The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

The Years of Extermination

Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

Saul Friedländer

To Yonatan

The struggle to save myself is hopeless…. But that’s not important. Because I am able to bring my account to its end and trust that it will see the light of day when the time is right…. And people will know what happened…. And they will ask, is this the truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth…. Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential
truth
.

—Stefan Ernest, “The Warsaw Ghetto,” written in hiding in 1943 on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw.

Contents

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I:
Terror (Fall 1939–Summer 1941)

One:
September 1939–May 1940

Two:
May 1940–December 1940

Three:
December 1940–June 1941

Part II:
Mass Murder (Summer 1941–Summer 1942)

Four:
June 1941–September 1941

Five:
September 1941–December 1941

Six:
December 1941–July 1942

Part III:
Shoah (Summer 1942–Spring 1945)

Seven:
July 1942–March 1943

Eight:
March 1943–October 1943

Nine:
October 1943–March 1944

Ten:
March 1944–May 1945

Notes

Bibliography

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Saul Friedländer

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

This work has greatly benefited from the research funds provided by the “1939 Club” chair at UCLA and, in particular, from an incomparably generous fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. To the “1939 Club” and to the MacArthur Foundation I wish to express my deepest gratitude.

I wish, first, to mention in fond memory the friends, all departed now, with whom I shared many thoughts about the history dealt with here: Léon Poliakov, Uriel Tal, Amos Funkenstein, and George Mosse.

Professor Michael Wildt (Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung) had the kindness to read an almost final version of the manuscript; I feel very grateful for his comments: He drew my attention to recent German research and mainly helped me to avoid some mistakes, as did Dr. Dieter Pohl of the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich) and Professor Eberhard Jäckel (University of Stuttgart). I am equally thankful to Professors Omer Bartov (Brown University), Dan Diner (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and the Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig) and Norbert Frei (Jena University) for having commented on various parts of the text.

Notwithstanding my recurring doubts, I was encouraged over time to complete this project by many colleagues, particularly professors Yehuda Bauer, Dov Kulka, and Steve Aschheim (all from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Professor Shulamit Volkov (Tel Aviv University), Professor Philippe Burrin (director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva), and the late Dr. Sybil Milton, a wonderful scholar and the most selfless of colleagues, whose untimely passing was a grievous loss.

Of course, as the formula goes, the responsibility for the (certainly many) mistakes remaining in the text is solely mine.

I remained dependent throughout this entire project upon a succession of graduate students. All should be thanked here in the persons of my most recent research assistants: Deborah Brown, Amir Kenan, and Joshua Sternfeld.

Both Susan H. Llewellyn and David Koral of HarperCollins have applied their considerable linguistic skills to the copyediting of this manuscript. I am very grateful to them and, of course, most thankful for the constant attention and encouragement provided by my editor, Hugh Van Dusen. The assistant editor, Rob Crawford, has shown patience beyond the call of duty in dealing with my frequent inquiries. And, to my agents and friends, Georges, Anne, and Valerie Borchardt, I wish to express again my heartfelt thanks. My personal and professional relations with Georges and Anne go back to the publication of my first book in the United States (
Pius XII and the Third Reich
), in 1966.

This work owes more than I can say to Orna Kenan’s emotional and intellectual support; she shares my life. The book is dedicated to my newly born fourth grandson.

Introduction

David Moffie was awarded his degree in medicine at the University of Amsterdam on September 18, 1942. In a photograph taken at the event, Professor C. U. Ariens Kappers, Moffie’s supervisor, and Professor H. T. Deelman stand on the right of the new MD, and assistant D. Granaat stands on the left. Another faculty member, seen from the back, possibly the dean of the medical school, stands just behind a large desk. In the dim background, the faces of some of the people crowded into the rather cramped hall, family members and friends no doubt, are barely discernible. The faculty members have donned their academic robes, while Moffie and Granaat wear tuxedos and white ties. On the left side of his jacket Moffie displays a palm-size Jewish star with the word
Jood
inscribed on it. Moffie was the last Jewish student at the University of Amsterdam under German occupation.
¹

The usual terms of praise and thanks were certainly uttered according to academic ritual. We do not know whether any other comments were added. Shortly thereafter Moffie was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He survived, as did 20 percent of the Jews of Holland; according to the same statistics, therefore, most of the Jews present at the ceremony did not.

The picture raises some questions. How, for example, could the ceremony have taken place on September 18, 1942, when Jewish students were excluded from Dutch universities as of September 8? The editors of
Photography and the Holocaust
found the answer: The last day of the 1941–42 university year was Friday, September 18, 1942; the 1942–43 semester started on Monday, September 21. The three-day break allowed Moffie to receive his degree before the ban on Jewish students became mandatory.
²

Actually the break was limited to precisely one weekend (Friday, September 18–Monday, September 21), meaning that the university authorities agreed to use the administrative calendar against the intention of the German decree. This decision signaled an attitude widespread at Dutch universities since the fall of 1940; the photograph documents an act of defiance, on the edge of the occupier’s laws and decrees.

There is more. The deportations from Holland started on July 14, 1942. Almost daily Germans and local police arrested Jews on the streets of Dutch cities to fill the weekly quotas. Moffie could not have attended this public academic ceremony without having received one of the seventeen thousand special (and temporary) exemption certificates the Germans allocated to the city’s Jewish Council. The picture thus indirectly evokes the controversy surrounding the methods used by the heads of the council to protect—for a time at least—some of the Jews of Amsterdam while abandoning the great majority to their fate.

In the most general terms we are witnessing a common enough ceremony, easy to recognize. Here, in a moderately festive setting, a young man received official confirmation that he was entitled to practice medicine, to take care of the sick, and as far as humanly possible, to use his professional knowledge in order to restore health. But, as we know, the
Jood
pinned to Moffie’s coat carried a very different message: Like all members of his “race” throughout the Continent, the new MD was marked for murder.

Faintly seen, the
Jood
does not appear in block letters or in any other commonly used script. The characters were specially designed for this particular purpose (and similarly drawn in the languages of the countries of deportation:
Jude, Juif, Jood,
and so on) in a crooked, repulsive, and vaguely threatening way, intended to evoke the Hebrew alphabet and yet remain easily decipherable. And it is in this inscription and its peculiar design that the situation represented in the photograph reappears in its quintessence: The Germans were bent on exterminating the Jews as individuals, and on erasing what the star and its inscription represented—“the Jew.”

Here we perceive but the faintest echo of a furious onslaught aimed at eliminating any trace of “Jewishness,” any sign of the “Jewish spirit,” any remnant of Jewish presence (real or imaginary) from politics, society, culture, and history. To this end the Nazi campaign deployed, in the Reich and throughout occupied Europe, propaganda, education, research, publications, films, proscriptions, and taboos in all social and cultural domains, in fact every existing method of erasure and stamping out, from the rewriting of religious texts or opera libretti tainted by any speck of Jewishness to the renaming of streets carrying the names of Jews, from the banning of music or literary works written by Jewish artists and authors to the destruction of monuments, from the elimination of “Jewish science” to the “cleansing” of libraries, and, as foretold by Heinrich Heine’s famous dictum, from the burning of books to that of human beings.

I

The “history of the Holocaust” cannot be limited only to a recounting of German policies, decisions, and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of genocides; it must include the reactions (and at times the initiatives) of the surrounding world and the attitudes of the victims, for the fundamental reason that the events we call the Holocaust represent a totality defined by this very convergence of distinct elements.

This history is understandably written as German history in many cases. The Germans, their collaborators, and their auxiliaries were the instigators and prime agents of the policies of persecution and extermination and, mostly, of their implementation. Furthermore, German documents dealing with these policies and measures became widely accessible after the Reich’s defeat. These immense troves of material, hardly manageable even before access to former Soviet and Eastern bloc archival holdings, have, since the late 1980s, naturally reinforced still further the focus on the German dimension of this historiography. And, in the eyes of most historians, an inquiry concentrating on the German facet of this history seems more open to conceptualization and to comparative forays, less “parochial” in other words, than whatever can be written from the viewpoint of the victims or even that of the surrounding world.

This German-centered approach is of course legitimate within its limits, but the history of the Holocaust requires, as mentioned, a much wider range. At each step, in occupied Europe, the execution of German measures depended on the submissiveness of political authorities, the assistance of local police forces or other auxiliaries, and the passivity or support of the populations and mainly of the political and spiritual elites. It also depended on the willingness of the victims to follow orders in the hope of alleviating German strictures or gaining time and somehow escaping the inexorable tightening of the German vise. Thus the history of the Holocaust should be both an integrative and an integrated history.

No single conceptual framework can encompass the diverse and converging strands of such a history. Even its German dimension cannot be interpreted from one single conceptual angle. The historian faces the interaction of very diverse long- or short-term factors that can each be defined and interpreted; their very convergence, however, eludes an overall analytic category. A host of concepts have surfaced over the last six decades, only to be discarded a few years later, then rediscovered, and so on, particularly in regard to Nazi policies per se. The origins of the “Final Solution” have been attributed to a “special course” (
Sonderweg
) of German history, a special brand of German anti-Semitism, racial-biological thinking, bureaucratic politics, totalitarianism, fascism, modernity, a “European civil war” (seen from the Left and from the Right), and the like.

Reviewing these concepts would demand another book.
³
In this introduction I will essentially limit myself to defining the road taken here. Nonetheless, a few remarks regarding two contrary trends in the present historiography of the Third Reich in general and of the “Final Solution” in particular become necessary at this point.

The first trend considers the extermination of the Jews as representing, in and of itself, a major goal of German policies, whose study, however, requires new approaches: the activities of midlevel actors, the detailed analysis of events in limited areas, specific institutional and bureaucratic dynamics—all meant to throw some new light on the workings of the entire system of extermination.
⁴
This approach has added greatly to our knowledge and understanding: I have integrated many of its findings into my own more globally oriented inquiry.

The other trend is different. It has helped, over the years, to uncover many a new trail. Yet, in regard to the study of the Holocaust, each of these trails eventually branches out from the same starting point:
The persecution and extermination of the Jews of Europe was but a secondary consequence of major German policies pursued toward entirely different goals
. Among these, the ones most often mentioned include a new economic and demographic equilibrium in occupied Europe by murdering surplus populations, ethnic reshuffling and decimation to facilitate German colonization in the East, and the systematic plunder of the Jews in order to facilitate the waging of the war without putting too heavy a material burden on German society or, more precisely, on Hitler’s national-racial state (
Hitlers Volksstaat
). Notwithstanding the vistas sporadically opened by such studies, their general thrust is manifestly incompatible with the central postulates underlying my own interpretation.
⁵

In this volume, as in
The Years of Persecution
, I have chosen to focus on the centrality of ideological-cultural factors as the prime movers of Nazi policies in regard to the Jewish issue, depending of course on circumstances, institutional dynamics, and essentially, for the period dealt with here, on the evolution of the war.
⁶

The history we are dealing with is an integral part of the “age of ideology” and, more precisely and decisively, of its late phase: the crisis of liberalism in continental Europe. Between the late nineteenth century and the end of World War II, liberal society was attacked from the left by revolutionary socialism (which was to become Bolshevism in Russia and communism throughout the world), and by a revolutionary right that, on the morrow of World War I, turned into fascism in Italy and elsewhere, and into Nazism in Germany. Throughout Europe the Jews were identified with liberalism and often with the revolutionary brand of socialism. In that sense antiliberal and antisocialist (or anticommunist) ideologies, those of the revolutionary right in all its guises, targeted the Jews as representatives of the worldviews they fought and, more often than not, tagged them as the instigators and carriers of those worldviews.

In the atmosphere of national resentment following the defeat of 1918 and, later, as a result of the economic upheavals that shook the country (and the world), such an evolution acquired a momentum of its own in Germany. Yet, without the obsessive anti-Semitism and the personal impact of Adolf Hitler, first in the framework of his movement, then on the national scene after January 1933, the widespread German anti-Semitism of those years would probably not have coalesced into anti-Jewish political action and certainly not into its sequels.

The crisis of liberalism and the reaction against communism as ideological sources of anti-Semitism, pushed to their extreme on the German scene, became increasingly virulent throughout Europe, the Nazi message thus garnering a positive response from many Europeans and a considerable phalanx of supporters beyond the shores of the old Continent. Moreover, antiliberalism and anticommunism corresponded to the stances adopted by the major Christian churches, and traditional Christian anti-Semitism easily merged with and bolstered the ideological tenets of various authoritarian regimes, of fascist movements, and partly of some aspects of Nazism.

Finally, this very crisis of liberal society and its ideological underpinnings left the Jews increasingly weak and isolated throughout a continent where the progress of liberalism had allowed and fostered their emancipation and social mobility. Thus the ideological background here defined becomes the indirect link between the three main components of this history: National Socialist Germany, the surrounding European world, and the Jewish communities scattered throughout the Continent. However, notwithstanding the German evolution to which I briefly alluded, these background elements in no way suffice to address the specific course of events in Germany.

II

The peculiar aspects of the National Socialist anti-Jewish course derived from Hitler’s own brand of anti-Semitism, from the bond between Hitler and all levels of German society, mainly after the mid-thirties, from the political-institutional instrumentalization of anti-Semitism by the Nazi regime and, of course, after September 1939, from the evolving war situation. In
The Years of Persecution
, I defined Hitler’s brand of anti-Jewish hatred as “redemptive anti-Semitism”; in other words, beyond the immediate ideological confrontation with liberalism and communism, which in the Nazi leader’s eyes were worldviews invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, Hitler perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating the Jews. The Nazi leader saw “the Jew” as the principle of evil in Western history and society. Without a victorious redeeming struggle, the Jew would ultimately dominate the world. This overall metahistorical axiom led to Hitler’s more concrete ideological-political corollaries.

On a biological, political, and cultural level, the Jew strove to destroy the nations by spreading racial pollution, undermining the structures of the state, and, more generally, by heading the main ideological scourges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Bolshevism, plutocracy, democracy, internationalism, pacifism, and sundry other dangers. By using this vast array of means and methods, the Jew aimed at achieving the disintegration of the vital core of all nations in which he lived—and particularly that of the German
Volk
—in order to accede to world domination. Since the establishment of the National Socialist regime in Germany, the Jew, aware of the danger represented by the awakening Reich, was ready to unleash a new world war to destroy this challenge to his own progress toward his ultimate aim.