Storming the Eagle's Nest (10 page)

Here, from 6 to 14 July 1938, the liberal democracies disgraced themselves. The French hosts set the tone by stating that their country had reached ‘the extreme point of saturation as regards the admission of refugees'. Lord Winterton, leading the British delegation, followed suit: ‘the United Kingdom is not a country of immigration. It is highly industrialised, fully populated and is still faced with the problem of unemployment.' The United States could do no better: it would not relax its strict immigration quota. The Swiss head of the police force responsible for foreigners, Dr Heinrich Rothmund, unapologetically told delegates that ‘Switzerland, which has as little use for these Jews as Germany, will take measures to protect herself from being swamped by Jews.'
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The consequence was that – at least officially – the enlightened democracies would do precious little to find new homes for the displaced Jews. In their defence, the extermination of the race first threatened by the Nazi SS chief, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, before the end of that year of 1938 was hardly an outcome imagined by the delegates. Nevertheless, the fact was that after Évian, as Chaim Weizmann, later Israel's first head of state, commented, ‘The world seemed divided into two parts – those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.'
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With the outbreak of war the pressure of Jewish refugees on the Swiss borders had risen.

In the Alps, Bavaria had been profoundly hostile to Jews since the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. In the resort of Garmish-Partenkirchen anti-Jewish posters were removed only on the occasion of the Winter Olympics in February 1936 – when they might be seen by international visitors; the twin towns' remaining forty Jews were expelled at two hours' notice during Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938. Two of them, turned back at the Swiss border, committed suicide. Austria's
Alpine provinces had kowtowed after Anschluss in March 1938, the resort of Kitzbühel seeing its Jewish community disappear virtually overnight. After the Fall of France, Vichy had required no prompting from Berlin to pass the Statut des Juifs: the
internment
camp in the Paris suburb of Drancy had opened on 21 August 1941. Following the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 in Berlin which formulated ‘die Endlösung der Judenfrage' (the Final Solution to the Jewish question), the persecution of the French Jewish population became more concerted. The Vel d'Hiv round-up of Jews in central Paris in July 1942 saw the first 13,000 of a total of 67,400 sent to Auschwitz. The French Alpine regions of the Rhône-Alpes and the Alpes-Maritimes soon followed. Nice lost 600 Jews on 26 August 1942; in Grenoble, capital of the Dauphiné, the community of around 3,000 Jews also found themselves persecuted, then – eventually – deported. In the Italian Alps, Mussolini's pale imitation of the Nuremberg Laws, the Manifesto della razza, held sway from September 1938. In Piedmont, persecution was sufficient to drive families into hiding in the surrounding mountains; deportations to Auschwitz began in 1942. In the Yugoslav Alps, Nazi
anti-Semitic
policies were pursued with their usual vigour after the Axis invasion of April 1941, though those parts of the country held by the Italians were less harsh in their treatment. By 1942, much of the Alps had become a place where Jews could not live.

Switzerland therefore became the obvious destination for the persecuted. Yet despite its tradition of offering asylum for the oppressed, the Swiss were cautious. They categorised those trying to enter Switzerland as Evaders (military personnel in plain clothes), Internierten (military personnel clothed as such) and Flüchtlinge – civilian refugees. They filtered and they sifted. In the aftermath of the Évian Conference the Swiss successfully petitioned the Nazis to stamp the passports of Jews with a J, a decision approved by the Federal Council on 4 October 1938. This was to enable them to be singled out at the border. As the Bergier commission pointed out, this meant that Switzerland was ‘making anti-semitic laws the basis of its entry practices'.
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By 1941 the country was playing host to 19,429 Jews, of whom 9,150 were classed as ‘foreign'. Some were en route to other countries, others had nowhere else to go. As the consequences of Wannsee became apparent, the refugees' problem became desperate. By the summer of 1942, the fate of Jews sent east in the railway cattle cars – the story of Treblinka – had found its way into the press. Both the
Daily Telegraph
in England and the
Washington
Post
in the United States carried stories of the mass exterminations. On 25 August 1942 the story was splashed all over the Swiss newspapers, and the Swiss found themselves besieged. Already, in late July 1942, Heinrich Rothmund had written to his superior, the Justice and Police Minister Eduard von Steiger,

To avoid the appearance of persecuting the Jews, on 13 August 1942 Steiger agreed to Rothmund ordering the closing of Swiss borders to
all
refugees, irrespective of nationality or race. In a speech at the end of the month, von Steiger explained,

This was generally interpreted in the headline ‘
DAS
BOOT IST
VOLL
' (The boat is full), a phrase used both by the Swiss President and by Rothmund himself.

The judgement of history on this decision has been harsh. The Bergier commission noted the democracy's failure to distinguish
between war and genocide. It also judged that the country ‘rarely chose' to use its position ‘for the defence of basic humanitarian values'.
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For the Swiss, Operation Anton, less than three months after Steiger's August decision, was a body blow. From 1940 onwards the republic's ambivalence towards refugees had been coupled with the practical difficulty of the shortage of food for an increasing number of mouths, together with fears of social and political unrest. While the refugees remained birds of passage, this was not an overwhelming problem even for a small country with limited food for its own population. The closure of the border caused by Operation Anton exacerbated the crisis, both in terms of perception and reality. It was one thing to be a staging post for refugees. It was another to accept them at the frontier without any prospect of their eventual departure. As Alexander Rotenberg put it, when Switzerland was encircled, ‘Refugees, at first a novelty, were also by now streaming in from wherever they could find leaks in the border … And now, surrounded and closed off from free world trade, sharing short rations with illegal foreigners was not a popular option.' Switzerland would soon be full,
complet, besetzt, pieno.

In the autumn of 1942, in a country averse to strangers, in a nation whose very existence was in jeopardy, in a land where the population was on rations, they were the unwanted.

In practice the reception of Jews of any age or status often depended on the charity – or otherwise – of the border officials whom they encountered. Some refugees were turned away at the Swiss frontier and sent to their deaths. Others were formally admitted. To yet others a blind eye was turned. Rotenberg recorded his experience in
Emissaries:
A Memoir of the Riviera, Haute-Savoie, Switzerland, and World War II
.
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In 1940 he had flown a Nazi round-up of Jews in his newly occupied home city of Antwerp. He had escaped first into occupied northern France, subsequently to the first port of call
for many European Jews that summer: the Alpes-Maritimes capital of Nice. Here he lived for eighteen months working for the Jewish underground. Forewarned of the general round-up of Jews in the city of 26 August 1942, he took a train north into the Haute-Savoie in the Rhône-Alpes.

Then, as summer turned to autumn, he and a companion, Ruth Hepner, took the steep, rough mountain paths that led up to the Franco-Swiss border close to the French hamlet of Barbère. This was ten miles north-east of the famous old Savoie resort of Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc, and at a height of more than 4,000 feet. It was a bleak and forbidding place, a world of bare rock and broken stones, bereft of vegetation, of human habitation and of pity.

Sucessfully avoiding the Swiss police patrols on the frontier, the pair scrambled down the mountainside towards what they hoped would be the safety of the Swiss village of Finhaut, Canton Valais. There they intended to throw themselves on the mercy of the occupants of the first chalet they could find. This, as they knew, was risky, for – in Rotenberg's words – ‘The border patrols had grown more hardened.'
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As it so happened, Rotenberg and Hepner chanced upon the home of an army officer, First Lieutenant Emile Gysin. His wife Marguerite was welcoming and plied the pair with café au lait in front of the fire; when her husband returned – complete with a giant mastiff – he was furious. He at once assumed the refugees were German spies and threatened to turn them back to Vichy. ‘Why shouldn't I arrest you right now? Can you prove to me you are not spies? And even at that – if you are refugees as you claim – I am supposed to turn you back.' Rotenberg was cornered. How could Gysin be convinced? With a flash of inspiration, the answer came to him. He burrowed in his knapsack and brought out two prizes. These were a Hebrew prayer book and his tefillin, the set of phylacteries – boxes containing parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah – with which he prayed. ‘Have you seen these before?' demanded Rotenberg of his host. ‘Do you know what they are?'

Gysin did indeed know. The ceremonial objects convinced the lieutenant of the bona fides of the pair, and he at once relented:

Rotenberg was sent by these two good Samaritans to Montreux on the northern shores of Lake Geneva. Here he would be safe because the Swiss authorities would only expel Jews caught within five miles of the frontier. As he had sought sanctuary in Switzerland he was categorised as a ‘Flüchtling'. This meant he would be sent to a labour camp: initially at Girenbad in Canton Zurich.

Rotenberg was lucky. He joined a group of foreign Jewish refugees in Switzerland that by the time of Operation Anton in November 1942 totalled 14,000. ‘For each one of us,' Rotenberg wrote of that time, ‘there were tens, hundreds, thousands who we knew had been hounded, tricked, duped, caught, torn from families, killed on the spot …' As he learned in the course of his stay in the Swiss work camps, his mother and sister Eva were amongst them.

Rotenberg had managed to escape to Switzerland over the Alps. Other Jews in France at the time of Operation Anton found refuge in the mountains themselves.

In the south-east of France on the Riviera, the operation had seen the Germans seizing the territory to the west of the Rhône, taking their local headquarters at Marseilles on the river mouth. As we have seen, the Italians had taken over to the east of the river along the coast to Nice itself, and the Alpine border running north to Geneva. This arrangement seemed a very welcome development to the Jewish community in the
Alpes-Maritimes
and Rhône-Alpes, for it freed them from the strictures
of Vichy's Statut des Juifs that had already seen persecution and deportations. If it was true that some amongst the Italians were themselves anti-Semitic, anti-Semitism was not the centrepiece of Italian Fascism, and Italy's anti-Semitic laws were relatively lenient. Moreover, in the Alpes-Maritimes the law was exercised without a great deal of vigour: its strictures were tempered both by the humanity of the Catholic Church and the desire of the Italians to have their own way in France. ‘The arrival of Italian soldiers in the departements east of the Rhône was generally received with satisfaction and with a feeling of relief among Jews in southern France.'
15

At first this sentiment seemed well founded. In the first few weeks after Operation Anton, the Italian Carabinieri protected Nice's Jewish monuments and even broke up a march of French anti-Semites on a synagogue. Yet it soon emerged that the situation was not as clear-cut as it seemed. The demarcation between the Italian and German authorities on the one hand and the remaining Vichy officials on the other was vague, ill-defined and – very shortly – quarrelsome.

No sooner had the Germans settled themselves in Marseilles in the early winter of 1942 than they began rounding up the local Jewish population. They also urged their Italian counterparts in Nice to do likewise. The Italians proved resistant. On 17 December 1942 Mussolini had heard the simultaneous declaration from the Allies in London, Washington and Moscow condemning the Nazis' ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination',
16
and drew the logical conclusion. That same month the Italian authorities prevented Vichy attempts in Nice to have the Jews' passports stamped with the letter J for Juif or Juive; they then began interfering with the round-ups being undertaken by the Germans. On 22 February 1943 the Pusteria Division of the Italian Fourth Army had stopped the prefect of Lyons arresting 2,000–3,000 Polish Jews in the Grenoble area to the
south-east
of France's second city. There was also an extraordinary stand-off between the Axis allies in Annecy. Here the Vichy authorities had rounded up a group of Jews in the local prison
for deportation. The Italians set up a military zone in the prison precincts and got them released.