Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (32 page)

The situation of rescuers and dissidents was quite different in the Netherlands than in Poland. People who hid Jews in the Netherlands, for example, were usually either not punished or punished lightly. People who protested anti-Jewish laws in public, such as Professor Rudolph Cleveringa at Leiden University, were sent to camps but were not killed. His Polish colleagues in Cracow or Lwów, meanwhile, were murdered for doing nothing other than being professors.

The Dutch were treated as citizens of an occupied country, unless they were Jewish. Because the Netherlands lacked basic institutions of sovereignty, and because Dutch institutions were fragmented on the east European model, the outcome for the Jews was similar, although not quite as awful, as in the stateless zones. The first transport of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz was in July 1942. Because there was no sovereign state functioning, there was no foreign policy, and no ability to change course in 1943. The Germans determined what happened to Jews, which meant that the trains from the Netherlands to Auschwitz kept running through 1944.

Greek sovereignty was also severely compromised, although in a different way. Greece was originally invaded by Italy in late 1940. The Greek army fought the Italians to a standstill, forcing Hitler to rescue Mussolini. The Greek dictator died at what proved to be a critical moment. Germany invaded Greece on April 6, 1941. The king and the government had fled the country by the end of the month. The Germans did not seek to destroy the state in Greece as they had done in Poland, but in these unusual circumstances created an occupation regime in which the Greek puppet government was powerless. Greece lost territory and was occupied by three separate powers: the Germans took the north, allowed the Italians to control the south, and granted part of Macedonia to Bulgaria. No Greek government exercising any real authority was formed during the war. Its head had to submit his nominations for ministerial positions to both the German and the Italian authorities. There was never a Greek foreign minister. The Germans and the Italians did not allow the Greek government to apply for the international recognition of the new regime in its new borders. Greek authorities were unable to control food supplies. Some forty thousand Greeks starved in the first year of the war.

The murder of Greek Jews proceeded where the Germans were in control. Italians saw the Ladino-speaking Jews of Greece, descendants of people who had fled centuries before from Spain, as members of their own Latin civilization. Italian officials provided many such people with bogus attestations of Italian nationality. Salonika, the major Jewish city in Greece, was under German occupation from April 1941. Although the Germans found that “for the average Greek there is no Jewish question,” local political and professional elites understood that lawlessness and German priorities could be used to fulfill their own desires. If Jews were no longer citizens of what was no longer really a state, others could make good on prewar claims and satisfy half-hidden desires.

In summer 1942, as the Germans were desperate for labor, local Greek authorities suggested that it might be more politic to use only Jews. This stigmatized one section of the population and confirmed its vulnerability. Later that year in Salonika, the German authorities satisfied a long-standing local postulate by ceding the property of the Jewish cemetery to the city. Such a major property transfer generated a sense of material complicity between Germans and locals as well as a new moral barrier between non-Jewish Greeks and Greek Jews. The destruction of the ancient cemetery and the desecration of hundreds of thousands of remains was painful enough in the present, but also raised a question about the future. If Salonika’s Jews were no longer welcome to die in their home city, where would they die?

In the first weeks of 1943, some of Adolf Eichmann’s closest colleagues arrived in Salonika with the goal of arranging rapid deportations to Auschwitz. They found little public sympathy for their ideology, it seems, but more than sufficient willingness to exploit the separation of Jews from other Greeks. As Salonika Jews were ordered to wear stars and forced into ghettos, others took their movable property and sometimes their houses. The deportations began on March 15, 1943, the Jews exchanging their Greek drachmas for counterfeit Polish currency. Some 43,850 children, women, and men were sent from Salonika to Auschwitz between March and June 1943. The timing was unusual: right after the German defeat at Stalingrad, when German allies were generally trying to switch sides, or change their Jewish policy as a signal to the Allies. But Greece, although regarded by the Germans as an occupied state, was much more like a stateless territory. It had no army in the war that might change sides, and no foreign minister who might send peace signals.

The French case was very different. The very notion of “collaboration” with Germany, although it has taken on other meanings since, was coined by the French to denote a policy of one sovereign state choosing to cooperate with another. France, in contrast to the Netherlands and to Greece, did retain the basic institutions of sovereignty, and its leaders chose a policy of friendship with the German victors. After Hitler’s armies crushed the French in spring 1940, he expressed the wish that “a French government continue to function on French territory.” Because France, unlike the Netherlands and Greece, was placed under a traditional military occupation, there was no clear opening for the SS and its state destroyers. The new regime, with Philippe Pétain as head of state and with Vichy as the administrative center, was regarded as the legitimate continuator of the prewar republic, both at home and abroad. High officials in all ministries remained in their positions. Indeed, the number of French bureaucrats increased quite impressively during the German occupation, from about 650,000 to about 900,000. The contrast here with Poland is instructive: For every educated Pole who was murdered during the war, an educated Frenchman got a job in the civil service.

France did introduce anti-Jewish legislation on its own initiative. A “Jewish statute” was passed on October 3, 1940, breaking the long French tradition of treating all citizens in metropolitan France as equal members of the state. (Algeria, though at this time part of the French state, was a different story.) In March 1941, a General Commissariat for Jewish Questions was established to coordinate Jewish policy with Germany. The legalized theft of Jewish property began in France that July. In November, the French government created an official Jewish organization that all Jews in France were required to join. The prevailing idea among French authorities was that Jews could eventually be removed to somewhere distant—such as Madagascar. The new laws were implemented by people who had served the prewar republic.

The reasoning behind French Jewish policy was different than that of Nazi Germany and closer to that of, for example, Slovakia or Bulgaria. In Bratislava and Sofia, as in Vichy, a domestic constituency for ethnic cleansing found itself in an unusual situation: Another state, Germany, actually wished to take some (not all) of the people deemed undesirable. In the late 1930s, before the war, the French Republic had already passed a law permitting the creation of “assembly points,” for Jewish and other refugees. The first of these camps had been established in February 1939.

Under the Vichy regime in 1940, the prewar aspiration to limit and control immigration became the open plan to make France an ethnically homogeneous state. Jews without citizenship, along with others who lacked citizenship, were to be removed. After the passage of the “Jewish Statute,” foreign Jews were sent to camps. About 7,055 French Jews were denaturalized and thereby placed in the category of greater risk, that of foreign Jews. Policy in France then followed the logic of escalation that was visible in eastern Europe. Major raids and roundups of Jews by the French police were timed with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941, with the reversal of the German offensive that winter, and then as retaliation for (very real) French communist resistance in March 1942. By summer 1942, the French roundups included Jewish women and children. Jews in Paris were taken to Drancy, where they were selected for transport to Auschwitz and death.

French and German policies met at a certain precise point. The French placed Jews without French citizenship in camps. The Germans wanted to take such people, but only insofar as the Germans themselves could consider them stateless. Crucially, Nazi malice stopped at the passport: As much as Nazis might have imagined that states were artificial creations, they did not proceed with killing Jews until states were actually destroyed or had renounced their own Jews. The French were willing to round up Jews from Hungary and Turkey, for example, but the Germans were unwilling to kill such people without the consent of the Hungarian and Turkish governments. Germany was entirely willing to murder Jews of Polish and Soviet citizenship, since it considered these states to be defunct. Germany was also willing to take and murder French Jews, but only under the condition that French authorities first stripped such people of citizenship. This the French authorities at first showed a certain inclination to do, although complications of law and bureaucracy delayed the process considerably.

In summer 1942, when the Germans demanded a greater number of French Jews, the highest French authorities reconsidered the question of depriving their own citizens of citizenship. Depatriation was not, for them, a Jewish question, but rather a sovereignty question. After the tide of war visibly turned at Stalingrad in February 1943, French authorities decided not to depatriate any more French Jews. In July 1943, efforts to strip French citizenship from Jews nationalized after 1927 (about half of the Jews who were French citizens) were abandoned. The Holocaust continued in France as a German policy executed with a certain amount of local French collaboration, bringing general terror to French Jews in hiding but achieving relatively little success. A large majority of French Jews, about three-quarters, survived the war.

The decisive matter, here as everywhere, was sovereignty. For French authorities, the Jewish question was subordinate to that of the well-being, as they saw matters, of their state. They certainly wished to remove Jews from France—foreign Jews to be sure and, no doubt, most or all Jews. But they could see the inherent problem of allowing German preferences to determine their own citizenship policy. The moment a state no longer determines internal membership, it loses external sovereignty. By the same token, French authorities had recourse to foreign policy and could react to the course of the war. Unlike the Dutch and the Greeks, who had lost these elements of sovereignty, the French could respond to Allied pressure about the Jews and anticipate a British and American occupation, which was indeed coming.

The Holocaust in France was mainly a crime against Jews who, from a French perspective, were foreign. As François Darlan, head of government in 1941 and 1942, put it: “The stateless Jews who have thronged to our country for the last fifteen years do not interest me.” Jews without French citizenship were about ten times more likely to be deported to Auschwitz than were Jews with French citizenship. At Drancy, Jews were selected for deportation according to the vitality of their state. Jews in France understood this perfectly. In 1939, when Poland was destroyed by the joint German-Soviet invasion, Polish Jews living in France flocked to the Soviet embassy in Paris. This was not out of any love for the Soviet Union or communism. They simply knew that they needed state protection. Between September 1939 and June 1941, documents from Hitler’s Soviet ally were of great value. But when Hitler betrayed Stalin, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union, these Jews’ new papers were suddenly useless.

Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousand murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.

The likelihood that Jews would be sent to their deaths depended upon the durability of institutions of state sovereignty and the continuity of prewar citizenship. These structures created the matrix within which individual choices were made, the constraints upon those who did evil, and the possibilities for those who wished to do good.

I
n the world that Hitler imagined, killers felt no responsibility for what they did. There was no source of ethical authority for individual action, and no basis for reciprocal social or political relationships: There was nothing except an eternal war among races. In this struggle the Jews were the only immoral ones, since they undercut the natural justice of German victory and thereby the only order that could prevail on the planet. Where the Holocaust took place, states were destroyed, laws abolished, and the predictability of daily life undone. In this grotesque situation the Jews themselves had to bear all of the responsibility for their own lives, for taking extraordinary action, again and again, over days, months, years, in a setting beyond their understanding and their control.

Every Jew who survived the Holocaust had to fight collective inertia, abandon the familiar and the beloved, and confront the unfathomable. Every Jew had some exposure to antisemitism, but nothing in the collective experience of millions of Jews over thousands of years was preparation for what began in 1941. The synthesis of information into knowledge depends upon familiarity, and nothing like the Holocaust had ever happened before. The conversion of knowledge into action was imperiled by hope. Any Jew could imagine that he or she would be spared what was happening to others; the bare fact of life continuing from one moment to the next seemed to suggest the possibility of its further continuation. The certainty of death was hard to confront. It was often difficult to accept that simply doing nothing would be followed by murder. Even a Jew who grasped all that could be grasped of the unprecedented situation, and took every initiative that could be taken, would very likely die.

Almost every Jew who survived had some help from non-Jews, of one kind or another, and usually of many different kinds. Whether Jewish appeals for help would resound depended on both the addressee and the setting. Martha Bernstein, the wife of a cantor in Zweibrücken in southwestern Germany, was someone whose appeal was heard, in a very special set of circumstances, only some of which she understood. Her husband, Eleazar Bernstein, was a man of good deeds and social conscience, who visited prisons to bring cheer and counsel to Jewish prisoners. In one prison, Eleazar befriended Kurt Trimborn, whom he knew as a prison guard and a police captain. The two men played chess.

On November 10, 1938, Eleazar Bernstein was arrested in the wake of
Kristallnacht
, as were thousands of other Jewish men throughout Germany. Martha crossed the rioting city to find Trimborn and ask for help. She was unaware of the extent of his authority in this particular situation. He told her that they must act quickly before the SS assumed control; in fact, he was the SS. He had been a member of the Nazi party since 1923 and exemplified the interpenetration of the SS and the Criminal Police (
Kripo
) in the 1930s. He told Martha to go home and pack. Trimborn had his friend released from custody and then drove the couple and their children to the French border in his own car and got them across. He then seems to have arranged the paperwork to create the appearance that the family had been deported to a concentration camp. The Bernstein family would eventually reach the United States, where they prospered. Eleazar sent Trimborn a letter about the good that was done: He wrote of his daughter who had become a teacher in America, the sons who had become engineers, the grandchildren. All of this thanks to Trimborn.

The letter was written later, much later, in 1978, after Trimborn’s trial for murder.

In
Einsatzgruppe
D, first in German-occupied Soviet Ukraine and then in German-occupied Soviet Russia, Kurt Trimborn ordered hundreds of Jews to be murdered and carried out neck shots himself. In at least one case he herded children from an orphanage into a gas van. In the East in 1942, he must have heard pleas for help, as he had in 1938 in Germany. At his trial he said that he had not liked the task of killing civilians and that he had, in some cases, allowed Jews to escape. This is quite possible. He was, after all, the same man. In one setting he was a rescuer, and in another a killer.

In 1938 in Germany, a game of war with clear rules, chess, had led Trimborn to become a friend and a protector. In 1942, in a war beyond Germany where all rules were rejected, Trimborn became a criminal. He used one automobile in 1938 to save three children; he used another in 1942 to kill hundreds: An engine starts, a gas pedal goes down, but in the one case people are driven to freedom and in the other they are asphyxiated. One of Bernstein’s children lives today in California in a house full of chess sets. Trimborn’s own children did not even know that their father knew the rules.

Most German Jews emigrated before the mass murder began. Most of the Jews who remained in Germany were killed, but only after being deported to a stateless zone, and thereby placed in a helpless situation. In some cases they were shot immediately; in others they joined local Jews in ghettos. Without prior human contacts, and without the local languages, German Jews once deported were almost never rescued. The East was for them a foreign land, just as it was for other Germans. One German Jewish woman, after her deportation to Riga, was brought to the death pits of the Rumbula Forest. Just before she was shot, she called out: “I die for Germany!” The local Jew who heard and recorded this exclamation was astonished by this cry from some other world.

No one can know what the doomed woman was thinking, but her dying commitment was far from absurd. The Germany from which she had been extruded was something that German Jews had helped to build. German Jews identified with Germany as strongly, or perhaps more strongly, than other Germans; its collapse into antisemitism and murder was for this reason a special sort of tragedy; their particular experience of the rise and fall of German civilization, limited to them and alien to the vast majority of European Jews, continues to structure our understanding of the Holocaust.

Only about three percent of the victims of the Holocaust were German Jews. For the Jews of eastern Europe, the vast majority of the victims, Germany was not something that Jews had cocreated but rather something that destroyed Jews. In his “Death Fugue,” one of the great short poems of the last century, Paul Celan called death itself a “master from Germany.” The Polish literary critic Michał Głowiński wrote of the experience of his boyhood in his memoir
The Black Seasons:
“My image of the Germans—or rather my image of a German, since my image of the whole nation was embodied in an individual and what the individual did—was extremely straightforward: at any given moment he seeks to murder me, you, someone else. And he will carry out this desire without fail the moment you fall into his hands.”

Głowiński, as a young boy in hiding, once played chess with a Polish blackmailer while his aunt sought the money that would save their lives. If his aunt had not succeeded, he would, in all likelihood, have been delivered to a German who would have made sure that he was killed. Głowiński’s memory of his boyhood is an accurate presentation of how most Germans behaved in the places where German (or Soviet and then German) power had destroyed the state. These zones of statelessness became places of death for Jews who had lived there before the war as well as for Jews brought there during the war.

The degree of statelessness was so crucial to the life chances of Europeans beyond Germany in part because it was important to the behavior of Germans themselves. The mutation of the German polity after 1933—the creation of a party-state, the establishment of camps, the hybridization of institutions, the discrimination of Jews—gave millions of Germans a taste of the pleasures of lawlessness. During the war, most German policemen comported themselves in one way in Germany and in an entirely different way when dispatched to the East. German soldiers who had previously occupied the peaceful Loire Valley in France could shoot Jews right after they arrived in Belarus. The Order Police of the prosperous northern German port city of Bremen could assemble the Jews of Kyiv at Babyi Iar for the largest mass shooting of civilians in history. Literally nothing could have prepared them for it, and in any case they had no special training for such actions. Yet these policemen were among those who organized and oversaw the killing and who attended a celebratory dinner afterwards. Later they went back to Bremen and to directing traffic.

A lesser known but equally striking example is that of the millions of German women working for the German occupation authorities in the East or accompanying their husbands or lovers on assignments there. About half a million German women served as “helpers” of the
Wehrmacht
, and another ten thousand as “helpers” of the SS. Precisely because the occupied East was governed as a kind of anarchic colony, the flexibility and individual initiative of these women must have been crucial. It goes without saying that they knew about the Holocaust, since many of them saw murders, heard about murders, or wrote and transmitted the reports about murders.

A few German women were direct participants in the killing. Twenty of the guards at Majdanek, for example, were women. This was a concentration camp in the Lublin District of the General Government that became, over time, an extermination facility as well. Some fifty thousand Jews were gassed to death there. These women had their first experience of work as guards in Ravensbrück, the major concentration camp for females in Germany. There they were employed in what was, in effect, a lawless zone inside Germany itself. In Majdanek they were employed in a similar facility, but now surrounded by an anarchic German colony. They took part in the killing of Jews and other prisoners, for example by helping to select who was to labor and who was to be gassed.

Further east, in places such as Latvia and Ukraine, a few German women murdered Jews without the structure and experience provided by such facilities and indeed without any orders to do so. These women went beyond their instructions, in the spirit of what they saw and heard around them every day. German women who killed or took part in the killing of Jews during the war lived unremarkable lives in Germany before the war, and, unless they were prosecuted, which was rare, lived normal lives in Germany after the war. The role that German women played in mass killing was probably indispensable, but women were not taken seriously as actors during the war and were therefore able to shelter themselves after the war. Sometimes they spoke to their daughters.

If statelessness drew German women to the East to become murderers, the fact that Nazi Germany was a state attracted Jewish women from the East. From the perspective of Jewish women in occupied Poland or in the occupied Soviet Union, Germany could be a relatively safe place. Jewish women presented themselves to German occupation authorities as gentiles and asked for labor assignments in Germany, believing, quite correctly, that their chances for survival were higher there. If a woman had a contact in the Polish or Soviet underground (or, more rarely, with a sympathetic German) who could arrange false papers, she could work in relative security in Germany, pretending to be a Pole or a Ukrainian or someone else. For men this was much harder, since Jewish males bore an identifying mark, the circumcision, which could always be checked and would always be a source of anxiety. For Jewish women, however, false documents were a step back toward the world of recognition by the state. To be sure, they were stigmatized as racial inferiors in Germany: Those from Poland wore a patch with a
P
, those from the USSR a patch with the word
Ost
. All were required to live a life only of labor and could expect heavy punishments for breaking rules. Some died from poor working conditions, some were executed for breaking rules, a few were murdered. Nevertheless, a piece of paper that permitted a return to a zone where some kind of law functioned usually meant life.

The end of states meant the end of state protection, and the scramble for the next best thing. When whole countries ceased to be, old passports and identity documents became useless by the million. New ones had to be acquired one by one, and usually on German (or Soviet) terms. The importance of documentation and citizenship was perfectly clear at the time. In the eastern Polish city of Lwów, surrounded by Ukrainians and largely inhabited by Jews, occupied by the Soviets in 1939, the Germans in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1944, a certain lapidary bit of wisdom made the rounds: “The passport is what holds body and soul together.” This meant that the people who had the power to rescue others were those who could dispense identity documents.

In eastern Europe most people understood the importance of regime transitions, and with time the western Allies also came to grasp the importance of documents. An attempt by the United States to rescue Jews depended precisely on the provision of documents and thus the extension of state recognition. In 1944, Washington appealed, under the auspices of the War Refugee Board, to European neutral states to use their diplomats to rescue Jews. Sweden cooperated with this plan, providing an amateur diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg. He was to enter Hungary in 1944, with the mission of extending to Hungarian Jews the protection of the Swedish state. Wallenberg did have backing from his own government and from the Americans, but he also knew that he was opposing German policy and provoking Hungarian fascists. Nevertheless, he issued something like fifteen thousand “protection passports,” and probably saved more Jews than anyone else.

Wallenberg, an exceptional man, represented a certain class of rescuer, diplomats who, by virtue of their position, embodied state sovereignty and could confer state recognition. In general, the only people who could rescue Jews in large numbers were those who had some direct connection to a state and some authorization to dispense its protection. A diplomat could grant to a Jew a passport or at least a travel document—an invitation to return to the world of human reciprocity, in which a person must be treated as a person because he is represented by a state. Wallenberg was a businessman who chose and was chosen to act as a diplomat at a crucial moment: the German occupation of Hungary, when the largest remaining population of European Jews was under threat. Yet there were also other professional diplomats who found themselves serving in situations where the sovereignty of the states in which they worked was compromised, who understood that this was a disaster for Jews, and who chose to try to save them.