فصل 10

X: Deportations from Western Europe—France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy

“Ruthless toughness,” a quality held in the highest esteem by the rulers of the Third Reich, is frequently characterized in postwar Germany, which has developed a veritable genius for understatement with respect to her Nazi past, as being ungut—lacking goodness—as though nothing had been wrong with those endowed with this quality but a deplorable failure to act according to the exacting standards of Christian charity. In any case, men sent by Eichmann’s office to other countries as “advisers on Jewish affairs”—to be attached to the regular diplomatic missions, or to the military staff, or to the local command of the Security Police—were all chosen because they possessed this virtue to the highest degree. In the beginning, during the fall and winter of 1941–42, their main job seems to have been to establish satisfactory relations with the other German officials in the countries concerned, especially with the German embassies in nominally independent countries and with the Reich commissioners in occupied territories; in either case, there was perpetual conflict over jurisdiction in Jewish matters.

In June, 1942, Eichmann recalled his advisers in France, Belgium, and Holland in order to lay plans for deportations from these countries. Himmler had ordered that FRANCE be given top priority in “combing Europe from West to East,” partly because of the inherent importance of the nation par excellence, and partly because the Vichy government had shown a truly amazing “understanding” of the Jewish problem and had introduced, on its own initiative, a great deal of anti-Jewish legislation; it had even established a special Department for Jewish Affairs, headed first by Xavier Vallant and somewhat later by Darquier de Pellepoix, both well-known anti-Semites. As a concession to the French brand of anti-Semitism, which was intimately connected with a strong, generally chauvinistic xenophobia in all strata of the population, the operation was to start with foreign Jews, and since in 1942 more than half of France’s foreign Jews were stateless—refugees and émigrés from Russia, Germany, Austria, Poland, Rumania, Hungary—that is, from areas that either were under German domination or had passed anti-Jewish legislation before the outbreak of war—it was decided to begin by deporting an estimated hundred thousand stateless Jews. (The total Jewish population of the country was now well over three hundred thousand; in 1939, before the influx of refugees from Belgium and Holland in the spring of 1940, there had been about two hundred and seventy thousand Jews, of whom at least a hundred and seventy thousand were foreign or foreign-born.) Fifty thousand each were to be evacuated from the Occupied Zone and from Vichy France with all speed. This was a considerable undertaking, which needed not only the agreement of the Vichy government but the active help of the French police, who were to do the work done in Germany by the Order Police. At first, there were no difficulties whatever, since, as Pierre Laval, Premier under Marshal Pétain, pointed out, “these foreign Jews had always been a problem in France,” so that the “French government was glad that a change in the German attitude toward them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.” It must be added that Laval and Pétain thought in terms of these Jews’ being resettled in the East; they did not yet know what “resettlement” meant.

Two incidents, in particular, attracted the attention of the Jerusalem court, both of which occurred in the summer of 1942, a few weeks after the operation had started. The first concerned a train due to leave Bordeaux on July 15, which had to be canceled because only a hundred and fifty stateless Jews could be found in Bordeaux—not enough to fill the train, which Eichmann had obtained with great difficulty. Whether or not Eichmann recognized this as the first indication that things might not be quite as easy as everybody felt entitled to believe, he became very excited, telling his subordinates that this was “a matter of prestige”—not in the eyes of the French but in those of the Ministry of Transport, which might get wrong ideas about the efficiency of his apparatus—and that he would “have to consider whether France should not be dropped altogether as far as evacuation was concerned” if such an incident was repeated. In Jerusalem, this threat was taken very seriously, as proof of Eichmann’s power; if he wished, he could “drop France.” Actually, it was one of Eichmann’s ridiculous boasts, proof of his “driving power” but hardly “evidence of… his status in the eyes of his subordinates,” except insofar as he had plainly threatened them with losing their very cozy war jobs. But if the Bordeaux incident was a farce, the second was the basis for one of the most horrible of the many hair-raising stories told at Jerusalem. This was the story of four thousand children, separated from their parents who were already on their way to Auschwitz. The children had been left behind at the French collection point, the concentration camp at Drancy, and on July 10 Eichmann’s French representative, Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, phoned him to ask what was to be done with them. Eichmann took ten days to decide; then he called Dannecker back to tell him that “as soon as transports could again be dispatched to the General Government area [of Poland], transports of children could roll.” Dr. Servatius pointed out that the whole incident actually demonstrated that the “persons affected were determined neither by the accused nor by any members of his office.” But what, unfortunately, no one mentioned was that Dannecker had informed Eichmann that Laval himself had proposed that children under sixteen be included in the deportations; this meant that the whole gruesome episode was not even the result of “superior orders” but the outcome of an agreement between France and Germany, negotiated at the highest level.

During the summer and fall of 1942, twenty-seven thousand stateless Jews—eighteen thousand from Paris and nine thousand from Vichy Franc—were deported to Auschwitz. Then, when there were about seventy thousand stateless Jews left in all of France, the Germans made their first mistake. Confident that the French had by now become so accustomed to deporting Jews that they wouldn’t mind, they asked for permission to include French Jews also—simply to facilitate administrative matters. This caused a complete turnabout; the French were adamant in their refusal to hand over their own Jews to the Germans. And Himmler, upon being informed of the situation —not by Eichmann or his men, incidentally, but by one of the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders—immediately gave in and promised to spare French Jews. But now it was too late. The first rumors about “resettlement” had reached France, and while French anti-Semites, and non-anti-Semites too, would have liked to see foreign Jews settle somewhere else, not even the anti-Semites wished to become accomplices in mass murder. Hence, the French now refused to take a step they had eagerly contemplated only a short time before, that is, to revoke naturalizations granted to Jews after 1927 (or after 1933), which would have made about fifty thousand more Jews eligible for deportation. They also started making such endless difficulties with regard to the deportation of stateless and other foreign Jews that all the ambitious plans for the evacuation of Jews from France did indeed have to be “dropped.” Tens of thousands of stateless persons went into hiding, while thousands more fled to the Italian-occupied French zone, the Côte d’Azur, where Jews were safe, whatever their origin or nationality. In the summer of 1943, when Germany was declared judenrein and the Allies had just landed in Sicily, no more than fifty-two thousand Jews, certainly less than twenty per cent of the total, had been deported, and of these no more than six thousand possessed French nationality. Not even Jewish prisoners of war in the German internment camps for the French Army were singled out for “special treatment.” In April, 1944, two months before the Allies landed in France, there were still two hundred and fifty thousand Jews in the country, and they all survived the war. The Nazis, it turned out, possessed neither the manpower nor the will power to remain “tough” when they met determined opposition. The truth of the matter was, as we shall see, that even the members of the Gestapo and the S.S. combined ruthlessness with softness.

At the June, 1942, meeting in Berlin, the figures set for immediate deportations from Belgium and the Netherlands had been rather low, probably because of the high figure set for France. No more than ten thousand Jews from Belgium and fifteen thousand from Holland were to be seized and deported in the immediate future. In both cases the figures were later significantly enlarged, probably because of the difficulties encountered in the French operation. The situation of BELGIUM was peculiar in some respects. The country was ruled exclusively by German military authorities, and the police, as a Belgian government report submitted to the court pointed out, “did not have the same influence upon the other German administration services that they enjoyed in other places.” (Belgium’s governor, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, was later implicated in the July, 1944, conspiracy against Hitler.) Native collaborators were of importance only in Flanders; the Fascist movement among the French-speaking Walloons, headed by Degrelle, had little influence. The Belgian police did not cooperate with the Germans, and the Belgian railway men could not even be trusted to leave deportation trains alone. They contrived to leave doors unlocked or to arrange ambushes, so that Jews could escape. Most peculiar was the composition of the Jewish population. Before the outbreak of war, there were ninety thousand Jews, of whom about thirty thousand were German Jewish refugees, while another fifty thousand came from other European countries. By the end of 1940, nearly forty thousand Jews had fled the country, and among the fifty thousand who remained there were at the most five thousand native-born Belgian citizens. Moreover among those who had fled were all the more important Jewish leaders, most of whom had been foreigners anyway, so that the Jewish did not command any authority among native Jews. With this “lack of understanding” on all sides, it is not surprising that very few Belgian Jews were deported. But recently naturalized and stateless Jews—of Czech, Polish, Russian, and German origin, many of whom had only recently arrived were easily recognizable and most difficult to hide in the small, completely industrialized country. By the end of 1942, fifteen thousand had been shipped to Auschwitz, and by the fall of 1944, when the Allies liberated the country, a total of twenty-five thousand had been killed. Eichmann had his usual “adviser” in Belgium, but the adviser seems not to have been very active in these operations. They were carried out, finally, by the military administration, under increased pressure from the Foreign Office.

As in practically all other countries, the deportations from HOLLAND started with stateless Jews, who in this instance consisted almost entirely of refugees from Germany, whom the prewar Dutch government had officially declared to be “undesirable.” There were about thirty-five thousand foreign Jews altogether in a total Jewish population of a hundred and forty thousand. Unlike Belgium, Holland was placed under a civil administration, and, unlike France, the country had no government of its own, since the cabinet, together with the royal family, had fled to London. The small nation was utterly at the mercy of the Germans and of the S.S. Eichmann’s “adviser” in Holland was a certain Willi Zöpf (recently arrested in Germany, while the much more efficient adviser in France, Mr. Dannecker, is still at large) but he apparently had very little to say and could hardly do more than keep the Berlin office posted. Deportations and everything connected with them were handled by the lawyer Erich Rajakowitsch, Eichmann’s former legal adviser in Vienna and Prague, who was admitted to the S.S. upon Eichmann’s recommendation. He had been sent to Holland by Heydrich in April, 1941, and was directly responsible not to the R.S.H.A. in Berlin but to the local head of the Security Service in The Hague, Dr. Wilhelm Harsten, who in turn was under the command of the Higher S.S. and Police Leader Obergruppenführer Hans Rauter and his assistant in Jewish affairs, Ferdinand aus der Fünten. (Rauter and Fünten were condemned to death by a Dutch court; Rauter was executed and Fünten’s sentence, allegedly after special intervention from Adenauer, was commuted to life imprisonment. Harsten, too, was brought to trial in Holland, sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, and released in 1957, whereupon he entered the civil service of the Bavarian state government. The Dutch authorities are considering proceedings against Rajakowitsch, who seems to live in either Switzerland or Italy. All these details have become known in the last year through the publication of Dutch documents and the report by E. Jacob, Dutch correspondent for the Basler Nationalzeitung, a Swiss newspaper.) The prosecution in Jerusalem, partly because it wanted to build up Eichmann at all costs and partly because it got genuinely lost in the intricacies of German bureaucracy, claimed that all these officers had carried out Eichmann’s orders. But the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders took orders only directly from Himmler, and that Rajakowitsch was still taking orders from Eichmann at this time is highly unlikely, especially in view of what was then going to happen in Holland. The judgment, without engaging in polemics, quietly corrected a great number of errors made by the prosecution—though probably not all—and showed the constant jockeying for position that went on between the R.S.H.A. and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders and other offices—the “tenacious, eternal, everlasting negotiations,” as Eichmann called them.

Eichmann had been especially upset by the arrangements in Holland, because it was clearly Himmler himself who was cutting him down to size, quite apart from the fact that the zeal of the gentlemen in residence created great difficulties for him in the timing of his own transports and generally made a mockery of the importance of the “coordinating center” in Berlin. Thus, right at the beginning, twenty thousand instead of fifteen thousand Jews were deported, and Eichmann’s Mr. Zöpf, who was far inferior in rank as well as in position to all others present, was almost forced to speed up deportations in 1943. Conflicts of jurisdiction in these matters were to plague Eichmann at all times, and it was in vain that he explained to anybody who would listen that “it would be contradictory to the order of the Reichsführer S.S. [i.e., Himmler] and illogical if at this stage other authorities again were to handle the Jewish problem.” The last clash in Holland came in 1944, and this time even Kaltenbrunner tried to intervene, for the sake of uniformity. In Holland, Sephardic Jews, of Spanish origin, had been exempted, although Jews of that origin had been sent to Auschwitz from Salonika. The judgment was in error when it ventured that the R.S.H.A. “had the upper hand in this dispute” —for God knows what reasons, some three hundred and seventy Sephardic Jews remained unmolested in Amsterdam.

The reason Himmler preferred to work in Holland through his Higher S.S. and Police Leaders was simple. These men knew their way around the country, and the problem posed by the Dutch population was by no means an easy one. Holland had been the only country in all Europe where students went on strike when Jewish professors were dismissed and where a wave of strikes broke out in response to the first deportation of Jews to German concentration camps—and that deportation, in contrast to those to extermination camps, was merely a punitive measure, taken long before the Final Solution had reached Holland. (The Germans, as de Jong points out, were taught a lesson. From now on, “the persecution was carried out not with the cudgels of the Nazi storm troops…, but by decrees published in Verordeningenblad…, which the Joodsche Weekblad was forced to carry. Police raids in the streets no longer occurred and there were no strikes on the part of the population.) However, the widespread hostility in Holland toward anti-Jewish measures and the relative immunity of the Dutch people to anti-Semitism were held in check by two factors, which eventually proved fatal to the Jews. First, there existed a very strong Nazi movement in Holland, which could be trusted to carry out such police measures as seizing Jews, ferreting out their hiding places, and so on; second, there existed an inordinately strong tendency among the native Jews to draw a line between themselves and the new arrivals, which was probably the result of the very unfriendly attitude of the Dutch government toward refugees from Germany, and probably also because anti-Semitism in Holland, just as in France, focused on foreign Jews. This made it relatively easy for the Nazis to form their Jewish Council, the Joodsche Raad, which remained for a long time under the impression that only German and other foreign Jews would be victims of the deportations, and it also enabled the S.S. to enlist, in addition to Dutch police units, the help of a Jewish police force. The result was a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country; it can be compared only with the extinction, under vastly different and, from the beginning, completely desperate conditions, of Polish Jewry. Although, in contrast with Poland, the attitude of the Dutch people permitted a large number of Jews to go into hiding—twenty to twenty-five thousand, a very high figure for such a small country—yet an unusually large number of Jews living underground, at least half of them, were eventually found, no doubt through the efforts of professional and occasional informers. By July, 1944, a hundred and thirteen thousand Jews had been deported, most of them to Sobibor, a camp in the Lublin area of Poland, by the river Bug, where no selections of able-bodied workers ever took place. Three-fourths of all Jews living in Holland were killed, about two-thirds of these native-born Dutch Jews. The last shipments left in the fall of 1944, when Allied patrols were at the Dutch borders. Of the ten thousand Jews who survived in hiding, about seventy-five per cent were foreigners—a percentage that testifies to the unwillingness of Dutch Jews to face reality.

At the Wannsee Conference, Martin Luther, of the Foreign Office, warned of great difficulties in the Scandinavian countries, notably in Norway and Denmark. (Sweden was never occupied, and Finland, though in the war on the side of the Axis, was the one country the Nazis hardly ever even approached on the Jewish question. This surprising exception of Finland, with some two thousand Jews, may have been due to Hitler’s great esteem for the Finns, whom perhaps he did not want to subject to threats and humiliating blackmail.) Luther proposed postponing evacuations from Scandinavia for the time being, and as far as Denmark was concerned, this really went without saying, since the country retained its independent government, and was respected as a neutral state, until the fall of 1943, although it, along with Norway, had been invaded by the German Army in April, 1940. There existed no Fascist or Nazi movement in Denmark worth mentioning, and therefore no collaborators. In NORWAY, however, the Germans had been able to find enthusiastic supporters; indeed, Vidkun Quisling, leader of the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Norwegian party, gave his name to what later became known as a “quisling government.” The bulk hundred Jews were stateless, refugees from Germany; they were seized and interned in a few lightning operations in October and November, 1942. When Eichmann’s office ordered their deportation to Auschwitz, some of Quisling’s own men resigned their government posts. This may not have come as a surprise to Mr. Luther and the Foreign Office, but what was much more serious, and certainly totally unexpected, was that Sweden immediately offered asylum, and sometimes even Swedish nationality, to all who were persecuted. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Undersecretary of State of the Foreign Office, who received the proposal, refused to discuss it, but the offer helped nevertheless. It is always relatively easy to get out of a country illegally, whereas it is nearly impossible to enter the place of refuge without permission and to dodge the immigration authorities. Hence, about nine hundred people, slightly more than half of the small Norwegian community, could be smuggled into Sweden.

It was in DENMARK, however, that the Germans found out how fully justified the Foreign Office’s apprehensions had been. The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe—whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. To be sure, a few other countries in Europe lacked proper “understanding of the Jewish question,” and actually a majority of them were opposed to “radical” and “final” solutions. Like Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Bulgaria proved to be nearly immune to anti-Semitism, but of the three that were in the German sphere of influence, only the Danes dared speak out on the subject to their German masters. Italy and Bulgaria sabotaged German orders and indulged in a complicated game of double-dealing and double-crossing, saving their Jews by a tour de force of sheer ingenuity, but they never contested the policy as such. That was totally different from what the Danes did. When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate resignation. It was decisive in this whole matter that the Germans did not even succeed in introducing the vitally important distinction between native Danes of Jewish origin, of whom there were about sixty-four hundred, and the fourteen hundred German Jewish refugees who had found asylum in the country prior to the war and who now had been declared stateless by the German government. This refusal must have surprised the Germans no end, since it appeared so “illogical” for a government to protect people to whom it had categorically denied naturalization and even permission to work. (Legally, the prewar situation of refugees in Denmark was not unlike that in France, except that the general corruption in the Third Republic’s civil services enabled a few of them to obtain naturalization papers, through bribes or “connections,” and most refugees in France could work illegally, without a permit. But Denmark, like Switzerland, was no country pour se débrouiller.) The Danes, however, explained to the German officials that because the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Nazis could not claim them without Danish assent. This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not statelessness per se that saved the Jews but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them. Thus, none of the preparatory moves, so important for the bureaucracy of murder, could be carried out, and operations were postponed until the fall of 1943.

What happened then was truly amazing; compared with what took place in other European countries, everything went topsy-turvy. In August, 1943 after the German offensive in Russia had failed, the Afrika Korps had surrendered in Tunisia, and the Allies had invaded Italy the Swedish government canceled its 1940 agreement with Germany which had permitted German troops the right to pass through the country. Thereupon, the Danish workers decided that they could help a bit in hurrying things up; riots broke out in Danish shipyards, where the dock workers refused to repair German ships and then went on strike. The German military commander proclaimed a state of emergency and imposed martial law, and Himmler thought this was the right moment to tackle the Jewish question, whose “solution” was long overdue. What he did not reckon with was that—quite apart from Danish resistance the German officials who had been living in the country for years were no longer the same. Not only did General von Hannecken, the military commander, refuse to put troops at the disposal of the Reich plenipotentiary, Dr. Werner Best; the special S.S. units (Ein-satzkommandos) employed in Denmark very frequently objected to “the measures they were ordered to carry out by the central agencies”—according to Best’s testimony at Nuremberg. And Best himself, an old Gestapo man and former legal adviser to Heydrich, author of a then famous book on the police, who had worked for the military government in Paris to the entire satisfaction of his superiors, could no longer be trusted, although it is doubtful that Berlin ever learned the extent of his unreliability. Still, it was clear from the beginning that things were not going well, and Eichmann’s office sent one of its best men to Denmark—Rolf Günther, whom no one had ever accused of not possessing the required “ruthless toughness.” Günther made no impression on his colleagues in Copenhagen, and now von Hannecken refused even to issue a decree requiring all Jews to report for work.

Best went to Berlin and obtained a promise that all Jews from Denmark would be sent to Theresienstadt regardless of their category—a very important concession, from the Nazis’ point of view. The night of October 1 was set for their seizure and immediate departure—ships were ready in the harbor— and since neither the Danes nor the Jews nor the German troops stationed in Denmark could be relied on to help, police units arrived from Germany for a door-to-door search. At the last moment, Best told them that they were not permitted to break into apartments, because the Danish police might then interfere, and they were not supposed to fight it out with the Danes. Hence they could seize only those Jews who voluntarily opened their doors. They found exactly 477 people, out of a total of more than 7,800, at home and willing to let them in. A few days before the date of doom, a German shipping agent, Georg F. Duckwitz, having probably been tipped off by Best himself, had revealed the whole plan to Danish government officials, who, in turn, had hurriedly informed the heads of the Jewish community. They, in marked contrast to Jewish leaders in other countries, had then communicated the news openly in the synagogues on the occasion of the New Year services. The Jews had just time enough to leave their apartments and go into hiding, which was very easy in Denmark, because, in the words of the judgment, “all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to simple citizens,” stood ready to receive them.

They might have remained in hiding until the end of the war if the Danes had not been blessed with Sweden as a neighbor. It seemed reasonable to ship the Jews to Sweden, and this was done with the help of the Danish fishing fleet. The cost of transportation for people without means—about a hundred dollars per person—was paid largely by wealthy Danish citizens, and that was perhaps the most astounding feat of all, since this was a time when Jews were paying for their own deportation, when the rich among them were paying fortunes for exit permits (in Holland, Slovakia, and, later, in Hungary) either by bribing the local authorities or by negotiating “legally” with the S.S., who accepted only hard currency and sold exit permits, in Holland, to the tune of five or ten thousand dollars per person. Even in places where Jews met with genuine sympathy and a sincere willingness to help, they had to pay for it, and the chances poor people had of escaping were nil.

It took the better part of October to ferry all the Jews across the five to fifteen miles of water that separates Denmark from Sweden. The Swedes received 5,919 refugees, of whom at least 1,000 were of German origin, 1,310 were half-Jews, and 686 were non-Jews married to Jews. (Almost half the Danish Jews seem to have remained in the country and survived the war in hiding.) The non-Danish Jews were better off than ever before, they all received permission to work. The few hundred Jews whom the German police had been able to arrest were shipped to Theresienstadt. They were old or poor people, who either had not received the news in time or had not been able to comprehend its meaning. In the ghetto, they enjoyed greater privileges than any other group because of the never-ending “fuss” made about them by Danish institutions and private persons. Forty-eight persons died, a figure that was not particularly high, in view of the average age of the group. When everything was over, it was the considered opinion of Eichmann that “for various reasons the action against the Jews in D whereas the curious Dr. Best declared that “the objective of the operation was not to seize a great number of Jews but to clean Denmark of Jews, and this objective has now been achieved.” Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their “toughness” had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage. That the ideal of “toughness,” except, perhaps, for a few half-demented brutes, was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants accused and betrayed each other and asssured the world that they “had always been against it” or claimed, as Eichmann was to do, that their best qualities had been “abused” by their superiors. (In Jerusalem, he accused “those in power” of having abused his “obedience.” “The subject of a good government is lucky, the subject of a bad government is unlucky. I had no luck.”) The atmosphere had changed, and although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology. Werner Best claimed at Nuremberg that he had played a complicated double role and that it was thanks to him that the Danish officials had been warned of the impending catastrophe; documentary evidence showed, on the contrary, that he himself had proposed the Danish operation in Berlin, but he explained that this was all part of the game. He was extradited to Denmark and there condemned to death, but he appealed the sentence, with surprising results; because of “new evidence,” his sentence was commuted to five years in prison, from which he was released soon afterward. He must have been able to prove to the satisfaction of the Danish court that he really had done his best.

ITALY was Germany’s only real ally in Europe, treated as an equal and respected as a sovereign independent state. The alliance presumably rested on the very highest kind of common interest, binding together two similar, if not identical, new forms of government, and it is true that Mussolini had once been greatly admired in German Nazi circles. But by the time war broke out and Italy, after some hesitation, joined in the German enterprise, this was a thing of the past. The Nazis knew well enough that they had more in common with Stalin’s version of Communism than with Italian Fascism, and Mussolini on his part had neither much confidence in Germany nor much admiration for Hitler. All this, however, belonged among the secrets of the higher-ups, especially in Germany, and the deep, decisive differences between the totalitarian and the Fascist forms of government were never entirely understood by the world at large. Nowhere did they come more conspicuously into the open than in the treatment of the Jewish question.

Prior to the Badoglio coup d’état in the summer of 1943, and the German occupation of Rome and northern Italy, Eichmann and his men were not permitted to be active in the country. They were, however, confronted with the Italian way of not solving anything in the Italian-occupied areas of France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, because the persecuted Jews kept escaping into these zones, where they could be sure of temporary asylum. On levels much higher than Eichmann’s, Italy’s sabotage of the Final Solution had assumed serious proportions, chiefly because of Mussolini’s influence on other Fascist governments in Europe —on Pétain’s in France, on Horthy’s in Hungary, on Antonescu’s in Rumania, and even on Franco’s in Spain. If Italy could get away with not murdering her Jews, German satellite countries might try to do the same. Thus, Dome Sztojai, the Hungarian Prime Minister whom the Germans had forced upon Horthy, always wanted to know, when it came to anti-Jewish measures, if the same regulations applied to Italy. Eichmann’s chief, Gruppenführer Müller, wrote a long letter on the subject to the Foreign Office pointing all this out, but the gentlemen of the Foreign Office could not do much about it, because they always met the same subtly veiled resistance, the same promises and the same failures to fulfill them. The sabotage was all the more infuriating as it was carried out openly, in an almost mocking manner. The promises were given by Mussolini himself or other high-ranking officials, and if the generals simply failed to fulfill them, Mussolini would make excuses for them on the ground of their “different intellectual formation.” Only occasionally would the Nazis be met with a flat refusal, as when General Roatta declared that it was “incompatible with the honor of the Italian Army” to deliver the Jews from Italian-occupied territory in Yugoslavia to the appropriate German authorities.

It could be considerably worse when Italians seemed to be fulfilling their promises. One instance of this took place after the Allied landing in French North Africa, when all of France was occupied by the Germans except the Italian Zone in the south, where about fifty thousand Jews had found safety. Under considerable German pressure, an Italian “Commissariat for Jewish Affairs” was established, whose sole function was to register all Jews in this region and expel them from the Mediterranean coast. Twenty-two thousand Jews were indeed seized and removed to the interior of the Italian Zone, with the result, according to Reitlinger, that “a thousand Jews of the poorest class were living in the best hotels of Isère and Savoie.” Eichmann thereupon sent Alois Brunner, one of his toughest men, down to Nice and Marseilles, but by the time he arrived, the French police had destroyed all the lists of the registered Jews. In the fall of 1943, when Italy declared war on Germany, the German army could finally move into Nice, and Eichmann himself hastened to the Côte d’Azur. There he was told— believed that between ten and fifteen thousand Jews were living in hiding in Monaco (that tiny principality, with some twenty-five thousand residents altogether, whose territory, the New York Times Magazine noted, “could fit comfortably inside Central Park”), which caused the R.S.H.A. to start a kind of research program. It sounds like a typically Italian joke. The Jews, in any event, were no longer there; they had fled to Italy proper, and those who were still hiding in the surrounding mountains found their way to Switzerland or to Spain. The same thing happened when the Italians had to abandon their zone in Yugoslavia; the Jews left with the Italian Army and found refuge in Fiume.

An element of farce had never been lacking even in Italy’s most serious efforts to adjust to its powerful friend and ally. When Mussolini, under German pressure, introduced anti-Jewish legislation in the late thirties he stipulated the usual exemptions—war veterans, Jews with high decorations, and the like—but he added one more category, namely, former members of the Fascist Party, together with their parents and grandparents, their wives and children and grandchildren. I know of no statistics relating to this matter, but the result must have been that the great majority of Italian Jews were exempted. There can hardly have been a Jewish family without at least one member in the Fascist Party, for this happened at a time when Jews, like other Italians, had been flocking for almost twenty years into the Fascist movement, since positions in the Civil Service were open only to members. And the few Jews who had objected to Fascism on principle, Socialists and Communists chiefly, were no longer in the country. Even convinced Italian anti-Semites seemed unable to take the thing seriously, and Roberto Farinacci, head of the Italian anti-Semitic movement, had a Jewish secretary in his employ. To be sure, such things had happened in Germany too; Eichmann mentioned, and there is no reason not to believe him, that there were Jews even among ordinary S.S. men, but the Jewish origin of people like Heydrich, Milch, and others was a highly confidential matter, known only to a handful of people, whereas in Italy these things were done openly and, as it were, innocently. The key to the riddle was, of course, that Italy actually was one of the few countries in Europe where all anti-Jewish measures were decidedly unpopular, since, in the words of Ciano, they “raised a problem which fortunately did not exist.” Assimilation, that much abused word, was a sober fact in Italy, which had a community of not more than fifty thousand native Jews, whose history reached back into the centuries of the Roman Empire. It was not an ideology, something one was supposed to believe in, as in all German-speaking countries, or a myth and an obvious self-deception, as notably in France. Italian Fascism, not to be outdone in “ruthless toughness,” had tried to rid the country of foreign and stateless Jews prior to the outbreak of the war. This had never been much of a success, because of the general unwillingness of the minor Italian officials to get “tough,” and when things had become a matter of life and death, they refused, under the pretext of maintaining their sovereignty, to abandon this part of their Jewish population; they put them instead into Italian camps, where they were quite safe until the Germans occupied the country. This conduct can hardly be explained by objective conditions alone— the absence of a “Jewish question”—for these foreigners naturally created a problem in Italy, as they did in every European nation-state based upon the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of its population. What in Denmark was the result of an authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the requirements and responsibilities of citizenship and independence—“for the Danes… the Jewish question was a political and not a humanitarian question” (Leni Yahil)— was in Italy the outcome of the almost automatic general humanity of an old and civilized people.

Italian humanity, moreover, withstood the test of the terror that descended upon the people during the last year and a half of the war. In December, 1943, the German Foreign Office addressed a formal request for help to Eichmann’s boss, Müller: “In view of the lack of zeal shown over the last months by Italian officials in the implementation of anti-Jewish measures recommended by the Duce, we of the Foreign Office deem it urgent and necessary that the implementation… be supervised by German officials.” Whereupon famous Jew-killers from Poland, such as Odilo Globocnik from the death camps in the Lublin area, were dispatched to Italy; even the head of the military administration was not an Army man but a former governor of Polish Galicia, Gruppenführer Otto Wachter. This put an end to practical jokes. Eichmann’s office sent out a circular advising its branches that “Jews of Italian nationality” would at once become subject to “the necessary measures,” and the first blow was to fall upon eight thousand Jews in Rome, who were to be arrested by German police regiments, since the Italian police were not reliable. They were warned in time, frequently by old Fascists, and seven thousand escaped. The Germans, yielding, as usual, when they met resistance, now agreed that Italian Jews, even if they did not belong to exempted categories, should not be subject to deportation but should merely be concentrated in Italian camps; this “solution” should be “final” enough for Italy. Approximately thirty-five thousand Jews in northern Italy were caught and put into concentration camps near the Austrian border. In the spring of 1944, when the Red Army had occupied Rumania and the Allies were about to enter Rome, the Germans broke their promise and began shipping Jews from Italy to Auschwitz—about seventy-five hundred people, of whom no more than six hundred returned. Still, this came to considerably less than ten per cent of all Jews then living in Italy.