Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

envisaged as a ‘final deadline for the evacuation of

the remaining foreign Jews’. 260

In order to guarantee this quota of deportations, at the end of August more than

6,500 stateless Jews had been arrested in the unoccupied zone, who were deported

during the following months, along with around 3,000 Jews of foreign origin who

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had been kept in internment camps in the south of France for a long time. These

included a large number of children who had been separated from their

mothers. 261 As these deportations met with strong hostility from the French population and led to the open opposition of the Church, at the beginning of

September 1942 the Vichy government made it clear to the Germans that further

arrests and deportations could no longer be carried out in the unoccupied zone.

Since HSSPF Oberg, in view of the general political situation in France, and with

regard for President Laval’s domestic prestige, had secured a decision from

Himmler that no French citizens were to be deported from the occupied zone

for the time being, 262 the occupation authorities now arrested foreign Jews in the occupied zone (Greeks and Romanians above all), who were deported in

November in four further transports. After this came the expected halt in deport-

ations until February 1943. The total figure of deportees from France for 1942 was

approximately 42,000.263

Extension of the Deportations to the Netherlands and Belgium

Since the summer of 1940 the occupation administration had begun to introduce

the anti-Jewish measures customary in German-occupied territory into the

Netherlands as well: a definition of Jews on the model of the Nuremberg Laws

was introduced; Jewish officials were dismissed from public service, a Jewish

council (Joodse Rat) responsible for the execution of German orders was formed,

Jewish property was expropriated. 264 In March 1941 the German Security Police established the Central Office for Jewish emigration, which dealt at first with

those Jews living in the Netherlands. In May 1942 Jews were ordered to wear the

yellow star and, at the beginning of 1942, labour camps for Jews were set up, in

which ultimately some 15,000 people were held. 265

At the beginning of 1941, the first deportations of Dutch Jews had already

begun, at first (comparable to the situation in France at the end of the year) as

‘a reprisal’ for Dutch acts of resistance. By the end of the year 850 Dutch Jews had

been deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where they had been subjected

to the most extreme hard labour; none was to survive to the end of the war. 266

Immediately after the RSHA’s decision in June 1942 to deport 40,000 Jews from

the Netherlands, preparations got under way. The representative of the Foreign

Ministry in the occupied Netherlands, Otto Bene, reported to Berlin early in July

1942 that the deportation of around 25,000 stateless Jews from the Netherlands

would begin in mid-July and take about four months; after that the deportation of

Jews with Dutch citizenship would begin. 267

As early as June 1942 the Central Office for Jewish emigration had informed the

chairman of the Dutch Jewish council of an imminent ‘police labour deployment’

of the Dutch Jews in Germany. 268 After the freedom of movement of the Jews had been greatly restricted by a series of regulations at the end of June, on 5 July 4,000

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Jews, most of them living in Amsterdam, were summoned to report to Westerbork

transit camp to join the ‘labour deployment’. Only some of those summoned

actually appeared, but the occupation authorities managed to exert so much

pressure that enough Jews arrived in Westerbork to assemble the first two

transports to Auschwitz carrying over 2,000 Jewish men.

By 12 December, another forty transports were dispatched from Westerbork to

Auschwitz, so that by the end of the year about 38,000 people had been deported

and the quota announced by Eichmann in June had hence almost been reached.

As with the French transports, from the end of August many of the trains were

halted at Kosel in Silesia, where men who were ‘fit for work’ were separated from

the rest.

In no other country under German occupation did the Security Police manage

to carry out the arrests and deportations so smoothly as in the Netherlands.

Tellingly, the deportation victims were not generally captured in raids or ‘actions’,

but arrested in their homes. The relatively calm progression of the arrests and the

continuous course of the deportations may be explained by a series of factors that

played into the hands of the Germans: the relatively strong position of the SS and

radical Party forces in the occupation authorities, the comprehensive registration

of Jews living in the Netherlands and their relatively pronounced trust in the

measures of the authorities, the cooperative stance of the Dutch authorities and

parts of the police apparatus, an ingenious system of ‘exemptions’ from the

deportations that left the majority of Jews in relative safety at first, the fact that

a relatively large number of people had always been put in camps, the weakness of

the Dutch resistance, and other factors. 269

There were still about 52,000 Jews in Belgium at the end of 1940, only about

10 per cent of whom were Belgian citizens. 270 From October 1940, and more intensively in the spring of 1941, the German military administration introduced

the measures against the Jews that were customary in German occupied territory:

definition, registration, dismissal from state employment, and ‘Aryanization’; the

formation of a ‘Jewish council’, the Association des Juifs en Belgique. 271

In comparison with similar steps in the Netherlands, these measures were

carried out much more slowly and inefficiently, not least because the German

Security Police in Belgium was given comparatively little room to manoeuvre by

the military administration, and the Belgian administrative apparatus was not so

associated with the anti-Jewish measures. There was also the fact that the Jews

living in Belgium, precisely because of their relatively low level of integration,

mistrusted the measures of the authorities and tried to elude them, and the fact

that in Belgium both the national resistance organization, which had come into

being relatively early, and specifically Jewish resistance groups could provide

greater support than in the Netherlands. 272

After the RSHA’s decision in June 1942 to deport 10,000 Jews from Belgium to

the extermination camps, the initial focus was upon Jews who had become

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stateless. 273 In