Army of Evil: A History of the SS (57 page)

The French Vichy regime implemented anti-Jewish measures, in line with the Nuremberg Laws, soon after the armistice in 1940.
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However, it was only in the summer of 1942 that substantial deportations
of Jews from Western Europe to Auschwitz–Birkenau began. In June, the German occupation authorities started to demand the surrender of French Jews for “evacuation” to Auschwitz. The Vichy regime refused to allow the deportation of any Jews with French citizenship, but it did offer up the stateless Jews and refugees who were resident in France.
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Himmler reluctantly accepted this compromise for diplomatic reasons. Nevertheless, the French government and police soon proved to be willing and effective collaborators with Dannecker: by September, some 27,000 Jews had already been deported and, usually, killed.

Roundups and deportations of non-French Jews continued right up to the liberation of France in 1944, but the Vichy government never relaxed its position that French Jews should not be deported, and relatively few were. One additional group of French-ruled Jews who were briefly threatened were the eighty thousand or so in Tunisia, which was occupied by the German Army following the Allied Operation Torch landings in Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942. The German occupation force was quickly followed by the Special Task Unit Tunis,
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commanded by SS-Lieutenant Colonel Walter Rauff, a pioneer in the use of gassing vans. However, the precarious supply situation of the
Afrika
Panzer Army ruled out any deportations. Consequently, many Tunisian Jews were expropriated and forced to work as slave labourers, but there were few killings.

By the end of the war, approximately 75,000 Jews had been evacuated from metropolitan France, of whom 69,000 were sent to Auschwitz. Only a few thousand survived.
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In contrast to France, the Netherlands was under direct German rule, so there was no need for diplomatic niceties. The first sweep—from June to September 1942—netted about twenty thousand Dutch Jews, and at least another eighty thousand were deported over the next two and a half years. They travelled east via transit camps set up in
Westerbork and Vucht that were guarded, for a time, by members of the Dutch–Flemish
Nordwest
Waffen-SS Regiment. About seventy thousand of them ended up in Auschwitz–Birkenau; but, as we have seen, a substantial number were also dispatched to Sobibor between March and July 1943.
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Deportations from Belgium began around the same time and totalled at least 25,000 by the end of the war. The majority of them died in Auschwitz.
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Attempts to round up and deport the Jews of Norway began in October 1942. The Norwegian Jewish population was relatively small—about two thousand—and rumours of the impending operation caused many of them to flee to neutral Sweden or go into hiding. Nevertheless, some 532 men, women and children were caught by the Norwegian Police and members of the
Germanske SS Norge
(the Norwegian imitation of the General-SS) in Oslo. They were deported by sea across the Baltic to Stettin, from where they were taken to Auschwitz. A further group of 158 from Trondheim and northern Norway were deported in February 1943; but fewer than a thousand Norwegian Jews were rounded up during the course of the war.

Denmark had about 6,500 native Jews and some refugees, but here the situation was initially similar to that in France, because the Danish government had retained control after the occupation, subject to German supervision. The German representatives in the country did not usually interfere in internal Danish political affairs, and even when they did suggest that the Danes might wish to address the “Jewish problem,” their overtures were always firmly rebuffed. However, this changed in the summer of 1943 as a consequence of a rise in Danish resistance activities. By that point, the senior German representative in Denmark was SS-General Werner Best, Heydrich’s former deputy in the RSHA,
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who had continued the reasonably conciliatory approach
to the Danish government but had no compunction about deporting Jews. In August 1943, with the situation in Denmark deteriorating, Best was summoned to meet Hitler at his headquarters, where he was given orders to declare a state of emergency and intern the remnant of the army that the Danes had been permitted to keep. In response, the Danish government resigned
en masse
and Denmark came under the control of the German military commander.

Best saw this as an opportunity and sent a message to his superiors in the German Foreign Office, suggesting that this was the ideal moment to start deporting Jews. This suggestion led to Best being reinstated as the German plenipotentiary in Denmark; and, as planning continued, the pre-deportation arrests were scheduled for the night of 1–2 October. However, the operation was compromised by leaks from within the German administration, and particularly from Best’s own transport attaché, so when the raids began most of Denmark’s Jewish population were in hiding or had fled to Sweden. In total, 477 Jews were eventually deported to the so-called “old people’s” concentration camp at Theresienstadt, where 52 of them died. In the weeks following the attempted roundup, almost all of the Danish Jews still left in the country were able to reach Sweden by boat.
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Although subject to some anti-Semitic measures enacted by Mussolini’s government, the Jewish population of Italy was protected from deportation while the country remained an ally and co-belligerent of Germany up to the summer of 1943. However, after the fall of Mussolini and the German occupation of northern Italy in September 1943, this protection largely evaporated as SS-General Karl Wolff, as military governor and Senior SS and Police Leader, took control. First, a large quantity of gold was expropriated from Rome’s Jewish community. Then, in mid-October, the first roundup took place, with the list of names compiled from Jewish community groups’ own subscription lists. More than a thousand Jews were arrested and transported to their deaths in Auschwitz.
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Many other Italian Jews now went into hiding, helped by the Catholic Church or even, on occasion, by Italian
Fascist officials.
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However, many were caught in the dragnet laid by Theo Dannecker. The Jews of Trieste faced a particularly notorious enemy with the arrival of Odilo Globocnik as Senior SS and Police Leader for the Adriatic Coastal Zone. Moreover, he was accompanied by a team of hardened Operation Reinhard veterans. Globocnik and his men established a transit camp at San Sabba, from where several hundred Jews were dispatched to Auschwitz. In total, around 7,500 Jews were deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945; fewer than 800 returned home.
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The other parts of Europe that deported large numbers of Jews to Auschwitz were the South-East and the Balkans. In Serbia between 1941 and 1942, much of the task of liquidating Jews and Gypsies was undertaken in the field by the German Army, which acted in much the same manner as the special task groups further east. Around eight thousand Jewish and Gypsy men were detained in the autumn and winter of 1941, after the German occupation of Yugoslavia, and shot by the army in reprisal for partisan attacks (even though the attacks had been conducted by ethnic Serbs and Croats, rather than Jews).
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Their fifteen thousand wives and children, who were interned in the Semlin camp, near Belgrade, were then liquidated in a gassing van supplied by the RSHA.
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Between March and August 1943, 46,000 Greek Jews were deported from Salonika to their deaths in Auschwitz.
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Just a few hundred were saved through the efforts of the Fascist Italian Consul General and the Spanish Chargé d’Affaires in Athens, who were able to classify them as either Italian or Spanish citizens. In 1944, several thousand Athenian Jews, as well as the Jewish populations of many of the larger Greek islands, were also sent to Auschwitz. In total, approximately sixty thousand Greek Jews were murdered.
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The first large group of Jews to be murdered in Auschwitz—in the spring and summer of 1942—were Slovakian. They numbered more than fifty thousand. This was followed by a lull of more than two years, but then the deportations resumed in October 1944, when
twelve thousand to fifteen thousand Jews were rounded up, with the majority going to Auschwitz.

In marked contrast to what happened in the rest of Europe, the great majority of the estimated 270,000 Romanian Jews killed during the Holocaust fell victim to their own countrymen, with encouragement but little assistance from Germany and the SS.

The last major European Jewish community to be murdered at Auschwitz came from Hungary. In 1941, there were just under 800,000 Jews in the country—about 5 per cent of the total population—but they were disproportionately well represented in the professional and commercial middle classes. Nevertheless, from 1938 onwards, the government of Admiral Miklós Horthy had been passing anti-Semitic legislation to limit Jewish economic activity,
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largely in the hope of gaining Germany’s support for territorial claims against Czechoslovakia and other neighbouring states. Hungary had also entered the war on the German side on 26 June 1941, but by the end of 1943 Horthy’s government had realised its error and was seeking a way out. Sensing they were about to be abandoned by their ally, the Germans bloodlessly occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, seizing control of key facilities and installing a more compliant government (although Horthy remained as leader). A wave of German agencies arrived in the country that same day, including Senior SS and Police Leader Otto Winkelmann and a special task group that had formed in Mauthausen concentration camp and was commanded by Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann installed his unit in the Hotel Majestic in Budapest and immediately summoned Jewish community leaders to meet him the following morning. At the meeting, he adopted a brisk but reassuring tone: the community would need to form a Jewish council and provide a list of all Jewish property. Similar meetings between the SS and the Jewish community over the next few days clarified and extended these orders, but did so without creating any alarm.
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Meanwhile, Germany’s political representatives were pushing their Hungarian puppets into adopting new legal measures to isolate the Jewish community, including
wearing the yellow Star of David, restricting travel and imposing curfews.

Eichmann’s unit next began to direct the concentration of the Jews. Working through the Hungarian Police, from mid-April, Jews in outlying towns were moved into ghettoes and makeshift concentration camps. Later, they were loaded onto trains and deported to Auschwitz at an average rate of twelve thousand people per day.

The Jewish community leaders were under no illusions about the fate of the deportees, and they started to make frantic efforts to save what was left of their people. Appeals to neutral governments and the Church were accompanied by attempts to ransom at least some of Hungary’s Jews. Back in January 1943, a group of Hungarian Zionists had formed a “rescue committee” that provided assistance to Jews who had managed to flee to the relative safety (at that time) of Hungary from elsewhere in Europe. Now, two members of the committee, Rudolf Kastner and Joel Brand, approached Eichmann’s team in a bid to broker some kind of deal. Kastner subsequently claimed that Dieter Wisliceny offered to release six hundred Jews in exchange for approximately $1.6 million. The money was raised and handed over, whereupon the SS agreed to raise the number of released Jews to sixteen hundred. These were selected by the committee and then transported to the concentration camp at Bergen–Belsen, near the north German town of Celle, which at the time was being used as a holding camp for prominent Jews.
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This deal came to the attention of Himmler, and Eichmann was now instructed to make a new offer to the rescue committee: more Jews would be spared in return for goods that were needed by Germany—200 tons each of tea and coffee; 10,000 trucks; 2 million cases of soap. The Hungarian Jews would continue to be sent to their deaths until these items were presented to the Germans. Brand was sent to Istanbul to negotiate this deal with the supposed leaders of “World Jewry,” but he was unable to convince the people he met of its viability. After the meeting, travelling overland to Palestine, he was arrested by
the British in Syria, taken to Cairo and held in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, the deportations and murders continued.
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Of course, it is impossible to say whether Himmler would have kept his side of the bargain if the goods had been procured, but now the remaining Hungarian Jews’ survival rested solely on how the battle between the Red Army and the
Wehrmacht
played out. On 23 June, the Soviets launched a major offensive against the German Army Group Centre. They overran Majdanek the following month and started to head towards Auschwitz. By then, Horthy had already ordered a halt to the deportations, largely because he feared that the rest of the world knew the extent of his government’s collaboration. However, with the exception of those living in Budapest, who had not yet been rounded up, this came too late to save Hungary’s Jews.

On 20 August, the Soviets began a series of operations designed to liberate South-East Europe. Three days later, the Romanian government requested an armistice and gave the German forces stationed in their country three days to leave. Horthy, now certain which way the wind was blowing, replaced the pro-German administration that had been forced on him in March with a government that was clearly designed to reach an armistice with the Allies. Then he requested the removal of Eichmann’s task force. The Germans had no option but to agree.
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Nevertheless, the Jews of Budapest remained extremely vulnerable throughout the autumn. On 15 October, SS-Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny and members of the SS-
Jagdverband Mitte
(a Waffen-SS special forces unit assigned to the RSHA) kidnapped Horthy’s son while tanks of the 24th Panzer Division occupied the capital. Horthy was deposed and replaced with the leader of the local National Socialist “Arrow Cross” Party, Ferenc Szalasi. Deportations to Auschwitz were no longer possible—Himmler had already ordered a halt to the gassing operations—but the SS attempted one last throw of the dice: the evacuation on foot of able-bodied forced labourers. In the first weeks of November, some thirty thousand Jews were rounded up and sent marching west, with little or no food and no provision of shelter along
the way. Many died from hunger, exhaustion or sickness; many others were shot. A few survivors were found starving in the Mauthausen and Wels concentration camps by the Allies in May 1945.