Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (37 page)

Blessing complained about various deficiencies within the Romanian state apparatus and explicitly blamed “the Jews” as playing a part in the rapid rise in prices. Should the devaluation of the leu continue “virtually unchecked,” he warned, Germany and Romania would be faced with a very serious danger “not only of social unrest but of a decline in Romanian production.” He suggested raising taxes, creating incentives for Romanians to open savings accounts, and reducing all expenditures not deemed essential to the Romanian war effort.
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For its part, the Romanian government tried to get the Reich to scale back its demands. The leadership in Bucharest required Wehrmacht intendants to renegotiate its financial contribution every ten days. Individual military units imes found themselves unable to pay their bills, since the Romanian government—with Neubacher’s support—had decided that introducing huge amounts of money into circulation would “endanger the currency and lead to inflation.” Once German military attachés had been convinced of this danger, Antonescu hoped that, “by refusing to provide lei, we can force the Germans to reduce their troop strength.” But Hitler objected, reminding Antonescu that, thanks to the war against the Soviet Union, Romania had not only reacquired northern Bukovina and Bessarabia but been given the right to administer and plunder Ukrainian Transnistria. In August 1941, the two leaders came to an agreement that Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia were to be immediately dispossessed. A short time later, after a successful joint campaign in Ukraine, the Wehrmacht and the Romanian armed forces concluded a treaty that included the following passage: “Deportation of Jews from Transnistria. Deportation across the Bug River is not feasible at present. Therefore, they will have to be detained in concentration camps and pressed into forced labor until the conclusion of operations, when deportation to the East will be possible.”
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In the summer of 1941, the number of Wehrmacht personnel who had to be provisioned in Romania averaged between 50,000 and 60,000. Despite official prohibitions, German soldiers repeatedly tried to smuggle surplus Romanian goods out via ship or freight train as “Wehrmacht resources.” Those shipments, bound either for Germany itself or for Russia, were not always successful. A member of the German army mission in Romania wrote in his diary: “For days and even weeks, the Romanians hold up individual shipments and whole trainloads of necessities that are supposed to be sent back home, by order of the Army High Command. All attempts to remove obstructions to transport of Wehrmacht resources only lead to individual shipments being let through after weeks of waiting.” There was no great mystery as to the cause of the delays. Even the German intendant in Romania admitted that the country suffered from “undeniable shortages of some basic necessities.”
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To redress the situation in Romania, the Nazi leadership decided to use shipments of gold to stabilize the currency, which had been so seriously undermined by the Reich’s own policies. With increasing insistence, the Romanian government had been demanding since July 1941 that Berlin pay at least part of its debts in gold, so that the Romanian National Bank could “show an improvement in its gold reserves.” Recognizing the danger “that Germany might have to introduce its own currency into Romania, if currency difficulties aren’t checked,” several of Hitler’s advisers acknowledged the gravity of the problem.
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Neubacher supported Romania’s demands, as well. Large amounts of gold had previously been shipped to the Romanian National Bank to stabilize the leu in June 1940, and in early 1942 the shipments were resumed. Together, the two sets of shipments amounted to some eighteen tons.
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Confident of his own position, Antonescu made no effort to fulfill all of the Wehrmacht’s demands. On the contrary, his chief negotiators fought with Wehrmacht intendants over every leu. On January 1, 1943, the German general in charge of the Wehrmacht in Romania felt compelled to issue a statement about “the shortage of lei”: “Our goal has to be to spare German soldiers in Romania another decrease in pay, to use all means at hand to further reduce material expenditures, and to avoid destabilizing Romania’s currency.”
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At the same time, the reversal of its military fortunes on the Eastern Front meant that Germany had to move more and more units to Romania to establish field hospitals and bases for reinforcements. To this end, a secret agreement was concluded between German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Romanian counterpart, Mihai Antonescu, on January 11, 1943, at Hitler’s Wolfsschanze command center. (Economics Minister Walther Funk, president of the Reichsbank, was also present at the meeting.) The accord provided for the delivery to Romania of thirty tons of gold, with a value of 84 million reichsmarks. In addition, the Reich government promised to pay 43 million Swiss francs to Romania within six months in order “to avoid the sale to Switzerland of Romanian export goods deemed essential to the German war effort.” Thanks to these measures, the Romanian government was able to stabilize the country’s currency in the short term and to procure Swiss-made weapons and matériel for its own army, which had suffered heavy losses on the Eastern Front and needed to be reequipped.
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Antonescu had arrived at the Wolfsschanze accompanied by a large entourage. While he was in transit, the commanding German officer in Bucharest reported to the head of the German army mission, who was traveling with Antonescu’s group, about “difficulties in acquiring lei.” Simultaneously the Wehrmacht leadership, represented by General Hermann Reinecke, declared that, on the “lei issue, the Romanians should be enlisted in the interest of our joint pursuit of the war.” When the members of the Romanian delegation returned home, they made “an impression of being very satisfied” on the German officer who accompanied them.
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Antonescu’s satisfaction with the deal ebbed quickly once he returned to Bucharest. On February 2, he repeated his earlier refusals to make “Romanian advance payments” toward meeting Wehrmacht demands, asserting: “Only after binding statements have been issued from German officials about the timetable for the delivery of the promised gold, and the first of those deliveries has actually been made, can Romania begin to provide promised monies for German troops.” The initial delivery left the Reichsbank’s gold depot on February 15, 1943, headed for Bucharest. At the last minute, however, as a revised waybill shows, the value of the gold being shipped had been reduced by about one-third, to 19,998,820.57 reichsmarks. As a result, a month later the Romanian finance minister refused to make payments in full to the Wehrmacht. The Reichsbank delivered the remainder of the gold in three shipments on April 15, April 18, and May 2, 1943.
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In the run-up to the negotiations at the Wolfsschanze, Reichsbank vice president Emil Puhl had tried to thwart Romanian claims against the Reich, which, as he put it, “now, on top of everything else, include demands for payment in gold.” Afterward, he remarked indignantly that Antonescu “had succeeded in wringing concessions from the German side.” Goebbels also noted that, in the wake of recent military defeats, Romania “was zealously concerned with creating a stable gold reserve.”
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The Romanian National Bank used the gold to stabilize its shaky currency. Thanks to those resources, and revenues earned from the Romanization of Jewish assets, the finance minister was able to declare in May 1943 that the states since October 1, 1942, no longer had to tap the national bank”—in other words, print more money.
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In return for the gold and the Swiss francs, the Reich received fuel and foodstuffs. The Romanian Finance Ministry also issued leu notes for the wages and upkeep of German soldiers. As spelled out in the transcript of the negotiations, the purpose of these transactions was to stabilize the Romanian currency and to enable “the issuance of additional currency in the German interest.” In return, and after consultations with German representatives, Romania pledged to increase its 1943 petroleum exports to Germany and Italy to 4 million tons. In addition, Romania was to provide “at least 15,000 tons of oil cake as well as 90,000 tons of oil seed” for the cooking needs of German housewives and to contribute, retroactively to October 1, 1942, 525 million lei a month to the Wehrmacht to pay for a raise in soldiers’ wages.
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On February 9, 1944, after a personal order from Hitler, Germany assured Romania that it would pay for future “deliveries of grain with shipments of gold.” An official at the Reich Finance Ministry noted of this guarantee: “The Führer must have had political reasons.” Accordingly, 10.3 tons of gold were to be transferred to the Romanian National Bank’s depository at the Swiss National Bank. Shortly before Romania switched sides in the war in August 1944, however, the government in Bucharest insisted that “equivalent values in currency or gold” be paid, if Germany made any further demands for its many soldiers stationed in the country. The chief German negotiator balked, but in the end he declared his country willing “to transfer a further 20 million Swiss francs of gold to Romania,” if that country continued to provide the German populace with grain and legumes
(Hülsenfrüchte).
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Although the gold transactions were kept top secret, regent Miklós Horthy in neighboring Hungary got word of them. When Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, he complained: “They’ll simply cart everything off and they won’t be paying in gold, as they do with the Romanians, but with their worthless paper money.”
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That was in fact what happened in Hungary, for the most part. The Germans paid in pengö, not in marks, and, as recounted above, they helped Hungary’s financial administrators underwrite some of the occupation costs with proceeds from Jewish assets. The latter tactic drew no objection from Horthy.

At the beginning of 1944, the Wehrmacht made a failed attempt to deport 8,000 Jews from Athens to Auschwitz. Without much assistance from local authorities, the relatively weak units of occupying German soldiers were able to round up only about 1,200 people. By contrast, the occupiers succeeded in deporting nearly all the Jews of Salonika, where Greek officials cooperated with their German occupiers.

For centuries, Salonika had been a mixed Turkish-Bulgarian-Greek-Jewish city. As late as the 1910s, its residents had used Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, as their lingua franca. Between 1912 and 1941, Salonika’s Jewish community lost tens of thousands of members through emigration prompted by growing Greek nationalism and economic misery. An entry in the 1927
Jüdisches exikon
reads: “When Salonika became part of Greece, moves were made to force Jews out of prominent positions in society. . . . The exchange of refugees with Turkey [1922] also led to the emigration of many Jews, who were compelled to make room for Greek refugees returning from Turkey.” In the eyes of local Jews, it seemed that “the new arrivals brought anti-Semitism with them.” Even as far back as 1912, the new Greek city government had tried to expropriate Jewish cemeteries in the center of town. Its attempts failed, but the properties were confiscated in 1942 and 1943 under the German occupation. Today, the local university occupies those sites.

To this day, many Greeks continue to suffer from selective memory when it comes to the fate of their Jewish fellow citizens. A documentary volume published in English by the Greek Foreign Ministry in 1998 talks about the philo-Semitism of Eleftherios Venizelos, modern Greece’s most influential politician, whose government was the first in Europe to call for an independent Jewish state. But the 1927
Jüdisches Lexikon
leaves no doubt that Venizelos adopted his position “in an effort to ‘de-Jewify’ and Hellenize Salonika.”
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This aspect of the deportation of Salonika’s Jews is well known; what is less well known—indeed ignored in the literature of the Holocaust—is the joint German and Greek exploitation of the assets of those Jews. Here, too, there is a connection between the enormous occupation costs the Germans imposed on its defeated enemy and the attempt to stabilize the local currency through the Aryanization of Jewish property. Some twelve tons of gold belonging to Jews from Salonika were sold for this latter purpose. Those involved in the transactions, both German and Greek, maintained absolute silence after the war about what they had done with the stolen gold. It requires painstaking detective work—and a host of footnotes—to reconstruct this historical episode.

IN 1941, the population of Greece numbered more than 7 million. The cost of living had risen steadily between 1930 and 1940, but at a relatively moderate rate of some 5 percent annually.
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Greece was a poor country, still trying to cope with the effects of the Greek-Turkish war, which included mass deportations and resettlements. Prior to the German invasion, the gross national product totaled 60 billion drachmas, the equivalent of only around 1 billion reichsmarks. On April 27, 1941, after a brief military campaign, German troops occupied Athens. Together with their Italian and Bulgarian allies, they divided the country into three occupation zones. The largest was put under Italian administration, and some northern regions were controlled by the Bulgarians. The Germans occupied other important regions in and around Salonika, Attica, and Crete.
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From the time of the invasion until November 1943, career diplomat Günther Altenburg served as Reich envoy in Greece. But the real power rested with Hitler’s special deputy for southeastern Europe, Hermann Neubacher. On October 5, 1942, he was given supplementary authority over economics and finance in occupied Greece. His official title was special envoy to the Führer for Greece. The two offices were combined in the fall of 1943, when the diplomat Hans Graevenitz succeeded Altenburg, but Neubacher continued to pull the strings in the background.