Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (10 page)

This was a misunderstanding, although one that Polish diplomats, lacking any better ideas, cultivated for as long as they could. The German-Polish nonaggression declaration of January 1934 was for Piłsudski and then for Beck a counterpoint to the July 1932 treaty of nonaggression with the USSR. For Hitler, it was a platform for recruitment to a future anti-Soviet crusade. Like most of Hitler’s policies in the 1930s, it was significant for what it promised about the future. In May 1934, Hitler was already wondering aloud what sort of commitment Poland would need to join in an alliance against the Soviet Union. Speaking to the Polish ambassador Józef Lipski that August, Hitler called Poland Germany’s “shield in the east.” The following January he pronounced that Germany and Poland would be compelled to make war together against the USSR. As Hitler explained to Beck later in 1935, the German-Polish declaration was to be understood as part of a German grand design.

It quickly became obvious in Warsaw what that design entailed. Hermann
Göring, Hitler’s plenipotentiary on Polish matters, was quite forthcoming with his Polish interlocutors. On a hunting trip in the Białowieża Forest with Polish officials in January 1935, Göring unveiled the grand scheme of a German-Polish invasion of the USSR, with Poland to get the spoils of Ukraine. Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin, found this implausible and asked Göring not to repeat such ideas to Piłsudski when they all returned to Warsaw. Göring did so anyway, but was ignored; Piłsudski was in any event very ill. Göring made similar approaches on at least four more occasions after Piłsudski’s death, sometimes offering land to the Poles from Soviet Ukraine, sometimes from northern Soviet Russia. No one in Warsaw would ever be persuaded by any of this, though the barrage of proposals from Göring and others continued for years.

Göring would later return to Białowieża to hunt—after the war began, after Poland was destroyed, after the SS cleared the woods of Jews.

Cults of personality are open to postmortem interpretation. Piłsudski’s successors struggled to preserve the status quo by realizing what they saw as his political testament of 1932–1934: a diplomatic balance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. People who wanted to change Europe recalled the young Piłsudski: Betar saw the legionary of the First World War in 1918, Irgun the conspiratorial state builder of the Polish Military Organization of 1919—and the Nazis the military commander who had beaten the Red Army in 1920. Hitler saw Piłsudski as the “great patriot and statesman” who having defeated the Bolsheviks once would surely have seized the chance to do so again. The Polish leadership, although happy to dabble in Jewish revolution in Palestine, had a much more conservative understanding of Piłsudski’s European prescription for the 1930s. Poland was to keep an equal distance from both mortal threats, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The hope was that if Poland could stay neutral between what Piłsudski had called “totalistic states,” no war could take place. Any war, the Poles liked to think, would have to involve Poland as an ally of either the Soviets or the Germans, since any war that involved them would have to take place on Polish territory. The plan was to stop all wars by refusing to join in them, to halt two mobile forces by standing still between them. Although Piłsudski himself understood that this was at best a strategy for a few years, his successors became attached to the leverage of neutrality and saw it as a doctrine. This prevented them from recognizing the scale of Hitler’s ambition and from grasping that Stalin had dismissed the Polish state and was awaiting an offer from Hitler.

Right after Piłsudski’s death, Göring proposed a common German-Polish invasion of the Soviet Union, an offer he repeated in February 1936. Throughout that year, Hitler made similar appeals to the Poles. Jan Szembek, Beck’s number two in the Polish foreign ministry, reported upon his extensive conversations with Hitler at the Berlin Olympics of August 1936: “Hitler’s policy to us is dictated by the conviction that Poland will be his natural ally in future conflicts with the Soviets and communism.” That November, Germany and Japan initiated the Anti-Comintern Pact. Though ostensibly a defensive arrangement against international communism, this rather quickly became the basis for a military alliance. Berlin asked Warsaw to join the Pact in February 1937, a full six months before Italy became its third member. Warsaw refused this proposal then, as it did on at least five occasions thereafter.

This was a trying time for Polish diplomats. Unlike the Germans, Japanese, and Italians, the Poles had experience with communist power and a sense of what a conflict with the USSR would mean. Many of the Poles running the country in the late 1930s had fought the Soviets in 1919–1920 and had lost comrades to the Red Army and to the Soviet secret state police, back then called the Cheka. Some of them had seen the tortured bodies of friends and relatives in mass graves; such things were not forgotten. In 1936, Polish diplomats serving in the Soviet Union received instructions about how to comport themselves in the event of arrest by the NKVD, as the Soviet secret state police was by then known. Beginning in 1937, Polish diplomats were filing or reading reports about the distressing number of ethnic Poles disappearing from Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the large cities of Soviet Russia.

General instructions from the Warsaw headquarters of Polish military intelligence made clear that the disastrous Polish position in the Soviet Union could not be improved by a German invasion. Poland had no capacity to intervene on Soviet territory, and a German intervention would only make matters worse. Poland’s policy of equal distance meant that its territory was not only Germany’s shield to the east, but the USSR’s shield to the west. It was a dire situation, whose logic Polish diplomats, of course, did not explain to their German colleagues. They tried, as diplomats do, to make the most of what their interlocutors wanted, without acceding to it. When asked about a German-Polish alliance against the Soviet Union, they evaded the issue for as long as possible. When finally forced to issue a categorical response, they categorically refused.

In summer 1938, Göring was once again trying to tempt the Poles with the fertile soil of Ukraine. Matters came to a head that October, when Hitler presented the Poles with a “comprehensive solution” to all of the problems in German-Polish relations. Such a grand stroke was very much Hitler’s style, and he could believe that he was offering Poland a more than reasonable arrangement. The claims he made on Poland’s territory were mild by comparison with the German mainstream: that Danzig, a free city on the Baltic coast, be allowed to return to Germany; and that German authorities be allowed to build an extraterritorial autobahn across Polish territory between the main body of German territory and its noncontiguous Prussian districts. These two issues were negotiable, and indeed were negotiated. The real problem was what Poland would get “in return.” As German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop explained to Ambassador Lipski, the Germans envisioned for the near future “joint action in colonial matters, the emigration of Jews from Poland, and a joint policy to Russia on the basis of the Anti-Comintern Pact.”

Ribbentrop made much of the gains of Ukrainian territory that Poland would supposedly win in the conquered Soviet Union. This fell on deaf ears. The decision against intervening in the Soviet Union had been made in Warsaw in 1933. Polish leaders had ceased to believe that Ukraine could be transformed easily by outside actors. They calculated that the Germans might take Moscow with Polish help, but did not see how a political victory could follow. They were keenly aware that a joint German-Polish invasion of the USSR would involve massive German troop movements around or through Poland, and anticipated that any such war would leave Poland a German satellite.

The side talk between German and Polish leaders during the critical weeks of late 1938 was about the Jewish question. Hitler had explained to Lipski in September that he anticipated a common anti-Jewish action by Germany, Poland, and Romania. In November, Hitler praised Polish authorities for undertaking the vital struggle against the Jews. At the time of his proposal of a “comprehensive solution” and in subsequent discussions with Polish diplomats, Hitler stressed the positive connection between an anti-Soviet alliance and the removal of the Jews from Europe, in the first instance from Poland and Romania. In his mind, the destruction of the Soviet Union was part of a larger campaign against the planetary Jewish threat. His Polish interlocutors did not follow this chain of reasoning.

In these negotiations the Germans and Poles seemed to be discussing the same desired outcome: an emigration of millions of European Jews to Madagascar. Although the two sides were apparently referring to the same island and the same action, something very different was meant. The Germans were perfectly correct that the Polish leadership feared the Soviet Union and wanted to be rid of most Polish Jews. The Poles saw these as distinct problems, where the attempt to solve one might create problems for the other. They were opposed to a war of aggression against the Soviet Union in any case. And they simply could not understand how the Germans meant to invade the Soviet Union while deporting the Jews of Europe. Any such mass deportation would have required the cooperation of the colonial powers, the British and the French, which would obviously not be proffered to countries that were trying to alter the world order by force. In simple logistical terms the idea also seemed to make no sense. How could Poland arrange a deportation of millions of Jews while the country was mobilized for war? Should the tens of thousands of Jewish officers and soldiers be pulled from the ranks of the Polish army? Insofar as the Poles understood German intentions, they were wary.

Most important was what the Poles did not understand. They could not grasp a special feature of Nazi thought: the aim to do something difficult or even impossible, in the secret knowledge that failure would prepare the way to something still more radical. The geopolitical vision of the Poles failed them here. They could not see that for the Nazis “Madagascar” was not simply a place, but a label, a bookmark in a burning book. It was synonymous with a Final Solution; or, in Himmler’s words, with “the complete extirpation of the concept of Jews.” For the Poles, Madagascar was an actual island in the actual Indian Ocean, an actual possession of the actual French empire, an actual site of an actual exploratory mission, a subject of actual political discussions, one of two places (along with Palestine) that were seriously considered as destination points for a mass migration of Polish Jewry. Polish leaders did not grasp that for the Nazis the issue was not the feasibility of one deportation plan, but the creation of general conditions under which Jews could be destroyed one way or another. Given their own obsession with the idea of statehood, Poles could not see that a bloody whirlwind of improvisation was coming, where German aggression would destroy polities, opening pathways toward the unthinkable. German leaders would later continue to speak of “Madagascar” even after their men had killed the Jews who were supposed to emigrate there.

Warsaw’s political vision reached as far as the idea of a State of Israel. If a European crisis was coming, perhaps Jewish rebels such as Avraham Stern would be able to organize a revolt—one that would lead to a Jewish state that would welcome millions of Polish Jews. Polish officers had already begun to train the rebels of Irgun who were to lead such a revolt, and the young men of Betar who were to be its soldiers. As Hitler and Ribbentrop were pressing their “comprehensive solution” in December 1938, Drymmer issued instructions that made explicit the final purpose of Polish policy toward Betar and Irgun. Warsaw was supporting Irgun and Betar so that they would be ready to press forward with violence to Jewish statehood when the crisis came.

Over the course of 1938, European states were already collapsing under Nazi pressure. As the year came to an end, the crisis seemed to be coming.

“O
vernight! This was all overnight.” Years later, Erika M. still could not hide her astonishment at the collapse of Austria, at the end of her country, on the night of the eleventh of March, in the pivotal year of 1938.

The Austria where Erika had spent a very happy Jewish childhood, “the most wonderful existence a child can have,” was perhaps an unlikely creation. In 1914, when the First World War began, “Austria” was simply the informal name of some German-speaking regions of the great power known as the Habsburg monarchy. When that war came to an end with the defeat of that empire, Austria was created as a new republic and the new homeland of those German-speaking people—including about 200,000 Jews, most of them inhabitants of the capital, Vienna. In the beginning, few believed that the small alpine country could survive.
Lebensunfähig
—incapable of life—was the verdict of economists and politicians alike. The population was only seven million, by comparison with the fifty-three million of the Habsburg domains. The richest lands of the old monarchy had fallen to the new state of Czechoslovakia. The separation of Austria from territories that fell to Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania destroyed a large and vibrant internal market. Most Austrians either had little sense of national identity or thought of themselves as Germans.

The leaders of the new country tried to found it as “German-Austria,” including in its constitution a promise to seek unification with the larger German state to its north. This was exactly what the victors in the First World War—the Americans, the British, and, above all, the French—wished to prevent. It had been precisely an alliance between Vienna and Berlin that had begun, as Paris and London saw matters, the bloodiest war in the history of the world. More than a million French soldiers had not fallen so that Germany could end the war holding Austrian territories it had not possessed at the beginning. Thus the peace treaties applied to Germany and Austria, signed at Versailles and Saint-Germain in 1919, explicitly forbade each country from uniting with the other. This was, of course, a resented violation of the principle of national self-determination, the moral cause that the American president Woodrow Wilson had brought to the western allies when the United States joined the war on the western front in 1917.

The contradictory Austria of the early twentieth century was frozen in the mind of Hitler and many other Europeans throughout the succeeding two decades. Hitler had no sympathy for the Habsburg monarchy, the land of his birth, nor for cosmopolitan Vienna, where he had failed as a painter. He saw the city as an unhealthy mixture of races, held together only by the iniquitous plans of the Jews, who held true power. When he moved from Vienna to Munich in 1912, he believed that he had left a non-German city for a German one. It seems that he went to Germany to avoid mandatory military service in the Habsburg army, but in 1914 he volunteered for the German one, and served in the trenches as a messenger during the First World War. A German by choice, he shared the view of many German soldiers and politicians that the old multinational monarchy was doomed by its very nature. For Hitler, Austria had a past that was unworthy of Germans and a future that was unworthy of mention. He was an Austrian who had joined Germany; at some point all of the others (except the Jews, of course) would follow.

Although Hitler did not place Austria at the center of his concerns in the 1920s and 1930s—that place was always held by the Soviet Union—he took for granted that Austria and Germany would one day be united. His National Socialist Party, including its paramilitary arms, the SA and SS, were active in Austria as well as in Germany. In Austria especially, it was obvious that the work of these racial organizations was directed towards something more ambitious than an internal transformation of Germany; after all, Austria and Germany had never in history been united in a single national state. The prospect of their unification—
Anschluss
—was the part of the Nazi program that was most relevant to Austrians.

Yet for Erika M., a Jewish girl whose whole life had been spent in independent Austria, and whose whole world was changed forever on March 11, 1938, Austria was real. Over the course of the two decades after the First World War, an Austrian state was constructed, despite everything. Austria inherited from the old empire major political parties with experience in mass politics. The Social Democrats, the largest party when Austria was established after the war, were discredited immediately by their failed attempt to join the new republic to Germany. Yet the Social Democrats ruled without interruption in the Viennese metropolis, the first socialist party to govern a city of a million people or more on its own. They built a miniature welfare state known as “Red Vienna,” which proved to be both popular and successful.

Beyond Vienna, the leading party was the Christian Socials, who, like their socialist rivals, had a rich history in democratic competition dating back to the monarchy. Unlike the Social Democrats, however, they had never believed in unification with some idealized Germany. They identified with the Roman Catholic religion, the one trait that distinguished most Austrians from most Germans. Some of them were monarchists, fondly recalling the old multinational empire.

Jews were relatively more numerous in Austria than in Germany, and functioned in both of the main Austrian political movements. Most Austrian Jews lived in Vienna, where most voted for the Social Democrats. Yet Jews were also to be found in conservative organizations. The leader of the Austrian monarchist movement, for example, was Jewish.

Austria’s major political conflict was between these two native traditions, the Right and the Left. In 1927, the Social Democrats, who had just won elections, organized a general strike in the capital, but were unwilling to try to seize total power. In 1934, the Christian Socials backed right-wing paramilitaries in conflicts with left-wing paramilitaries, leading to clashes that became a brief civil war. The Austrian regular army backed the Right, and the Left was crushed. The symbolic end came as army artillery shelled the great public housing complexes, the pride of Red Vienna, from the hills beyond the city. The Social Democrats were then banned, and the Christian Socials reformed themselves as the largest part of a right-wing coalition known as the Fatherland Front. Austrian politicians and journalists associated with the Social Democrats fled the country, among them a considerable number of Jews.

The Nazis were never the largest party in Austria, and never won an election. They were a significant but distant third in popularity. But with the socialists humiliated and Hitler’s model in display across the border after 1933, the Nazis could challenge the Austrian authoritarian regime. Austrian Nazis assassinated the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß on July 25, 1934, but their coup did not lead to the national revolt they expected. On the contrary, the murderers were arrested and executed. Austrian Jews saw the Dollfuß regime as a barrier to National Socialism. Although the Fatherland Front looked very much like a fascist organization, complete with its own uniforms and salutes—and even its own version of a cross meant to compete with the Nazi
Hakenkreuz
—its politics were quite different. It identified Austria as “the better Germany” and Austrians as Germans, but did not identify Germans as a race. Although there were certainly antisemites in the movement, the Fatherland Front instituted no antisemitic policies on the model of Hitler. Despite considerable antisemitism on the Right and even on the Left, Jews continued to serve in Austrian ministries and to live more or less unhindered lives as Austrian citizens.

The rise of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933 raised the Austrian question in a new economic form. Germany’s recovery from the Great Depression created an attraction that could not be reduced to tradition or nationalism. Austrians who found jobs in Germany were impressed. Like its east European neighbors, Austria was an agrarian country and as such had been wracked by the Great Depression. The Fatherland Front, despite its radical iconography, was among the most conservative European governments in its economic policy. Whereas Germany under the Nazis accumulated huge budget deficits, Austria under the Fatherland Front pursued a tight fiscal and monetary policy, jealously hoarding its foreign currency and gold reserves. From Hitler’s perspective, this was one more reason, and an increasingly pressing one, why Austria needed
Anschluss
with the Reich. Germany needed the money.

As Germany asserted its place in Europe, Austria lost its allies. In 1934, during the failed Nazi coup in Austria, fascist Italy rallied to Austria’s defense. Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist
Duce
, was still hoping to create an Italian sphere of influence in the Balkans, Hungary, and Austria. Two years later, after Hitler had begun to rearm Germany, Mussolini had to accept the role of partner (and soon junior partner). He washed his hands of the Austrian question, leaving the matter to Hitler. Thus in 1936, in what was known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” members of the Nazi party in Austria were amnestied, and some of them brought into government. Austrian Nazis used their access to the public sphere to press the case for an
Anschluss
. That October, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy announced their “Axis.” For Vienna this meant political isolation. As the saying at the time went, the Axis was the spit upon which Austria was roasted.

In February 1938, Hitler summoned the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to his residence in the Bavarian Alps. Like his predecessor Dollfuß, Schuschnigg represented the Christian Socials and the Fatherland Front—and thus the sovereign Austrian Right that was opposed to
Anschluss
. Hitler demanded concessions that would have meant the end of Austrian sovereignty. Schuschnigg was intimidated, but upon his return to Vienna he regained his spine. In defiance of Hitler, he called a referendum on Austrian independence. Hitler was using the language of self-determination to press a German claim on what Hitler thought were German territories, so let the Austrian people decide. Schuschnigg was sure that he would win the referendum: The question was full of so many desiderata as to make clear that the correct answer was “yes”; the voting was to be open rather than secret; ballots were to be issued with answers already printed; much of the Austrian population really did favor independence in 1938; and, in any event, his regime was an authoritarian one that could arrange the results as necessary.

The days of March 9 and 10, 1938, were devoted to propaganda in favor of Austrian independence, over the radio, in the newspapers, and, following Austrian traditions, in signs painted on the streets of Vienna. The main propaganda slogan was simply
Österreich
—Austria. Abandoned by its former ally Italy and ignored by Great Britain and France, the country had no external backers. In rallying internal support, Schuschnigg was hoping to make a case against Hitler’s claims that European powers might heed. Hitler, understanding the risks, threatened to invade. Under this second round of threats, Schuschnigg yielded. No referendum took place.

Erika M. was right: Everything really did change overnight. On the evening of March 11, Austrians sat close to their radios to hear an important announcement from the chancellor. This was a Friday night, but Erika’s family, like other observant Jews, broke the Sabbath to listen to the radio. Although this was probably not a case of immediate threat to a particular person, which would technically justify the violation of Jewish law, Viennese Jews were right to think that this radio address was a matter of life and death. At 7:57 p.m. Schuschnigg announced his decision not to defend Austria from Hitler. At that moment the Austrian state in effect ceased to exist. Formal power passed to an Austrian Nazi lawyer, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, whose program involved the termination of the entity he now governed. Popular opinion assimilated the meaning of the end of Austria far more quickly than even Nazis in Vienna or Berlin expected. That same evening crowds appeared on the streets, shouting Nazi slogans and looking for Jews to beat. That first night of lawlessness in Austria was more dangerous for Jews than the preceding two decades of Austrian statehood. Their world was gone.

The next morning the “scrubbing parties” began. Members of the Austrian SA, working from lists, from personal knowledge, and from the knowledge of passersby, identified Jews and forced them to kneel and clean the streets with brushes. This was a ritual humiliation. Jews, often doctors and lawyers or other professionals, were suddenly on their knees performing menial labor in front of jeering crowds. Ernest Pollak remembered the spectacle of the “scrubbing parties” as “amusement for the Austrian population.” A journalist described “the fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting one another to get closer to the elevating spectacle of the ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before a half-dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips.” Meanwhile, Jewish girls were sexually abused, and older Jewish men forced to perform public physical exercise.

The symbolic destruction of Jewish status was accompanied by and enabled theft from Jews. On March 11, 1938, about seventy percent of the residential property on the
Ringstrasse
, the beautiful circular avenue that encloses Vienna’s first district, had belonged to Jews. From the dawn of the twelfth of March, that percentage decreased by the hour. Jewish businesses were marked as such, and the automobiles of Jews were stolen. The SA had made lists of Jewish apartments that their members wanted for themselves, and this was their chance. Jewish professors and judges were driven from their offices. Austrian Jews began to commit suicide: seventy-nine in March, and then sixty-two more in April.

The “scrubbing parties” were also political. Jews were cleaning the streets at certain places, working with acid, brushes, and their bare hands to remove one sort of mark. They were erasing a word that had been painted on Vienna’s avenues only a few days before: “Austria.” That word had been the slogan of Schuschnigg’s referendum propaganda, of which Jews could now be portrayed as the organizers. It was also the name of a state of which Jews had been citizens. Jews were unwriting Austria, and they were doing it within the circles of onlookers on the streets, under the gazes and the grins.