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. After the State of Israel was established in May of 1948, many also immigrated to Israel. Currently, there is no community of Jews, refugee or other, in Shanghai. In the final chapter of her book Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora communities of Shanghai19, which looks at both the Slavic and Jewish communities that found refuge between 1900 and 1950, Marcia Reynders Ristaino writes the following: The European Jews who arrived in Shanghai in the late 1930s could look to both well-established Ashkenazi leaders and organizations and the wealthy members of the Sephardi community for help. Jewish identity evoked support for the needy arriving Jews…the numbers and diversity of the refugees in terms of nationality (i.e. German, Austrian, Polish, Russian) and their differing degrees of religious commitment led to intense divisions and rivalries. This situation impaired organized efforts to provide them with assistance. But even with these obstacles to overcome, local Jewish organizations, helped significantly by international Jewish organizations, were still able to meet the basic needs of the Jewish refugees for food and shelter.20

Thus, when all is said and done, the salvation and survival of the refugee Jews of Shanghai, perhaps somewhat unique in the overall story of 18

Meisinger ultimately was turned over to Polish authorities who executed him on March 7, 1947. 19 Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 20 Ristaino, Post of Last Resort, 279-280.

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the Holocaust, reflects the commitment of Jews, no matter who they are and no matter their differences, to two distinct and primary Jewish values. These are (1) the concept of Amcha, that the Jewish people are, by definition, collectively united by a common faith (with variations to be sure) and fate, and (2) Kol Yisrael areivim zeh l’zeh/Each and every Jew is responsible for his/her fellow Jew, i.e. that the claim of the collectivity supersedes differences. Finally, as Ristaino writes, the process of aid did not end with VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day), August 14/15, 1945, but, ultimately, continued until the Jewish community of Shanghai was but a memory: The post-World War II years again showed the impact of the wellorganized Jewish relief organizations. Officials of these organizations arranged employment opportunities and relief supplies of all types, mainly for the European Jews. Another of their major tasks was to deflect early Chinese initiatives to deport German and Austrian Jews as enemy aliens. World Jewish organizations had also helped expedite the escape from Nazi Europe, and later, Shanghai, of revered Polish rabbinical groups (i.e. Mirer and Lubavitch Yeshivas) and kept open channels of communication about the fate of Jews in other Nazi-occupied countries. What these key organizations could not control, however, were the nationality-based restrictions on immigration imposed by various countries, especially the United States.21

Given the present reality of continuing vulnerable Jewish communities, not only in the Middle East but Europe as well, it is a reminder to Jews of their ongoing responsibilities to their fellow Jews and a model for other minority communities as well.

21

Ibid., 281.

CHAPTER SIX THE GLASS HOUSE BUILDING AS AN EMBODIMENT OF THE CHANGING FATE OF JEWS IN BUDAPEST FROM 1848 TO THE PRESENT NAOMI ROBERTSON1

Buildings as Testimony Obviously, a well-constructed building may easily outlive its original inhabitants and may indeed remain standing while several successive generations pass through its doors. A building that has survived in a war zone often bears particularly poignant testimony to the lives of those who have dwelt within its walls and who may no longer be among us to tell their stories. Such a building may bear the scars of war or of misuse, along with the ravages of aging and decay that affect all of us, humans and buildings alike. The Budapest Glass House is such a building. In this article, I will recount the history of the Glass House, tying this history to that of its Jewish owners as a reflection of the changing fate of Jews in Budapest from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. While the building itself was not constructed until the 1930s, the Weisz family who were its owners made their fortune during what was considered the “Golden Age of Hungarian Jewry”, which extended from 1867 until the end of World War I. This is a period during which most of Budapest’s iconic buildings were designed and constructed, and in many cases the architects who designed them and the industrialists who paid for their construction were Jewish. This article will explore how creativity, industriousness and financial 1

In October 2011, when the author made a presentation on the Glass House at Middle Tennessee State University, her name was Nancy Jean Robertson. In May 2012, Ms. Robertson legally changed her name to Naomi Ruth.

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wherewithal, once valued, became traits that led to envy, contempt, greed and the near destruction of individuals who had so notably served their country. Using a building to represent the history of a family is a literary device that has been employed to powerful effect to depict a building that has survived dramatic times, even as some of its inhabitants have not. A recent novel depicting the home of a prominent Central European family over several generations provides a portrait similar to the history of the Budapest Glass House.

Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room2 The common themes between Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room and my description of the Budapest Glass House do not end with their titles. While The Glass Room is set in a fictitious industrial town in the former Czechoslovakia, the novel is based on an actual house, now a museum, in the town of Brno, some 300 kilometers from Budapest. As in the novel, the real Villa Tugendhat was designed by a renowned German architect for a wealthy Jewish factory owner and his wife, much as we shall see that the Glass House was built for the Weisz family of Budapest. Setting aside all of Mawer’s literary devices, the history of the real family that inhabited Villa Tugendhat parallels the lives of the Glass House’s Weisz family in a strikingly similar manner. The Villa Tugendhat was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with construction beginning in 1929. The house includes a living room of glass and onyx that becomes the “glass room” in which many of the extraordinary scenes of Mawer’s novel take place. Mawer is quoted in a New York Times article3 as explaining, “It seemed so emblematic of the Czechoslovakia of the interwar period – a place of progressive ideas, of culture, of light and openness – and the dreadful double disaster of Nazism followed by Soviet Communism. The appeal for a novelist was obvious. I’m surprised no one else had had the idea before.” Ironically, according to the same New York Times article, Villa Tugendhat also was the site at which the declaration for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia was signed by Václav Klaus and Vladimír Meþiar in 1992. Restoration, with the objective of returning the villa to its original 1930s grandeur, began in 2010 and was completed in 2012, with a cost of 2

Mawer,S. The Glass Room (2009) The Other Press, New York, NY. Rawsthorn, Alice (February 24, 2012), “Reopening a Mies Modernist Landmark”, The New York Times.

3

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approximately $AU 9 million. Funding came primarily from the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Culture.4 Sadly, the possibility of the Hungarian government funding the restoration of the Glass House is very remote. The Tugendhat family lived in the villa for only eight years, since they fled Czechoslovakia for Switzerland in 1938. Here, Mawer’s novel diverges from the history of the Villa, since the novel’s family, the Landauers, remain in the house much too long, making a hair’s breadth escape, with the death of one of the protagonists and the deportation to a concentration camp of another. In the novel, the “Glass Room” is, during the later war years, entrusted to a cadre of Nazi eugenicists (including one notably sadistic one) who are then driven out by the invading Soviet forces who stable their horses there. According to the aforementioned New York Times article, this latter act of desecration did indeed occur at Villa Tugendhat, along with the burning of opulent furniture from interior designer Lilly Reich.5 The post-war use of the house as a dance school and rehabilitation center also is mirrored in Mawer’s novel, although the novel’s too-neatly-tied-together ending did not take place, since the Tugendhats never returned to the villa. The newly-restored villa now hosts tours six days per week and apparently requires ticket purchase at least a month in advance. As Simon Mawer stated, it is amazing that a place with architecture as dazzling, and a history as chequered, as Villa Tugendhat had not already inspired a novel. Buildings bear silent witness to joyful events, to atrocities, and to the banality of everyday life. Their walls give testimony to all the passions of which humans are capable and to the scars and the indignities that are visited upon them. A forward-thinking government, or some coalition of wealthy individuals, may recognise a building’s dignity, worth and historical significance and may pledge funds to restore it to its former grandeur. The building that inspired The Glass Room has benefitted from wealthy and appreciative donors; the Budapest Glass House, by contrast, has been left to decay.

Historical Notes on the Golden Age of Hungarian Jewry The Tugendhat family shared with the Weisz family of Budapest the good fortune that Jews enjoyed in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian 4 Haluzova, Sona (February 29, 2012), “Tugendhat Villa: restoration completed”, press release from the website of Tugendhat Villa: http://www.tugendhat.eu/data/ tz_pdf/en/Villa_Tugendhat_PR_Restoration_Completed.pdf. 5 Rawsthorn, Alice (February 24, 2012), “Reopening a Mies Modernist Landmark”, The New York Times.

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Empire until the empire’s collapse at the end of World War I. This was a time when enterprise, inventiveness, hard work and venture capitalism were valued, and many Jews had, over their centuries in Europe, honed these characteristics and skills. It is helpful to begin this historical analysis by looking back nearly a century before the Shoah, to a time when Hungarian Jewish communities began to thrive. One of the reasons for Jewish good fortune in the AustroHungarian Empire was the long-lived Emperor Franz Josef, who ruled from 1848 to the middle of the First World War in 1916.6 Albert Lindemann, in the 6th chapter of his insightful book Esau’s Tears, describes Franz Josef as a ruler who “looked upon his Jewish subjects with benevolence”, rewarding talented and loyal Jewish financiers with titles of nobility and maintaining a military where 3,000 of 27,000 officers were Jewish. Indeed, Hungary’s Jews were generally more loyal to Franz Josef than were the nationalistic Magyars, and when in 1867 the AustroHungarian Empire became an Ausgleich (the creation of a dual monarchy), Jews were among the beneficiaries of the new form of government. Briefly emancipated in 1848, only to have their rights revoked the following year, Jews finally received rights as citizens in 1867. An influx of Jews to both Austria and Hungary followed. Lindemann states7 that Hungarian antisemites referred to Budapest as “Judapest”, as the Jewish population there swelled to over 200,000 by 1910. The urbanised Jews, not content to remain shop-keepers and artisans, quickly entered the professions, especially after the opening of the Budapest University of Jewish Studies in 1877. By 1920, Jews were vastly over-represented in the professions relative to their 6% share of the population of Hungary, and indeed, in 1920, the Numerus Clausus Act was introduced in an attempt to restrict Jewish participation in the professions to 6%. Maria Kovacs in her book Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics: Hungary from the Hapsburgs to the Holocaust8 wrote that, in 1920, Jews had the following representations among professionals: lawyers (60%), medical doctors (51%), and engineers (33%). She further explains that even though Numerus Clausus caused an immediate decline in Jewish students enrolled in university (and the immediate departure of promising young Jewish scientists such as theoretical physicist Edward Teller), some Jews got around the restriction by converting to Christianity or “Magyarizing” their names. Still, neither 6

Lindemann, A. (1997) Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge University Press. 7 Lindemann, A. (1997) Page 189. 8 Kovacs, M (1994). Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics: Hungary from the Hapsburgs to the Holocaust ,Oxford University Press. See pages 60 to 65.

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these ploys, nor the honors that had been bestowed upon their fathers and grandfathers, were of any protection for Jews during the Shoah. The year 1920 was truly the start of a precipitous decline through deprivation of rights, confiscation of property, humiliation, forced labour, deportation and murder. The Numerus Clausus led directly to the gates of Auschwitz.

Searching for a History of the Glass House Until recently I was able only to piece together a history of the Glass House from sources that mentioned it as a former glass warehouse under Swiss protection during the last months of World War II. None of these sources had as a primary interest the house itself, but rather in the people who resided there or the events that occurred there between circa July 1944 and January 1945. Aside from this, I had only my own observations and photographs, plus what I could glean from conversations with Gyorgy Vamos, who is the Director of the Carl Lutz Foundation and the curator of the small Glass House museum. Because conversations with Vamos have had to take place through friends or relatives serving as interpreters, I have found it difficult to obtain more than a sketchy outline of the house’s history until Vamos made me aware of a recently-completed Hungarianlanguage Glass House history. Friends in the Canberra Jewish community in Australia introduced me to David Sade, a Hungarian who was qualified to translate the document because, in addition to speaking English well after having spent two decades in Australia, he is a structural engineer with a knowledge of architectural terminology in both Hungarian and English. Also, he is a child survivor of the Holocaust in Budapest. Sade maintains a strong interest in Budapest’s buildings and is fascinated by the Glass House as a building and as a centre for Jewish resistance in the final months of the war. He assisted in translating the document on the history of the house, in keeping me informed of events in Hungary, and serving as my host during a trip to Budapest.

Glass House History Commissioned by the Current Owners of the Building The Hungarian version of the Glass House’s history was completed in March 2011 as part of an initiative to place the building under heritage protection. The document contains a list of recommended renovations to restore the Glass House to at least part of the 1930s glory of its iconic style, both inside and out. Ostensibly, this document was one of several prepared to assist the Hungarian government in determining the feasibility

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of restoring certain historical sites, in particular those related to the Holocaust in Hungary. A communiqué from the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office9 states the following in reference to the Glass House: Renovation of the building under number 29 Vadász Street – the Glass House – which used to be under the protection of Carl Lutz, Swiss diplomat in 1944. Its future usage: presentation of the Jewish self-rescuing attempts, setting up constant exhibitions.10

The renovation proposed above is listed under the heading “Further heritage protection programmes and programmes of a commemorative nature” with a realization date of “continuously throughout the memorial year”. There has been no work started on renovation of the Glass House, nor any funding allocated for it, thus a target date for its completion is unavailable. Two [Hungarian] entrepreneurs, who are the primary owners of the house, are eager to restore the building but currently lack the funding to do so. It was they who commissioned architectural historian Zoltán Fehérvári to prepare a history of the Glass House, which has been translated by David Sade. Upon meeting Fehérvári on 26 May 2014, I obtained his approval to utilize information and photos from his document.11

Early History of Pest The neighborhood surrounding the Glass House is a vibrant one today. The Google Earth image below shows the location of the Glass House 9

Office of the Prime Minister of Hungary (13 March 2013) Hungarian Holocaust Year. This document, which I downloaded in August 2013, has disappeared from the Office of the Prime Minister and has been replaced by a new website: http://holocaustmemorialyear2014.gov.hu/ which makes no mention of specific plans for building restoration or for conferences that were promised for this, the 70th commemorative year. My letters to the Prime Minister’s Office and to the office of the Hungarian Ambassador to Australia Anna Siko have gone unanswered. The original Hungarian Holocaust Year document is, however, retrievable at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/143280939/Hungarian-HolocaustMemorial-Year-2014-Preliminary-Proposal having apparently been archived there. It may be downloaded only after paying a fee. 10 Ibid, page 13. 11 In an email dated 11 June 2014, Mr. Fehérvári also sent me an article (in Hungarian) featuring some of the highlights of his Glass House history. It is entitled Az Uveghaz and was prepared as one of a series of essays in honour of Istvan Bibo by the CentrArt Egyesulet in 2011.

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relative to the Danube, visible on the left of the image. Also visible is Hungary’s ornate Parliament House (on the banks of the Danube) and Szabadsag Square, which includes the American Embassy and a largerthan-life statue of Ronald Reagan. This “Freedom Square” has also been the site of numerous anti-government demonstrations in recent years. The buildings visible in the Google Earth image have, however, been constructed within the past two centuries. Prior to that, this area called Lipótváros was, according to the history prepared by Fehérvári, “an empty sand dune wasteland.”12 The area had belonged to a convent located on nearby Margaret Island until the mid-18th century when the city of Pest managed to claim it. The neighbourhood moniker of Lipótváros, which still stands today, was in honour of Kaiser Lipót, or Leopold I, who was Austrian and Holy Roman Emperor 1658-1705.

Figure 6-1: Neighborhood surrounding Glass House (Google Earth image).

The Weisz Family and a brief history of the Glass House During the 19th century, the plots around the present-day Glass House were subdivided, and the property changed hands numerous times. About the time of the unification of Buda and Pest (1873) the property was 12 Fehérvári, Z. Budapest, Vadász Street 29. Academic Documentation. A study by: Zoltán Fehérvári. March 2011. Page 8.

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owned by the Halbauer family, who sold it to glass merchant Gyula Weisz (or Weiss) in 1906.

Figure 6-2: Photo of the Weisz family as preserved on the Glass House website.13

The fate of Gyula’s son Artur is well known, as he was not only the owner of the Glass House in 1944 but also one of its heroes and martyrs. Artur was taken into custory by functionaries of the Arrow Cross14 government on New Year’s Eve 1944, and he never returned. According to Gyorgy Vamos, curator of the Glass House museum, Gyula and Ernesztina Weisz survived the war but, being well into their 70s, were unable to recover the glass works enterprise. Artur’s wife Manci remarried and immigrated to 13 Source of photo: http://www.uveghaz.org/?categoryId=36529. This photo was uploaded from www.upsite.co.il/images/832_c85eebda37e078521e1936a72 65a32d.jpg. It is in the public domain. 14 EDITORS’ NOTE: The Arrow Cross (Nyilaskeresztes Párt) was a fascist movement and political party founded by Ferenz Szálasi in 1937. In 1939 it won approximately 25% of the votes cast and became the most important opposition party to the government of Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy. In mid-March 1944, Horthy consented to the German occupation of Hungary and remained in power. However, in October 1944, when he failed to negotiate Hungary’s removal from its alliance with Germany and Horthy reneged on the deportation of the Jews, he was forced to resign. Szálasi was installed as head of state by the Germans, making the functionaries referred to in this sentence de facto government officials.

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the United States with their son, Gabor. While the Weisz family is central to the story of the Glass House, their glass company was “nationalised” by the Hungarian state in 1950.15 Gyula Weisz purchased the property in 1906 and, over three decades, built up a thriving business. His ability to engage the services of noted architect Lajos Kozma in 1934 testifies to the success of his glass enterprise. Kozma was known not only for his structural design of numerous Hungarian villas in the 1920s and 1930s but also for their interiors, and indeed for the furniture that adorned them. While most of the buildings he designed were residential, he also was the architect of dental offices and of schools, corporate offices and theatres. Kozma’s trademark designs include black-and-white tiled floors and the use of glass not only as windows but in some of the interior features.16 According to the Fehérvári document, Lajos Kozma stipulated the following features for the Glass House: - Ground floor storeroom for the retail sales department - A narrow-gauge train passing through the gateway into the courtyard (note that the tracks for this are still visible today) - A mobile crane with a one-tonne capacity for lifting products within the courtyard - An elevator in the courtyard for conveying other goods to the wholesale sales department and upstairs showroom - A first-floor office space for management staff, secretarial staff and accountants, along with a showroom, waiting room and toilets - Second-floor storerooms for glass products - A four-room apartment for Gyula Weisz’s son, Artur and his family - A cellar with a chute for lowering goods One notable aspect of the Glass House was the use of glass as a building material in as many interior and exterior applications as possible with the presumption that the building itself would serve as an advertisement for its products. The following are some of the glass features visible on the exterior of the Glass House:

15 Fehérvári, Z. (2011) Page 12. Until the change of the regime in 1990, the building was handled by various state owned companies. From 1951 the “Glazing Co.”, then the “Building Glazing Co.”, then from 1959 the “General Trade Co.” belonging to the Ministry of Building, and from 1965 the “Light Industry Planning Co.” used the property. 16 Horanyi, E. (2006) Modern Buildings by Kozma Lajos. TERC, member of the Union of Hungarian Book Publishers.

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Fire-resistant “diamond and honey-comb glass bricks” on the ground-floor sales department Roof overhangs containing 14 segments using “Sollux” translucent glass-bricks Concertina-style garage doors made from wire-reinforced glass Black panes of glass on the first floor to show a continuous black band A glass logo proclaiming Uvegház, or Glass House, between the first and second storeys

Figure 6-3: Exterior of the Glass House17

The interior also made ample and creative use of glass, including in the following features: Coloured glass panels in the walls, ceiling and floors of the kitchen and bathroom of the Manager’s Apartment and staircases made

17 Permission was granted by Zoltan Fehervari, the author of the report on the Glass House’s history, to utilise any photographs included in his report.

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of 25mm thick Belgian glass, with gleaming, coloured glass panels along the walls of the stairways.

Figure 6-4: Interior of Glass House

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Note the colored glass panels along the walls and the “chessboard” floor, a trademark of Lajos Kozma. - Black, white and red “marble glass” used on the walls and even the ceiling (literally, a glass ceiling!), along with the “chessboard” floor, as shown in the photo below - The logo of Gyula Weisz incorporated into both the floor and the doorway

Figure 6-5: Interior of Glass House

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Figure 6-6: Ground workshop and storeroom of Glass House

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Figure 6-7: Futuristic floor-to-ceiling coat rack and umbrella stand

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Figure 6-8: State-of-the-art glass-enclosed office from 1935 (note Underwood typewriter and telephone with rotary dial)

Fehérvári speculates18 that Gyula and Artur Weisz had a beneficial relationship with architect Lajos Kozma, since the Weisz’s glass products are found in the Atrium Theatre as well as numerous other commercial and residential buildings designed by Kozma. Until 1944, the Weisz family appeared to be enjoying commercial success and a comfortable life within the Glass House’s residential quarters. It seems safe to say that, like 700,000 other Hungarian Jews, the Weisz family remained reassured by cordial relationships with their neighbours, business partners and clients and by their government’s willingness to protect them. Tragically, their confidence was sorely misplaced.

18

Fehérvári, Z. (2011) Page 22.

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The Glass House in 1944-45 Until March 1944 the Glass House was a functioning glass retail and wholesale operation, with offices and warehouses and a top-floor apartment. By May 1944 this Jewish-owned business was under threat of confiscation by the Hungarian government of Miklós Horthy, and it was only through a diplomatic coup scored by Carl Lutz (who negotiated directly with Eichmann)19 that it came under Swiss protection. By December 31, 1944, it was home to 3,000 people. On that same day, soldiers of the Arrow Cross government invaded the building, forcing inhabitants out into the icy streets. When Artur Weisz intervened, he was arrested by the Arrow Cross government, with the promise that he would be allowed to return. He never did.

Figure 6-9: People attempting to enter the Glass House in 194420 19

EDITORS’ NOTE: Adolf Eichmann (1906-1963) at this time was Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA of Reich Security Central Office) Section IV B4, part of the Allgemeine SS (Schutzstaffel or General SS). Only in Hungary did Eichmann involve himself directly in the deportation of Jews. From April-July 1944, 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported under his orders. 20 From: http://digitalassets.ushmm.org/photoarchives/detail.aspx?id=12142. Use of this photograph is permitted under terms of use specified for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: www.ushmm.org/copyright-and-legal-information/terms-of-use.

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There are no known photographs of the interior of the Glass House in 1944. The above photo gives a glimpse of those using the first-floor office space. Numerous survivor testimonies21 attest that this space was being utilised by Zionist youths for the production of thousands of false documents that were then couriered into the Jewish ghetto for distribution. The artist’s sketch below is the only known artistic rendering of life within one of the crowded living quarters of the Glass House. Here of particular interest is the young woman with braided hair turning out documents, the young man with a backpack, and dozens of people sitting on bunks in what must be one of the underground storage rooms. The bare light bulb barely illuminates the scene.

Figure 6-10: Photograph taken by author at Glass House Museum, December 2011.

21

These include: Benshalom, R. (2001). We Struggled for Life. Jerusalem, Gefen Publishing House. Denes, M. (1997). Castles Burning. New York, W.W. Norton and Company. Gur, D. (2004). Brothers for Resistance and Rescue: The Underground Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary during World War II. Jerusalem, Gefen Publishing House. Shkedi, Moshe. (2005) The Fatal Jump For Life, Budapest, Hungary 15.10.1944. Jerusalem, Israel. (in Hebrew).

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Survivor testimonies attest to the crowding of every part of the Glass House: people sleeping between panes of glass, people so crowded onto bunk beds that when one person turned they all had to move and people sleeping on the staircases. The underground cellars, the attics, the office spaces, the warehouses and the courtyard, all were crammed with humanity. There are reports that the inhabitants also broke through the walls into an unused sports club at 31 Vadász Street and that when Arrow Cross functionaries invaded on New Year’s Eve 1944, some residents climbed through the rubble to hide there. Killed during this incursion, along with owner Artur Weisz, were the following people who are memorialised on a plaque on the Glass House’s exterior:

Figure 6-11: Photgraph taken by author in December 2011.

The inadequate sanitary facilities within the Glass House must also have taken their toll on the building, as survivors attest to hastily-constructed latrines in the courtyards, long queues to use these facilities, outbreaks of infectious diseases, infestations of lice and other parasites, and all the horrors that are bound to occur when thousands of people are packed into spaces that were not constructed as residential, let alone to become a refuge for desperate people. It is no wonder that when the Soviet Army

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liberated the Glass House on January 17, 1945, survivors report people scattering in every direction. In spite of the damage that must have occurred due to over-crowding within the Glass House, the building did survive largely intact. Fehérvári reports that a Russian bomb that hit a nearby building in January 1945 caused some of the Glass House’s beautiful glass façade to shatter, but otherwise the building was left abandoned but still standing.

The Glass House 1945 to 2005 Survivor testimonies and historical documents22 recount the chaos that ensued as the Red Army gained a stranglehold on Budapest. It was during January 1945 that Raoul Wallenberg disappeared, and to this day no one can say with certainty when and where he met his death.23 The Soviet Army raged through the streets, raping, looting, and summarily executing perpetrators, victims and heroes alike. It is no wonder that records of what happened to individual buildings such as the Glass House are sketchy for this period. The next Glass House-related event about which Fehérvári was able to obtain information is the 1951 “nationalising” of the former Weisz Glass Company. A new entity called the “Building Glazing Company” took possession of the property and began to renovate and engage in a massive clean-up. In 1957, plans were submitted to create six residential apartments in place of the second floor warehouse, necessitating changes to the staircase and removal of Lajos Kozma’s trademark black-and-white landings and decorative glass walls and ceilings. In addition, the exquisite glass bricks of the façade were demolished and the overhanging roof with its Uveghaz (Glasshouse) sign was removed. Windows on all floors were standardised. A much-diminished Glass House, virtually devoid of its original character, may be seen in plans from 1960, as well as the buildings-surrounding–a-courtyard configuration familiar to visitors of the Glass House today. Some mysteries remain as to what occurred in the building behind the courtyard (shown to the right in the Google Earth image) in the post-war 22

See in particular, Ungvary, K. (2006) The Siege of Budapest. Yale University Press. EDITORS’ NOTE: Raoul Wallenberg (born 1912) was a Swedish architect and businessman who was recruited by the War Refugee Board (WRB) and given diplomatic status as first secretary to the Swedish legation in Hungary. His task was to attempt to save and otherwise aid Hungarian Jews working with the WRB and World Jewish Congress. He is credited with saving many thousand Hungarian Jews, perhaps as many as 100,000. 23

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period. Gyorgy Vamos has confirmed that this building was warehouse space occupied by some of the thousands of Jewish refugees in 1944-45, but he has also stated that it is structurally unsound and is likely to be torn down, even if restoration of the remaining buildings is carried out. There is evidence of squatters having resided in this building, although it is possible that it was simply the residence of a bicycle club. The only significant changes that have occurred since the collapse of the Communist regime in 1990 are the purchase of the building by entrepreneur Gabor Kostyal and Gyorgy Vamos’ 2005 establishment of a museum in one of the former garages. As their website states, the Carl Lutz Foundation is sustained entirely from donations, coming primarily from survivors and their families.24

Struggle for Protected Status Fehérvári documents a long-standing struggle for protected status for the Glass House, dating back to 1974. As government departments were disbanded and new departments established, the Glass House languished in an unprotected state, suffering the degradation of uncaring landlords, greedy industrialists and simply the ravages of time, as demonstrated in this recent photo:

Figure 6-12: Photograph of courtyard by David Sade, August 2013

24

http://www.uveghaz.org/?categoryId=36511

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In 2008, when the “National Monument Protection Agency” was replaced by the "Office of the Cultural Inheritance", the Glass House finally received temporary protection. Fehérvári cites Imola Gebauer of the “Office of Cultural Inheritance” as stating: Till now, the 'Glass House' was an unrecognised and un-acknowledged building by one of the most prominent architects of Hungarian modern architecture. The building, currently under temporary protection, especially in its interior, represents historical values, the protection of which cannot be guaranteed by present administrative means. A declaration of protected status would allow the professional reconstruction of the building, which would make it acceptable for the public as well. The protected monument status of the building at Vadász Street 29 would widen the prospect for investigators of the Jewish history and for researchers of local history as well, thus opening the door for worthy commemoration."25

Restoration Proposal

Figure 6-13: Exterior of Glass House, photography by David Sade, August 2013

Fehérvári concludes his history and appraisal of the Glass House with a proposal for its restoration. Both the interior and exterior of the Glass 25

Fehérvári, Z. (2011) Page 27.

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House are in a shocking state of decay. The above photo of the Glass House’s exterior shows the utilitarian windows installed after 1960, as well as the complete absence of glass adornments, and a heavy level of grime. The first-floor interior is in a deplorable and even dangerous state, with huge holes in the old parquet floors, exposed wires, and a general level of grime. Although Fehérvári does not mention this, it seems clear that this former warehouse area will also need to be brought up to safety standards if the house is to become a national landmark. Other safety violations clearly exist in the cavernous cellar and in the stairway leading to it, although these areas are fascinating from a historical perspective as many survivors speak about residing in the cellar. We can imagine the bunk beds on the left, the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, the young woman feverishly turning out false documents, and the young man with the backpack preparing to distribute them. Such is the evocative power of buildings such as this that they cause the imagination to soar. Fehérvári’s historical document and his proposal for restoration did not suggest to the Monuments Protection Agency that the Glass House should be preserved because the building itself managed to preserve the lives of 3,000 Jews. Neither does he suggest that it be preserved because it represents the heroism of Swiss Vice Consul Carl Lutz and the courageous and self-sacrificing Zionist youth. Rather, his advocacy for the building is based on its architectural significance due to its design by Lajos Kozma. There is no financial proposal attached to the list of suggested restorations, and the likelihood of a government with serious financial problems allocating such a sum to preserve a building that might be promptly defaced by anti-Semites is remote. A meeting with Gabor Kostyal on 27 May 2014 confirmed my suspicion that the Hungarian government is unlikely to contribute to the Glass House’s restoration. Kostyal and his brother are entrepreneurs and inventors. In 2007 they purchased 85% of the Glass House building (the remaining 15% consists of 4 apartments on the top floor). They are keen to restore the Vadasz Street portion of the Glass House to its original splendour, constructing a garage beneath it, an office building in the present courtyard and encourage the expansion of the current museum. An estimate of total cost for this enterprise would be about $AU 8 million. The Kostyal brothers are seeking support from a wealthy philanthropist in Australia who, as a 13-year-old, obtained protective passes from inside the Glass House. The importance of restoring and preserving this iconic place should not be lost on anyone with a connection to it.

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In viewing Vadász Street in the photo I took on a damp day in January 2012, I am reminded of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico entitled “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street”. Although di Chirico painted his eerie scene in 1914, 30 years before the Holocaust in Hungary, the sense of foreboding that it creates seems to linger on Vadász Street. A girl rolls a hoop toward the shadow of a hulking, terrifying figure. An empty van, reminiscent of a railway car, lies open, waiting to entrap her. The horrible fate the National Socialist state mandated for all Hungarian Jews was spared to many of those who managed to find sanctuary within the Glass House. It remains a place of testimony: to the hard work and ingenuity of the Weisz family, to the creativity and brilliance of Lajos Kozma, to the courage of Carl Lutz, to the martyrdom of many of the Zionist youth, and to the full lives that have been lived by those who on January 17, 1945 exited its doors. Aside from the visceral sense of mystery that some Glass House photos evoke, there are mysteries pertaining to humanity’s propensity for evil, and, conversely to the extraordinary bravery of those who risked their own lives to save the lives of others. As in Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, buildings like the Glass House are testimonials to our tragedies and our triumphs, to depravity and to all the soaring heights of which humans are capable.

Figure 6-14: Photograph by author of Vadász Street, January 2012.

CHAPTER SEVEN ALABAMA’S JEWS AND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1938-1941 DAN J. PUCKETT

After the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, they enforced increasingly restrictive antisemitic measures such as economic boycotts, professional and social segregation, and the legal removal of Jews civil rights and citizenship. As a result, German Jews were systematically isolated and marginalized. By 1938, the Nazi efforts to expunge the Jews from German life, as well as from the recently annexed Austria, took the form of forced emigration. Nonetheless, they placed enormous obstacles in the way of emigration by confiscating Jewish property, imposing a steep emigration tax, and limiting the amount of money that could be transferred by Jews from German banks. Few nations opened their doors to the impoverished Jewish refugees. The two nations best suited to aid the Jews, the United States and Great Britain, both maintained strict limitations on immigration. In the United States, the public outcry against a wave of refugees and entrenched antisemitic sentiment in the federal government resulted in thousands of Jews being denied entrance into the country during the 1930s. The American State Department imposed antisemitic, bureaucratic hurdles, what David Wyman has called “paper walls,” that prevented Jewish refugees from entering the United States in greater numbers.1 Approximately 90,000 Jewish refugees entered the United States between 1933 and 1939, a far smaller number than the immigration quotas from Nazi-dominated lands allowed. Those Jews generally came to New York, often with only the clothes on their backs. The rapid influx of Jewish refugees to New 1

David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968); David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

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York created tremendous financial and social strains on the New York Jewish community. Many Jewish leaders worried that overcrowding was creating another Jewish ghetto, prompting intensive efforts to re-settle refugees throughout the country.2 Great Britain, like the United States, also erected barriers to fleeing European Jews. Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that promised the creation of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. Despite this pledge and the desperate plight of the Jews in Europe, Britain ignored the cries for aid from Jewish and humanitarian groups, and refused to open Palestine as a haven for the Jews. Indeed, the Nazi policy of forced emigration failed precisely because the restrictive and antisemitic policies of the United States and Great Britain meant that the two places most able to absorb large numbers of Jewish immigrants remained effectively closed to Jewish refugees. Because of the dire threat to Jews driven under the Nazi heel, made more explicit after Kristallnacht, Alabama’s Jews, like Jews throughout the United States, clearly recognized a responsibility to aid and support Jews worldwide. They organized at both the local and state level to work for the rescue of those still trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe. These efforts included lobbying for relaxed immigration policies and opening Palestine as a refuge for persecuted European Jews, as well as sponsoring refugees who wanted to flee or who had already fled Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Although these lobbying efforts had little effect on the immigration and refugee policies of either the United States or Great Britain, the sponsorship of refugees by Alabama’s Jews had a profound effect on both the individual refugees and Alabama’s Jewish community at large. Public opinion in Alabama, as well as throughout the United States, generally sympathized with the Jews attempting to flee Nazi persecution, but this did not translate into demands to provide refuge for them in the United States. As early as 1934, editors at the Birmingham Age-Herald called for sympathy and understanding from the United States government to fill its immigration quota from Germany, although its motive is not merely on behalf of Jews but of all Germans who are under the Nazi heel. At no time did the editors of the Age-Herald, or anybody else, advocate exceeding existing quotas. Later that same year, the Age-Herald suggested Palestine as the solution to the great “burden” that German refugees placed on the nations of the world, a common refrain when discussing the plight

2

Special meeting with Dr. Kohs, December 15, 1938, binder 1936-1940, Birmingham United Jewish Fund Minutes, Levite Jewish Community Center (hereafter cited as LJCC).

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of Jewish refugees.3 Even after the intense violence of Kristallnacht in 1938, there is little evidence to suggest that non-Jewish Alabamians supported any extra-ordinary effort to aid suffering Jews above advocating filling existing immigration quotas, a position consistent with national opinion. In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, a poll by the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago revealed that ninety-four percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews, but seventy-two percent of those polled opposed admitting a large number of German Jews into the United States.4 The Birmingham News spoke for many non-Jews concerning the refugee crisis when it reasoned that, in the midst of the lingering Depression, no country could be expected to increase immigration beyond present legal limits, and that there should be ample latitude within existing immigration quotas to take care of most, if not all, of the refugees.5 In the months following Kristallnacht attention on immigration peaked, but little more was said in the press about increased quotas. By 1940, few in the press or public addressed the issue. Instead, the drive to open British Palestine for Jewish refugees gained momentum.

Alabama’s Jews Respond to the Crisis Many individual Jews sponsored family members and numerous nonfamilial refugees, often much earlier than 1938. It is unknown, however, just how many people came to Alabama in this fashion during the 1930s, but these efforts, which comprised relatively small numbers when compared to major metropolitan centers such as New York City, unquestionably saved lives. Individuals in Alabama such as Sol Kahn, Charles Wampold, and Julius Hagedorn, in addition to Joseph Abraham and Herman Loeb, were only a fraction of the Jews in the state who sacrificed much to bring family and friends to the United States. Sol Kahn, who had been brought over from Germany by his uncle many years prior to the Nazi seizure of power, in return brought over his nephew and two nieces from Worms, Germany, in 1934. Kahn owned Kahn Manufacturing Company in Mobile and supposedly signed between 100 and 200 affidavits. These were sworn statements that the visa applicant (immigrant) would not become a public charge during the 1930s to rescue German Jews from Nazi persecution, so many that a family member 3

Birmingham Age-Herald, March 21, 1934, 6; April 13, 1934, 6. The United States and the Refugee Crisis, www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/stlouis/teach/supread.htm, accessed June 11, 2010. 5 Birmingham News, March 30, 1938, 8. 4

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jokingly quipped that he “was surprised that Hitler didn’t send him an Iron Cross” for removing so many Jews from Germany.6 In Opelika, Alabama, Julius and Amelia Hagedorn sponsored six of their relatives from Westheim, Germany in 1937. Julius S. Hagedorn, who grew up in the Westphalia region of Germany, returned to visit his relatives in 1935 and was appalled at the antisemitism rampant there. After his return to the United States, he told the Opelika Kiwanis Club of the “depression and despair among the people” of Germany.7 Hagedorn quickly made arrangements for his relatives, his brother and sister, Joseph Hagedorn and Rosalie Hagedorn Israelsohn, as well as Israelsohn’s son-inlaw and daughter Arnold and Hedwig Stern and their children, Heinz and Hannelora, to emigrate to the United States. On June 24, 1937, Hagedorn met them at the dock in New York City. Upon their arrival in Opelika, the townspeople greeted them at the train station, and Opelika’s mayor, John Crossley, presented them with a proclamation welcoming them to the United States and to Opelika. In order to acculturate more quickly, Julius Hagedorn suggested that the children Americanize their names: Heinz became Henry and Hannelora became Lora. The local kindergarten teacher, Louise Tollison, even learned German prior to their arrival in order to communicate with the Stern children and help them learn English. Acculturation came easier for the children: Henry Stern recalled that they experienced “a typical American childhood.” However, the adults, understandably, had a more difficult time. Ruth Meadows, a vocational teacher in town, worked with the Sterns, using a Sears Roebuck catalogue to help them learn English; Hagedorn and Israelsohn, however, never learned English.8 Like other refugees who had been sponsored by friends or relatives, they were assured employment. Just as Kahn had done in Mobile, Hagedorn employed his relatives in his business, the largest department store in Opelika. Yet, unlike many of the refugees who made it to the United States, the Sterns, Hagedorn, and Israelsohn had made additional financial arrangements to begin their new life in America. Prior to their departure, they sold their belongings in Germany and subsequently purchased goods and merchandise -- linens, jewelry, and silver -- which they shipped to Hagedorn’s department store in Opelika. After they 6

Milton Klein, interviewed by Dan J. Puckett, Mobile, Alabama, September 24, 2009. 7 Opelika Daily News, July 12, 1935. 8 Henry Stern, interviewed by Karni Perez, September 16, 1997, Opelika, Alabama, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, University of Southern California.

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arrived, they sold the goods to members of the community and used the money to establish themselves, even building a house in town. The warm welcome that the Sterns, Hagedorn, and Israelsohn experienced was atypical for most refugees, and it resulted from the goodwill of Opelika’s citizens and the prominence of Julius Hagedorn in the community. It certainly made an impression as Henry Stern observed that their welcome was in sharp contrast to the brutal treatment of Jews by the Nazis.9 Some individuals relied heavily upon their representatives to assist them. Alabama’s politicians strongly condemned the Nazi treatment of Jews in Europe, and were clearly sympathetic to the plight of the persecuted German Jews, but they nevertheless advocated maintaining the current immigration policy. Their support of these immigration restrictions, however, did not extend to their Jewish constituents’ family and friends imperiled in Europe whom they assisted by removing the obstacles to obtaining American visas. For instance, United States Senator Lister Hill used his political influence in Washington to rescue numerous European Jews, and assisted many in Montgomery’s Jewish community and throughout Alabama in matters both great and mundane. Charles Wampold in Montgomery used his influence with Hill to get his wife’s parents, Bertha and Moritz Manasse, out of Germany. Initially, Moritz Manasse resisted leaving Germany, believing that the persecution would pass in time, but after Nazis ransacked their house during Kristallnacht the Manasses finally fled, arriving in Montgomery in February 1939 with “nothing but the clothes on their back.”10 Hill also helped Herman Loeb, Sr., bring between thirty-five and forty relatives from Bavaria to the United States in 1937, and, on behalf of Montgomery’s Sephardic congregation Etz Ahayem, he secured the visa of Rabbi Moses Albagli, who arrived in the city in 1939.11 While Hill’s sympathy for his Jewish 9 http://www.bhamholocausteducation.org/biostern.htm. Accessed August 23, 2011; Stern interview. 10 Charles H. Wampold, Jr., interview with Louisa H. Weinrib, October 30, 1991, Montgomery, Alabama, 1-5, box 1, folder 27, Holocaust Survivors and U.S. Liberators Oral History Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History (hereafter cited as ADAH). Bertha Manasse’s siblings included Samuel Kaufman, the president of Schloss & Kahn Grocery Company, Jacob Kaufman, Clara Kaufman Loeb, and Paula Kaufman Wampold. The Manasses moved to New York in the early 1940s because of the language difficulties in Montgomery. 11 Rabbi Albagli received a non-quota immigration visa as a minister of religion. He was in Naples, Italy. See Lister Hill to Commissioner of Immigration, December 15, 1938; Lister Hill to Thomas D. Bowman, December 19, 1938; Thomas D. Bowman to Lister Hill, January 21, 1939; Lister Hill to Thomas B. Hill, February 20, 1939; Thomas B. Hill to Lister Hill, February 23, 1939; E.

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constituents and friends existed largely because of his mother’s German Jewish heritage, a fact that he concealed from the public, his actions on behalf of the persecuted European Jews emanated from his humanitarian concern for them and his outrage at Nazi brutality. Indeed, throughout his long political career, Hill unselfishly assisted numerous people, both publicly and privately, who came to him in need.12 He never made public his actions on behalf of the Jews, nor did other Alabama politicians who helped their Jewish constituents, but he worried that his Jewish heritage, rumored in the community, might hurt him in elections. Hill had actually been raised as a Catholic, but because of the powerful anti-Catholic sentiment in the South, he renounced his Catholicism when he sought public office in 1923. United States Representative John Sparkman also became a veteran at writing letters in connection with immigration matters and helped numerous constituents bring their family into the country. In one case, Sparkman worked for almost two years to secure visas for family members of Joseph Abraham, a friend and former Huntsville constituent. Abraham’s aunts, Elsa and Sofie Loew, had been removed from their homes in Germany and interned at Camp de Gurs, Basses Pyrenees, in Vichy France, in late 1940.13 Sparkman’s attempts to secure passage and visas for the two sisters met with resistance at the State Department, which advised him that it did not “invite aliens to the Consular Offices, and especially those aliens in concentration camps,” to negotiate for immigration visas. The State Department determined that the German government had “complete control” over their release from the concentration camp and their transportation from the internment camp to Marseilles.14 For over a year, the Loew case met with postponement after Toranto to Thomas B. Hill, March 30, 1939, all in box 161, fld.1, Lister Hill Papers, Hoole Special Collections, University of Alabama (hereafter cited as HSC). 12 Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Lister Hill: Statesman from the South (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 3, 13; Hill served in the House of Representatives from 1923 until his election to the Senate in 1938, where he represented Alabama until his retirement in 1969. 13 Joseph L. Abraham to John Sparkman, January 13, 1941, box 13, fld. Joseph L. Abraham, John Sparkman Papers, HSC. 14 John Sparkman to Joseph L. Abraham, May 27, 1941 (first quote); John Sparkman to Joseph L. Abraham, May 17, 1941 (second quote), box 13, fld. Joseph L. Abraham, Sparkman Papers, HSC. In the letters to Abraham, Sparkman did not state with whom in the State Department he had spoken, only referring to “the State Department” and the American consulate in Marseilles. In one letter, however, he mentioned speaking to a “Mr. Monroe” in the Visa Division. This

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postponement, much to the dismay of the Abraham family. A day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Joseph Abraham despondently wrote to Sparkman “that the war has, or soon will, put a definite end to all immigration for the present, and our only hope now is that my aunts can survive in France.” But the Loew sisters did not perish. After considerable delay, Elsa and Sofie arrived in America in mid-1942. Abraham credited the determined efforts of Sparkman for their survival.15

Jewish Communities Organize Where individuals had selflessly sponsored refugees, Alabama’s Jewish community organizations had not. In 1938, however, Jewish organizations throughout the state began signing affidavits that made them responsible for refugees, so the refugees did not become a financial burden to the general community. Strictly speaking, organizations could not sign affidavits, only individuals could do so. To circumvent this hurdle, individuals within the Jewish community signed the affidavit, with the promised financial backing of the organization. The visa application process, including the information and forms required by the State Department in the 1930s and 1940s, was both onerous and extensive. Those applying to immigrate to the United States had to provide the State Department the following: 1. Visa Application (five copies); 2. Birth Certificate (two copies; quotas were assigned by country of birth); 3. The Quota Number must have been reached (This established the person=s place on the waiting list to enter the United States.); 4. A Certificate of Good Conduct from German police authorities, including two copies respectively of the following: Police dossier; Prison record; Military record; other government records about the individual included: 1. Affidavits of Good Conduct (required after September 1940); 2. Proof that the applicant passed a Physical Examination at the U.S. Consulate; 3. Proof of Permission to Leave Germany (imposed September 30, 1939); 4. Proof would have been Herbert B. Monroe. It is unclear if Sparkman communicated exclusively with Monroe in the case of the Loews. 15 Joseph L. Abraham to John Sparkman, December 8, 1941, box 13, fld. Joseph L. Abraham, Sparkman Papers, HSC; The correspondence between Abraham and Sparkman does not reveal exactly when or how the Loew sisters reached America. Joseph L. Abraham to John Sparkman, August 7, 1942, box 13, fld. Joseph L. Abraham, HSC. All of the correspondence pertaining to the Loews and other Abraham family members can be found in box 13, fld. Joseph L. Abraham, Sparkman Papers, HSC.

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that the prospective immigrant had booked passage to the Western Hemisphere (required after September 1939); 5. Two Sponsors (“affiants”); close relatives of prospective immigrants were preferred.16 The sponsors of these immigrants, whether family or not, had to be “American citizens or have had permanent resident status, and they must have filled out an Affidavit of Support and Sponsorship (six copies notarized), as well as provided: Certified copy of their most recent Federal tax return; Affidavit from a bank regarding their accounts; and an affidavit from any other responsible person regarding other assets, such as an affidavit from the sponsor’s employer or a statement of commercial rating.”17 “Paper Walls” indeed. The organizations that sponsored refugees provided housing, job training, employment, and some even offered start-up loans. Such support for the newly arrived refugees varied according to the specific community, but resettlement generally proceeded in a similar fashion throughout the United States. According to William Haber, the executive director of the National Refugee Service (NRS), the re-settlement apparatus began to function for the refugee family when it reached the community. A committee, usually composed of local housewives, took charge of the housing problem by finding an adequate room or apartment for the family and supplying minor deficiencies in household equipment. . . . Normally the refugee committee had some sort of an adjustment program: e.g. provision for entertaining the refugees at local homes, parties at Jewish centers and social activities for younger people.18 The sponsorship of refugees, however, did not replace contributions, fund-raising, or lobbying as the primary methods that organizations employed to aid Jews in Europe, and local groups continued to contribute directly to Jewish welfare and host lectures for fund-raising campaigns to alleviate suffering and aid the escape of Jews trapped by antisemitic aggressors in European countries. For instance, Mobile’s Jews sponsored a lecture on Austrian Jews at the Jewish Progressive Club in June 1939, while the Mobile section of the National Council of Jewish Women sent generous gifts to homeless

16 The United States Department of State, www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/stlouis/teach/supread.htm#two, accessed June 11, 2010. 17 Ibid. 18 William Haber, “Resettling New Americans: Out of New York Into America,” 3, MKM13.10.225, RG248 National refugee Service Papers (hereafter cited as NRS), YIVO.

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refugees interned in concentration camps in Canada that did not have harsh conditions such as those in Germany.19 In April 1938, Beatrice Kaufman, who had been appointed as a delegate to the National Council of Jewish Women’s Conference in Nashville, urged the Montgomery Jewish Federation to “accept the obligation of caring for refugee families from Germany” as the increasing number of refugees in New York had placed great strain on the resources of the New York Jewish community. Kaufman had been inspired at the Nashville Conference by representatives from the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees Coming from Germany (NCC), which encouraged southern communities to sponsor more refugees. Samuel C. Kohs, the director of the Resettlement Division of the NCC, suggested much the same when he met with members of Birmingham’s United Jewish Fund, arguing that “it is easier for [refugees] to adjust to smaller and friendlier communities,” although such claims did not always prove to be true. In May 1938, the Montgomery Federation had named Henry Weil to chair a local coordinating committee to resettle refugee families in Montgomery.20 The NCC originated in 1934 in order to coordinate the activities of approximately twenty Jewish relief and aid organizations in the United States, drawing most of its funding from the American Jewish JDC and the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), two organizations to which Alabama’s Jews prominently contributed.21 The NCC made no serious effort to resettle 19 Refugees Relief Drive Is Opened By Mobile Jewry, June 8, 1939, newspaper clipping found in Schwarz Scrapbook no. 14, MMA; Report Read at Mt. Vernon, May 19, 1941, folder National Council of Jewish Women, 1897-1969, Springhill Avenue Temple Archives. 20 Beatrice Kaufman was the president of Montgomery’s chapter of the National Council for Jewish Women. Meeting of the Board of Trustees, April 11, 1938, binder 1935 through 1940, JFM; Special Meeting with Dr. Kohs, December 15, 1938, binder 1936-1940, Birmingham United Jewish Fund Minutes, LJCC; The Montgomery Coordinating Committee consisted of Henry Weil, Lucien S. Loeb, Nathan Segall, Eli Hanan, Beatrice Kaufman, Mrs. Sigmund Weil, and Mrs. Myron Lobman. Meeting of the Board of Trustees, April 11, 1938, and May 24, 1938; The President”s Message to the Jewish Federation of Montgomery, January 26, 1939, binder 1935 through 1940, JFM. A thorough study of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981). 21 The national JDC did not participate in direct case work, but was “the largest financial contributor to the National Co-ordinating Committee. . . . A number of the officers and members of the Board of Directors of the JDC serve on the

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refugees from Nazi Germany until 1936, “when the flow of refugees . . . began to assume considerable proportions.” That same year, it created a Resettlement Division to address the problems associated with growing numbers of émigrés, and determined to resettle the refugees throughout the country for three reasons. The first reason was to prevent the concentration of the newly arrived refugees in their port of entry, in this case, New York City, a development that would have crippled the support structure of the local Jewish community if left unchecked. The second was for fear of an antisemitic reaction in New York City. The NCC based its third reason on the assumption “that many of the new arrivals could make a better adjustment in the outlying communities where economic opportunities were better and where the Americanization process might be more rapid.”22 To fulfill its mission, the Resettlement Division contacted sponsors, arranged housing, and found employment for refugees. Its work with approximately 900 cooperating communities throughout the United States consumed the bulk of its time and energy. As Jewish immigration peaked in 1939, the newly created NRS succeeded the NCC in caring for the recently arrived refugees, focusing solely on the resettlement and integration of the refugees into American life.23 Jewish federations and organizations throughout Alabama worked with the NCC/NRS to help those who had escaped Nazi Germany, with the Birmingham and Montgomery communities taking the lead in accepting refugees and coordinating resettlement into smaller towns in the surrounding areas. By the end of 1938, Birmingham’s United Jewish Fund had joined Montgomery’s Federation in creating a refugee settlement program. Lee B. Weil, a prominent and respected leader in the Birmingham Jewish community, chaired Birmingham’s Refugee Committee.24 Walter Lobman, National Co-ordinating Committee, thus making for an intimate interrelationship between the two organizations.” Erika Mann and Eric Estorick, Private and Governmental Aid of Refugees, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 203 (May 1939), 147. A particularly good history of rescue operations is Bat-Ami Zucker, Cecilia Razovsky and the American-Jewish Women’s Operations in the Second World War (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008). 22 Problems in the Distribution of the Jewish Refugee Population in the United States, n.d. (1941), MKM13.48.1001, 3-4; Resettlement Division: Brief Historical Sketch and Outline of Current Activities, n.d. (1939), 1, MKM13.4.68, RG248 NSR, YIVO. 23 Problems in the Distribution of the Jewish Refugee Population in the United States, n.d. (1941), MKM13.48.1001, 5, NSR, YIVO. 24 Reorganization Plan, March 5, 1939, binder 1936-1940, Birmingham United Jewish Fund Minutes, LJCC.

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the president of the Montgomery Federation, expressed the sentiments of many Jews and Jewish organizations throughout the state when he claimed that it was their great responsibility “to render maximum service to our oppressed people of Europe. . . . So much has the problems of our people increased since 1933 because of events in Germany . . . and other European lands that responsibilities must be shared by every Jew in every community of the United States, for European Jewry is Calling America.”25 The first major hurdle faced by both local organizations and the NRS centered on the willingness and preparation of refugees to resettle in Alabama. After having been forced from their homes and making a long, arduous journey to the United States, psychologically many refugees found it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to leave the safety and security of New York, with its refugee organizations, large Jewish population, and the economic opportunities that the city offered, for an unknown location elsewhere in the country. The problems faced by the NRS and local Alabama communities, however, were not new. Similar resettlement of immigrant Jews had been attempted, with some success, by Jewish organizations in the early twentieth century as immigration from Eastern Europe had increased dramatically after 1881. The Industrial Removal Office (IRO) and the Galveston Movement both intended to resettle Jewish immigrants into the heartland of the United States. The IRO operated from 1901 to 1922 resettling unemployed Jewish immigrants from New York to other states, towns and cities throughout the nation, including Alabama. In fact, between 1901 and 1913, the years when immigration from Eastern Europe was heaviest, the IRO resettled 834 Jewish immigrants in Alabama, the majority being Russian Jews who settled in Birmingham.26 The IRO, like the NRS later, wanted to speed the process of assimilation and avoid the creation of more Jewish ghettoes in the northeast, generally perceived to be overpopulated slums that festered with disease and crime, which Jewish officials believed contributed to antisemitism among non-Jews. Conversely, the Galveston Movement, which flourished from 1907 to 1914, encouraged European Jews to disembark in Galveston, Texas, rather than at ports on the East Coast, such 25

The President’s Message to the Jewish Federation of Montgomery, January 26, 1939, JFM. 26 Thirteenth Annual Report of the Industrial Removal Office for the Year Nineteen Thirteen, pamphlet found in Box 1, folder 5, I-91 Records of the Industrial Removal Office, AJHS. The total number of immigrants resettled in Alabama by the IRO is not known, but a number of these immigrants, like the refugees resettled by the NRS decades later, left the state for opportunities elsewhere.

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as Ellis Island in New York. Once at Galveston, the Jewish Immigrants’ Information Bureau directed them to places west of the Mississippi River. Where the IRO and the Galveston Movement worked through B’nai B’rith lodges, the NRS worked through local Jewish federations. Like the NRS, too, in regard to the refugee crisis, both the Galveston Movement and the IRO’s attempts to resettle immigrant Jews into the nation’s interior made barely a dent in the total numbers of Jewish immigrants who had flooded into New York and other northeastern cities.27 The NRS tried to avoid some of the problems that plagued these earlier resettlement efforts. Through its Social and Cultural Adjustment Division, the NRS attempted to orient refugees with American life and culture prior to their resettlement. This included education about American history, civics, American customs, and the English language, with which many, if not most, of the refugees had difficulty. In fact, the NRS advocated rapid social adjustment for those being resettled in order that it should deprive “anti-alien and anti-Semitic elements [from using] anti-refugee arguments,” a preventative measure that benefitted both the refugee and the Jewish community.28 Representatives from the various coordinating committees in the state met in Montgomery in December 1938 for “the purpose of formulating plans and devising ways and means of handling the refugees [throughout] the State of Alabama.” They elected Lucien Loeb of Montgomery as the state chairman and organized the state into multiple regions to coordinate the influx of refugees more efficiently, while Birmingham and Montgomery functionally served as the two centers of refugee activity and coordination 27 See Jack Glazier, Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998); Robert A. Rockaway, Words of the Uprooted: Jewish Immigration in Early Twentieth Century America (New York: Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998); Bernard Marinbach, Galveston: Ellis Island of the West (New York: State University of New York Press, 1984); Gary Dean Best, “Jacob H. Schiff’s Galveston Movement: An Experiment in Immigrant Deflection, 1907-1914,” American Jewish Archives 30 (April 1978), 43-79; Hollace Ava Weiner, “Removal Approval: The Industrial Removal Office Experience in Fort Worth, Texas,” Southern Jewish History 4 (2001), 1-44; Gur Alroey, “Galveston and Palestine: Immigration and Ideology in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Jewish Archives Journal (2004), 129-150. 28 “Problems in the Distribution of the Jewish Refugee Population in the United States,” n.d. (1941), MKM13.48.1001, 8; William Haber, “Community Responsibility for Refugees,” October 8, 1939, 4, MKM13.10.225; “Facts About the National Refugee Service: Questions and Answers,” n.d., MKM13.48.1005, 10, NSR, YIVO.

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in the state. Loeb supplied each regional coordinating committee with essential information concerning refugee resettlement and worked directly with the Resettlement Division of the NCC and, after mid-1939, the NRS. Each coordinating committee had three active sub-committees to handle placement, social services, and affidavits. The local coordinating committees pledged to accept “a certain number of refugees on a yearly quota basis,” with each community determining its own quota and accepting full responsibility for their welfare.29 The direction and decisions concerning the refugees’ resettlement, however, rested solely with the coordinating committee within each region. In many ways, the lack of social welfare agencies in Alabama at both the state and local levels and the guidance that they could have provided contributed to the initial uncertainty and confusion of refugee committees, and added another organizational hurdle that both the state committee and local committees had to overcome. Field representatives from the NRS traveled throughout the state meeting with coordinating committees and community leaders to discuss how best to organize themselves. Jewish communities varied throughout the state, with some thoroughly organized to handle the influx of émigrés and others just preparing to organize. Once organized, these committees had to have a source of funding to support the refugees at least until they became self-supporting. Moreover, they had to determine a realistic standard of how to treat refugees once they arrived in greater numbers, as communities at first lavished an inordinate amount of attention on individual immigrants. In one case the Mobile Refugee Committee hired a maid for a newly arrived family, and, in another, a refugee “was ‘wined and dined’ to such an extent that the refugee indicated that he might have come down for a social visit rather [than] for making a living.”30 Some Gentiles in the press, including Grover Hall in Montgomery and Bruce Sheldon in Tuscaloosa; offered encouragement to these Jewish efforts while other Gentiles proposed more material assistance to help resettle refugees by offering to donate tracts of land in Florence,

29 In addition to Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile, the minutes indicate that representatives from Selma, Florence, and Empire attended the meetings, although undoubtedly many more communities sent representatives. “Meeting of State Conference in Montgomery,” December 15, 1938; Refugee Committee Meeting, January 19, 1939; State Meeting, October 29, 1939, binder 1936-1940, Birmingham United Jewish Fund Minutes, LJCC. 30 “Alabama Field Trip,” March 28, 1939, MKM 13.50.1039, RG248 NRS, YIVO.

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Montgomery, and Autaugaville.31 The most generous offer came from Prattville merchant E. H. Pearson, who contacted Lucien Loeb in mid1939 about a plan to re-settle “fifty to one hundred Jewish families . . . in the Autaugaville Community,” only twenty-five miles west of Montgomery. Pearson, a manufacturer of mops and brooms, offered to sell 4,500 acres of land and his factory and mills, which included twenty-two existing houses, in order to “work out a real home for hundreds of Jewish people who are now homeless.” Pearson’s proposal called for the creation of a cooperative rather than a privately owned operation, and detailed the expansion of the factories and mills, and the clearing of 1000 acres for farms and pastures to facilitate the gradual addition of refugee families to the settlement. In addition to offering to work for the cooperative for “one year without pay so that the business can be firmly established and on a paying basis,” Pearson asked Loeb to “select someone whom you have confidence in to set up a system of bookkeeping and open a bank account,” in order that the enterprise be above board and that the Jewish community play a central role in its operation.32 Pearson had garnered the support of Autauga County officials, the Baptist and Methodist churches in the community, the local bank, and the probate judge, J. F. Posey, not an inconsequential figure in local and county politics. As a member of the Autauga County school board, Pearson also promised educational support for the refugees.33 As he explained to Loeb, not only do the refugees “need a home and would agree to any reasonable terms” to enter the United States, but also that “we need these people. . . . Our section needs these people. We have land that needs to be cleared and worked. Wooded sections that need to be protected from forest fires, so that a supply of timber will always be available . . . ensuring our section a supply of lumber for years to come.” Moreover, he explained, “this set-up would work in harmony with the people of this section, as our people have already expressed themselves as being glad to do all in their power to make the plan a success.”34 31

J. W. Pincus to William Haber, August 23, 1939, MKM 13.1.9, RG248 NRS, YIVO. No information concerning the offers, save for the one in Autaugaville, seem to have progressed beyond inquiries, and no replies by the NRS office have been found in the files. 32 E. H. Pearson to Lucien Loeb, June 20, 1939, MKM 13.1.9, RG248 NRS, YIVO. The letter to Loeb included the plan for the details of the proposed settlement of refugee families. 33 Ibid. 34 E. H. Pearson to Lucien Loeb, August 11, 1939, MKM 13.1.9, RG248 NRS, YIVO.

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Walter Lobman, Max Baum, and Henry Weil, all members of the Montgomery Jewish Federation, visited Autaugaville to examine Pearson’s project and came away convinced of the feasibility of the plan. Because the $50,000 purchase price suggested by Pearson went far beyond anything the local Jewish communities could afford, they encouraged Loeb to take the proposal to the NRS, “since the money has to come from New York.”35 In New York, NRS officials rejected the plan. William Haber, the executive director of the NRS, explained that they directed their limited resources toward industrial projects for refugees rather than agricultural projects. He told Loeb that a “relatively small percentage of refugees have had agricultural training,” leading most refugees to seek urban areas for re-settlement. Even for those who have had agricultural training, Haber continued, “we have found it very difficult to persuade refugees to go into Southern agricultural projects,” largely due to the isolation of rural southern communities.36 Such reticence on the part of numerous refugees to re-settle in the South often produced friction between the NRS and Jewish leaders in Alabama. Many of Alabama’s Jewish communities initially requested refugees with certain skills to fill specific jobs, requests that the NRS could scarcely fulfill. This caused delays and, in some cases, cancellations, in sending refugees to these communities, producing frustration at the state and local level, as well as with representatives of the NRS. In July 1940, the NRS could not find refugees for two Alabama communities “simply because of very definite restrictions imposed on the kind of individual to be sent.” It also failed to find a family to resettle in Jasper, a small town northwest of Birmingham with a small Jewish population. This caused Birmingham investment banker Mervyn Sterne, a member of the state committee, to express his dismay to Loeb about such delays: “It seems perfectly silly to consider taking up your time and that of others who help you, to get small communities to agree to take refugees and then have no refugees sent them.”37 Loeb subsequently arranged for a refugee family 35 Walter Lobman to Lucien Loeb, July 28, 1939, MKM 13.1.9, RG248 NRS, YIVO. 36 William Haber to Lucien Loeb, August 30, 1939; William Haber to Lucien Loeb, October 24, 1939, MKM 13.1.9, RG248 NRS, YIVO. 37 Mr. Gomberg to Mr. Haber, July 1, 1940, MKM13.50.1038, NRS, YIVO. Other communities, Florence, Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery also failed to receive refugees requested. Loeb “required almost a year to induce Selma . . . to agree to take a refugee.” See Lucien Loeb to William Haber, November 18, 1939; Lucien Loeb to William Haber, November 27, 1939; William Haber to Lucien Loeb, December 7, 1939, MKM13.1.9, NSR, YIVO.

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already in Montgomery to resettle in Jasper, although the family returned to Montgomery soon after because it found life in Jasper “very unsatisfactory.” An NRS official hoped that the family’s return to Montgomery would “impress on both Mr. Sterne and Mr. Loeb the problem of getting families to leave New York for certain of these small towns.”38 Sterne, one of the most influential men in the Birmingham community, led Birmingham’s United Jewish Fund’s initial efforts to aid the persecuted Jews of Europe, and his support for such endeavors never waned. Yet, Sterne’s antipathy toward northern organizations and his “expressed distrust of professional social workers”—a common attitude among white southerners—produced a deep suspicion of the NRS that frequently prevented the state committee from working smoothly with representatives of the NRS. Both Sterne and Birmingham merchant Isadore Pizitz thought the resettlement of refugees to be a “New York” problem, with which Alabama’s Jews were willing to help, rather than the responsibility of all American Jews. They both supported the effort to distribute refugees across the nation, but suggested that the NRS adopt a policy of “resettle or else” for reluctant refugees in order to alleviate overcrowding in New York and blamed the NRS for the “poor preparation” of refugees once they arrived. Despite Sterne’s and Pizitz’s reservations, the NRS and the state committee agreed to concentrate on Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile for “general resettlement opportunities” due to the restrictions and limitations of smaller communities that “made it almost impossible to resettle successfully the types of family units that were available.”39 The Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile committees then looked to small surrounding communities for further resettlement opportunities. To help ease the frustration involved in delays and cancellations, the NRS urged communities to receive a certain number of refugees and place them in jobs after their arrival. Once refugee committees began doing this, the numbers of refugees placed in Alabama increased. Despite organizational problems and delays, state and local committees made significant progress in resettling and integrating refugees into American life. In one instance, the refugee committees throughout the state, under the aegis of the state coordinating committee, sponsored a total of ten male refugees to attend the National Youth Administration’s (NYA) training facility in Gadsden. The Roosevelt Administration created 38

Mr. Gomberg to Mr. Haber, July 1, 1940, MKM13.50.1038, NRS, YIVO. “Field Report of Kingloff,” Birmingham, Alabama, May 19, 1940, MKM13.50.1039, NRS, YIVO. 39

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the NYA in 1935 to provide part-time work-study opportunities for high school and college students and vocational education and apprentice training to unemployed youths in order to help them earn a living. The Associate Director of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the liberal Alabamian Aubrey Williams, directed the NYA as it attempted to give millions of unemployed young Americans “socially useful and constructive work so that they can become assets rather than liabilities to society.”40 The refugees sponsored by Alabama’s Jewish organizations attended the trade school in Gadsden until June 1942 when the federal government converted it to a Civil Service training school and limited participation to citizens.41

Enemy Aliens Nazi aggression in the late 1930s and the rapid conquest of Western Europe after war began in September 1939 prompted an increase in American defense preparation. This accelerated both the economy and Americans’ fears of Nazi spies and saboteurs in the United States. As historian Arnold Krammer explains, “foreigners in any country have always been viewed with some suspicion, especially during times of international tension. The situation in America was no different. . . . Now, the [European] war confirmed America’s worst fears. The sudden appearance of Fifth Columns in Poland, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France were significant to Hitler’s successes. German citizens and Nazi sympathizers, living quietly among the population, cast off their sheepskins when Hitler signaled, revealing themselves as enemy wolves.”42 President 40

Aubrey Williams, “The Work of the National Youth Administration,” Living 1 (November 1939), 65; see also Williams, “Government’s Responsibility for Youth,” Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science 194 (November 1937), 119-128. For more information on Williams and the creation of the NYA, see John Salmond, A Southern Rebel: The Life and Times of Aubrey Willis Williams, 1890-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 78-85. 41 Lucien Loeb reported for the State Coordinating Committee that ten boys had attended the Gadsden school and “5 had been employed in the State, 2 had enlisted in the army, and 1 had returned to New York.” Of the two that remained at the school, Loeb stated that one had found employment and the other “would be accepted by Birmingham as its unit if he did not find a job.” “May Board Meeting,” May 18, 1942, binder 1941 through 1945, JFM; the NYA also had centers in Bessemer and at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. 42 Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997), 3.

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Roosevelt voiced such fears of a Fifth Column in a June 1940 press conference when he warned that “the refugees has [sic] got to be checked because unfortunately, among the refugees there are some spies, as has been found in other countries. And not all of them are voluntary spies. . . it is rather a horrible story but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees; they have found a number of definitely proven spies. . . . it is something we have got to watch.”43 On June 28, 1940, Congress approved the Alien Registration Act that required all immigrants, including refugees, over the age of fourteen to be registered and fingerprinted at their local post office, a process that met with overwhelming approval from the American public. According to a Gallup Poll conducted on June 10, 1940, ninety-five percent of respondents replied “yes” when asked the question, “Should all people who are not United States citizens be required to register with the Government?”44 Within four months, almost five million aliens had registered with the government. Once the United States entered the war against Germany, the Jews who had fled from Nazi Germany became “enemy aliens.” Roosevelt quickly issued Presidential Proclamation 2526, which gave the government the authority to detain, arrest, and deport citizens of Germany who had not become naturalized citizens of the United States. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undertook the investigation and surveillance of enemy aliens—the FBI’s investigations of potential threats actually began in 1936—and such scrutiny did not spare Jews who had fled Nazi persecution, as Roosevelt’s warning made clear.45 Some within the FBI reasoned that Jewish refugees who had family still in Germany could be forced to aid the Nazis, lest their relatives be killed, and this “unreasonable suspicion of Jewish immigrants and exiles” helped to promote anti-alien and anti-refugee sentiment within the larger population that went hand-inhand with the growth of antisemitism in the United States, forcing these refugees to “toe the mark.”46 The United States did not, and indeed could 43

Roosevelt quote in Zucker, Cecilia Razovsky, 127-128. “Alien Registration Act of 1940,” U.S. Statutes at Large (76th Cong., 3rd Sess., 670-676), found at http://tucnak.fsv.cuni.cz/~calda/Documents/1940s/Alien Registration Act of 1940.html, accessed October 14, 2010. See Krammer, Undue Process, 23. 45 Proclamation 2525 addressed the Japanese and Proclamation 2527 pertained to Italians. See “Presidential Proclamation, No. 2526 Alien Enemies German,” http://www.foitimes.com/internment/Proc2526.html, accessed October 14, 2010; see also Krammer, Undue Process, 2. 46 John Christgau, “Enemies”: World War II Alien Internment (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985), 50-51. 44

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not, intern or relocate Germans or Italians the way it had the Japanese on the West Coast, but the mass evacuations of the Japanese created immense trepidation on the part of Alabama’s Jewish refugees that they, too, might be evacuated and interned. While German and Italian immigrants avoided internment, the hastily created Enemy Alien Internment Program imprisoned 31,275 enemy aliens deemed a threat to national security between 1941 and 1946. In Birmingham, the FBI arrested twenty-eight German enemy aliens during the war, although none were Jewish refugees.47 Nevertheless, this suspicion, as well as the forced evacuation of the Japanese on the West Coast, produced significant consternation among Alabama’s Jewish refugees who showed “a genuine desire to do what was expected of them.”48 On February 20, 1942, however, Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9106 relaxed the restrictions on both German and Italian enemy aliens and encouraged them to become American citizens. By 1941, events in Europe transpired that severely limited the ability of Jews to emigrate from wartime Europe and left their fate in the hands of the Germans. On June 22, 1941, Germany implemented “Operation Barbarossa,” a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Almost immediately, Heinrich Himmler deployed the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads that identified and executed Jews, or anyone deemed a threat to the Nazi state in occupied Soviet territory. The invasion of the Soviet Union and the access to the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe set in motion the plans for the extermination of the Jews in Europe. On July 31, 1941, Herman Göring ordered Reinhard Heydrich to create an “overall plan of the preliminary organizational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.” By October 1941, the Nazi policy of forced emigration and the expulsion of Jews from the Greater German Reich came to a halt as Hitler forbade any further Jewish emigration. This essentially ended the outflow of Jews from Nazi-dominated territories. On January 20, 1942, at a conference at 47

Christgau, “Enemies,” vii; The number of arrests of enemy aliens in Birmingham totaled fifty-four, including three Japanese and twenty-three Italians. See http://foia.fbi.gov/custodet/custode2.pdf, 189, accessed August 17, 2010; Krammer, Undue Process, 52. There were a number of Jewish refugees ultimately interned as enemy aliens. One hundred German Jews were interned on the West Coast, over 900 Italian Jewish refugees were interned in the Fort Ontario Refugee Shelter at Oswego, New York, and eighty-one Jews from Latin American were held in camps in Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. None were held in Alabama. See Harvey Strum, “Jewish Internees in the American South, 1942-1945,” American Jewish Archives 42 (1990), 27-48. 48 Monte Kandel, “Field Report,” Montgomery, Alabama, June 27-29, 1942, MKM13.50.1039, RG248 NRS, YIVO.

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Wannsee outside of Berlin, Heydrich unveiled to Nazi officials the Final Solution of the “Jewish question,” the diabolical plan to exterminate systematically all of the Jews remaining in Europe. The Nazis had concentrated Jews in ghettos and detainment camps in Germany and occupied Europe since the beginning of the war in 1939, making deportation of the Jews to the rapidly constructed—in some cases previously constructed—killing centers in Poland and Eastern Europe easier to accomplish. The implementation of the Final Solution ended in the murder of approximately six million Jews. The NRS resettled over 14,000 refugees throughout the United States, a task made infinitely more difficult because, according to the NRS, the refugee who arrived in New York in 1941 was “older, less employable, has practically no means of his own, and has health problems generally associated with higher age groups of the population. In other words, the refugee of 1941 is less resettleable in spite of the fact that communities are now willing to accept refugees for resettlement who are older and less employable than the refugees who came in the years 1937 to 1939.”49 As the number of Jewish refugees entering the United States declined precipitously by the end of 1941, so too did the numbers being resettled. By 1942, with the United States having entered the war, immigration ground to a halt and resettlement of refugees effectively came to an end. The vast majority of refugees who were resettled in Alabama through the NCC/NRS ultimately left the state for greener pastures elsewhere, but those refugees who remained in Alabama became part of the fabric of their communities.

49 “Problems in the Distribution of the Jewish Refugee Population in the United States,” n.d. (1941), MKM13.48.1001, 7, NSR, YIVO.

CHAPTER EIGHT INTERNATIONAL HIERARCHY AND THE FINAL SOLUTION1 ETHAN HOLLANDER

What you cannot enforce, do not command. —Socrates

Though the Nazi destruction of European Jewry is one of the world’s most striking and well-studied instances of ethnic brutality, there exists no systematic explanation as to why German efforts were more ‘successful’ in some countries than others. Historians have brought the details of each case to our scholarly attention; but, as of yet, there exist few reliable insights as to why the victimization rate of Jews varied from one country to the next. Thus, the absence of a broadly comparative perspective has left this interesting historical question essentially unanswered. Using the scope and methods of comparative political science, I propose an answer to a question that some have assumed is unanswerable. The level of Jewish victimization in an occupied country depended upon the nature of German authority in that country. Where Germany ruled directly, and therefore had complete or near-complete control of the political policy of a given territory, German demands and interests — including the desire to rid the territory of Jews — prevailed. Where Germany, for whatever reason, shared sovereignty over a given territory with domestic officials, where it ruled, indirectly, through collaborators 1

I owe thanks to countless individuals for their kind assistance and encouragement at various stages of this project. Special thanks go to David Lake, Victor Magagna, Michael Mann, Mark Roseman, and Scott Straus in this regard, as well as to my many colleagues and friends at Wabash College. Thad Kousser and Bobby Horton were especially generous in helping me with the statistical analyses in this paper. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ellen Comisso, my dissertation advisor, mentor, and hiking partner, who lives on in the work of her many students, colleagues and friends.

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and Quislings of various stripes, principal-agent problems had a ‘negative’ effect on the successful execution of Nazi policy.2 In short, my independent variable is mode of German occupation: Where Germany directly ruled a territory, the rate of Jewish victimization was high. Where it relied on collaborators, ceteris paribus, the rate of victimization was lower. The degree of Jewish victimization varied inversely with the relative autonomy of domestic officials. As a contribution to the vast literature on the Nazi Holocaust, the significance of this project is clear. While many Holocaust scholars have considered the implementation of the Final Solution in this or that particular country, there are few broadly comparative studies of the Nazi genocide, and none that provides such a close analysis of the incentives facing the primary individuals in this monumental event. This gap in the literature warrants further attention. But the implementation of Nazi policy throughout Europe also tells us a great deal about the relationship between imperial powers and the subject-states they try to influence.3 Taking my 2 The ‘problem’ often turned out to be a tendency among Germany’s collaborators to drag their feet when it came to the implementation of genocidal policy. To be sure, their hesitation was only sometimes caused by genuine moral concern for the people they were protecting. More often than not, collaborators simply found the deportation of Jews to be politically unpopular or economically unfeasible, or they considered Jews more valuable as targets of continued exploitation than as deportees. 3 Thus, this project fits into a growing literature on imperial hierarchy [See Alexander Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Military Occupations (Cornell University Press, 2005); Ronald Findlay, “Towards a Model of Territorial Expansion and the Limits of Empire,” in The Political Economy of Conflict and Appropriation, ed. Michelle Garfinkel and Stergios Skaperdas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41-56; Herschel I. Grossman and Juan Mendoza, “Annexation or Conquest? The Building of the Roman Empire,” Working Papers 2002-15 (Brown University. Department of Economics. May 2004); Robert O. Keohane, “The Big Influence of Small Allies,” Foreign Policy No. 2 (Spring 1971), 161-182; and Alexander Wendt and Daniel Friedheim, “Hierarchy under anarchy: informal empire and the East German state,” International Organization 49:4 (Autumn 1995), 689-721.] especially during cases of military occupations. [See David M. Edelstein, “Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail,” International Security Vol. 29, No. 1 (Summer 2004), 49–91; Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century A.D. to the Third, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and The Economist. “The joys and irritations of indirect rule,” Economist Newspapers Ltd. (April 1, 2004), 36.

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lead from international relations theory, I conceptualize German military occupations during World War II as cases of international hierarchy — situations where a dominant power, a hegemon, attempts to implement a relatively uniform policy throughout a huge and varied sphere of influence. I will show that the efficiency of the implementation of that policy depended upon the type of occupation or influence used by the hegemon in each individual case. Where hierarchy was more direct, policy implementation was more efficient, albeit more costly for the hegemon. Of course, Germany could defray those costs by allowing collaborationist subject states to implement anti-Jewish policy on its behalf; however, delegation of this sort led to agency slack, as collaborating leaders in these subject states implemented policy in such a way that served their own interests more than it did the Germans. Indeed, in every country it occupied, Germany faced a choice as to how it was to administer the newly acquired territory: Germany could remove local officials from positions of political power and impose its own personnel in a fairly direct form of occupational hierarchy; or it could leave those locals in place, influencing (or coercing) these ‘puppets’ from behind the scenes but, at the same time, negotiating with them about everything from policy implementation to the sovereignty of their regime itself. As we shall see, Germany’s choice in this matter — which was itself contingent upon the availability and willingness of locals to negotiate — was to have tremendous impact on the implementation of Nazi policy throughout the German sphere of influence. World War II and the Final Solution thus provide us with a fascinating case for the study of international hierarchy, policy and negotiation.

What others have said In the vast literature on the Holocaust, there are surprisingly few attempts to explain comparative rates of victimization in rigorous terms or to generalize about them in a valid manner.4 In those works that are explicitly comparative, cultural and ideological factors (of which antisemitism 4

This is partly because political scientists have been surprisingly hesitant to treat the Nazi Holocaust as a case study for rational and systematic analysis. See the recent work of Manus Midlarsky [“The Demographics of Genocide: Refugees and Territorial Loss in the Mass Murder of European Jewry,” Journal of Peace Research 42:4 (July 2005), 375-391] for a welcome exception to this rule. Also, Scott Straus includes some brief remarks on the Holocaust in the concluding chapter of The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2006).

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is one) often take on important explanatory roles. As we shall see, antisemitism — or, more precisely, specific types of antisemitism — could have dramatic effects on the implementation of the Final Solution in any given country. However, the ability for this factor to affect rates of victimization was itself deeply contingent upon the nature of German hierarchy in the country. Although many scholars are hesitant to explicitly suggest explanatory variables for differing victimization rates,5 a few possible factors become apparent in a review of their findings. Geography, the timing of deportations, local attitudes and demographics, and even the precise makeup of the German occupational bureaucracy have all been proposed as explanations for Jewish victimization. But while each of these factors clearly had an effect, none is sufficient to explain outcomes across a wide variety of cases. This project examines an often-ignored factor in victimization rate variation: The mode of German occupation itself and the equilibrium reached between the occupying power and local government officials. In pointing to the level of German hierarchy as a determinant of victimization rates, my intention is not to replace other explanatory variables or to suggest that they were unimportant. Neither is my intention to add occupational hierarchy as yet another salient variable. Rather, I see occupational hierarchy as an underlying variable, one that combined with or modified other factors to produce specific rates of Jewish victimization. (See Figure 1.) Indirect German rule provided a context within which geography, political culture, timing, and other idiosyncratic factors could act to reduce rates of Jewish victimization. Where German rule was direct, victimization rates were higher — and the potential influence of other factors was largely negated.

5

In their broadly comparative analysis of the implementation of the Final Solution in Western Europe, Marrus and Paxton conclude that “Generalizations break apart on the stubborn particularity” of each case. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, “The Nazis and the Jews in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1944,” in Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, ed. Furet, Françios (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 196. Bela Vago echoes that sentiment in his complementary assessment of Eastern Europe, arguing that “generalization … entail[s] the risk of simplification and misrepresentation.” Bela Vago, “The Reaction to the Nazi anti-Jewish Policy in East-Central Europe and in the Balkans,” in Unanswered Questions, 233. My hypothesis is that such caution is unwarranted, and that we can make certain, limited generalizations regarding victimization rate — even across such a wide variety of cases.

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Geography

ĺ

Timing

ĺ

Antisemitism

ĺ

Demographic factors etc.

German Hierarchy

ĺ

Victimization Rate

ĺ ĺ

Figure 8-1: German Hierarchy as Underlying Variable

In the vast literature on the Holocaust, only two scholars have given careful consideration to the influence of German occupational hierarchy on rates of Jewish victimization.6 They are Helen Fein and Wolfgang Seibel. In “The Strength of Perpetrators – The Holocaust in Western Europe, 1940-1944,”7 Seibel explains the comparative Jewish victimization in France, Belgium and the Netherlands with regard to the nature of the German occupational bureaucracy (i.e., civilian versus military administration) and territorial fragmentation of the occupied country. However, Seibel’s case selection is still somewhat limited, focusing on only three countries, all in Western Europe. By broadening his analysis to include Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, I believe I can better test the applicability of his explanatory variables. For example, Seibel attributes France’s low victimization rate, in part, to that country’s territorial fragmentation; but Greece and Yugoslavia were also subject to territorial fragmentation, and victimization in these countries remained rather high. The larger sample size in this analysis also allows me to establish the statistical significance of these findings in a way Seibel’s cannot. Finally, this essay will provide a more precise determination of German occupation authority and an overview of the motives of collaborators, two important pieces of the puzzle missing in Seibel’s analysis.

6

Cornelis Lammers addresses this issue brilliantly; however, his primary focus is on bureaucracy and organization theory; moreover, he limits his treatment to Western Europe. See Cornelis Lammers, “The Interorganizational Control of an Occupied Country,” Administrative Science Quarterly 33:3 (September 1988), 438 – 457. 7 Wolfgang Seibel, “The Strength of Perpetrators — The Holocaust in Western Europe, 1940 – 1944,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions Vol. 15: No. 2 (April 2002), 211 – 240.

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Perhaps the most explicit treatment of Jewish victimization during World War II is that of Fein’s Accounting for Genocide.8 Fein argues that the “extent of Jewish victimization” varied primarily with regard to the level of prewar antisemitism, and increased sharply “as a function of the intensity of the SS grip over the state in 1941.”9 Of all the scholarship on this specific issue, Fein’s comes closest to presenting a theoretical explanation of Jewish victimization that can be generalized. Still, there are some problems with Fein’s analysis: First, victimization rates in Romania (with its high degree of antisemitism) and the Netherlands (where antisemitism was minimal) are not predicted by her model. Moreover, by looking to the size of native fascist movements as a measure of antisemitism, Fein does not account for the fact that many fascist movements (especially Italy’s) were not particularly antisemitic. Finally, there is some question as to whether the “SS grip over the state”, rather than German authority in general, was of paramount importance. As Michael Mann suggests, the SS was only one institution through which the Germans could attempt to influence the domestic policy of an occupied regime.10 In my view, Fein places too much emphasis on this one element of the German occupational bureaucracy and thereby overlooks more general aspects of German hierarchy and, particularly, the relationship between Nazi Germany and local, collaborating officials. This project corrects for the deficiencies in Fein and Seibel, and thus adds to the victimization rate literature, in a number of important ways. First, my independent variable (German hierarchy) is more general than Fein and Seibel’s ‘SS-centered’ variables and thus is applicable to a wider variety of cases. I also provide more precise measures of this variable, both by incorporating analogous operationalizations from the extant literature and by providing a more complete (case-based) justification for 8

The book’s sub-title (“National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust”) notwithstanding, Fein’s work gives direct attention to this question in only half of one chapter (“The Bonds that Hold, The Bonds that Break”). The rest, though intriguing, is only tangentially related to the question of victimization rate variation. [See Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: The Free Press, 1979).] (Irving Louis Horowitz makes a similar (but more critical) observation in his review of Fein’s work. [Horowitz, “Bodies and Souls,” Comparative Sociology, (July 1980), 498–519.]) This is yet another reason that direct attention to this question is warranted. 9 Fein, Accounting, 82. 10 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 279.

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my own operationalization.11 Finally, rather than simply observing a correlation between German hierarchy and victimization rate variation (as Fein and Seibel can be understood to do), I locate the ‘motor’ of that variation in ‘agency loss’ and in the principal-agent relationship between Germany and local officials in each occupied country. In this sense, I compensate for the most damaging consequence of Fein and Seibel’s brevity: Their virtual silence on the issue of collaboration and the role of domestic officials in the implementation and subversion of Germany’s Final Solution. In focusing exclusively on the role of the SS and German administrative institutions, Fein and Seibel overlook a crucial part of the equation. In giving explicit and thorough attention to domestic officials and the ways in which their interests differed from Germany’s, I do more than simply observe a correlation between German hierarchy and victimization rate; I explain why that correlation exists. Without a detailed, country-by-country analysis of collaborators and their motives, we cannot determine why some collaborators chose to use their relative autonomy to protect local Jews. And without explicit consideration of the relationship between German policy-makers and domestic political institutions, we cannot understand why higher levels of German occupational hierarchy correlated with higher rates of Jewish victimization. Notwithstanding these critiques, Fein has done the important work of directing us to some of the most relevant questions, and Seibel has provided a powerful foundation for understanding the German role in the country-by-country implementation of the Final Solution. I intend to build upon the foundation provided by their important scholarship.

11

My measures of victimization rate, the dependent variable, are also more precise than those that exist in the current literature. In many cases, I have had to revise the extant statistics to account for territorial shifts and refugee flows before the onset of the Final Solution in a given country. I have also been careful to account for ‘victimized survivors’, people who were deported but who somehow managed to survive the war. For reasons discussed below, I consider such persons to be victims. Since much of the current literature is concerned with death rates or losses to the community, there is sometimes a tendency to exclude such survivors from the total number of victims. [For more detail on how victimization rates were calculated for this study, see the section titled “The Dependent Variable: Victimization rates in German-Occupied Europe,” below.]

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Sovereignty, hierarchy and the variety of international relations In the field of international relations, many scholars conceptualize international politics as a realm of anarchy in which states preserve their autonomy at all costs.12 But there also is an alternative viewpoint, whereby sovereignty is seen as a matter of degree, not of kind.13 For the purposes of this project, the alternative viewpoint constitutes a welcome addition to the field, because it allows us to see the various types of occupational administration imposed upon countries by Germany during World War II in the light of an already-established literature. Rather than seeing countries as either fully independent or strictly subordinate to one another, this project investigates the “gray area” in between, where weak but formally independent states are under such pressure and such threat by their more powerful neighbors that to call them “sovereign” without qualification is hyperbole. In other words, to speak of states as either sovereign or not sovereign is to ignore a vast range of international relationships where a regional hegemon influences the internal politics of nearby states to such a degree that their very independence is called into question. Weak states with powerful neighbors may retain all the trappings of independence (local elections, diplomatic missions, even symbols of national independence), but when the regional hegemon disapproves, intervenes, or simply flexes its muscles, the poverty of the “either/or” view of sovereignty becomes all the more apparent. This model of international governance is nothing new, and instances of it can be found in both the ancient world and the modern day. A more precise study of German military occupations during World War II will require that we see occupation not simply as the extension of one country’s authority over another, but as a relationship between polities — where one polity, the occupier, assumes (by force or negotiation) some (but not all) of the authority in the polity it occupies. In this view, it makes only limited sense to speak of dominated countries as either occupied or autonomous. Rather, we should speak of the degree or intensity of an occupation — thus giving voice to the sheer variety of relationships that exist between regional hegemons and the subject states in their domain.

12

Kenneth W. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 13 See especially Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton University, 1999) and Wendt and Friedheim, “Hierarchy under Anarchy.”

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The continuous, rather than discrete, nature of international hierarchy found horrible revival among the protectorates, puppet-states, satellites and Axis allies of the Third Reich. As German hegemony over the continent of Europe increased, Germany had to choose how it would administer new countries within its sphere of influence. This, in turn, required a choice as to how much authority Germany would give (or leave) to local officials and how much it would retain for itself. On the one hand, Germany could choose a relatively hierarchical form of occupation, removing domestic officials from their positions in office and subjecting the local population to direct occupational rule. But where local leaders were otherwise cooperative or sympathetic to German hegemony, Germany often found it preferable to leave significant domestic institutions unchanged and in place. In such cases, Germany left local officials responsible for paying the costs of governance but, in turn, limited its own direct involvement in the country’s domestic affairs. Germany “got away” with a cheaper military occupation but, in turn, came to be reliant upon local officials over whom it had less direct control. Of course, the equilibrium that was eventually established in each case had a lot to do with the willingness of local officials to stay in office and cooperate with the Germans — a sentiment that was itself dependent upon the assessment of local officials regarding how much they would suffer at German hands and how sympathetic they were to German hegemony in the first place. In the end, however, each German occupation regime during World War II can be characterized as an equilibrium that resulted from an explicit or implied bargain between Germany and those domestic policymakers who stayed in office. The particular arrangements made between Germany and its domestic partners clearly had a lot to do with the reaction of the local population and its leadership to German ascendancy. Where locals were willing to cooperate, Germany often found it easier to stay in the background and rule through its newfound collaborators. Where Germany faced resistance, however, it sometimes was left with little choice but to staff the occupational bureaucracy with its own personnel or with locals of its own choosing. In fact, in many cases, Germany presented local rulers with this choice explicitly. At the moment of the German invasion, leaders in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg all were given the option to lay down their arms and stay in power under German occupation.14 If they did so, Germany promised, their citizens would be 14

It should be noted that all of these countries are primarily inhabited by populations that Nazi racial theorists considered to be ‘acceptable racial stock.’ Still, the important issue is not so much the offer that was made, but the potential

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spared the burden of direct occupational rule and the officials themselves would be allowed to keep their jobs.15 Refusal to cooperate, however, would result in a more invasive (that is, more hierarchical) mode of occupation, the brutal results of which would be faced by the population at large and especially local Jews. As we shall see, the reaction of local officials would have a great effect on their country’s experience under German occupation.16 Despite the crucial effects that an occupational regime would have on the wartime experience of a country’s Jewish population, it is important to remember that the level of German hierarchy established in each case had little or nothing to do with the Final Solution or even with the treatment of Jews more generally.17 For the most part, the particular occupation regimes in question were established before the Final Solution was implemented. Although mass killings of Jews began on Germany’s eastern front and in Romania as early as mid-1941, the Final Solution as a uniform, systematic and Europe-wide policy was not established until the consequences of its acceptance or refusal. For the Norwegians and the Dutch, who valiantly and completely rejected the German offer, being of ‘acceptable racial stock’ did little to mitigate the horrors of direct German rule. Meanwhile, even the French – considered to be ‘inferior’ by this same calculus – eventually came to a collaborationist accommodation more like Denmark’s than Norway’s or the Netherlands’. In other words, while Nazi racial theories clearly affected Germany’s approach to negotiation and occupation, those same theories were apparently only one factor among many in determining the level of German hierarchy imposed on an occupied country. [See also footnote 16.] As we shall see, the ‘racial stock’ of a country’s majority population also had little to do with the victimization rate of its Jewish inhabitants. 15 In the end, only Danish officials accepted the German ultimatum. It is my contention that the survival of Denmark’s Jewish population had a lot to do with their leaders’ fateful decision to ‘negotiate’. See my article, “The Banality of Goodness: Collaboration and Compromise in the Rescue of Denmark’s Jews,” The Journal of Jewish Identities, 6:2 (July 2013), 41-66. 16 The primary purpose of this paper is to point to the important consequences of different forms of occupational hierarchy, not to establish how any particular equilibrium was reached. There is, of course, an entire literature that explores how and why negotiations between Nazi Germany and would-be collaborators turned out the way they did in each particular case. But since our primary aim is to measure the implementation of German occupation policy, the given form of occupation will usually be taken as exogenous. 17 Norman Rich observes that German racial programs were carried out with “almost total disregard for political, military, or economic consequences.” Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion, Volume I (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), xiii.

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Wannsee Conference in February 1942.18 By that time, most hierarchic equilibria in German-occupied Europe had been established and relatively stable for over a year. Indeed, even in cases where the equilibria were ‘renegotiated’, the bargaining seldom if ever concerned the treatment of local Jews explicitly. Ultimately, levels of German hierarchy were determined by military strategy, economics, governance costs, and the willingness of local officials to play a role in Germany’s New World Order. Generally speaking, the establishment of German hierarchy was exogenous to the Jewish Question throughout the German sphere of influence.19

The Dependent Variable: Victimization rates in German-Occupied Europe Let us now begin the comparison by looking at the dependent variable, the degree of victimization faced by Jews in the German sphere of influence. The following chart indicates the Jewish victimization rate for all countries in the German sphere of influence during World War II. Note that, since this is a study of policy implementation and efficiency, victimization rate has been defined as the percentage of Jews deported and/or killed from a given territory. Thus, Jews who survived the ordeals of deportation and imprisonment (“victimized survivors”) are still considered victims, as are those Jews (“undeported victims”) who were killed in their countries of origin. Insofar as statistics are available, preFinal Solution Jewish population figures are given according to national borders and the number of Jews remaining at the time the policy was first implemented.20 I have also used the most inclusive definition of Jews for 18

EDITORS’ NOTE: Most historians believe the decision to murder all Jews was reached no later than the summer of 1941. Some believe it was made well before that date. In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, the Final Solution, as a policy, was expanded to include a large variety of agencies and systematized for efficient application. 19 Indeed, even if it were not, the findings of this project would be revealing. As we know, particular institutional arrangements do not always lead to particular levels of policy success. Even if German officials and local leaders established degrees of hierarchy with specific reference to the treatment of local Jews, it would be interesting to discover why these negotiated agreements were implemented faithfully in some cases and not in others. 20 Thus, I have not included Austria as a separate country, but rather, as part of the German Reich. Moreover, I have tallied Germany’s pre-Final Solution Jewish Population to be 240,000 (the approximate number of Jewish people living in Greater Germany in mid-1941), even though more than twice that number of Jews

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the pre-Final Solution population statistics, since legal maneuvers to reduce the number of would-be victims by defining “Jew” more narrowly were common among countries determined to protect their most assimilated Jewish populations. Given these considerations, the statistics presented here may differ somewhat from other figures in the existing literature.21 Table 8-1 (following page): Jewish Victimization Statistics for the German Sphere of Influence

lived in Germany alone at the time the Nazis came to power in 1933. [See Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, (Oxford University Press, 1999), 11.] For similar reasons, the Jews of Macedonia and Thrace are included in Bulgaria’s population statistics. It should be noted that, in some cases, occupied-countries were divided into different entities, each administered differently. And in some cases, the type of administration changed quite dramatically during the war, as when collaborating governments in Denmark and Hungary withdrew their support (or threatened to), and were thus subjected to much increased levels of German hierarchy – with correspondingly horrific consequences for their remaining Jewish populations. 21 Victimization rate tables (as well as discussions on the various methods of calculation) can be found in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), Appendix B; Israel Gutman and Robert Rozett, “Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Vol. 4 (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1990), 1797-1802; Ronnie S. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 316; Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933 – 1945, (New York: Thomas Crown, 1968), 715-8; Fein, Accounting, 54-6; Seibel, “Strength,” 213; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933–1945, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 403; and Donald L. Niewyk, The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), xxiv. Most of the rates listed in Table 1 (below) are in agreement with those found in the aforementioned sources or in the existing literature on the individual countries. More detailed Jewish population and victimization statistics can be found in these sources and in the case study chapters of “Swords or Shields? Implementing and Subverting the Final Solution in Nazi-Occupied Europe” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2006). For reasons discussed above, I have relied on the sources that are most precise in their language about borders, time periods, and definitions of ‘victim’ [see my definition of ‘victimization rate’, above]. Due to rounding, estimation, and the fact that I have relied on a number of independent sources, some of these figures do not add up precisely. Nonetheless, they are all close, and do not differ significantly from statistics found in the existing literature.

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Pre-Final Solution Jewish Population

Jews Deported and/or Killed

Victimization Rate (%)

Lithuania

220,000

212,000

96.4

Latvia

70,000

67,000

95.7

Estonia

1000

936

93.6

Poland

3,300,000

3,000,000

90.9

Germany (including Austria)

240,000

210,000

87.5

Luxembourg

796

674

84.7

Greece (always German-occupied) (initially Italian-occupied)

68,000

56,685

83.4 87.5 72.6

Hungary Until March 19, 1944 After March 19, 1944

825,007 825,007 762,007

681,007 63,000 618,007

82.5 7.6 81.1

Czechoslovakia Protectorate Slovakia

179,851 90,847 88,951

146,400 75,205 71,300

81.4 82.8 80.0

Yugoslavia Croatia Serbia

56,000 40,000 16,000

45,000 30,000 14,750

80.4* 75.0* 92.2*

Netherlands

159,806

107,000

67.0

Belarus (SSR)

375,000

245,000

65.3

Ukraine (SSR)†

1,500,000

900,000

60.0

Belgium

65,696

34,801

53.0

Romania

557,313

285,505

51.2

Norway

1700

786

46.2

France

310,000

79,721

25.7

Italy

43,118

7,800

18.1

Bulgaria

63,403

11,393

18.0

Russia (RSFSR)†

975,000

107,000

11.0

Denmark Until August 29, 1943 After August 29, 1943

7,851

477

6.1 0.0 6.1

Finland

2000

8

0.4

* †

Death rates. These territories were never completely occupied by Axis forces.

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On the face of it, the most striking aspect of the chart is simply the degree of variation demonstrated among countries under German domination. This fact alone brings us to question a tacit assumption sometimes made in discussions of totalitarianism – namely, that it is characterized by an extreme form of authoritarian rule, where the regime has “total control over the lives and actions of citizens.”22 A simple glance at the chart demonstrates the fallacy of such an assumption. Contrary to common belief, the Nazi regime — in some respects, the very definition of a totalitarian regime — was subject to considerable limitations in the implementation of its anti-Jewish policy. Not only did two countries succeed in protecting nearly all of their Jewish citizens; a full third of them finished the war having lost ‘only’ a quarter of their Jewish populations. Indeed, it was only in a small fraction of the administrative units that the destruction was what we could call “complete” in general terms. In fact, most of the countries seem to fall somewhere in the middle — losing between 50% to just over 80% over their pre-war Jewish populations. Contrary to the common image of a Europe “under the thumb” of imperial domination, the Nazi regime itself was clearly subject to some very real constraints. One purpose of this project is to investigate further the nature and causes of these constraints. A glance at the chart also serves to challenge a number of tacitly held assumptions about the causes of victimization rate variation. For example, though precise levels of antisemitism are difficult to establish, the figures on the chart do not even coincide with our general impressions of this potential factor: The Netherlands, with its high victimization rate, was arguably the least antisemitic country in all of Europe. [A peer reviewer pointed out that “It was the extensive cooperation of the Dutch administration, police and some of the population with German authorities that accounts for the high rate of Jewish victims.”] Romania and France,23 on the other hand, demonstrate markedly lower rates of Jewish victimization despite being more antisemitic by most reasonable measures. Likewise, there seems to be no correlation between the absolute number of Jews in a given country and the percentage victimized. Norway, with its 22

Michael Curtis, Totalitarianism, (New Brunswick (USA): Transaction Books, 1980), 49. Even Hannah Arendt, usually very sensitive to the limits on dictatorial power, describes totalitarianism as “not merely dictatorship,” but that form of government characterized by “total domination.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), ix, xxxvii, and passim. 23 EDITORS’ NOTE: See footnote 31 for information regarding the two different kinds of administration in France from 1940 to 1942.

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tiny Jewish population, lost about the same percentage of its Jews as did Belgium and Romania, even though their initial Jewish populations were much larger. Meanwhile, Bulgaria, Belgium, Greece, and Latvia each had between sixty and seventy thousand Jews when the Final Solution was first put into effect, even though these countries demonstrate a huge range in rates of Jewish victimization. Clearly, even if we were to establish that these factors (antisemitism or Jewish population) had some effect on rates of Jewish victimization, the finding would be incomplete, and we would be forced to search for additional factors as to why antisemitism and absolute size would have salience in certain cases and not in others. There are, however, certain trends that emerge when we view the countries in broadly geographic terms. With a few conspicuous exceptions (the Netherlands, Belgium, Bulgaria), countries in Eastern Europe generally demonstrate markedly higher rates of victimization than countries in Western Europe. Of course, part of this variation might be explained by broad cultural differences between East and West, e.g., levels and forms of antisemitism or nationalism, political culture, and/or various conceptions of Jewish citizenship. Even so, we cannot help but focus our attention quite squarely on those countries that seem to defy geographical categorization. When “Western” countries like the Netherlands and Belgium and “Eastern” countries such as Bulgaria and Romania demonstrate such uncharacteristic levels of victimization, we are justified in our search for factors that do not fit so neatly into our pre-existing notions of East and West.24 While much of this article serves to question the centrality of antisemitism in determinations of a country’s victimization rate during World War II, it should be mentioned, by way of disclaimer, that a low victimization rate for a given country does not imply that the country was 24 For a systematic comparison of victimization rates between and within Bulgaria and Romania, see my “The Final Solution in Bulgaria and Romania: A Comparative Perspective” [East European Politics and Societies, 22:2 (Spring 2008), 203-248]. In this paper, I observe that the difference between the victimization rates in these two countries is not as significant as it might seem. Even though Romania has a higher overall rate of Jewish victimization, both countries show similar patterns of Jewish victimization. In other words, Jewish populations in the acquired territories of both countries were almost completely decimated; and Jewish populations in the ‘home’ territory of Bulgaria and Romania were both largely spared. In the end, the difference between the overall victimization rates of the two countries can be explained by the fact that, in Romania, a higher proportion of the Jewish population lived in the acquired territories, whereas in Bulgaria, most of the Jewish population lived in the metropole.

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somehow “morally superior” to countries where Jewish victimization was, for whatever reason, more complete. Jews in countries with low victimization rates only survived because their leaders were allied with and collaborating with Nazi Germany, and thus, indirectly, prolonging the suffering of Jewish people and others elsewhere on the continent. Jews in the Netherlands and Norway came face-to-face with the full brutality of Nazi tyranny precisely because their elected leaders, unlike those in France and Denmark, refused to cooperate with Nazi Germany in the first place.25 Jews in Hungary were largely spared only so long as their country remained a faithful German ally; when Hungary’s leaders threatened to leave the Axis alliance (in March 1944), Germany imposed direct rule on the country and its Jews were thoroughly victimized despite the fact that the war was almost over. 26

25

It should be noted that the ‘headless’ Dutch administration, police forces, and even its Jewish Council have all been charged with exacerbating the victimization rate in the Netherlands. While there may be some truth to some of these assertions, it is crucial to see these domestic institutions in the political context of a particularly invasive German hierarchy—the most invasive occupation administration in all of Western Europe (excepting Luxemburg). Unlike in Denmark, France, and even Norway, the highest-ranking domestic officials in the Netherlands were the Secretaries-General of a ‘headless’ administration – all under the watchful eye and chronic intrusion of a notoriously brutal Reichskommisariat. Indeed, the most comparable case to the Netherlands can be found in neighboring Belgium. However, in that country, King Leopold III’s controversial decision to stay in the country and negotiate with the Germans insured that Belgium’s otherwise-headless administration would be subject to a less invasive German military administration. In direct contrast to Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart in the Netherlands (who, incidentally, reported directly to Hitler), the chief German official in Belgium was the General Baron Alexander von Falkenhausen, a retired military commander and, significantly, not a member of the Nazi party. Assertions that domestic institutions in the Netherlands contributed to that country’s high victimization rate should also consider the intensely hierarchic environment in which those institutions operated. 26 On March 18, 1944, armed with evidence of Hungarian machinations to abandon the Axis alliance, Hitler pressured Hungary’s leader, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to consent to a ‘limited’ occupation of his country, one that would allow the Hungarian leader to remain in charge, at least nominally. However, in October 1944, when Horthy once again failed to extricate Hungary from the German alliance, Horthy was forced to resign, and Hungary was placed under the leadership of Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the country’s fascist Arrow Cross party (Nyiaskeresztes Part). Of the 681,000 Hungarian victims of the Holocaust, 618,000 (over 90%) were deported in the period following the German occupation.

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Furthermore, it should be remembered that, even in cases where collaborators protected local Jews, they didn’t necessarily do so for the “right reasons” or as the result of some sort of well-articulated plan. Romania’s antisemitic leadership infamously extorted local Jews, extracting bribes, subjecting Jews to exploitative taxation, or using them as slave labor in the country’s thriving armaments industry. In a policy more xenophobic than antisemitic, collaborators in Vichy France ruthlessly (albeit not consistently) focused their energies on rounding-up and deporting foreign Jews while procrastinating on the more controversial and politically difficult task of attacking Jews who were French citizens. Although they frequently were antisemitic, collaborating leaders often lacked the Nazis’ “enthusiasm” for addressing the Jewish Question. Indeed, one of the surprising and fascinating lessons of this project is that, despite the availability of willing collaborators, the German genocidal apparatus, like any bureaucracy, constantly faced problems of agency loss and inefficiency in the implementation of its evil designs.

The Independent Variable: Forms of German occupational administration While this project’s dependent variable is relatively easy to quantify, the independent variable presents much more formidable difficulties.27 It is one thing to say, with relative certainty, that Bulgaria’s victimization rate was 18%; it is quite another to establish the precise level of German hierarchy vis-à-vis a country in its sphere of influence. In order to compensate for the difficulty involved in measuring my independent variable, I turn to the work of Raphael Lemkin, a special advisor to the US War Department during World War II. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,28 Lemkin provides a comparative analysis of occupational law throughout German-occupied Europe. Because it was published in 1944, Lemkin’s work is particularly helpful for the current project. His study retains and highlights a number of objective administrative facts that have since been clouded over in years of moral adjudication. In fact, just looking at Lemkin’s table of contents provides a reliable set of indicators of German 27

David Lake, a pioneer of this way of analyzing international hierarchy, admits that the placement of a particular relationship along the hierarchy continuum is “only approximate.” David A. Lake, “Anarchy, hierarchy, and the variety of international relations,” International Organization, 50:1 (Winter 1996), 8. 28 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).

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hierarchy — since the very inclusion of a country in his study indicates that, in his view, it was occupied. In a related sense, Lemkin’s assessments of German hierarchy are also helpful for this project because they do not discuss levels of Jewish victimization. Lemkin, of course, was aware of the persecution of European Jews and, to his credit, tried to bring it to the attention of the West at a very early date. In fact, he coined the term genocide. However, he could not have known the varying levels of Jewish victimization from one country to another, in part because that victimization was still under way when his study was being researched and published. Lemkin’s judgments about German hierarchy were made in ignorance of Jewish victimization rates. We may therefore be assured that his assessments of German hierarchy were not informed by its outcome. Lemkin provides two analyses of German occupation regimes during World War II.29 One analysis focuses on German aspects of administration (i.e., the German institutions responsible for oversight in an occupied country) and the other focuses on local elements of that administration (i.e., the domestic institutions utilized by the German occupier). With respect to the first, Lemkin considers three broad types of German administrative institutions: (1) District administration by Gauleiters;30 (2) Administration by Reich Commissioners (Reichskommissars) and Governors (Reichsstadthaltern); and (3) Administration by Military Commanders. Of the countries relevant for our study of victimization rate variation,31 Lemkin notes that Austria, Luxembourg and the incorporated (western) areas of Poland all were subject to the first type of German administration. Naturally, to this list, we can also add the territory of Germany itself, since at the local level, it, too, was governed by district Gauleiters. Norway, the Netherlands and the Polish General Government were subjected to a civilian administration of German Reichskommissars

29

Lemkin, Axis Rule, 9-12. Within the territory of the Reich itself, a ‘Gauleiter’ was both the head of the local Nazi party and a governor in a given administrative district. Thus, territories in the first category can be seen as subject to a particularly direct form German occupational administration. In being placed under the leadership of a German Gauleiter, these territories were brought directly into Germany’s own administrative apparatus — a step that might be seen as prepatory for eventual annexation into Greater Germany itself. 31 The Sudetenland and Alsace-Lorraine were also administered in this manner. However, by the time the Final Solution was implemented, the Jews in these regions had already been expelled. 30

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and Governors. Belgium, France,32 Yugoslavia and Greece were subjected to military administration, largely due to their strategic importance. To the three modes of German administration presented by Lemkin, we can add a fourth category: (4) Informal administration by German diplomats. This category represents countries in which Germany had no formal authority — territories where the highest German administrative agency was a representative of the Foreign Office and where German diplomats were “armed” with the implements of diplomatic pressure alone. In this category, we may add Germany’s Axis partners as well as Denmark, which, though occupied, was also ‘administered’ via diplomatic pressure alone. In order of increasing German hierarchy, the countries subjected to German administration are listed below, along with the average victimization rate for each category. Institution of German Occupational Administration Diplomatic Civilian Military (informal) (Reichskommissars) Denmark [1] France Norway (46.2%) (0.0%) (25.7%) Netherlands (67%) Finland Belgium Poland (General Gvt) (0.4%) (53.0%) (90.9%) Hungary [1] Yugoslavia (7.6%) (80.4%) Bulgaria Greece (18.0%) (83.4%) Italy (18.1%) Romania (51.2%) Victimization Rate

15.9%

60.6%

68.0%

Incorporation (Gauleiters) Luxembourg (84.7%) Germany (including Austria) (87.5%) Poland (Incorporated) (90.9%)

87.7%

Table 8-2: Types of German Occupational Administration Represented graphically (below), we also observe a clear correlation between increasing levels of German hierarchy and increasing level of Jewish victimization.

32

At first, German military rule was extended only to the northern three-fifths of France, in accordance with the Armistice agreement. In November 1942, however, German military occupation was extended to southern France, which had theretofore remained formally unoccupied.

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Figure 8-2: German Occupational Administration

Due to the small number of cases and the inherent difficulty of locating countries on a hierarchical spectrum with mechanical precision, exacting statistical analysis of this sample is difficult to achieve.33 Nonetheless, the intuitive impact of this display and the undeniable correlation of German hierarchy and victimization rate are difficult to deny. Lemkin also provides an analysis of occupational administration that looks to the domestic institutions utilized by the occupying power. Lemkin mentions Denmark (at least until August 1943) as a case where Germany was able to utilize the services of all existing governmental agencies. Puppet Governments (such as those which existed in Norway, Serbia, Greece, France, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) were organized under the leadership of a Prime Minister or President, and must be distinguished from Puppet States (such as Slovakia or Croatia), where

33 An analysis of variance test (ANOVA) of this sample returns a test statistic of F=10.088, indicating that the direct relationship between German hierarchy and victimization rate is indeed statistically significant (p < .001). Spearman’s Rho, a correlation coefficient appropriate for ordinal data, also confirms this conclusion (ȡ = .843).

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the state itself is “an entirely new organism created by the occupant.”34 As cases where the occupier-utilized domestic institutions were even lower on the bureaucratic chain-of-command, Lemkin mentions Headless or Subcabinet Governments, which were headed by Secretaries General (in the cases of Belgium and the Netherlands) or Councillors (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), the latter being a “special kind” of headless government where the directors had even less authority than the secretaries general. Finally, Lemkin mentions a few cases where the German occupier was only able to make use of minor authorities in the domestic administration (in the Polish General Government, Belarus, and the occupied Russian territories35). Once again, we may include Germany’s Axis allies as an extreme case of local administration, where the local government remained entirely intact and maintained formal autonomy in the sphere of international relations. The following graphic representation suggests a clear trend (see Table and Figure below): Local Institutions Utilized by German Occupiers Complete (Axis partners)

All Existing Local Institutions

Finland Hungary [1] Bulgaria Italy Romania

Denmark [1]

19.1%

0.0%

Puppet Gvts.

Puppet States

Headless Governments Secretaries General

France Norway Protectorate Greece Serbia

Croatia Slovakia

Belgium Netherlands

66.1%

77.5%

60.0%

Minor Authorities

Councillors Estonia Latvia Lithuania

95.2%

Belarus Poland (Gen Gvt)

78.1%

Table 8-3: Local Institutions Utilized by Germany

34

Lemkin adds that, in a puppet government, “only the governmental functions are a creation of the occupant, the original state having been in existence before the occupation.” Lemkin, Axis Rule, 11. 35 Russia and the Ukraine cannot be considered in this study, since parts of these territories were spared German occupation.

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Figure 8-3: Local Institutions Utilized by Germany

Together, these analyses provide strong grounds for rejecting the null hypothesis that local autonomy and victimization rates are unrelated.36 Of course, country-specific idiosyncratic factors have considerable influence on the average victimization rate in each category, especially given the small number of cases. It is my belief that this explains the relatively low levels of Jewish victimization in the Netherlands and Belgium, considering the low rank of existing local institutions in those countries. Moreover, powerful individuals at the local level in these countries could often sway their country’s victimization rate in one direction or another. The influence of fanatical puppets like Slovakia’s Jozef Tiso and Croatia’s Ustashe organization can be seen in the overall rate of Jewish victimization for the category.37 Likewise, in addition to 36

For the second sample, F=7.019, p