Hitler and the Holocaust (23 page)

From the end of 1942, a flourishing trade in exemption certificates for Jews developed, as Romanian officials discovered that the sale of Jews abroad for hard currency could be profitable. Romania became an enthusiastic convert to the idea of Jewish emigration and an outlet for Jews seeking to reach Palestine. The one country in Europe (outside of Germany) that had practiced mass extermination of Jews entirely on its own initiative also proved to be the most mercenary, and this corruptibility led to a new “moderation” on the “Jewish question.” Antonescu first tried and ultimately failed to persuade the Nazis to permit the departure of Jews to the Middle East. Then, ignoring German pressure, he decisively obstructed the deportation of Jews from the Regat region. Despite Antonescu’s record of murderous anti-Semitism, about three hundred thousand Romanian Jews (more than half the Jewish population) survived the Holocaust.

Hungary was an exceptionally tragic case, for had the Germans not invaded the country in March 1944, far more Jews
would have been spared than in Romania. Instead, in a dizzying, accelerated process of destruction that took fewer than four months, more than 60 percent of Hungary’s 725,000 Jews were packed off to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. By 8 July 1944, almost 440,000 Jews had been deported, and toward the end of the year, except for the Jews of Budapest, the country was virtually
Judenrein.
The speed seemed all the more shocking given the late stage of the war, the certainty that Nazi Germany would be defeated, the widespread knowledge of the Holocaust, and repeated Allied warnings to the Hungarian government. The two hundred Germans in Adolf Eichmann’s Sondereinsatzkommando (Special Operations Unit), aided by another six hundred Gestapo men, could hardly have deported Hungarian Jewry to the death chambers on their own. The collaboration of the Hungarian Army, the gendarmerie (who played the key role), politicians, civil servants, fascist Arrow Cross militia, and transport workers was essential. The process was made much easier by the spinelessness of the Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, and the hostility of ordinary Hungarians who seemed to sympathize more with the persecutors of the Jews than with the victims.
²¹
There were no fewer than thirty-five thousand Hungarian denunciations and betrayals of Jews in the first weeks of the German invasion. Moreover, the Christian churches and the Primate of Hungary, Cardinal Justinian Seredi, displayed remarkably little resistance (except on the issue of converts) to the anti-Jewish measures that ultimately led to the deportations.
²²

Jewish resistance, while difficult in Hungary’s open plains, was also minimal. One of the reasons why so few Hungarian Jews resorted to arms lay in the depth of their integration in Hungarian society, ever since their emancipation in 1867. Before 1914, they had been important allies for the Magyars in the multiethnic Hungarian state that was still part of the Habsburg Empire and faced with constant demographic and political challenges from Romanians, Germans, Slovaks,
Serbs, and Croats.
²³
During the First World War, however, the short-lived Soviet Republic established by Béla Kun and his associates (two thirds of whom were Communists of Jewish origin) changed perceptions decisively for the worse, even though the revolutionaries were as hostile to Judaism as they were to the Christian churches. This was especially true for the conservative, landowning elites who had traditionally looked to Jews as their natural business partners.

In 1920, Hungary had been the first modern state in postwar Europe to institute a
numerus clausus
in order to reduce Jewish admissions to the universities to 6 percent. In 1938, the first anti-Jewish law limited Jewish representation in commercial, financial, and industrial concerns, as well as in journalism and the professions, to 20 percent. A second anti-Jewish law of wider scope followed in May 1939, restricting Jewish participation in professional and economic life to 6 and 12 percent respectively. The third anti-Jewish law of July 1941 was much more openly racist, forbidding mixed marriages between Christians and Jews and narrowing exemptions.
²⁴
This barrage of legislation reflected in its own way the exceptional importance of the role that Jews had played in Hungary’s economic and cultural life for many decades.

As in Romania, during the 1930s successive Hungarian governments tried to outflank the far right by adopting more moderate anti-Semitic legal measures. But this tactic did not stop the Nazi-style Arrow Cross from winning 45 out of 260 parliamentary seats in the May 1939 elections. The Arrow Cross immediately demanded far sterner measures against the Jews, which were partly satisfied by the new legislation of July 1941. Then, in June 1942, Prime Minister Miklós Kállay a cosmopolitan Catholic aristocrat, introduced a bill to expropriate Jewish-controlled estates. A few weeks later, the Jewish religion was deprived of equal treatment with other denominations, which it had enjoyed since 1895. But Kállay firmly rejected German demands to expropriate all Jewish
wealth, to impose the yellow star, or to deport the Jews to the east.
²⁵
When Hitler summoned Admiral Horthy to Klessheim Castle on 17–18 April 1943, it was evident that both he and Ribbentrop were profoundly irked by the fact that Jews still held positions of economic and political influence in Hungary. This was almost certainly a factor in the German invasion of Hungary nearly one year later.

After the March 1944 invasion, the new Hungarian prime minister, Döme Sztójay, was ready to give the Germans what they wanted. Adolf Eichmann soon found three Hungarians on whom he could rely completely for the concentration of Jews in the provinces with “lightning speed” and then for the transportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau of nearly half a million Jews: Lieutenant Colonel Ferenczy, who had direct charge of the deportations; László Baky, in the Interior Ministry, who controlled the gendarmerie; and László Endre, State Secretary in Charge of Political Jewish Affairs, a particularly rabid anti-Semite.
²⁶
Collaboration now proceeded on a very broad scale. Deportations in every locality required the intervention of the mayor, the police chief, and gendarmes as well as civil servants, who, along with other Hungarians, often enriched themselves by plundering the belongings and property of the departing Jews. The lack of resistance by most Hungarian Gentiles to this forcible uprooting of so many Jews (some of whom had lived continuously in certain communities for centuries) within a matter of days was all the more stunning, given the extent of assimilation on which Hungarian Jewry had long prided itself. Eventually, Admiral Horthy did buckle to pressure from the Western Allies, Pope Pius XII, the king of Sweden, and other dignitaries; he stopped the deportations on 7 July 1944. Undoubtedly, he feared retribution after the American bombing raids on Budapest (2 July 1944), the approach of the Red Army from the east, and the Allied advances in Normandy. He could not but take note of President Roosevelt’s ultimatum that “Hungary’s
fate will not be like any other civilised nation … unless the deportations are stopped.”
²⁷

But in mid-October 1944, the Germans overthrew the Horthy government, appointing the violently anti-Semitic Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi as head of state. Now began the gruesome last phase of the Hungarian Holocaust—a reign of terror in which the Danube turned red with the blood of more than twenty thousand Jews, tormented and butchered by Arrow Cross fanatics.
²⁸
It was a period of feverish appeals by world Jewry to Allied governments, to the International Red Cross, to the Vatican, and to neutral countries. Protective passes—an idea inspired by Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic Swedish diplomat—saved at least fifteen thousand Jews in Budapest. Jewish lives were also saved by the energetic papal nuncio, Angelo Rotta, and through Swiss diplomatic protection in specially acquired safe houses.
²⁹
A sustained Swiss press campaign did much to ignite the indignation of Western leaders at the fate of Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944.
³⁰

The position of Jews in the “independent” Slovak state established with German help in 1939 was even shakier than in Hungary. The fascist militia (the Hlinka Guard) in this small, weak, backward puppet state was Catholic in outlook but also ultranationalist, pro-German, and very anti-Semitic. Most of the Catholics in the Slovak government did not fully share the “modern” racism of the Nazis and still favored the traditional Catholic distinction between baptized and unconverted Jews.
³¹
By the end of 1941, they were certainly interested in deporting the Jews and taking over their property but as yet unaware of the “Final Solution.” However, there were powerful figures such as Alexander Mach (the interior minister) and the German-oriented prime minister, Vojtech Tuka, who wished to imitate the Nazi handling of the “Jewish question.” These men were the driving force behind the deportation of nearly ninety thousand Slovak Jews, which began in early
1942. The evidence suggests, as Yehuda Bauer has argued, that it was the Slovaks, rather than the Germans, who initiated the deportations.
³²
The Slovak leaders did not definitively know until May 1942 of the mass murders in Poland, though they had probably received some indications before then. By the end of July 1942, however, fifty-two thousand Jews had been transported to Poland, including women, children, the very young, and the infirm. Nazi Germany demanded five hundred Reichsmarks for every Jew received but did not make any claim on their property. The Slovak government, eager to cooperate, expected to benefit handsomely from the massive expropriation of Jewish possessions.

It was in Slovakia that a Jewish Center (Ustredna Zidov) first emerged that tried to prevent the deportations by bribing Slovak officials and negotiating with Eichmann’s representative in Bratislava, Dieter Wisliceny. Though nominally part of the Tiso regime’s apparatus (and including at least one collaborator with the Germans), the Jewish Center’s members tried to subvert the machinery of destruction as best they could. They established intelligence networks, smuggled and aided some eight thousand Jews in reaching the comparative safety of Hungary, passed information about deportations on to the west, and engaged in other underground activities. There was also a working group that emerged apart from the center, led by a courageous Zionist, Gisi Fleischmann, and the ultra-Orthodox rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissmandel, who conceived the plan of trying to stop the deportations by offering a major bribe to Wisliceny.
³³
Toward the end of 1942, the working group suggested a sweeping idea to Wisliceny, called the Europa Plan, which was intended to halt all the deportations to Poland (and perhaps even the killings) in return for an initial down payment worth $200,000, with more cash to follow. Rabbi Weissmandel (who wrongly assumed that the first payment to Wisliceny had succeeded in halting the deportations from Slovakia in the summer of 1942) later denounced the outside Jewish world for having failed to save
European Jewry by not sending the money in time. But his accusations were based on ignorance of what had really happened in Slovakia and of the financial constraints on the Jewish side, as well as on a misreading of Nazi intentions.
³⁴

There were, as we have seen, countries that preceded or even rivaled the Germans in their brutal treatment of Jews. But there were also opposite cases where the “Final Solution” was partially or wholly sabotaged. A dramatic example was Bulgaria, whose fifty thousand indigenous Jews survived the war, despite considerable German pressure on its wartime ally to deliver them up for deportation.
³⁵
The Bulgarian monarchy had enjoyed extensive territorial aggrandizement (at the expense of Greece, Yugoslavia, and Romania) thanks to its alliance with Nazi Germany. Unlike Hungary and Romania, however, it did not send even a token force to fight against the Soviet Union. Also, in contrast to Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary, its native fascist movement was small and without political influence. Moreover, the country had a highly respected parliament, which worked harmoniously in tandem with the monarchy. Above all, Bulgarians were strikingly free from the anti-Semitism that was so pervasive in most of eastern Europe—a critical factor in their opposition to surrendering native Jews to the Nazis. The predominantly Sephardic community, which was well integrated into national life, was simply not regarded by most Bulgarians as a threat to their society.
³⁶

In January 1941, the Bulgarian government did pass some anti-Jewish laws, but they were far milder than those in most European countries and mitigated by many exemptions. For example, all baptized Jews (irrespective of their conversion date) were automatically exempted. Five thousand Jews—a tenth of the entire Jewish population—were given special privileges. A
numerus clausus
was imposed, but it was based on the percentage of Jews in the cities, which made it rather high. The most severe measure, mobilizing six thousand able-bodied men for work, was hardly guaranteed to enthuse the
Nazis, who bemoaned Bulgaria’s failure to understand the “Jewish problem.” Even when a yellow badge was briefly introduced (and then removed), it was extremely small, and most Jews did not even bother to wear it. An SD report to the Foreign Ministry in November 1942 noted that those who did wear it received much sympathy from “the misled population.”

When Hitler asked King Boris III of Bulgaria to transfer the Bulgarian Jews for work in Germany’s eastern territories, the monarch resisted, claiming that the Jewish workforce was required in the country to build roads and railway trucks. Not even the arrival of the zealous SS Jewish expert Theodor Dannecker in Sofia, early in 1943, succeeded in changing the situation, largely because the parliament and a wide section of the Bulgarian population was opposed to deportation. Nonetheless, Dannecker did negotiate an agreement with Aleksandr Belev, the commissar for Jewish affairs, to deport twenty thousand Jews. Politicians, clerics, intellectuals, and civil servants were on the side of the Jews, however, and as soon as the news reached the king, he instructed the prime minister to cancel the deportations.
³⁷
The Jews were resettled from the capital to rural areas, which, much to German displeasure, dispersed rather than concentrated them. The Greek Orthodox metropolitan Stephan of Sofia declared publicly that “God had determined the Jewish fate, and men had no right to torture Jews, and to persecute them.” This was considerably more explicit than anything Pope Pius XII could bring himself to say in public.