Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (29 page)

At one extreme of state destruction, the Holocaust took place; at the other extreme of state integrity, it did not. The middle cases, where the Nazi leadership sought but could not complete a Final Solution, are places where German power reached but where the state was not destroyed: the countries that were allied with Germany or occupied by Germany (or both). German policy was that Jews who inhabited such places were to be extracted, deported, and killed. Although a horribly high number of Jews from such countries were killed, and the fate of Jews in such places was always worse than that of their fellow citizens, more than half of the Jews who had been citizens of these countries, taken together as a group, survived. The scale of suffering, almost one murder for every two Jews, exceeds that of any other category of people in the Second World War. Yet it is sufficiently different from the murder rate in the stateless zone, something like nineteen murders for every twenty Jews, to warrant serious attention. The history of each country that retained (some measure of) sovereignty despite German influence was, of course, distinct, but the logics of survival were everywhere the same:
citizenship, bureaucracy
, and
foreign policy
.

Citizenship
is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places where the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection. This meant that the other major German mass crimes, the starvation of prisoners of war and the murder of civilians—mostly Belarusians and Poles and Gypsies—also took place almost entirely within zones of statelessness. These policies together killed about as many people as the Holocaust, and they were implemented, and could only be implemented, in the same places. Where the state was not destroyed such extremes were impossible.

In states allied with Germany or states under more traditional occupation regimes, where the major political institutions remained intact, non-Jews who protected Jews were rarely punished for doing so. Non-Jews who were citizens of states could not simply be killed if they aided Jews. In the General Government and in the occupied western Soviet Union, however, the punishment for aiding Jews was death. More Poles were executed for aiding Jews in individual districts of the General Government than in entire west European countries. This is not because Poles were particularly inclined to rescue Jews, which they were not. It is because they were, in fact, sometimes executed for doing so, which rarely happened in western Europe. Indeed, in some places in German-occupied western Europe it was not even a punishable criminal offense to hide a Jew.

Compare the fates of Victor Klemperer, Anne Frank, and Emanuel Ringelblum, three famous chroniclers of these years. Klemperer was a German scholar of Jewish origin who wrote a brilliant analysis of the language of the Third Reich. Frank was a German Jewish girl in hiding in the Netherlands who kept a diary that later became the most widely read text about the Holocaust. Ringelblum was a historian of Jewish life in Poland who, within the Warsaw ghetto, organized the assembly of an entire archive, creating one of the most important collections of sources of the Holocaust. “Collect as much as possible,” said Ringelblum to a colleague in the project known as Oneg Shabbat. “They can sort it out after the war.” Klemperer lived and so did the person who cared for him; Frank died but the people who tried to shelter her survived; Ringelblum was shot along with several people who had helped him. These fates reflect the different legal structures of Germany, the occupied Netherlands, and occupied Poland during the war.

Because Klemperer was a German citizen with a non-Jewish wife, he was not subject to the general policy of the deportation and murder of German Jews. Since his wife did not divorce him, he, like many such German Jewish men, survived. Anne Frank was also a German Jew, but in fleeing to the Netherlands she lost even the residual state membership available to her under the Nuremberg Laws. She and her family were eventually discovered and deported to Auschwitz. She died after a transfer to Bergen-Belsen, probably of typhus. The Dutch citizens who had hidden her family survived, since what they did was not subject to criminal prosecution in the Netherlands. Ringelblum’s history was different. He was captured and rescued multiple times, aided by both Polish Jews and non-Jewish Poles. In the end, he and the Poles with whom he was hiding were all executed, probably together, in the ashes of the Warsaw ghetto. Most Poles who tried to aid Jews were not killed, but many of them were; and it was a risk that they all faced. This was the stateless predicament.

For Jews themselves, the existence of a state meant citizenship, even if only in an attenuated and humiliating form. Citizenship meant the legal possibility of emigration. Most German and Austrian Jews exploited this possibility, although they generally lost their possessions and their connections to their previous lives in doing so. Citizenship for Jews meant the existence of a civil code, even if sometimes a very discriminatory one, which allowed them claims to property. These could be traded, in ways that were obviously unjust, for the right to depart. The legal exploitation of Jews is often seen as a step towards their extermination, but this was not exactly the case. Even the most exploitative and painful forms of
legal discrimination were much less risky to Jewish life than regime change or removal of state authority. In those situations, Jews were suddenly and totally vulnerable, since they lost their access to the civil code and thus their property rights. Rather than trading their property for their lives, they lost both.

Legal discrimination by antisemitic states did not bring an automatic downward spiral toward death, but state destruction did. Once a Jew lost access to a state he or she lost access to the protection of higher authorities and lower bureaucrats. Jews could live if they restored that access, but this was a difficult feat. Anton Schmid was a German (Austrian) soldier from Vienna who, in Vilnius, was responsible for the office that returned individual German soldiers to their units. He saved a Jewish man by providing him with a
Wehrmacht
uniform and paybook. He saved a Jewish woman in Vilnius by inventing for her a legal identity. With a bit of charm and bluster he generated a false baptismal certificate and moved her through the five necessary offices until she was fully documented. No Jew alone in the stateless zone could have done that. All in all, Schmid provided at least one hundred Jews with documents that gave them a chance to live.

Citizenship in modern states means access to
bureaucracy
. Bureaucracy has the reputation of killing Jews; it would be closer to the truth to say that it was the removal of bureaucracy that killed Jews. So long as state sovereignty persisted, so did the limits and possibilities afforded by bureaucracy. In most offices, time is slowed and matters are considered, perhaps with the help of petitions or bribes. When people in sovereign states beyond Germany wished to be noble, bureaucracy provided them with the opportunity to frame their arguments on behalf of individual Jews in the pragmatic or patriotic terms that employees of the state could understand and endorse. The bureaucracies beyond Germany also exhibited the typical tendencies of passing the buck, awaiting clear orders from higher authorities, and insisting on clarity of expression and proper paperwork. Many of the things that make bureaucracies annoying in daily life could and did mean survival for Jews.

Even German bureaucracy did not kill Jews by itself. Even after it was overlaid and penetrated by Nazi structures for six years, German bureaucracy was not capable of murdering the Jews of Germany. German officials were never even instructed, in any final and dispositive way, as to who among German citizens counted as a Jew. At the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the issue seems to have consumed more time than any other; but it was not resolved, either then or later. This was not for lack of desire: The lawyers concerned believed that Jewish “blood” had to be cleansed “from the German and indeed the entire European bloodstream.” Such a thing could be undertaken only when neighboring European countries were invaded and their polities wrecked. German Jews died not because of bureaucratic precision in Germany but because of the destruction of bureaucracies in other countries. German Jews were not killed, with a very few exceptions, on the territory of prewar Germany. Instead they were extracted from Germany and deported to bureaucracy-free zones in the East, places where they would have been entirely safe before the war.

The killing sites of German Jews were places such as Łodż, Riga, and Minsk. If the Holocaust is recalled from the perspective of German Jews, as it usually is, these names evoke nothing but the horror of death amidst the unknown. In the minds of many Germans, and thus in many German sources, these cities are nothing more than improbable assemblages of subhumans in the colonial
Lebensraum
. The combination of Nazi and German Jewish sources can convey a misleadingly incomplete impression of these places.

Before the war, before the arrival of policies of state destruction, each of these cities was a model of Jewish civil society in Europe. Łodż, for example, was Poland’s second largest city and its second largest Jewish city, with a sizable Jewish middle class. It was the birthplace of one of the most influential poets of the Polish language, Julian Tuwim, who was a Jew. It was annexed to the Reich after the 1939 invasion of Poland. Riga had been the capital of Latvia, where Jews enjoyed equal rights under the civil code, had sat in parliament, and were ministers of government. In the late 1930s, Riga was a site of refuge for a considerable number of Jews from Germany and Austria. It was altered first by Soviet state destruction in 1940 and then by German state destruction in 1941. Minsk, before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, had been the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Rates of intermarriage were high, and Jewish and non-Jewish schoolchildren were often close friends. Jews had been executed in large numbers in the Soviet Great Terror of 1937, but not as Jews; most often they were taken away by the NKVD’s black ravens and shot on false charges of espionage for Poland. Antisemitism was certainly present in Soviet Minsk; but it was a crime. Minsk had to be occupied by Germany, as it was in 1941, before it could become a place where people were murdered as Jews. Jewish urban civilization in eastern Europe had exhibited great variety; only the destruction of the state transformed cities with Jewish particularities into sites for a general policy of killing.

Bureaucracies in Germany could kill Jews only when bureaucracy-free zones elsewhere had been established. The elimination of Polish statehood at the beginning of the war was thus crucial for the entire course of the Holocaust, since it was on occupied Polish territory, in Germany’s special colonial zone, that death facilities could be established. The Germans also considered creating a death facility in the occupied Soviet Union, in Mahileu. This was never undertaken; the crematoria designed for Mahileu were delivered instead to Auschwitz.

As a general matter, bureaucrats owed their salaries and their dignity to the sovereign state, and they understood that compromises over citizens meant compromises about citizenship, and that compromises over citizenship meant the weakening of sovereignty. Even when bureaucrats were implementing anti-Jewish measures, it mattered to them that these were policies that originated locally, rather than ones imposed from abroad. The thought “our Jews, our solution” was not noble, but it was typical. Then as now, sovereignty meant the visible ability to conduct foreign policy. In most places and times, the fundamental goal of foreign policy was to preserve the state. This required the ability to alter Jewish policy, since one Jewish policy or another might seem more strategically promising given the constellation of international power at a given moment. Even ethnic cleansers who were convinced that deporting Jews served the state did not lose sight of the fact that the Jewish question was only one issue among others.

For everyone making foreign policy who maintained the typical political focus on the state itself, the crucial question was always the likely outcome of the war. In general, states allied to Nazi Germany tacked towards Nazi policy through 1942 (although none of them followed it completely), and then toward Allied policy thereafter (while, of course, beginning from a position of antisemitic policy and sometimes a record of mass killing). Insofar as states were sovereign, policy was changed, and Jews sometimes survived as a result. Where sovereignty had been eliminated, foreign policy was no longer made.

Thus citizenship, bureaucracy, and foreign policy hindered the Nazi drive to have all European Jews murdered. Of course, each of the many states affected but not destroyed by German policy had its own history and its own particularities. Among the states that were not destroyed but were in some way dominated by Germany, three groups emerge: first, puppet states such as Slovakia and Croatia created in the wake of the destruction of other states; second, states that existed before the war and allied with Nazi Germany of their own accord, such as Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy; and third, states whose territories were occupied by Nazi Germany after defeat on the battlefield and whose institutions were altered to various degrees without being completely destroyed, such as France, the Netherlands, and Greece. The variation among these countries was not as extreme as that between Estonia and Denmark. They supply points on the spectrum between the two points of double annihilation of sovereignty and mild German occupation. The history of their Jews confirms the connection between sovereignty and survival.

A
mong Germany’s allies, the puppets that arose from the wreckage of other states most closely resembled the zone of lawlessness where the Holocaust took place. A state had to be eliminated in order for such entities to be born, and both the end of the old and the creation of the new took place at Germany’s behest. All of the citizens of that prior state lost the protection of the previous regime during the transition. The rulers of new states could then decide which of the people on their territory would be granted citizenship. When constitutions were written under German tutelage, it was unlikely that Jews would be granted full membership in the state. Germany was eager to receive the Jewish populations of these new states, first in labor camps and then in death facilities, which created an opportunity for local ethnic cleansers. Both of the puppet states that Germany created, Croatia from Yugoslavia and Slovakia from Czechoslovakia, were ruled by nationalists who could not have reached power without the destruction of multinational units. Over the long term, the puppets’ factual dependence upon Nazi Germany meant that they did not engage in normal foreign policy and were not really sovereign. Since such entities had no prospects of surviving a Nazi defeat, their leaders could not really contemplate switching sides or trying to save their remaining Jews.

Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 after a coup took the country out of the Axis. The invasion was an Axis operation, with Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops taking part. Yugoslavia had been a centralized state dominated by Serbs; after its destruction Serbia became a district under German military occupation. Although a puppet government was appointed, it lacked every aspect of sovereignty. In Serbia, Germans placed all male Jews capable of work into forced labor camps and announced that all sabotage would bring massive retaliation. As in the occupied Soviet Union, and on a similar timetable, German occupation forces opted for terror against civilians as the central method of control. Reprisals for any act of resistance were taken against Jews (and sometimes against Gypsies or communists), with a standard ratio of one hundred locals killed for every German death. By this method the vast majority of Serbia’s Jews, about eight thousand, were dead by the end of 1941.

After Serbs, Croatians had been the next most numerous population of Yugoslavia. The prewar Kingdom of Yugoslavia had not been a federation divided into national territories; its electoral districts were gerrymandered to ensure the dominance of Serbs. For these and other reasons, Croatians had substantial grievances about rule from Belgrade, which were articulated by the Croatian Peasant Party. It differed from the radical Croatian nationalists of the Ustaše in that it opposed terrorism. It is impossible that the Ustaše could have come into power in Yugoslavia and extremely unlikely that it would have won elections in a democratic and independent Croatia. The Ustaše was, however, the chosen tool of the Germans. Its regime blamed Serbs and Jews for the existence and injustices of Yugoslavia and undertook a program of ethnic cleansing as a substitute for any actual domestic policy. The largest killing facility in wartime Croatia was the Jasenovac camp complex, a hundred kilometers south of Zagreb. The Serbs were by far the largest victim group there, though, in proportion to the size of their populations, the Gypsies and Jews suffered far more.

Croatia as a state had no hope of surviving a German defeat, and in this sense had no foreign policy and was not sovereign. Croatian authorities deported Jews to Auschwitz in August 1942 and again in May 1943, after most allies of Germany had ceased to do so. All in all about three-quarters of the Jews in wartime Croatia were murdered.

Slovakia was the other German puppet that arose from the wreckage of a multinational state destroyed by Germany. Czechoslovakia had been a multinational but not a federal state, and Slovaks had understandable grievances about the preponderance of Czechs in the administration of Slovak territories. These issues would almost certainly not have brought down democratic Czechoslovakia. In 1938, as he threatened Czechoslovakia with German nationalism in the “Sudetenland,” Hitler also encouraged Slovak separatism. The result was that a nationalist fringe gained credibility and was able to join forces with the more mainstream Slovak parties in a campaign for autonomy from Prague. The Slovak state led by Jozef Tiso was created as a result of the German destruction of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. During the transition from Czechoslovak to Slovak law, Slovaks and others stole with enthusiasm from the Jews. Tiso and the leaders of the new state saw this as part of a natural process whereby Slovaks would displace Jews (and, in some measure, Slovak Catholics would displace Slovak Protestants) as the middle class. Laws expropriating Jews thus created an artificial Jewish question: what to do with all of these impoverished people?

Slovakia joined the Axis in November 1940 and participated in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. That September Slovakia passed its own discriminatory Jewish law. In October, Slovak leaders came to an accord with Heinrich Himmler on the deportation of their Jewish population to Auschwitz, and in December they received assurances that those deported would not return. Though some twenty-three thousand Jews did gain access to a bureaucratic exemption, about fifty-eight thousand were deported, most of whom were murdered. In March 1943, after the tide of war had turned, Slovak bishops intervened on behalf of Jewish converts to Christianity and Christians of Jewish origin. Slovak authorities then ceased deportations. In late August 1944, as Soviet forces entered eastern Slovakia, the Slovak resistance began an uprising against the Tiso regime. This brought a German invasion of the country by the German army and an
Einsatzgruppe
, and the murder of a further twelve thousand Jews. In the end, about three-quarters of the Jews of Slovakia were killed.

Romania, Germany’s major military ally on the eastern front after 1941, was the only other state to generate an autonomous policy of the direct mass murder of Jews. Historically, antisemitism was far more integral to Romanian political life than to German. In the nineteenth century, state authorities had already identified and stigmatized Jews as a threat to Romanian security; only foreign pressure from the western powers that extended Romania’s territory after the First World War brought the Jews inclusion as full citizens. Romania’s policy to deport and kill Jews began during the Second World War in connection to a trauma of lost lands. Romania did not lose statehood during the war, but it did lose state territory. Regaining that land would become the central political obsession in Bucharest; Jews on the territory that Romania lost would later be the main victims of murderous new policies.

Romania had been regarded as one of the victor states after the First World War; along with admonitions about equal treatment for Jews had come massive territorial gains. Over the 1920s and 1930s, Bucharest’s major institutional and political preoccupation was the romanianization of these new lands. In a matter of a few weeks in the summer of 1940, most of what had been gained was lost. The Soviet Union occupied northeastern Romania (Bessarabia and northern Bukovina) in June and July 1940 and annexed these territories that August. That same month, Germany ordered Romania to grant northern Transylvania to Hungary. Shortly afterwards Romania lost southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. Thus, something like a third of the national territory and population vanished that summer. The monarchy paid the price. The Romanian king, who had declared himself to be a royal dictator, sought to divert the blame for his weakness to the Jews. Those who deposed him blamed both him and the Jews. In September 1940, General Ion Antonescu seized power with a program of territorial restoration, governing at first with the fascist Iron Guard.

Traditionally Romania had been a client of France, with whose culture Romanian elites identified, whose language was widely spoken, and whose foreign policy had brought Romania’s territorial gains after the First World War. Germany had invaded and defeated France in spring 1940, and then forced Romania to cede territory to its neighbors. In this situation, Antonescu’s only option, as he saw matters, was to ally with Germany, on the logic that Paris no longer counted and Berlin could alter borders. Romanian propaganda did not criticize German actions, but instead focused on Soviet aggression. Jews lost all of their rights in summer 1940. As part of Bucharest’s courting of Berlin, Romanian law was modeled on German law. On January 7, 1941, Antonescu, visiting Berlin, became the first foreign leader to learn of Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler took the Romanian army seriously; after the destruction of Poland, it was the only sizable force in eastern Europe that could be exploited against the Red Army. Understanding Hitler’s intentions and enjoying Hitler’s trust, Antonescu felt free to break with the Iron Guard and govern alone.

When on July 2, 1941, Romanian troops joined the German Eleventh Army in an attack on the USSR from Romanian territory, this was, like the German campaign generally, a reinvasion. Romanian troops first reached lands, northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, that had been part of Romania until a year before, when the Red Army had occupied them. As in the Baltic states, the Soviets were in the midst of mass deportations when the Romanian reinvasion took place. On the night of June 12, three weeks before the arrival of Romanian troops, the Soviet NKVD had deported at least 26,173 Romanian citizens and arrested about 6,250 more. Like Germany, Romania portrayed the Soviet Union as a Judeobolshevik state. Massive pogroms were initiated on Romanian territory in the days before the invasion, far exceeding anything possible in prewar Germany. As Romanian forces reinvaded the lands that had been lost to the Soviets, they shot a large number of Jews in the towns, killing some 43,500 in all.

The Romanian political rhetoric was similar to that presented by the Germans. Both Hitler and Antonescu proclaimed a liberation from Judeobolshevism. Germans were telling others (Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belarusians, and Russians) that Jews were communists and communists were Jews. Romanians were telling this to other Romanians. The Germans were unaware at first that most collaboration with the Soviet order had not been Jewish. The Romanians knew that they were creating an alibi for their own people by blaming the Jews for Soviet rule. As elsewhere on the eastern front, the first reaction of local people was personal score settling, with little or no account taken of ethnicity. Romanian forces actually intended to protect local Soviet collaborators who were not Jewish and to punish those who were, and other Jews along the way. Their task was defined as “killing all Jews while protecting pro-Soviet gentiles from the rage of their neighbors.” As local Romanians understood, “Nobody except Jews was persecuted at this time!” The ethnicization of guilt was fully planned and conscious.