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

the most successful head-hunt, it must be

recognized that the Jewish action achieved its goal. Denmark is free of Jews, as

no Jew who falls under the relevant regulations can legally live and work here

any longer. ’156

Compared with the situation in other countries with a greater collaborative

potential, in Denmark, a country largely free of anti-Semitism and one with very

little sympathy for the Nazi regime, the implementation of Judenpolitik did not

serve to integrate native forces into the German policy, but rather the opposite.

It had the function of excluding the Danish parties from the system of ‘supervised

administration’, and of consolidating its transformation into a police state.

Within the Judenpolitik that the Nazi regime pursued within its sphere of

influence, the action in Denmark in autumn 1943 represented a turning point.

Until now Judenpolitik had fulfilled an important integral function within the

German collaboration and alliance policy, by involving the respective ‘partner’ in

the German policy of a racist reorganization of the continent and making it an

accomplice in a crime on a massive scale. But this policy did not go entirely

smoothly. When the deportations were set in motion, the attitude of the allied or

collaborating government had to be taken into account, which meant that the

deportations happened slowly or not on the desired scale (Slovakia, France) or not

at all (Old Romania, Italian occupied territories).

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

After the turning point of the war in the winter of 1942/3 it became more and

more difficult to implement deportations in cooperation with allied or collabor-

ating governments (to a limited extent this ocurred in Bulgaria and France; efforts

with regard to Hungary and the Italian-occupied territories remained ineffective

at first). However, the Germans did not abandon their policy, since precisely in

view of the worsening military situation they saw the intensification of the

persecution of the Jews and the associated compromising of their ‘partners’ as

an important safeguard for the cohesion of the block under their rule. Attitudes

towards the ‘Jewish question’ became an important gauge for the German side, on

which they could read the loyalty of their partners.

Goebbels’s diaries document this way of thinking on the part of the German

leadership with regard to the allies Romania157, Italy, 158 and Bulgaria159: too ‘lax’ a treatment of the persecution of the Jews was seen as an indication of the weakness

and lack of loyalty of the allies. But that meant, according to the logic of German

Judenpolitik, that a radicalization of the persecution on the German model bound

the allies irreversibly to the German Reich.

‘Most of our contemporaries’, Goebbels wrote in March 1943, recording

remarks made to him by Hitler, ‘failed to realize that the wars of the twentieth

century were racial wars, and that in racial wars there has only ever been survival

or extermination, and that we must therefore understand that this war too will end

with just such a result. ’160

Three weeks previously he had noted of a conversation with Goering, ‘Goering

is completely clear about everything that would threaten us all if we were to

weaken in this war. He has no illusions about it. Particularly in the Jewish question

we are so locked in that there is no escape left for us. And that is as it should be.

From experience, a movement and a people that have broken the bridges behind

them, fight much more relentlessly than those who still have the possibility of

retreat.’161

It should not be overlooked that it was the three states that successfully resisted

German Judenpolitik—Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria162—that succeeded in leaving their alliances with Germany with separate ceasefires between September 1943 and

1944. This stepping out of line on the part of—from the German perspective—the

‘pro-Jewish’ allies must have served as a confirmation of their policy that any kind

of compromise on Judenpolitik was to be avoided at all costs.

In other words: if Judenpolitik had originally (along with economic policy and

military security and cooperation) been one of the main axes of German occupa-

tion and alliance policy, it now threatened to undermine earlier forms of collab-

oration and alliance. In future, deportations, where they were not organized by the

German occupation apparatus itself, were only possible with the help of terror

regimes which were entirely under the control of the Nazi regime, had little

support from the local population, and were prepared to act with extreme

brutality against it.

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

401

The Allied landing in North Africa, with the shift of power that it brought to the

whole of the Mediterranean area still under Axis control, had constituted the

starting point for an expansion of persecution: the Jews of Tunisia and southern

France had now fallen into the immediate clutches of their German persecutors,

while in early 1943 the RSHA was organizing mass deportations from Greece and

Bulgaria. The further military successes of the Western Allies, the rising prospect

of an Allied landing on the continent, and the advance of the Red Army, but above

all the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April/May 1943 led to a further burst of

radicalization in the spring/early summer, which we have already examined

with reference to the Holocaust in Poland and the occupied Soviet territories.

But this new radicalization was also evident in Western and South-Eastern

Europe. It was apparent in the deportation of thousands of children from the

Netherlands, it was seen in the demands of the RSHA to start the deportation of

Jews with Belgian citizenship, and it lay behind Himmler’s call on 8 June to deport

French Jews who were due to be denaturalized by 15 July. But the radicalization

can also be observed in German Judenpolitik in Croatia in May 1943, when the

Germans were urging that the deportations be taken to their conclusion; and it

was also apparent in Slovakia, where a new initiative was introduced in the spring

of 1943, to spur the government there to resume deportations.

A further burst of radicalization began in September 1943, after Italy’s secession.

On the one hand, Judenpolitik now had the new function just referred to, on the

other hand, as was seen in Denmark, the German deportation machinery lacked

the power to implement further deportations on its own; it was forced more than

ever to rely on the collaboration of local forces. Where that collaboration worked,

the murder machine was horribly effective.

Italy

After the ceasefire in September 1943, the invasion of the Wehrmacht, and the

formation of a