فصل 11

XI: Deportations from the Balkans—Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania

To those who followed the case for the prosecution and read the judgment, which reorganized its confused and confusing “general picture,” it came as a surprise that the line sharply distinguishing the Nazi-controlled territories to the east and southeast from the system of nation-states in Central and Western Europe was never mentioned. The belt of mixed population that stretches from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic in the south, the whole area most of which today lies behind the Iron Curtain, then consisted of the so-called Successor States, established by the victorious powers after the First World War. A new political order was granted to the numerous ethnic groups that had lived for centuries under the domination of empires—the Russian Empire in the north, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the south, and the Turkish Empire in the southeast. Of the nation-states that resulted, none possessed anything even approaching the ethnic homogeneity of the old European nations that had served as models for their political constitutions. The result was that each of these countries contained large ethnic groups that were violently hostile to the ruling government because their own national aspirations had been frustrated in favor of their only slightly more numerous neighbors. If any proof of the political instability of these recently founded states had been needed, the case of Czechoslovakia amply provided it. When Hitler marched into Prague, in March, 1939, he was enthusiastically welcomed not only by the Sudetendeutschen, the German minority, but also by the Slovaks, whom he “liberated” by offering them an “independent” state. Exactly the same thing happened later in Yugoslavia, where the Serbian majority, the former rulers of the country, was treated as the enemy, and the Croatian minority was given its own national government. Moreoever, because the populations in these regions fluctuated, there existed no natural or historical boundaries, and those that had been established by the Treaties of Trianon and St. Germain were quite arbitrary. Hence, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria could be won as Axis partners by generous enlargements of their territories, and the Jews in these newly annexed areas were always denied the status of nationals; they automatically became stateless and therefore suffered the same fate as the refugees in Western Europe—they were invariably the first to be deported and liquidated.

What also came crashing down during these years was the elaborate system of minority treaties whereby the Allies had vainly hoped to solve a problem that, within the political framework of the nation-state, is insoluble. The Jews were an officially recognized minority in all Successor States, and this status had not been forced upon them but had been the outcome of claims entered and negotiations conducted by their own delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference. This had marked an important turning point in Jewish history, because it was the first time that Western, or assimilated, Jews had not been recognized as the spokesmen for the whole Jewish people. To the surprise, and also sometimes to the dismay, of the Western-educated Jewish “notables” it had turned out that the large majority of the people desired some sort of social and cultural, though not political, autonomy. Legally, the status of the Eastern European Jews was just like that of any other minority, but politically—and this was to be decisive—they were the only ethnic group in the region without a “homeland,” that is, without a territory in which they formed the majority of the population. Still, they did not live in the same kind of dispersion as their brethren in Western and Central Europe, and whereas there, prior to Hitler, it had been a sign of anti-Semitism to call a Jew a Jew, Eastern European Jews were recognized by friend and foe alike as a distinct people. This was of great consequence for the status of those Jews in the East who were assimilated, making it utterly different from that in the West, where assimilation in one form or another had been the rule. The great body of middle-class Jews, so characteristic of Western and Central Europe, did not exist in the East; in its stead we find a thin layer of upper-middle-class families who actually belonged to the ruling classes and the degree of whose assimilation—through money, through baptism, through intermarriage—to Gentile society was infinitely greater than that of most Jews in the West.

Among the first countries in which the executors of the Final Solution were confronted with these conditions was the puppet state of CROATIA, in Yugoslavia, whose capital was Zagreb. The Croat government, headed by Dr. Ante Pavelic, very obligingly introduced anti-Jewish legislation three weeks after its establishment, and when asked what was to be done with the few dozen Croat Jews in Germany, it sent word that they “would appreciate deportation to the East.” The Reich Minister of the Interior demanded that the country be judenrein by February, 1942, and Eichmann sent Hauptsturmführer Franz Abromeit to work with the German police attaché in Zagreb. The deportations were carried out by the Croats themselves, notably by members of the strong Fascist movement, the Ustashe, and the Croats paid the Nazis thirty marks for each Jew deported. In exchange, they received all the property of the deportees. This was in accordance with the Germans’ official “territorial principle,” all European countries, whereby the state inherited the property of every murdered Jew who had resided within its boundaries, regardless of his nationality. (The Nazis did not by any means always respect the “territorial principle”; there were many ways to get around it if it seemed worth the trouble. German businessmen could buy directly from the Jews before they were deported, and the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, initially empowered to confiscate all Hebraica and Judaica for German anti-Semitic research centers, soon enlarged its activities to include valuable furnishings and art works.) The original deadline of February, 1942, could not be met, because Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory, but after the Badoglio coup Hermann Krumey, another of Eichmann’s men, arrived in Zagreb, and by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers.

Only then did the Germans realize that the country was still not judenrein. In the initial anti-Jewish legislation, they had noted a curious paragraph that transformed into “honorary Aryans” all Jews who made contributions to “the Croat cause.” The number of these Jews had of course greatly increased during the intervening years. The very rich, in other words, who parted voluntarily with their property were exempted. Even more interesting was the fact that the S.S. Intelligence service (under Sturmbannfühhrer Wilhelm Höttl, who was first called as a defense witness in Jerusalem, but whose affidavit was then used by the prosecution) had discovered that nearly all members of the ruling clique in Croatia, from the head of the government to the leader of the Ustashe, were married to Jewish women. The fifteen hundred survivors among the Jews in this area five per cent, according to a Yugoslav government report—were clearly all members of this highly assimilated, and extraordinarily rich, Jewish group. And since the percentage of assimilated Jews among the masses in the East has often been estimated at about five per cent, it is tempting to conclude that assimilation in the East, when it was at all possible, offered a much better chance for survival than it did in the rest of Europe.

Matters were very different in the adjoining territory of SERBIA, where the German occupation army, almost from its first day there, had to contend with a kind of partisan warfare that can be compared only with what went on in Russia behind the front. I mentioned earlier the single incident that connected Eichmann with the liquidation of Jews in Serbia. The judgment admitted that “the ordinary lines of command in dealing with the Jews of Serbia did not become quite clear to us,” and the explanation is that Eichmann’s office was not involved at all in that area because no Jews were deported. The “problem” was all taken care of on the spot. On the pretext of executing hostages taken in partisan warfare, the Army killed the male Jewish population by shooting; women and children were handed over to the commander of the Security Police, a certain Dr. Emanuel Schäer, a special protégé of Heydrich, who killed them in gas vans. In August, 1942, Staatsrat Harald Turner, head of the civilian branch of the military government, reported proudly that Serbia was “the only country in which the problems of both Jews and Gypsies were solved,” and returned the gas vans to Berli. An estimated five thousand Jews joined the partisans, and this was the only avenue of escape.

Schäfer had to stand trial in a German criminal court after the war. For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison. The military governor of the region, General Franz Böhme, committed suicide, but Staatsrat Turner was handed over to the Yugoslav government and condemned to death. It is the same story repeated over and over again: those who escaped the Nuremberg Trials and were not extradited to the countries where they had committed their crimes either were never brought to justice, or found in the German courts the greatest possible “understanding.” One is unhappily reminded of the Weimar Republic, whose specialty it was to condone political murder if the killer belonged to one of the violently anti-republican groups of the Right.

BULGARIA had more cause than any other of the Balkan countries to be grateful to Nazi Germany, because of the considerable territorial aggrandizement she received at the expense of Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. And yet Bulgaria was not grateful, neither her government nor her people were soft enough to make a policy of “ruthless toughness” workable. This showed not only on the Jewish question. The Bulgarian monarchy had no reason to be worried about the native Fascist movement, the Ratnizi, because it was numerically small and politically without influence, and the Parliament remained a highly respected body, which worked smoothly with the King. Hence, they dared refuse to declare war on Russia and never even sent a token expeditionary force of “volunteers” to the Eastern front. But most surprising of all, in the belt of mixed populations where anti-Semitism was rampant among all ethnic groups and had become official governmental policy long before Hitler’s arrival, the Bulgarians had no “understanding of the Jewish problem” whatever. It is true that the Bulgarian Army had agreed to have all the Jews—they numbered about fifteen thousand—deported from the newly annexed territories, which were under military government and whose population was anti-Semitic; but it is doubtful that they knew what “resettlement in the East” actually signified. Somewhat earlier, in January, 1941, the government had also agreed to introduce some anti-Jewish legislation, but that, from the Nazi viewpoint, was simply ridiculous: some six thousand able-bodied men were mobilized for work; all baptized Jews, regardless of the date of their conversion, were exempted, with the result that an epidemic of conversions broke out; five thousand more Jews—out of a total of approximately fifty thousand—received special privileges; and for Jewish physicians and businessmen a numerus clausus was introduced that was rather high, since it was based on the percentage of Jews in the cities, rather than in the country at large. When these measures had been put into effect, Bulgarian government officials declared publicly that things were now stabilized to everybody’s satisfaction. Clearly, the Nazis would not only have to enlighten them about the requirements for a “solution of the Jewish problem,” but also to teach them that legal stability and a totalitarian movement could not be reconciled.

The German authorities must have had some suspicion of the difficulties that lay ahead. In January, 1942, Eichmann wrote a letter to the Foreign Office in which he declared that “sufficient possibilities exist for the reception of Jews from Bulgaria”; he proposed that the Bulgarian government be approached, and assured the Foreign Office that the police attaché in Sofia would “take care of the technical implementation of the deportation.” (This police attaché seems not to have been very enthusiastic about his work either, for shortly thereafter Eichmann sent one of his own men, Theodor Dannecker, from Paris to Sofia as “adviser.”) It is quite interesting to note that this letter ran directly contrary to the notification Eichmann had sent to Serbia only a few months earlier, stating that no facilities for the reception of Jews were yet available and that even Jews from the Reich could not be deported. The high priority given to the task of making Bulgaria judenrein can be explained only by Berlin’s having received accurate information that great speed was necessary then in order to achieve anything at all. Well, the Bulgarians were approached by the German embassy, but not until about six months later did they take the first step in the direction of “radical” measures—the introduction of the Jewish badge. For the Nazis, even this turned out to be a great disappointment. In the first place, as they dutifully reported, the badge was only a “very little star”; second, most Jews simply did not wear it; and, third, those who did wear it received “so many manifestations of sympathy from the misled population that they actually are proud of their sign”—as Walter Schellenberg, Chief of Counterintelligence in the R.S.H.A., wrote in an S.D. report transmitted to the Foreign Office in November, 1942. Whereupon the Bulgarian government revoked the decree. Under great German pressure, the Bulgarian government finally decided to expel all Jews from Sofia to rural areas, but this measure was definitely not what the Germans demanded, since it dispersed the Jews instead of concentrating them.

This expulsion actually marked an important turning point in the whole situation, because the population of Sofia tried to stop Jews from going to the railroad station and subsequently demonstrated before the King’s palace. The Germans were under the illusion that King Boris was primarily responsible for keeping Bulgaria’s Jews safe, and it is reasonably certain that German Intelligence agents murdered him. But neither the death of the monarch nor the arrival of Dannecker, early in 1943, changed the situation in the slightest, because both Parliament and the population remained clearly on the side of the Jews. Dannecker succeeded in arriving at an agreement with the Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs to deport six thousand “leading Jews” to Treblinka, but none of these Jews ever left the country. The agreement itself is noteworthy because it shows that the Nazis had no hope of enlisting the Jewish leadership for their own purposes. The Chief Rabbi of Sofia was unavailable, having been hidden by Metropolitan Stephan of Sofia, who had declared publicly that “God had determined the Jewish fate, and men had no right to torture Jews, and to persecute them” (Hilberg)—which was considerably more than the Vatican had ever done. Finally, the same thing happened in Bulgaria as was to happen in Denmark a few months later—the local German officials became unsure of themselves and were no longer reliable. This was true of both the police attaché, a member of the S.S., who was supposed to round up and arrest the Jews, and the German Ambassador in Sofia, Adolf Beckerle, who in June, 1943, had advised the Foreign Office that the situation was hopeless, because “the Bulgarians had lived for too long with peoples like Armenians, Greeks, and Gypsies to appreciate the Jewish problem”—which, of course, was sheer nonsense, since the same could be said mutatis mutandis for all countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It was Beckerle too who informed the R.S.H.A., in a clearly irritated tone, that nothing more could be done. And the result was that not a single Bulgarian Jew had been deported or had died an unnatural death when, in August, 1944, with the approach of the Red Army, the anti-Jewish laws were revoked I know of no attempt to explain the conduct of the Bulgarian people, which is unique in the belt of mixed populations. But one is reminded of Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist who happened to be in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and whom they chose to accuse of the Reichstagsbrand, the mysterious fire in the Berlin Parliament of February 27, 1933. He was tried by the German Supreme Court and confronted with Goring, whom he questioned as though he were in charge of the proceedings; and it was thanks to him that all those accused, except van der Lubbe, had to be acquitted. His conduct was such that it won him the admiration of the whole world, Germany not excluded. “There is one man left in Germany,” people used to say, “and he is a Bulgarian.”

GREECE, being occupied in the north by the Germans and in the south by the Italians, offered no special problems and could therefore be left waiting her turn to become judenrein. In February, 1943, two of Eichmann’s specialists, Hauptsturmführers Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, arrived to prepare everything for the deportation of the Jews from Salonika, where two-thirds of Greek Jewry, approximately fifty-five thousand people, were concentrated. This was according to plan “within the framework of the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in Europe,” as their letter of appointment from IV-B-4 had it. Working closely with a certain Kriegsverwaltungsrat Dr. Max Merten, who represented the military government of the region, they immediately set up the usual Jewish Council, with Chief Rabbi Koretz at its head. Wisliceny, who headed the Sonderkommando für Judenan-gelegenheiten in Salonika, introduced the yellow badge, and promptly made it known that no exemptions would be tolerated. Dr. Merten moved the whole Jewish population into a ghetto, from which they could easily be removed, since it was near the railroad station. The only privileged categories were Jews with foreign passports and, as usual, the personnel of the Judenrat— not more than a few hundred persons all told, who were eventually shipped to the exchange camp of Bergen-Belsen. There was no avenue of escape except flight to the south, where the Italians, as elsewhere, refused to hand Jews over to the Germans, and the safety in the Italian Zone was short-lived. The Greek population was indifferent at best, and even some of the partisan groups looked upon the operations “with approval.” Within two months, the whole community had been deported, trains for Auschwitz leaving almost daily, carrying from two thousand to twenty-five hundred Jews each, in freight cars. In the fall of the same year, when the Italian Army had collapsed, evacuation of some thirteen thousand Jews from the southern part of Greece, including Athens and the Greek islands, was swiftly completed.

In Auschwitz, many Greek Jews were employed in the so-called death commandos, which operated the gas chambers and the crematoria, and they were still alive in 1944, when the Hungarian Jews were exterminated and the Lódz ghetto was liquidated. At the end of that summer, when rumor had it that the gassing would soon be terminated and the installations dismantled, one of the very few revolts in any of the camps broke out; the death commandos were certain that now they, too, would be killed. The revolt was a complete disaster—only one survivor remained to tell the story.

It would seem that the indifference of the Greeks to the fate of their Jews has somehow survived their liberation. Dr. Merten, a witness for the defense in Eichmann’s trial, today, somewhat inonsistently, claims both to have known nothing and to have saved the Jews from the fate of which he was ignorant. He quietly returned to Greece after the war as a representative of a travel agency; he was arrested, but was soon released and allowed to return to Germany. His case is perhaps unique, since trials for war crimes in countries other than Germany have always resulted in severe punishment. And his testimony for the defense, which he gave in Berlin in the presence of representatives of both the defense and the prosecution, was certainly unique. He claimed that Eichmann had been very helpful in an attempt to save some twenty thousand women and children in Salonika, and that all the evil had come from Wisliceny. However, he eventually stated that before testifying he had been approached by Eichmann’s brother, a lawyer in Linz, and by a German organization of former members of the S.S. Eichmann himself denied everything—he had never been in Salonika, and he had never seen the helpful Dr. Merten.

Eichmann claimed more than once that his organizational gifts, the coordination of evacuations and deportations achieved by his office, had in fact helped his victims; it had made their fate easier. If this thing had to be done at all, he argued, it was better that it be done in good order. During the trial no one, not even counsel for the defense, paid any attention to this claim, which was obviously in the same category as his foolish and stubborn contention that he had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews through “forced emigration.” And yet, in the light of what took place in RUMANIA, one begins to wonder. Here, too, everything was topsy-turvy, but not as in Denmark, where even the men of the Gestapo began sabotaging orders from Berlin; in Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Rumania was the most anti-Semitic country in prewar Europe. Even in the nineteenth century, Rumanian anti-Semitism was a well-established fact; in 1878, the great powers had tried to intervene, through the Treaty of Berlin, and to get the Rumanian government to recognize its Jewish inhabitants as Rumanian nationals—though they would have remained second-class citizens. They did not succeed, and at the end of the First World War all Rumanian Jews—with the exception of a few hundred Sephardic families and some Jews of German origin—were still resident aliens. It took the whole might of the Allies, during the peace-treaty negotiations, to “persuade” the Rumanian government to accept a minority treaty and to grant the Jewish minority citizenship. This concession to world opinion was withdrawn in 1937 and 1938, when, trusting in the power of Hitler Germany, the Rumanians felt they could risk denouncing the minority treaties as an imposition upon their ‘sovereignty,’ and could deprive several hundred thousand Jews, roughly a quarter of the total Jewish population, of their citizenship. Two years later, in August, 1940, some months prior to Rumania’s entry into the war on the side of Hitler Germany, Marshal Ion Antonescu, head of the new Iron Guard dictatorship, declared all Rumanian Jews to be stateless, with the exception of the few hundred families who had been Rumanian citizens before the peace treaties. That same month, he also instituted anti-Jewish legislation that was the severest in Europe, Germany not excluded. The privileged categories, war veterans and Jews who had been Rumanians prior to 1918, comprised no more than ten thousand people, hardly more than one per cent of the whole group. Hitler himself was aware that Germany was in danger of being outdone by Rumania, and he complained to Goebbels in August, 1941, a few weeks after he had given the order for the Final Solution, that “a man like Antonescu proceeds in these matters in a far more radical fashion than we have done up to the present.” Rumania entered the war in February, 1941, and the Rumanian Legion became a military force to be reckoned with in the coming invasion of Russia. In Odessa alone, Rumanian soldiers were responsible for the massacre of sixty thousand people. In contrast to the governments of other Balkan countries, the Rumanian government had very exact information from the very beginning about the massacres of Jews in the East, and Rumanian soldiers, even after the Iron Guard had been ousted from the government, in the summer of 1941, embarked upon a program of massacres and deportations that even “dwarfed the Bucharest outburst of the Iron Guard” in January of the same year—a program that for sheer horror is unparalleled in the whole atrocity-stricken record (Hilberg). Deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite follow-up to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops. Also, the horrors of Rumanian concentration camps, which were established and run by the Rumanians themselves because deportation to the East was not feasible, were more elaborate and more atrocious than anything we know of in Germany. When Eichmann sent the customary adviser on Jewish affairs, Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, to Bucharest, Richter reported that Antonescu now wished to ship a hundred and ten thousand Jews into “two forests across the river Bug,” that is, into German-held Russian territory, for liquidation. The Germans were horrified, and everybody intervened: the Army commanders, Rosenberg’s Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, the Foreign Office in Berlin, the Minister to Bucharest, Freiherr Manfred von Killinger—the last, a former high S.A. officer, a personal friend of Röhm’s and therefore suspect in the eyes of the S.S., was probably spied upon by Richter, who “advised” him on Jewish affairs. On this matter, however, they were all in agreement. Eichmann himself implored the Foreign Office, in a letter dated April, 1942, to stop these unorganized and premature Rumanian efforts “to get rid of the Jews” at this stage; the Rumanians must be made to understand that “the evacuation of German Jews, which is already in full swing,” had priority, and he concluded by threatening to “bring the Security Police into action.” However reluctant the Germans were to give Rumania a higher priority in the Final Solution that had originally been planned for any Balkan country, they had to come around if they did not want the situation to deteriorate into bloody chaos, and, much as Eichmann may have enjoyed his threat to use the Security Police, the saving of Jews was not exactly what they had been trained for. Hence, in the middle of August—by which time the Rumanians had killed close to three hundred thousand of their Jews mostly without any German help—the Foreign Office concluded an agreement with Antonescu “for the evacuation of Jews from Rumania, to be carried out by German units,” and Eichmann began negotiations with the German railroads for enough cars to transport two hundred thousand Jews to the Lublin death camps. But now, when everything was ready and these great concessions had been granted, the Rumanians suddenly did an about-face. Like a bolt from the blue, a letter arrived in Berlin from the trusted Mr. Richter—Marshal Antonescu had changed his mind; as Ambassador Killinger reported, the Marshal now wanted to get rid of Jews “in a comfortable manner.” What the Germans had not taken into account was that this was not only a country with an inordinately high percentage of plain murderers, but that Rumania was also the most corrupt country in the Balkans. Side by side with the massacres, there had sprung up a flourishing business in exemption sales, in which every branch of the bureaucracy, national or municipal, had happily engaged. The government’s own specialty was huge taxes, which were levied haphazardly upon certain groups or whole communities of Jews. Now it had discovered that one could sell Jews abroad for hard currency, so the Rumanians became the most fervent adherents of Jewish emigration—at thirteen hundred dollars a head. This is how Rumania came to be one of the few outlets for Jewish emigration to Palestine during the war. And as the Red Army drew nearer, Antonescu became even more “moderate, he now was willing to let Jews go without any compensation.

It is a curious fact that Antonescu, from beginning to end, was not more “radical” than the Nazis (as Hitler thought), but simply always a step ahead of German developments. He had been the first to deprive all Jews of nationality, and he had started large-scale massacres openly and unashamedly at a time when the Nazis were still busy trying out their first experiments. He had hit upon the sales idea more than a year before Himmler offered “blood for trucks,” and he ended, as Himmler finally did, by calling the whole thing off as though it had been a joke. In August, 1944, Rumania surrendered to the Red Army, and Eichmann, specialist in evacuation, was sent pell-mell to the area in order to save some “ethnic Germans,” without success. About half of Rumania’s eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews survived, a great number of whom—several hundred thousand —found their way to Israel. Nobody knows how many Jews are left in the country today. The Rumanian murderers were all duly executed, and Killinger committed suicide before the Russians could lay their hands on him; only Hauptsturmführer a.D. Richter, who, it is true, had never had a chance to get into the act, lived peacefully in Germany until 1961, when he became a belated victim of the Eichmann trial.