Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse after the Holocaust (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)

Collaboration with the Nazis

This book examines the changes in representing collaboration during the Holocaust, especially in the destruction of European Jewry, in the public discourse and historiography of various countries in Europe that were occupied by the Germans, or were considered, at least during part of the war, as Germany’s allies or satellites. In particular, it shows how representations and responses have been conditioned by national and political trends and constraints. As historical background to the issues of postwar collective memory and public discourse, it includes references to and short descriptions of major manifestations of collaboration, chiefly in regard to the Jews, in each of these countries during the war. Whether they were Communist or democratic regimes, the book shows how the burden of the past was suppressed, denied or distorted in various periods. Covering a wide area of both Eastern and Western Europe from different specialist perspectives, this comprehensive study of collaboration in the Holocaust and its aftermath will be a valuable tool for teachers and students in the field of modern European history and Holocaust studies. Roni Stauber is a Senior Research Fellow at the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Racism and Antisemitism, Tel Aviv University, and a lecturer in the university’s Department of Jewish History.

Routledge Jewish Studies Series Series Editor: Oliver Leaman, University of Kentucky

Studies, which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology, religion, as they relate to Jewish affairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterised Jewish culture both in the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals. Medieval Jewish Philosophy An introduction Dan Cohn-Sherbok Facing the Other The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas Edited by Seán Hand Moses Maimonides Oliver Leaman A User’s Guide to Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption Norbert M. Samuelson On Liberty Jewish philosophical perspectives Edited by Daniel H. Frank Referring to God Jewish and Christian philosophical and theological perspectives Edited by Paul Helm

Judaism, Philosophy, Culture Selected studies by E. I. J. Rosenthal Erwin Rosenthal Philosophy of the Talmud Hyam Maccoby From Synagogue to Church: the Traditional Design Its beginning, its definition, its end John Wilkinson Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt Margaret Betz Hull Deconstructing the Bible Abraham ibn Ezra’s introduction to the Torah Irene Lancaster Image of the Black in Jewish Culture A history of the other Abraham Melamed From Falashas to Ethiopian Jews Daniel Summerfield Philosophy in a Time of Crisis Don Isaac Abravanel: defender of the faith Seymour Feldman Jews, Muslims and Mass Media Mediating the ‘other’ Edited by Tudor Parfitt with Yulia Egorova Jews of Ethiopia The birth of an elite Edited by Emanuela Trevisan Semi and Tudor Parfitt Art in Zion The genesis of national art in Jewish Palestine Dalia Manor Hebrew Language and Jewish Thought David Patterson

Contemporary Jewish Philosophy An introduction Irene Kajon Antisemitism and Modernity Innovation and continuity Hyam Maccoby Jews and India History, image, perceptions Yulia Egorova Jewish Mysticism and Magic An anthropological perspective Maureen Bloom Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed: Silence and Salvation Donald McCallum Muscular Judaism The Jewish body and the politics of regeneration Todd Samuel Presner Jewish Cultural Nationalism David Aberbach The Jewish–Chinese Nexus A meeting of civilizations Edited by M. Avrum Ehrlich German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust Kafka’s kitsch David Brenner The Jews as a Chosen People Tradition and transformation S. Leyla Gürkan Philosophy and Rabbinic Culture Jewish interpretation and controversy in medieval Languedoc Gregg Stern Jewish Blood Reality and metaphor in history, religion and culture Edited by Mitchell B. Hart

Jewish Education and History Continuity, crisis and change Moshe Aberbach; edited and translated by David Aberbach Jews and Judaism in Modern China M. Avrum Ehrlich Political Theologies in the Holy Land Israeli messianism and its critics David Ohana Collaboration with the Nazis Public discourse after the Holocaust Edited by Roni Stauber

Collaboration with the Nazis Public discourse after the Holocaust

Edited by Roni Stauber

Tel Aviv University Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism

First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 editorial selection and matter, Roni Stauber; individual chapters the contributors Associate editor Beryl Belsky All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collaboration with the Nazis : public discourse after the Holocaust/edited by Roni Stauber p. cm. – (Routledge Jewish studies series ; 34) “Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada”–T.p. verso Includes bibliographical references and index 1. World War, 1939–1945—Collaborationists—Europe, Eastern. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Collaborationists—Europe, Western. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Collaborationists—Public opinion. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Collaborationists—Historiography. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Public opinion. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Historiography. 7. Public opinion—Europe, Eastern. 8. Historiography—Europe, Eastern. 9. Public opinion—Europe, Western. 10. Historiography—Europe, Western. I. Stauber, Roni. D802.E92C656 2010 940.53’18–dc22 2009046046

ISBN 0-203-85171-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 978–0–415–56441–0 (hbk) ISBN 978–0–203–85171–5 (ebk)

This publication was supported by a grant from the conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Contents

Notes on the contributors Acknowledgments 1

Introduction

xi xiii 1

RONI STAUBER

PART I Occupied countries: the Communist bloc 2

Where the past is never past: Holocaust memory in post-Communist Poland

23

25

LAURENCE WEINBAUM

3

Collaboration in Ukraine during the Holocaust: Aspects of historiography and research

44

ANATOLY PODOLSKY

4

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States: Between evasion and facing a burdensome past

53

YITZHAK ARAD

PART II Occupied countries: the Western world 5

Failures and mistakes: Images of collaboration in postwar Dutch society

69

71

IDO DE HAAN

6

Turning a blind eye: Aspects of Holocaust memory in Belgium MAXIM STEINBERG AND JOËL KOTEK

91

x

Contents

7

Between tradition and new departure: The dilemmas of collaboration in Denmark

110

SOFIE BAK

8

Collaboration in the deportation of Norway’s Jews: Changing views and representations

125

BJARTE BRULAND

9

Strategies of evasion: Avoiding the issue of collaboration and indifference during the Holocaust in Greece

138

ANDREW APOSTOLOU

PART III Germany’s allies

167

10 Collaboration and collaborators in Vichy France: An unfinished debate

169

ALAIN MICHEL

11 Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia in the postwar discourse

186

GILA FATRAN

12 Oblivion and denial in the Italian postwar resistance ethos

212

MANUELA CONSONNI

13 Hungary: Continuing trials of war and memory

229

RAPHAEL VAGO

14 Romania’s tortuous road to facing collaboration

245

MICHAEL SHAFIR

Bibliography Index

279 298

Notes on the contributors

Andrew Apostolou completed his D.Phil. thesis at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on Greek Christian reactions to the Holocaust in Greece, and was the first historian to have written on this subject. Among his publications are “Mother of Israel; Orphan of History: Writing on Jewish Salonika,” Israel Affairs 1 (January 2007). Yitzhak Arad served as Director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority, for twenty-one years (1972–93), and remains associated with this institution in an advisory capacity. Among his numerous publications, some of which have been translated into several languages, is Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna (1980). Sofie Lene Bak is Executive Secretary at the Royal Library, Copenhagen. She is author of the books Jødeaktionen oktober 1943. Forestillinger i offentlighed og forskning (Copenhagen, 2001) and Dansk antisemitisme 1930–1945 (2004). Bjarte Bruland is Scientific Head and Curator of the Jewish Museum in Oslo and is doing his Ph.D. on the subject “Norway and the Holocaust. Norwegian Policy toward Jews, ca. 1920–1950.” He has published several articles on Norwegian Holocaust history. Manuela Consonni is a Mandel Fellow at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and teaches at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry and in the Department of Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University. Her book War of Memories: Deportation and Shoah in Italy, 1945–1985 was published in 2007. Ido De Haan is Professor of Political History at the Institute of History, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He has published works on political theory and the political history of Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as on history and the memory of the Holocaust. Gila Fatran was the first researcher to write about the destruction of Slovakian Jewry during the Holocaust. Among her publications on this subject are Die Deportation der Juden aus der Slowakei 1944–1945 (1996). She worked with Yad Vashem in collecting and computerizing Slovakian

xii

Notes on the contributors documents from the Holocaust era and writing assessments of Czech and Slovakian candidates for the “Righteous among the Nations.”

Joël Kotek is Professor of Contemporary History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Between 2003 and 2006 he was founding director of the Mémorial de la Shoah de Paris. Among his recent publications is La Carte postale antisémite, with Gérard Silvain (2006). Alain Michel is Head of the French Desk at the International School for Holocaust Study (Yad Vashem) and director of Elkana Publishing House, Jerusalem. Among his publications are Roots of Israel (2003) and Jules Braunschvig, a Humanist Jew (2006) Anatoly Podolsky is Director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies in Kiev and a research associate at the Department of Jewish History and Culture, Institute of Ethnic and Political Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has published more than fifty articles on the history of the Jews in Ukraine, the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Eastern Europe and teaching the Holocaust. Michael Shafir teaches in the Faculty of European Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where he has been Chair of International Relations since September 2007. He is head of the Romanian delegation to the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. Maxime Steinberg is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). He is an expert on the history of antisemitism and genocide, in particular the history of the Holocaust. One of his recent publications is La Persécution des Juifs en Belgique 1941–1945 (2004). Raphael Vago is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, and Senior Research Fellow at the Stephen Roth Institute and the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies, at Tel Aviv University. He was a member of the International Commission of Historians on the Holocaust in Romania and was general editor of the four-volume English edition of The History of Jews in Romania. Laurence Weinbaum is Director of Research at the Institute of the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem and an adjunct lecturer in history at the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel. He is working on a book, together . with Dr. Dariusz Libionka, on the historiography of the ZZW (Jewish Military Union) and its role in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the authors of the chapters, who have contributed their unique perspectives to the main questions posed in this volume. I am indebted also to Beryl Belsky, publications editor at the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University, who worked with me from the outset of this project. Her professional and meticulous work had a considerable impact on the final draft of this book. This project was carried out within the framework of the Stephen Roth Institute. I am indebted to my friends at the institute for their support. In particular, I would like to thank Professor Dina Porat for her invaluable advice and continuous encouragement. Many thanks to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) for their generous support at all stages of this work. I am grateful to the editors and staff of Routledge, and especially acquisitions editor James (Joe) Whiting, who showed great interest in the project; Oliver Leaman, editor of the Jewish Studies series; senior editorial assistant Suzanne Richardson, and senior production editor Emma Hart. I completed editing the manuscript and wrote the introduction during a sabbatical as the Aresty Visiting Professor at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University. I am grateful to Professor Yael Zerubavel, head of the center, to Gary A. Rendsburg, Chair, Department of Jewish Studies, and to all my friends at the Center and the department for the warm hospitality they extended to me and my family during our stay.

1

Introduction Roni Stauber

In January 1987, the Polish Catholic periodical Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly), opposed to the Communist regime, published an article that provoked a fierce debate among Polish intellectuals. In the piece, entitled “The Poor Poles look at the Ghetto,” Jan Błon´ski, professor of literature at Jagiellonian University, challenged the widespread Polish notion that the local population bore no moral responsibility for the Jewish tragedy in Poland during World War II and criticized Polish indifference to the fate of their fellow countrymen, the Jews.1 Błon´ski’s censure of Polish society was inspired by the poem “Campo de Fiori” of Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, written in 1943 following the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It describes the scene at a merry-go-round while the Germans burn the ghetto, killing or capturing the remaining Jews who are trying to resist: “The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall … /And the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.”2 Studies on the Holocaust relate mainly to three groups: the perpetrators, the victims and the bystanders. The bystanders, to whom Miłosz and Błon´ski referred, were undoubtedly the largest group. They encompassed most Europeans, the majority of whom were indifferent to the fate of the Jews. The others, who might have sympathized with the Jews’ suffering, did not want to get involved for one reason or another, not least because they feared the death sentence in some of the lands occupied in Eastern Europe, or internment in others. In addition, two relatively small groups were active players in the fate of many persecuted Jews. On the one hand, there were a few who saved Jews – the Righteous among the Nations, to use the traditional Hebrew term. They risked their lives and those of their families and their acquaintances to rescue Jews, frequently defying the hostility of many of their countrymen. On the other, there were a considerable number among the local population, both individuals and governmental agencies, that assisted the Germans in implementing the Final Solution. Some collaborators served as auxiliaries, guarding concentration camps, helping to deport Jews from the ghettos to the death camps, and particularly in Eastern Europe, participating in mass murder in killing fields near Jewish locations or in the death camps themselves. Others, particularly in West European countries, such as France, the Netherlands, and

2

Roni Stauber

Belgium, became “desk murderers” who assisted the Germans in the necessary bureaucratic preparations. By providing lists of names and addresses, or by enacting and publishing anti-Jewish decrees, these officials played a key role in the eventual implementation of murder.3 The term “collaboration” in this volume refers to various forms of cooperation with the Germans. Originally, however, it had an ideological connotation. Philip Pétain, the Vichy head of state, used the word collaboration following his meeting with Adolf Hitler at Montoire in October 1940 to describe the relationship between Vichy France and Nazi Germany. During the war both state-level politicians, as well as individuals who aided the Germans, varied greatly in their motives. Realpolitik, fear, career advancement and personal benefit were some of the main reasons for collaboration. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “collaborate” as: “to cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy of one’s country and especially an occupying force.” In the reality of the geo-political situation of Europe on the eve of the war as well as during it, the Germans were not treated as enemies by some European governments and peoples, at least for part of that period. Moreover, politicians and individuals regarded by the Allies or by some circles of their populations as traitors were considered by others as patriots and heroes. The controversy over these issues has continued since the war, as demonstrated in the chapters of Fatran (Slovakia), Vago (Hungary) and Shafir (Romania), among others. The definition of collaboration is especially complex in the context of the Holocaust. In East European countries under German occupation such as Ukraine (Podolsky) and Poland (Weinbaum), in particular, there was often no inconsistency between anti-German hostility and the sense of delight and satisfaction experienced when Jews were murdered. Some Polish partisans regarded by their compatriots as true Polish patriots killed Jewish fugitives from ghettos and camps. “Paradoxically, many saw no contradiction between acting against the German occupant and aiding in the destruction of Jews,” writes Weinbaum (p. 27). This book examines the changes in representing collaboration, especially in the destruction of European Jewry, in the public discourse and the historiography of various countries in Europe as a consequence of national and political trends and constraints. The chapters have been organized to accord with the geo-political circumstances of each of the countries during the war. Thus, a distinction has been made between countries that were occupied by the Germans and those that were considered, at least during part of the war, as Germany’s allies, or satellite states, although they differ in the extent of independence they gained or retained during that period. An analysis of the postwar public discourse – the core of this volume – calls also for a distinction between Western countries, which besides one (Greece), were democracies during the entire period, and Communist states, where freedom of speech was curtailed and dissident attitudes regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust and local collaboration were rarely, if ever, heard.

Introduction

3

In what follows, an attempt is made to summarize some of the main features characterizing the resolution of issues relating to collaboration during the Holocaust in the thirteen European countries included in this volume. The analysis focuses primarily on similarities and differences in the attitudes of the various societies to this question. As historical background to the issues of postwar collective memory and public discourse, it includes references to and short descriptions of the major manifestations of collaboration, chiefly in regard to the Jews, in each of these countries during the war. Five East European countries appear in Part I: Poland, Ukraine and the three Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). All were under German occupation: Poland from September 1939 and the others from June 1941. From the end of the war until the end of the 1980s and early 1990s they were all part of the Soviet bloc, where “public discourse” was dominated by ideological conformism and government censorship. Collaboration of the local population in the annihilation of the Jews was ignored, as part of the general trend of disregarding the unique fate of the Jews during the war. Yitzhak Arad points out that the principle of ignoring the singularity of the genocide against Soviet Jewry was determined by Stalin in fall 1941 and continued to characterize the position of the Communist regimes until their collapse (p. 53). Regardless of the extent of collaboration and its various faces, common to all these countries during the Communist period was the deep conviction that the Germans bore sole responsibility for the crimes and atrocities perpetrated during the occupation. As demonstrated by the authors of the first three chapters, this view, which was shared by many opponents of the regime as well (Weinbaum, p. 28), has continued to be central to the public discourse, even since the establishment of democratic governments. There is a clear difference, however, between Poland, on the one hand, and the Baltic States and Ukraine, on the other, in regard to the origins and evolvement of the discourse on the Holocaust and collaboration. In Poland a fierce, open debate regarding the attitude of Poles toward the Jews was launched in 1987 on the pages of the abovementioned Catholic opposition paper Tygodnik Powszechny. It might be assumed that memories of Jewish survivors and studies from abroad had a certain impact on the beginnings of more genuine deliberations in Poland regarding their feelings toward the Jews. One such example is the book Unequal Victims, published in English in 1988 by two leading Israeli historians and Holocaust survivors, Israel Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski. In contrast to the unequivocally negative image of Poles among Israelis and Jews in general, Gutman and Krakowski pointed out some positive aspects of Polish–Jewish relations, describing at length efforts of Polish individuals and groups to rescue Jews. However, a large part of the book is devoted to the indifference of Poles to the fate of the Jews as well as to more extreme manifestations of hostility: blackmailing and handing over of Jewish fugitives by szmalcownicy (groups of bounty hunters) and others, as well as to the tragic fate of Jews who escaped from ghettos and camps to the forests, only to be hunted down and murdered by local peasants or Polish partisans.4

4

Roni Stauber

Those who initiated the debate regarding Polish behavior during the war in the second half of the 1980s, when the Communist era was coming to a close, were principally members of the Polish intelligentsia. About three million Polish Jews perished during the war. Their fate and the Jewish presence in Poland for about one thousand years became a central issue in Polish intellectual and cultural life after the collapse of the Communist regime. About a decade later, when the mass murder of Jews by their Polish neighbors in Jedwabne and other villages in the area was revealed by the historian Jan Gross, the arguments among various circles of the Polish intelligentsia became even fiercer (Weinbaum, p. 30). In the Baltic States it was governments that initiated the establishment of historical commissions eight years after independence had been gained. In his chapter on the significance of these commissions to the complex process of facing the past, Yitzhak Arad claims that it was mainly international considerations and not a genuine desire to confront the past that led the governments of these states to establish the commissions (p. 55). In Ukraine, as Podolsky shows, there has been more readiness to examine the Holocaust since the collapse of the Communist regime. Some Ukrainian historians and philosophers call for a genuine, comprehensive discourse on the matter, which would be based on a national admission that Ukrainians aided the Germans in carrying out the murder of Jews in Ukraine and other regions. Nevertheless, after fifteen years of democracy there is still a general reluctance to face the extent and severity of Ukrainian collaboration (Podolsky, p. 50). It seems that the level and nature of collaboration in each country has affected its willingness to face the past. Despite known and relatively new revelations about Poles who murdered Jews or handed them over, the selfimage of the Poles as one of the chief victims of Nazi Germany has not been weakened. Since they themselves were subjected to a policy of genocide and generally speaking did not play a significant role as collaborators in the German machinery of destruction, the past for them appears less threatening. On the other hand, in Ukraine and the Baltic States, principally Lithuania, local collaborators and frequently the mob played an active part in the destruction of local Jewish communities. Collaborationist police battalions of Ukrainians participated in the mass murder of Jews, and in raping Jewish girls and women. In addition, they served as guards at killing sites, such as Babi Yar, as well as in death camps, especially Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In western Ukraine, in particular, thousands of Jews were murdered in pogroms carried out by the local population (Podolsky, p. 47). Local police battalions were sent to serve as auxiliaries of the German machinery of destruction in other countries as well. In fall 1942, for example, the Estonian security police killed Jewish deportees from Theresienstadt and Berlin. Lithuanian troops participated in deportations and killing operations in Belorussia, while Ukrainian and Latvian police battalions were part of the forces that carried out deportations of Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka (Podolsky, p. 46, Arad, p. 64). The reluctance in Ukraine and the Baltic States

Introduction

5

to confront the dark chapters of their history seems especially strong because of the knowledge of the enormous crimes committed and the fear that new revelations will exacerbate the negative image of these nations. Allegations of the Jews’ loyalty to the hated Soviet Union and in particular of their role in the Communist bureaucracy and the security services have been central to the public and academic discourse in Eastern Europe regarding the attitude of the local population toward the Jews. While various studies have concluded that this image of the Jews has been grossly distorted, it nonetheless serves as an explanation for many in these countries for the atrocities committed by the local population against them (Arad, pp. 56–8; Podolsky, pp. 46–7). Moreover, in the ongoing debate between liberal forces and nationalists, who reject any attempts at self-criticism, the supposed Jewish–Communist equation serves as moral justification for the crimes against the Jews. Part II includes five European countries that were occupied by the Germans and which after the war became part of the Western world: the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Greece. Common to all these countries was the German attempt to deport all or at least part of the Jewish population to the death camps in the East. Thus, unlike in East European countries, most of the collaborators did not participate directly in the murder of Jews. They assisted the Germans in implementing the preliminary steps of the destruction process, including registration and providing information on Jews, promulgating special decrees and assembling the victims. While some were motivated by ideological conviction or political aspirations, many opted to collaborate in spite of the fact that they identified neither with Germany nor with National Socialism. Civil servants who were part of the local administration prior to the occupation continued to follow directives, avoiding any moral questions or consideration of the obvious contradictions between their deeds and the civil and legal norms that were part of the democratic system of their countries before the occupation. High-ranking bureaucrats frequently justified their collaboration on the grounds of “the lesser of two evils.” They assumed that partial cooperation with the Germans would prevent measures against the general population and in certain cases might even alter the original German plan to deport the Jews and/or alleviate the brutality. On the other hand, the phenomenon of groups fighting the Germans while simultaneously supporting anti-Jewish persecution and even murder of Jews was uncommon in these countries. The five states may be distinguished from each other by German occupation policy and the level of collaboration. In the Netherlands, zealous Nazis, notably Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who governed the country, saw the implementation of the Final Solution as a top priority and was ready to crush, if necessary, any Dutch resistance. Harsh German reaction to a strike that broke out throughout the Netherlands at the end of February 1941 as an act of solidarity with the first Jews deported, ensured that such civil resistance would never take place again.5

6

Roni Stauber

Dutch society, with the exception of ardent Dutch Nazis and extreme antisemites, did not support the deportation of Jews. Prior to the occupation, the Jews, an old and well integrated community, had suffered neither explicit antisemitic manifestations nor discrimination. During the occupation, many Dutch people extended a hand to Jews, providing them with hiding places, and some, consequently, were punished severely with internment. At the same time, many Jews were handed over by fellow Dutch citizens. Numerous civil servants – burgomasters, police officers and railway officials – were involved in the persecution and deportation of Jewish compatriots.6 Over seventy percent of Dutch Jews were murdered, the highest proportion in Western Europe. The ruthless determination of the German civil administration and of the strong contingent of SS officials to implement the Final Solution in the Netherlands undoubtedly played a major part in this outcome. The German ability to carry out the destruction process, however, would not have been possible without the widespread collaboration of Dutch civil servants. In his chapter, Ido de Haan states that 400,000 personal files of different levels of collaboration were compiled after the war. Over 100,000 persons were convicted and imprisoned for various terms (p. 74). In Belgium, 55 percent of the Jewish population survived, principally because zealous Nazis and SS officials did not succeed in gaining the power and control that they did in the Netherlands. Belgium was ruled by a military administration which was less eager to deport Jews and more attentive to local objections. In contrast to the other four countries in this section, most of the Jews in Belgium were foreigners, many of whom came as refugees in the 1930s. In 1940 only 6.6 percent of Jews had Belgian citizenship. In order to avoid intensifying public protest, the SS tended to target and deport Jews without citizenship. Only the last deportation in September 1943 included Jews holding Belgian citizenship. Many Christians offered to aid persecuted Jews in Belgium, and underground groups, particularly the Communist ones in which Jews and non-Jews cooperated, were active in efforts to save victims of the Germans. The Catholic clergy, some major municipal governments, notably that of Brussels, and the king’s mother, who remained in Belgium, also tried to prevent the deportations.7 Nevertheless, in Belgium too, persecution of Jews and deportations were carried out with the aid of local collaborators. In their article, Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek go so far as to claim that, “ … from Brussels to Antwerp, via Liège and Charleroi, Nazi Germany could not have implemented the Final Solution without the active cooperation of local intermediaries, in the public services and the police force alike” (p. 91). There were two kinds of collaborators: members of nationalist groups, mainly in Flanders, who admired and supported the Nazi regime and aspired to turn Flanders into a separate, independent state; and civil servants who obeyed orders. As in the Netherlands, collaboration was justified by the theory of “the lesser of two evils” (Steinberg and Kotek, p. 92). Only 1,700 Jews lived in Norway when it was occupied by German troops. The Norwegians resisted the Germans and after the occupation, like the

Introduction

7

Dutch and Belgians, established a government-in-exile in London. However, unlike the other two countries, in Norway the Germans approved the establishment of a collaborationist government headed by Vidkun Quisling, leader of the National Unity Party. Apart from a small minority, Norwegians opposed and despised Quisling whose name during the war became a symbol of collaboration and treason. Quisling’s government, however, lacked real autonomy and in fact as in the Netherlands was ruled by a Reichkommisar. During the deportation of the small Jewish community to the death camps in 1942, hundreds of Jews were warned in advance and many were saved, thanks to Christian compatriots and members of the underground who helped them escape to Sweden. Nevertheless, members of the Norwegian SS division, representatives of the Quisling party, local bureaucrats, and particularly the police, played a major role in the deportation of hundreds of Jews to their death and in confiscating their property (Bruland, pp. 131, 133).8 While in those countries the local administration’s cooperation with the Germans was disastrous for the Jewish community, in Denmark the situation was more complex. Unlike the Belgians, Dutch and Norwegians, the Danes did not oppose the German occupation. The Germans agreed to refrain from intervention in the domestic life of the kingdom and the security of the small Jewish community (7,800) was part of that understanding. Denmark continued to be ruled by the king, the government, and the parliament, while other democratic institutions carried on functioning as well. In return, Denmark supplied Germany with provisions, including weapons, and signed the Antikomintern treaty against “international Communism.” Sofie Bak notes that “Denmark served as a model protectorate, a prototype for the new Europe ruled by the Third Reich” (pp. 131, 132–3). Denmark’s unique status changed drastically in the summer of 1943 following manifestations of resistance, notably mounting activity of the Danish underground. As a result, the Wehrmacht assumed executive power and declared a state of martial law. The situation of the Jews deteriorated and the fear that the Germans would carry out deportations in Denmark, too, grew, despite the explicit objections of the king, the Danish government and Danish public opinion. At the beginning of October 1943 when a plan to arrest the Jews was revealed, the Danish underground and many Danish individuals, especially Danish fishermen, helped rescue almost all the Jews, an operation that became a symbol of civil courage. Without minimizing the compassion showed by many Danes to the Jews, Bak stresses the assumption currently accepted by Danish historians that the advance warning of the deportation was part of a strategy of the German plenipotentiary in Denmark, Werner Best. He did not prevent the Jewish evacuation to Sweden because he considered it the best option for serving German interests in Denmark. Thus, according to this thesis, “the successful rescue and the actions of the Danes who helped their compatriots to escape must be seen in this context of reluctance and self-restraint on the part of the Germans” (Bak, p. 117).

8

Roni Stauber

Based on the work of Danish historians, notably Hans Kirchhoff, Bak points out that the policy of cooperation, adopted primarily by the permanent secretaries, who continued to function until the end of the war, and principally, the idea to arrest and intern the Jews in order to prevent their deportation, could have been disastrous had the Germans really been determined to implement the Final Solution in Denmark. In addition, recent studies have stressed that in parallel to the heroic rescue, agencies and civil servants such as train staff and coastguards took part in the deportation of Jews or refrained from helping them as part of their cooperation with the Germans and/or their reluctance to disobey the law (Bak, p. 122). In contrast to Denmark, the Jews of Greece met a horrendous fate. Over 80 percent were murdered, mainly in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Following its defeat by the German army in April 1941, Greece was divided among Germany, Bulgaria and Italy. Most of the Jewish population – 70 percent (56,000 out of 77,000) – were concentrated in Salonika in the German Zone and deported in the spring of 1943. Almost all of them – 96 percent – were slaughtered. While the Italians refused to persecute and later to deport the Jews from their territories (part of the west coast and the Greek islands), the Bulgarians in Macedonia and Thrace rounded up more than 11,000 Jews and handed them over to the Germans, who murdered them in the death camps in Poland. In the autumn of 1943, following the collapse of Italy, the Germans occupied the Italian zone. In April 1944 several thousand Jews were assembled there and murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.9 As in the Netherlands, SS determination to deport the Jews to their death in Poland, and the free hand they were given by the other German authorities had a significant impact on the high number of Jewish casualties in Greece. However, the indifference of the local population and the assistance provided by the local Greek administration undoubtedly helped the SS accomplish the destruction of the community. In his chapter, Andrew Apostolou also points out that the Greeks did not participate in the actual murder of Jews. Moreover, 70 percent of the Greek population lived in rural areas and were, at most, only vaguely aware of the fate of the Jews. There were numerous cases in which Greeks extended help to Jews. Damaskinos, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, for example, joined with some of his fellow clergymen in courageously opposing the deportations from both Salonika and Athens. Nonetheless, particularly in Salonika, the main Jewish center, there was considerable administrative and police collaboration in rounding up and deporting the Jews and popular indifference was widespread. Greek policemen also guarded the ghettos to keep the Jews enclosed and were involved in moving Jews from the larger ghettos to the smaller one next to the railway station, where they briefly awaited deportation. After the Jews were dispatched, local Christians plundered their property or were given it as a gift by the Germans. Apostolou emphasizes the differences between Salonika and Athens, where about half of the 3,500 Jews in the latter escaped the arrests, many with Christian help. He argues that any evaluation of the indifference, as well as

Introduction

9

the collaboration of Christians, in Salonika should take into consideration the antisemitism there and attempts to discriminate against the large Jewish community in the 1930s (p. 148). Political constraints, deep-rooted myths and national pride were among the factors that affected and frequently prevented an open and comprehensive discourse after the war on collaboration and the fate of the Jews in the five countries in this section. As demonstrated by de Haan, in the Netherlands the pendulum swung back and forth in the first decades after the war between clear condemnation and punishment of those who collaborated to apologetics and a call for more understanding of the culprits as part of a general mode of accommodation that characterized Dutch society during the war. In the 1950s, severe punishment and purges gave way to pardons and reintegration of those who “only made mistakes.” High-ranking civil servants in particular argued that they were protecting Dutch society. As to the persecution and deportation of the Jews, they contended they had acted in accordance with the policy of “the lesser of two evils.” Their call for clemency was supported by those who urged drawing a curtain on the war (de Haan, p. 77). The pendulum swung back in the 1960s following the Eichmann trial, as well as the trials of Nazi criminals in West Germany, and interest was aroused regarding the fate of the Jews and the role of Dutch collaborators. Former resistance groups continued to draw public attention to the failed purge. Since the beginning of the 1980s the discourse has focused on the possible linkage between collaboration in the persecution and deportation of the Jews and Dutch society’s accommodation to the occupation. While some Dutch historians emphasize this connection, others argue that it blurs and diminishes the responsibility of those whose decisions and deeds helped the Germans destroy the Jewish community in the Netherlands. Some studies also relate to the responsibility of the Dutch government-in-exile and accuse Queen Wilhelmina of having abandoned Dutch Jews by remaining aloof and not clearly condemning the collaboration of the Dutch bureaucracy (de Haan, p. 85). In Belgium the public debate on collaboration with the Germans has been influenced considerably by the political and ethnic tensions between Walloons and Flemings. For years collaboration was viewed in Belgium in the context of ideological cooperation between nationalist and pro-German elements among mostly Flemings and the Germans. For many Walloons denunciation of collaboration with the Germans was part of an attempt to put an end to the activities of Fleming nationalists and separatist groups. On the other hand, the postwar purge of civil service collaborators was viewed by Fleming politicians and writers as anti-Flemish. The ethnic and political confrontation escalated as a result of the fierce debate at the beginning of the 1950s over the conduct of Leopold III during the war and the question of his continued reign. Steinberg and Kotek point out that the Fleming–Walloon conflict strengthened Flemingis identification with those who collaborated during the Nazi occupation. According to the myth which became a main pillar of Flemish collective memory, the collaborators

10

Roni Stauber

were Flemish patriots who cooperated to further the political and national goals of their people. Thus, as in other countries, collaboration was portrayed as a necessary reaction under the circumstances – the option of “the lesser of two evils,” and “maintaining a presence.” From the 1950s onward, the Flemish political world no longer considered it taboo to express approval of nationalist collaboration (Steinberg and Kotek, pp. 95–6). French-speakers cultivated their own myth, according to which the Walloons identified with the Resistance, although as Steinberg and Kotek emphasize, the Resistance had members in Flanders just as there were collaborators in Wallonia (p. 96). Since the 1990s both accounts have been eroded, influenced considerably by growing interest in the Holocaust and new studies on the fate of Belgium’s Jews. Both the apologetic claim that Flemish collaborators were patriots who cooperated solely for the benefit of the people and the notion that French speakers did not collaborate and were on the side of the resistance were challenged and revised by a new generation of scholars. As in the Netherlands, recent studies have revealed the important role of civil servants – “administrative collaboration” – in the destruction process. As part of this new approach, researchers have dealt with the prolonged reluctance of the Belgian state to grant any form of recognition to Jewish victims of racial persecution most of whom did not held Belgian citizenship (Steinberg and Kotek, pp. 100–3). The trend in Belgium and the Netherlands to make a moral distinction between ideological and administrative collaboration has been central to the discourse over collaboration in Norway, too. Bjarte Bruland maintains that while during the war the deportation of Jews from Norway was highlighted in Norwegian broadcasts from London and Sweden, after 1945 the fate of Norway’s Jews was marginalized. The leading role of the Norwegian bureaucracy, and particularly the police, in the deportation of Jews was obfuscated and the dominant myth drew a clear dividing line between the German oppressor and the Norwegian resistance. Moreover, most Norwegian perpetrators were not punished even for a direct part in arresting Jews who were later deported, or in confiscating their property. The question of awareness – the assertion that they were unaware of the implications of their deeds – was accepted by the courts and later by Norwegian historians, engendering a more lenient assessment of collaboration in Norway (Bruland, pp. 129–30). In the last two decades, Norwegian unwillingness to confront the central role of the local population in the destruction of the small Jewish community has been challenged by researchers and others. Thus, criminologist Per Ole Johansen highlighted the impact of Norway’s policy toward Jewish refugees in the 1930s on the conduct of the Norwegian police during the war. Facts published for the first time in the mid-1990s about Jewish property confiscated in Norway have served as a catalyst for a more soul-searching debate on both the question of Norwegian police behavior during the deportations and the minor place the Jewish tragedy occupied in Norwegian collective memory. The discussion, which is only in its initial stages, clearly indicates

Introduction

11

the growing importance of this event in the collective memory of the war (Bruland, p. 132). Paradoxically, in Denmark where, uniquely, almost all the Jews were saved, their rescue became central in the debate over collaboration. On the one hand, says Bak, historians such as Hans Kirchhoff emphasize the compliance and opportunism of the Danish government, defining its behavior as a “policy of collaboration.” Criticism of this policy culminated on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of August 29, (the day marking the end of this policy when the Danish government resigned) in the Danish prime minister denouncing it as reprehensible and a moral failure (Bak, p. 112). An inverse thesis, raised immediately after the war by Danish politicians who defended their behavior during that period, and which was supported by the first and second postwar generation of historians, defined relations with the Germans as a “policy of negotiation,” in which the Danish government and the German authorities were equal negotiating partners. It stresses the advantages of this policy which enabled the Danish government to keep Denmark and its democratic institutions free of the terrors of occupation. Accordingly, the protection of the Jewish community in Denmark was one of its most conspicuous achievements. In recent years a third concept, which combines elements of the two previous schools, has become dominant in Danish historiography: “policy of cooperation.” It accepts the contention that cooperation with the Germans indeed contributed considerably to the wellbeing of Danish society during a time of war and international crisis, and played an undeniably significant role in the ability to protect and later to save the Jews. On the other hand, it emphasizes the “cost” of collaboration: the humiliating surrender without resistance and the support lent by Denmark to the Nazi state. Moreover, it tries to show that the policy of cooperation could have resulted in tragic consequences had the Germans been more determined to deport the Jews to the death camps (Bak, p. 112). Greece has not confronted its society’s reaction to the Holocaust and particularly the questions of indifference and collaboration. Apostolou argues that collective memory of the war was shaped so that the focus was transferred from events in Salonika, where the majority of Greek Jews lived, to Athens, where there was a concerted effort to save the small Jewish community. The Greek government-in-exile played up the heroic role of Greek Christians in Athens who hid Jews from the autumn of 1943 onward, while ignoring events in Salonika. “As in many countries in Europe, Greek non-Jewish society entered the postwar era believing official propaganda. The difference, however, was that the Greek propaganda version would remain largely unchallenged to this day,” says Apostolou (p. 145). While any reference to Christian collaboration was avoided, the collaboration of Jewish leaders, in particular that of Chief Rabbi Zvi Koretz, was highlighted. By shifting responsibility for collaboration during the Holocaust from Christians to Jews, it was insinuated that the Jews had been a party to their own destruction. In contrast to other West European countries occupied during the war and

12

Roni Stauber

which became stable democracies after it, Greece staggered into a civil war from 1946 to 1949, followed by continuing political tensions and restrictions on democracy which prevented any determined policy of retribution against collaborators with the Axis countries. Any such attempts became even more difficult after 1967 since many among the military junta that had seized power in a coup, such as Minister of Justice Ilias Kyriakopoulos, had collaborated with the Germans during the war. Collaboration was portrayed by supporters of the military regime as a form of patriotic anti-Communism (Apostolou, p. 151). Only since the 1990s, with growing stability and prosperity has discussion of Jewish history become more widespread in Greece. In addition, the state expressed its willingness to erect a memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Salonika. Nevertheless, as Apostolou demonstrates, self-censorship on the issue of collaboration during the Holocaust is still firmly fixed in Greek society, and has not yet been comprehensively tackled by Greek historians of World War II. Part III covers countries and states that collaborated with Germany for at least part of the war. Two, Vichy France and Slovakia, were created as a result of their submission to Germany. The other three, Italy, Hungary and Romania, were Germany’s allies, members of the Axis. The geo-political situation of Italy changed in September 1943 when the government of Pietro Badolgio surrendered to the Allies after overthrowing Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator who had ruled Italy since 1922. The Germans reacted immediately by occupying central and northern Italy, where they formed a puppet state headed by Mussolini whom they had rescued from prison. Hungary’s geo-political situation also altered, when in March 1944, fearing that the country was trying to reach a separate peace with the Allies, the Germans invaded and decreed the establishment of a pro-German government there. In October 1944, ahead of the rapidly advancing Red Army, the Germans overthrew the Hungarian regent and nominated the leader of the Hungarian Nazi movement’s Arrow Cross, Ferenc Szálasi, as dictator. A relatively large proportion, 75 percent, of the Jews in France, survived the Holocaust. Many of them escaped the fate of Auschwitz with the assistance of French Christians, including clergymen and underground groups. However, until the latter half of 1942, when deportations of Jewish French citizens began and the Vichy territories were seized by the Germans and Italians, the French population was largely indifferent to the anti-Jewish measures. Moreover, collaboration was a widespread phenomenon at least in the first three years of occupation. There were three kinds of collaboration: state level collaboration of the Vichy government, collaboration of fascist and far right groups in occupied France, and collaboration of ordinary French citizens in their day-to-day contacts with the Germans. In the occupied territories of western France, extreme French adherents of National Socialism, militant antisemites, and in particular the French police, were instrumental in rounding up Jews. On July 16, 1942, thousands of French policemen arrested

Introduction

13

about 13,000 “stateless” Jews in Paris. Some 14,000 succeeded in hiding. Until mid-1943 Drancy, the main internment camp for the Jews prior to their shipment to Auschwitz, was under French authority.10 Vichy France, with its memory of collaboration in persecuting and deporting the Jews, is the focus of Alain Michel’s article. Vichy France was established following an agreement between Marshal Philippe Pétain and Adolf Hitler in October 1940 after France’s defeat. As demonstrated in the pioneering work of Robert O. Paxton, and later in his joint work with Michael Marrus (see p.18), the Vichy administration not only accommodated to the situation resulting from the defeat but strove to bring about a profound reform of the country on the basis of an ideology that was radically at odds with France’s tradition as a republic. At least during part of the period before the southern part of France was occupied by the Germans, the Pétain regime enjoyed considerable popular support. Moreover, the antisemitic policy initiated by the Vichy administration was not merely a response to German dictates but was part of its political program of “national revolution” and campaign against “foreigners.” The anti-Jewish legislation was generally well received by the majority of the population in the non-occupied zone, and no objections were raised by the French episcopate.11 The Vichy administration was responsible for various measures that isolated the Jews, including property confiscation as well as internment and deportation. Among the twenty thousand stateless Jews that Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister, agreed to deport were several thousand children who had not been earmarked by the Germans.12 In the summer of 1943, following German demands for massive denaturalization in preparation for further deportations, Laval abstained from further collaboration in this endeavor. This shift resulted from reports that the deportations, particularly of Jewish French citizens, were becoming unpopular, as well as growing confidence that the Germans were losing the war. Like Vichy France, the Slovak administration, governed by the fascist, antisemitic Hlinka People’s Party, cooperated from the outset in deporting the Jews. Since there were no “foreign” Jews as such, the anti-Jewish policy was directed immediately at the estimated 80,000 Jews. Slovakia was established as a German puppet state in March 1939 out of the ruins of Czechoslovakia. Thereafter it implemented a harsh anti-Jewish policy, which included dismissal of Jews from government service, followed by the “aryanization” of Jewish firms, confiscation of Jewish property and forced labor.13 The Slovak regime comprised two groups: a conservative one headed by the priest Jozef Tiso, head of the party and state president, and an extreme nationalist one, composed of Nazi adherents and radical antisemites led by Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka and Interior Minister Alexander Mach. Neither the extremists nor the conservatives opposed German demands to deport Jews from Slovakia and in fact it was the Slovaks who initiated the deportations in March 1942,14 making Slovakia the first country – after the Reich – to begin the expulsion of its Jews.15 Their differences centered basically on matters of execution, with the extremists pressing for speedy action and the conservatives

14

Roni Stauber

insisting on gradual implementation, taking into consideration the economic and social conditions of the young country (Fatran, p. 187). As early as the end of 1941 Tiso was well aware of the atrocities being committed by the Germans against the Jews. He ignored, however, two appeals during the deportations from Slovak rabbis and from the heads of the community to intervene as the highest authority in order to prevent the fate that awaited the country’s Jews (p. 189). By the end of June 1942 some 52,000 were deported, mainly to Auschwitz. The Slovaks planned and implemented the expulsion of the Jews in every detail and confiscated the property of the deportees (p. 187). Tiso’s vacillation in continuing the deportations, following inquiries from the Vatican as well as the bribing of Slovak officials, resulted in a temporary halt toward the end of 1942; the extremists under prime minister Tuka, on the other hand, tried to resume them by demanding German intervention. However, rumors in 1943 about the fate of the deported Jews led to protests, especially from Slovak clergy. Since most of the Jews who remained in Slovakia in 1943 were baptized, the clergy demonstrated greater determination in their efforts to prevent the new deportations.16 German and Hlinka atrocities against remaining members of the Jewish community and the deportations to Auschwitz and other camps were resumed at the end of 1944 during the Slovak anti-Nazi uprising. They were sanctioned by Tiso in “order to defend the nation from its foe.”17 Until the occupation of central and northern Italy by the Germans in September 1943 and the establishment of the Italian Social Republic (Salò Republic, RSI), Jews in Italy had suffered neither deportations nor brutal assaults. Ruled by the fascist duce Benito Mussolini since 1923, Italy adopted a racial discrimination policy against the Jews in 1938 as part of its collaboration with the Third Reich. In some cases they were interned and humiliated, mainly Jews in Libya.18 Nevertheless, in Italy the majority of Jews were not persecuted and many could continue their daily lives without interruption. Mussolini’s fascist government and the army were well aware of the Germans’ murderous policy against the Jews, but it was clear to the Germans that any attempt to press the Italians to follow this course would be rejected.19 Nor in the occupied territories in Europe did Italy toe the German line. Moreover, they obstructed German plans to deport Jews from the territories that were under their control in France, Croatia and Greece. The situation of the Jews deteriorated, however, after September 1943. Mussolini, who was deposed by the Grand Council of Fascism following the Allied invasion, was returned to power by the Germans within the borders of the Salò Republic. It was during the existence of the RSI that the Italian fascist bureaucracy, fascist legions, the police and gangs participated, sometimes without German involvement, in registering, arresting, torturing, executing or deporting Jews.20 Italians also played a central role in running the provincial transit camps (Durchgangslager), the most well-known of which was Fossoli di Carpi near Modena, from where the victims were sent to Auschwitz. Some 7,000 Jews – 20 percent of Italy’s Jewish population – were murdered. As in France, the relatively low

Introduction

15

percentage of Jewish casualties was a result of the hand extended by the general population, among which thousands of Jews managed to hide. The change in Hungary’s political status in March 1944 from Germany’s ally to occupied country and the nomination of a puppet government also determined the fate of Hungary’s Jews. Until almost the end of the war, writes historian Raul Hilberg, “the Hungarian Jews were living on a land island, enclosed and protected by its boundary.”21 Hungarian–German cooperation that developed in 1938–1941 was influenced considerably by Hungary’s irredentist claims which had arisen after the end of World War I. With the active support of Germany, Hungary succeeded in reclaiming the territories it had lost as a consequence of the postwar peace agreements (the Treaty of Trianon). Among the main results of its growing commitment to Germany were the anti-Jewish laws passed in 1938 and 1939, which limited the participation of Jews in the political and economic life of the country. Anti-Jewish measures were reinforced in the summer of 1941 when Hungary actively joined the war, sending its troops to aid the German military invasion of Soviet territories. The third racial Jewish law of August 1941 completed the removal of Hungary’s Jewry from Hungarian society and the economy. In the same month the Hungarian authorities sanctioned the deportation of almost 18,000 stateless Jews, mostly of Polish origin, to western Ukraine, near Kamenetz– Podolsk where they were all murdered by the Germans, assisted by a Hungarian unit. Hungarian troops were also involved in massacres of Serbs and Jews in Novi Sad when they entered Yugoslavia after April 1941 (Vago, p. 238). In addition, tens of thousands of Jews were drafted to specially formed forced labor battalions in Ukraine where they suffered severe maltreatment and from which most did not return.22 The Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy, a self-proclaimed antisemite who was responsible for the murder of Jews during the White Terror in 1919–20, refused the German demand to deport any part of the 825,000 Jews living within the country’s borders. In 1943 German suspicions of Hungary’s intentions to abandon the Axis grew, and Hungary’s refusal to deport the Jews was viewed as a sign of the country’s disloyalty. On March 19, 1944, fearing Hungary’s imminent split from the Axis, Germany invaded, a move that led to the rapid destruction of Hungarian Jewry. Eager to implement the Final Solution, while the German army continued its retreat from all fronts, the SS special mission headed by Adolf Eichmann commenced the deportation of some 430,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.23 A major reason for the SS success in completing the deportation within less than two months was widespread Hungarian collaboration. Under German pressure Horthy nominated a pro-German government, with Döme Sztójay, Hungary’s former ambassador to Germany, as prime minister. The interior minister, the gendarmerie, and an entire structure and network of local, provincial and country level authorities were willing partners in the process of removal of the Jews from Hungarian society, followed by their ghettoization and deportation to the death camps (Vago, p. 242). Horthy himself did not

16

Roni Stauber

ban this pervasive collaboration until the deportation of Jews from the Hungarian provinces was completed. His refusal to abdicate lent legitimacy, in the eyes of Hungary’s gendarmes and bureaucrats, to their own collaboration with the Germans.24 In July, when only about 100,000 Budapest Jews remained in the country, international protests as well as American air raids, led to suspension of the deportations, thus sparing the lives of the remaining Jews. Persecution of the Jews resumed, however, in October when the Germans arrested Horthy, dismissed his government and appointed Ferenc Szalási, head of the Nazi-style Arrow Cross. Before the completion of the Russian occupation in February 1945, Szalási’s Hungarian gangs had murdered and tortured thousands of Jews.25 Like Hungary, the Romanians sided with the Germans, hoping to re-annex the lands they had been forced to hand over to the Soviets. Unlike both Hungary and Italy however, Romania under the regime of Ion Antonescu initiated, without any German pressure, a mass destruction policy resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. This policy was the culmination of traditional Romanian antisemitism that had existed since the nineteenth century. It was intensified in the interwar period as part of extreme nationalist tendencies in Romania, exemplified by the activities of right-wing antisemitic parties such as the Iron Guard. In 1940, shortly after taking over the reins, Antonescu, as a close ally of Germany, instructed his government to enact anti-Jewish legislation that would restrict the economic and political rights of the Jews. The policy of mass murder began after the invasion of the Soviet territories. The Romanian army and police participated together with German killing units in the massacre of tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. Masses of Jews were deported, forced to march by the Romanians from their territories into the German killing zones in Ukraine. According to Hilberg “no country besides Germany was involved in the massacre of Jews on such a scale.”26 The destruction process continued against the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina, retaken from the Soviet Union in 1941. Some 146,000 Jews were deported from the two provinces to Transnistria, lying between the Bug and Dniester rivers. Some 75 percent of them perished, mainly from hunger, disease, maltreatment and unremitting murder.27 Like the leaders of other German allies, such as Vichy France, Hungary and Bulgaria, Antonescu differentiated between Romanian Jews and “foreigners” – those who lived in the territories re-annexed from the Soviet Union – and hesitated to deport the Jews of Old Romania, the Regat (Romanian Old Kingdom – Wallachia and Moldavia). Although he first promised the Germans, and in fact planned to deport approximately 300,000 Jews living in Old Romania, Antonescu changed his mind in the autumn of 1942 when he began to doubt that Germany would win the war. There were probably other reasons for Antonescu’s turnabout, such as the intervention of the papal nuncio, Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, as well as the bribing of

Introduction

17

officials and members of his own family by wealthy Jews. While most Romanian Jews living in the Regat were saved, the Romanians were responsible for the murder of 280,000–380,000 Jews.28 After the war two of the five countries of this section, France and Italy, became leading members of the democratic West, while the other three, with Slovakia incorporated into Czechoslovakia, became part of the Communist bloc. The marginalizing of collaboration and highlighting of resistance were the hallmarks of the political and public discourse in both France and Italy after the war. This trend was dictated by political circumstances and national constraints, mainly the desire for national reconciliation and the closing of ranks by avoiding the issues of the extent of collaboration and war crimes. In France, even before the end of the war, a myth of resistance was forged in national memory, as part of Charles De Gaulle’s struggle to represent France as a full partner in the Allied campaign to defeat Germany and in the postwar settlements that would follow. According to this narrative, which gained the support of all political forces, France demonstrated wall-to-wall resistance during the war, while collaboration was a minor phenomenon that involved a small group of traitors detached from the country’s real situation. In Italy, too, both the postwar conservative government and the left opposition single-mindedly pursued a national heritage that construed the antiNazi and anti-fascist struggle as a widespread movement, although few had been truly active in it during the occupation (Consonni, p. 215). The Jews, both the victims and the survivors, were included in this patriotic memory of resistance. However, in the effort to marginalize the issue of collaboration, the special nature of their deportation and the role played by the Italian authorities in its execution were disregarded. As in De Gaulle’s France, in Italy, too, headed in the first eight years after the war by the founder of the Christian Democratic Party Alcide De Gasperi, the widespread resistance myth served to cement the nation in its quest for economic prosperity and a leading position in the new European political alignment of democratic countries and in NATO. Both in France and Italy, where the very core of national consciousness was shaken not only by the disgrace of defeat and consequent occupation, but also by the fact that liberation was owed to the Allies, the new democratic leaders used the resistance myth to strengthen national pride. Also common to both countries was the desire not to turn supporters of the wartime regimes into pariahs, alienated from the new democratic state, lest this approach undermine national goals. In Italy, there was a consensus among the political parties that they should avoid imputing to the resistance the character of a civil war during the years 1943–45 and that they should integrate not only segments of the population that had not participated in the resistance but also those that continued to adhere in one way or another to the fascist experience (Consonni, pp. 218–19). In 1950s France, Vichy apologists attempted, with considerable success, to integrate their narrative into the national myth, positing the “sword and

18

Roni Stauber

shield” theory. Accordingly, collaboration served as a “shield” containing the Germans while the nation awaited liberation. As to the anti-Jewish policy, it was argued that it had been imposed on Vichy by the Germans (Michel, pp. 171–2). In Italy the myth of the “good Italian,” ascribed mainly to the behavior of the Italian army when it still asserted independent authority alongside its German ally in Italian occupied zones, has overshadowed the issue of Italian collaboration with the Germans during the existence of the Salò Republic in the internment and deportation of Jews from Italy (Consonni, p. 222). In France, however, the prolonged marginalization of French collaboration in the persecution and deportation of the Jews was challenged in the wake of the 1968 student revolution and the appearance of historical studies by researchers such as Eberhard Jäckel and notably Henri Michel. The myth collapsed completely following publication of the work of American historian Robert O. Paxton at the beginning of the 1970s, and subsequently the book he co-authored in 1981 with Canadian historian Michael Marrus, which focused on the fate of the Jews. These studies contributed considerably to a change in the perception of Vichy from being an obedient ally to an initiator of substantial anti-Jewish measures. They triggered a comprehensive debate regarding the degree of French collaboration in deporting Jews, on the one hand, and the extent of assistance rendered by the French to the Jews, on the other. Although political circumstances in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania during the war differed significantly, the three chapters relating to attitudes in these countries to the Holocaust and the issue of collaboration reveal conspicuous similarities. As in all Communist countries, there was a clear reluctance to perceive the persecution of the Jews as a unique event. In 1949, for example, the initiative of the Jewish community in Slovakia – which from the end of the war until the 1990s was part of Czechoslovakia – to publish a documentary work on the fate of Slovakian Jews was blocked by the Communist authorities (Fatran, p. 191). In Romanian Communist historiography under Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, even anti-Jewish “pogroms,” such as that perpetrated in Ias¸i in late June 1941, had been organized “against anti-fascist forces” (Shafir, p. 245). In addition, from the first postwar trials officials in the three countries dismissed any suggestion of large-scale collaboration of citizens with the Germans. Collaboration and atrocities during the war were attributed to “small groups of criminals.” Nationalist sentiments within the Communist parties, which were joined by ex-fascists, some of whom became high-ranking officials, played a considerable role in the marginalization of collaboration and the Holocaust. This trend radicalized in Romania from the mid-1960s, with the consolidation of Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s National Communist regime. Ultra-nationalists, supported by the regime and court historians, sought to rehabilitate the wartime leadership, and especially Marshal Ion Antonescu, by denying their participation in war crimes and particularly in the Holocaust (Shafir, pp. 252–3).

Introduction

19

Following the demise of the Communist regimes in Central Europe, attitudes toward the Holocaust and collaboration were manifested in opposing ways. In line with their desire to be part of the West, and particularly to establish close relations with the US, the new democratic regimes were inclined to recognize the centrality and uniqueness of the Holocaust in national memory of the war. External pressures and occasionally local initiatives, such as that of twenty-four leading Slovak intellectuals, led to declarations that accepted at least partial responsibility for the fate of the Jews and even asked forgiveness in the name of their nations (Fatran, p. 196). Simultaneously, nationalist groups, including writers, as well as politicians, have continued an apologetic line regarding the role played by wartime governments and citizens in the destruction of the Jewish people. Coalition governments, particularly in the 1990s, were dependent upon the support of right-wing and nationalist parties, which rejected even minimal accountability of their nations (Vago, p. 232; Shafir, p. 256). Policy makers in the three new democracies were pressured, on the one hand, by demands in the international arena to accept at least partial responsibility for the crimes of the past, and by local public opinion, which denied any accountability let alone collective guilt, on the other. Politicians and public figures were equivocal in their attitude toward blaming the wartime governments for the atrocities against the Jews and the Roma. Occasionally, leading politicians conveyed dual messages: they made statements to the international public accepting responsibility, and apologetic ones at home (Shafir, p. 261; Fatran, p. 197). The principal goal of nationalists in all three countries was the rehabilitation of wartime politicians and high-ranking army commanders, and especially the state’s leaders: Romania’s Antonescu, the Hungarian regent Horthy and Slovakia’s president Tiso. In trying to influence the shaping of collective memory of the war, it was claimed that these figures, like many officials and military officers, should not be blamed for crimes that were committed by the Germans with the help of small groups of local Nazi collaborators. Furthermore, it was contended, under these leaders all three countries were in fact unwilling satellites that were forced to collaborate due to their complex geopolitical situation, the desire for self-determination in the Slovak case and the wish to regain “lost territories” in that of Hungary and Romania (Fatran, pp. 186–7; Vago, p. 237; Shafir, p. 238 n. 82). These arguments, which gained wide public support, were bolstered by the allegedly illegal, politically motivated and unprofessional nature of the war crime trials (Vago, p. 236; Shafir, p. 253). In the post-Communist era, Antonescu, Tiso and Horthy were portrayed as nationalist leaders who stood up against Communism. Jews, on the other hand, were perceived as having played a major role in the atrocities perpetrated by the Communists before and during the postwar period, crimes that were no less horrific than the Holocaust. Thus, according to this still widespread concept, wartime leaders were not only innocent of shedding Jewish blood but also paid a heavy price for trying to defend their nations against the “Red Holocaust.”

20

Roni Stauber

A comparison between the evolution of collective memory and public discourse in postwar Europe demonstrates that in European countries that were in the German sphere of influence, regardless of their precise geo-political situation during or after the war, collaboration in general and its role in the destruction of Jewish life in particular has remained a sensitive issue. In all of them, whether they were under Communist or democratic rule, the matter was suppressed, denied or distorted in various periods. While in Communist countries challenging the official narrative was considered by the authorities an act of political subversion, in the democracies, too, the inviolable consensual narrative, which tended to marginalize collaboration, was not seriously challenged. Conformism, self-censorship and the stifling of dissident views were important components in the effort to strengthen national cohesion after severe national turmoil and traumatic events.29 Thus, these studies contribute considerably to our understanding of societies which shaped collective memory while rejecting others that threatened to undermine the dominant one. Coming to terms with the past, and particularly with the question of collaboration, was affected by a growing distance from the events and especially by political and social changes that the various societies underwent. For decades collaboration in the destruction of European Jews was represented as a marginal phenomenon during the occupation, confined to Nazi fanatics or criminals. The myth of widespread resistance was nurtured by both democratic and Communist regimes. In some West European countries such as France, new studies and political and social turmoil at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s led to cracks in this consensus. In other countries such as Norway, fresh evaluation began only in the 1990s, while in Greece flagrant public denial has continued. In the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of the regimes led for the first time to a more open discourse on the past; in some cases, such as the Baltic States, the discussion began only in the wake of external pressures. In Western countries where the bureaucracy and the police aided the Germans in isolating the Jews and deporting them, the main apologetic line has been the “lesser of two evils” – the assumption that collaboration prevented more drastic measures against the general population and might have eased Jewish suffering. In East European countries where collaborators assisted the Germans in killing Jews and frequently initiated the killings, and where murderous pogroms was part of the destruction process, collaboration has been frequently explained and even justified as retaliation for alleged collective Jewish support of and collaboration with the Soviet regime, particularly in territories such as the Baltic States and western Ukraine that were annexed to the Soviet Union in 1939–40 and occupied by the Germans in 1941. Countries that were Germany’s allies or satellites described the policy of their governments as “unwilling collaboration” – a German dictate, against which they were unable to resist without risking the safety of their people. The role of more conservative leaders was distinguished from that of more extreme

Introduction

21

pro-Nazi elements, such as the Arrow Cross in Hungary and the Iron Guard in Romania. Finally, there appears to be a clear linkage between marginalization of the Holocaust in Western Europe until the 1970s and 1980s and in Eastern Europe until the 1990s, and reluctance to tackle the question of collaboration. Confronting the Holocaust raised difficult questions and intensified the debate over the behavior of many Europeans under German domination. These were burdensome issues that all governments and societies, at least in the first decades after the war, ignored in their attempts to forge a new sense of national unity and pride.

Notes 1 Jan Błon´ski, “The Poor Poles look at the Ghetto,” in A. Polonsky (ed.), My Brother’s Keeper? Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London, 1989), pp. 34–52. 2 Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems, 1931–2004 (New York, 2006), pp. 13–14. 3 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (New York, 1992), pp. ix. 4 Y. Gutman and S. Krakowski, Unequal Victims (New York, 1986). 5 Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats (Jerusalem, 2001; in Hebrew), pp. 121–48; Hillberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 79–80. 6 Guus Meershoek, “The Amsterdam Police and the Persecution of the Jews,” in M. Berenbaum and A. J. Peck (eds.), The Holocaust and History (Bloomington, IN, 1998), pp. 284–300; Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 208–11. 7 Mordecai Paldiel, “The Rescue of Jewish Children in Belgium during World War II,” in Dan Michman (ed.), Belgium and the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 307–25; Jose Gotovitch, “Resistance Movement and the Jewish Question,” in Michman, Belgium and the Holocaust, pp. 285–73. 8 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York and New Haven, CT, 2003), Vol. II, pp. 738–55. 9 Ibid. 10 Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination (New York, 2007), p. 415. 11 Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London, 1988), p. 72; Friedlander, The Years of Extermination, pp. 112, 175. 12 Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 82. 13 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. II, pp. 767–72. 14 Ibid., p. 776. 15 Friedlander, The Years of Extermination, p. 231. 16 Ibid., p. 485. 17 Ibid., p. 640. 18 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. II, p. 709. 19 Friedlander, The Years of Extermination, pp. 453–4. 20 Ibid., pp. 612, 717–18. 21 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. II, p. 854. 22 Ibid., pp. 857–71. 23 Friedlander, The Years of Extermination, pp. 613–19. 24 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, p. 82. 25 Friedlander, The Years of Extermination, pp. 640–2. 26 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. II, p. 809. 27 Ibid. 28 Friedlander, The Years of Extermination, pp. 225, 450.

22

Roni Stauber

29 In this regard, Germany and Israel, which were not within the province of this volume, are two fascinating examples. On the troubling process of coming to terms with the past in Germany after the war and in the Federal Republic in the 1950s see Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past (New York, 2002); on emphasizing the resistance while marginalizing other aspects of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust see Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950: Ideology and Memory (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007).

Part I

Occupied countries The Communist bloc

2

Where the past is never past Holocaust memory in post-Communist Poland Laurence Weinbaum

There is a chance that once remembering the Jew is taken as a given, the hard work of confronting the past can properly begin.1

Introduction2 The past is never past, wrote William Faulkner. The great American writer had in mind his native Mississippi, but he might as well have written those words about Poland. Indeed, among history-conscious Poles, the findings of historians have had far-reaching social and political consequences that transcend the esoteric discussions of scholars. This was corroborated in recent times by the emergence of a discourse in Poland over what some have called polityka historyczna (Geschichtspolitik, or history policy), which focuses on the question of whether historians who write of the less glorious episodes in Polish history are actually acting against the interests of the nation.3 Many Polish historians, including the best-known scholars among them, have protested against this suggestion, which poses a clear danger to the fidelity of their discipline. The dissolution of the Communist regime in Poland at the end of the 1980s made possible the deconstruction of every aspect of contemporary history. The process of reconstruction, begun in earnest, proved to be complex and painful. This was particularly the case when dealing with the bitterest chapters in the millennial story of Polish–Jewish relations, which were, and continue to be, the subject of popular and intellectual discussion as well as serious scholarly research. Out of this process emerged a new understanding of history, one that renders much of the earlier canon on the topic virtually obsolete. It had, in fact, been under way for some years even before the collapse of Communism – especially in the pages of Poland’s extraordinarily vibrant underground press and also, to an impressive extent given the prevailing censorship, in those of Poland’s legally operated independent Catholic press. Polish émigré journals were also regularly smuggled into Poland and had significant influence.4 Nevertheless, it was only with the collapse of the

26

Laurence Weinbaum

old regime and the birth of Poland’s Third Republic that this activity could be carried out without interference and Poland could finally undergo its own Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). This chapter discusses the evolution of Poland’s confrontation with the destruction of Polish Jewry.

The dead and the living For the past sixty years, in the absence of a numerically strong Jewish presence in Poland, the Polish–Jewish encounter, of which antisemitism has been an integral element, has taken place mainly in the form of an ongoing discussion of historical relations between the two peoples, especially the most painful chapters in their contemporary history.5 In other words, where Polish– Jewish relations are concerned, the past, or at least the perception of the past, is actually of far greater significance than the present. Thus, relations between Jews and Poles today pertain mainly to the dead, not to the living. As the journalist and diplomat Małgorzata Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska noted in 1999: Most conflicts between Poles and Jews concern unsettled accounts with the past … The accounts are still being settled with regard to the period of the Second World War, which was dramatic, although not to the same degree, for both nations. Reminiscences of the war and of the years that followed are the source of the strongest emotions and never-ending conflicts. On the one hand, Poles want recognition of their tragedy. And they rarely get it. On the other hand, they often fail to understand not so much the magnitude of the Jewish tragedy in terms of numbers but the social significance of the Final Solution.6 For historians in Poland, especially the younger generation of scholars, the most compelling periods of study were precisely the most politically charged ones: Polish–Jewish relations during the German and Soviet occupations. The postwar years, including the anti-Jewish excesses of 1945–46 and the 1967–68 campaign which resulted in the departure of most of the last, highly assimilated, Jewish remnants from Poland, are also well explored. Part and parcel of this subject are the sensitive, even explosive, issues of the Jews’ relationship to Communism, and, of course, the period leading up to the outbreak of World War II. Undoubtedly, the most complex question concerned the response of Polish society to the destruction of Polish Jewry and the anti-Jewish violence of the immediate postwar period. This was an enormous challenge to Polish historians – and later to Polish society itself. It should be stated from the outset that the Polish reaction to the Holocaust in Poland resists simple characterization. It ran the gamut from the heroic and selfless rescue of Jews to active participation in the crime (whether through acts of blackmail or outright murder) – and everything else in-between. This

Poland: where the past is never past

27

makes any study of the topic especially complex. Certainly, indifference to Jewish suffering was widespread. It is also true that had the reaction of Polish society been one of indifference and passivity alone, Jews in hiding on the so-called Aryan side would have had a greater chance of survival. In the memoirs of survivors, the notion that many more Jews would have survived had Poles closed their eyes to the Jews hiding in their midst is a common, one might even say predominant, motif. Undoubtedly, the concept of “collaboration” in the conventional sense, and as applied in other countries, does not easily fit the Polish wartime reality. Paradoxically, many Poles saw no contradiction between acting against the German occupant and aiding in the destruction of Jews. The Polish–Jewish sociologist Aleksander Smolar observed in the émigré journal Aneks: Poland was the only [occupied] country in which antisemitism preserved its patriotic and national legitimacy … Precisely because this Polish antisemitism did not have the stigma of collaboration with the Germans, it could prosper during the war not only on the street, but also in the underground press, political parties and armed units.7 On the other hand, in Jewish circles there has not always been an understanding of the perils involved in aiding Jews and the extent of the German terror in Poland. These issues were at the heart of the open research and discussion that were finally made possible by the collapse of Communism, and which led to a new and far more nuanced approach toward history. This change has been especially dramatic given the relative paucity of work on the subject during the Communist period and given the fact that Polish Jews had largely been excised from the general narrative of Poland. Most Polish history books carried only the briefest (if any) mention of Polish Jews, despite their having been a fixture on the Polish landscape for nearly a thousand years. The tragic fate of millions of Polish Jews was covered in a few lines and often subsumed in the general Polish martyrology.8 This was the case with both scholarly and popular works as well as with school books. There was nothing especially new in this, because even prewar Polish historiography made only very sparing reference to Poland’s Jewish community. The history of Jews in Poland was the exclusive domain of Jewish historians such as Majer Balaban and Emmanuel Ringelblum. In the new historiography that emerged after the collapse of Communism, Jews suddenly re-surfaced in force on the historical landscape, exploding in the process many Polish myths and forever altering the Poles’ self-perception. For the better part of five decades Polish society had convinced itself that it was entirely blameless for the implementation of the Final Solution on Polish soil. Poland presented itself as “the country without Quislings” – in which no collaboration deserving of that name even existed. Moreover, and in contrast to the widespread Jewish perception of Poland, Polish society, it was said, had

28

Laurence Weinbaum

displayed extraordinary heroism and humanity in the face of the Jewish tragedy and had acted energetically to rescue Jews.9 Immediately after the war, before the imposition of the Stalinist interpretation of history,10 considerable attention was devoted to telling the tragic story of Polish Jewry. During the liberalization of 1956–57 it once again became possible to cautiously re-examine these aspects of history. History, of course, has always been subject to fluctuations. The period between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s was particularly bleak. Significantly, in this regard there were few differences between the way in which anti-Communist émigré circles dealt with the Holocaust and the treatment the subject received in Communist Poland, whether by Communists or those identified with the anti-Communist opposition. Almost without exception they chose to accentuate the role of Polish rescuers and to suggest that Polish society as a whole was sympathetic to the Jews and did as much as it could to resist their destruction.11 A spate of publications appeared which highlighted inspiring stories of rescuers from across Polish society. In the most extreme works by writers such as Tadeusz Bednarczyk, who was connected to Poland’s internal security services, the misdeeds (both real and imagined) of the Jewish ghetto police and Jewish profiteers were accentuated. Jews were also charged with passivity and inaction in the face of mortal danger and of having gone like sheep to the slaughter.12 Israel’s ties with West Germany often served as a backdrop to such writings.13 Especially after the unrestrained anti-Zionist campaign of 1967–68, Polish society was conditioned to see itself as the primary victim of World War II. The fact that in 1966 the editors of Poland’s premier encyclopedia had dared to distinguish between concentration and death camps and had clearly indicated that it was mainly Jews who were murdered in the latter, created a storm of controversy. The result was the angry censure of those involved. A new entry was rapidly prepared to replace the contentious one, according to which Poles and Jews suffered equally. Both had been slated for biological destruction and any suggestion that Jews had been subjected to a different fate was regarded as heresy – even though practically every child living in Poland during the war years had understood that the Germans were bent on the total annihilation of Polish Jewry.14 The notion of Polish victimization was an element deeply rooted in Polish history, and the suffering and death of the Jews of Poland who were tormented and murdered solely because they were Jews was expropriated and exploited in order to advance the Polish narrative of national suffering. “Dead Jews make good Poles,” observed Paul Lendvai in his book Antisemitism without Jews.15

The emergence of a new historiography The rise of the Solidarity movement, which allied itself with opposition intellectuals, led to the beginnings of a new perspective on history and to the

Poland: where the past is never past

29

open discussion of many formerly taboo subjects, including the story of Polish Jews. Even after the imposition of martial law at the end of 1981, the public demand for underground literature, much of it dealing with contemporary history, was seemingly insatiable. The pace of inquiry and debate continued unabated and by the second half of the 1980s was demonstrating a candor that would have been unthinkable in earlier years. Gradually some of the prevailing notions were weakened. The impassioned appeal of Jan Błon´ski in 1986 for Poles to reassess their perception of themselves as victims was a watershed that aroused a storm of controversy. Błon´ski, a professor of literature at Jagiellonian University, took his countrymen to task for seeing themselves as mere witnesses to the tragedy and suggested that as bystanders they bore a certain degree of responsibility, if not guilt, for the fate of the Jews.16 Błon´ski was prompted to write his powerful article in response to poems by Czesław Miłosz. In his “Campo dei Fiori,” the Nobel prize-winning Polish writer had described how Poles amused themselves on a merry-go-round in Aryan Warsaw while the ghetto uprising was being crushed by the Germans. Significantly, Błon´ski did not suggest that Poles were themselves perpetrators, but rather bystanders. Still, the article had an extraordinary resonance. Jerzy Turowicz later claimed that in the forty-two years he had edited Tygodnik Powszechny, he had never published anything that had proven to be so contentious. With the collapse of Communism and the long-awaited introduction of genuine democracy in Poland, all constraints were finally lifted and censorship ceased. In the research and debate that ensued, many of the stereotypes that had pervaded the works of both Polish and Jewish historians, and were reflected in the ways in which they viewed their common past, were finally laid to rest, at least in the scholarly community. Over time, a common narrative began to emerge, rooted in solid scholarship and less subject to emotion. This is evident not only in the latest academic publications on the subject, but also, and most important, in schoolbooks and popular works. In what must be seen as extraordinary overcompensation for past silence, since the early 1990s there has been a virtual explosion in the publication of literature on Polish Jewry and Jews in general, which has almost no parallel in any country in Europe. Significantly, a vast number of diaries and memoirs have also been published, greatly enriching the literature on the period. The creation of the National Institute of Remembrance (IPN) in 2000, in accordance with a law enacted by the Sejm in December 1998, was, perhaps, the most important development in Poland’s confrontation with the past. The IPN was charged with investigating the years 1939–89, the period covering both the Nazi and Communist regimes. In the initial period of its existence, it did not flinch from revealing even the most chilling secrets of contemporary Polish history and produced an impressive body of scholarship, which in future years is likely to be regarded as the definitive interpretations of many of the most vexed issues in Polish–Jewish relations.17

30

Laurence Weinbaum

Bystanders and perpetrators, patriotism and penitence The Jedwabne debate Undoubtedly, the greatest challenge to those who have striven to remold the prevailing view of Polish–Jewish history was the extraordinary debate on the revelations about the 1941 massacre at Jedwabne (and neighboring hamlets) which emerged as a result of the research of Jan Tomasz Gross at New York University. Several hundred Jews fell victim to a murderous mob of local Poles who slaughtered the Jewish townsmen with almost no prompting from the German forces. The publication in 2000 of Gross’s book Sa˛ siedzi (Neighbors)18 precipitated a discussion in Polish society, unmatched in any of the other post-Communist states – in many of which a far higher level of culpability in the dispatch and destruction of the Jewish minority could be ascribed to the autochthonous populations and regimes than to Poles. Although the debate was fierce, for the most part it was conducted through scholarly arguments. One of the most interesting and bitter exchanges took place between two senior scholars: the Israeli researcher Israel Gutman, regarded as a doyen of Holocaust studies in Israel, and the late Tomasz Strzembosz, a pre-eminent historian of contemporary Poland.19 Strzembosz and other Polish scholars and publicists attempted to “contextualize” the crime by pointing to what they claimed was widespread Jewish collaboration with the Soviet authorities (and hence a betrayal of Poland) during the Russian occupation of eastern Poland. It was pointed out, for example, that Jews had benefited from the Soviet occupation and that large numbers of Jews found employment in the Soviet hierarchy.20 An entire “school” arose based on the notion that the Jedwabne killings should be seen as an act of vengeance for Jewish misdeeds.21 It has also been suggested that Gross’s research laid the ground for Jewish material claims against Poland, the next target of the “Holocaust industry.”22 Undoubtedly a part of the opposition to Gross might be explained by the fear in certain Polish circles that the Poles’ status as victims was under attack. These critics, some of whom may be regarded as practitioners of what Michael Shafir aptly called “deflective negationism,”23 have chosen to ignore the fact (or were simply ignorant of it) that the Jewish readiness to cooperate with Soviet rule was itself largely a reaction to their suffering during the years of Polish rule and their understanding that Soviet occupation would be preferable to life (and later death) under German rule. Nor did they explain the meaning of “cooperation.” The fact that a disproportionately large number of Jews were among the deportees and together with their Polish neighbors found themselves in the frozen wastelands of the Soviet Gulag was never highlighted in Polish literature on the subject. The reasons that the Soviet authorities considered minority populations (and especially Jews) less suspect than Poles is not always understood or is simply glossed over. Whatever their misgivings about his methodology, some of Gross’s detractors, of whom there are many, have welcomed the debate that emerged.

Poland: where the past is never past

31

Bogdan Musiał, who was harshly critical of Gross’s methodology, declared in answer to the question “Is it possible to say anything positive about Jan Gross’s book?” What Gross had to say has stirred interest in this subject in Poland … Up to now, there has existed a fear of seeking out the complete truth about Polish–Jewish relations. A fear of being accused of antisemitism and a fear of touching upon certain painful places in the history of Poland has predominated. Gross wanted to provoke Poles, to tell them how terrible they are, but at the same time he has forced them into debate. This can represent a great breakthrough in Polish historiography, which thus far has not had much to say on these issues, and has in the main confined itself to journalistic platitudes.24 In Polish liberal circles, Jedwabne was seen as a test of sorts, one which postCommunist Poland has passed. A Gazeta Wyborcza editorial opined: … Poland has been examining its conscience. A debate never seen before is taking place in our public sphere … Poland is today the only postCommunist country that has dared to undertake such a confrontation with its history … All this demonstrates that Polish democracy is on the road of truth and that truth serves democracy. We deserve a place in the community of free nations. There are reasons for other nations to view Poland with respect.25 On the other hand, in nationalist circles especially, a new urgency was discernible in the vehement calls for Jews to acknowledge the crimes committed by Jewish-born Communist functionaries during the Stalinist era, often accompanied by lurid descriptions of their many excesses, both real and imagined. Poland’s American-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich, who has lived in Poland for many years, himself suggested that such a public apology by Jews could serve as a catharsis. In that approach he was joined by Stanisław Krajewski, a well-known Warsaw Jewish intellectual who played a leading role in the revival of Jewish life. The Jedwabne debate, not surprisingly, unleashed strong emotions and culminated in an impassioned apology by Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwasniewski. Significantly, his carefully crafted request for forgiveness was made in the name of Poles “who felt the need to apologize.”26 Nevertheless, it awakened a storm of opprobrium among the most conservative, if not reactionary, circles in Poland, who accused Kwasniewski of pandering to the Jews and . never tired of insinuating that the Polish president was himself a crypto-Zyd. Certainly, even after the passage of time and prodigious new scholarship, Jews and Poles, including even the most enlightened elements of Polish society, often speak a different language when dealing with the issue of

32

Laurence Weinbaum

“collaboration.” For example, in an op-ed article in the New York Times in the wake of the Jedwabne revelations, Adam Michnik wrote: During Hitler’s occupation, the Polish nationalistic and antisemitic right didn’t collaborate with the Nazis, as did the right-wing elsewhere in Europe, but actively participated in the anti-Hitler underground. Polish antisemites fought against Hitler and some of them even rescued Jews, though this was punishable by death. Thus we have a singularly Polish paradox: on occupied Polish soil, a person could be an antisemite, a hero of the resistance and a savior of the Jews.27 However, Michnik failed to identify another, more pervasive and painful paradox namely, the fact that for many Poles the German war against the Jews had nothing in common with the Polish struggle to defend the homeland against the Germans. On the contrary, for them the destruction of Polish Jewry was a (and perhaps the only) beneficial by-product of the German occupation. This bitter truth was, perhaps, best reflected in the powerful novel Wielki Tydzien´ (Holy Week), written in 1943, by Jerzy Andrzejewski. While the Ghetto was in flames one of the protagonists, Zalewski, declares: … I tell you that in this case we can be grateful to Hitler. He has done a very difficult job for us – let us say frankly, a very unpleasant, dirty job. Now there won’t be any more Jewish problem. If Hitler hadn’t done it for us, after the war we would have had to liquidate the surviving Jews.28 Irrespective of the outcome of the war, Poland was rapidly being rendered Judenrein. Therefore, an underground fighter who bravely fought the Germans (the word “Nazi” or “fascist” was not yet fashionable) could also take part in the destruction of the Jews. This phenomenon also occurred elsewhere in occupied Europe, but in Poland it was especially prevalent, evidenced, for example, in the case of insurgents in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising murdering Jews.29 However, even that bitter truth is slowly seeping in, thanks to the new generation of Polish historians, many of whom have not shied from outing even the most sinister ghosts in Poland’s historical closet. On the other hand, it would be naïve to expect that this discussion would at once effect a sea change at the grass-roots level and in public consciousness, let alone among Polish intellectuals. Nor would it be rational not to expect that it would induce a very severe reaction from those committed to upholding traditional views, whether driven by dogmatism, xenophobia or both. However, one cannot but be impressed by the speed and thoroughness with which a shift in thinking has come about. One might have assumed that the revelation that local Poles had butchered their Jewish neighbors (even if there is a serious debate about the number of victims) would have led to an especially smug reaction in Jewish circles, and even gloating on the part of those who had long resisted the idea that

Poland: where the past is never past

33

Polish–Jewish history defies simple explanations.30 This was not evident, however, at least not immediately so, and it did little or nothing to slow the pace of research and rapprochement – and perhaps even accelerated it. In fact, most Jewish scholars were also cautious in their assessments. Professor David Engel of New York University, for example, noted in a speech at Tel Aviv University, at an event honoring the memory of Jan Karski: What happened in the town of Jedwabne in July 1941 tells me by itself nothing about anyone save those directly responsible for the outrage. But by the same token, the valiant mission of Jan Karski taken by itself can tell me nothing about anyone save him and the relatively small number of people – Poles, Britons, and Americans, Jews and non-Jews – with whom he came into direct contact during the mission’s course. I am distressed by the tendency so many of us often display to turn the actions of individuals in a particular time and place into bases for permanent collective stereotypes, whether positive or negative. Neither the residents of Jedwabne nor Jan Karski, neither Poles who blackmailed Jews in hiding nor Poles who risked their lives to save them, can be taken by themselves as indicative of how Polish society as a whole weathered the moral test of the Holocaust. That question is a terribly difficult and many-sided one, to whose elucidation serious and thoughtful scholars have devoted, and continue to devote, significant portions of their professional lives.31 Hence, despite a number of serious challenges both Polish society and Jewish society have, for the most part, come to grips with the more troubling aspects of their common past, while also coming to recognize the brighter ones. The Jewish legacy and commemoration The Polish–Jewish confrontation is also complicated by the question of the material legacy of Polish Jewry, scattered across the length and breadth of Poland, as well as preserving the sites of death camps. Up until the collapse of Communism there was wanton neglect of Jewish heritage sites and even conscious efforts to erase traces of the Jewish presence from the landscape.32 However, in recent years there has been an extraordinary appreciation of the value of conserving these landmarks, exemplified by initiatives on the local level, without any Jewish prompting.33 This sensitivity has been bolstered by the appearance of a prodigious number of books dealing with the history of local Jewish communities and Jewish landmarks. Nevertheless, there is also insensitivity and callous, if not malicious, disregard for the sentiments of Jews. In the years 2004–05, for example, the story of the desecration of the Jewish burial ground in Szczekociny came to public attention after a family led by a survivor living in America was startled to discover that public toilets had been erected on the resting place of their

34

Laurence Weinbaum

forebears. Only after an outcry, including the intervention of the World Jewish Congress, did the local authorities finally remove the toilets.34 Auschwitz, of course, is an enduring symbol for both Jews and Poles and has been a bellwether reflecting changes in the Polish–Jewish understanding of history. Until the beginning of the 1990s, the exhibition there was mainly geared to highlighting the suffering of the Poles. Any reference to Jews was almost an afterthought. It was widely believed in Jewish circles that, in Auschwitz, Poles were attempting to “appropriate the Holocaust.”35 That feeling was buttressed by the controversy surrounding the convent established there at the end of the 1980s. With the disappearance of Communism the situation changed dramatically. Most of the controversy surrounding the Polish account of the terrible crimes perpetrated at Auschwitz and the magnitude of the losses suffered by Jews and Poles has died down. The convent was eventually relocated, and the crosses planted by Kazimierz Switon were removed. Today the message presented to visitors is based largely on the latest scholarship, without the strong political overtones that once characterized it.36 In spring 2006, the Polish government announced its intention to petition UNESCO to formally change the name of the site to “Former German concentration camp at AuschwitzBirkenau,” to reflect the fact that Germans were responsible for the crime. Certainly, Poland’s reputation has suffered from careless references to Auschwitz as “the Polish concentration camp Auschwitz,” by virtue of the fact that it is situated on Polish soil. Significantly, Yad Vashem supported the Polish move. Attitude of the Church No discussion of Poland and its history can omit mention of the Church and its role in the ongoing debate on Polish–Jewish relations. During the Communist period the Church was seen as the only authentic repository of Polish national values, including the history that was being falsified and manipulated by the regime. Since the collapse of the old system, the role of the Church has changed and it no longer enjoys that monopoly. Moreover, it would be a great mistake to suggest that the Catholic clergy spoke, or speaks, with one voice on this issue. The Catholic Church in Poland reflects the society in which it operates – meaning there are priests representing the entire political spectrum. Priests have been among the most eloquent and influential voices calling for . introspection and reconciliation. In this, the archbishop of Lublin, Józef Zycin´ski, distinguished himself in the historical debate about Jedwabne. In an article entitled the “Banality . of Barbarism,” published in the liberal Catholic journal Wie˛ z´, Archbishop Zycin´ski wrote of those who attempt to mitigate the crime at Jedwabne through a contextualization of the murders by comparing them to purported crimes of Jewish Communists: “It would be insane to suggest that there could be any justification for the collective burning of human beings in barns.”37

Poland: where the past is never past

35

On the other hand, some priests, echoing traditional anti-Jewish motifs, have loudly denounced Jews and Poles who sought to advance an impartial investigation of the crime.38 A particularly critical voice has been that of Father Waldemar Chrostowski who was once active in Catholic–Jewish dialogue.39 In present-day Poland, Radio Maryja, which identifies itself as a Catholic station, is the leading mouthpiece of the ascendant right wing.40 Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, its director, attempted to whitewash wartime Polish massacres of Jews by drawing attention to Israel’s policies toward Palestinian Arabs. The radio has often broadcast thinly disguised attacks on Jews and even engaged in Holocaust denial.41

Contemporary Poland: lights and shadows Education and curricula Ultimately, only a reform in education can really effect a grass-roots change in the perception of Polish history. When one compares the curricula of Polish schools of only a few years ago to what is taught today, it becomes immediately evident that enormous strides have been made. This is best reflected in the newest history textbooks. For the most part these texts present a credible and balanced picture of Jewish life in prewar Poland, including the contributions of Polish Jewry. The Holocaust in Poland is portrayed without any attempt to hide the fact that Poland’s Jewish population was slated for biological extermination and suffered a fate incomparably worse than that of ethnic Poles.42 In higher education, the creation in 2003 of a special interdisciplinary unit of the Polish Academy of Sciences to conduct research on the Holocaust must be regarded as a major development.43 The high level of the articles in the first issue of its scholarly journal Zagłada is a hopeful sign for the future. Another important development is the Polish government’s decision to support the construction of a major museum in Warsaw dedicated to the history of Polish Jewry. The Jewish Historical Institute also continues its scholarly activity, much of which is devoted to the history of Polish Jewry during the Shoah, but has also been involved in the publication of texts for school-age youth. Changes in Jewish and Israeli perceptions of Poland Undoubtedly, Poland’s cordial relations with Israel have done much to improve the climate in Polish–Jewish relations. However, history still looms in the background. Shlomo Avineri, former director general of the Israel foreign ministry, and a recognized authority on Central Europe, characterized contemporary Poland as “one of the nations most friendly to Israel,” but added: Poland is coming to terms with its history, including its tortuous relationship to its Jewish population, which has oscillated between exemplary

36

Laurence Weinbaum tolerant approaches and some extremely hostile attitudes … president Kwasniewski has courageously urged his people to confront the unpleasant reality that while Poland was a victim during World War II, some Poles were also perpetrators. It is a painful learning process.44

Among Jews, too, there has also been an extraordinary change. It should be recalled that the traditional Jewish perception of Polish–Jewish relations was characterized by bitter animosity. A Polish-born Jewish observer recently referred to Poland as “the country so many Jews love to hate.”45 Poles, including those who cannot be suspected of any anti-Jewish sentiment, have repeatedly expressed their frustration with this phenomenon. The film-maker Andrzej Wajda, for example, lamented: “As each year passes the West becomes more and more convinced that the Poles are antisemites, as if the Poles as a nation, a society, were actually the ones who helped Hitler commit his crimes.”46 However, in recent years, Jews have acknowledged the fact that Polish– Jewish history transcends the simple explanations and clichés that often characterized their summary dismissal of Jewish history in Poland as a centuries-long period of uninterrupted misery and suffering. This is especially significant since until very recently the Jewish experience in Poland in the interwar period was generally regarded as a prelude to the Shoah. Jews in Poland were living on the “edge of destruction,” according to the American Jewish historian Celia Heller.47 Consequently, Jewish literature on the Holocaust often stressed the heightened antisemitism in Poland in the 1930s. At the core of much, if not most, of that literature, was the widespread thesis that Polish antisemitism had laid the foundations for the destruction of the Jews of Poland. It was often suggested that, since prewar Poland was especially fertile ground for antisemitism, the Germans deliberately chose that country as the killing field for European Jewry and that this was the reason the main death camps were all situated on Polish soil. Thus in some Jewish circles Poland is more closely associated with the Holocaust than Germany itself.48 Today there is considerably more thought given to a balanced, nuanced portrayal of Poles than in years past when Poles suffered from the stereotype of “ingesting antisemitism with their mother’s milk,”49 or the now infamous “You will hate them” pronouncement from the March of the Living textbook.50 Over time, the Israeli government and various Jewish organizations finally began to reassess the curricula of the various field trips to Poland. It had been charged, and rightfully so, that the participants in these expeditions came away with a skewed view of Poland as the killing fields of European Jewry. In 1999, an Israeli observer noted that: … most Holocaust voyages can best be understood, not as study trips, but as civil religious pilgrimages to the death sites. Sensory stimuli and emotional experiences are far more prominent than intellectual learning … There is no contact with Diaspora Jews and no effective contact with Polish Gentiles … the emphasis on security, the manifest presence of

Poland: where the past is never past

37

Israeli flags and symbols and the isolation from the surrounding modern Polish environment create an environmental bubble dividing the voyage’s constructed world into two polar categories: inside space, homologous with Israel, and outside space, homologous with Holocaust Poland.51 That has changed somewhat in recent years and there is an increasing awareness of the need to present a more balanced view of Poland, as well as to arrange meetings between Israeli and Polish youth.52 Many groups have invited Polish rescuers to address them. Another promising development has been the fact that for some years now, Polish youth have participated in the annual March of the Living. But most encouraging of all has been the convening of a joint commission of Israeli and Polish educators to review their respective textbooks. A telling example of this change in attitudes has been the reaction of Jews to an appeal by representatives of the Polish community in Norway. A wellknown Norwegian television journalist specializing in East European affairs produced a tendentious report from Lviv, Ukraine, in which he accused the Polish population of Nazism, both during the war and in the present time. When Jacek Godlewski, a prominent member of Oslo’s ethnic Polish community, appealed over the Internet and, directly, by telephone for aid in correcting the report, he received spirited replies from a number of Jews in Israel and abroad. The Oslo Poles also sought and received the help of Israel Gutman, whom they interviewed for publication of a response on their Internet site Maxveritas.53 New political era – old ghosts The results of the elections at the end of 2005 changed the climate in Poland. Certainly, Lech Kaczyn´ski, the new president, had no history of antisemitism and had clearly demonstrated his sensitivity to Jewish concerns and Holocaust memory. However, the conservative clerical atmosphere (in Polish, sometimes called bogoojczyzniany – best translated as “godfatherlandish”) that he and his colleagues from the Law and Justice Party had introduced, and in particular the elevation of some of his coalition partners whose record on Jewish issues was questionable, to say the least, could be felt. In May 2006, the education portfolio was turned over to Roman Giertych, the leader of the extreme right-wing Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish . Families, LPR). LPR traces its roots to Młodziez Wszechpolska, a prewar student movement strongly influenced by the ideology of the nationalist politician Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) and which actively propagated antisemitism.54 Symptomatic of this new era was the bitter struggle in the town of Biłgoraj, near Lublin, over the proposal that a street be named after the Nobel Prizewinning Yiddish writer I. B. Singer who was raised there. Right-wing town councillors initially rejected the idea, ostensibly because it has been charged

38

Laurence Weinbaum

that Singer’s literature is “toilet pornography.”55 Moreover, at the beginning of 2006 it was revealed that many Poles who had been designated as “Righteous among the Nations” for their attempts to rescue Jews during the Shoah were afraid to have their names published for fear of a hostile reaction on the part of their neighbors.56 Another troubling development in 2006 was the publication of a book on the Warsaw Ghetto by the historian Ewa Kurek, who advanced an outlandish interpretation of the development of the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland.57 According to Kurek, “there is no shadow of a doubt” that the ghettos “were essentially autonomous Jewish provinces built in the years 1939–42 by Polish Jews with the approval of the German occupation authorities” and the Jews “for the first time in over 2,000 years built their own framework of Jewish sovereignty.” Kurek also claims that the situation of Poles beyond the Ghetto walls was far worse than that of the Jews confined within them.58 In July 2006, on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the slaughter in Jedwabne, and in the wake of considerable uproar regarding his party’s record of antisemitism,59 Giertych traveled to the town, where he publicly declared, “In Poland there is no place, and there will be no place, for antisemitism.” He also distanced himself from the anti-Jewish ideology of Roman Dmowski. At the same time, however, a deputy from his party, Wojciech Wierzejski, openly defended the isolation of Jewish students through the use of so-called ghetto benches in the 1930s.60 Some weeks earlier, another party activist, a one-time editor of a Polish neo-fascist journal, Piotr Farfał was appointed vice-director of state television. Meanwhile, within the LPR there was uproar over Giertych’s remarks, which were widely viewed as a betrayal of the party’s traditional platform. In the summer of 2006, another fierce public debate arose regarding Polish– Jewish relations. This time the trigger was the publication in the United States of another book by Jan T. Gross, about postwar Polish antisemitism, with the provocative title Fear. Meanwhile, public discussion of the politicization of history and the “critical history,” which has confronted the darkest ghosts of Poland’s past, has come under attack. Opponents charge historians and others who have revealed the most compromising moments in Poland’s history with acting against the nation’s interests.61 The patriotism of those who have devoted themselves to an honest portrayal of history and a revision of the canon has been questioned. This does not bode well for the future, and it seems reasonable to assume that if the strides since the fall of Communism are rejected and old interpretations reintroduced, antisemitism will gain ground. In the mid-1990s, the Paris-based Jewish intellectual-historian Diana Pinto wrote: Through a vast physical and psychological effort Poles must at last confront their shattered past, which is composed essentially of tragedy and suffering, and bring it back to the level of historical sites which Poland

Poland: where the past is never past

39

must unearth as it comes to terms with itself and learns to situate itself with respect to its neighboring “others” … Clearing the rubble from this field will not only heal still open wounds, but will also place Poland at the heart of Europe’s cultural renewal. Fifty years after the Holocaust, the time has come to build a new Jewish and Polish memory, one in which these separate and often conflicting strands will be reconciled beyond the guilty omissions, the embarrassed silences and the multiple selfcensorships, be they communist, nationalist (not only Polish but also Israeli and from within the Jewish Diaspora), or simply cultural.62 We may argue the extent to which the rubble has already been cleared, or the pace at which the building work continues, but there is no denying that something has been torn down, and something new is being constructed in its place. Only time will determine the architecture of the edifice that finally emerges.

Notes 1 Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Neutralizing Memory: The Jew in Contemporary Poland (New Brunswick, NJ, 1989), p. 186. 2 The author would like to express his gratitude to Professor Szymon Rudnicki of Warsaw University for his helpful suggestions in the preparation of this text. 3 See Adam Leszczyn´ski, “Polityka historyczna. Wielki strach,” Gazeta Wyborcza (Lublin), July 4, 2006. 4 Two of the most notable émigré journals were the London-based Aneks and the Paris-based Kultura. The Krakow-based Tygodnik Powszechny and Znak also dealt, on occasion, with Jewish themes, as did the Warsaw journal Wie˛ z´. 5 More often than not anti-Jewish sentiment is directed at a virtual community rather than at a real one. See Laurence Weinbaum, “Jewish Communities in the Diaspora and Antisemitism in Poland,” Moreshet: Journal for the Study of the Holocaust and Antisemitism, No. 6 (spring 2009), 161–75. Notably, there is a lingering perception in Poland that the number of Jews (and especially cryptoJews) is far higher than the official figures, a view buttressed by the relatively large number of high-profile figures of Jewish origin. However, over time, there has also been growing awareness in Poland as to the real scale of the Jewish population of the country. According to demographer Sergio della Pergola, there are no more than 3,300 Jews in Poland out of a total population of 38.6 million. But he attaches a C accuracy rating to that estimate. See American Jewish Year Book 2004 (New York, 2004), p. 508. Even assuming the most inclusive criteria, the Jewish “community” numbers no more than several thousands at most, and in that respect is more virtual than real. Thus, the extraordinary media attention accorded Jews and Jewish issues, of which antisemitism is an integral part, lends the impression that the Jewish presence must be considerably greater. Undoubtedly, press coverage far exceeds that of any other religious or ethnic minority in Poland, including groups many times larger. 6 Małgorzata Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska, “Main Issues in Polish–Jewish Relations,” 1999 Yearbook of the Polish foreign ministry (Warsaw, 2000), p. 274. 7 Aleksander Smolar, “Tabu i niewinnos´c´,” Aneks, No. 41 (1986), p. 99. In fact, this phenomenon was not confined to Poland, and existed in Western Europe as well, most notably in the Netherlands.

40

Laurence Weinbaum

8 In an unpublished study in one of Poland’s premier historical journals, Przegla˛ d Historyczny, the Polish-born American political scientist Alexander J. Groth noted that: “ … between 1946 and 1992, in over 35,000 printed pages representing the work of 3,000 authors, there appeared only five articles, including a book review, in which the Jews and/or aspects of Jewish life in the twentieth century were the principle foci of the work rather than merely peripheral or ‘incidental’ references. In terms of space, this constitutes less than one quarter of one percent of the journal’s pages. The theme of Jewish extermination has been all but neglected … So has the subject of Polish–Jewish relations, with the relatively brief exceptions of articles … in the 1988, 1989 and 1991 volumes … Unless one happened to know something from other sources about the fate of Jews in Poland after 1939, one could read forty-six years’ worth of Przegla˛ d Historyczny without the least realization that there indeed was such a thing as a Final Solution and that most of it happened in Poland. It appears not to have occurred, or at least not to have been significant enough to merit any scholarly attention. In the area of Polish– Jewish relations, marginalization occurs in the very scant and “subdued” treatment given the subject of antisemitism in all its political and ideological, cultural and even religious, and certainly practical expressions.” A. J. Groth, “Whatever Happened to the Jews of Poland? A Research Note on Przegla˛ d Historyczny” (unpublished manuscript). I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Alexander J. Groth for furnishing me with this typescript. Przegla˛ d Historyczny can be seen as a rather extreme case. In fact, beginning in the late 1980s, other historical journals began devoting considerable attention to Polish–Jewish history. 9 Examples of this sort of treatment abound in both popular and scholarly works, and Jewish writers, especially those who remained in Poland, often highlighted the story of rescue while downplaying instances of betrayal, which in any case were regarded as the work of fascist elements or simply szumowina (scum). In this context, and especially in light of later scholarship that evolved in postCommunist Poland, it is interesting to examine the treatment of the massacre at Jedwabne as presented in the work of the Polish–Jewish scholar Szymon Datner, who was associated with the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. See . “Ekster. minacja ludnos´ci zydowskiej w Okre˛ gu Białostockim,” Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce (1966). Datner generally did not refer to the murderers as “Poles” but rather “bands” or “scum” and wrote of the victims using the passive form “were raped/burned.” 10 See Joanna Michlic, “The Holocaust and its Aftermath as Perceived in Poland: Voices of Polish Intellectuals, 1945–1947,” in David Bankier (ed.), The Jews are Coming Back (Jerusalem, 2005). Even before the end of the war itself there were individual instances in which Poles dared to question the way in which they had responded to the fate of the Jews. In a journal edited by Zofia Kossak, for example, the massacre in Jedwabne was even discussed by name. See Prawda (organ of the Catholic Front for the Rebirth of Poland), May 1942, Nos. 5–6 AZ´IH Ring II/331). 11 In certain circles this situation has persisted to the present day. Polish historian Dariusz Libionka noted, “The issue of righteous [Christians] has been exploited. Whenever we speak of complexities of Polish–Jewish relations, for example, about szmalcownicy (bounty hunters who blackmailed Jews), or the theft of Jewish property, or the level of indifference, the argument about the impressive number of righteous Poles is trotted out.” Pawel P. Reszka “Le˛ k Sprawiedliwych,” Gazeta Wyborcza, February 10, 2006. 12 See for example Tadeusz Bednarczyk, Obowia˛ zek silniejszy od s´mierci (Warsaw, 1982). 13 The writings of the notorious Tadeusz Walichnowski are a good example. See, for instance, his Israel and the German Federal Republic (Warsaw, 1968).

Poland: where the past is never past

41

14 In his poignant diary, posthumously published under the title Czy ja jestem morderca˛ ? Calel Perechodnik observed that Polish Gentiles understood what the Germans had in store for the Jews even before the Jews themselves. 15 Paul Lendvai, Antisemitism without Jews (Garden City, NJ, 1971), p. 188. 16 Jan Błon´ski, “Biedni Polacy patrza˛ na getto,” Tygodnik Powszechny, 18 January 1987. 17 For information on the IPN see www.ipn.gov.pl/, including, among others, comprehensive studies of Polish–Jewish relations; the massacre at Jedwabne and the pogrom in Kielce. 18 Jan T. Gross, Sa˛ siedzi (Sejny, 2000). 19 Tomasz Strzembosz, “Inscribed in Professor Gutman’s Diary”; Israel Gutman “‘Them’ and ‘Us’: In Reply to Professor Tomasz Strzembosz,” Yad Vashem Studies, No. 30 (2002). 20 This argument was used by many leading historians such as Strzembosz and Szarota. . 21 See for example Jerzy R. Nowak, 100 kłamstw J.T.Grossa o zydowskich sa˛ siadach i Jedwabnem (Warsaw, 2000). 22 Professor Norman Finklestein’s book The Holocaust Industry, in which the Jewish “establishment” is sharply condemned for its efforts to secure the restitution of Jewish property and payment of reparations, was widely quoted. One writer noted, “Why have Poles been so strongly and mendaciously attacked only now … Because Poles had to be compelled to apologize and in that way to acknowledge that they were accomplices, because then and only then, could Poles, who were victims, be made into perpetrators, complicit in the German crimes and only then could demands for financial satisfaction from us .be effectively demanded.” Maciej K. Sokolowski, “Tyle kłamstw o Polakach i Zydach,” Tygodnik Głos, July 7, 2001. 23 Michael Shafir, “Between Denial and ‘Comparative Trivialization’: Holocaust Negationism in post-Communist East Central Europe,” ACTA (Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism), No. 19 (2002), p. 23. 24 Bogdan Musiał interview with Paweł Paliwoda, “Nie wolno sie¸ bac´–Pawel . Paliwoda rozmawia z Bogdanem Musiałem,” Zycie, 2 February 2001. 25 “Stanacz w prawdzie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 10, 2001. 26 See ibid. for the complete text. 27 Adam Michnik, “Poles and the Jews: How Deep the Guilt?” New York Times, March 17, 2001. 28 Jerzy Andrzejewski, Wielki . Tydzien´ (Warsaw, 1993). 29 Michał Cichy, “Polacy-Zydzi: Czarne karty powstania,” Gazeta Wyborcza, January 29–30, 1994. See also subsequent debate on the propriety of publishing Cichy’s findings, February 5–6, 1994. An even earlier example of such an exposé was Paweł Łozin´ski’s film Miejsca Urodzenia (1992), which chronicles the return of Polish–Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg to Poland and his inquiry into the fate of his father, murdered by local Poles. 30 This point was raised by the Polish-born Israeli historian Shimon Redlich, among others. See his “What Happened One Day in Jedwabne,” Haaretz, December 8, 2000. 31 David Engel, “Jan Karski’s Mission in Historical Context,” in Esther Webman and Laurence Weinbaum (eds.), Jan Karski, The Man and his Mission (Tel Aviv, 2006; in Hebrew), pp. 23–31. 32 Sławomir Kapralski, “Battlefields of Memory,” History and Memory 15, No. 2 (2001). 33 One of the first such initiatives dates back to the late 1960s when the Club of Catholic Intelligentsia carried out restoration work at the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. 34 Hilary Leila Krieger, “Toilets instead of Tombs,” Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2004.

42

Laurence Weinbaum

35 Henryk Grynberg, “Appropriating the Holocaust,” Commentary (November 1982). 36 For a discussion of the change at Auschwitz see Laurence Weinbaum, “The Struggle for Memory: Auschwitz, Jedwabne and Beyond,” WJC Policy Study No. 22 (Jerusalem, 2001). 37 Wie˛ z´, February 2000. 38 For a discussion of the Church and its reaction to the Jedwabne revelations see Laurence Weinbaum, “Prejudice and Penitence: The Roman Catholic Church and Jedwabne,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Nos. 3–4 (fall 2002). For a discussion of the reaction of the Polish Church to the Shoah see Dariusz Libionka, “The Catholic Church in Poland and the Holocaust, 1939–1945,” in Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith and Irena Steinfeldt (eds.), The Holocaust and the Christian World (London, 2000). . 39 Paweł Paliwoda, “Kto utrudnia dialog–wywiad z ks. Chrostowskim,” Zycie, April 10, 2001. In an address on March 5, 2001 at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw, Father Chrostowski decried Catholic and non-Catholic elements of the media that had displayed a conciliatory attitude toward Jews: “There are among us circles, connected by family, professional, social and financial ties, that readily speak about and propagate views that Jews like. Far less often are they willing to respect Catholic and Polish identity and sensitivities. Here I have in mind the group of people linked to Gazeta Wyborcza, Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak and Wie˛ z´. But this is not a complete list of titles. To this could be added other ‘friendly’ women’s journals, radio studios and television programs in which debate on Catholic and Polish–Jewish themes takes place on the principle of mutual choice of speakers and mutual adoration. Whoever does not fit the imposed scheme or departs from it, sooner or later becomes the object of severe criticism or is essentially ignored. The speakers never allow for the full truth of certain essential and important aspects of mutual relations to be spoken of. The dialogue of the Church with Judaism is not only meetings and conversations of people of different faiths, but also an internal Church dialogue on the very dialogue itself. If that does not exist or is stifled, then the inter-religious dialogue essentially loses its sense and even leads us astray.” 40 Radio Maryja has, on occasion, prompted condemnation on the part of the Church hierarchy and should not be understood as speaking for the Church. 41 The most shocking example of this was the presentation at the end of the 1990s of Dariusz Ratajczyk, a historian from Opole, who questioned the parameters of the Holocaust and whether gas chambers had actually existed at Auschwitz. He was supported in this by the well-known historian from the Catholic University of Lublin and former senator, Professor Ryszard Bender. See Dariusz Ratajczyk, Niebezpieczne tematy (Opole, 1999). 42 Two of the most notable examples are Robert Szuchta and Piotr Trojan´ski, ´ Dlaczego (Warsaw, Holokaust. Zrozumiec Feliks . . 2003) and Barbara Engelking, . Tych, Andrzej Zbikowski and Jolanta Zyndul, Pamie˛ c´, Historia Zydów Polskich przed, w czasie i po Zagładzie (Warsaw, 2004). 43 For a description of the activities of the Polish Research Center on the Holocaust see www.holocaustresearch.pl/index1.htm. 44 Shlomo Avineri, “My Grandfather’s House,” Jerusalem Post, April 6, 2005. 45 Tad Taube, “Who’s One of Israel’s Best Friends?” Jerusalem Post, February 16, 2006. 46 As quoted by Paul Coates, “Observing the Observer: Andrzej Wajda’s Holy Week” (1995), Canadian Slavonic Papers (March–June 2000). 47 Celia Heller, On the Edge of Destruction (New York, 1977). 48 This is especially so because occupied Poland was the killing ground of much of European Jewry. The major death camps were all situated on Polish soil. In

Poland: where the past is never past

49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

43

Jewish circles wide credence has been given to the unfounded thesis that the Germans deliberately chose Poland as the venue for the Final Solution because they could count on Polish cooperation in the destruction of the Jews. Interview with Yitzhak Shamir by David Landau, Jerusalem Post, 23 September 1989. This became a mantra in Polish circles expressing the characterization by Jewish society. March of the Living, To Know and to Remember (n.d.), p. 6. That contentious volume has since been withdrawn from circulation. Jackie Feldman, “Voyages to Poland: Sensitizing Educators to Non-verbal Elements,” typescript of paper presented at International Conference on Holocaust Education, Yad Vashem, October 1999, p. 1. The opposite side of the coin, though rarely broached by Jewish circles, are the visits of Polish pilgrims to the Holy Land, during which visitors see almost nothing of modern Israel, except Ben-Gurion Airport, and do not even visit Yad Vashem. www.maxveritas.com/index.html?0.18564785958507796. Gutman labeled Hans Steinfeld’s reportage “a work of ignorance,” adding, “it is upsetting to find such disinformation … it does not deserve to be a part of scholarly debate.” Giertych has no public record of antisemitic pronouncements. That, however, cannot be said of his father, Maciej Giertych, and especially of his grandfather, the late Je˛ drzej Giertych, who has left a copious collection of antisemitic vitriol. Jacek Brzuszkiewicz, “Patronem ulicy zostanie Popiełuszko,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 3, 2005; Grzegorz Józefczuk, “Biłgorajskie Stowarzyszenie Kulturalne im. Singera wybiera władze,” Gazeta Wyborcza February 19, 2006. Reszka “Le˛ k Sprawiedliwych.” . Ewa Kurek, Stosunki polsko-zydowskie 1939–1945 (Kielce, 2006). For a critical review of this . volume see Paweł P. Reszka and Jan Cywin´ski, “Kurek: Getta zbudowali Zydzi,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 20, 2006. The press had reported that the Israeli Ambassador to Poland, David Peleg, had stated his intention of boycotting the Education Minister. Adam Leszczynski, Gazeta Wyborcza, July 11, 2007. Among those who came under attack was Professor Błonski. Diana Pinto “Fifty Years after the Holocaust: Building a New Jewish and Polish Memory,” East European Jewish Affairs 26, No. 2 (1996), p. 80.

3

Collaboration in Ukraine during the Holocaust Aspects of historiography and research Anatoly Podolsky

Introduction This chapter will discuss key aspects of Ukrainian–Jewish relations during World War II and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and their reflection in postwar historiography. It will first examine collaboration of the non-Jewish population (including both ethnic Ukrainians and members of other ethnic groups who took part in or assisted the Nazis in the murder of Jews) with the occupation regime on Ukrainian territory,1 in order to throw light on: (1) the reasons for and motives behind Ukrainian collaboration; (2) the behavior of collaborators during the occupation; (3) the extent, scope and influence of collaboration in Ukraine during the extermination of the Jews on its territory; and (4) the impact of Nazi antisemitic propaganda on the nature and level of collaboration. Second, it will relate to attitudes toward collaboration during the Soviet era and to the beginnings of a debate on this theme among the Ukraine intelligentsia in the post-Communist era.

Attitudes toward the Jews during the war The attitude of the non-Jewish population to the Holocaust in Ukraine ranged from collaboration through neutrality to rescue. The prevailing tendency was indifference to the tragic fate of Jewish compatriots. The period of occupation and the war, said well-known philosopher Tsvetan Todorov, was one of extremes, and the behavior of the majority was directed first and foremost at saving their own lives and those of their closest relatives.2 Historian Yaroslav Gritsak points out that saving a Jew during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine was heroism, and heroism is not a routine event – people had to live, or rather survive, and not perform heroic deeds.3 An examination of the demography of Soviet Ukraine would seem to be relevant in a study of attitudes of Ukrainian citizens4 under occupation toward the Jews. The total population of Soviet Ukraine prior to the German invasion was over 30 million. About 5 million fought against Hitler in the Red Army; hundreds of thousands were evacuated or fled. According to Krupnikov and Gritsak, no fewer than 20,000–25,000 people collaborated

Collaboration in Ukraine during the Holocaust

45

with the Nazis, assisting them in the “Final Solution of the Jewish question.”5 Data at Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) show that the number of non-Jews (mainly Ukrainians, but not only) who saved Jews during the Holocaust in Ukraine was slightly more than 2,000.6 Therefore, we cannot claim that collaboration with the Nazis in Ukraine was on the same scale (relative to the total population) as it was in occupied Lithuania and Croatia. However, it is likely that without the support of the local non-Jewish population the extent of the Holocaust in Ukraine would have been less.

Manifestations of collaboration The position of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Rebel Army (UPA) toward the Jews will be dealt with below; however, there was almost no political collaboration between Ukrainian nationalistic forces and the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1944. No puppet or collaborationist government was set up on the territory of occupied Ukraine, as it was in Croatia (Pavelic) and Hungary (Szalasi), and especially in Norway and France. The Nazi leadership thought it would be unwise to raise the hopes of the Ukrainian nationalist movement about gaining power.7 However, they used the nationalists in order to further their own interests on occupied Ukrainian territory, and especially their antisemitic policy. Despite their opposition to the German occupation, a large segment of nationalist forces supported the Nazi genocide of Jews (see p. 50). Collaboration of the non-Jewish population of Ukraine during the Holocaust took place first in units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, most of whose members were volunteers. Many joined in order to save their own and their families’ lives out of fear of the Nazi occupation, while others enlisted for “ideological reasons,” such as hatred of the Soviet regime and antisemitism. Among other acts, these units took part in killing Jews, accompanying them to places of execution and securing these locations, sorting objects and valuables and guarding confiscated property. Members of the local Ukrainian police were also involved in the mass murder of Jewish men, women and children, and in raping Jewish girls and women.8 On the other hand, some Ukrainian policemen – in Zhmerinka and Bershad (Vinnitsa region), for example – released victims for ransom or simply gave them the opportunity to escape from the ghetto or before an action, without remuneration, thereby saving their lives.9 The extent of collaboration in Transnistria and Galicia was considerable, but it was less so in Reichscommissariat Ukraine. An infamous case of Ukrainian collaboration took place during the mass murder at Babi Yar, Kiev. On September 29–30, 1941, when 33,77110 Jews were murdered in Babi Yar, there were more units of the Ukrainian police11 than members of Einsatzgruppe C and other German units; however, the collaborators here functioned as guards and collected the victims’ belongings. It is widely assumed that most Ukrainian policemen were recruited in western Ukraine. However, collaborationist police battalions were also

46

Anatoly Podolsky

drafted from central Ukraine (in the Kiev region), from the Crimea and from eastern parts of Ukraine (such as Zaporozhie, Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk). Further, Ukrainian police units took part in anti-Jewish acts in Poland: guards in the Nazi death camps, particularly in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, were Ukrainian, often recruited among prisoners of war.12 In addition, there were spontaneous pogroms and murder of Jews by the local population, often initiated and supported by the Nazis. Such acts were motivated by one of the main cornerstones of Nazi propaganda in Soviet occupied territories: the Jews’ involvement in Stalinist crimes against Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, Russians and others. This line had great success in the district of Galicia (Lvov, Stanislav, Drogobych, Ternopol, Zolochev, Berezhany, Buchach, Kolomyia, Zhovkva, Stryii and Skola), and thousands of Jews were murdered in these so-called acts of retaliation.13 Lastly, there were Ukrainian units within the German SS or Wehrmacht. These were military units, in most cases comprising young men of the SS Galichina division and Nachtigal battalion. They had no direct connection with the Holocaust in Ukraine, as they were created at the end of 1942 or in 1943, when the western areas of Ukraine were practically Judenrein.

Motives for collaboration A key focus of interest of many researchers of collaboration in the Holocaust in Ukraine is determining the motives for cooperation with the Nazis and participation in anti-Jewish actions. Several reasons may be discerned. (1) Collaboration was considered a feasible and reliable way of preserving one’s own life and those of one’s relatives in the prevailing conditions. (2) It was viewed as an opportunity for enrichment – often at the expense of the Jews. (3) The population was under the influence of prewar antisemitism and Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda. (4) many blamed the Jews for the crimes of the Stalinist Bolshevik regime. The last two seem to be the most substantial and are interconnected. In the Soviet territories, including Ukrainian lands, Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda repeatedly stressed the responsibility of Ukrainian Jews for Bolshevism. Stalin’s policies in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s – including the artificial famine of 1932–33 (Holodomor), the continual repression of various social echelons, and the creation of the Gulag system with its concentration camps – set the majority of Ukrainian society against the Soviet regime. Nazi propaganda in the Eastern Territories equated the Jews with the criminal Bolshevik authorities, maintaining that the Third Reich had liberated the local population from that regime, which had cruelly mistreated them.14 The image of the Jew was completely dehumanized in Nazi propaganda – in proclamations and leaflets, as well as in the periodicals of the occupied Ukrainian lands, which were under the full control of the German authorities. In contrast to Western Europe, most of this literature was directed not at racial degradation of the Jews (although this factor of Nazi anti-Jewish ideology was also present), but at blaming them for Bolshevism and the

Collaboration in Ukraine during the Holocaust

47

crimes of the NKVD, Stalin’s security service. In general, the regime in Ukraine was labeled “Jewish” or “Jewish–Bolshevik.” This was an open call to kill Jews as representatives of Bolshevik ideology and practice, a mission that the liberation, under the aegis of Greater Germany, would facilitate.15 Such propaganda played a major role in promoting collaboration in the Holocaust among the non-Jewish population, especially in western Ukraine. The documentation confirms that many opponents of the Stalin regime volunteered for auxiliary police units, took part in anti-Jewish actions and betrayed their Jewish neighbors. These people turned a blind eye to the fact that, like Ukrainians, Russians and Poles, Jews, their fellow countrymen, were also victims of the Communist regime in prewar times and that many Ukrainians, too, had served in Bolshevik persecution units.16 In the interwar period western Ukraine had been a part of Poland. Although Polish antisemitism existed, Jewish political and socio-cultural life had flourished. In 1939 these lands were annexed to Soviet eastern Ukraine and by 1941 all features of democratic life there had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks, among whom were Jews who had come from the east. Within two years the Stalinist regime had implemented the policies that it had pursued in eastern Ukraine during the previous twenty years: confiscation of private property, collectivization, industrialization and political repression. Among the leadership of the party and state organizations which executed these actions in western Ukraine were Russians, Ukrainians and Jews, who had come to Galicia from the east. When the Nazis entered Lvov and other Galician cities in June 1941, they provoked and supported anti-Jewish pogroms organized by the local population. Tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children were victims of these actions.17 In Lvov, Zolochiv and other cities of western Ukraine the Nazis opened NKVD penitentiaries, and when the locals saw dead bodies of their relatives, killed by the Bolsheviks before their retreat, the finger of blame was pointed at the Jews. Historian Marco Carynnyk notes an important detail in his study of the Zolochiv pogrom: the perpetrators had received a licence from the Nazi authorities for “retaliatory action,” but did not understand or ignored that fact that the guilty had left the city long before and that among the bodies were not only Poles and Ukrainians but Jews, too.18

Attitudes after the war The Soviet era The issue of collaboration of the non-Jewish population (including Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Poles, Romanians, Moldavians, Hungarians and Crimean Tatars) with the Nazis in the persecution and murder of Jews on the occupied territories of Ukraine (1941–44) is one of the most complex and ambiguous, yet least studied, aspects of modern Ukrainian Holocaust historiography.

48

Anatoly Podolsky

Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Holocaust was barely touched on in Soviet Ukrainian historiography, and was never a separate subject for historical research. Moreover, in the historiography of the Great Patriotic War19 no studies were expressly dedicated to the policy of the overall persecution and genocide of the Jews undertaken by Nazi Germany on the occupied Soviet Ukrainian territories. Nevertheless, some collections of documents on Holocaust history were known to contain testimonies and other files on places of mass execution of Jews in those lands.20 Most of these sources were ruthlessly censored and any mention of Jews was forbidden. A euphemism coined in academic, pedagogic and even journalistic literature referred to Jews exterminated solely because of their ethnic/national background as “Soviet civilians.” This accorded with one of the main maxims of Soviet wartime historiography: that those who died were Soviet citizens regardless of their national identity. Therefore, the history of the war in all that concerned the relationship between Jews and non-Jews on Nazi-occupied lands was falsified. Nor did Soviet historiographic studies, apart from a few exceptions,21 deal especially with collaboration. In regard to the conceptual approach toward the subject, the following should be borne in mind: Soviet historiography (in keeping with official Soviet ideology and policy) categorically condemned any form of cooperation with the Nazis during the war and the occupation years. Consequently, Soviet censure applied not only to obvious collaborators but also to those who remained in the occupied territories of Ukraine; those who survived captivity and returned alive became potential “enemies of the people” (an infamous phrase dating from Stalinist terminology of the 1930s – the period of Communist repression of practically all levels of society). As a result of the suspicious attitude of Soviet party organizations, and especially the NKVD, toward those who remained in those territories, they were unable to find jobs or housing. Yet at the same time, Soviet ideology never referred specifically to collaborators who took part in the murder of Jews, only to crimes against the Soviet state and the Soviet people. From the second half of the 1940s until the beginning of the 1960s several trials took place, as a result of which 10,000–15,000 “Hitlerite accomplices” (in “Soviet-speak”) received death sentences or long prison terms. At trials held in Kiev in 1946 and in Vinnitsa in 1947, defendants known to have killed Jews were charged rather with collaboration with the German occupiers during 1941–44. They were also accused of participating in the execution of “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Some of the defendants were sentenced to death by hanging or shooting, others were convicted of treason and sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment.22 The post-Communist era A turnabout took place after the collapse of the Soviet system. The Holocaust became a theme in modern Ukrainian historical studies. Over the past

Collaboration in Ukraine during the Holocaust

49

fifteen years Ukrainian historiography has seen the creation of a new branch – Holocaust studies – which has produced a range of academic works, including articles, monographs, collections of documents, source guides and memoirs. Most important, the conceptual approach to modern Ukrainian historiography has changed.23 This may be attributed to the weakening of ideological pressure on the sciences, following the collapse of the Soviet regime, as well as to the partial opening of archives and the beginning of awareness of the existence of Israeli, European and American historiography. Today the Holocaust is studied as a premeditated genocide of the Jews, a unique policy of the Nazis aimed at the extermination of a people based on their ethnic origins or Jewish descent. Undoubtedly, one of the most complex aspects of Holocaust studies in Ukrainian historiography is that of collaboration in Ukraine during the war. No specialized work on this issue has so far been published, although the theoretical framework for research on the collaboration of Ukrainians and other non-Jewish populations of Ukraine has been more or less determined. In one of the first works on the topic, Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Gritsak24 formulated a primary approach, which serves as a guide for modern Ukrainian historians and philosophers. Basically, it stresses the necessity of admitting the fact of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust; that this is a truth that should be neither rejected nor concealed, and that it is imperative to investigate the reasons for this phenomenon, as well as the motives which drove various groups of the non-Jewish population to collaborate with the Nazis in the Holocaust in Ukraine. According to Gritsak, the history of World War II in Ukraine and the history of Ukrainian–Jewish relations of the period must not be falsified. Moreover, exposing as many factual, objective materials as possible on this complex and tragic period of history will facilitate the restoration of political and socio-cultural relations between Jews and Ukrainians.25 A range of wellknown Ukrainian scholars in the country and in the diaspora support this view.26 In recent years, debates over Ukrainian collaboration during the Holocaust have appeared in the scientific and cultural journal Kritika.27 Gritsak, Zhanna Kovba, Sofia Gracheva, Miroslav Popovich, Andreii Portnov, Sergeii Grabovich, Miroslav Marinovich, Taras Vozniak, Andreii Portnov, Ivan Khimka and Marko Tsarinik are among the scholars and public figures involved. It seems that the point of this discourse is to find common ground and to relate the facts since, as Gracheva wrote, “they lived amongst us.” They were part of the society, part of Ukrainian history and culture. Since the Holocaust practically destroyed Ukrainian Jewry, they argue, it is now incumbent upon Ukrainian society to form an honest opinion about collaboration, not only by presenting objective facts but by naming the crime directly: aiding the Germans to annihilate the Jewish population. This view is strongly rejected by extreme right antisemitic circles, led by the Inter-regional Academy of

50

Anatoly Podolsky

Personnel Management – MAUP – and its rector, Giorgii Shchekin, who also heads the Ukrainian Conservative Party. Currently, one can point to the beginnings of discussion among Ukrainian researchers concerning levels of collaboration with the Nazi regime during the war in Ukraine. The most important contribution in Ukraine concerning the participation of Ukrainians in the destruction of the Jewish population has been made by philologist Zinoviy Antoniuk. He believes that those who betrayed Jews during the occupation, or took part in the work of police units or in extermination actions, or guarded the concentration camps (notably, Treblinka camp was guarded only by Ukrainians28), should be called “toadies,” not “collaborators,” as they were mostly people of low moral standards, motivated by primitive instinct rather than ideology.29 Ideological collaborators included Ukrainian formations within Nazi military units, such as the Galitchina SS division, made up of Ukrainian volunteers in 1943. Another related issue concerns the activities of Ukrainian nationalist organizations and groups – OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, consisting of two branches: OUN Melnik and the more radical OUN Bandera), and UPA (Ukrainian Rebel Army, created at the end 1942) – during the occupation of Ukraine. These organizations, which were set up with the purpose of creating an independent Ukrainian state (Ukrainian Independent Sovereign State30), fought, at a certain stage, simultaneously against two totalitarian regimes – that of Stalin and that of Hitler. However, OUN Melnik, and to some extent OUN Bandera,31 supported the Nazi genocide of Jews, accusing them in their program documents – like Nazi propaganda in the Eastern Territories – of cooperation with the Bolshevik regime and crimes against the Ukrainian nation.32

Conclusion Modern Ukraine, where the foundations of a civil and plural society are only just beginning to take root, has so far neither conducted a scholarly evaluation of the historical role of Ukrainian national forces and their activities in World War II nor admitted to Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust. Nor have the Ukrainian authorities come up with a balanced approach to these phenomena and to this period of Ukrainian history. The government has been too busy making peace among the various forces that fought on Ukrainian territory against the Nazis in 1941–44 – including between Soviet and UPA veterans – and drawing a curtain on the past. A discussion has taken place only among Ukrainian intellectuals, some of whom have been calling expressly for the truth – no matter how painful – to be told about Ukrainian history, including Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust. However, these debates and, more important, the conclusions, have not reached a wider audience, especially students and youth in general. Nor have they been heard by the authorities. At the same time, contrary forces such as MAUP have been reviving Nazi-style propaganda, claiming, for example, that during the

Collaboration in Ukraine during the Holocaust

51

interwar period Ukraine was ruled by “Jewish Bolsheviks” and that the Jews were solely responsible for the problems of modern independent Ukraine, which is now in the “clutches of Zionism.”

Notes 1 During the first twenty years of the Communist regime (1918–39) Jewish communities in eastern Ukraine (i.e. Soviet Ukraine) were practically assimilated as a result of the Bolshevik policy of Korenizatsia (transforming all ethnic groups into a unified community – a “Soviet nation”). The Hebrew language was forbidden, synagogues were closed, a religious way of life was banned and the community structure was destroyed. When the Nazis occupied Ukraine, no Jewish community structure existed in the east. Thus, when researching the Holocaust in this part of Ukraine we cannot speak of the annihilation of communities, only the murder of Jews – Soviet citizens. A different situation existed in the western part of Ukraine in the interwar period: Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina and other areas were part of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Despite open antisemitism in these countries then (except for Czechoslovakia, where the Jewish community thrived during the 1930s), the structure of the communities was not destroyed; on the contrary – they were very active. Thus, here we can speak of the extermination of entire communities during the Holocaust, and not just of individual Jews or Jewish families. 2 Ts. Todorov, Oblichiam do extremism. 3 Gritsak, Ukraintsy v anti evreiiskikh aktsiakh pid chas Drugoy svitovoy vyini. 4 It would be more historically correct to say “citizens of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,” since before the Nazi occupation in June 1941 all historically ethnic lands of Ukraine were part of the USSR. 5 See presentation of Professor G. Krupnikov on collaboration in Europe, in Proceedings of a Conference on Holocaust Studies and Teaching in Europe, under the auspices of the Council of Europe (Warsaw, 1996); also Gritsak, Ukraintsy v anti evreiiskikh aktsiakh pid chas Drugoy svitovoy vyini. 6 Data of Yad Vashem Authority (Jerusalem) to January 1, 2006 7 At the outset of the Soviet–German war (summer 1941) the Nazi leadership made various promises to the nationalist Ukrainian organizations concerning the possible establishment of an independent Ukrainian state under German auspices. However, as early as July 1941 the leaders of OUN (S. Bandera and Ia. Stetsko) were arrested by the Nazis, and in February 1942 they executed the Ukrainian poet Olena Teliga in Babi Yar; this put paid to all illusions of Ukrainian nationalists that the Nazi occupation regime would support the idea of Ukrainian statehood. 8 See, for example, M. Popovich, “Evreiiskii genotsid na Ukraine,” Filosofskaia i sotsiologicheskaia mysl’, No. 4 (1994). 9 See F. Vinokurova, “Protystoyannya osobystosti polityci nacystckogo genocydu,” Golokost I suchasnist, Nos 2–4 (2002). 10 See, for example, Unichtozhenie evreev SSSR v 1941–1944 godakh., Sbornik documentov i materialov (Jerusalem and Moscow, 1992). 11 Vitalii Nakhmanovich, “Bukovinskiy kurin I masovi rozstrily evreiv Kyeva voseny 1941 roku,” Ukrainskiy istorychnyi zhurnal, 2007, No 3 (474), p. 76–97. 12 See, for example, R. Oerbakh, Oif di felder fun Treblinke (Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow, 1947; in Yiddish), and M. Rusiniak, “Paradoks Treblinki,” Golokost I suchasnist, No. 1(2) (2007), pp. 60–70.

52

Anatoly Podolsky

13 E. Iones, Evrei Lvova v gody Vtoroii Mirovoii voiiny (1939–1945) (Jerusalem and Lvov, 2000); Ia. Khonigsman, Katastrofaevreev Zapadnoii Ukrarainy (Lvov, 1998). 14 Alen Bezanson, Bedstvie veka (Moscow, 2000); Andre Glucksmann, The Discourse of Hatred (St. Petersburg, 2006); Anne Applebaum, Gulag: a History (Kiev, 2006). 15 S. Averbukh, “Gitlerovskaia yudofobia v proklamatsiakh i karikaturakh,” Ukrainskyi tcentr vyvchennya istorii Golokostu (Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies) (Kiev, 2005). 16 Ia. Khonigsman, Katastrofa evreev Zapadnoii Ukrarainy (Lvov, 1998); M. Gon, Z krivdoiu na samoty., Ukraynsko–evreiisky vzaemini na Voliny v 1926–1939 rokakh (Rivne, 2005); Sh. Redlikh, Razom ta naryzhno v Berezhanakh (Kiev, 2003). 17 Iones, Evrei Lvova v gody Vtoroii Mirovoii voiiny. 18 M. Tsarinnik, “Zolochiv movchit,” Kritika 8 (Zhovten, 2005). 19 This was a term introduced into the academic and socio-cultural lexicon denoting the events of World War II on the Soviet–German (Eastern) front from June 22, 1941 till May 9, 1945. It was often used as a synonym for “World War II”; though now employed much less in modern Ukrainian historiography and Ukrainian society, it remains in academic and cultural discourse. 20 See, for example, Niornbergskii protsess v dokumentakh i materialakh (Moscow, 1957), SS v deiistvii – dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1959), Sovershenno sekretno – documenty i materialy (Moscow, 1961). In the 1940s and 1950s collections of documents on the Nazi occupation existed for certain regions of Ukraine: Kiev, Vinnitsa, Zhitomir and Dnepropetrovsk, among others. 21 Including several works by Mikhaik Semiryaga, the most well known of which is The Nazi Prison Empire and its Collapse (Moscow, 1988). In the post-Soviet era he published the book Collaboration (Moscow, 2000), but his concepts remained unchanged. 22 See, for example, Kyevshchina v roky nymetsko-fashistskoi okupatsii (Kiev, 1948) and Vinnichina v roki nymetsko-fashistskoi okupatsii (Vynnitsa, 1948). 23 Those were monographs and articles of Ukrainian historians, namely F. Levitas, Y. Honigsman, Z. Kovba, S. Yelisavetskiy, A. Kruglov, A. Podolsky, M.Tyagliy, F. Vinokurova, M.Koval, V. Kucher, V. Koval, V. Korol and others, touching on the Holocaust in Ukraine in general, and in western Ukraine, Crimea, Transnistria and eastern Ukraine in particular. 24 Gritsak, Ukraintsy v anti evreiiskikh aktsiakh pid chas Drugoii svytovoy voiini, ch. 1. 25 Ibid.; id., Strasti za natsionalizmom. Zbirka stateii (Kiev, 2004); M. Popovich, “Genotsid evreev na Ukraine,” Filosofcka i sotsiologichna dumka (Kiev, 1994). 26 Including Ukrainian scholars M. Popovich, Z. Kovba, P. Potichnyi, J. Himka, Z. Antoniuk, S. Gratcheva and I. Dziuba. 27 Articles in Kritika, Nos. 4–5 (Kiev, 2005). 28 Rusiniak, “Paradoks Treblinki.” 29 Presentation of Zinoviy Antoniuk, www.holocaust.kyiv.ua. 30 For example, P. Myrchuk, Dokumenti pro dialnist UPA (Lvov, 1992); Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair. Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 31 In contrast to OUN B documents, those of the UPA contained no antisemitic statements or calls to kill Jews; however, UPA fighters sometimes murdered Jews. 32 Proceedings of the Second Krakow Summit of OUN, 1940. See, for example, Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, pp. 32–3, 56–7.

4

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States Between evasion and facing a burdensome past Yitzhak Arad

This chapter will examine the work of the Historical Commissions established in the Baltic States – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in order to determine what took place in those countries during World War II under Soviet and German occupation. It will analyze the commissions’ evaluations of the extent of local collaboration with the Nazis in the genocide of the Jews.

The Holocaust as presented in the Soviet Baltic republics The attitude of the Baltic States toward the Holocaust during the period of their annexation to the Soviet Union, from the summer of 1944 when the Soviet army re-conquered the area until the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, was determined by Stalin in Moscow at the start of the war. On November 6, 1941, in a speech delivered on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, he said: Hitler’s rabble mercilessly rapes and murders the peace-loving people of our homeland, women, children, old people … they carry out a medieval pogrom against the Jews like those in the days of the tsar … Hitler said … if we want to establish a Greater German Empire, we must first get rid of the Slavic people … Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovakians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Belorussians.1 As far as is known, this was the only public utterance made by Stalin during the war in which the Jews were mentioned, and even here there is no allusion to mass murder, only a comparison to the pogroms of the Tsar, which pales before the reality of Jewish suffering under the Germans. This was the thrust of Soviet propaganda until the last days of the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s–early 1990s. Perversely ignoring the unique fate of the Jews, which was extermination, it posited the Slavic people as the target for genocide. Stalin continued this vein of propaganda in other speeches he made during the war, noting every nation that fell under the German yoke. On May 1, 1942 he stated:

54

Yitzhak Arad We wish to liberate our brethren, the Ukrainians, the Moldavians, the Belorussians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians, the people of Karelia, from the humiliation they suffer under the villainous German fascists.2 On November 6, 1942, he said: They [the Germans] rape and murder men, women and children and the aged, our brothers and sisters, citizens of areas of our country that they have subjugated. They intend to enslave or wipe out the Ukrainian people, the Belorussians, the Baltic people, the people of Moldavia, Crimea and the Caucasus.3

Only the Jews remained unmentioned. The aim of this wartime propaganda was to obscure the fact that the genocidal policy of the German enemy was directed against Jews alone, an approach that resonated well among much of the Soviet population, as demonstrated by their ready cooperation with the German killers in various areas of the Soviet Union. It was also intended to strengthen the resolve of both Soviet soldiers in the field and civilians on the home front. Moreover, this line was a projection of Stalin’s own disposition and dislike of Jews. In July 1943 Pravda published several articles on the condition of the Baltic States under the German conquest. In one, First Secretary of the Latvian Communist Party Jan Kalbarzin said, “The Nazis murdered over 150,000 sons and daughters of the Latvian people.” In another, A. Snechkus, Lithuanian Communist Party First Secretary, stated, “In two years 200,000 Lithuanians were killed or tortured by the Nazis.”4 The Jews, whom they failed to mention, made up the overwhelming majority of the victims, while the killers were mostly Lithuanians and Latvians.5 This approach may be considered the dominant Soviet ideological position, which remained unchanged until the collapse of the Soviet Union. They continued to speak of 500,000 “Soviet citizens,” or 700,000, or sometimes 300,000, killed in Lithuania. The number of Jews murdered, over 200,000, was small when compared with the figures for Lithuanians, Poles, Russians and others. It should be noted that credit is due to the Lithuanian Historical Commission, which published a study of the Lithuanian historian Rimantas Zizas, stating that the number of non-Jews killed by the Germans did not exceed 5,000, mostly Russian or Lithuanian Communist activists, and Polish intellectuals and farmers accused of aiding the partisans.6 In Soviet Latvia, Communist sources claimed that 313,798 Soviet citizens were murdered under the German occupation;7 however, according to my own estimate, 70,000 Jews and no more than 5,000 non-Jews were killed in Latvia under German occupation. Figures contrary to the official line could not be made public in any context in the Soviet Union.

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States

55

The motivation of the wartime Soviet administration for diminishing the importance and uniqueness of the fate of the Jews under German occupation is perhaps understandable. However, the fact that this propaganda line continued throughout the entire Soviet period until the time of Gorbachev, when considerations of morale on the battlefield or the home front had become irrelevant, can only be explained by the antisemitism of the Soviet administration and its opposition to the State of Israel. Mention of the Holocaust and the murder of the Jews could be found mainly in materials of Nazi collaborators, chiefly from the Baltic States, who found refuge in the United States and other Western countries, from where they waged an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign. With the exception of the Baltic States, historians of World War II in the independent republics of the former Soviet Union, whether in academia, government or public service, made no serious attempt to tackle issues relating to the Holocaust in the Soviet areas under German occupation, especially the involvement of citizens in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. With few exceptions, only Jewish scholars and some Jewish organizations in these countries dealt with the subject of the Holocaust, in historical research or in commemoration of the victims. After the Baltic States gained independence in the early 1990s, historians there began to address the subject, emphasizing, however, “the two holocausts” – the Holocaust of the Jewish people under German occupation and “the holocaust of the Baltic people” under Soviet occupation. The notion of two holocausts was raised throughout the years by those who fled from the Baltic countries, including Nazi collaborators, before the Soviet reoccupation of those states in 1944. However, after Lithuania and Latvia regained their independence in the early 1990s the concept of “two holocausts” came to dominate their historiographies.

The Historical Commissions of the Baltic States Historical Commissions were established in 1998 by the governments of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia eight years after independence. Understandably, the memory of the Holocaust was not their first order of business, for both the people and the new governments were of the opinion that the Holocaust was an affair to be settled between the Jews and the Germans alone. The Germans perpetrated the Holocaust on the Jews; the Baltic people bore no responsibility. The issue of Soviet oppression and occupation, on the other hand, was of great moment even prior to independence, and required immediate investigation and research. Political exigency – the standing of these countries vis-à-vis the European Community (NATO and the European Union) – and not a genuine desire to face up to the past, to examine the truth about the behavior of their people during the time of the Holocaust, led to the establishment of these commissions. In order to equate Jewish suffering in the Holocaust with that of the Baltic people under the Soviet yoke, first from 1940 to 1941, and then from

56

Yitzhak Arad

1944 to 1953 when Stalin died, it was mandated that these commissions research not only what occurred in these countries during the German occupation, but also under the Soviets. The theory of the “two holocausts” rests on this assumption. An important aspect of this approach is the inference that Soviet occupation, particularly during 1940–41, influenced the behavior of the local population toward the Jews during the German occupation. However, as of writing this chapter, the reports of the Historical Commissions of Lithuania and Latvia were not yet completed, and it was not possible to predict whether the conditions created by the acceptance of these countries into the European Community would gradually obviate the need for them to finish their work. This discussion therefore addresses only what was published up to mid-2005. The methodologies used by Lithuania and Latvia differed. In Lithuania the commission drew up a list of subjects on which it asked Lithuanian and foreign scholars to submit a paper. After discussing the various studies and asking for clarifications or revisions from the authors, the commission would reach its conclusions. The Latvian commission, however, chose to convene scientific conferences where invited speakers presented their research, which was then published as progress reports. The conclusions of the commission were to be based on this material. The wide range of subjects with which these commissions dealt, dating back to the years before the Holocaust, included the sources of antisemitism in those countries. Discussed below are three central issues raised in the research and conferences initiated by the commissions: (1) the first year of Soviet occupation, June 1940–June 1941 (2) the first weeks of the German occupation, the period of pogroms, from the end of June to early July 1941; (3) the period of extermination, directed and carried out by German security forces with the aid of local collaborators, from July until December 1941, when the vast majority of the Jews of these countries were exterminated.

The first year of Soviet occupation and its impact on relations between the Baltic peoples and the Jews According to the Lithuanian commission: Relations between Lithuanians and Jews turned bitter during the years of the Soviet occupation (1940–41). Anti-Semitism grew to a new, far more threatening level. Previous stereotypes, frequently invoked against the Jews, such as “enemies of Christians” and “exploiters of Lithuanians,” were now, in minds of many Lithuanians, overshadowed by the new image of Jews based on a political rationale – “ the traitors of Lithuania” and “collaborators with the occupiers”. The word “Jew” often became synonymous with the term “Communist.”8 The general feeling among the Baltic people was that the Jews identified with the hated Soviet regime, that they held key positions in it, and that they took

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States

57

part in the repression, in arrests and in the exile of tens of thousands of local people to Siberia and other remote places of the Soviet Union about a week before the German invasion. The Lithuanian commission, however, claims that this image of the Jew was not borne out by the facts, a conclusion based on the invited research of Lithuanian historian Liudas Truskas, in which he proves that at the time the Jews suffered more than other Lithuanians under the Soviet regime. The Jews constituted 7 percent of the Lithuanian population and their proportion in leading government positions or as officers in the NKVD did not differ substantially. Moreover, among Lithuanian citizens deported in June 1941 for being “anti-Soviet elements,” Jews constituted 13.5 percent, twice their share in the general population. The commission also mentioned the harm done to Jewish educational and religious institutions and to traditional sources of Jewish livelihood. The general population, frustrated at their loss of independence, did not assimilate these facts, or did not want to know them. They saw the Jews in exaggerated numbers in government jobs and in the Soviet security forces, a situation to which they were completely unaccustomed, since in independent Lithuania such positions were not open to Jews. The report also notes that the anti-Jewish atmosphere was intensified by the anti-Communist propaganda disseminated in Lithuania by the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), established in Germany in 1940, in which all right and center Lithuanian parties were represented. According to the commission’s, conclusions approved on June 19, 2002, “The anti-Semitic proclamations issued by the LAF headquarters in Berlin as well as other documents made their way to Lithuania and had a significant impact on the attitudes of Lithuanians.”9 Latvian documents also dealt with the effect of the first Soviet occupation on Latvian–Jewish relations during the German occupation. Nazi anti-Semitism was influential in Latvia, as elsewhere in Europe … But the Soviet invasion exacerbated anti-Semitism … The image of the JewBolshevik – pounded home in Nazi propaganda – also seemed to be personified in the new Soviet administration. Not that the Russians and Latvians who brought Soviet power to Latvia in 1940 were particularly Jewish, as many in the population asserted, or that fewer Latvian Jews were deported percentage-wise than ethnic Latvians. The important thing is that many Latvians believed these canards. When the Nazis invaded and the Soviets pulled out, the German propaganda and their Latvian friends confirmed these popular beliefs … The Nazis made the Holocaust in Latvia; Latvians who committed or were complicit in the crimes share some responsibility, as do, to a lesser extent, those Latvians who turned their backs on the Jews when they could have helped. But the role of the Soviets should also be mentioned; they prepared the ground for the Latvian participation in the Holocaust by their actions in the 1939–41 period [sic].10

58

Yitzhak Arad

In fact, antisemitism increased significantly in the year of Soviet occupation, although in general the Jews welcomed the Soviet regime. The first two years of World War II saw a conflict of interests between the Jews and the Baltic people. In the geo-political and military reality which developed in Europe, principally in the summer of 1940 with the fall of France and the conquest of Western Europe by the Germans, it became impossible for the Baltic States to remain neutral and independent. The alternatives were either to become part of Europe as a client of Nazi Germany or to become part of the Soviet Union. The Jews, who knew the fate that awaited them under German rule, preferred the Soviet Union. The overwhelming majority of the Baltic people preferred Germany, which they saw as liberating them from Soviet occupation, and as reinstating their independence within a Europe under the hegemony of Hitler. This created an unbridgeable chasm between the Jews and the Baltic people. However, perceiving the Jews as guilty of Soviet occupation and terror – an image of the Jew widespread in some circles even today – is a distortion of the reality, a point stressed by the Lithuanian Historical Commission and less so by the Latvian one, the difference stemming from the composition of these bodies.

The German occupation Pogroms: late June–early July 1941 This period has been variously referred to by researchers of the Historical Commissions as one of “unplanned killing,” “spontaneous killing” or “political murder.” The commissions tried to find answers to the following questions which they posited:   

Who among the local population initiated the pogroms and what part did the Germans play? What was the background to the pogroms? To what extent did the first Soviet occupation (1940–41) affect the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence? How extensive were the pogroms? How many victims were there, and how many local people took part in them?

A key to understanding the tension between the Jews and Latvians and Lithuanians appears to lie in the events of those days. German reports and many Jewish documents contain relevant material. Eyewitness accounts of Jews ascribe both the initiative and the implementation to local residents. As the Jews saw it, the motivation for the pogroms lay in generations of historical antisemitism. The convergence of the disappearance of the Soviet regime and the German takeover unleashed a wave of hatred that led to mass murder. As noted previously, the commission documents also mention that these pogroms occurred chiefly because of the conflict of interests between the Jews and the Baltic people in regard to the first Soviet occupation and to the

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States

59

help which certain extremist elements in the local population extended to the Germans. Most members of the commissions and those who were invited to present studies agree that in the early days of the German occupation thousands of Jews were murdered and that in most areas (an exception was the part of Lithuania bordering east Prussia) local elements, not German units, carried out the killings. Some scholars on the Lithuanian commission label this a period of “spontaneous killing” and, although acknowledging popular antisemitism, they attribute the main cause of the fury and outbreak of murder to the events of the first Soviet occupation when, as noted, hatred of Jews increased among large sections of the public in these countries. Some of the interim reports of the Lithuanian commission described the slaughter of this period as “political murder,” the claim being that most of the Jews were killed in a political context: they had been members of the Communist Party or the Komsomol, held office in the Soviet administration or supported the Soviet regime. Lithuanians, Poles, Russians and others were killed at that time for the same reasons. Thus, the large majority of the victims were men, not women, children or the aged. This argument, however, ignores the fact that the local population branded every Jew a Communist, so that every Jew, certainly every Jewish man, was a target. The reports lend considerable weight to the part played by the Germans in encouraging the pogroms. Without their support, they claim, it is unlikely they would have occurred, or they would have been much less disastrous. The commission documents also stress the difficulties encountered by the Germans in instigating them. This claim and its source rests on two German documents quoted by the commissions: one written by Reinhard Heydrich to the Einsatzgruppen on June 29, 1941, and the second by Franz Stahlecker on October 15, 1941. Heydrich’s document repeats in writing his briefing in Berlin to the Einsatzgruppen and the EinsatzKommando before the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 17. He urged: Do not place any obstacles in the way of any self-cleansing actions [Selbstreiningungsbestrebungen] on the part of anti-Communists or antisemites in the occupied territories; on the contrary, see that they become more intensified, of course as much as possible without leaving any traces, and turn it in a proper direction … 11 In the final report that Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, wrote on their “actions” in connection with the pogroms in the Baltic countries until October 15, 1941, he said: Based on the consideration that the population of the Baltic countries suffered most severely under the rule of Bolshevism and Jewry while they were incorporated into the Soviet Union, it was to be expected that after liberation from this foreign rule, they themselves would to a large extent

60

Yitzhak Arad eliminate those of the enemy left behind after the retreat of the Red Army. It was the task of the security police [Sicherheitspolizei] to set these self-cleansing actions in motion and to direct them into the right channels, in order to achieve this cleansing as rapidly as possible. It was no less important to establish as unshakable and provable facts for the future that the liberated population itself took the most severe measures, on its own initiative, against the Bolsheviks and Jewish enemy – without any German instruction being evident. In Lithuania it was achieved for the first time by activating the partisans in Kovno. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set any large-scale pogrom in motion there … In the course of the first pogrom, during the night of June 25–26, Lithuanian partisans eliminated more than 1,500 Jews … During the following nights 2,300 Jews were eliminated in the same way. In other parts of Lithuania similar Aktionen followed the example set in Kovno, but on a smaller scale … It proved to be considerably more difficult to set in motion similar cleansing Aktionen and pogroms in Latvia. The main reason was that the entire national leadership, especially in Riga, had been killed or deported by the Soviets. Even in Riga it proved possible by means of appropriate suggestions to the Latvian auxiliary police to get an antiJewish pogrom going, in the course of which all the synagogues were destroyed and about 400 Jews were killed … In Estonia there was no opportunity to instigate pogroms owing to the relatively small number of Jews … 12

Heydrich’s exhortation to intensify the pogroms and Stahlecker’s call to the security police to set these cleansing actions in motion are the basis for the claim that the German SS was behind their implementation and influenced the extent of the pogroms. Why were the Germans so interested in pogroms when Stahlecker had already noted that they alone could not solve the Jewish problem in the occupied territories and that the next stage, planned extermination, was necessary? The documents submitted to the Lithuanian commission by the Lithuanian American historian Saulius Suziedelis and the German historian Christoph Dieckmann suggest the following explanations: 



It was in the interest of the Einsatzgruppen to prove to the German army that the motivation for killing Jews stemmed from normal Lithuanian and Latvian hostility toward Jews, to which end they photographed and filmed the pogroms. They wished to probe how the army and the military administration would react to apparently spontaneous pogroms, from which they could extrapolate the reaction to the Einsatzgruppe plan of systematic executions. The extreme cruelty of the Letukis (Kovna) garage killings, where on 27 June, fifty to sixty Jews were tortured and murdered, took place 200 m from the headquarters of the 16th Army. The officers at these

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States

61

headquarters witnessed this murder committed by civilians and uniformed Lithuanians, while a mob of hundreds shouted encouragement and German soldiers stood by, their officers responsible for the area doing nothing to stop the killing. Seeing this and similar scenes, Stahlecker wrote in his report, “As a result of the briefing which army cadres received, they understood the right way of implementing this and the pacification Aktionen were carried out with no slip-ups.”13 The Lithuanian commission also dealt with the activities of the provisional Lithuanian government set up on June 24, 1941, which ignored the pogroms. The report states: The Provisional Government did promulgate orders about separating the Jews (from the general population) and punishing them, but ignored the systematic murder, and dissociated itself from the extreme elements among the partisans [in Lithuania the anti-Soviet activists were then called “partisans”]. Their leaders made no public mention of the liquidation of the Kovno Jews, which occurred on the doorstep of the government building … While it is doubtful that any action of the Provisional Government could have changed the German policy of extermination … since the government empowered establishing a defense battalion as early as June 27 [the battalion that took part in the liquidation of the Jews at the 7th Fort in Kovno and other locations] and appointed Col. Yurgis Bobelis as military commander of Kovno, [it] should have felt responsible for clarifying its position, beyond a request to refrain from the public killing of Jews.14 The quotation may be seen as criticism of the provisional government, since it noted that the latter ignored the mass murder of Jews, expressed no public opposition to it and even set up a (defense) battalion that carried out the murder. However, the document also attempts to vindicate the provisional government: “ … while it is doubtful that any action of the Provisional Government could have changed the German policy of extermination.” There is no doubt about the powerlessness of the Lithuanian government – which was dissolved by the Germans at the beginning of August 1941 – to change the German extermination policy, but had they appealed to the public they might have been able to alleviate the severity of the pogroms perpetrated by the Lithuanians at that time. The extent of the pogroms at the end of June and beginning of July 1941 is dealt with in the reports of both the Lithuanian and the Latvian commissions, which describe the killings in the provinces and in provincial towns where formerly information was scant. There, too, the pogroms were the work of locals, while the advance forces of the Einsatzgruppen lent their support. The perpetrators were presented as fringe groups of anti-Soviet agitators, not members of the general population, although, in fact, the number of those who took part in the pogroms belied this claim.

62

Yitzhak Arad

The interim Latvian conclusions give various estimates for the first period of pogroms. The historian Rudite Viksne, who edited the research of the Historical Commission on the murder of Jews in the provinces, lectured on the subject at the scientific conference of the commission in November 2001. She described the events in Auce, a town in the region of Jelgava where 100 Jews lived, as representative of what occurred in the provinces. Until the Germans’ arrival there were no excesses against the Jews or communists in Auce … It is evident that the first actions began on July 5 or 6 … Soon thereafter there arrived two German officers from Jelgava who met with the local leaders … the Germans ordered them to arrest the Jews and assemble them in a barn … The next move took place on July 11. In the morning there arrived two vehicles with Germans … The Jews were killed in small six- to eight-persons groups … All witnesses agree that it was the Germans who killed the first group to show how it was done … This fits the usual pattern elsewhere in Latvia [sic].15 Rudite Viksne stressed that there was no murder until the Germans arrived, that the killings took place under their direction and after they fired the first shots; there is no mention of who fired the others. Doubtless it was Latvians, but Viksne did not say this clearly and openly. In contrast to the presentation of the proceedings at Auce, where there is an attempt at blurring the truth, another lecture at the same conference given by Latvian historians Grigory Smirim and Mayer Meler portrays events at the provincial towns of Silene, Gostini and Malta thus: The facts described in this article support the statement that the inhabitants of the small towns and villages of Latvia participated in extermination of their Jewish neighbors. It happened in the time when the Nazi occupation authorities had not yet taken under full control of the small provincial towns of Latvia due to lack of time … Nationalism that was rife in pre-war Latvia was aggressive and chauvinistic. The nationalistic ideology, after the Soviet repression, required the enemy figure and found it in the Jewish minority [sic].16 Liquidation: mid-July–December 1941 The wave of pogroms was followed by a period of liquidation, beginning in mid-July and lasting until the end of 1941. The initiative, the organization and the responsibility for these murders can be attributed to the German SS, which worked with the extensive cooperation of murder squads made up of local inhabitants. The question of the exact meaning of “collaboration in murder” was raised in the discussions of the commission. Did it refer only to those who shot people beside the graves? Or did it also include those who

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States

63

guarded the ghetto before and during the Aktionen; those who ferreted out Jews from hiding and brought them to the killing fields; and those who caught Jews with Aryan papers or who smuggled food to children in the ghetto (since any arrest for these “offenses” meant death to the Jew who was caught)? The matter of numbers was also disputed. Were there only a few hundred individuals who served in the Ypatingai Buriai in Vilna or the Commando Arajs in Latvia, or a company of the Schutzmannschaft battalion which functioned in Lithuania and Belorussia? Or should one include the tens of thousands of police volunteers who facilitated the work of the Germans in carrying out their anti-Jewish policy? At the request of the commission in Lithuania, the Lithuanian historian Arunas Bubnis wrote a thirty-six-page document, “Lithuanian Police Battalions and the Holocaust (1941–1943),” which deals with the twenty-five Lithuanian mobile police battalions. According to his findings, there were three types of Lithuanian police battalions active in the Holocaust:  



Group 1. Battalions that served regularly and often in the murder actions, including Battalions No. 1 (13) and No. 2 (12). In 1941 these battalions killed ten of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and Belorussia. Group 2. Eight battalions which served the Holocaust on occasion (active in actual murder once or twice, guarding the killing locations, transporting Jews to the locations, guarding ghettos or concentration camps). The number of Jews killed in this group was far fewer than in Group 1. Maidenek was guarded by Battalion No. 252, but they perpetrated no murders. Battalion No.3 guarded the Kovno ghetto, but took no direct part in the Aktionen. Group 3. Fourteen battalions which, according to the information at our disposal, took no part in the Holocaust.

In conclusion, one might say that ten of the twenty-five police battalions took part, in one way or another, in the Holocaust. To the best of our knowledge, some thousands of policemen from these battalions were implicated directly in executions or guarded the victims during them. In Lithuania and Belorussia they murdered at least 78,000 Jews; in addition, they participated in the murder of non-Jews and Soviet war prisoners.17 The document does not cover police in stations in the towns and cities or the Lithuanian civil authorities in which the ghettos were located, their help in the choice and sometimes the preparation of the killing site, and additional tasks needed to implement the German anti-Jewish policy. Andrievas Ezergailis, a noted historian living in the United States who has written on the Holocaust in Latvia, lectured on “Folklore versus History: A Problem in Holocaust Studies” at a commission conference in Latvia. He criticizes those who maintain that the Holocaust in Latvia was carried out by Latvians and diminish the role of the Germans, in what he terms “a Germanless Holocaust.” He attributes the source of this viewpoint to Jewish

64

Yitzhak Arad

survivors, who failed to see the Germans giving orders, and saw only the Latvians who expelled and shot them. The Jews whose world was destroyed, he claims, sought an explanation for their fate and found it by accusing the Latvians. There was little truth in this. Ezergailis asserts: “It is my opinion that especially the survivors truly believe they saw what they think they saw.” In other words, what they “saw” was imagined. He stresses that the evidence of survivors is folklore, not eyewitness testimony to be used in historical research. Another source interested in maintaining the notion of a Germanless Holocaust are the Germans, who prefer to attribute the extermination of the Jews to the revenge the Baltic peoples took on them for the part they played in the Soviet regime.18 It goes without saying that there was no Germanless Holocaust, and that the German occupation and German policy toward the Jews were the sine qua non of the Holocaust. However, without the testimony of survivors as an essential source for research into the events of the Holocaust in occupied Europe there can be no accurate picture of what occurred there. The final reports of the Lithuanian and Latvian commissions had not yet appeared, while it was unclear whether the report from Estonia was the last one. The latter deals with the murder of Jews, as follows. By the end of 1941, the 950–1,000 Jews remaining when the occupation began – about onequarter of the original Jewish population – were killed; about a dozen survived. The following bore responsibility: 





The independent Estonian administration, the Directorate. The Directors served as advisors to the German administration, having areas of independence under German supervision: “The men who served as Directors bear, together with German groups, responsibility for all the criminal acts perpetrated in Estonia.” (There follows a list of eight names.) The Estonian police took an active part in arrests and killing of Estonian Jews. Not every policeman was involved, but those who participated in arrests and murders can be considered directly responsible. The notable exception is the political police (section 4-b) where every man who served in this branch is guilty and responsible for murder. The commission believes that of those who served in the Forest Brothers and the fascist organization Omakaitse, some 1,000–1,200 took part in the arrests, and perhaps in the murder of Jews.

The commission report deals with the part Estonian police units played in actions against Jews outside of Estonia and the murder of Jews from other countries who had been brought to their areas. On August 7, 1942, Estonian police battalion No. 36 took part in the round-up and execution of all the Jews remaining in Novogrudok, Belorussia. The reports of this squad record many entries on “military action against partisans,” a phrase which conceals punitive measures against citizens and the killing of Jews. The commission report notes the presence of Estonian police battalions 286, 287 and 288 in

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States

65

actions in Belorussia, Poland, and Lithuania. Battalion 287 served as guards in the Klooga concentration camp in September 1944 where, hours before the retreat, 2,000 Jews were killed, and some bodies burnt. It also states that it is unclear whether the German SS or the Estonians were responsible, or whether police battalion 287 took part. Clearly they served as guards in order to prevent any escape. Concerning the murder of Jews from other countries, apart from the 2,000 killed in Klooga, the commission notes that in 1942 several thousand Jews were brought to Estonia from other lands, including a shipment from Theresienstadt. Most went to the Jagala camp, commanded by the Estonian Alexander Laak; 3,000 were shot on the spot at Kalevi–Liiva. The commission also stressed that during the period of Soviet rule, and particularly during the mass deportations of June 1941 (about 1 percent of the Estonian population was deported and about 10 percent of the Jews), an atmosphere of panic prevailed, leading the Estonians to see the Germans as liberators.19

Conclusion In his address on the anniversary of the October Revolution on November 6, 1941, Stalin determined the ideology and propaganda line for presenting the goals of Nazi Germany when it attacked the Soviet Union. These included a policy of terror against the population of occupied areas and the claim that Nazi Germany planned to wipe out the Slavic peoples and establish a Greater German Empire on their territories. The extermination of the Jews was likened to the pogroms under the Tsars. That the Jews were the only people singled out for extermination and not the Slavs was a truth that had to be ignored, or at the very least, obscured. As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was no material change in the portrayal of the Holocaust, which may be summarized thus: there was a holocaust in the occupied lands of the Soviet Union; however, it involved almost no Jews (a Jewless holocaust). In contrast to the Soviet approach, the Historical Commissions set up in the Baltic States after the fall of Communism took a more scientific view in attempting to examine the events of the Holocaust period, using the tools of historical research. As of writing, the work of the commissions in Lithuania and Latvia is not yet complete and it is unclear whether the report of the Estonian commission was in its final redaction. The definitive word on this research will only be heard when the final reports are published, but indications of the direction it is taking are already discernible. The existence of such commissions may be seen as an attempt to cleanse the Baltic population in general from the accusation of having participated in the Final Solution and to prove that while some thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians did take part, it was not the entire nation, which itself suffered under both Soviet and German occupations. All three commissions found that the first Soviet occupation,

66

Yitzhak Arad

1940–41, had the effect of intensifying antisemitism, as the Jews were falsely identified with the hated repressive regime from which the people saw the Germans as liberators. As for the pogroms of the first week or two of German occupation, which were carried out by Lithuanians and Latvians, there seems to be a trend lending more weight to the encouragement and determination of the advancing Einsatzgruppen than to initiatives from within the local population. The existence and work of the commissions is an important contribution to research on the Holocaust, to current information on the tragic events of the period in the three Baltic States – and especially on what occurred in the countryside – to the identification of local police units that took part in the liquidation, and to many additional aspects of our understanding. However, the theory of “two equal holocausts” presented by the Baltic Historical Commissions, and especially by the Lithuanian commission – a holocaust of Jewish carried out by the Germans and a holocaust of the Lithuanian people carried out by the Soviets – is a distortion of the truth. The suffering of the Lithuanians under the Communist regime cannot be compared with the Holocaust of the Jews.

Notes 1 I. Stalin, O velikoii otechestvennoii voine Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1950), pp. 34, 51–2. 2 Ibid., p. 102. 3 Ibid., pp. 137–8. 4 Both articles published in Pravda, July 1943. 5 Over 200,000 Jews remained in German-occupied Lithuania (including Vilnius), 75,000 in Latvia and 1,200 in Estonia. 6 Rimantas Zizas, “Persecution of Non-Jewish Citizens of Lithuania,” pp. 8–9 (Document No. 3, n.d., in the author’s possession). The author of this article was a member of the International Commission in Lithuania in the years 2002–April 2005, and received the papers submitted by the researchers on the various subjects discussed by the commission. Most of the papers do not include dates (see notes 13, 14 and 17). 7 A. Kadikis et al. (eds.), My obvinnaen (Riga, 1967), pp. 6–7. 8 Liudas Truska and Vygantas Vareikis, The Preconditions for the Holocaust: Antismitism in Lithuania (Vilnius, 2004), p. 328. It was published by the International Commission for the Evaluation of Crimes Committed by Nazi and Soviet occupation regimes in Lithuania. 9 Ibid. 10 Norman M. Neimark, “The Holocaust in Latvia in the Context: Problems of Comparison and Historicization,” in The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia: Reports of an International Conference (Riga, 2001; in English), pp. 25–6. 11 Helmut Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppe. Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges 1938–1942 (Frankfurt, 1985), p. 145. 12 Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman and Abraham Margaliot (eds.), Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany, Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 389–90. 13 Nuremberg Documents L-180, p. 22; Christoph Dieckmann, “Persecution of Jews in Lithuania: Murders and other Crimes carried out during the First Days

Popular collaboration in the Baltic States

14 15 16 17 18 19

67

of the Nazi–Soviet War,” pp. 48, 56–7. This paper was presented by Dieckmann to the Lithuanian Commission (Document No. 2, n.d., in the author’s possession). Christoph Diekmann and Saulius Suziedelis, “The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941: Sources and Analysis” (Document in the author’s possession, n.d.), pp. 49–50. Rudite Viksne, “The Destruction of the Auce Jews, July 1941,” in The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia: Reports of an International Seminar (Riga, 2003; in English), pp. 124–5. Grigory Smirin and Meyer Meler, “The Tragedy of Jewish People in the Latvian Countryside during the Holocaust in the Summer of 1941,” in The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, p. 234. Arunas Bubnys, “Lithuanian Police Battalions and the Holocaust, 1941–1943,” pp. 31–2, submitted to the commission meeting of April 18–20, 2003. Approved by the commission on April 20, 2005. Andrievas Ezergailis, “Folklore versus History: A Problem in Holocaust Studies, in the Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia,” in The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia (2001), pp. 111–13. Report of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity (Conclusions), Phase 2, “The German Occupation of Estonia, 1941–1944: Estonia and the Holocaust” (2001), pp. 2–10.

Part II

Occupied countries The Western world

5

Failures and mistakes Images of collaboration in postwar Dutch society Ido de Haan

Introduction In Onderdrukking en verzet (Repression and Resistance), the first comprehensive history of World War II in the Netherlands, Henk van Randwijk discussed the distinction between goed and fout, right and wrong. According to van Randwijk, who was editor of the underground newspaper Vrij Nederland, this was a distinction used extensively during the war to differentiate between those “one could trust and with whom one could share the secrets of underground and open resistance” and those “about whom one could not say this with 100 percent certainty.” While acknowledging that it was a very crude distinction of limited use, Van Randwijk claimed it was necessary in times when “even minimal knowledge in the hands of the wrong people might have had the worst consequences.” However, applying it after the war had ended would lead to “grave injustice. … to wit, when the danger had passed, there was room for more subtle distinctions. From then on, it was no longer a matter of self-protection but of a sense of justice.” Quoting the last minister of the interior of the Dutch government-in-exile in London, Jaap Burger, Van Randwijk stressed the difference between fout, as a matter of ideological conviction, and fouten begaan, making mistakes, due to a flawed judgment of the situation. The latter was very often the case, according to van Randwijk, since mentally the Netherlands was completely unprepared for the war. Although the nature of the Nazi regime was clear to anyone prepared to look across the eastern border, in the first years of the occupation many had hoped to negotiate a fair deal with the Germans, thus preserving at least part of the nation’s pride and independence. Only a few understood immediately the true nature of Nazi Germany and acted accordingly.1 While introducing nuances, or maybe even ambivalence, to the discussion of collaboration and resistance, Van Randwijk ultimately confirmed the view that there was a specific and limited group of Dutchmen who had been plainly wrong, that there had been a much larger group with at least a questionable sense of judgment, and that only those who had stood firm from the beginning deserved to be called good Dutchmen. This notion was particularly

72

Ido de Haan

strong among some members of the resistance in occupied Netherlands and in government circles in London, but most notably in the mind of Queen Wilhelmina. In exile in London, she had acquired much more power than her constitutional position justified, and from this position she sought a radical reform of the political system. Like many others who had deplored the divisiveness of the 1930s, Wilhelmina hoped to tear down the walls that had rent prewar society. She aspired to “a new Netherlands, in which all of us without distinction would be part of a heroic people.”2 The Netherlands should be led by the good citizens who had resisted the German forces, and be purged of the bad elements that had collaborated with the enemy. However, as Van Randwijk’s ruminations make clear, it was difficult to decide where to draw the line. The disagreement between those who prefer a more restricted definition of collaboration, and those who argue for a wider one has characterized the debate over collaboration from the moment of German capitulation until the present day. There was, however, a dramatic shift in the moral implications of these different perspectives. While the broader definition long served as justification for moral ambivalence in the face of Nazi policies, after 1960 it began to serve as a means of accusing the majority of Dutch society of complicity with them, and particularly in the persecution of the Jews. Since the beginning of the new millennium the pendulum has appeared to swing back in the other direction, explaining, if not justifying, not only the majority who “made mistakes” but also those who consciously chose to collaborate with Nazi Germany.

Collaboration in a legal framework In the immediate postwar years, collaboration was first and foremost defined in legal terms in regard to the prosecution of collaborators. As early as December 1943, the Dutch government-in-exile in London had drafted a Besluit Buitengewoon Strafrecht (Extraordinary Criminal Law Ruling, BBS) against collaboration with the enemy, including not only direct support but also exposing others, or threatening to expose others, to enemy violence. The punishment for these offenses varied, from revocation of citizenship to life imprisonment and the death penalty. The BBS deviated from the Dutch constitution, since it reintroduced retroactive justice and the death penalty, abolished in non-military criminal law in 1886. On the basis of the BBS and the regular criminal code, a total of 14,562 Dutch citizens were convicted of specific crimes related to collaboration with the enemy. The severest punishment was meted out to people involved in violence and murder. Some 1,342 were convicted of betrayal, in many cases of Jews in hiding. In general, informing on Jews was punished more severely than informing on other people, since almost without exception Jews were killed after they had been betrayed. Usually, participation in the persecution of Jews led to the death penalty. In total, 152 people were sentenced to death. Forty sentences were actually

Postwar Dutch society

73

carried out: thirty-nine men and one woman, the Jewess Ans van Dijk, who, after her arrest by the SD, betrayed a number of Jews hiding in Amsterdam.3 Public attention was drawn mainly to a number of high-profile cases involving leading Dutch National Socialists, such as the head of the NSB (Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, National Socialist Movement), Anton Mussert, the propagandist Max Blokzijl and Robert van Genechten, who occupied various high positions in the NSB, the wartime administration and the judiciary. The main line of defense of all three was that they had promoted a genuinely Dutch variant of National Socialism. They rejected the accusation that they had served an enemy power, maintaining, on the contrary, that they had only been seeing to the best interests of the Netherlands. However, many commentators observed a remarkable display of “very personal vanity.”4 Van Genechten exhibited a professorial pompousness, while Blokzijl proffered all kinds of arguments, perceived generally as cowardly subterfuge. Mussert’s defense was received with ambivalence. The reporter of the left liberal newspaper De Groene Amsterdammer heard only: [the] chit-chat of a half-developed person, who thinks he is quite something. … a dumb and vain braggart, whose petty bourgeois decency prevented even the chance of him becoming an illustrious crook. It is perhaps the cruelest thing to be said about a man who is facing death, but it needs to be said, because it is the truth: Mussert is ridiculous, and even facing the firing squad he will remain ridiculous.5 On the other hand, Herman Kuiphof of the popular periodical Wereldkroniek saw an idealist, who presented a passionate defense of the movement he had founded. Mussert has never been a great orator, nor is he now because sentence structure is still his weak point; but his plea is inspired, sometimes grim, at times sarcastic and now and then even humorous … Our words do not lack a certain element of appreciation. The reason, in our personal opinion, is that Mussert – despite the wrongness of his deeds and the crookedness of his ways – in essence envisaged the interests of our people.6 Collaborators were also prosecuted on the basis of the Tribunaalbesluit of September 1944. This ruling pertained to the prosecution of people who had not committed specific crimes but had failed to demonstrate loyal citizenship, such as members of the NSB, or war profiteers. These cases were judged by a lay tribunal – also a novelty in Dutch law. Punishment varied: detention, revocation of citizenship rights, or confiscation of property. The latter was unconstitutional, as were the lack of right to appeal and the absence of an official public prosecutor. Any citizen was allowed to file a complaint against any other citizen, which resulted in a total of 49,920 convictions. In two-thirds of these cases, citizenship was temporarily revoked, and almost all cases led to

74

Ido de Haan

confinement for varying periods in one of the dozens of detention camps around the country. Civil servants who collaborated were also prosecuted on the basis of the Zuiveringsbesluit (Purge Ruling) of January 1944. This was the means to carry out a purge of the civil service and the educational sector. It was also the model for disciplinary measures among the liberal professions, such as doctors, lawyers and artists. On the basis of the Zuiveringsbesluit, the authorities could suspend all civil servants with or without continuation of salary, and at the end of the purge, dismiss them, with or without half-pay. Later, other measures were added: official reprimand, demotion, or honorable discharge. After the German capitulation, hundreds of local purge committees were installed to judge thousands of suspended civil servants. Following complaints and apparent excesses, Interior Minister Louis Beel ordered the reinstatement, in December 1945, of all civil servants who had been suspended, with the exception of the “most serious” cases. Some 10 percent of a total of 380,000 civil servants were purged. About one-third of these, 11,500 in all, were considered to have been fout: these included members of the NSB and women who had been involved with German personnel. More exact figures are available for the burgomasters who, after the abolition of the city councils on March 1, 1941, were made responsible for all local affairs. At the beginning of the German occupation, 1,054 burgomasters were in service, of whom 726 remained until the end of the war. About one-third of these were purged: 131 were discharged, nine resigned under pressure, and 110 received a reprimand. Another ninety-five had “made mistakes,” but were left unharmed by the purge boards. This did not imply they were beyond moral reproach. For instance, not one burgomaster had protested officially against the disbandment of the city councils. Some burgomasters who received a reprimand had been instrumental in the deportation of Jews, a crime for which others had received the death penalty. Others, who escaped purge measures altogether had “cooperated in the arrest of Jews,” “given the address of a Jewish man to the SD,” “arrested three Jews on the request of the SD,” or “arrested Jews without any prior warning.”7 The sheer numbers involved in the purges and prosecutions constituted an important factor in the impression that the issue of collaboration made on post-war Dutch society. Out of a population of about 10 million, over 100,000 persons were convicted and imprisoned for varying lengths of time. The 120,000 to 150,000 arrests, 165,000 investigations, and some 400,000 personal files compiled in the process meant that many families, workplaces and neighborhoods were involved in the prosecution or purge of collaborators. The distinction between goed and fout thus became a very concrete instrument of social distinction and exclusion. Moreover, the purge was more severe in the Netherlands than in France, where a similar number were convicted but out of a much larger population. Quantitatively, it might be compared to that of Belgium. However, in the long run, its effects were less far-reaching because, especially in Flanders, collaborators suffered for decades as a result

Postwar Dutch society

75

of so-called repression. This qualitative difference is due not only to the entanglement of Flemish collaborators in domestic Flemish politics but to the fact that the purge of collaborators in the Netherlands soon met with strong resistance from various quarters.

From perpetrators to victims The newly installed political authorities placed high priority on the restoration of peace and order. In their view, this required a purge that was severe and fair, but quick.8 As leading politicians in 1945 stressed, there was a need for a new “synthesis,” bridging the world of the underground resistance and postwar political life, and which, said first postwar prime minister Willem Schermerhorn, “accords with perspectives other than those that count in the selection of personality and character, courage and perseverance, which have come to light in the world of the resistance.”9 Thus, the desire to leave the war behind undermined the zeal to follow a hard line, once the prosecution of collaborators became lengthy and tedious. This tendency was reinforced by the deplorable situation in some of the detention camps. Not only were basic material goods lacking, but it soon became clear that the regime in some of the camps was harsh and cruel. Hendrik Willem van der Vaart Smit, who was prosecuted for his support of the NSB, revealed in a widely read brochure that there was a constant lack of food, and that in many camps prisoners were tortured and sexually abused, in some cases resulting in their death. In comparison, he wrote, the German camps were worse, yet, “even if the German camps … were harsh and radical, the Dutch camps and prisons in peacetime are sadistic.”10 Comparisons of German and Dutch practices were very common. Arnold Meyer, leader of Zwart Front, a fascist organization that vainly competed with the NSB, wrote in a brochure entitled Pruisische practijken in herrijzend Nederland (Prussian Practices in the Reviving Netherlands): Apparently to some the word “democracy” needs to be defined in the sense that it grants rights only to those from their own party, in short, that it is actually no different from the state absolutism of the German National Socialists.11 Yet not only people targeted by the purge compared the extraordinary criminal law system with German practices. In April 1949, the former underground newspaper Het Parool justified an article on the situation in the detention camps by stating that “democracy is not served if we remain silent about it. When we shrug our shoulders and accept, this means a victory of the German mentality against which we always fought.”12 This was only the last in a series of newspaper publications denouncing “the weapons of the barbarians.” As an article of the radical periodical De Groene admonished on July 21, 1945: “We are not Nazis!”13

76

Ido de Haan

In August 1945, the radical theologian Krijn Strijd voiced his wish to “let our people be released from the Nazi shame … committed by Netherlanders.” According to Strijd, the treatment of NSB members was a test to prove postwar Dutch society’s worthiness for the newly acquired freedom, and he called especially upon “all the churches (Roman Catholic and Protestant) … to help the government remove this black stain from our new carpet.” The greatest danger did not come from the relatively limited group of NSB members, Strijd contended, but from the much larger group of “nazified Netherlanders, who think they are anti-national socialists … Among them are those who talk about ‘the Germans’ as they talked for years about ‘the Jews’.” Therefore, Strijd argued against a “Pharisaical attitude, as if the situation was: on the one hand, an NSB member, and on the other, “decent” society. It was not all that simple.”14 Thus, the controversy over the detention camps created a partial role reversal of perpetrators and victims, turning collaborators into victims of a disorderly purge and prosecutors into perpetrators comparable to Nazis.15 This confusion added to the already substantial aversion among civil servants, politicians and social leaders to the purge. As early as the end of 1945, a strong current emerged against the indiscriminate suspensions and often lengthy rehabilitation of civil servants.16 Moreover, many high-ranking civil servants and members of the prewar elite argued they had done nothing wrong. On the contrary, they claimed that they had been the only ones who had stood firm. This was the leading line of defense of the leadership of the Nederlandse Unie (NU), a political movement created in June 1940, which quickly mobilized a mass following of about 700,000 members. The leaders had two objectives: creating a counterweight to the NSB in order to prevent the nazification of Dutch society, and, grasping the opportunity of renewal following the political division and stagnation of the 1930s by strengthening Dutch national unity. Both objectives brought the NU both practically and perhaps also ideologically closer to the German occupier. In 1945, an official research committee on the NU and its triumvirate leadership concluded that mistakes had indeed been made, but that in general the movement had stood firm, particularly when it protested against the first anti-Jewish measures. Only in the 1960s, after one of the leaders of the NU, Jan de Quay, had become prime minister, did the mood against the NU become more negative.17 Further justification came from high-ranking civil servants, who had become the de facto executive authority after the Dutch government went into exile. Their defense was powerfully presented by Karel Johannes Frederiks, until 1944 secretary-general of the Ministry of the Interior, who was discharged in 1946 because of his “weakening influence on the spirit of resistance.” In his apology, Op de bres 1940–1944, he portrayed himself as someone who had resisted all the dangers that had threatened the well-being of the population. These included, according to Frederiks, not only the German occupying forces, but also the Dutch resistance movement and the

Postwar Dutch society

77

government-in-exile. Moreover, he argued that he had only followed the Aanwijzingen in geval van een vijandelijke inval (Instructions in the Event of a Foreign Invasion) of 1937, in which the government had ordered civil servants in wartime to stay put as long as they were able to serve the interests of the population, by keeping the institutions of state intact, fairly distributing the burdens of the occupation, mediating between the occupying force and the population, and protesting against infringements of international law. Frederiks seemed to accept that following this path of a lesser evil forced him to sacrifice the Jewish part of the population in order to assure the welfare of the majority. Yet he also defended his position by referring to the rescue of 632 Jews, who, due to his intervention, were exempted from deportation until September 1944, when they were all transported to Theresienstadt and survived.18 These so-called “Frederiks Jews,” or Barnevelders, named after the place where they had been interned until 1944, also figured in the arguments of other high-ranking civil servants, such as the secretary-general for economic affairs, Hans Max Hirschfeld, and the secretary-general for education, Jan van Dam. Lower-level civil servants argued that they had merely followed bureaucratic procedures, and that their only fault was that they had taken pride in their administrative duties. For instance, J. T. Veldkamp, director of the Amsterdam census bureau – which played a crucial role in the registration of Jews – noted in his memoir of the war period that he was mainly concerned with the workload the deportation of Jews had created for his bureau. Moreover, he deplored the arson attack by a resistance group in 1943 on the registry, by expressing his regret “that an administration which had cost so much time and effort, and to which one had contributed for years on end to make it as good as possible, was destroyed in a couple of hours.”19 Many of these civil servants were supported by the chairman of the Dutch parliament, the Catholic politician and lawyer Leonardus Gerardus Kortenhorst, in the immediate postwar years. In a brochure published in the fall of 1945, entitled Was samenwerking met de vijand geoorloofd? (Was Cooperation with the Enemy Allowed?), Kortenhorst argued that “if and in so far as the measures of the authorities de facto serve the interests of the defeated country, then the population is obliged, even morally, to obey its orders.”20 By implication, Kortenhorst presented administrative collaborators as a group that had served the interests of the country in good faith, just like, or maybe even better than the clandestine resistance. This point of view amounted to the “shield and sword” argument used in France to reconcile the Resistance under de Gaulle and the accommodation under Pétain. On the basis of these considerations, in December 1945 Kortenhorst formed a Comité voor Rechtszekerheid (Committee for Legal Security), supported by leading politicians from left to right, and whose mandate was to plead the case of higherranking civil servants unnerved by purge procedures. Not only did the prosecution and trials against collaborators come to be viewed with suspicion but the strict execution of punishments soon lost its

78

Ido de Haan

appeal. In 1946 a first group was pardoned on the grounds that their sentence was much more severe than that of people who were tried at a later date. On the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of Queen Wilhelmina in 1948 prison terms were reduced. These partial amnesties were based on traditional grounds of pardon: equal justice to all and special occasions. In the same year, Justice Minister Johannes Henricus van Maarseveen was pressured by his own Catholic Party to release “young men of good standing” who had been convicted for joining the Waffen SS, had no previous criminal record and “deserved to be reintegrated.” This wave of pardons led subsequent Ministers of Justice to adopt a new approach to the punishment and purge of collaborators. The exclusion of political delinquents from society ceased to be a priority, and emphasis was placed on their smooth reintegration. In 1949 and 1950 new waves of pardons followed, no longer preceded by an individual request but which brought about the release of a large category of convicts with fewer than ten years’ imprisonment to go; and, then, those convicted for up to fifteen years. The new minister of justice, Teun Struycken, was inspired to take this step by the notion of charity, presented by Pope Pius XII as the theme for the 1950 holy year.21 As of the early 1950s, people sentenced to death were also pardoned: first the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and then they were released. In 1960 the four Germans remaining in Breda prison fueled a continuous debate, which ended with the release of two of them who were still alive in 1989. None of the Dutch collaborators, some of whom had been involved in the most horrendous crimes, served a sentence of more than fifteen years.22

A failed purge? The tendency toward swift fairness and leniency in execution was rejected by those hoping for justice, revenge and renewal. Yet most of the pardons passed without much public outrage. In the early 1950s, the main protests were directed against commuting of the death penalty of the former head of the SD, Willy Lages, to life imprisonment. Both the Communist Party and the Jewish newspaper Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad (NIW) argued that “a deranged girl like Ans van Dijk was put to death while mass murderers were not”; Lages was eventually pardoned. Some 57,500 people signed a nationwide petition demanding that those serving life sentences should not be pardoned at a later date – also to no avail. Another campaign was launched in 1956 against the burgomaster of The Hague, Frans Schokking, who had handed over a Jewish family to the SD while he was burgomaster in another town in 1942. After six months of muckraking journalism, it became clear that not only had Schokking been involved in the deportation of the Pino family but his purge file had been suppressed and leading politicians had supported him although they knew of his dubious record. Ultimately Schokking had to resign, but the judicial procedure against him was not resumed.23

Postwar Dutch society

79

The campaign against Schokking, as well as other protests, was led by former members of the resistance. On the pages of their newspapers – Het Parool, Vrij Nederland and Trouw – there were strong protests against what was viewed as a failed purge and the continued presence of foute people in high places. In 1950, the Grote Advies-Commisssie der Illegaliteit (GAC), a committee established in July 1944 to unite all resistance groups, published a Witboek (White Paper), which stated: In the course of the purge the illegals [former resistance] were infuriated by the lack of resoluteness, force and consistency of government policy, a variety of norms in different sectors of the purge, inequity and inconsistency, a tendency, legalized by actual policies, to spare the great and to punish the small, to overestimate expertise, to underrate values such as character and principle. In general: that the Government and the People have failed to meet the measure, have fallen back into prewar pusillanimity, have not been chastened by the suffering of the occupation, are not elevated by the will to bring national life to a higher, broader level – all this caused disappointment and discouraged circles among the illegals.24 This image was eloquently presented in Volg het spoor terug (Follow the Track), published in 1953 by a former member of the “illegality,” as the resistance was called, J. B. Charles (alias the criminologist Willem Nagel). In this book, Charles warned against historical revisionism. In retrospect, it became clear that … the traitors still live on. They served their prison term (only the worst) and got half of it pardoned. They sit opposite you in the train, reading the morning paper of the enemy, mark my words. They sit there and read that the persecutions in Spain are not too bad and that we should show charity and that the illegals (whom at the time they had “transported”) had been stealing … 25 The purge was frequently evaluated negatively in the historiography of World War II in the Netherlands. Louis de Jong, for instance, quotes the Witboek word for word in the conclusion to his discussion of the purge in his multivolume work.26 Other historians were more positive. The American Henry L. Mason, military intelligence officer in the Netherlands from 1944 to 1946, pronounced in 1952 that the Dutch purge had involved a huge number of people, but had been hampered by the problematic status of political justice, the distance of the government-in-exile from the realities of the occupation, and the lack of experience due to Dutch neutrality in World War I. Nevertheless, the Netherlands … profited immensely from the fact that its purge was kept out of the sphere of party politics. No evidence could be found that any problem of

80

Ido de Haan the purge became a serious point of dispute among political, religious or social groups. Protestants and Catholics, conservatives and Socialists, men and women, workers and employers – all had formed a united front against the occupier.27

A less rosy picture emerged from the work of August David Belinfante, a former official of the Directoraat-Generaal voor de Bijzondere Rechtspleging (DGBR, Directorate for Extraordinary Law Enforcement) of the Ministry of Justice. In his 1978 study he drew attention to the maltreatment of collaborators in the detention camps and criticized the lack of publicity in the decision to grant pardons to ever increasing circles of collaborators, including Jew hunters and killers. However, he also concluded that the policy had actually led to a swift reintegration of collaborators into Dutch society and concurred with Mason that the purge had never been politically controversial.28 Peter Romijn, too, in his 1989 study, acknowledged the tendency to depoliticize the purge which, on the one hand, promoted a pragmatic and quite effective neutralization of the problem of collaborators within postwar Dutch society, yet on the other created the impression of opacity, inconsistency and injustice. Moreover, Romijn draws attention to the role of lawyers, criminologists and social workers, who in a joint effort transformed collaborators from a class of traitors and enemies of the nation into a group of individuals suffering from the social disease of political delinquency.29 The reintegration of collaborators was much facilitated by a huge organization, the Stichting Toezicht Politieke Delinquenten (STPD, Foundation for the Supervision of Political Delinquents). The STPD was supported by all members of the political establishment, had its main office in the building of the Dutch parliament and employed at its zenith more than 300 people. The foundation sought especially to reintegrate small-time collaborators and prevent them from being seduced by other totalitarian temptations. More remarkable than obvious anti-Communism in the objectives of the STPD is the explicit socio-psychological approach to collaborators. According to Klaas Toornstra, head of the mental health care section of the DGBR, “these were people who had lost track, due to all kinds of circumstances, due to political and social dull-headedness; misled by empty slogans. First and foremost, they needed guidance and help.”30 An even more mental health-centered perspective on political delinquents was presented in a speech to the STPD by the psychiatrist Albert Lourens Cornelis Palies. He argued that the German occupation had created a perfect opportunity for psychopaths to rape, plunder and kill. Since they were mentally disturbed, the legal approach was useless. Palies urged the STPD “to take into account the fact that there might be individuals among these people, who as a result of mental disturbances or of anomalies in temperament and character had joined the NSB and committed the most horrendous crimes.”31

Postwar Dutch society

81

This image of the collaborator as a victim of circumstance, or as a social dropout seduced by National Socialism, was also prominent in the literary representation of collaborators in the first decades after 1945. A clear example of this view is developed in the novella W.A. Man, by the Communist writer Theun de Vries, originally issued by the resistance publishers Busy Bee, in 1944. It describes Frans Dijkgraaf, who as a youngster became aware of the fact “that even within the petty bourgeoisie there were rungs, and that his parents stood on the lowest one.” Dijkgraaf “despised politics, since the concept was intrinsically linked to the days of the Red revolt.” After joining the NSB, he dressed in uniform, as a result of which “he lost the feeling of being the son of a small grocer … a boy who at school and in life always came out a loser.” Only after a cynical co-member of the NSB told him that “we National Socialists are nothing but derailed petty bourgeois who seek to connect with the garbage of the proletariat in order to survive” did he understand that the future lay in the hands of the working classes.32 In general, the conclusion to these stories was seldom stamped by Marxist orthodoxy, yet the diagnosis of political delinquents as the victims of modernization and political seduction was widely shared.33

Murderers among us A complex image of collaboration in the Netherlands had emerged by 1960. Most collaborators had been well shielded from public exposure. Their prison terms had ended, their citizenship was restored after ten years, and they had been converted into medical cases who could be reintegrated with the assistance of the welfare professions. Perhaps the most telling proof of effective repression of the entire issue was the fact that De Quay, scrutinized in 1945 for his role in the NU, became prime minister of a center-right government, without even a single debate about his political past. Yet at the same time, former resistance groups and newspapers, many of them with a relatively progressive viewpoint, continued to draw public attention to the failed purge. As Van Randwijk stated in a collection of articles he wrote beginning in the 1950s, Dutch society still stood “in the shadow of yesterday.”34 Like many others of his generation, he suspected that many collaborators had returned to high places, thus contributing to the sense that the “murderers are among us,” as Simon Wiesenthal argued in a book published at about the same time.35 In addition, on the international level, the Eichmann trial and renewed interest of the German judiciary in the prosecution of war criminals, following the establishment of the Bureau for the Prosecution of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg, contributed to the continuing focus on National Socialists and collaborators. In the Netherlands, this led to reinforcement of the concepts of goed and fout, which began to be used in an increasingly encompassing way, especially through remembrance of the persecution and murder of the Jews. After the Eichmann trial, another major influence was the publication in 1965 of the

82

Ido de Haan

two-volume study Ondergang (Ashes in the Wind, in the English translation), a history of the persecution of the Jews, by the historian Jacques Presser, which was a huge commercial success, selling over 140,000 copies within the year. Presser describes the persecution, on the one hand, conventionally, as a “cat-and-mouse game” between Germans and Jews. On the other, he writes explicitly from the perspective of the Jewish victims, whose voice had been muffled until then.36 Moreover, he adds a scathing criticism of the role of the administration, non-Jewish bystanders, and the Jewish Council, established in February 1941. Remarkably, Presser only mentions in passing the role of Dutch civil servants, railway officials and police officers in the persecution of the Jews. Presser compares the behavior of the non-Jewish population to that of Friedrich Weinreb, a Jewish healer, who in June 1945 was charged with espionage and betrayal of a large number of Jews, and in 1948 was sentenced to six years imprisonment. In the framework of the pardons granted on the occasion of Queen Wilhelmina’s fiftieth year in office, he was released on December 11, 1948. According to Presser, “the Jew Weinreb was made into a scapegoat, who had to pay for the failure of so many non-Jews. He had to have failed, to have failed too, since they had failed.”37 By suggesting that Weinreb should actually be considered a hero Presser contributed to a painful debate within the decimated Jewish community about the lack of Jewish resistance and even the involvement of the leadership of the Jewish Council in the deportation of the Jewish community. In December 1947, this discussion led to judgment by an internal Jewish council of honor, which advised banning the leaders of the Jewish Council from all public office, yet opposed bringing criminal charges against Abraham Asscher and David Cohen. After a public outrage they were released, and their case was dropped in 1951.38 In all these debates, Weinreb had appeared occasionally as an example, both of Jewish collaboration, and of the positive counterexample, of a Jew who had creatively and daringly tried to delude the Germans in a complicated game of deception.39 In the latter sense, Weinreb also became a hero of those who came to think that Dutch society had not dealt seriously with the collaborators in its midst, and consequently, was still in a sense a fascist society. His three-volume memoir, Collaboratie en verzet, attracted much attention, especially after a ferocious debate developed between leading literary figure Renate Rubinstein, who defended Weinreb, and Willem Frederik Hermans, who argued that Weinreb’s memoirs were a collection of fantasies of resistance concocted to cover up his crimes. In the end, an official commission established that Weinreb’s claims were false and that he had been justly convicted in 1948.40 This notion of widespread cooperation was reinforced by the Eichmann trial. In the Netherlands, the account of the trial by the novelist Harry Mulisch rather than Hannah Arendt’s report (Eichmann in Jerusalem) contributed to the idea that his acts might be explained more by a thoughtless normality than by abnormal cruelty.41 Together, these images led to a growing sense of a

Postwar Dutch society

83

generalized, if passive, responsibility for the persecution of the Jews.42 This perception was clearly represented in the documentary Vastberaden, maar soepel en met mate. Herinneringen aan Nederland 1938–1948, modeled after Marcel Ophüls’s Le Chagrin et la pitié, which stressed the continuities from the pre- to the postwar period, and the predominant accommodation with the Occupation.43 This conception also fed the sense of imminent danger that it could happen again. It fueled, for instance, the formation of a protest group against the 1971 census, which began after the lawyer and spokeswoman for Dutch Gypsies, Lau Mazirel, wrote letters of protest to Vrij Nederland; the Comité Waakzaamheid Volkstelling (Census Watchdog Committee, named after the Comité van Waakzaamheid, which in the 1930s had warned against the rise of Nazism) was established, among others, by the editor of Weinreb’s memoirs, Peter Muijlwijk. They argued that, like the registration of Jews by the German authorities, the census was the first step to the concentration camps.44 Radicalization of public opinion also led to renewed interest in individual collaborators. On the one hand, investigative journalists pressured the authorities to examine several high-profile cases of apparent collaboration, or even worse, involvement in war crimes, such as that of the Dutch antique collector Pieter Menten. Like many others, he had escaped close scrutiny in the late 1940s, yet in May 1976 it was revealed he had been an SS officer in Galicia. He was arrested and tried; an official research committee was also set up to investigate (and subsequently reject) rumors that at the time his case had been dropped as a result of political manipulation.45 Among others investigated in this period was the parliamentary leader of the Protestant Antirevolutionaire Partij, Willem Aantjes, who resigned in 1977 after it was revealed he had joined the German SS in 1944; and former Minister of Foreign Affairs (1956–71) and Secretary General of NATO Joseph Luns, who had been a member of the NSB – an allegation he denied, first claiming there was confusion with his brother, and later that he had never consciously joined the party. Finally, in 1979, a special prosecutor was appointed to investigate old cases against war criminals and crimes against humanity. No trials ever took place.46 Alongside this renewed interest in war criminals, the attitude toward collaborators in this period became more open. This fascination culminated in a series of interviews conducted with eight (out of 25,000) former Dutch members of the SS, “out of curiosity” and “unhampered by personal feelings,” as the authors stated in their introduction. The interviewees gave a frank account of their career before and during the war. In general, they showed little regret, although some distanced themselves from the destruction of European Jewry by doubting the figures or by stressing their disappointment in the Nazi regime.47 After 1980, there was also a small wave of “collaboration novels.” As Rolf Wolfswinkel argues in his account of the theme of collaboration in Dutch literature, the clear-cut moral scheme of right and wrong is effectively absent in these works. “The “enemy” has developed into an

84

Ido de Haan

object of curiosity and partial admiration, while collaborators have developed into potential idealists.”48

Accommodation Ultimately, the renewed interest in collaborators and the application of the notion of collaboration to various social phenomena increasingly blunted its sense. In 1983, dissatisfaction with this conceptual atrophy became manifest in the inaugural lecture of Hans Blom, professor of Dutch history at the University of Amsterdam. He argued that for too long the historiography of World War II in the Netherlands had been dominated by the moral categories of goed and fout. As a result of the close relation between historiography and purge in the first post-war years, the Dutch Institute of War Documentation and the semi-official historian of the war, De Jong, had emphasized the alternatives of resistance and collaboration. De Jong’s work had an enormous influence: over 100,000 copies of the complete series of twenty-nine volumes were sold. According to Blom, the possibility to get beyond De Jong “depended on the extent to which historians could break the spell of the political–moral question of goed and fout, and the associated perspective of collaboration and resistance.”49 He suggested reading the works of German historians Martin Broszat and Gerhard Hirschfeld, as well as those of Dutch historian Ernst Kossmann, commencing from the assumption that the majority of the population had not chosen between resistance and collaboration but had tried to adapt to the occupation. Blom’s lecture inspired a range of new research, which placed the notion of collaboration on a new footing. For instance, Guus Meershoek argued that the Amsterdam police force did not fit the model of initial accommodation and gradually growing resistance, which Hirschfeld and others had suggested.50 Meershoek demonstrated how police officers had been prepared to assist in the arrest of Jews in 1942, as a result of German policies which addressed a number of complaints that the officers had voiced since the 1930s.51 In his study of economic development between 1938 and 1948, Hein Klemann argued that most entrepreneurs kept a clear eye on their economic interests, and were able to contribute to economic prosperity, which continued until the end of 1941. As a result, “daily life could continue and the average Dutch person could ward off the suffering that comes with war in work and family.”52 Afterwards, German exploitation and finally outright plundering of the economy increasingly frustrated the possibility of accommodation, although material supply and production remained at an acceptable level until 1944. In the cultural sector, such as music, the German occupation was welcomed as an opportunity to improve work conditions, such as in orchestras – for non-Jews.53 At the universities, most professors tried to continue “business as usual,” an attitude that was prefigured by the strict separation of politics and science that had prevailed in the 1930s.54 On the other hand, the motives of declared academic collaborators were neither

Postwar Dutch society

85

opportunistic nor even clearly ideological, but derived from a mixture of political and scientific considerations, which drove some of them to seek support from Germany.55 In general, these studies confirmed the conclusion that resistance and collaboration failed to capture the range of options and motives that people had in their response to the German occupation. They profited from growing interest in the history of the war and collaboration by social scientists, who introduced more refined conceptual tools.56 It became clear that accommodation meant business could not continue as usual. It also implied an adjustment so that German demands could be met with minimal effort. In the context of an increasingly repressive and murderous German policy, this sometimes meant looking in the other direction, or even assisting in the injustices committed against clearly defined co-patriots. The inevitability of moral choices formed the basis for the protest by some commentators against Blom’s call to go beyond the distinction of goed and fout. His lecture was fiercely criticized by the literary historian Adriaan Venema, who wrote a multi-volume history denigrating the Dutch literary scene during World War II, in which he tried to vilify the reputation of some of the most respected authors, in some cases with an apparently solid resistance record.57 In addition, Nanda van der Zee, in her short account of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, reinstalled a clear moral framework. She accused the political elite, and above all Queen Wilhelmina, of having abandoned Dutch Jews, either by staying put and condoning antiJewish measures as the best way “to prevent the worst,” or by fleeing to London, where she and the government-in-exile showed little concern for their suffering.58 Moral indignation is also a prevalent element in the account of Joggli Meihuizen of the purge of economic collaborators. The Dutch government viewed this purge as a “necessary evil” that could hamper the rebuilding of society. Consequently, the purge was “dictated by opportunism in the service of reconstruction.”59 Some of these studies, notably Van der Zee’s indictment of Queen Wilhelmina, caused a stir; yet the fierce public debates of the 1960s and 1970s over collaboration did not continue after 1980. At the same time, these works confirmed the persistence of a predominantly moral perspective toward collaboration. In addition, former collaborators remained social outcasts. Nevertheless, there was a slight change in views. In the slipstream of the victim-centered approach of social problems, and also of the history of war and persecution that came to prevail after 1980, the children of former collaborators demanded recognition of their particular suffering. As part of a much larger group of second-generation victims, they found a niche to tell their story.60 This trend led to the publication of a series of novels, memoirs and confessions, all stressing the fact that while the children of collaborators bore “no guilt,” they received “the punishment all the same.”61 Further, their parents found a new opportunity to voice their concerns, generally their remorse about their wrongdoings, but also their feeling that they had been

86

Ido de Haan

victims of circumstances, thus returning to the predominant view of collaborators from the 1950s. This is most clearly demonstrated in “Social Psychological Research on Criminal Behavior in the Service of the German Occupying Force,” as the dissertation “De collaborateur” of Jacob Hofman is subtitled. Hofman concluded that “comparatively one may more often observe characteristics … which predispose to collaboration and political crimes.” [Yet] it is not so much their personal character as the perfidious Nazi regime that created the conditions of their criminal behavior from the moment they became, for whatever circumstances or motives, part of this regime. There occurred for them the tragic situation that they helped to sustain this regime, while at the same time they fell victim to it, in the sense that they lost their freedom to act.62 All these developments came together in the publication of Chris van der Heijden’s Grijs Verleden. Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog. In this concise account of World War II in the Netherlands, Van der Heijden explicitly adopted the agenda Blom had formulated in 1983. He argued that, instead of the heroic device luctor et emergo (I struggle and overcome) which inspired the Dutch resistance, most Dutchmen lived by the credo “I drift about and stay afloat.” Most choices made in the face of the German forces were inspired by opportunism. Pragmatism predominated not only among average Dutch people, but also among the Jews who reacted to the persecution, as well as among those who decided to join the SS. With this radical version of the accommodation argument, Van der Heijden invited the obvious comment that the moral grayness he observed could not be applied equally to victims and perpetrators.63 This criticism became more sharp-edged when it turned out that Van der Heijden was the son of a former Dutch National Socialist. The explanation of moral choices as the outcome of pragmatic evaluation in the face of dire circumstance was interpreted by some as justification for the inexcusable moral failures of his father.

Conclusion The reactions to Van der Heijden’s work belied his claim that World War II had lost its moral appeal, and that the Dutch could finally view it with an objective eye. Even today, remembrance of collaboration acts as a dividing line between them and us. References to Nazi sympathies or methods are among the sharpest political tools used regularly to discredit unfavorable policies or politicians. In daily parlance, too, the collaborator remains a recognizable negative stereotype. In the course of writing this chapter, I visited my local supermarket, where two young shop assistants were joking about the tasks they were assigned. When one of them apparently connected up with the wrong team, his colleague shouted: “Get lost, you traitor, NSB-er!” So

Postwar Dutch society

87

much for the deplored loss of historical consciousness among youth. The history of the collaboration remains clearly very much alive.

Notes 1 H. M. van Randwijk, “‘Fout’ en ‘goed’,” in J. Bolhuis, C. D. J. Brandt, H. M. van Randwijk and B. C. Slotemaker (eds.), Onderdrukking en verzet. Nederland in oorlogstijd, Vol. I (Nijmegen, n.d. [1949–54]), pp. 381–4. 2 Quoted by Cees Fasseur, Wilhelmina. Krijgshaftig in een vormloze jas (Amsterdam, 2001), pp. 463–4. 3 K. Groen, Als slachtoffers daders worden. De zaak van de joodse verraadster Ans van Dijk (Baarn, 1994). 4 Reine Friedman-van der Heide, Drie processen (Amsterdam, 1946), pp. 18–19. 5 G. Th. Kempe, De Groene Amsterdammer, December 8, 1945, quoted in Het proces Mussert (‘s Gravenhage, 1948), p. 302. 6 H. P. Kuiphof, Wereldkroniek, 8 December 1945, quoted in Het proces Mussert, p. 310. 7 W. Derksen and M. L. van der Sande, “Wij waren niet op heldendom geselecteerd,” in W. Derksen and M. L. van der Sande (eds.), De burgemeester, van magistraat tot modern bestuurder (Leiden, 1984), pp. 5–82, 69–72. 8 P. Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig. Politiek beleid inzake de bestraffing en reclassering van ‘foute’ Nederlanders 1945–1955 (Groningen, 1989). 9 Radio broadcast, Schermerhorn, July 1, 1945, quoted by Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig, p. 69. 10 H. W. van der Vaart, Kamptoestanden 1944–’45–1948 (4th edn., Haarlem, 1949), p. 44. 11 Arnold Meyer, Pruisische practijken in herrijzend Nederland (Oisterwijk, 1945), p. 12. 12 Quoted in A. van het Kamp, Kamptoestanden 1944–1952 (The Hague, 1973), p. 13. 13 Quoted in K. Strijd, Wat moet er met de NSB-ers gebeuren? (2nd edn., Hengelo, Overijsel, 1945), p. 1. 14 Strijd, Wat moet er met de NSB-ers gebeuren? passim. 15 Similarly, A. Ingwersen, Open brief aan Zijne Excellentie de Minister-president Prof. Ir. W. Schermerhorn (n.p., n.d. [Amsterdam, 1945]), strongly emphasizes the negative effect of the purge on children of collaborators. 16 L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Vol. 12 (The Hague and Leiden, 1988), pp. 479–85. 17 De Nederlandsche Unie en haar Driemanschap. Rapport uitgebracht door de daartoe op verzoek van het Driemanschap door Prof. Ir. W. Schermerhorn benoemde Commissie (Schiedam [1946]). See also Wichert ten Have, De Nederlandse Unie. Aanpassing, vernieuwing en confrontatie in bezettingstijd 1940–1941 (Amsterdam, 1999). 18 K. J. Frederiks, Op de bres 1940–1944. Overzicht van de werkzaamheden aan het Departement van Binnenlandse Zaken gedurende de oorlogsjaren (The Hague, 1945). 19 J. T. Veldkamp, Het Amsterdamse bevolkingsregister in oorlogstijd (Amsterdam [1954]), passim. 20 L. G. Kortenhorst, Was samenwerking met de vijand geoorloofd? (The Hague, 1945), p. 19. 21 A. D. Belinfante, In plaats van bijltjesdag. De geschiedenis van de Bijzondere Rechtspleging na de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Assen, 1978), pp. 513–40. 22 Belinfante, In plaats van bijltjesdag, pp. 436–58, 542–66.

88

Ido de Haan

23 Ido de Haan, Na de ondergang. De herinnering aan de Jodenvervolging in Nederland 1945–1995 (The Hague, 1997), pp. 104–16 24 H. W. Sandberg, Grote advies-commissie der illegaliteit. Witboek over de geschiedenis van het georganiseerde verzet voor en na de bevrijding (Amsterdam, 1950), p. 154. 25 J. B. Charles, Volg het spoor terug (Amsterdam, 1984 [1953]), p. 14. The “enemy newspaper” was De Telegraaf, which had continued publication during the war and was banned until September 1949; see Jan Driever and Jan Brauer, Perszuivering. De Nederlandse pers 1944–1951 (Weesp, 1984). 26 De Jong, Het Koninkrijk, Vol. 12, pp. 476–7. 27 Henry L. Mason, The Purge of the Dutch Quislings: Emergency Justice in the Netherlands (The Hague, 1952), p. 139. 28 Belinfante, In plaats van bijltjesdag. 29 Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig; see also P. Romijn, “The Image of Collaboration in Post-war Dutch Society,” in Bulletin du Comité international d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 27/28 (1995), special issue 1945: Consequences and Sequels of the Second World War, pp. 311–24. 30 Quoted in Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig, p. 232. 31 A. L. C. Palies, De politieke delinquent. Enige sociale en psychiatrische aspecten bij de berechting en reclassering van politieke delinquenten. Met een voorwoord van P. J. Bouman (Assen, 1948), p. 21. 32 Theun de Vries, W.A.-man (Amsterdam, 1982 [1944]), pp. 27, 31, 47, 57. 33 See Rolf Wolfswinkel, Tussen landverraad en vaderlandsliefde. De collaboratie in naoorlogs proza (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 47–83. 34 H. M. van Randwijk, In de schaduw van gisteren. Kroniek van het verzet in de jaren 1940–1945 (Amsterdam, Baarn and The Hague, 1967). 35 S. Wiesenthal, Moordenaars onder ons (Amsterdam and Brussels, 1967 [1966]); see also Koos Groen, Landverraders, wat deden we met ze? (Baarn, 1974); Koos Groen, Landverraad. De berechting van collaborateurs in Nederland (Weesp, 1984). 36 De Haan, Na de ondergang, p. 28. 37 J. Presser, Ondergang. De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940–1945, Vol. 2 (The Hague, 1985 [1965]), p. 110. 38 J. Th. M. Houwink ten Cate, ‘De justitie en de Joodsche Raad’, in E. Jonker and M. van Rossem (eds.), Geschiedenis en Cultuur. Achttien opstellen (The Hague, 1990), pp. 149–68; Veld, N. C. K. A. in ‘t Veld, De Joodse Ereraad (Amsterdam, 1989). 39 I. Schöffer, “Weinreb, een affaire van lange duur,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 95 (1982), pp. 196–224; Regina Grüter, Een fantast schrijft geschiedenis. De affaires rond Friedrich Weinreb (Amsterdam, 1997). 40 Friedrich Weinreb, Collaboratie en verzet 1940–1945: een poging tot ontmythologisering, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1969); Grüter, Een fantast schrijft geschiedenis; D. Gilthay Veth and A. J. van der Leeuw, Rapport door het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie uitgebracht aan de Minister van Justitie inzake de activiteiten van drs. F. Weinreb gedurende de jaren 1940–1945, in het licht van nadere gegevens bezien (2 vols., The Hague, 1976). 41 Harry Mulisch, De zaak 40–61. Een reportage (Amsterdam, 1961). 42 J. Bank, Oorlogsverleden in Nederland (Baarn, 1983), p. 23. 43 H. J. A. Hofland, H. Keller and H. Verhagen, Vastberaden, maar soepel en met mate. Herinneringen aan Nederland 1938–1948 (Amsterdam, 1976). 44 J. Katus, Volkstelling in opspraak. Een studie naar de overheidsvoorlichting met betrekking tot de volkstelling van 1971 (Leiden, 1984). 45 J. C. H. Blom, A. C. ‘t Hart and I. Schöffer, De affaire-Menten 1945–1976. Eindrapport van de commissie van onderzoek betreffende het opsporings- en vervolgingsbeleid

Postwar Dutch society

46 47

48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

89

inzake Menten vanaf de bevrijding tot de zomer van 1976 en de invloeden waaraan dat beleid al dan niet heeft blootgestaan (The Hague, 1979). P. M. Brilman, “Een strafrechtelijke nalatenschap,” in D. Barnouw, M. de Keizer and G. van der Stroom (eds.), 1940–1945: Onverwerkt verleden (Utrecht, 1985), pp. 163–78. Armando and Hans Sleutelaar, De SS-ers. Nederlandse vrijwilligers in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1967); for a more reasoned report of interviews, see J. Th. M. Houwink ten Cate and N. C. K. A. in ‘t Veld, Fout. Getuigenissen van NSB-ers (SDU, 1992). Wolfswinkel, Tussen landverraad en vaderlandsliefde, p. 136. The novels are Louis Ferron, Hoor mijn lied, Violetta (1982); A. ten Hooven (alias Adriaan Venema), Lemmingen (1982); Dirk Ayelt Kooiman, Montyn (1982; the English version, Montyn, a Lamb to Slaughter, also mentions Jan Montyn as co-author); Adriaan Venema, Het dagboek (1990). J. C. H. Blom, In de ban van goed en fout? Wetenschappelijke geschiedschrijving over de bezettingstijd in Nederland (Bergen, 1983), p. 11. Hirschfeld had argued in his study of the German occupation of the Netherlands that, at least until the end of 1941, the attitude of the population had to be characterized as “attentism,” “the preparedness of the majority of the population to accept the political consequences of military defeat and to reach a modus vivendi with the victorious Occupation forces in order to restore order and authority.” G. Hirschfeld, Bezetting en collaboratie. Nederland tijdens de oorlogsjaren 1940–1945 in historisch perspectief (Haarlem, 1991 [1984]), p. 250. Guus Meershoek, Dienaren van het gezag. De Amsterdamse politie tijdens de bezetting (Amsterdam, 1999). Hein Klemann, Nederland 1938–1948. Economie en samenleving in jaren van oorlog en bezetting (Amsterdam, 2002), p. 566. Pauline Micheels, Muziek in de schaduw van het Derde Rijk. De Nederlandse symfonie-orkesten 1933–1945 (Zutphen, 1993). Peter Jan Knegtmans, Een kwetsbaar centrum van de geest. De Universiteit van Amsterdam tussen 1935 en 1950 (Amsterdam, 1998). Peter Jan Knegtmans, Paul Schulten and Jaap Vogel, Collaborateurs van niveau. Opkomst en val van de hoogleraren Schrieke, Snijder en Van Dam (Amsterdam, 1996). Cor Lammers, “Levels of Collaboration: A Comparative Study of German Occupation Regimes during the Second World War,” Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences 31 (1995), pp. 3–31, Adriaan Venema, Blommeldingen (Amsterdam, 1990); Adriaan Venema, Schrijvers, uitgevers en hun collaboratie (5 vols., Amsterdam, 1988–92). Nanda van der Zee, Om erger te voorkomen. De voorbereiding en uitvoering van de vernietiging van het Nederlandse jodendom tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1997). Joggli Meihuizen, Noodzakelijk kwaad. De bestraffing van economische collaboratie in Nederland na de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 2003), p. 751. See Ido de Haan, “The Construction of a National Trauma: The Memory of the Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands,” Netherlands Journal for Social Science 34 (1998), pp. 196–217. Rinnes Rijke, Niet de schuld, wel de straf. Herinneringen van een NSB-kind (Bussum, 1982); see also R. Berserk, De tweede generatie. Herinneringen van een NSB-kind (Utrecht and Antwerp, 1985); Sytze van der Zee, Potgieterlaan 7. Een herinnering (Amsterdam, 1997). Earlier Van der Zee published Voor Führer, Volk en Vaderland. De SS in Nederland (Amsterdam, 1992), in which his personal connection with the theme remained unmentioned.

90

Ido de Haan

62 J. Hofman, De collaborateur. Een sociaal-psychologisch onderzoek naar misdadig gedrag in dienst van de Duitse bezetter (Amsterdam, 1981), p. 275. 63 Ido de Haan, “Een wereldbeeld in grijstinten,” review of Chris van der Heijden, Grijs verleden. Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 2001) in Vrij Nederland 62 (2001), pp. 62–3. The debate over Van der Heijden’s family background, notably the arguments of author Leon de Winter, also appeared in the summer 2001 issues of Vrij Nederland.

6

Turning a blind eye Aspects of Holocaust memory in Belgium Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

Introduction Sixty years after the deportations of the Jews, it is perhaps time for Belgium, following the example of France, to acknowledge the Belgian state’s involvement in and accountability for the Nazi persecutions carried out on its territory. True, there are no grounds for comparing France and Belgium. France had a government – a head of state, ministers, and public services – which was independent, collaborationist and officially racist, whereas Belgium’s government, at odds with the king, had opted for exile. Nevertheless, from Brussels to Antwerp, via Liège and Charleroi, Nazi Germany could not have implemented the Final Solution without the active cooperation of local intermediaries, in the public services and the police force alike. Otherwise, it is inconceivable that fifteen German SS personnel could have organized the deportation from Belgium of some 25,000 individuals. Until recently, community-based conflicts kept the Shoah from occupying a place in the heart of Belgian memory of World War II. Now, although the path has been a rocky one, the Jews have set foot on the terrain of the history of World War II in Belgium. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part will analyze Belgium’s perception of collaboration, concentrating mainly on political differences over this issue between Flanders and the two largely francophone regions of Belgium, Brussels and Wallonia. The second part will examine the country’s complex attitude to the memory of the Holocaust, and particularly to Belgian collaboration in the deportation of the Jews, and to the interests and compensation of Jewish victims and their descendants.

Memories of collaboration: Flemish and francophone perspectives Occupied Belgium Unlike its French and Dutch neighbors, Belgium was placed under the authority of a German military administration, which stayed in power almost until liberation in September 1944. The Germans’ idea was to make maximum use of the existing administrative machinery. As a result, the Collège

92

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

des Secrétaires généraux des ministères, which was given legislative and executive powers under a law dated May 10, 1940, became the military governor’s primary interlocutor. Acting on the basis of both realism and political opportunism, the military occupation regime inaugurated by Germany thus left the running of the country in the hands of the existing national and local authorities. This approach was used in the implementation of “measures against Jews,” the infamous Maβnahmen gegen Juden. “It was the officials from the former system, both at the top and at the bottom who, whether willingly or not, played their prescribed roles in the anti-Jewish scenario.”1 In the name of a policy of “the lesser of two evils” and “maintaining a presence” (politique de présence), these individuals agreed to work with the victor of the moment. Seen from this perspective, Belgium’s Jews – the vast majority of whom were foreigners – could be entirely ignored in the equation. Rather, they would be pawns in the hands of the German authorities. From the outset, the country’s highest authorities, both administrative and legal, endorsed the lesser-of-two-evils line, even providing it with a legal formula which refined the concept of passively implementing the occupier’s antiJewish orders. The Belgian authorities adjusted their services to carry out a persecution which, though desired by a Nazi occupier, ran counter to the country’s constitutional principles, international law during wartime, and the law of nations. In Antwerp, the main “Jewish” city in terms of the size of its Jewish population at the start of the occupation, the police and the municipal services soon became accustomed to doing all the Germans’ work, including rounding up the Jewish deportees from 1940 onward. In the Antwerp metropolitan area – unlike in Brussels, where the mayors of the communes refused to lend their police forces for this purpose – the reinforcements provided by the communal police were decisive, despite the fact that Antwerp’s mayor was a staunch Catholic (see p. 98).2 In the case of Belgium one cannot refer to “state collaboration” as in Vichy France because the Nazi occupier “had no use for it in its geopolitical plans.”3 Today we know that members of the traditional elites, both on the left, such as Henri de Man, and on the Catholic right, tried unsuccessfully to benefit from Belgium’s collapse in order to set up an authoritarian or fascisttype “new order,” which they would have controlled. This anti-democratic attitude affected the king as well, who wished to set up a royal government.4 However, the German occupier was not interested in any – even royalist – collaboration on the part of the state. At the beginning, at least, the Germans were content to use the local authorities to pass on their directives. They also knew that they could count on the various far right movements, which were itching to take power in the north and south. The far right prior to the occupation The history of the far right in Flanders goes back to 1931, when Joris van Severen founded the Verdinaso (Verbond van Dietsche Nationaal

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

93

Solidaristen, Union of Dutch National Solidarists). The party stated that it opposed democracy (“partisan democracy stinks”) and the Jews (“The Jewish people, more than any other peoples, display very acute signs of degeneracy of a sexual origin”). Its goal was to set up a state, comprising Flanders, the Netherlands and French Flanders (Diets, in Flemish). In 1940, following the death of Joris van Severen (who was shot by French soldiers), Verdinaso’s members joined the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV, Flemish National League). The VNV had been founded in 1933 by Staf de Clercq, with the goal of setting up a Flemish state separate from Wallonia. On the eve of the war this extreme right-wing party was gaining ground, having won nearly 15 percent of the vote in the 1939 general elections, compared to 13.6 percent in the 1936 parliamentary elections. In parallel to these Flemish groups, a particularly powerful nationalist far right movement called the Rex Party had emerged. Rexism was created by Léon Degrelle in 1930 on the basis of the slogan “Christus Rex,” “Christ the King.” Rexist ideology called for the moral renewal of Belgian society in accordance with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, by forming a corporatist society in which democracy would be abolished. The Rexist movement attracted supporters primarily among francophone Belgians. In the 1936 parliamentary elections, Rex won 11.49 percent of the vote, gaining twenty-two seats out of 202 in the Chamber of Deputies. During the prewar years, Rex enjoyed Nazi Germany’s support. Léon Degrelle met Hitler in 1936. He also signed an alliance with the VNV. Such steps did not please his electorate, and his popularity plummeted on the eve of World War II. In 1939, Rex won just 4.43 percent of the vote. Even in Wallonia, Rex had become a fringe party. In autumn 1940, most French-speakers considered Degrelle and his followers to be traitors.5 Everything conspired to make VNV and Rex members ready for ideological collaboration. For both groups, the 1940 defeat was viewed as their hour for revenge on Belgian democracy. The far right during the occupation It was logical for the Germans to rely on Staf de Clercq’s VNV in Flanders. However, although VNV members were given positions of authority, their aspirations for the future autonomy of their region were ignored. Under pressure from De Vlag, a more extremist movement which enjoyed the support of the SS and favored Flanders’ annexation to Germany, the VNV had to radicalize its stand. Thus de Clercq declared, “We are faithful to Adolf Hitler. The Flemish are Germans … That is why we will be racist, anglophobe and anti-Jewish.” Because its popularity had declined since 1937, the largely francophone Rex movement also tried to outdo its rivals, especially since the Germans displayed a clear preference for the Flemish nationalists, whom they considered more disciplined and undeniably more Germanic.6 Hence, Degrelle began adopting the Nazi salute and in January 1943 he

94

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

stressed the German character of the Walloons, even requesting that Belgium be annexed to the Reich. Such rhetoric was purely opportunist in nature, intended to persuade the Germans to grant them political power. However, his extremist stance would eventually prove to be counterproductive, since his followers were more ultra-conservative than fascist.7 All these groups provided recruits for the SS. They organized militias and auxiliary forces for the German army and, after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, legions of volunteers took part in the “crusade against Bolshevism” on the eastern front. The liberation: from freedom to rupture For most of the population, French- and Dutch-speakers alike, the liberation in September 1944 meant a time of rejoicing and togetherness. It was an important historical moment, although the confrontation between the Leopoldists (the party of the king) and the Resistance prevented complete identification between the nation and the latter. Logically, it was also a time for punishing collaborators. True, as underscored by Luc Huyse and Steven Dhondt, there were more civilian trials in Flanders than in Wallonia: “There was nothing surprising in this: purging was aimed first and foremost at political collaboration, and there was more of this in the north than in the south.”8 There was indeed a marked difference between north and south: 4.40 percent of the Flemish population were investigated for collaboration compared with 3.38 percent of the French-speaking population (outside of Brussels), which adds up to about 100,000 individuals. As for those found guilty, the figures are 0.73 percent of the Flanders population compared with 0.52 percent of the Walloon one. In contrast, more death sentences were carried out in Wallonia than in Flanders – 122 compared with 105, respectively, and a further fourteen in the Brussels district.9 Nevertheless, although the punishments meted out were in no way antiFlemish, in practice they were directed primarily at the Flemish nationalist movements, most of which had collaborated ideologically with the Nazi occupier. More than one French-speaker thought, naively, that this would put a definitive end to Flemish nationalism. Many French-speakers, failing to properly understand the shifts occurring in the balance of power in the north of the country, genuinely hoped that the Flemish movement would be consigned to the trashcan of history, together with the Rex Party. Others even expected that it would be possible to benefit from crushing Flemish nationalism once and for all.10 This was a far cry, however, from what would actually transpire. The triumphant patriotism of the first years of liberation barely survived, mainly because of the “royal question.” Paradoxically, the challenge to the king’s cause by the mostly French-speaking secular bloc resulted in radicalization of the Flemish movement, initially Leopoldist, and then Flemish nationalist.

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

95

The royal question Withstanding the Belgian government’s urgent appeals to join it in exile, Léopold III had chosen to remain in Belgium. Placed under house arrest at his castle in Laeken, he considered himself a “prisoner in his own palace.” This attitude was responsible for the “royal question,” which became controversial throughout Belgium immediately after the liberation.11 To resolve the crisis, the Belgian government was forced to hold a referendum on the return of the king to the throne. The referendum took place on March 12, and the results were close: 57.68 percent of Belgians were in favor of the monarch’s return compared with 41.3 percent against. The population was divided, with city dwellers tending to be anti-Leopoldist, while country folk supported his return; above all, 72.2 percent of Flemings backed the monarch, compared with 42 percent of Walloons who fiercely opposed his behavior during the war. The decision of the new Catholic government instituted following the June 1950 elections proved to be disastrous. The most violent reactions took place in the Walloon industrial basins, and particularly the Liège area. On July 30, 1950 gendarmes shot and killed three men during a demonstration in Wallonia. To avert a civil war, Léopold III abdicated in favor of his son, Baudouin. Belgian society was scarred by these events for many years. Together with the education question, it revealed the divisions in Belgian society. Although they made up the majority of the population, Dutch-speakers, who once again had their views subjugated to those of French-speakers, turned against the Belgian state, which they considered unduly favored Walloons. The royal question also eased the move of most Flemish opinion toward identifying with the memory of Flemish collaborators. As historian Pieter Lagrou puts it: The anti-Leopoldist coalition in power from August 1945 to March 1947 had presented itself as “the resistance government” and assumed the mantle of resistance and anti-fascism, an approach that triggered a certain amount of resentment in Flemish Catholic and Leopoldist circles … Gradually, Flemish public opinion was alienated by the identification of anti-fascist memory with the cause of the anti-Leopoldists, secularism and the unity of the state. In its search for an alternative identification, it ultimately opted for the cause of Flemish collaboration which, it maintained, had fallen victim to an excessively disproportionate degree of purging.12 This Flemish turnabout enabled the nationalist movements to emerge from the ostracism imposed on them by collaboration. Confronted by the antiLeopoldist secular parties, the Flemish Catholics of the Christian Socialist Party (PSC) moved closer to the Flemish nationalists in the hope of being able to harness their votes. From the 1950s onward, the Flemish political

96

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

world no longer considered it taboo to show approval of Flemish nationalist collaboration. Thus, “from the end of the 1940s on, Flemish Catholic public opinion was largely won over by the idea that there was a positive aspect to Flemish national collaboration and that the crackdowns had to be eliminated.”13 In 1954, the process was completed with the creation of the Volksunie, a nationalist party openly intended to attract people known as inciviques, those disqualified by the post-war trials from exercising certain civic rights as a punishment for being collaborators. The period of myths At this point, the memory of collaboration appeared to split between Belgium’s north and south. French-speakers increasingly placed the Flemish movement and Nazi Germany in the same camp, and developed the myth of a Wallonia identified with the idea of resistance and grass-roots democracy. This view was not entirely unwarranted.14 Clearly the promise of a Flemish state played a major role in intensifying such collaboration, and explains why the Flemish ultra-nationalist movements, already won over to fascist thinking, fell into line so readily with the Nazis. From this point on the French-speaking public had a foreshortened view of Flemish society (since the Resistance had members in Flanders just as there were collaborators in Wallonia), according to which Flemings had collaborated across the board. This perception became especially convenient to both Flemings and Walloons: from the 1950s on Flemish historiography idealized collaboration and presented the punishments and crackdowns as a settling of anti-Fleming accounts. In response, an equally absurd Flemish collaborationist myth came into being countering the Walloon myth about everyone being in the Resistance. According to this fiction, on liberation, the Belgian authorities had unleashed a merciless purge against the Flemish nationalists, the goal being to wipe out the Flemish movement once and for all. The idea was to justify collaboration by demonizing the crackdown. Until the 1980s Flemish historiography embraced this view of the purge as a “brutish anti-Flemish pogrom.” Thus, the collaborators were merely idealists who had gone astray and who during the interwar period had seen how their people had been oppressed by the Belgian state. The only thing for which they could be criticized was naivety in believing the Nazi promises to free them. By highlighting their idealism and love of their people, this argument clearly skirted round the very ideological foundations of their choice to collaborate. Although it cannot be asserted that these two mythical views have changed entirely, they have evolved considerably since the early 1990s. in response to the emergence of an alternative memory on the part of the Flemish left, justifiably based on Flemish resistance to Nazism, and even more strongly, as Lagrou contends, when they took account of the Shoah.

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

97

Belgium and the Shoah: from denial to repentance Collaboration in deporting the Jews Until the 1980s, the debate in Belgium centered largely on the communitybased dimension of collaboration and resistance. It was only “when the reference to genocide became an instrument in the struggle against the worrying inroads made by the far right in Flanders during the 1990s that the fate of the Jews who were murdered during the occupation was recalled.”15 Growing international interest in the fate of the Jews during World War II seemed to have played a crucial role in undermining and countering the Flemish victim-based myth: “Focusing on the horrors of the antisemitic persecutions eventually shed a more sordid light on the Nazi regime than previously.”16 Attesting to this change in perspective, the new Encyclopedia of the Flemish Movement adopts an unequivocal position from the first edition. It analyzes collaboration for what it was, not as an overblown lesser-of-two-evils policy, draped in the mantle of the sacred cause of Flanders, but uncompromisingly, as adopting the occupier’s aims and ideology. Nor does the encyclopedia hesitate to categorize the VNV as having been overtly fascist from the outset.17 There is also progress in research on the French-speaking side as a result of awakened interest in the Shoah. The Walloon myth that everyone was in the Resistance is being partially revised, in light of new historical work, such as Thierry Rozenblum’s study of the role of the mayor in the persecution of the Jews of Liège.18 Rozenblum reveals the murky role played by Joseph Bologne, who, in order to protect his Socialist and Freemason friends, had no hesitation in providing the occupier with tokens of good faith. Hence in May 1941 he gave to the local Verwaltungschef (administrative head) a list with the names of some 180 Communist militants in the Liège region, and in July the register of the Jews. In September 1942, he provided the occupying authorities with the names of some thirty known criminals and “procurers.” Without ignoring the role played by “collaborators,” recent studies by historians highlight the responsibility that might be ascribed to the Belgian administrative and police apparatus.19 True, in the spring of 1941 the occupying forces installed the Flemish ultra-nationalist Gerard Romsée, representing the new order, in the key position of Secretary General of the Interior Ministry. However, from the highest to the lowest levels, it was the previous regime’s officials who, from the autumn of 1940 onward, whether willingly or reluctantly, played the role laid down in the Germans’ anti-Jewish scenario, and provided them with local registers of Jews. Adapting themselves to the Nazi occupation regime, they agreed, by entering the “Jews by race” in a special register, to implement an order that ran counter to the constitutional principles and laws of the occupied country.20 There can be no denying the fact that these racist and antisemitic registers, drawn up and maintained by Belgian public servants, made it possible to

98

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

persecute the country’s Jews. Based on studies chronicling the deportation of the Jews of Belgium,21 we must acknowledge that this “administrative collaboration” was not the upshot of siding with the occupying forces on an ideological level but rather of the Belgian authorities’ policy of the lesser of two evils (passive implementation of the occupying forces’ anti-Jewish edicts) in order to protect the Belgian nation. Undoubtedly, the administration committed sins of omission. Neither top-ranking civil servants nor judges questioned the occupying forces’ commands, passing on their orders when it came to stripping Jews of social security benefits and excluding Jewish children from school. There was no reaction to racist edicts unless they affected the few Belgian nationals among the Jewish community (who constituted only 6.6 percent of the total Jewish population).22 An exception to this “passive” approach occurred in Antwerp, where the local police played an active role in the major roundups. From summer to autumn 1942, no fewer than 17,000 of the total of 25,000 Jews deported from Belgium had been shipped to Auschwitz by the end of the occupation (see Table 6.1). Over the same period, during which three large-scale round-ups took place in Antwerp, some 2,558 Jews, or the equivalent of two or three trainloads, were assembled with the cooperation of the city police. It should be recalled that the Antwerp local services undertook unhesitatingly to distribute the infamous yellow stars. The police carried out the German orders in the context of the deportations. On one occasion, police officers, acting on their own on the night of August 28, made arrests in the Jewish quarter at the central railway station; on the night of August 15, although they arrested only twenty or so, their mission was to secure the Jewish residential concentrations so that the Feldgendarmes and Flemish SS could do their work. On September 11, they acted as escorts for the Jews who had been arrested. In the meantime, they assembled over 1,000 Antwerp Jews for deportation at the Atlantic Wall shipyards. With their “repatriation” to Malines for the last transports of the year, the Antwerp police helped round up 15 percent of the 17,000 Jews sent to Auschwitz in this acute phase of the expulsion. These Antwerp musters, which have been allowed to sink into oblivion, may be compared to the infamous Vel d’Hiv round-up in Paris. Although the political and police context was different, the two events have relatively the same historical import, and while taking account of their specific characteristics Table 6.1 The xenophobic paradox in the Final Solution in Belgium: deportations of citizens v. deportations of foreigners Population

Deportees

Jews

No.

%

No.

%

% deportees in population

Citizens Foreigners Total

3,680 51,991 55,671

6.6 93.4 100

1,203 23,931 25,134

4.9 95.1 100

32.69 46.02 45.14

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

99

they underpin the modus operandi of the Final Solution in the west in 1942: the mandatory role of the local police as intermediaries in assembling foreign Jews through massive raids, thereby increasing the efficiency of the operation. Because of their policies of politique de présence and the lesser of two evils, on the one hand, and because of police collaboration in the case of Antwerp, on the other, the administration – Belgium’s sole representative during the occupation – was very seriously involved in the persecution and deportation of the Jews. Failure to recognize this collusion, which violated the law of nations, constitutes a denial of justice as well as of memory. A past that cannot yet be left in the past Belgian memory cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the machinations of both the national and local public services during the occupation. Undoubtedly, the racist and antisemitic registers drawn up by Belgian public servants made the persecution feasible.23 Confronted with this undeniable fact, the least that can be said is that successive governments have demonstrated extreme caution. Belgian evasion tactics were evident in the “historic” speech made by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt in October 2002 on the occasion of the annual remembrance ceremony at the Dossin barracks in Malines, where the Jews were gathered for deportation. Although the prime minister acknowledged the responsibility that a number of Belgians bore for the persecution of the Jews (“There were too many who sank into the abyss of collaboration, including the administration”), by masking the machinations of the state apparatus and by ascribing collaborationism to the acts of individuals he managed to avoid uttering the slightest apology to the Jews on Belgium’s part.24 When all is said and done, his Malines speech – in contrast to his appearance at Kigali, where he courageously asked for the forgiveness of Rwanda’s Tutsis – will hardly go down in history.25 It lags far behind president Chirac’s July 1995 declaration, in which he recognized the responsibility of the French state in the liquidation of French Jewry. No doubt this difference can be explained by the enforced nature of the exercise, which was an obligatory, involuntary fulfillment of pressures, including that of the media, which led the prime minister to address Belgium’s Jewish community. At a time when an agreement had finally been reached between the state, the banks and the insurance companies, settling the question of looted Jewish assets and paying compensation to eligible parties, a number of voices were raised in the Jewish community denouncing the attitude of the public authorities both during and after the country’s “liberation.” Indeed, the Jews were completely overlooked and ignored in the task of national reconstruction. The post-1945 situation, even after the Belgian–German settlement of September 28, 1960, to the tune of DM80 million, was extremely unfavorable to them.

100

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

1945–2003: the status of Belgian Jewish deportees A perusal of the postwar press reveals that the annihilation of the Jews was not a major concern in Belgium – a situation that remained unchanged until the 1980s.26 During the postwar period, there was no reference to the extermination of the Jews, no contrition, no talk of reparations. The focus was only on economic and patriotic reconstruction. After 1945, the Belgian state did not grant any form of recognition to Jewish victims of racial persecution on its territory, which included registration as Jews, leaving “Aryan” schools, remaining at home during the hours of the “Jewish” curfew, wearing the yellow star, and deportation. Even worse, no specific status was given to deportees (or related individuals with a legal claim to compensation). In defining “war victims,” the legislators undertook to belittle, not to say discount, the suffering of Jewish deportees who were murdered as soon as they reached their destinations, giving priority, instead, to love of one’s homeland and selfless patriotic activities. In contrast to members of the underground or political deportees, the Jews could not be classed as patriotic or heroic, since they took no risk for the Belgian state. The first minister of war victims, Baron Adrien van den Brande de Reeth, adhered to “a definition of ‘political prisoners’ based on suffering endured,” according to Lagrou.27 The adjective “political” qualified “prisoner” in the sense of a victim of the occupying forces. Unlike France, Belgium has no status of “political internee and deportee,” which recognizes the individual as a victim of the occupier’s policy, at the very least. France’s Jewish deportees – racial deportees – have been granted such a status. In Belgium, the status of “political prisoner” corresponds to the French “internee and deportee of the Resistance,” and is granted to Belgian nationals only. A law of February 5, 1947, also instituted a category of “foreign political prisoner,” granted to foreigners arrested on the basis of their patriotic activities. Foreigners may benefit from the status, but not from the title of “political prisoner,” if they were arrested for a reason other than patriotic activities. In other words, over 90 percent of Jewish deportees were excluded from recognition since they did not qualify as foreigners who had performed “patriotic activities” prior to deportation. In adopting this approach, Belgian lawmakers evaded any assumption of responsibility for the ravages of judeocide, just as during the war they decided that the authorities should allow the Nazi occupier, without any protest, to carry out mass deportations of Jews who were not Belgian nationals. Table 6.1 (p. 98) provides a breakdown by nationality of the Jewish population, based on the files of the Judenabteilung of the Sipo-SD in 1940–44.28 Of the 25,134 Jews deported from the Sammellager Mecheln transit camp to Auschwitz and other camps, 1,335 survived.29 Research by Laurence Schram, archivist at the Malines Museum of Deportation and Resistance, further indicates that 37 percent of survivors were granted the title or the benefits of the status of political prisoner.30 One figure provides the most striking illustration of the denial of statutory recognition to the overwhelming majority of

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

101

Jewish deportees. According to the statistics of the (Belgian) administration for war victims, the legal title of political prisoner was granted to 26,535 Belgian citizens and 764 foreign nationals, making a total of 27,299. Posthumous recognition was granted to a further 13,781 Belgian citizens and 177 foreign nationals. The number of foreigners – fewer than 1,000 – confirms, as demonstrated by Steinberg,31 that most of the 23,921 foreign Jewish deportees have not been recognized as political prisoners or as beneficiaries of that status. The differences resulting from genocide must also be emphasized. In the case of recognized political prisoners, 14,000 died during arrest or incarceration. For the racial deportees, the ratio between those who died and those who lived is in complete contrast. Over 95 percent did not survive deportation. Implementation of the 1960 Belgian–German agreement It should be noted that this agreement also turns a blind eye to the problems outlined above that are specific to Belgium. The Belgian negotiators failed to make the point that the overwhelming majority of victims of racially motivated Nazi persecution were Jews who did not have Belgian nationality. Hence, acting entirely in good faith, the Federal Republic of Germany went along with the Belgians in agreeing that the DM80 million of compensation should go solely to “Belgian nationals who were subjected to National Socialist persecution measures adopted for racial, denominational or ideological reasons, and whose freedom or health was adversely affected as a result of these persecution measures.”32 A Belgian law of March 4, 1961, ratified the Belgian–German agreement, involving 1 billion Belgian francs’ worth of compensation. In a royal decree dated November 27, 1961, the Belgian government decided, as stipulated in the agreement, that those who had been Belgian citizens during the war and political prisoners would receive compensation. In other words, the vast majority of victims persecuted for racial reasons and related eligible parties (since 95 percent did not survive the war) were not recompensed by the Belgian–German agreement of September 28, 1960. The Belgian state directed the compensation exclusively to Belgian victims of “non-racial persecutions.” Up to the 1990s, Belgian legislators steadfastly refused to grant recognition to those who died as a result of the racial deportations. Prior to 1990, they drew up no fewer than nineteen different statutes for recognizing war victims, including those in Korea, but never envisaged adding to these a specific statute for Jewish and Gypsy deportees.33 For half a century, therefore, the Treasury Department managed to save a sum three times higher than the amount that it undertook to repay, in 2002, to those with a legal claim to compensation.34 In July 2002, representatives of the Jewish community of Belgium signed two protocols with the minister of finance, the National Bank of Belgium (BNB) and the Professional Association of Insurance Companies (UPEA) relating to compensation for assets

102

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

looted from its members or for goods which they were forced to surrender during World War II. These agreements amounted to nearly €56 million.35 A turning point in 2003 In 2003, the Belgian government decided to grant benefits, equivalent to those conferred on political prisoners, to racial deportees who were still alive: specifically, pursuant to the conditions laid down, to thirty survivors who held foreign nationality at the time but had acquired Belgian nationality by January 1, 2003.36 Furthermore, “orphans of persons deported for racial reasons” – those who had lost both their parents – as well as adults and children who went into hiding and could prove that they went underground in September 1942, were to receive the equivalent of a pension of four sixmonthly periods of absence (réfractariat).37 This meant that other orphans of the Final Solution who had lost one parent were not recognized. The 24,000 Jewish deportees who failed to return have still not been recognized posthumously. Nor have they benefited – in the form of eligible parties related to them – from any statutory equivalence with “political prisoners.” Steinberg has calculated that by failing to grant the 25,000 Jewish and Gypsy deportees the exceptional and supplementary allowances envisaged in 1954, the Belgian Treasury Department has saved the country’s coffers the equivalent of some €350 million. In contrast, political prisoners, or related eligible parties in the case of posthumous recognition, have benefited from an exceptional allowance of BFr 1,500 (at 1954 values)38 per month of incarceration, the end of which was set at June 1, 1945. In addition, they have gained a supplementary allowance, also BFr 1,500 (1954 value) per six months of incarceration, for a four-year period. The sum of €350 million which the Treasury Department failed to disburse represents three times the amount of €110 million which was the government’s estimate of the restitution value of looted or abandoned Jewish assets. As for individuals who would have a legal claim to compensation because of their relationship to the 24,000 Holocaust victims, they are at most what are known in French as ayant cause, successors in title or beneficiaries – but, in their case, the Belgian view is that the “cause” of Holocaust victims in no way proves that they are entitled to anything, nor should they expect any acts of generosity on the part of the state. In their talks with the Belgian authorities Jewish representatives have focused on restitution to the community in general rather than to individuals – who might be said to have been sacrificed – and hence have undoubtedly failed to pay due attention to other questions, especially that of orphans. Euphemistically, the preamble to the draft Bill explains, when referring to the latter, that “neither their parents nor they themselves met the nationality conditions required by the coordinated laws on compensation pensions.” Since the authorities are determined to achieve a balanced budget, this device is tantamount to an arrangement whereby, some sixty years later, the small number of survivors from the racial

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

103

deportations who are still alive can be added to the category of those entitled to the status of political prisoner (on condition that they did not benefit from that status in the 1950s, that they were aliens or stateless at the time, and that – an absolute sine qua non – in the meanwhile they have acquired Belgian nationality).39 Lastly, it should be pointed out that one of the consequences of the despoilment agreements was the establishment, in July 2004, of the Fondation du Judaïsme de Belgique. Supposedly, this state-approved institution’s mandate is to perpetuate the memory of the Shoah, but it also engages in combating all forms of racism, intolerance, and human rights violations through an array of projects. Its first priority, however, is to obtain a settlement for assets plundered from the Jews of Belgium during the Nazi occupation – a task that since 2001 had been entrusted to the Despoilment Commission. If the Foundation’s chairman, Lucien Buysse, is to be believed, the 6,000 applications submitted to the Commission were to be processed at a rate of 100 to 200 a month. Although imperfect and of fairly limited scope, the July 2002 restitution agreement managed to upset the political deportees’ spokesmen. The president of the National Confederation of Political Prisoners and Entitled Parties, François de Coster, reacted angrily to the inclusion of Jews as political prisoners – although only a very small number of individuals were eligible – in his greetings for the 2003 new year. “We are and remain Belgians because we lived through the horrors of the war and we love our homeland,” he said to those who confused the group he represents with the Jews of the genocide.40 He continued, There is also a major difference between Belgian political prisoners who, exhausted by hunger and forced labor, died in the German concentration camps, in the wake of their patriotic activities, and the majority of Jews who were gassed as soon as they arrived in the Polish extermination camps, solely for racial reasons. Then, he added, without the slightest hesitation: “therefore, they did not suffer as much as Belgian political prisoners.” This spirit of revolt on the confederation’s part was maintained until the final parliamentary vote in the spring of 2003.41 However, in the absence of any parliamentary support for not giving Jewish survivors who were still alive the same treatment as former political prisoners, the only achievement of the confederation was to block any amendment to the new measures for war victims, including rectifying discrimination against Jewish children who lost just one parent.42

Conclusion: the vital need to work on memory Apart from its extremely ambiguous character, the speech by the prime minister reflected an authentic debate that has been taking place not only within the Belgian Jewish community, but also among historians, the press, and all

104

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

levels of Belgian society up to the Belgian parliament. More and more voices are being raised, calling for an examination of the national conscience. Since 2001, parliamentary initiatives have been taken in response to the Liberal Flemish prime minister’s hesitant attitude toward acknowledging the state’s failings and faults. Two of these are worth noting: one by (francophone) Senators Alain Destexhe and Philippe Mahoux, who called for commissioning the Center for the Study and Documentation of War and Contemporary Societies (CEGES) to carry out new studies “on the Belgian state’s attitude to the persecution and deportation of the Jews,” and another by Olivier Maingain, who proposed that a proper parliamentary inquiry should be held on the same issue. Ultimately the Belgian government opted for the CEGES solution. The task with which the CEGES was entrusted was a weighty one: to conduct a study in order to establish whether any responsibility might be ascribed to the Belgian authorities in the identification, persecution, and deportation of the Jews during World War II. The CEGES addressed the following questions, among others: measures adopted by the Nazis, the attitude of the Belgian authorities at the time, the compilation of the Jewish register, the distribution and wearing of the yellow star, the round-ups, economic plundering, aiding and abetting, and the role of the Association of Jews in Belgium (AJB – see p. 105). Over a two-year period, researchers studied the behavior of the judges, the central administration’s services, the legal, provincial and local authorities, the Belgian government-in-exile in London, and the role of the Resistance. As of September 1, 2004, five specialist historians – including Rudy Van Doorslaer, the project head – labored to carry this assignment to a successful conclusion. Their final report was released in August 2006. While the effort was a laudable one, it was not really necessary. When expressing their feelings about the “dark hours of our history,” it would suffice for the political establishment to admit that during the deportation of the Jews the administration and the Belgian police acted contrary to the social values of equality and liberty. In the meantime historical studies have advanced in this direction, notably recent monographs on Antwerp43 and Liège,44 which substantiate the responsibility borne by the state apparatus in the deportations. For example, in the wake of research by a young historian from Liège, the city’s mayor, Socialist Willy Demeyer, stated that, because of collaboration by the authorities at the time, “the City of Liège, undoubtedly bears some of the responsibility for the tragedy, and to deny this would be tantamount to intellectual dishonesty, at the very least.”45 Similarly, the Socialist mayor of Molenbeek, a professor of history, needed only see the archives of the Jewish registry in his municipality to “offer his fellow Jewish citizens his apologies” in the name of his administration “for the errors made by civil servants during the implementation of the antisemitic policy imposed by the Nazis during the last war.”46 It should be noted, too, that historians have already done a large part of the work. The paradox is that if they have been able to do so, it is above all

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

105

because they were working outside the CEGES – in other words, without being paralyzed by the “patriotic” patronage of this federal institution. Now that people are almost literally jostling to rectify the post-1945 denials of memory that have persisted for half a century, it is high time that other institutions, such as the Catholic Church and the Consistoire Central Israélite (the representative body of Belgian Jewry), also shouldered the burden of their past, complete with its weighty implications. This holds particularly true for the Consistoire Central, which retained as chief rabbi a man who accepted the office after the first anti-Jewish edicts in 1940, and conferred his authority upon the SS-controlled Judenrat. The publication of a collective work on the AJB, edited by Jean-Philippe Schreiber and Rudy Van Doorslaer, as well as the controversy that it sparked, indicate that at the very least a debate has begun here as well.47 As for the Eglise de Belgique, it must be borne in mind that, together with the Belgian government, it has shown no contrition, in marked contrast to the Eglise de France (1997). Throughout the entire war, it failed to raise the slightest protest against the deportation of the Jews. This silence on the part of the Church in no way detracts from the conduct and acts of many members of the clergy, who on an individual level took risks in order to save Jews. Cardinal Danneels, who was a candidate for the papacy after the death of Pope John Paul II, still has nothing to say about the silence of the Archbishop of Malines, one of his predecessors at the head of this diocese whose see was located close to the Sammellager Mecheln. It should be noted that when it came to nudging its political courage, the Eglise de France had no need of a study by the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, the French equivalent of the CEGES. Rather, there was something of a scramble on its members’ part to express their remorse and contrition just before the Papon trial began.48 As can be seen, there is, nevertheless, progress in Belgium. In reality, no one any longer disputes the facts themselves. Generally speaking, Belgium is procrastinating, unsure as to the path it should follow, because what is at stake is so important. The issues in question are to be found in the spheres of ethics and civics. The country’s electoral agenda, however, is such that the Belgian political scene is in no hurry to come to grips with these problematics of memory. The Vlaams Belang (formerly Vlaams Blok), a far-right populist party, enjoyed the electoral support of one Flemish voter in four – and in its Antwerp bastion, one in three – in regional and European elections in 2004. Fear of the Vlaams Belang may explain why the Belgian political world is not yet entirely prepared to examine itself in the mirror of history and to do some real work of introspection. It undoubtedly clarifies why, in January 2005, the prime minister failed, once again, to make his mark in history during the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On March 17, 2005, after Belgium had joined the Task Force for International Cooperation in Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research,49 Verhofstadt, during a visit to Yad Vashem, finally expressed the apologies that were absent from his speech of 2002.

106

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

Notes 1 Maxime Steinberg, La Persécution des Juifs en Belgique 1940–1945 (Brussels, 2004), p. 12. 2 Ibid. 3 José Gotovitch and Chantal Kesteloot (eds.), Collaboration, répression. Un passé qui résiste (Brussels, 2002), p. 37. 4 All the evidence would seem to indicate that the king would not have been a great defender of Belgium’s Jews. After all, on a number of occasions he complained that they were “the real culprits for our troubles. The Masons are their smokescreen. It’s the Jewish–Masonic clique.” Steinberg, La Persécution des Juifs en Belgique, p. 54. 5 Gotovitch and Kesteloot, Collaboration, répression, p. 32. 6 The occupiers showed preference for the Flemings, for example, by releasing most of their prisoners-of-war. 7 See Martin Conway, Degrelle. Les années de collaboration, preface by José Gotovitch (Brussels, 2005). 8 Luc Huyse and S. D’hont, La Répression des collaborateurs (Brussels, 1993). 9 Francis Balace, “Collaboration et repression en Wallonie, un regard particulier?” in Gotovitch and Kesteloot, Collaboration, répression, p. 54. 10 Gotovitch and Kesteloot, Collaboration, répression, p. 32. 11 On November 19, 1940, however, the king met with Hitler in Berchtesgaden, where he called for the return of all prisoners, including the Walloons, and for increased food rations for Belgians. He insisted that a promise be given about Belgium’s independence in postwar Europe. Hitler did nothing as a result of this conversation: unlike the Flemish POWs, their Walloon counterparts were not freed. After this attempt, the king ceased his efforts, but did not think of calling for resistance and/or curbing collaboration. He even remarried in 1941, to the great displeasure of many Belgians, eventually triggering the crisis over the royal issue. 12 Pieter Lagrou, Mémoires patriotiques et occupation nazie (Brussels, 2003), p. 287. 13 Marnix Beyen, “Comment s’est forgée l’image de l’occupation et de la répression en Flandre 1945–2000,” in Gotovitch and Kesteloot, Collaboration, répression, p. 102. 14 It is difficult to deny the prominent role played by Flemish nationalists in collaborating with Germany. But, as demonstrated by a leading francophone historian, some Walloon nationalists were also tempted to collaborate. See Hervé Hasquin, Les Séparatistes wallons et le gouvernement de Vichy 1940–1943. Une histoire d’omerta (Brussels, 2004). 15 Lagrou, Mémoires patriotiques et occupation nazie, p. 278. 16 Ibid. 17 Nieuwe encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging (NEVB) (Tielt, 1998). 18 Thierry Rozenblum, “Une cité si ardente. L’administration communale de Liège et la persécution des Juifs 1940–1942,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, No. 179 (September–December 2003) (Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris), pp. 9–74. 19 See, in particular, studies by Rozenblum, “Une cité si ardente” ; Lieven Saerens, Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad. Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en zijn joodse bevolking 1880–1944 (Tielt, 2000), or Benoît Majerus, “Logiques administratives et persécution anti-juive. La police bruxelloise et les arrestations de 1942,” Cahiers d’histoire du temps présent, No. 12 (2003), pp. 181–217. 20 Steinberg, La Persécution des Juifs de Belgique, p. 12. 21 See all Maxime Steinberg’s works, including L’Etoile et le fusil (La Question juive 1940–1942, 1942), Les cent jours de la déportation des Juifs de Belgique and La traque des Juifs 1942–1944 (Brussels, 1983–87), as well as his most recent work, La Persécution des Juifs de Belgique.

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

107

22 Steinberg, La Persécution des Juifs de Belgique, p. 19 23 See note 21. 24 As early as September 2000, Guy Verhofstadt had justified Belgium’s refusal to make any official act of contrition on the grounds that, during the war years, the situation in Belgium could not be compared to that of neighboring countries such as Vichy France. 25 On April 7, 2000, Verhofstadt apologized to the government and people of Rwanda at Gisozi, a suburb of Kigali, where a memorial to genocide was constructed. 26 See, for example, Maurice Krajzman, The Image of the Jews and Judaism in Belgian History Textbooks (Brussels, 1973). 27 Lagrou, Mémoires patriotiques et occupation nazie, p. 211. 28 Maxime Steinberg, “Le paradoxe français dans la solution finale à l’Ouest,” Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisation 3 (May–June 1993), pp. 567–82. 29 See updated statistics in Steinberg, La Persécution des Juifs en Belgique, p. 35. During the renovation of the Belgian pavilion at Auschwitz, Laurence Schram, the archivist historian of the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance in Mechelen/Malines, reassessed the numbers of Belgians deported to Auschwitz. The figures published here are based on her calculations. 30 Laurence Schram, “La mémoire des rescapés juifs d’Auschwitz,” unpublished dissertation (Brussels, 1992–93). 31 See the section entitled “La confusion des morts” in chapter VIII, “Le chiffre du secret,” in Les Yeux du témoin ou le regard du borgne. L’histoire face au révisionnisme (Paris, 1990). 32 Steinberg, La Persécution des Juifs en Belgique, p. 227. 33 See the law of January 26, 1999 which introduced new measures to assist war victims. 34 The allowances envisaged in the statute on political prisoners, given the conditions for granting them, and depending on whether the 25,000 racial deportees were entitled to them, would total more than €300 million. In estimating this amount, it must be borne in mind that entire families were wiped out, and hence there would be no direct parties entitled to receive such allowances. This is the case for looted Jewish assets, the value of which was estimated in 2002 at €110 million. See also “Après les restitutions des biens spoliés, quelles réparations pour les déportés? Le point avec l’historien Maxime Steinberg,” Regards, posted on line January 9, 2003. 35 According to the work of the Buysse Commission (named after the president of the Research Commission on the Fate of Assets belonging to the Jewish Community of Belgium Plundered or Abandoned during the 1940–1945 War), the value of assets not restored to the Jewish victims of Belgium at the end of World War II was estimated at more than Bfr 173 million at 1945 values (which experts consider should be multiplied by 22). This was the figure for the despoilment operations carried out by the state, the insurance organizations and the banks when the commission’s final report was submitted, a week after the country’s Council of Ministers (cabinet) adopted the draft legislation relating to compensation for Jewish victims despoiled during this black period in history. As a starting point, the Buysse Commission, which based itself on the work of seven researchers under historian Rudi Van Doorslaer, identified 70,000 members of the Jewish population who were living in Belgium before or during the war. The identity of these individuals was recorded in the database of the commission of inquiry. A number of archival holdings enabled researchers to identify the Jewish victims’ possessions and assets, which were also included in the database. 36 In mid-2004 the law of April 11, 2003, resulted in the submission of 194 applications, twenty-seven of which resulted in the granting of the reparations pension.

108

Maxime Steinberg and Joël Kotek

37 Or the equivalent per person of €305 a year as well as an additional allowance (amounting to €275) making medical services completely free. 38 Or €37.5. The government earmarked the sum of €1.4 million for 2003, meaning that it was counting on 2,500 applicants. 39 Wisely, the technical note from the Defense Minister dated December 6, 2002, fails to put a figure on the approximate number of potential beneficiaries. 40 F[rançois] De Coster, L’effort, No. 1 (January–March 2003). By way of background to this patriotic profession of faith, the author uses this excuse when asked “Are you Jewish too?” by pupils when he is acting as guide on visits to the Breedonk Fort, where he was held before being transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp in May 1944: “It was always painful for us to hear this question time and time again, because we are and remain Belgians.” 41 Was Minister Flahaut afraid that his Jewish interlocutors would similarly return with more demands if he were to accede to those of other war victims? Reply by Minister Flahaut in the Senate, March 26, 2003 session. According to the report presented by Magda De Mayer on behalf of the Public Health, Environment and Social Revival Commission to the House of Representatives, February 27, 2003 (2273/005 DOC 50): “The minister feels that the attitude of the National Confederation of Political Prisoners and Entitled Parties of Belgium … is to be somewhat deplored – because not all of its own claims have been granted, it is seeking to obstruct the adoption of the legislation.” 42 In line with the narrow-minded attitude leading to abortive acts of reparation, the Belgian state recognizes only children both of whose parents died after deportation “as a result of the racial persecution measures of the occupying authorities.” Distinguishing between Jewish orphans according to whether one or both parents died is an utterly inappropriate measure. During the parliamentary debate, an environmentalist member of the House, Zoé Genot (although she belonged to the majority) ironically elaborated on the macabre implications of being orphaned and came up with the worrying question “If one lost ‘only’ one’s father, and one’s three brothers and sisters, and one’s grandparents, did that mean one was not an orphan?” (Rozenblum, “Une cité si ardente.”) “Once again,” she lamented, identifying the crux of the question, “the intention was to bring about equality … with the orphans of Belgian patriots who as children received little assistance. Once again, specific characteristics have been erased.” 43 Saerens, Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad. 44 Rozenblum, “Une cité si ardente.” 45 Speech by the mayor of Liege, Willy Demeyer, inaugurating the commemorative plaque in mamory of Maurice Federman, Rue du Mouton Blanc, Liege, April 24, 2002. 46 www.resistances.be/moureaux.html, summary of a ceremony commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, held in Molenbeek (Brussels), February 17, 2005. 47 J. Ph. Schreiber and de R. Van Doorslaers (eds.), Les Curateurs du ghetto. L’association des Juifs en Belgique sous l’occupation nazie (Brussels, 2004). 48 As a bureaucrat in the Vichy regime, which governed southern France and cooperated with the German occupation in the north, Papon was responsible for the deportation from France of 1,690 Jews, most of whom ended up in the extermination camps. The extent of Vichy collaboration has been an endless source of controversy and shame, and many French would prefer, as former president Georges Pompidou once urged, to “draw a veil over that time and forget it.” Papon was finally tried in 1997 under a 1964 French law that incorporates international law on crimes against humanity. Papon’s trial and conviction forced France to lift the veil on Vichy and its role in Nazi Germany’s Final Solution.

Turning a blind eye in Belgium

109

The process reveals as much about the France of 1944 as it does about France today, but its significance is even wider-reaching. 49 The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research consists of representatives of government, as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. Its purpose is to gain the support of political and social leaders for Holocaust education, remembrance and research, both nationally and internationally. Initiated by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson in 1998, the Task Force had twenty-six member countries in early 2009.

7

Between tradition and new departure The dilemmas of collaboration in Denmark Sofie Bak

Introduction At 04:15 on April 9, 1940, German troops crossed the overland border into Denmark. Simultaneously, a troop carrier passed the silent cannons atop the fortress of Copenhagen. The General Headquarters in the capital were conquered in fifteen minutes. Large numbers of German bombers flew over the entire country. Germany – as the memorandum handed to the Danish government stated – had taken over protection of the Kingdom of Denmark. It declared, nevertheless, that Germany had “no intention of interfering with the territorial integrity or political independence of Denmark.” Denmark was not originally part of the German military campaign. Moreover, the Danish policy of appeasement of the Nazi regime, the country’s formal status of neutrality and, ultimately, the signing of a non-aggression pact in May 1939 ensured that Germany did not need to use force in order to obtain what it could get through diplomatic pressure. However, increased Allied activity in the sea around Norway attracted German attention to the Nordic countries – and to Denmark in particular – as a useful stepping stone in its campaign against Norway, whose strategic position and pro-British orientation made it an important target. Military occupation of Denmark was a means to an end. Political and economic benefits depended on the reactions of the Danes. The Danish government issued a cease-fire order at 06:00. The occupation of Denmark had become a reality before sunrise. What became known as the “peaceful occupation” of Denmark allowed the government to insist on the formal sovereignty of the kingdom and created a unique and illusory construction in a Europe controlled by Nazi forces. In principle, Denmark was still ruled by king, government and parliament. The Danish courts, administration, and even the army and police, maintained an independent status. The affairs of the two countries were directed through normal diplomatic channels, namely the German embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Auswärtiges Amt, in Berlin. Denmark never came under the control of the Nazi party or the SS. The “promises of April 9” was a standard reference to Denmark’s right to govern its own internal affairs, which included matters concerning the Jewish

Denmark: between tradition and new departure

111

community. The arrangement required a minimum of German soldiers and officials. In return, Denmark supplied Germany with provisions, weapons, machines for the metal industry, cement and ships; it outlawed the Communist Party and interned its members and eventually signed the Antikomintern treaty, which called for combating international Communism. Wealth was attainable in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe and plans for the Danes to do business in the German Grossraum were initiated immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The Danish foreign minister suggested a monetary and customs union with Germany. Thus Denmark served as a model protectorate, a prototype for the new Europe ruled by the Third Reich. During the summer of 1943 a wave of sabotage, strikes and guerrilla campaigns against German soldiers swept the country. The uprising, which began among industrial workers, spread, and was supported by a growing number of resistance groups. When the Allies won the psychologically crucial victory at El Alamein, and Stalingrad did not fall, the Danes believed the collapse of the German regime was imminent and looked forward to the prospect of an Allied invasion. Since the Danish authorities had lost control of the masses, Berlin issued an ultimatum to the government, demanding martial law, curfew regulations and the death penalty for sabotage against the German Wehrmacht. Presented on August 28, it was promptly rejected by the government and by a united front of political parties. In the early morning of August 29, the Oberbefehlshaber der deutschen Besatzungstruppen in Denmark proclaimed that the Wehrmacht had assumed executive power and declared a state of martial law. The government and parliament resigned, the king was put under house arrest, and the officers and soldiers of the Danish army and navy were interned. A few marines managed to escape to Sweden. Yet the diplomatic break was not absolute. The Danish police and the courts remained free of German influence. The permanent secretaries of the Ministries stayed in their positions and now represented “official” Denmark – a modus vivendi that served both German and Danish interests in continuing the policy of cooperation.

A war of words Danish historiography employs at least three concepts that refer to the policy pursued during the German occupation, 1940–45. The differences are not purely semantic but reflect also theoretical disagreement. These perceptions provide an excellent clue to the ideological position of the various writers on the topic. Two opposing discourses utilize the respective notions of “policy of collaboration” and “policy of negotiation.” The term “policy of collaboration” was introduced into Danish historiography in 1979 by the historian Hans Kirchhoff.1 Briefly, it focuses on the compliance and opportunism of the Danish government, arguing that the policy was similar, in some respects, to that conducted in Vichy France, Norway and Holland, regardless of

112

Sofie Bak

whether active support and assistance to the German military machine was the intent or the result. The second stresses the exigencies and advantages for Danish politicians of negotiation. The term, coined by some politicians who felt a need to defend their behavior after the war, was adopted by the first and second postwar generation of historians, who considered it important to correct the prevailing image of these figures as treacherous and pro-German.2 By using the word “negotiation” the researcher implies that the Danish government and the German authorities were equal negotiating partners in a neutral, almost mechanical process of adjustment. In recent years, as the focus of most research has moved from the history of the resistance to less flattering aspects of Danish wartime history, such as the refugee policy of the 1930s and Danish SS volunteers at the eastern front, and substantially new findings have given historians fresh insights into the mechanisms and dilemmas of policy-making during the occupation, most historians have tended toward a third concept of “policy of cooperation.” A term originating in the illegal press, it stresses the voluntary, active nature of the policy on the part of the Danes and signifies that the Danish political effort to balance German pressure with more active support and integration into the German Grossraum – the protection of the Jewish community in Denmark being one of the most conspicuous achievements – was in the interests of the German occupiers, since the fiction of a neutral Denmark, peaceful occupation and the logic of a policy of cooperation served the political ends of both the Germans in Denmark and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin. The policy of cooperation was a political goal in itself: it gave the Danish government some freedom of action and placed considerable restraint on the Germans. The term combines the “intentionalism” implied in the concept of “negotiation,” by stressing the national motives of the politicians, with the “functionalism” of “collaboration” by underlining the activist nature of the policy and its actual consequences. As of the 1990s the concept of collaboration all but disappeared from the historical debate, and with it the suspicion cast on the Danish government for being pro-German or even crypto-Nazi. Danish politicians saw it as their primary task to keep Denmark and its democratic institutions free of the terrors of war and totalitarianism and to pilot the country through the occupation without destruction and the death of civilians. Unlike the “negotiation” school, most third-generation historians agree that the end was not without cost. As politicians agreed to cut democracy to fit the German shoe, only too late did they realize that the population would react to the damage to their souls caused by humiliation and surrender.3 In 2003, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the day, August 29, marking the end of the policy of cooperation, when the Danish government resigned, the prime minister denounced that strategy as naïve, reprehensible and wrong. Looking back to that April morning in 1940 when the difficult decision was made, he dissociated himself, in an official statement, from what he termed a political and moral failure.

Denmark: between tradition and new departure

113

While this chapter does not deal with the morality of the policy of cooperation, it addresses the question of whether aspects of compliance and cooperation with the Germans had consequences that might be termed collaboration, in the sense that actions – however unintentionally – aided and facilitated the persecution and deportation of Danish Jews. Yet to disconnect the events of 1943, when the Germans initiated the persecution of the Jews of Denmark, from the political context of cooperation with Germany is a historical blind alley that precludes an understanding of the preconditions of Jewish rescue and survival during the Holocaust.

October 1943 At 21:00 on October 1, 1943 all phone lines in Copenhagen were cut. Shortly afterward, columns of trucks manned by German police drove through the streets of the capital to arrest Danish Jews. After three years of hesitation and postponement the occupying power implemented the Endlösing der Judenfrage (Final Solution of the Jewish problem) in Denmark. Fortunately, the Jews in Denmark had been warned. The shipping expert at the German embassy, G. F. Duckwitz, a close associate of the plenipotentiary in Denmark, Werner Best, as well as several other anonymous Germans, leaked the crucial information of the time and date of the raid. The warning spread like wildfire. Only those too old, sick or alone who could not or would not take refuge spent the night at home. The element of surprise was almost completely absent. Only 202 of the 7,000 Jews in Copenhagen were arrested.4 There was only one raid: the orders stipulated that there should be no break-ins or vandalism and the search should be terminated after three hours.

Danish historiography Research on the persecution and spectacular rescue of Danish Jews is 1943 is currently in the process of revision – although mostly within the confines of Danish historical debate, and in the Danish language. Not only has the consensus among historians changed during the past few years, but the focus and context have shifted from an almost exclusively national interpretation to incipient comparative research. For generations the main theme in Danish historical debate concerning October 1943 was the high politics of the plenipotentiary in Denmark, Werner Best, and the seeming paradox of his actions: from his arrival in Denmark in November 1942 he continually advised Berlin to cancel or postpone any measures against the Jews, citing the risk of a public uprising and the irreversible damage antisemitic action would cause to the policy of cooperation. Yet he initiated the raid by suggesting that a round-up be carried out during the state of martial law declared on August 29. From that moment onward, however, he launched, in parallel, a series of actions behind the scenes to sabotage the raid and facilitate the escape.5

114

Sofie Bak

The first generation of Danish historians accepted the apologetic view of Werner Best’s role, which secured the commuting of his death sentence in 1948: that he had merely reacted to rumors of a forthcoming Aktion from Berlin.6 In 1966 Israeli historian Leni Yahil published a comprehensive study of the persecution of the Jews in Denmark during the Holocaust.7 Both her approach and her conclusions differed widely from those of previous studies. She held that Best alone was responsible for the initiative to implement the Final Solution in Denmark. He had recommended a raid in order to strengthen his position in Berlin. On the other hand, he had ambitions vis-à-vis the Danish authorities on whom his position in Denmark depended, and while playing the part of a tough SS general for Berlin, in Denmark he denied all rumors of a raid and set the minds of the permanent secretaries at rest. Although Yahil’s idealized conclusions on the moral and democratic standing of the Danes and her assumption of the national spirit as a causal variable have faced much criticism in Denmark, her theory of Best’s double-dealing remains unchallenged. The German shipping expert G. F. Duckwitz played an important role in sabotaging the raid. As soon as he heard of the planned action, he took steps to obstruct it and mitigate its effect. In accordance with the popular perception of Duckwitz – he was given the post of ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Denmark after the war, and the distinction of Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem – Danish historians, as well as Leni Yahil, declared Duckwitz to be an outstanding hero and the savior of Danish Jews, although Yahil also emphasized the importance of Best’s compliance.8 The popular perception of Duckwitz was revised in 1986 by Tatiana Berenstein (Danish edition, 1993), who argued that Duckwitz was in fact an SS officer and a loyal follower of Best.9 Suspicions regarding Duckwitz were rejected by the Danish historian Hans Kirchhoff. According to Kirchhoff, Duckwitz was never admitted to the SS. He was, however, a member of the NSDAP and had close political and social ties to the plenipotentiary.10 Yet a shadow of doubt appeared in subsequent historical studies.11 The relationship between the two men may not have been as uncomplicated as hitherto maintained. It has now been established in Danish discourse that Duckwitz was Best’s right-hand man and that his actions were within the scope of Best’s strategy – among them, ensuring that the warning of the upcoming raid reached the ears of the Jewish community.

The condition of rescue: reluctant and restrained Germans The escape and survival of 95 percent of the Danish Jewish community is seemingly a miracle beyond rational explanation. Additionally, it is commonly concluded that “it was not Nazi behavior that made the crucial difference, because it was murderous everywhere.”12 It leaves us, at best, with very limited insight into the causes and conditions of altruistic behavior; at worst, we must resort to clichés of national characteristics. The rescue of

Denmark: between tradition and new departure

115

more than 7,000 people in the course of about three weeks in October 1943 is not inexplicable. Since the early 1990s various aspects of the persecution of the Jews in Denmark have been highlighted and revised in a wave of new critical approaches. The historical debate has turned to the question of the conditions of the mass escape. Did the Germans act with similar brutality and determination all over Europe regardless of local political circumstances? Was the raid actually a failure from the German viewpoint? Was the mass escape over the small strip of water separating Denmark from Sweden a result of German incompetence and deficiency? Tatiana Berenstein opened the debate by asserting that the abortive roundup of the Jews on the night of October 1–2, resulted from a shortage of German police; this was a likelihood that Best had long foreseen, and consequently he converted the strategy of deportation into one of expulsion.13 Expulsion had initially been the general policy of the Nazis, and been abandoned largely for practical, not ideological, reasons. The attempt to expel the Jews from Germany before the war had yielded unsatisfactory results – only half of the Jews left after five years of constant pressure, largely because other states had been unwilling to take them in – and the Anschluss in addition to the partition of Czechoslovakia had left more Jews within the Reich than there had been in 1933. The conquest of Poland bringing millions of Jews under German rule made the prospect of eliminating them through pressure to emigrate quite hopeless. Nevertheless, Jewish emigration continued to be permitted and was even encouraged while other expulsion plans were considered. The best known was the famous Madagascar Plan, which, despite Hitler’s enthusiastic support, also proved impractical.14 From this perspective the action on October 1, was not a failure but the revival of an alternative policy of terrorizing the Jews into leaving. Within a few weeks thousands of them were driven into exile. Berenstein’s thesis seems to be a plausible explanation for Best’s involvement in sabotaging the raid: why, after all, would a devoted Nazi and convinced antisemite facilitate the escape of thousands of Jews? When Best realized that he would not have a large enough police force (in Berenstein’s view, mainly due to the occupation of Italy), he knew that the raid would produce only limited results, and cause panic among the Jews as well as unrest among the Danish population. He thus began looking for alternatives. Expulsion of the Jews needed only two means: a passage to Sweden and a timely warning. Duckwitz was the answer to both. Within weeks the result was a territory “cleansed of Jews.” In 1995 Berenstein’s argument of insufficient police forces was rejected by Rasmus Kreth and Michael Mogensen.15 Their study showed that the raid had been well thought out and effectively executed. Careful planning and systematic registration of the Jews and their residences preceded it. More than 1,800 German policemen participated. Best had all the police forces he needed to hunt down and capture the Jews of Copenhagen. But apparently he took every step to ensure that the round-up would not be effective. Thus,

116

Sofie Bak

ultimately, the findings of Kreth and Mogensen supported the theory of expulsion. A biography of Best by the German historian Ulrich Herbert was another argument in favor of the expulsion theory.16 Herbert stressed Best’s ideological standpoint and his ambition to create a judenrein territory, either by means of deportation (and subsequent elimination) or by expulsion as a preferred strategy – at least as far as Best himself was concerned. It accommodated both his ideological perceptions and his pragmatic view of the policy of cooperation in Denmark. Kopfjagd (head-hunting) was never an option. There were no round-ups of Jews after the raid of October 1, 1943. Persecution of the Jews after the raid was left to a small group of Gestapo men. About half of the Jews deported after October 2 – 197 in total – had been arrested due to the intervention of a single man, the Gestapo chief in Elsingnore. Of these, fifty were deported after an informer betrayed Jews hiding in the fishing village of Gilleleje on October 6. Jews were often caught at harbors crowded with people. In Taarbaek, a small fishing hamlet north of Copenhagen, for example, two Gestapo agents who had been tipped off arrived at the port just as a fishing boat with refugees was leaving the quay. Thirteen people were arrested that night; five were later deported to Theresienstadt. Witnesses at the judicial purge after the war reported that about forty people were gathered at the harbor, among them several Danish police officers who assisted in the escape, although Danish law during the occupation prohibited pleasure boating and unauthorized traffic. The Wehrmacht, for its part, looked the other way. Moreover, uniformed German police that were available, about 1,600 men in all, were not brought into action after the October 1, raid. Both the Wehrmacht and Gestapo protested to Berlin and tried unremittingly to prevent the implementation of the Endlösung in Denmark. Furthermore, Werner Best had taken steps to avert Jews being caught at sea. There was no German police surveillance over the strait between Denmark and Sweden in October 1943. German patrol boats performed only naval duties. Any surveillance boats available were allocated to minesweeping. Not even one of the 600–700 illegal transports carrying Jewish refugees was seized by German police at sea. Rescuers caught by the Gestapo were handed over to the Danish courts to be charged with assisting illegal migration. The maximum penalty was three months’ imprisonment under relatively lenient conditions in a Danish prison. Most of the cases, however, never came to court, or court officials let the rescuers slip away through the back door. Thus the rescuers faced only very limited sanctions. Contrary to myth, the rescuers did not risk their lives to save the Jews.17 It is essential to consider the difference between contemporary assessments and those of the people involved at the time, who could not have understood – or could only have partly understood – German motives. Yet since the early 1990s the taboo surrounding the detail that the Jews paid considerable amounts of money for their escape has been seriously challenged. Danish

Denmark: between tradition and new departure

117

historians now cautiously question the fairness of the high price the fishermen demanded for taking the Jews safely to Sweden.18 The cost per person ranged from Dkr 500 to Dkr 2,000 ($83–$330), when the average hourly wage for an industrial worker was about Dkr 2 ($0.33). The sources tell of families that paid exorbitant sums of up to Dkr 50,000 for the crossing. Prices were subjected to the mechanisms of supply and demand, regardless of the need for insurance of the material risk taken by the fishermen, or security for the families of the rescuers in the event of their arrest. Humanitarian motives were undoubtedly intertwined with the desire to profit from the situation. Deported Danish Jews were sent to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt in the protectorate of Böhmen-Mähren, where they were held until the liberation. They were allowed to receive letters and monthly parcels with clothes, medicine and food. These privileges were extended to German Jews deported from Danish soil, too. The arrangements in Theresienstadt were the result of an agreement between Adolf Eichmann and Werner Best, who insisted that Danish Jews were not to be deported to Eastern Europe.19 Why did Best go out of his way to ensure that the Danes stayed in a camp without gas chambers, and with provisions that secured their survival? Why did he postpone the raid and issue the warning? And why did both the Wehrmacht and the German police try to prevent an action against the Danish Jews? The answer is persuasive: the policy of cooperation. Denmark accepted the terms of April 9, and tried hard to comply with German demands. Yet the policy of cooperation allowed for mutual concessions. Moreover, the Danish government refused to allow any special measures regarding the Jews. On this point they were in consonance with the vast majority of the Danish population. Best realized that any further action against the Jews would make it impossible to work for a mutual understanding between the two nations. The Germans did not have freedom of action when it came to the Jews. Reporting to Berlin on October 5, the plenipotentiary in Denmark wrote: As the objective goal of the Judenaktion in Denmark was die Entjudung [cleansing of Jews or de-judaization] of the country, and not a successful headhunt, it must be concluded that the Judenaktion has achieved its goals. Denmark is entjudet, as no Jew who falls under the relevant legislation can stay or work here any more.20 The successful rescue and the actions of the Danes who helped their compatriots to escape must be seen in this context of reluctance and self-restraint on the part of the Germans. Without minimizing the deeds of the rescuers, the exceptional circumstances that made the escape possible should be understood. What would have happened if the raid had been carried out in 1942, when deportations began in the rest of Europe, and when the prospects of German defeat were not looming? What if the population of 7,000 people could not flee across the water to Sweden, but had to stay underground in

118

Sofie Bak

Denmark for months or years, depending on the help, housing and provisions of their fellow Danes? What if the punishment for helping the Jews had been long prison terms, concentration camps or even the death penalty?

Aspects of collaboration: dilemmas of the cooperation policy The recent reappraisal of history has yet to gain acceptance by the Danish public. Popular accounts of the event still largely reiterate the conventional views of Germans and Danes, and public reaction to historians who question the image of zealous yet stupid Nazis and cunning fishermen who tricked the Gestapo with complete disregard for danger has been massive and emotional. It may not be easy to change cherished, well established notions, not to mention international perceptions of the 1943 rescue, which, moreover, are colored by a range of myths and distortions that work as powerful metaphors for widespread sympathy and solidarity toward the Jews on the part of the Danish people. Growing international attention to the Holocaust, and especially to the rescue of the Jews, has promoted a somewhat stereotyped view of the German players as well as emotional generalizations about the Danes. Yet acknowledging the importance of the cooperation policy to Jewish survival is not tantamount to unconditional acceptance of its practice and consequences. For generations Danish historians paid no attention to aspects of this policy that had real and potential implications for Danish Jews. Faced with a popular and historic denunciation of the policy of cooperation, the task of expounding a balanced analysis that does not become counterfactual is a slippery one. Following are three examples. The internment plan “It’s about saving people from the irreversible, from death and horror and from the cruel annihilation of human life.” These were the words of the permanent secretay of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and head of the administrative rule, Nils Svenningsen, at a meeting of permanent secretaries held on the late afternoon of September 29, 1943.21 On the previous night, Duckwitz had confirmed rumors that had been circulating since August 29 that a raid against Danish Jews was imminent. The Germans would round up the Jews on the Sabbath eve. Action had to be taken fast. Only four days earlier, two Jewish leaders, chairman of the Jewish community Carl Bertel Henriques and deputy chairman Karl Lachmann, had consulted Svenningsen. Henriques had cautiously asked what the reaction of the permanent secretaries would be in the event of persecution or deportation. Svenningsen answered that “the permanent secretaries would protest jointly, [and] most energetically,” and did not exclude the possibility of collective resignation.22 The question of resignation was, however, swiftly rejected at the permanent secretaries’ meeting. Resignation would throw society into chaos. Instead

Denmark: between tradition and new departure

119

they discussed the possibility of offering a ransom, but agreed in the end on “relief action that would never be perceived as support for the German standpoint.”23 They would offer to intern the Danish Jews, if necessary with the assistance of the Danish police – by force if need be. The plan was never executed. It proved impossible for Svenningsen to get an audience with Werner Best – until midnight October 1, when it was presented without reservations on behalf of the permanent secretaries, the assistance of the Danish police being part of the offer. Best, however, rejected the proposal. The raid against the Danish Jews was in already full swing, and Best was trying to dissociate himself from it. Several facts can be deduced from the accounts of the permanent secretaries’ meetings. They knew of the horrifying consequences of deportation, including the systematic annihilation of men, women and children in concentration camps. They knew of hunger, disease and slave labor and even rumors of mass executions. They knew that deportation was equivalent to death, and they wanted to prevent deportation from Danish soil by all means. Yet what counted more – the principle of law or survival? Resignation would have been of no help to the Jews, apart from its enormous symbolic importance; it would have been a useless demonstration that would have removed the last buffer between the Jews and the Nazis. Unable to imagine a solution beyond the established structure and practice of cooperation, they turned to the question of ransom – so painfully recurrent in the history of the Holocaust – and internment. But on what legal basis could Danish citizens be arrested, and what was their crime? The accounts also reveal blind faith in the logic of the policy of collaboration: the implicit understanding was that the Germans were a rational, susceptible negotiating partner, and that Werner Best was an equal whose promises they could trust. Cooperation and quid pro quo were routine, even if conditions had changed by August 29. By not recognizing the fanaticism of Nazi antisemitism they came alarmingly close to assisting the Nazi Endlösung. The plan of internment of the Danish Jews reveals the flexibility of Denmark’s survival strategy. The history of the internment plan is not suppressed in Danish historiography. Jørgen Hæstrup, a leading expert in Danish occupation history, elaborated extensively on the subject in his standard work on the permanent secretaries.24 He questioned the permanent secretaries’ knowledge of human nature but supported the “realistic–humanitarian way of thinking which ignored all personal moral risk.”25 Hæstrup, however, never referred to the potentially catastrophic consequences of internment. In 1993, Hans Kirchhoff published a work commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the rescue of Danish Jews and devoted considerable attention to negotiations over the internment plan, which has now become a standard component of Danish historiography.26 Public reaction in Denmark as well as abroad has been somewhat sensationalist and the portrayal accords with the counter-myth of naïve and cowardly politicians who betrayed and misled the people. Yet the question

120

Sofie Bak

remains, in the words of historian Bo Lidegaard: “What was in their power to do was not good. Everybody knew. But was it not worse to do nothing?”27 The coastguard Following the rumors and the final confirmation that disaster was imminent, Jewish refugees headed spontaneously for the coastline of Zealand, where only 4 km of water separated occupied Denmark from neutral Sweden. Some went without promises or connections to the small villages at the seaside where they had spent their last vacation, others to a summer cabin of a friend to hide, while several were aided and guided by the equally spontaneous networks of rescuers that sprang up across the island. All were hoping for an opportunity to escape from Denmark. With the number of refugees rising steadily, the first Danish authority to suffer the dilemmas built into the policy of cooperation was the Danish coastguard. After August 29, and the resignation of the Danish government, cooperation between Danish and German police forces was guided by a police order drafted in September 1943. The prime tasks of the coastguard were to maintain order along the coastline and prevent illegal flight from Denmark. The Danish coastguard was ordered to withdraw immediately if the German police or military intervened in cases of illegal flight. Those arrested by the Danish police were to be prosecuted under Danish law. Generally, Danish historians have described cooperation between the Danish guards and German police as frictionless. However, it was by no means unproblematic. In the days of the mass escape in October, the flight of the Jews was illegal under Danish law, as was assistance in their escape. On this basis the Danish police closed the harbor at the fishing town of Gilleleje, north of Copenhagen, on October 6, preventing Jewish refugees from boarding ships and leaving the port. This situation was the result – as the commissioner of the coastal police laconically put it – “of a lack of understanding on the part of the Jews,” since they had “arrived at the harbor in great numbers, bringing a large quantity of hand luggage.”28 A few hours later the Gestapo arrived, and the Jews were caught in a trap. The Gestapo arrested over 100 Jews that night, among them about eighty who had been hiding in the attic of the church in Gilleleje. What happened that night is an example of law-abiding but fatal cooperation by the coastguards. They maintained order even after the Germans had suspended order by arresting people without any legal grounds. Moreover, illegal arrest did not suspend the ban on illegal departure. Basic principles of Danish law had been discarded, but not Danish–German police cooperation. The situation at the harbor was out of control and was bound to attract the attention of the Gestapo. However, closing the port did not save the Jews, and the indirect and unintended result of the cooperation was the deportation to Theresienstadt of about fifty people. They were not prosecuted under Danish law. Yet the conduct of the coastguards was not accidental.

Denmark: between tradition and new departure

121

Gilleleje has become a symbol of the rescue in the minds of Danes and foreigners alike. The town and its church play an important part in commemoration events and tourism because of the united actions of the community on behalf of the Jews and the large number of people who reached Sweden in safety from this harbor. Yet the attention is a paradox, since the raid of October 6, also represents the greatest failure of the rescue organization. It is an object lesson in the dilemmas of the cooperation policy. However, on an individual level many coastguards were involved in rescue and many looked the other way. Accounts from those days speak of guards as crucial friends of the rescuers and of others that could be persuaded, distracted or avoided. Personal contacts and personality determined how the coastguards reacted to the flight. Faced with the distress of the Jews, they had to weigh their own morals and convictions against the risks and disadvantages of helping the refugees vis-à-vis their superior officers and the Germans. Danish State Railways The German railway authority had ordered forty cattle wagons and one passenger coach for the transport of Jews from Jutland and Funen captured during the raid on the night of October 1–2, 1943. The passenger coach was meant for the German guards. The total number of Jews arrested was eightytwo. Only three wagons were used for their transport. Additionally, two trains left Denmark for Theresienstadt, on October 13 and November 23, with 170 and twenty deportees, respectively. The Jews were forced on board the Danish wagons in the presence of Danish train staff – yet another Danish example of the European railway network regardless of nationality serving the Endlösung.29 An employee of Danish State Railways (DSB) described the brutality used to force the Jews on board the wagons and the distressing conditions in the cramped cattle trucks. His account echoes horrifying pictures of seemingly endless trains packed with starving and suffocating Polish Jews on the way from the ghetto to the death camp of Auschwitz. Despite the considerable surplus of wagons, the eighty-two captured Jews were squashed together with limited supplies of food and water. It was the same method, the same intention of depriving the Jews of their human dignity. The witness is passive, reflecting an image of uncritical and silent cooperation on the part of the state railways with the German occupation forces, not in connection with the carriage of coal or provisions, but with the transport of human beings in cattle trucks without seats or straw. The Danish State Railways’ report on the transports states that the staff behaved “correctly” and that “the entire dispatch proceeded in orderly fashion; there were no untoward incidents of any sort.”30 The Danish State Railways did not know the purpose and destination of the transports until shortly before departure. Whether surprised or not, the Danish train staff reacted “correctly” and “efficiently.” No protest, relief or rescue was attempted.

122

Sofie Bak

The police and railways were ordered to work with the Germans in accordance with the terms of the peaceful occupation and the policy of cooperation. In practice, this meant preventing obvious disorder and covering up the illegal nature of the deportations, as well as observance of the timetable regardless of the fact that the load consisted of human beings. In addition, these forces displayed remarkable orthodoxy and esprit de corps.

Conclusion Until the 1990s, there was no conflict between scholarly opinion and popular tradition on the subject of October 1943. The clash between new critical research and the heroic and romantic view of the event, however, has become increasingly emotional and uncompromising. Danish historians have been faced with a revived idealism which rejects the policy of cooperation while ignoring the fact that persecution of the Jews in Denmark was not a priority for the Germans, thanks to that cooperation. Furthermore, the conclusion that the Germans acted with restraint – and pragmatism – is subject to distortion, reflected in the presence of myriad neo-Nazi and “revisionist” sites on the Internet. Historians might find themselves caught in the middle: defending a policy that is once again presented as pro-German – for contrary reasons. However, these challenges should not divert attention from a renewed and critical focus on the practice and consequences of the policy. The source material relating to the persecution of Danish Jews tells of the unpleasant – albeit law-abiding – collaboration of railway staff and coastguards. The latter did, in some instances, contribute to the rescue operation, but mostly collaborated with the German police. The rail staff all remained passive eye witnesses to the brutal deportation of Jews. The line between involuntary passive and active collaboration is blurred. Administrative collaboration served the goal of keeping the wheels of society turning and sheltering the daily life of the population. Yet the actions of the government services cannot be defended by reference to the welfare or protection of the population. The plan for the internment of Danish Jews proposed by the permanent secretaries is yet another object lesson in bureaucratic inertia and the loyalties and limitations of civil servants influenced by conservative bureaucratic traditions – a phenomenon that recurred throughout Europe during the Holocaust. The widespread tendency to deny complicity and responsibility, or to minimize the significance of collaboration, is usually a characteristic that Danes attribute to other nations and ideologies, and is far from our own selfunderstanding. This, however, is in essence what happens when historians and writers, in presenting the events of October 1943, at best ignore, or at worst refrain from investigating. Research into forms of collaboration will not defile the heroic image of the rescue, but will increase understanding of the processes and circumstances that generated passive collaboration rather than moral action.

Denmark: between tradition and new departure

123

The purpose of the myth is to attribute a sense to history that transcends time. Regardless of positions on the debate over collaboration versus negotiation, the Danish myth of the battle against evil tells of ultimate victory due to the superiority of Danish democratic and political culture. Comprehending the consequences of cooperation is part of a painful compromise with the myth of an immaculate past. Yet a flexible and realistic perception of the rescue in 1943 has much to offer. It enables identification and understanding to a greater extent than do emotional statements about national spirit and visions of heroic freedom fighters. Since the rescue is still an event from which we can draw important moral lessons, it may be concluded that the price of compromise might not be prohibitive.

Notes 1 Hans Kirchhoff, Augustoprøret. Samarbejdspolitikkens fald, Vols. 1–3 (Copenhagen, 1979). 2 The most conspicuous example is Jørgen Hæstrup, … til landets bedste. Hovedtræk af departementschefstyrets virke 1943–1945, Vols. 1–2 (Copenhagen, 1966). 3 More recent examples: Steen Andersen, Danmark i det tyske storrum. Dansk økonomisk tilpasning til Tyskland nyordning af Europa 1940–1941 (Copenhagen, 2005); Bo Lidegaard, Kampen om Danmark 1933–1945 (Copenhagen, 2005); and Claus Bundgård Christensen, Joachim Lund, Niels Wium Olesen and Jakob Sørensen, Danmark besat. Krig og hverdag 1940–1945 (Copenhagen, 2005). 4 Rasmus Kreth and Michael Mogensen, Flugten til Sverige. Aktionen mod de danske jøder oktober 1943 (Copenhagen, 1995). 5 Sofie Lene Bak, Jødeaktionen oktober 1943. Forestillinger i offentlighed og forskning (Copenhagen, 2001). 6 Hæstrup, … til landets bedste. 7 Leni Yahil, Test of a Democracy: The Rescue of Danish Jewry in World War II (Jerusalem, 1966; Danish edition 1967). 8 Among numerous examples, Hartvig Frisch, Danmark besat og befreit, Vol. III (Copenhagen, 1948); Hæstrup, … til landets bedste; Hans Kirchhoff, “Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz: Skitser til et politisk portræt,” Lyngy–Bogen (1978); Yahil, Test of a Democracy, pp. 137–9. 9 Tatiana Brustin Berenstein, “The Historiographic Treatment of the Abortive Attempt to Deport the Danish Jews,” Yad Vashem Studies, No. 17 (Jerusalem, 1986, Danish edition, 1993) pp. 181–218. 10 Hans Kirchhoff and Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, in Boris Ruge (ed.), Tyskere mod Hitler. Fem diplomater i København (Copenhagen, 1999). 11 Examples: Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996); Hans Sode-Madsen (ed.), I Hitler–Tysklands skygge (Copenhagen, 2003). 12 Irving Greenberg, “The Righteous Rescuers,” in Carol Rittner and Sondra Myers (eds.), The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York, 1986), p. 3. 13 Berenstein, “The Historiographic Treatment.” 14 Gunnar S. Paulsson, “Bridge over the Øresund: The Historiography on the Expulsion of the Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark,” Journal of Contemporary History, No. 3 (1995), p. 442. Paulsson represents the most radical interpretation of the expulsion theory and further propagates the extraordinary thesis – originally propounded by Berenstein – that the expulsion strategy was the result of a

124

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

Sofie Bak conspiracy between Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann. This thesis can be neither verified nor disproved. Kreth and Mogensen, Flugten til Sverige. Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus. Kreth and Mogensen, Flugten til Sverige, p. 94. Henrik Dethlefsen, “Ud af mørket – den danske modstand og redningen af jøderne i oktober 1943,” in Hans Sode-Madsen (ed.), “Føreren har befalet!” Jødeaktionen oktober 1943 (Copenhagen, 1993); Kreth and Mogensen, Flugten til Sverige; Bak, Jødeaktionen oktober 1943. Yahil, Test of a Democracy, pp. 258–9 (Danish edition). Quoted in Michael Mogensen, “October 1943: The Rescue of the Danish Jews,” in Mette Bastholm Jensen and Steven L. B. Jensen (eds.), Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen, 2003), p. 58. Hæstrup, … til landets bedste, Vol. 1, p. 152. Quotation from account of the meeting; author’s translation. Ibid., p. 133. permanent secretay of the Ministry of Social Affairs Hans Henrik Koch, in Hæstrup … til landets bedste, Vol. 1, p. 159. Ibid. Ibid., p. 152. Hans Kirchhoff, “Endlösung over Danmark,” in Sode-Madsen, “Føreren har befalet!” new revised edition in Hans Sode-Madsen (ed.), I Hitler–Tysklands skygge (Copenhagen, 2003). Hans Kirchhoff: “Det værste skal undgås,” Politiken, September 20, 1993. Bo Lidegaard, Overleveren. Dansk Udenrigspolitiks historie, Vol. 4 (Copenhagen, 2003), p. 544. Archive of Sven A. Holten: account dated November 18, 1943, Danish National Archives, Copenhagen. Sode-Madsen, “Føreren har befalet!” p. 10. Quotation from the report of the Danish State Railways, in Hans Kirchhoff, “Endlösung over Danmark,” p. 103; author’s emphasis.

8

Collaboration in the deportation of Norway’s Jews Changing views and representations Bjarte Bruland

In 1957, the film On Such a Night1 appeared in Norwegian cinemas.2 Depicting the rescue of children from a Jewish orphanage in Oslo during the Nazi occupation, it came to symbolize the Holocaust of the Jews in Norway. The movie opens with an unnamed Jewish physician who throws himself out of a window as German SS soldiers smash in his door. The physician flees to a colleague, known simply as Liv (“Life,” in Norwegian). With the last of his strength, he begs: “Take care of the children.” Liv, who has contacts in the Norwegian underground, understands that he means the children at the Jewish orphanage in Oslo. In the film, the children are pursued by a ruthless German Gestapo officer, who employs all the means at his disposal to hunt them down. The movie is based on a true story. The children from the Jewish orphanage in Oslo were indeed saved by the famous Norwegian physician Nic Waal. Aided by others, including people from the Communist opposition, she smuggled the children safely into Sweden in the fall of 1942. The question is: who were really after the children – the German SS and the Wehrmacht, or the Norwegian police? An image of the Holocaust became fixed in the Norwegian psyche only a week after the end of the German occupation. To most Norwegians, while Germans arrested Jews, heroic Norwegians opposed the Nazis and tried desperately to save as many Jews as possible. This was the perceived reality.3

Background: Norway’s short history The postwar period was a difficult time in Norwegian history. Unlike many countries, Norway was not completely devastated by the war. However, the north of the country – Finnmark County and the northern part of Troms County – was razed by German forces retreating from the Arctic front. In addition, the economic situation was difficult. Norway was undersupplied in many fields, and rationing of many commodities continued well into the 1950s. Norway was a young nation in 1945. In 1814, as a result of fallout from the Napoleonic wars, the victorious Swedes and Russians used the country as a bargaining chip. The country had been under Danish rule for hundreds of

126

Bjarte Bruland

years; now Sweden was granted it as compensation for its loss of Finland to Russia. However, the Norwegian elite, comprising mainly the bureaucracy of the Danish state, was not going to hand the country over without a fight. As in most other European countries, nationalism was on the rise then. In May 1814, representatives from around the country met at Eidsvold to draft a liberal constitution with limited democracy. Later that same year the Swedish king accepted the Norwegian constitution. The Constitution was liberal; in fact it was probably the only constitution from this period to survive the conservative era that would follow. There was, however, a flaw in this liberalism: neither Jews nor Jesuit priests were allowed entry into Norway. This contradiction appeared logical to most representatives at Eidsvold. As nationalism took hold, Norway sought to remain a country for “Norwegians.” The evangelical Lutheran Church and its connection to king and state were to be retained. Despite the Constitution’s partial pledge to freedom of speech and religion, pluralism was to be avoided. Jews were permitted into Norway only in 1851 after a long and difficult political struggle.4 The Norwegian parliament, the Storting, became a battleground for competing political views. Liberals, mainly farmers and the petit bourgeoisie of the cities, opposed the old bureaucratic elite. In 1884, the Liberals became the governing power and introduced a parliamentary system of government. From the 1880s to 1905 a continual struggle for independence was waged. To further increase the pressure, all Norwegian males received voting rights in 1898.5 However, there would be no military showdown. In 1905, Sweden conceded to Norwegian demands and Norway became an independent nation. In the same year, there was a referendum in which the Norwegian population (in reality, the Norwegian male population) was given the choice between a monarchy and a republic. A large majority voted for the former, and Denmark’s Prince Carl was appointed sovereign. He chose the more Norwegian name of Haakon, becoming the fifth in line, in accordance with Norway’s royal legacy.6 The Jews never had a strong presence in Norway. As the country opened up in the 1850s and 1860s, only a few Jews entered, and most chose not to stay. The first Jews arrived from west European cities such as Hamburg and Lübeck in search of business opportunities, and left when such prospects diminished. Larger numbers of Jews only began arriving in the 1880s. Most were of Baltic origin and many had dwelt for various lengths of time in Sweden. Many were peddlers who traveled the countryside until they had saved enough money to settle down. In 1893, there were enough Jews in the capital Oslo to create two Jewish congregations. The majority of Jews, from the Baltics, Belorussia and Ukraine, settled in Norway between the early 1890s and the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. They were relatively poor, and most settled in Oslo or Trondheim, the only two cities to have organized Jewish communities. In 1920 there were some 1,500 Jews in Norway.7 In addition to the conflict that existed between center and periphery, the years 1905–40 were characterized increasingly by a struggle between workers

The deportation of Norway’s Jews

127

and factory owners. The result was a mixed blend of parties from the far left to the far right. There were a few fascist tendencies in the 1920s, but the Norwegian Labor Party (Arbeiderpartiet), established in 1889, gradually became the largest party. Its road to success was a difficult one. In the early 1920s the party split into three. Nevertheless, the Labor Party remained the largest of them and gradually marginalized all other parties on the left, including the Communists. In the early 1920s a conservative farmers’ party (Bondepartiet) was also created. In 1929 the Farmer’s Party became a deciding factor in abolishing Jewish slaughtering methods (shechita), and in 1930 they joined a governing coalition that included the old Liberal Party (Venstre). The minister of defense was Vidkun Quisling. In 1933, Quisling established the National Unity Party (Nasjonal Samling). Conflict with the workers, the economic depression and fear of the Bolsheviks laid the groundwork for his movement. He and his supporters hoped they would make a sweep in the coming elections. However, the party received barely one percent of the vote, and came increasingly to resemble a sect. Antisemitism played a role in the party’s politics from the start, but not a major one. As the movement continued to be marginalized, however, antisemitism became an increasingly major element in its program. In 1935, as a result of a deal with the Farmer’s Party, the Labor Party took over the government. A new era had begun in Norwegian politics. Barring the interlude of German occupation, Labor was to dominate Norwegian politics for more than 30 years.

“The war” World War II, known simply as “the war” in Norway,8 reinforced Norway’s self image, as well as national myths. When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, the army was not prepared for war. Nevertheless, the king and members of the government, who had fled from the capital hours before the Germans arrived, decided to resist the invasion. As the Wehrmacht took control of the capital, Vidkun Quisling attempted a coup d’état by taking over the national broadcasting station in Oslo. The German army had expected the Norwegian government to surrender without a fight. As a result of the Norwegian decision to combat the invaders with all the military means at their disposal, Hitler appointed Josef Terboven as his personal envoy in the country (Reichskommissar). Nevertheless, the Germans did not give up their attempts to make a deal with the remnants of the Norwegian bureaucracy and the political parties in the territory under their control. Early on, discussions were held between Terboven and the Norwegian authorities concerning the establishment of an “administrative council” as a more permanent solution. Quisling at this point was shunned and sent to Germany. Since he had supporters in the Nazi hierarchy there, among them Alfred Rosenberg, Terboven soon demanded that the vestiges of the Norwegian political authority accept Quisling and his party as part of the

128

Bjarte Bruland

new Norwegian political order. Ironically, it was this demand, rather than the call to depose the king, that finally forced the rump parliament and senior bureaucrats to break off negotiations. Enraged, in September 1940 Terboven appointed a government, mainly from the ranks of the National Unity Party.9 All other parties were abolished, but the state and local bureaucracy remained in place. In February 1942, Quisling was appointed “ministerial president” in a ceremony at Akershus Castle in Oslo. In practice, however, Terboven’s authority remained undiminished and tensions with Quisling continued. Terboven would always have the upper hand; Quisling, after all, was dependent on German arms.10 Quisling and his party attempted to effect several changes in the organization of Norwegian society during the war. Among other things, he tried to “nazify” the church and schools and create corporative organs like those set up by Mussolini in Italy. This was a complete failure. The reaction of the vast majority of the population was one of outright dismissal. The Quisling regime’s wish to impose their order was the primary factor in encouraging civilian and military resistance.11 Systematic anti-Jewish measures came late to Norway. Unlike most other West European countries under German control, the first steps were instituted only in early 1942. All radio receivers belonging to Jews were confiscated in May 1940, by order of the German Security Police. Regular Norwegian police carried out this operation. The residual Norwegian political and administrative bureaucracy, the Administrative Council, later half-heartedly protested it. The measure was not based on a decree.12 In 1941, Norwegian Minister of Church Affairs Ragnar Skancke proposed a law prohibiting marriage between “Aryans” and Jews and the Sámi people, and Minister of Justice Sverre Riisnæs attempted to register Jewish property that same year.13 The Norwegian church and its leader, Bishop Berggrav, stymied Skancke’s proposal, while Riisnæs’ efforts were silently boycotted by a majority of the county judges who were to carry it out. The pretext for most of the answers to Riisnæs’ request was that Jewish property could not be registered as such in the property books.14 On January 20, 1942, before Quisling’s formal “takeover” as head of state, the Norwegian Ministry of Police introduced registration of Jews based on definition. All identification papers belonging to Jews were to be stamped with a “J.” The initiative for this decree came from the German Security Police in October 1941.15 In March 1942, shortly after Quisling had been inaugurated as ministerial president, Article 2 of the Constitution stating, “Right of entry of Jews to the country is forbidden,” was reinstated.16 A number of Jews had been deported in isolated actions during 1941 and early 1942.17 In the fall of 1942, anti-Jewish measures accelerated. In the course of five months, Jews were arrested and deported, their property was confiscated by the Quisling regime, and remaining persons with “Jewish blood” were registered. Confiscation of Jewish property was anchored in a law of October 26, 1942; that same day Jewish males over the age of 15 were

The deportation of Norway’s Jews

129

arrested. On November 17, 1942, the regime introduced a law registering all persons “of Jewish blood.” Unlike the order of January 20, 1942, this registration included “half” and “quarter Jews.”18 All in all, 772 Norwegian Jews were deported, only 34 of whom survived. In addition, 24 persons died or committed suicide directly or indirectly because of measures that were taken against them. As the process intensified, unwritten orders and internal decisions replaced formal laws and decrees. This pattern was so common that it is difficult to determine the source of the initiative. It may be established to some degree of certainty that no order was received from Berlin to the German Security Police headquarters in Oslo.19 It can furthermore be assumed that the calls for action came from the ranks of the German Security Police in Oslo, but even this cannot be ascertained completely.20

The continued discussion of awareness As noted, the Quisling regime was largely responsible for the rise of the Norwegian resistance movement during the war. After the war, the process of punishing members of the Quisling apparatus began. During the war, Norwegians broadcasting from London and Sweden focused on the central role that Quisling and his regime played in deporting the Jews of Norway. Quisling himself was sentenced to death in 1945 and executed. Deportation of the Jews was an important but not a central claim made against him by the state attorney. The main charge was high treason against the legally elected government in Norway. When it came to the persecution of the Jews, a key question was whether he knew what would happen to the Jews who were arrested and deported.21 In Quisling’s final appeal, the Supreme Court judge made the following concluding statement: I cannot question that the Court of Appeals meant to express the opinion that the person convicted at the time in question did have knowledge of the German persecution of the Jews, and that he therefore involuntarily participated in the death of a larger or smaller number of Jews when he collaborated with the German authorities in the arrest and deportation of Jews to Germany. I therefore assume that the appeal [of the accused] on this point must be rejected.22 The ruling against Quisling on this point is unique in Norwegian history. In the end Quisling was convicted of “involuntary assistance in manslaughter,” a verdict given to only one other person in the history of Norwegian criminal justice. In other words, Quisling was believed by a majority of the judges when he claimed that he had no knowledge of the fate awaiting the majority of deported Jews.23 Quisling was nonetheless convicted, and his actions with regard to the Jews were taken into consideration. In many, if not most other cases, the accused

130

Bjarte Bruland

were not convicted on clauses relating to the arrest and deportation of the Jews. Wilhelm Wagner, the SS Hauptsturmführer in charge of the “Jewish Question” at the German Security Police HQ in Oslo was originally condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1951, however, he was pardoned and expelled to Germany. Knut Rød, the Norwegian police inspector in charge of the arrest of Jews in the capital Oslo, was acquitted, mainly because he had helped the resistance movement with information while working for the State Police. He later returned to his work in the Oslo Police Department and was pensioned off with honors in 1966.24 An interesting point, however, is the court’s insistence upon the question of awareness. Participation in the annihilation of the Jews was regarded as serious, but if the accused could “prove” that they did not know about the drastic measures taken “further down the line,” they would be treated more leniently. As late as the 1980s this contention was used once again by the historian Nils Johan Ringdal in his book on the Norwegian police under German occupation: In modern European practice of law there is a difference between murder with intent and unintentional manslaughter. Insufficient access to information at the time when a crime is being committed is commonly regarded as a mitigating circumstance. In this account, the action taken against the Jews should be viewed in its contemporary unintentional view.25 Another well-known Norwegian historian, Hans Fredrik Dahl, endorses this view in his biography of Vidkun Quisling from 1992: Sound documentation concerning what members of the National Unity Party knew about the destiny of the Jews does not exist. It is possible that an idea about internment camps or work colonies in Norway was present in the ranks of the party. It is, however, not probable. Plans or preparations for such a solution cannot be found anywhere. Quisling had himself on two occasions – in 1938 and in 1941 – principally determined that only a common European or international solution of “the Jewish problem” would lead to success. On the other hand, it is likely that no one could imagine that the final and international solution would come at this time.26 Not surprisingly, these arguments do not differ much from the ones used by the perpetrators themselves in the years after the war. During his trial, Quisling himself stated that he “knew nothing of the arrests before they had taken place, and I knew even less about deportation from the country.” He explained that “these things” happened because of an order from Berlin, “and absolutely not according to any wish from me.” As to the Norwegian police, he explained that “they cooperated with the German authorities, and they always regulated such things between themselves. I never intervened in such matters.”27

The deportation of Norway’s Jews

131

Who were the perpetrators? While awareness has been one question in the mythology of Norwegian participation in the Final Solution, the role of the Norwegian police and other authorities has been another. As mentioned above, the expression “the Germans” was used soon after the war, coinciding with the need to shake off the burden of occupation. During the war it was a different matter altogether. The deportation of Jews from Norway was indeed highlighted in Norwegian broadcasts from London and Sweden. In these commentaries, Quisling and his collaborationist regime were given a far more important role than they would receive in the “official” version in the postwar period. In December 1942, a Norwegian broadcast from London stated: “He [Hitler] has already managed to kill two of the ten million Jews in territories under German control. In our country, Hitler has left the dirty deed to Quisling – as usual.”28 In November 1942, the Swedish newspaper Göteborgs Handels-och Sjöfartstidende published the Norwegian cartoonist Ragnvald Blix’s depiction of the deportation, with Quisling writing the following Christmas greetings to Hitler: “I hereby send you a load of Jews as a small show of support for you in these trying times. I hope it will reach you before the lights on the Christmas tree are lit.” In the background members of the Quisling party army, the “Hird,” are seen driving Jews aboard a ship.29 This image of the Quisling regime as collaborationist was not expunged from the national myth. The question, however, was who organized and carried out the arrest of the Jews in Norway. After the war, there was a tendency to quietly forget that the Norwegian police had been the key perpetrators in Norway, and that German participation in the actual arrests and transportation to Oslo was minimal or even non-existent. The fact that other Norwegian bureaucratic organizations and even private transport firms were involved in anti-Jewish measures was never mentioned. During the arrest of Jewish women and children in Oslo on November 26, 1942, the State Police requisitioned one hundred taxis. The taxis were an essential part of the operation. The ship Donau was waiting at Oslo harbor and was to leave at noon.30 The arrests began at 04:00, and were carried out by one hundred patrols each comprising three men, which speeded up the operation considerably. The Jews were brought to a special “reception center” at Oslo harbor, where they were registered and counted before being led on board the vessel.31 After World War II the annihilation of Norway’s Jews was rarely mentioned. Between 1947 and 1950 the first major work on war and occupation appeared. In the three-volume Norway’s War the Jewish catastrophe received little attention.32 Even in works from the 1950s by historians such as Sverre Kjelstadli33 and Magne Skodvin,34 the deportation of the Jews was barely touched upon. In the meantime, the above-mentioned film, On Such a Night appeared, portraying the Germans as evil perpetrators while the Norwegian resistance movement played the part of the heroes. The movie seems to have filled whatever space there was for the Jewish catastrophe in Norwegian memory.

132

Bjarte Bruland

In schools and universities the subject of the Holocaust was rarely discussed, and in a short history published in 1983 on the occupation of Norway aimed specifically at university students, the deportation of the Jews of Norway was covered in a single sentence.35 It was only in the 1980s that some definitive works on the anti-Jewish policy and deportation of Norway’s Jews came out, beginning with a study by the criminologist Per Ole Johansen, describing Norway’s policy toward Jewish refugees in the 1930s and the role of the Norwegian police during the war. The author created a link between suspicion of refugees (and Jewish refugees in particular) within the Norwegian bureaucracy and collaboration of the Norwegian police during World War II.36 It was perhaps typical that a criminologist and not a historian pioneered this new trend. The 1980s and early 1990s saw the appearance of two more works, both by Jewish authors. In 1986, Oscar Mendelsohn, originally from the northern Jewish community of Trondheim, published the second volume of his comprehensive work on Norwegian Jewry, The History of the Jews in Norway. This work, which covered the years 1940–80, generated for the first time a serious, detailed study of anti-Jewish policy in Norway.37 In 1991, Samuel Abrahamsen’s Norway’s Response to the Holocaust appeared in English.38 Abrahamsen, also originally from the Trondheim Jewish community, collaborated with an Israeli historian, but his work was not characterized by the same thoroughness as Mendelsohn’s. These studies did not have a significant impact on the scholarly discourse, possibly because neither of the authors was part of the academic establishment. They did, however, contribute to changing the tide toward a new way of looking at Norway’s role in the destruction of the Jewish communities. In 1984, the movie Across the Border, directed by Bente Erichsen and focusing on the so-called Feldmann case, appeared. The couple Rakel and Jacob Feldmann had attempted to escape to Sweden in October 1942, but were killed by two “border pilots,” members of the resistance who helped people cross the border to neighboring Sweden. In 1947, the two pilots were tried for the murders but acquitted – probably because the victims were Jews, according to the liberal press. The movie itself was based on a book by Sigurd Senje.39 In the movie, as in the book, national myths about resistance were questioned. Two members of the resistance movement killed a Jewish couple, and after the war, were protected, both by the “myth of resistance” and by the new establishment that grew out of the ranks of the resistance movement. The movie obfuscated the past, making it more difficult to distinguish between black and white. Focusing more on the involvement of Norwegian society as a whole, its approach was completely different from that in the earlier On Such a Night. While collaboration in the Final Solution was never considered an important issue in Norway, change came about in the 1990s. The slow process began in 1995 when journalist Bjorn Westlie published an article in Dagens Næringsliv (Financial News Daily), on the liquidation of Jewish property.40 Later, the Norwegian government established a committee to investigate this

The deportation of Norway’s Jews

133

wartime question, as well as restitution after the war. The expropriation had been led and carried out by a designated bureaucratic office under the Quisling regime. Apartments and possessions from the estates of deported Jews were either auctioned or distributed, especially to party members and soldiers on the Eastern Front. The process and the end result received much attention in the Norwegian press and helped to further expose the role of Norwegian society in the annihilation of the Jews.41 There were protests against these new views as well, but they only became more vocal when the role of the Norwegian police was once again discussed. On November 26, 1998, 56 years after the arrest of Jewish women and children in Oslo, the artist Victor Lind hired one hundred taxis to take part in a live re-enactment at the former State Police headquarters in Oslo. In the resulting video he focused on the above-mentioned Knut Rød, the head of the State Police in Oslo.42 Lind wanted not only to demonstrate the role of Knut Røed in the extermination of Norway’s Jews but especially to highlight postwar Norwegian society. In Lind’s view, Norway’s collective memory required amendment to include history’s darker moments. Lind’s views were disputed in December 2003, when author Ragnar Ulstein wrote an article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, headlined: “It Was the Enemy Police, Not Ours Who Betrayed the Jews.”43 He stressed the importance of the Norwegian resistance in saving “more than one thousand Jews.” He also mentioned that the resistance movement warned Jews about the arrests that were about to take place, but “the warning did not reach – or was not believed by – all Jews.” According to Ulstein, most members of the police during the war were “good Norwegians, hundreds were active members of the resistance, and some fell victim to German bullets.” Ragnar Ulstein is one of the “old guard” of Norwegian historians. In the 1970s, after conducting over one thousand interviews with members of the resistance and others, he wrote two major works on Norwegian refugees in England and Sweden.44 In 1995, he published a work on the escape of Norway’s Jews to Sweden,45 in which he points to the considerable assistance received by the Jews from members of the Norwegian resistance and so-called export groups – underground groups that helped people flee to Sweden. There is no doubt that parts of the resistance movement played a major role in the rescue of many Norwegian Jews in the autumn of 1942.

National mythology World War II figures prominently in Norwegian national memory and undoubtedly helped shape Norway’s identity in the postwar era. As mentioned, Norway had only a brief history as an independent nation when it was invaded in 1940. Thus, a national mythology about Norway’s World War II experience was created.

134

Bjarte Bruland

According to Anne Eriksen, professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Oslo, “the handing over of collective memory to a new generation of children functions as an initiation.”46 She goes on to mention the role of anniversaries in the collective tradition. In her view, monuments and anniversaries represent “the mechanism of creating mythologies.” In many cases, she notes, “precise historical knowledge is put aside to advance mythical knowledge” about Norway’s World War II experiences.47 If that is indeed the case, the Jews have little or no place in Norway’s historical memory. Only a small number of monuments are dedicated to the fate of Norway’s Jews and few anniversaries are marked. In fact, until recently the fate of Norway’s Jews was absent from Norwegian national memory, as if the Jews were not part of Norwegian society at all. Nevertheless, the Jewish catastrophe was incorporated into Norway’s national mythology in a surprising way. In 1992 an organization was founded, significantly called “White Buses to Auschwitz.” It was based on the idea that Norwegian pupils, aged twelve to fourteen, be sent on buses to Auschwitz as well as to other concentration camps. The name derived from a mission carried out by the Swedish Red Cross organization headed by Count Folke Bernadotte in 1945. In 2002 the organization published a book celebrating their tenth anniversary.48 However, it fails to mention the fact that none of the “white buses” ever went to Auschwitz. It furthermore omits to state that according to Bernadotte’s agreement with Heinrich Himmler, the white buses were sent not to collect Jews from the concentration camps but to comb them for Danish and Norwegian survivors.49 In response, the organization expressed the view that “the white buses from the concentration camps gave hope and rescue to many Scandinavians. The [organization’s] White Buses to Auschwitz will offer hope for a good and peaceful world, where there is no room for lies and hatred, only for love and truth.”50 In an essay included in the book, one of the leaders of the organization repeats two well-known mantras of the organization: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and, “A person who forgets history will have to relive it.”51 Views on collaboration in the Final Solution in Norway might be changing, but progress is slow. Many parts of the destruction process have yet to come under scientific scrutiny. As long as this state of affairs continues, the field will remain open for an interpretation of Norway’s past that is perhaps more politically but less historically correct.

Notes 1 The title On Such a Night derives from a poem by national hero Henrik Wergeland (1808–45), who was instrumental in the institution of May 17, as a national holiday (Constitution Day) in Norway. He also fought for the removal of parts of Article 2 from the Norwegian constitution, according to which Jews were not permitted entry into Norway. This part of the constitution was finally removed in 1851, six years after the poet’s death.

The deportation of Norway’s Jews

135

2 Sigval Maartman-Moe directed the movie. 3 There are numerous examples of this. When Jews were deported in 1942 and 1943, their apartments were taken over by members of Quisling’s collaborationist National Unity Party and other “ordinary” Norwegians in need of living quarters. When the war ended, interest in these apartments rose even further, often being referred to as “Jew apartments.” In a letter concerning such an apartment, a lawyer representing an interested party only ten days after the occupation had ended wrote of “N.N., who was arrested and deported by the Germans.” Oslo City Archives (OBA), Archives of the Oslo Requisitions Board, letter from lawyer to the board, May 18, 1945. The archives of the Oslo Requisitions Board reveal that at this point no one was in any doubt that deportation meant that the original tenants would never return. 4 Tore Pryser, Norsk historie 1800–1870 (Oslo, 1985), pp. 294–5. 5 Norwegian women received voting rights fifteen years later, in 1913. 6 Jostein Nerbøvik, Norsk historie 1870–1905 (Oslo, 1986), pp. 215 ff. 7 Oscar Mendelsohn, Jødenes historie i Norge gjennom 300 år, Vol. I (Oslo, 1969), contains a description of Jewish history in Norway from the earliest times until 1940. The statistics appear in Vol. II, published in 1986. 8 Norway had experienced the horrors of World War I only in part. Norway was neutral during that conflict, but its merchant navy was badly damaged, and more than 2,000 Norwegian sailors died as a result of German torpedoes. 9 For a thorough account of the discussions about the Administrative Council and Terboven’s decision see Magne Skodvin, Striden om okkupasjonsstyret i Norge fram til 25. september 1940 (Oslo, 1956). 10 Hans Fredrik Dahl, Guri Hjeltnes, Berit Nøkleby, Nils Johan Ringdal and Øystein Sørensen (eds.), Norsk krigsleksikon (Oslo, 1995), pp. 417–18. A comprehensive account of Josef Terboven appears in Berit Nøkleby, Josef Terboven. Hitlers mann i Norge (Oslo, 1992). 11 Hans Fredrik Dahl et al., Norsk krigsleksikon, pp. 277–8. 12 Per Ole Johansen, Oss selv nnærmest. Norge og jødene 1914–1943 (Oslo, 1984), pp. 136–8. 13 Norwegian National Archives (RA), Ministry of Church and Education, copy book June 1941; letter from Minister Skancke to the Bishop of Oslo, June 13, 1941, ref. 2772 A. 14 Ibid., pp. 141–3. 15 The letters concerning this matter are found in the National Archives, Ministry of Police, Registration of Jews, 1940–45, Ref. 1261/01. 16 Norsk Lovtidend, March 12, 1942, law signed by Quisling, Minister of Justice Riisnæs and Minister of the Party Fuglesang. 17 All in all, eleven Jews were deported in these isolated actions between 1941 and July 1942, according to Bjarte Bruland, Victims of the Shoah in Norway (Database of Holocaust victims, 2005). 18 Law signed by Quisling, Minister of the Interior Hagelin and Minister of the Party Fuglesang, November 17, 1942, announced in Norsk Lovtidend, November 20, 1942. 19 This can be established from documents in Towiah Friedman, Dokumentensammlung ueber “Die Deportierung der Juden aus Norwegen nach Auschwitz” (Ramat Gan, 1963; Haifa, 1994). The collection contains an exchange of telegrams concerning the deportation of 532 Jews on the ship Donau (November 26, 1942) and 158 Jews on the ship Gotenland (February 25, 1943) from Oslo to Stettin. The exchange was between the headquarters of the German Security Police in Oslo, the Security Police in Stettin and the office of Adolf Eichmann, Referat IV B 4 of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) in Berlin.

136

Bjarte Bruland

20 Meetings took place between officers of the German Security Police headquarters in Oslo and the Norwegian State Police in October and on November 24, 1942. These meetings were between Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Wagner, head of Office IV B of the German Security Police, and head of the State Police Karl Alfred Marthinsen, as well as other high-ranking officers of the Norwegian State Police. During these talks, arrests and deportation were organized. It may be assumed that the initiative for these meetings came from the German Security Police. Case against Wilhelm Wagner (RA – L-dom 2479–47;), written affidavit by Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Wagner, n.d. 21 Straffesak mot Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssoen Quisling (Oslo, 1946), p. 464. 22 Ibid. 23 Aftenposten, May 23, 2001. The article was written in connection with the infamous Orderud murder case. One of the accused, Lars Grønnerød, was originally sentenced under the same clause as Quisling. The Court of Appeal later changed the verdict in his case. 24 In 1945, the Military Resistance Movement killed the leader of the Norwegian State Police, Karl Alfred Marthinsen. 25 Nils Johan Ringdal, Mellom barken og veden. Politiet under okkupasjonen (Oslo, 1987), p. 229. 26 Hans Fredrik Dahl, Vidkun Quisling. En fører for fall (Oslo, 1992), p. 373. 27 Straffesak mot Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsoen Quisling, p. 126. 28 Report from Quisling’s Ministry of Culture and Propaganda, Norwegian listening service, December 12, 1942. Norwegian National Archives (RA), State Police (STAPO), “Action against the Jews,” folder 29, marked “Inquiries to Quisling concerning the action against the Jews.” 29 Cartoon by Ragnvald Blix. Blix escaped from Norway to Sweden, where he was hired by Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidende, under the pseudonym Stiig Höök. His drawings were published in Norway in 1945 under the title Blix: The Five Years. 30 In reality the vessel did not leave Oslo harbor until 14:55. 31 Copy of a report from the head of the State Police to the head of the Norwegian Security Police, November 17, 1942, entitled “Evacuation of Jews.” RA, the case against Wilhelm Wagner, L-dom 2479/47, file marked “Dok. 12–50.” 32 Sverre Steen (ed.), Norges krig 1940–1945 (Oslo, 1947–50). 33 Sverre Kjelstadli, Hjemmestyrkene. Hovedtrekk av den militære motstanden under okkupasjonen (Oslo, 1959). 34 Magne Skodvin, Striden om okkupasjonsstyret i Norge fram til 25. september 1940 (Oslo, 1956). 35 Ole Kristian Grimnes, Norge under okkupasjonen (Oslo, 1983). The same author covered the Jews in half a page in the mammoth work Et flyktningesamfunn vokser fram. Nordmenn i Sverige 1940–1945 (Oslo, 1969). 36 Johansen, Oss selv nærmest. 37 Mendelsohn, Jødenes historie i Norge. Oscar Mendelsohn fled to Sweden in 1942. Both his parents were deported. He returned to Trondheim in 1945, where he became the leader of the Jewish community before he left for Oslo in 1948. 38 Samuel Abrahamsen, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust. A Historical Perspective (New York, 1991). Abrahamsen fled with his family from Trondheim to Sweden in 1941. From there, he and his brothers made their way to Canada. He later settled in New York. 39 Sigurd Senje, Ekko fra Skriktjenn. En dokumentarroman basert på Feldmannsaken 1942–1947 (Oslo, 1982). 40 The article appeared on May 1, 1995, eight days before the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II.

The deportation of Norway’s Jews

137

41 For more information on the liquidation of Jewish property in Norway see Berit Reisel and Bjarte Bruland, The Reisel/Bruland Report on the Confiscation of Jewish Property in Norway during World War II. Part of Official Norwegian Report 1997: 22 (Oslo, 1998). 42 The video re-enactment was called “Who’s Afraid? Contemporary Memory.” 43 Ragnar Ulstein, “Det var fiendens politi, ikkje vårt, som svikta jødane,” Aftenposten, 6 December 2003. 44 Id., Englandsfarten and Svensketrafikken (Oslo, 1979 and 1974). 45 Id., Jødar paa flukt (Oslo, 1995). 46 Anne Eriksen, Det var noe annet under krigen: 2. verdenskrig i norsk kollektivtradisjon (Oslo, 1995), p. 120. 47 Ibid., p. 122. 48 Torald Tveiten (ed.), Kan vi lære av historien? Ti år med Hvite busser til Auschwitz (Porsgrunn, 2002). 49 Ingrid Lomfors, Blind fläck. Minne och glömska kring Röda Korsets hjälpinnsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm, 2005). 50 Tveiten, Kan vi lære av historien? p. 16. 51 Gunnar Lingås, “Kan vi lære av historien?” in Tveiten, Kan vi lære av historien? p. 63.

9

Strategies of evasion Avoiding the issue of collaboration and indifference during the Holocaust in Greece Andrew Apostolou

Introduction1 Just days after the Allied landing in Normandy and the capture of Rome, the German occupying forces rounded up the 2,000-strong Jewish community on the Greek island of Corfu. On June 9, 1944, the mayor of the city of Corfu, Spyridonos Kollas, along with the prefect of Corfu, Ioannes Komianos, and the chief of police, Pericles Dedopoulos, issued a public notice celebrating the forthcoming expulsion of the Jews: Corfiot Patriots, Now commerce finds itself in our own hands! Now we ourselves shall reap the gains of our labor! Now the supply of food and the economic situation will turn to our advantage! The entirety of the Jews’ fortune belongs to the Greek state, and consequently to all of us. The declaration ended with the words “Long live Corfu, our beautiful fatherland.”2 Of the 2,000 Corfiot Jews assembled, 1,795 were deported on June 14, 1944. They reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on June 30, 1944. Of the 2,044 Jews on the transport from Corfu and Athens, 1,423 were murdered on arrival. There were barely 200 survivors from the Corfiot community.3 A copy of the June 9, 1944, declaration is now framed on a wall in the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens. There is no explanatory note and no attempt is made to draw attention to the document. Visitors to the Jewish Museum who know no Greek will miss it. If those who read Greek notice it at all, they will discover that the prevailing assumption in Greece of Greek Christians behaving in an exemplary manner during the Holocaust is challenged by the text.4 The undeniable fact of the proclamation welcoming the expulsion of the Corfiot Jews and its surreptitious display in the Jewish Museum of Greece, sums up the way Greece has dealt with the issue of the response of non-Jews to the Holocaust. A key test in Greece, as elsewhere, has been to understand how

Strategies of evasion in Greece

139

society behaved during the German-initiated persecution and murder of the Jews. The Corfu proclamation, evidence of collaboration in the despoiling of the Jews, support for their removal and indifference to their fate, is there for all to see. However, such issues are rarely discussed or publicized in Greece. This chapter will investigate how Greece has avoided examining, let alone coming to terms with, non-Jewish reaction to the Holocaust. While this attitude, reflected by the Greek state, has generally not been challenged by historians and memorialists, the actions of the Greek authorities and the civilian non-Jewish population, composed overwhelmingly of Greek Christians during the German-implemented murder of Greek Jews, have been discussed in detail.5 There was a mixture of administrative collaboration and popular indifference to the fate of the Jews in the country’s main Jewish center, the northern port city of Salonika. As this chapter will argue, those unpleasant facts have been evaded and ignored in Greece, a task in part accomplished by shifting the focus away from events in Salonika, where the majority of Greek Jews lived, to Athens, where a very small community was present before World War II and where there was a concerted rescue effort. What is notable about Greece is neither the official nor the popular reluctance to discuss this historical problem, but the ease with which the question has been dodged, to the extent that its existence is even denied.

The Holocaust in Greece The barest outline of the Holocaust in Greece indicates where the problem lies. On the eve of World War II, some 56,000 (70 percent) out of a community of 77,3576 Greek Jews lived in just one city, Salonika, the capital of the Greek province of Macedonia.7 Within Salonika, Jews accounted for about one-quarter of the population and were a majority of the city’s residents as recently as 1923.8 Jews were a largely urban group in a largely rural country: in 1940, 70 percent of Greece’s population lived in rural areas, while the Jews, 1 percent of all Greeks, were concentrated in a few towns and cities. Consequently, most Greek citizens had little or no contact with the Jews. The Holocaust bypassed large swathes of Greece, regions whose inhabitants were, at best, only vaguely aware of the fate of the Jews. There were two main waves of deportations of Greek Jews, in 1943 and 1944. During the spring of 1943, the Germans and Bulgarians rounded up Greek Jews in their occupation zones in northern Greece – Macedonia,9 including Salonika, western Thrace and the nomos (prefecture) of Evros, Greece’s border region with Turkey. Jews from the German-occupied areas were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans could congratulate themselves in 1943 that Salonika’s non-Jewish population had accepted the deportation of the Jews “calmly.”10 The Bulgarians, who had occupied eastern Thrace and the islands of Samothrace and Thassos in 1941, rounded up Jews in those areas and handed them over to the Germans for dispatch to Treblinka; only a handful of these Jews survived, and some communities were wiped out.11

140

Andrew Apostolou

In the autumn of 1943, following the collapse of Italy, the Germans took over the remainder of Greece in 1941. The Germans imposed antisemitic restrictions on the Jews who had lived for two and a half years under Italian rule. The Jews were then rounded up in April and June 1944 and sent to their death in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Very few Jews survived in hiding in Salonika. Barely 2,00012 remained of the Salonika Jewish community. Most Salonika survivors spent the war outside of the city or, in the case of a few hundred, emerged from the extermination camps. The result was an overall death rate in Salonika of about 96 percent. In Athens, however, about half of the 3,500 Jews living in the city escaped the arrests and eventual deportations of April 1944. An unknown but significant number, probably some 1,200, according to the historian Hagen Fleischer,13 received false identity cards bearing Christian names. The strikingly different death rates between Salonika and Athens demand an explanation. The importance of this issue is underlined by the fact that Jews were the second largest human loss of the war in Greece after the 1941–43 famine, which began after the German occupation as a result of induced food shortages and hyperinflation. The 1941–43 famine cost some 250,000 lives.14 The non-Jewish death rate in Greece during the war was about 5 percent. By contrast, the Jewish death rate in Greece as a whole was over 80 percent. In Greece, as elsewhere in German-dominated Europe, occupied or otherwise, the local non-Jewish population sometimes participated in the eviction of the Jews. Non-Jewish civilians in Salonika were for the most part Greek Orthodox Christians. There were also small communities of Armenians and some ethnic Macedonians in the city. Most writing on this period of Greek history refers to “Greeks” (meaning Greek Orthodox Christians) and “Jews,” seeming to imply that the Jews were not truly Greek. The Greek state, which has long taken such a view, formally distinguishes between its citizens on the basis of their religion. The most accurate labels are therefore Christians and Jews (to qualify the Christians as Orthodox is redundant as 99 percent are members of the Greek Orthodox Church). Relatively few Jews in Greece were killed by the Greek authorities or by local armed Greek Christian collaborators who served the Germans. There is no definitive figure, but the total was probably no more than 100 or 200. However, there was considerable administrative and police collaboration in the rounding up and deportation of Jews in Salonika, and popular indifference was widespread. Although morally different, both collaboration and indifference proved lethal to the Jews. The Germans generally handed down orders to the Greek authorities in Salonika, which they implemented expeditiously. A rare instance of a Greek official taking the lead in the persecution of the Jews was the call by Vassilis Simonides, the genikos dioiketes (governor-general, a minister with cabinet rank who lived in Salonika)15 of the province of Macedonia, to impose forced labor on Jewish men in July 1942. This was the first public act of physical persecution in wartime Greece and it came from the highest-ranking Greek

Strategies of evasion in Greece

141

official in Macedonia. For over three years, Simonides worked closely with the Germans. He helped them enforce their discriminatory measures against the Jews, and then cooperated extensively during the deportations of 1943. Simonides did not act alone. Assisting him was the bureaucracy of the province of Macedonia, as well as the police and the gendarmerie. Greek gendarmes accompanied the work details of Jewish men conscripted for forced labor.16 Greek policemen also guarded the ghettos to keep the Jews enclosed, along with the politophylake, a small unarmed force of Jewish guards working for the Germans.17 Gendarmes, aided by the politophylake, supported the German Schützpolizei (protection police, a unit of which came from Belgrade in 1943 to oversee the deportations) in moving Jews from the larger ghettos to the smaller ghetto next to the railway station, from where they briefly awaited deportation.18 There were also local ideological collaborators with the Germans, such as the Ethnike Enosis Ellas (National Union Hellas, which during the war renamed itself Ethnososialistike Enosis tes Ellados, National Socialist Union of Greece). A separate phenomenon was the indifference of local Christians to the fate of the Jews. Although the context in Salonika was arguably unfavorable to hiding large numbers of Jews, what is striking about Salonika is that so few Christians attempted to assist Jews when compared to Athenians. Salonika in the spring of 1943 was emerging from a famine, and Jews numbered, by then, about one-fifth of the population. The often cold local reaction, with a few unusual exceptions, to German-initiated antisemitic persecution left Salonika’s Jews isolated. After the Jews were expelled, the state and many local Christians plundered their property. As elsewhere, postwar restitution was at best grudging and generally slow, if made at all. The postwar Greek state showed little interest in memorializing the Jews, and even less in discussing their suffering. Public attention was similarly sparse. At no point since the war have the issues of Christian collaboration and indifference during the Holocaust been nationally debated. At best, they have been hinted at in the historical literature and in memoirs. There was no memorial to the deported Jews of Salonika in any public place until 1997. The lack of interest in the genocide of Greek Jews prompted Rena Molho, a Greek historian, to argue that “the silence about the Jewish past is a second murder, conscious or unconscious.”19 The lack of official and social interest in the historical and moral question of how non-Jews behaved during the Holocaust has created an atmosphere that discourages scholarly enquiry. The inadequacies of the Greek state have also played a role, while the threadbare literature on the Holocaust in Greece is partly a result of the paucity of official documentation. Writing in 1993, Mark Mazower, a leading historian of modern Greece, branded Greek archives a “national disgrace.”20 Well over a decade later, despite some small improvements, the best that can be said is that Mazower was too generous. The problem is that there are no real archives in Greece, merely dumping grounds for old official papers that are often not properly sorted or classified.

142

Andrew Apostolou

There is no standardized document release mechanism and no way for the public to request access to official papers.

“We should stress and praise the absence among the Greeks of antisemitism” The rehashing of wartime propaganda has been the main strategy used to enable Greece to evade any discussion of the behavior of Greek non-Jews during the Holocaust. Self-serving propaganda was transformed postwar into the dominant account of the Holocaust in Greece. Any view that challenged this version has simply been ignored. The question of how non-Jews responded to the persecution of their Jewish compatriots was already controversial in most countries during World War II. To a significant extent, such concerns were focused on and defined by Poland. The largest Jewish community under German occupation lived in Poland, and the country had a history of considerable prewar antisemitism. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, the Germans deported the survivors from the ruins of the ghetto to Treblinka. When the news reached New York, Jacob Robinson, the director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, asked in June 1943: “How could it happen that hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported and slaughtered during the course of four months without the slightest reaction on the part of the Polish population, the Polish underground, and the Polish government-in-exile?”21 A similar question might have been raised about Salonika. There had been sporadic antisemitic incidents in the city for decades. When the Greek army captured Salonika in October 1912, Jews were raped and killed, and sixty of the city’s Muslims were murdered.22 In 1931, gangs of Greek nationalists attacked Salonika Jews during the “Campbell pogrom,” claiming two lives and leaving thousands of Jews homeless. Jews suffered antisemitic discrimination when they were forced to vote, from 1923 to 1933, in a separate electoral college, which underrepresented them, supposedly to prevent them from being the arbiter in national elections, while the traditional closure of businesses on Saturday, which the Greek government had guaranteed in 1912, was banned in favor of enforced closure on Sunday as of 1924.23 No concerns were expressed about Salonika, for two reasons. To an extent, there was a lack of information about Greece. There was also a desire by the Allies to accentuate the positive about Greece, a country whose resistance to the Italians in 1940 had delivered a brief victory that had considerable propaganda value and whose suffering in the 1941–43 famine highlighted Axis barbarity. The British Foreign Office, through the Political Warfare Executive’s (PWE) weekly directives to the BBC Greek Service, tried to emphasize the supposed lack of antisemitism in Greece. The PWE’s directive for January 8–15, 1943 stated: “The oppression of the Jewish community in Salonika should be linked with the Nazi atrocities against Jews throughout the whole of Europe, and we should stress and praise the absence among the Greeks of

Strategies of evasion in Greece

143

antisemitism.”24 The directive was issued two months before the start of the deportations from Salonika and Bulgarian-occupied north-eastern Greece, but less than a month after the inter-Allied denunciation of German atrocities against Jews in December 1942, to which the Greek government-in-exile was a signatory.25 While antisemitism was less virulent in Greece than in many other places in Europe, it was not absent. When information reached both the Greek government-in-exile and the British Foreign Office of Greek state collaboration in the deportations from Salonika (which occurred largely between March 15 and May 9, 194326) and local Christian support for antisemitic measures, it was ignored. Given prewar antisemitism in Salonika, some level of local Christian assistance to the Germans might have been expected – and indeed occurred. Instead, the Greek government-in-exile played up the heroic role of Greek Christians in Athens who hid Jews from the autumn of 1943 onward, while avoiding mention of events in Salonika. It cannot be stated that the Greek government-in-exile supported in any way the assistance that its rival, the Greek collaborationist state, extended to the Germans, nor did it approve of the often unhelpful attitude of local Salonikan Christians toward their Jewish neighbors. Nor, in contrast to the Polish government-in-exile,27 did the Greek government-in-exile exhibit any hostility toward the Jews. The information available to the government-in-exile was fragmentary and its lack of desire to draw attention to negative aspects of wartime Greece meant that it could ignore occasional news that did not conform to official propaganda. The Greek government-in-exile was demonstrably more helpful to Greek Jews than many non-Jewish citizens in Greece who were close to the catastrophe and in a better position to help. It was willing to support Jewish citizens by broadcasting appeals to Christian citizens to hide Jews. In October 1943, the Germans were attempting to register the Jews of Athens. The rescue committee of the Jewish Agency had asked the Greek government-in-exile and the British authorities in the Middle East to arrange supportive radio broadcasts calling on nonJewish civilians in Athens to assist the Jews. On October 14, 1943, the BBC’s Greek service complied with this request.28 Yet, on November 8, 1943, the acting chief secretary of the British Mandatory government of Palestine refused the Jewish Agency’s urgent appeal of October 11, 1943 for a broadcast to help Jews by arguing that it “might do more harm than good.” He added that “the Minister of State feels assured that the Greeks, as fellow sufferers under Axis tyranny, can be relied upon to render all possible assistance to their Jewish compatriots without special exhortation from outside.”29 The British authorities may already have known of the Greek broadcast, but appear to have been reluctant to be seen as too dominant in their relations with the Greek government-in-exile. Unwittingly, however, the government-in-exile set the tone of debate for almost the next sixty years when in 1943 it began publicizing expressions of concern about the fate of Greek Jews. The basic line, elaborated during the war and followed largely to this day, was that the Holocaust in Greece consisted of the Germans deporting the Jews without any local government or

144

Andrew Apostolou

non-Jewish civilian assistance but with the help of some members of the Jewish community. The implication was that Greek Christians, whether in the collaborationist government or civilians, were in no manner responsible for what happened to Greek Jews; rather non-Jewish civilians did their best to save Jews. No less significant was the implication that the Jews were in some way involved in their own murder because, it was claimed, some Greek Jews such as Zvi Koretz, the chief rabbi of Salonika, assisted the Germans. These two elements were combined in a government-in-exile propaganda leaflet entitled “Le Drame des Juifs hellènes” (The Drama of Hellenic Jews), which appears to have been published in 1943. The historian Steven Bowman believes that Dimitres Pappas, the Greek chargé d’affaires of the governmentin-exile’s embassy in Cairo,30 wrote the text. “Le Drame des Juifs hellènes” described Greeks as “having refused to a man to be used as instruments of anti-Jewish persecution, and on the contrary displayed solidarity with their Jewish compatriots”31 – a claim demonstrably false even on the basis of the fragmentary information available. The pamphlet blamed Koretz for handing over Salonika’s Jewish community lists to the Germans.32 In fact, Koretz did not surrender these records, and could not have done so, as the Germans had seized them in 1941 when Koretz was in Athens. Opinions from within Greece were remarkably similar. A report by Phaedon Kontopoulou, a Greek Christian student who fled Salonika in 1943, mentioned the assistance that Koretz extended for a time to the Germans, under coercion. Kontopoulou referred only obliquely to non-Jewish collaboration, which he qualified by stating that “certainly some deviations occurred, but they emanated solely and exclusively from organs of the Gestapo.” Reflecting a view that would become dominant after the war, Kontopoulou confidently asserted: “I do not imagine that there would ever be a Jew who would have the audacity to complain about the Greek population,” and: “In these circumstances, the Greek people did as much as they could to help their brothers the Greek Jews.”33 Such attitudes coupled with official propaganda have, in the long-run, set the parameters of discussion for memorialists and historians. This fundamental desire to put the best possible gloss on the behavior of Greek non-Jews also led to misinterpretation of information emerging from occupied Greece during the war. A. L. Molho, writing from Cairo in October 1943, mistakenly claimed that there had been “violent demonstrations” in Athens on behalf of the Salonika Jews.34 There had indeed been protests in Athens during February and March 1943, but these were motivated by reports that the Germans planned to impose civil mobilization in Greece; the Jews, in fact, were not mentioned.35 There was no public demonstration against the persecution of the Jews. The protests that broke out in June 1943 after it was announced that the Bulgarian zone of occupation in Macedonia was being extended to include areas close to Salonika, were violently suppressed,36 and were unrelated to the Jews. The favorable view of non-Jewish attitudes toward the Jews in occupied Greece, and in particular Salonika, was formed despite troubling indications

Strategies of evasion in Greece

145

that some non-Jews were at the very least failing to assist their Jewish compatriots. The Greek government-in-exile received an intelligence report in the summer of 1943 that the Jews had been persecuted “under the eyes of the indifferent governor general of Macedonia, who, it appears, did not even take the trouble to officially report the events to the [Athens] government.”37 Unsurprisingly given its political agenda, the Greek government-in-exile did not publicize this report. Other evidence of less than friendly attitudes by non-Jews toward Jews in wartime Greece which came the way of Greece’s allies was also not made public. A particularly striking report of non-Jewish behavior in Salonika was given in March 1944 to Burton Berry, the American consul-general in Istanbul, who had been stationed in Salonika between the wars. Four prominent Jews who had fled Greece in late 1943 came to see Berry in Istanbul and complained about the behavior of Greek Christians in Salonika: The attitude of the Greek people toward the Jews was praised in the highest terms. With the exception of the Greeks of Salonica, who are reported to have had an unsympathetic and sometimes hostile attitude toward the Jews during the persecution of 1943, the Jewish refugees pay the sincerest possible tribute of respect and admiration for the Greeks who have consistently given aid, even at the cost of tremendous sacrifices.38 In a similar vein, a refugee sent a letter from Istanbul to the Jewish Agency in October 1943 that read: “It must be granted that the inhabitants of Athens have behaved more humanely than did the population of Salonika.”39 The difficulty for Greek government propagandists was that it was not Salonika, where 70 percent of Greek Jews lived on the eve of the war, that was the exception but Athens, where Jews were often hidden but whose prewar Jewish population was less than one-twentieth that of Salonika. By the end of 1943, the account that has prevailed until today had been defined. Direct, eye-witness evidence of at least non-Jewish indifference to the persecution of the Salonika Jews, which was not rebutted in any manner, was disregarded in favor of unsubstantiated, self-congratulatory Greek propaganda. As in many countries in Europe, Greek non-Jewish society entered the postwar era believing official propaganda. The difference, however, was that the Greek propaganda version would remain largely unchallenged to this day.

“The Greek conscience is untroubled” After the war the supremacy of official propaganda was exemplified by the writer Elias Venezis, whose 1952 biography of Damaskinos, the archbishop of Athens and All Greece, took a complacent view of Greek Christian behavior during the Holocaust. Damaskinos had courageously opposed the deportations from both Salonika and Athens. In a sleight of hand, Venezis used Damaskinos’ protests against the deportations as a means of avoiding the issues of

146

Andrew Apostolou

collaboration and indifference. Greek society was thereby allowed to escape the difficult issues of the war by hiding behind Damaskinos’ courage. To this day, concerns about antisemitism in Greece are often answered with a reference to the heroic conduct of Damaskinos and some of his fellow clergymen during World War II.40 Venezis wrote that “certainly, the tragedy [the deportations] of the Jews of Greece, within the general measures of Hitlerism against European Jews, was completed. Yet the Greek conscience is untroubled because it did its duty on this question.41 In response, the historian Bernard Pierron asked: “In Europe, which nation can thus affirm its serenity after the Holocaust?”42 The difference is that while many other countries, such as the Netherlands, held similarly high regard for their own conduct during the Holocaust, they have eventually been forced to question the belief. This officially supported account of the Holocaust in Greece implicitly shifted responsibility for collaboration during the Holocaust from Christians to Jews, thereby insinuating that Jews had been a party to their own destruction. This was achieved by repeatedly stressing Christian assistance, recalling the limited Jewish collaboration that occurred, and doggedly overlooking real Christian collaboration and indifference. This morally appalling implication may have been unintentional, but it runs through the official version to this day. Postwar legal proceedings, which were erratic and selective, reinforced the impression that of all Greeks, Greek Jews alone had to answer for collaborating in the Holocaust. No Christian was put on trial in Greece for direct involvement in the deportation of the Jews. By contrast, the Jewish community did not hesitate to name those whom it considered to be collaborators. Greek courts tried and executed Vital Hasson, a Salonika Jew, for his role in the persecution of his own people. Many Salonika Jewish survivors felt that they had been misled by Koretz (who died of illness in Germany at the end of the war). Koretz’s widow and son were ostracized by the Salonika Jewish community and they emigrated to Mandatory Palestine. While the Jews confronted the few collaborators within their own community, the state and Greek society were less willing to do likewise for the far greater number of non-Jewish collaborators. There is no evidence to indicate that there was a deliberate policy of punishing Jews rather than Christians after the war. Instead, political developments partly shaped the official Greek response. The impulse to prosecute German and other Axis collaborators that had been strong in October 1944 when the Germans evacuated the Greek mainland soon waned. The Greek liberation government in 1945 found defining collaboration for the purposes of postwar justice difficult, and drew up a long, unwieldy list of potential categories.43 However, postwar Greece knew no peace after the end of the German occupation, staggering into a civil war from 1946 to 1949 followed by a form of limited democracy. Salonika became a front-line city in that war between the Communist-dominated wartime resistance, supported by Greece’s northern Communist neighbors, and a

Strategies of evasion in Greece

147

democratic government in Athens composed largely of prewar politicians. Many wartime collaborators proved to be politically flexible, saving themselves from prosecution by casting their lot with the liberation government. This allowed them to be quickly rehabilitated and, in some cases, to return to government service. There were remarkably few trials of Axis collaborators. The three collaborationist government prime ministers were imprisoned. Two of them, General Giorgios Tsolakoglou and Ioannes Rallis, died in jail in 1948 and 1946, respectively. The third, Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, was released in 1951 despite a sentence of life imprisonment. The case against Vassilis Simonides, the governor-general of Macedonia, was shelved. Another key collaborator, Athanasios Chrysochoou, who had been Tsolakoglou’s chief of staff during the fighting that preceded the fall of Greece and who spent most of the war working with the Germans in Macedonia, was not punished.44 Propaganda constraints ensured that postwar Greek government policy would appear supportive of the remnants of Greek Jewry, although in practice the often incapable Greek state showed little interest. A supposedly exemplary restitution law was passed in 1946, but it was implemented erratically. The Greek government still boasts about this law and the fact that it was the first of its kind in Europe.45 Many Jews emigrated, particularly from Salonika, while others left the city for the anonymity and greater tolerance of Athens. Both movements of Jewish population were intensified by the Greek civil war and the economic chaos of postwar Greece. The notion implicit in postwar justice and the propaganda version that Greek non-Jews were in no manner implicated in the destruction of Greek Jewry but that Greek Jews were somehow involved, is rarely made explicit in Greek writing on the Holocaust. Although it is present as a logical consequence of how the Holocaust in Greece has been treated, few writers will state it baldly or accept the consequences of their arguments. One example of the partial articulation of this insinuation can be found in a footnote in Demosthenes Koukounas’ largely unoriginal biography of Archbishop Damaskinos. Koukounas makes the patently false claim that many Jews collaborated with the Germans, in contrast to the supposed great philanthropy shown to the Jews by their Christian compatriots. Referring to the Greek Orthodox Church’s provision of 560 false identity cards to Athenian Jews, Koukounas states: There are also many other instances in which Greeks showed a humane disposition toward the Jews, indifferent to the risks which they ran. Nevertheless, it should be reported that there were plenty of Jews of our country who collaborated with the Germans and even with the SS. After the liberation, plenty of them were judged and condemned (also to death and executed) by the special courts.46 Koukounas has turned the relatively few Jewish collaborators, such as Vital Hasson, and members of the politophylake (which initially numbered just 250)

148

Andrew Apostolou

into “plenty,” while overlooking the more influential non-Jewish state collaborators such as Simonides, the bureaucracy of the provincial government in Greek Macedonia, and the gendarmerie.

“Such examples of self-denial and sacrifice certainly existed in Salonika, but they can be counted on one’s fingers” Greek Jews challenged the propaganda narrative in their postwar memorial book, which provided a radically different and accurate account of Greek behavior during the Holocaust. No wider discussion ensued, however, in part because the weak and vulnerable Jewish community did not contest the official version in the public arena. The survivors could only lose from questioning the propaganda of the fickle Greek state. Survivors from Salonika who returned from the camps or emerged from hiding thanks to Christian assistance often encountered a hostile response from non-Jews who now occupied their property and who had come to believe that no Jew would ever return. A Jew who had survived and returned to Greece was referred to as an “unused cake of soap.”47 Such hostility toward Jewish survivors in Greece was displayed not just by Christian looters and collaborators; the Greek liberation government also took advantage of the postwar era to attempt to revoke the passports of Greek Jews living abroad, some of whom had actively supported the Greek war effort, either to prevent them from reclaiming property or simply to reduce the number of Greek Jews in the country.48 The tiny remnant of Salonika Jewry produced a three-volume memorial study of the persecution of Greek Jews, entitled In Memoriam. Written in French, it is to this day the only comprehensive history of the Holocaust in Greece. The first two volumes were published in 1948 and 1949 in Salonika. The third volume, which dealt with remarkable frankness with the role of the Salonika municipality in the destruction of the historic Jewish cemetery of Salonika, was published in Buenos Aires in 1953. The principal author was Rabbi Michael Molho, who survived outside of Salonika with the assistance of Greek Christians. In the first volume he noted how the helpful attitude of Athenian Christians was being used to distract attention from events in Salonika. Molho knew that he had to be careful. The postwar Jewish community was destitute and dependent upon the suspicious Greek state for protection. Molho, who later emigrated from Greece and settled in Argentina, criticized the propaganda version thus: It is also convenient to lean upon the admirable conduct of thousands of Orthodox [Christian] families in the capital, who with contempt for the most terrible punishments, gave assistance, protection and asylum to two or three thousand Jews during many long months, and one can cite by the hundreds cases where the very poor, living in slums, generously shared the little that they had with the unfortunate Jews whom they secretly put up, and to whom the Jews owe their lives. Such examples of self-denial

Strategies of evasion in Greece

149

and sacrifice certainly existed in Salonika, but they can be counted on one’s fingers and scarcely compensate – however great the gratitude that is owed to those who did so – for the pressure, the blackmail and the treason of which Jews who tried to save themselves were the pitiable victims.49 A Greek translation of In Memoriam was published only in 1974. The authors of In Memoriam drew heavily on an extraordinary source, the unfinished memoir of Yomtov Yacoel,50 a Greek Jewish lawyer who fled Salonika in March 1943 but was betrayed to the Germans in December that year.51 The Germans executed Yacoel in Birkenau in 1944.52 Yacoel had a unique vantage point. As a lawyer working with the Jewish community leadership in Salonika for some twenty years, he had dealt with major Greek and German figures in the city during the German occupation. Many aspects of his memoirs in the Greek context are remarkable. For most Greek Jews on the eve of the war, Greek was neither a native nor a preferred language as their mother tongue was Judeo-Spanish. Yacoel, however, was not a Sephardi Jew but a Romaniot, a native Greek-speaking Jew from the community of Trikkala in central Greece. Consequently, Yacoel wrote in katharevousa, a formal Greek used by the well educated. His account of the German persecution of Salonika’s Jews was tinged with bitterness at the Christian response to the suffering of the Jews. Yacoel contrasted the assistance Jews received from Christians in Athens with the indifferent response from Christians in Salonika: It will suffice to note this: that the stance both of the Christian community and of its leaders in Salonika in the circumstances of the enforcement of the German antisemitic program was completely different from that of the Christian community in the Greek capital, as will be shown below.53 Yacoel’s arrest in December 1943 meant that his manuscript, which ends in mid-sentence during a description of events on March 7, 1943, was not completed. The memoir, used by Molho and his fellow compilers of In Memoriam, was first serialized in Evraike Estia (Jewish Home), the newspaper of the Athens Jewish community from 1950 to 1952.54 The text was then translated into Hebrew in 1961 for the Eichmann trial and published in Israel that same year.55 No discernible public debate emerged from these occasional publications of Yacoel’s concerns and his sometimes damning comments about Greek Christian behavior. Yacoel’s memoir was not published as a book in Greece until 1993. The dominant account of Greek Christian rescue and sympathy for the Jews became so fixed in the postwar era that when opportunities arose to question the supposed overwhelming support for the Jews, they were not taken. Indeed, the notion that Greek Christians had no reason to doubt their

150

Andrew Apostolou

behavior during the Holocaust ensured the persistence of the civil war era reluctance to bring collaborators to account. This was underlined in 1959 during the trial of Maximilian Merten, the official who had been the Kriegsverwaltungsrat (civil administrator) reporting to the Befehlshaber Saloniki– Ägäis (German military commander of northern Greece and the Aegean) from 1942 to 1944. Merten had decided to visit Greece for a holiday. He had received an assurance from Greek military officials in West Germany in 1947 that he was not a wanted man.56 To his surprise, however, he was arrested. Merten faced hearings in Athens, not in Salonika, in 1959. The trial centered mainly on the German persecution of the Jews and was not a forum for discussing Greek Christian involvement in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, leading Greek collaborators in the Holocaust such as Vassilis Simonides and Athanasios Chrysochoou testified during the trial, since they had been sufficiently rehabilitated in Greek society that their evidence was not considered tainted. Similarly, the dominant version of the Holocaust went unchallenged when the trial covered anti-Jewish acts in which Greek non-Jews had been involved. For example, Simonides stated that he did not know who had destroyed and plundered the Jewish cemetery of Salonika and that Merten was uninvolved.57 This was a lie, as Simonides had given the order to destroy the cemetery after consulting with Merten.58 Simonides was not queried on this point. Merten was found guilty, but he was soon released because he was well connected in West Germany. In 1952 he had been involved with Gustav Heinemann’s Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei (GVP), a short-lived political movement that was dissolved in 1957. Heinemann, who had been West German Interior Minister from 1949 to 1950, acted as a defense lawyer for Merten.59 With such powerful friends working for him, West Germany put diplomatic and economic pressure on Greece. Following rumors that Merten might unmask former collaborators at high levels of postwar Greek politics, the Greek government led by prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis caved in and released Merten. He was sent back to West Germany supposedly to face legal proceedings there. The Greek government must have known that the West German authorities had little intention of prosecuting Merten. An investigation was opened in Berlin but Merten was not tried.60 Merten, however, resurfaced in 1961 to swear an affidavit in support of Eichmann, who was by then on trial in Jerusalem. A key piece of evidence on the persecution of the Jews of Greece was Yacoel’s memoir, submitted to the court by his friend Asher Moissis, who unlike Yacoel had survived in hiding in Athens. Hannah Arendt, who covered the Eichmann trial, left with an unfavorable impression of the behavior of non-Jews in Greece during the Holocaust. She judged that “at best” Greek Christians had shown indifference toward their Greek Jewish compatriots during the Holocaust.61 Remarking upon the unusually lenient treatment of Merten in Greece in 1959, Arendt commented: “It would seem that the indifference of the Greeks to the fate of their Jews has somehow survived their liberation.”62

Strategies of evasion in Greece

151

Although hardly the most controversial comments in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt was posthumously taken to task by the historian Susanne– Sophia Spiliotis, who argued that Arendt was ignorant of the diplomatic background to the Merten case. Rejecting the notion that “indifference alone” could explain the handling of the Merten affair, Spiliotis writes that “political and economic expediencies”63 shaped how the Merten and other war crimes cases were handled. Although Spiliotis has examined German diplomatic files (Greek files are unavailable), her criticism of Arendt is flawed. Arendt did not argue that indifference was the sole factor behind the clemency shown to Merten, but one of several that linked his early release to the behavior of Greek Christians during the Holocaust. So keen is Spiliotis to dismiss the notion of indifference that she forgets that indifference is a political factor and one of the reasons why the Greek government was so easily pressured, both politically and economically, by West Germany into releasing Merten. Thanks to the Eichmann trial, however, there was growing global interest in the Holocaust which even Greece could not completely avoid. Greek writers, however, proved more than able to assimilate evidence that did not correspond with the self-congratulatory consensus. One popular historian, Polychrones Enepekides, published a series of articles in To Vema (Greece’s leading newspaper) from August 21, 1966 to September 23, 1966 describing the persecution of Greek Jews on the basis of German archives. These articles were collated and published in book form as The Persecutions of the Jews in 1969.64 Both the timing and content of the book were in a sense remarkable. As of April 1967, Greece was run by a military junta that had seized power in a coup. Many of those involved in the junta, including Minister of Justice Ilias Kyriakopoulos, did not hide the fact that they had collaborated with the Germans. This was regarded as politically acceptable as it was portrayed as a form of patriotic anti-Communism, the collaborators having supposedly worked with but not for the Germans. Nevertheless, Enepekides was blunt in his description of Simonides, writing that the governor general tried to be “more German than the Germans.”65 While he did not label Simonides a “collaborator,” Enepekides’ implication was clear: Simonides had assisted the Germans in the persecution of the Jews and was a traitor. These few words were potentially strong stuff for Greece. However, Enepekides, in standard fashion, muffled the impact with detailed chapters on how Christians in Athens nobly saved their Jewish compatriots – precisely the device against which Molho had warned in 1948, of using the rescuers and the righteous as a cover for the much larger number of Greek Christians who had benefited from the suffering of the Jews.

Missing in translation What Enepekides demonstrated, despite his creditable disparagement of Simonides, was that the complacent myth of Greece’s conscience being “untroubled” could conceal difficult questions. The Jewish community, which

152

Andrew Apostolou

was dwindling in numbers, could not be expected to raise the issue publicly. Instead, understandably, it adopted a low profile and missed no public opportunity to proclaim its patriotism and support for the tale of near universal Greek Christian compassion.66 Christian collaboration and indifference during the Holocaust became a public taboo, a matter of private knowledge not to be discussed openly. So strong was this taboo that in one case memoirs were edited in translation in order to play down Christian apathy to helping Jews in wartime Salonika. While indifference and collaboration are not the same, both had the effect of condemning Salonika Jews to die in large numbers. The strength of Greek society’s self-censorship on the discussion of collaboration in the Holocaust and the dominance of the myth of rescue have meant that even mention of indifference as an issue, let alone as a fact, is unacceptable. The various editions of the memoirs of Jacques Stroumsa, a former pupil of Yomtov Yacoel, illustrate how this key question can go missing in translation. At the end of his memoir, entitled Choose Life,67 Stroumsa addresses queries that are often put to him, including why so few Jews were sheltered by Christians in Salonika. The Greek translation of the memoir offers a different explanation from that given in the Hebrew and French editions. The French edition, the original text, implies that relations between the Christians and Jews in Salonika were distant: During the occupation the idea of finding refuge in Christian families was absolutely preposterous. First, because the Jews spoke Greek with a distinctive accent and so would immediately be given away, furthermore because these families would have refused to hide them (with some rare exceptions).68 The Hebrew translation of this French text is not word-for-word, but accurately explains that “the links between the Jewish community and the Christian community did not in any way allow many Jews to hide themselves.”69 The Greek translation provides a different impression by stressing the danger to Christian rescuers rather than Christian unwillingness to assist Jews. The following words that have been added to the Greek text at the end of the above quotation in the original French one have the effect of excusing Christian indifference to the fate of the Jews; “and secondly because apart from a few families, there were not many who would take on such a hazardous enterprise, which would put their lives in danger.”70 The Greek edition of Choose Life was published by Etz Haim (Tree of Life), the printing house of the Jewish Community of Salonika.

Distorted memory The absence of any public discussion of Greek Christian reaction to the Holocaust, indeed the inability to even allow that the issue is relevant, may be

Strategies of evasion in Greece

153

compared to the way Greek society has ignored Greek Jewish history. The Jews, who defined Salonika, were marginalized after the war and became strangers in the history of their own city. Memoirs of the war years written by non-Jews exhibited a remarkably similar pattern: Greek Christian participation in anti-Jewish measures was mentioned in passing or explained away, while the Jews were portrayed as refusing to be saved. In her memoir “In Salonika,” Eleutheria Drosakes recalled accompanying her grandfather to visit a Jewish friend in a ghetto guarded by Greek gendarmes. Her grandfather apparently tried to persuade his friend Mouloutso and his family to hide, and offered his assistance, at the very least in sheltering the children, but Mouloutso declined.71 The Communists did send messages into the ghetto to encourage Jews to leave. However, since the ghettoes were surrounded by armed guards, such appeals were in vain.72 Similar distortions were evident in the work of Giorgios Ioannou, a Salonikan writer who actually acknowledged the Jewish presence in Greece and discussed the deportations. The Kentriko Israelitiko Symvoulio Ellados (KIS, the Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece), the official representative institution of Greek Jews, therefore held Ioannou in considerable respect for having the decency to remember the Jews. An entire issue of Chronika, the official publication of KIS, was devoted to Ioannou after his death. Yet, despite Ioannou’s recognition of the Jews, his opinions of them were tainted by Greek nationalism. Ioannou’s explanations of Christian–Jewish relations are tortured and stereotypical, and his account of how his father drove a train of Jews to the border of German-occupied Yugoslavia is characterized by selfpity, not moral self-examination.73 Repeating the cliché that the Jews had gone unresisting to their deaths, he wrote in an article reprinted by Chronika that the Jews went “silently on the path of martyrdom.”74 Ioannou vindicated one of the more uncomfortable facts about the history of Salonika, that Christians and Jews often led separate lives and were sometimes at odds with each other, by blaming the Jews. He avoided the fact that this social division was in part due to Christian antisemitism. Instead, Ioannou claimed that the lack of contact between the two communities was due to the psychology of the Jews, an allegation characterized by stereotypes and an archaic notion of “oriental calculation.” Turkish rule, which received the Jewish refugees [from Spain as of 1492] out of pure oriental calculation, as well as the psychological state of those Jews, who had an unforgettable previous history of persecutions in other places, and continuous pressure on this place from the Turkish dynasts, did not allow much mixing with the indigenous ethnic Greeks, who lived beside them and beneath the same yoke, in Salonika and in other Greek areas.75 In other words, Ioannou argued that Greek Christians did not shun the Jews. Rather he partially blamed the Ottomans (the Turks) for keeping Christians

154

Andrew Apostolou

and Jews apart, disparaging the Ottoman acceptance of the persecuted Jews of Spain as crude “oriental” cunning rather than the act of humanitarianism or generosity that it was. Ioannou also held the Jews responsible for their own isolation because of their “psychological state,” a classic example of “blaming the victim.” The implication was that while the Jews had faced persecution elsewhere, they had no reason to fear such treatment from Greek Christians. What Ioannou avoided was not only Greek Christian antisemitism but also the history of Greek rule in Salonika after 1912. The Greek state had gradually and deliberately eroded the position of the Jews, albeit with relatively little violence and largely through official discrimination that was mild by most standards. In a similar vein, Ioannou wrote that Salonika Christians were indifferent to the Jews, neither hating nor loving them,76 hardly a statement of any great warmth and not the words of a writer that a Jewish community could be expected to honor.

Convenient remembrance During the 1990s, political changes in Greece led to slightly more discussion of Jewish history and state willingness to consider a public memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Salonika. Although the change in attitude was hailed abroad as evidence that Greece had joined the European mainstream in confronting the painful legacy of the Holocaust, there was less to the upsurge in remembrance than met the eye. Memorializing Salonika Jews became politically expedient for the Greek state. Greek governments in the 1990s were keen to cast off the image that the country had acquired in the 1980s as a minor international irritant that was reflexively hostile to the West and rabidly antiIsrael. To the official Greek mind, memorialization of the Holocaust was a political and diplomatic tool which would bring it closer to the Israeli–Arab peace process and allow it to contend with Turkey, its long-standing rival, whose ties with Israel were reportedly growing. In November 1997, the Greek state unveiled a Holocaust memorial in Salonika. The sculpture was the first official Holocaust monument erected in a public space; a memorial had been unveiled in the Jewish cemetery of Salonika in 1962, in the presence of Greek officials, but it was a community, not a state, initiative. The official memorial in Salonika had been promised for over a decade. It was finally erected, in part because in 1997 Salonika was designated the European Capital of Culture, which made it difficult for the Greek authorities to ignore the Holocaust and the Jewish element of Salonika’s history. Moreover, the Greek government was keen to avoid the criticism that it had faced in January 1995 when the Greek foreign minister boycotted the commemorative events on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau due to the presence of a representative of the independent state of Macedonia, which Greece does not recognize.77 The political aspect of the inauguration of the Holocaust memorial in 1997 was made plain in explanations provided by Greek officials to journalists,

Strategies of evasion in Greece

155

indicating three factors that had motivated the government to make good its pledge to erect a monument. In addition to Salonika being the European Capital of Culture and diaspora Greek pressure, a leading motive had been “Israel’s burgeoning military cooperation with Turkey – political players saw the memorial as a way to strengthen ties with Israel.”78 There are limits to how far official remembrance can proceed in light of boundaries set by the propaganda version of history. The Holocaust memorial sculpture is dedicated to those deported by the Germans in 1943. It remains beyond the realm of the imagination for a memorial to be erected that might refer to non-Jewish participation in the persecution of Greek Jews. There is no memorial to Salonika Jews shot by Greek collaborators in September 1944. Nor is there a plaque at the site of the Jewish cemetery destroyed by the municipality during the German occupation and upon which the Aristoteleion University of Thessaloniki is now largely built.79 An integral element in the remembrance of the 1990s was the involvement of the Jewish community in funding official propaganda that dodged the issues of Greek Christian collaboration and indifference. Under Greek law, the Jewish community in Greece is not a private religious organization but an official body incorporated under a 1920 law that defines its functions. The Jewish community took the opportunity presented by the state’s greater willingness to discuss the Holocaust to raise its profile, which it had previously kept low. There was, however, a cost involved. Under subtle pressure to prove its patriotism, the community openly funded a pamphlet entitled “Wartime Jews: The Case of Athens,”80 written by Alexander Kitroeff. Published by a semi-official think tank, the Elleniko Idryma Europaikes kai Exoterikes Politikes (ELIAMEP, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy), the pamphlet highlights the partial perspective that ignores Salonika and focuses on Athens in order to avoid difficult questions about the high death rate in the former. In many countries, it would be easy to dismiss such publications as obvious propaganda that nobody would take seriously. However, in Greece, where there is a dearth of information on the Holocaust, such half truths, with the academic imprimatur of having been drafted by a historian and published by a well-known think tank, have an impact. Thus, when there was a slight rise in interest in Greek Jews and their history in the Greek media during the 1990s, the clearly expressed propaganda view of “Wartime Jews” was readily at hand. Journalists delving into these issues have therefore tended to reiterate this perspective, as there is no other version available. Journalist Dan Georgakas termed the Holocaust in Greece “a still largely untold story of how Greek Christians massively resisted the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Greece.”81 The same writer blamed Koretz for the high losses of Jews in Salonika, claiming that it was “partly due to his false counsel [that] the death rate in the city was a staggering 96 percent.”82 The second example of how the Jewish community pays for official propaganda was the publication in 1998 of a foreign ministry volume, Documents

156

Andrew Apostolou

on the History of the Greek Jews: Records from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, co-edited by then archivist of the Istoriko Archeio Ypourgeio Exoterikon (AYE, Greek foreign ministry Archive) Photini Constantopoulou, and a leading ELIAMEP scholar, Thanos Veremis.83 The cost of producing the volume, which Greek diplomatic missions handed out free, was borne by KIS. The volume was published in English, although this meant translating documents from Greek (a Greek edition was published some years later), because the collection was intended as the Greek contribution to the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, November 30–December 3 1998. While many of the documents are useful, the selection for the volume was rather obviously made with the idea of promoting a positive image of Greece. The message is that Greece is good to its Jews. As for the Jews, they are often portrayed as either grateful or unjustly complaining.84 With the official version now encapsulated in a document collection, Greece’s official representatives were able to portray their country as a protector of its Jews, a country which unlike almost any other had no need for soul searching. Speaking to the American Jewish Committee in May 2000, then Greek foreign minister George Papandreou cited the volume of documents and boasted that “during the Second World War, the Greek authorities issued 18,500 false identity papers to protect Jews hiding from the Nazis.”85 In fact, there were only about 10,000 Jewish survivors in Greece and the number of false identification cards issued is estimated at just 1,200.86 The inflated figure aside, Papandreou’s point was firmly within the framework of the propaganda version – that Greece only needed to congratulate itself on the behavior of previous generations.

The evasions of scholarship With greater documentation, including Greek archives, becoming available, it might be expected that the propaganda version would be publicly challenged, especially by historians. With the exception of one academic journal, however, this has not happened. Instead, while the history of wartime Greece has become more widely accessible, thanks to the writings of historians such as Hagen Fleischer of the University of Athens and Mark Mazower of Columbia University, the propaganda version has been left largely intact. Although these highly regarded scholars have had access to evidence that could allow them to confront Greek audiences with uncomfortable questions, they have failed to do so. There have been two exceptions: Greek novelist Vasilis Boutos and French scholar Bernard Pierron. The infamous proclamation and welcoming of the deportation of the Jews of Corfu was mentioned in a novel by Boutos, E sykophantia tou aimatos (The Blood Libel) in 1997. Boutos had attempted to disguise the figure of the mayor of the city of Corfu, Spryridonos Kollas, behind a character called Antonios Kallas. A grandson, great-grandson and great-granddaughter of Kollas tried to sue the novelist for defaming the

Strategies of evasion in Greece

157

memory of their forebear. (The reputation of the dead is protected in Greek law and libel is a criminal offense, although the guilty can “buy off” their sentences.) The case attracted some local attention in Corfu but little in Athens. The debate was polarized and inconclusive, as was the case. In its coverage, a national newspaper, Elephtherotypia, reported the claim made by some that it was unclear whether Greek Christian collaborators had even signed the proclamation. This idea has been popularized by Stephanos Rozanis, former director of the Jewish Museum of Greece, who cast doubt on the proclamation’s authenticity.87 Bernard Pierron, whose vast thesis “Histoire des relations entre les Grecs et les Juifs de 1821 à 1945” has been published in a shorter, book version,88 concentrates on relations between the Jewish community and the Greek state before World War II and makes extensive use of the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, as well as newspapers of that era. Although Pierron used few archival documents on the period of the Holocaust, he has no illusions as to the behavior of Greek Christians and the Greek state. The importance of Pierron’s section on the Holocaust is that he discusses in print what is known privately: that Christians in Salonika often cared little for the fate of their Jewish compatriots but hastened to steal their property once the Jews had been deported. In contrast to Pierron, the historians Fleischer and Mazower have not tackled the issue of Christian conduct during the Holocaust in any depth, although they have used Holocaust-era archives. Fleischer raised the question of Christian attitudes toward the Jews, although he mitigated his comments so that they did not come across as overly critical. For example, he argued in 1993 that hostility to the Jews stemmed from the perception that they could not easily be assimilated and that they had not welcomed the Greek conquest of Salonika in 1912, claims that are not particularly contentious but which acknowledge the existence of Greek Christian animosity toward the Jews. Yet he immediately softens the blow: “These remarks do not minimize, however, in any way the contribution of all those Salonikans who assisted their Jewish compatriots, thereby putting their own lives at risk.”89 Fleischer’s apologetic explanation sums up the literature on the Holocaust in Greece. Historians asking how Christians reacted to the persecution of their Jewish compatriots instantly qualify their question by denying that they are casting any aspersions upon the rescuers. This failure to distinguish between different groups of Greek non-Jews, between those who could have had no role, those who were indifferent, those who looted Jewish property and those who actively assisted the Germans, is a key impediment to any serious analysis of Christian behavior during the Holocaust in Greece. Fleischer took a similar approach in his contribution to the Istoria tou Ellinikou Ethnous (History of the Greek Nation), a standard reference work. While not denying the strikingly dissimilar non-Jewish response to the persecution of Jews in Salonika and Athens, he explained that it resulted from different levels of Jewish assimilation that supposedly influenced Christian

158

Andrew Apostolou

willingness to either help the Germans or assist the Jews. Discussing Salonika, Fleischer cited the following reasons for the considerable Jewish losses, which implied a degree of Christian unfriendliness toward the Jews: the language issue (many Salonika Jews spoke Judeo-Spanish rather than Greek); close family ties among the Jews, which made young Jews unwilling to abandon their parents; and the lack of any resistance-controlled safe area to which Jews could flee. Fleischer did not discuss why Christians seem to have made little effort to bridge these gaps between the communities. Instead, he accentuated the positive. Although he barely touched upon the issue of Christian collaboration at all, he did mention that all 275 Jews on the island of Zakynthos were saved.90 Mazower, the other main historian of World War II Greece, has taken two different positions on the question of Greek attitudes to the Holocaust. His scholarship on Greece has been more prominent in recent years because he is such a prolific writer. Mazower has authored six books, all of which deal with Greece and five with the Holocaust,91 which have brought modern Greek history to wider public attention. Yet while Mazower writes about the Holocaust, he also questions whether anything can be learned from investigating it further. Mazower began by largely ignoring Christian collaboration during the Holocaust in Greece and the role of local antisemitism. He now acknowledges both factors, but like Fleischer dissipates their impact and attempts to explain away their significance. In a judgment that did not challenge the official version but was consistent with it, Mazower argued in his 1993 book Inside Hitler’s Greece that “overall, Orthodox Greeks showed a remarkable generosity of spirit toward the Jews which bears comparison with that of any other group in Europe.”92 He summed up the Greek Christian reaction as “Greeks’ overwhelming disapproval of German policy towards the Jews.”93 In 1993, Mazower did not consider local Greek Christian antisemitism a significant factor. His reasoning was that “the vulnerability of the Jews in the Macedonian capital owed less to the indifference or hostility of fellow Greeks than to the fact that they were the first to be persecuted.”94 Mazower did not mention the 1931 Campbell pogrom in his 1993 chapter on the Holocaust, although some of those who had been involved in sparking this antisemitic riot became active collaborators with Germany during the war.95 In addition, Mazower barely mentioned the chief collaborators; Simonides rated just one passing reference.96 He touched on the participation of Christians in looting Jewish property, but not on their role in the preceding persecutions and deportations.97 Oddly, Mazower overlooked evidence of Simonides’ involvement in ordering Jewish men to be conscripted for forced labor in July 1942, a fact noted in a document published in 1962 by the United Restitution Organization,98 although he had consulted the volume for his 1993 book.99 Mazower also failed to include in his account other evidence that was inconsistent with the view that validates Greek Christian behavior. On three

Strategies of evasion in Greece

159

occasions he cites Burton Berry’s report from March 1944 noted above, but does not quote the passage about “the Greeks of Salonica,” in which Jewish refugees criticized the attitude of Christians there.100 Indeed, the only historian to quote this passage in full is Michael Matsas,101 a survivor from the Romaniot community of Agrinion. Matsas, who hid in the mountains of central Greece, argued in his book The Illusion of Safety that while Christians who assisted Jews deserve recognition, their role was perhaps exaggerated.102 Mazower’s more recent scholarship takes a more nuanced stance on the question of how Greek Christians behaved in Salonika during the Holocaust. This more critical view is partially hedged by laudatory qualifications and somewhat obviated by his questioning of whether any further study of the Holocaust is necessary. In Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 Mazower, in part drawing upon this writer’s research,103 describes the Greek collaborationist state and Greek Christian involvement in the Holocaust and discusses Simonides’ role as a collaborator. Yet Mazower weakens the effect of raising this issue by writing that “solidarity was shown by many friends and neighbors when the Jews were forced out of their homes and confined to the ghettoes.”104 This statement is not consistent with the evidence or with Molho’s conclusion over fifty years earlier that “such examples of self-denial and sacrifice certainly existed in Salonika, but they can be counted on one’s fingers.”105 In addition to this writer’s critical observations of Mazower’s discussion of antisemitism,106 the Balkan historian Noel Malcolm said of City of Ghosts: “it might be argued that he [Mazower] has treated one of the most awkward questions in Greek history with some indulgence.” According to Malcolm, … the issue of Greek antisemitism (a minor phenomenon, but occasionally important in this story) is not properly explored here: hostility to Jews is given, whenever possible, a political explanation, and the nature of its Orthodox religious background is not investigated.107 That Mazower, the most widely read and best known historian of Greece and the Holocaust in Greece, does not tackle these issues makes sense given his doubts as to the importance of further research into the Holocaust. Reflecting upon the Waldheim affair of the 1980s, he says: “The accusation that Waldheim had been involved in the Final Solution – unfounded as it turned out – reflected the extent to which the Holocaust was dominating thinking about the Second World War.”108 Mazower, whose book Inside Hitler’s Greece was partially a result of his own work on Waldheim, begins with the words “It was Kurt Waldheim who aroused my interest in occupied Greece,”109 and proceeds to complain that “sometimes it seemed from the way people talked and wrote as though nothing else of significance had happened in those years.”110

160

Andrew Apostolou

According to Mazower, “There were good reasons for deploring this state of cultural obsession,”111 because it meant that “outsiders” could judge the behavior of those who lived in wartime Europe, and because it meant that he, as a historian, could ignore today’s Salonika since all he was looking for was evidence of the crimes of the past. Commenting on recent scholarly additions to the historiography of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Mazower wondered “what more remains to be learned.”112 In Greece, the answer must be that much remains to be learned and much unlearned. Over sixty years after the end of World War II, discussion of the Holocaust in Greece, and its epicenter in Salonika, remains largely trapped within the confines of wartime propaganda. There has been almost no discussion of the role that Greek non-Jews or the Greek collaborationist state played in the deportation and despoliation of Jewish citizens, largely because the validity of this issue has not yet been conceded. Greek society and the Greek state do not even see such questions before them, in part because historians and memorialists have not called into doubt the official version – an account of events concocted for the purposes of wartime propaganda, and which has long outlived its usefulness. During World War II, too many Greek Christians, particularly in Salonika, evaded their moral and civic responsibilities toward their Greek Jewish compatriots. Over sixty years later, the few that remain and their descendants continue to escape any discussion of the past.

Notes 1 The author wishes to dedicate this chapter to the memory of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg (1921–2006). 2 Bernard Pierron, “Histoire des relations entre les Grecs et les Juifs de 1821 à 1945,” thèse de doctorat de l’Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Etudes Hébraiques et Juives (Paris, 1993), pp. 929–30. 3 Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945. From the Archives of the Auschwitz Memorial and the German Federal Archives (New York, 1990), p. 654. 4 A copy is also available online at www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/greece/ eng/corfu.htm. 5 Andrew Apostolou, “‘The Exception of Salonika’. Bystanders and Collaborators in Northern Greece,” Holocaust Genocide Studies 14, No. 2 (fall 2000), pp. 165–96. 6 Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S26/1407. 7 Hagen Fleischer, Stemma kai Svastika. E Ellada tes Katoches kai tes Antistases 1941–1944, Vol. 2 (Athens, 1995), p. 302. 8 Rena Molho, Salonica and Istanbul. Social, Political and Cultural Aspects of Jewish Life (Istanbul, 2005), p. 166. 9 This refers to the Greek province of Macedonia. The Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and its successor, the independent state of Macedonia, lie to the north of Greek Macedonia. 10 NARA (National Archives and Records Administration, USA)/T501/Roll 252/ Frame 001121. 11 See Hagen Fleischer, “Griechenland,” in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1991), pp. 241–74. In addition, the memorial publication Chronika, the publication

Strategies of evasion in Greece

12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

161

of the Kentriko Israelitiko Symvoulio Ellados (Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece), has some of the figures: Aphieroma teuchos gia to Olokautoma ton Evraion tes Ellados (Athens, 2006, previous editions 1985, 1992), p. 3. Miriam Novitch, Le Passage des barbares. Contribution à l’histoire de la déportation et de la résistance des Juifs grecs (Paris, 1967; 2nd edn Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, 1982), p. 14. Personal communication from Professor Hagen Fleischer. AYE (Istoriko Archeio Ypourgeio Exoterikon, Greek foreign ministry Archive, Athens)/1944/Cairo/File.8/subfile.1/AEP.275/D/5 August 11, 1944, quoting the Palestine Post, August 11 1944; AYE/1945/KY/File.26/subfile.3/National revendications of Greece/n.d.; for famine losses see Bendt Helger, Ravaitaillement de la Grèce pendant l’occupation 1941–1944 et pendant les premiers cinq mois après la libération: Rapport final de la Commission de Gestion pour les Secours en Grèce sous les auspices du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge (Athens, 1949), p. 625. Genikos dioiketes can also be translated as “general administrator.” Daniel Carpi (ed.), Italian Diplomatic Documents on the History of the Holocaust in Greece, 1941–1943 (Tel Aviv, 1999), pp. 102–3. AYE/Archeio Istorias Ellenon Evraion (Archive of the History of Greek Jews – AIEE)/1943/File.1/subfile1/doc.5; Photini Constantopoulou and Thanos Veremis, (eds), Documents on the History of the Greek Jews. Records from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Athens 1998), p. 258. For more details see Apostolou, “‘The Exception of Salonika’,” pp. 165–96. Michael Molho, In memoriam. Hommage aux victimes juives des Nazis en Grèce, 2nd edn, revised and augmented by Joseph Nehama (Thessaloniika, 1973; 1st edn, 3 vols, Salonika, 1948, 1949, Buenos Aires, 1953), p. 98. Thanassis Cambanis, “Forgotten History, Fragile Future. A Belated Tribute to Greece’s Fascinating Jews,” Odyssey (January–February 1998), p. 46. Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece. The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1993), p. 423. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York, 1992), p. 208. Rena Molho, Salonica and Istanbul, p. 221. Ibid., p. 192. Political Warfare Executive weekly directive, January 8–15, 1943: “[T]he oppression of the Jewish community in Salonika should be linked with the Nazi atrocities against Jews throughout the whole of Europe, and we should stress and praise the absence among the Greeks of antisemitism,” PRO (Public Record Office, UK) FO 371/37211/R113/13/19, January 11, 1943. AYE/1942–1943/Cairo/File.21/subfile.A/15/II. Hans Safrian, Eichmann und seine Gehilfen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1995), p. 257. David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1987); Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1993). Telegram from Leon Castro, Cairo, to Itzhak Gruenbaum (head of the Rescue Committee), Jewish Agency, Jerusalem, 1225, October 15, 1943. CZA, S26/1407 (Yehudei Yavan). Acting Chief Secretary of the Government of Palestine to the Jewish Agency, 8 November 1943, Ref. I/129/43. CZA, S (Yehudei Yavan). I am grateful to Professor Steven Bowman for alerting me to Pappas, and to his likely authorship of this pamphlet, in particular. “Le Drame des Juifs hellènes” [n.p., n.d.], p. 9, in CZA/S26/1407/handwritten file No. 851/44 (hereafter Drame). Also in Jewish Museum of Greece/WWII/Istoria

162

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44

45

46 47

Andrew Apostolou Istoria Koinotitas Thessalonikes (History of the Salonika Jewish Community)/ Bulletin de Documentation, No. 6 [n.p., n.p.]. “Le Drame des Juifs hellènes,” p. 10. AYE/AIEE/1943/File.1/subfile1/doc.5, Constantopoulou, Documents, p. 260. Kontopoulou’s report was first published in Hebrew in HaMahon Lemehkar Yahdut Saloniki, Ginzach Saloniki (Tel Aviv, 1961). A. L. Molho, “The Situation of the Jews in Greece,” World Jewish Congress (New York, February 1944), p. 1. Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, pp. 117–18. Christos D. Kardaras, Boulgarike Propaganda ste Germanokratoumene Makedonia. Boulgarike Lesche Thessalonikes 1941–1944 (Athens, 1997), p. 19. AYE/AIEE/1943/File.1/subfile.1/doc.5/Hellenic Intelligence Service June 1943; Constantopoulou and Veremis, Documents on the History of the Greek Jews, p. 270. Entry.16/65281, 18 March 1944 (also in NARA/RG59/1944/868.4016/75 LM097/ Roll.7). Molho, “The Situation of the Jews in Greece,” p. 6. In March 2001, after the Jewish community protested against the antisemitic comments of Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and All Greece (Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece letter of March 20, 2001, available at www.ecclesia.gr/English/archbishop/letters/apoisrail.html, in response to statements by Christodoulos, in N. Chasapopoulou, “Christodoulos: to peisma pou echoun oi kyuvernontes einai anexegeto … ,” To Vema, March 15, 2001), the archbishop alluded to Damaskinos and other clerics who had assisted Jews during World War II by chiding the Jewish community: “Jews in other countries may not understand this, but you should have been aware that the Church of Greece has been on your side at times of hardship, taking all the pursued children of God under its wing” (March 28, 2001, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece to Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece, at www.ecclesia.gr/English/ archbishop/letters/prosisrail.html). Elias Venezis, Archiepiskopos Damaskinos (Athens, 1952), p. 269. Pierron, Histoire des relations entre les Grecs et les Juifs, p. 909. Ephemeris tes Kyverneseos 20 (January 1945), Arithmos Phyllou 12, Syntaktike Praxis 6. Eleni Haidia, “The Punishment of Collaborators in Northern Greece, 1945–1946,” in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over. Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960 (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2000), pp. 43–4. I am indebted to Stratos Dordonas for information on the fate of Simonides and Chrysochoou. The inadequacy of postwar purges was denounced at the time and since. See Leuteres Apostolou, E parodia tes dikes ton dosilogon kai e autokatadike tes dexias (Athens, 1945); Eleni Haidia, “The Punishment of Collaborators in Northern Greece,” pp. 42–61; and Procopis Papastratis, “Purging the University after Liberation,” in id., After the War Was Over, pp. 62–72. “AJC Honors Greek foreign minister Papandreou,” 3 May 2000. Papandreou said: “Greece became the first country in Europe to return Jewish properties that had been confiscated during the Nazi occupation and reinstated citizenship and employment in the public sector for the Jewish population,” and as address by George A. Papandreou, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece, to the American Jewish Committee, Washington, DC, 3 May 2000, at www.hri.org/MFA/whatnew/ jewish_352000.htm. Demosthenes Koukounas, O Archiepiskopos Damaskinos (Athens, 1991), p. 180 n. 80. Hal Lehrman, “Greece: ‘Unused Cakes of Soap’. The Pattern of Jewish Fate Repeats Itself,” Commentary (May 1946), pp. 48–52.

Strategies of evasion in Greece

163

48 AYE/AIEE/1948/Z.3/10736, 28 May 1948, letter from Leon Castro, May 18, 1948. 49 Molho, In Memoriam, p. 138. 50 Yomtov Yacoel, Apomnemoneumata 1941–1943, ed. and intro. Phragkiske Abatzopoulou (Salonika, 1993). 51 Yacoel, Apomnemoneumata, p. 20. 52 Declaration Assermentée, Asher Raphael Moissis, YVA/TR3/351. 53 Yacoel, Apomnemoneumata, p. 60. 54 Prologue [no pagination], Yacoel, Apomnemoneumata. 55 Ha-Mahon Lemehkar Yahdut Saloniki, Ginzach Saloniki (Tel Aviv, 1961). 56 State of Israel, Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, Vol. V (Jerusalem, 1994), pp. 1928–34. 57 Archeio Ephetiou Athenon, Arithmos apophaseos 1/1959. To Eidikon Stratodikaion Egklemation Polemou (Merten). Praktika, p. 92. 58 Molho, In Memoriam, pp. 384–5; Yacoel, Apomnemoneumata, p. 87. 59 He later became West German president from 1969 to 1974, a post which another former GVP member, Johannes Rau, held from 1999 to 2004. 60 See Susanne-Sophia Spiliotis, “‘Mia ypothese tes politikes kai ochi tes dikaiosunes’. E dike tou Merten (1957–1959) kai oi elleno-germanikes scheseis’,” in Rika Benveniste (ed.), Oi Evraioi tes Ellados sten Katoche (Salonika, 1998), pp. 29–41; the same article appears in English: Susanne-Sophia Spiliotis, “‘An Affair of Politics, not Justice’. The Merten Trial, 1957–1959, and Greek–German Relations,” in Mazower, After the War Was Over, pp. 293–302; Samuel Hassid, The Trial of Max Merten in the Changing Mirrors of Time and Place (Haifa, 2002). 61 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963), p. 189. 62 Ibid. 63 Spiliotis, “‘Mia ypothese tes politikes kai ochi tes dikaiosunes,’” pp. 40–1. 64 Polychrones Enepekides, Oi diogmoi ton Evraion en Elladi. Epi te vasei ton mystikon archeion ton ES-ES (Athens, 1969; 2nd edn 1996). 65 Ibid. (2nd edn), p. 43. 66 This theme of the public and private aspects of memory is discussed in Bea Lewkowicz, The Jewish Community of Salonika. History, Memory, Identity (London and Portland, OR, 2006). 67 Devarim (Deutoronomy) 30:19. 68 Jacques Stroumsa, Tu choisiras la vie. Violiniste à Auschwitz, preface by Beate Klarsfeld (Paris, 1998), p. 136. 69 Jacques Stroumsa, Ubeharta behaim. Mesaloniki leyerushalayim derech Auschwitz veParis (Tel Aviv, 1995), p. 106. 70 Id. Dialeksa te zoe … apo ti Thessalonike sto Auschwitz (Salonika, 1997), p. 138. 71 Eleutheria Drosakes, En Thessalonike. Apo ton polemo, ten katoche kai ten antistase (Salonika, 1985), pp. 98–9. 72 Daniel Carpi, (ed.), Italian Diplomatic Documents on the History of the Holocaust in Greece 1941–1943 (Tel Aviv, 1999), p. 140. 73 Giorgios Ioannou, To diko mas aima (Athens, 1978), pp. 60–1. 74 “Aphieroma ston Giorgo Ioannou,” Chronika (March 1986), p. 16. 75 Albertos Nar, Meletes kai arthra gia ten Ebraïke Koinoteta tes Thessalonikes (Salonika, 1997), p. 12. 76 “Aphieroma ston Giorgo Ioannou,” Chronika (March 1986), p. 16. 77 Lewkowicz, The Jewish Community of Salonika, p. 123. 78 Cambanis, “Forgotten History, Fragile Future,” pp. 44–8, 80.

164

Andrew Apostolou

79 Pictures 27 and 28 in Lewkowicz show parts of tombstones in a path and other stone fragments on the ground at the university in 1989. 80 Alexander Kitroeff, Wartime Jews: The Case of Athens (Athens, 1995). 81 Dan Georgakas, “Safe Havens. Sheltering Jews during the German Occupation of Greece,” Odyssey (July–August 1995), p. 38. 82 Ibid., p. 41. 83 Photini Constantopoulou and Thanos Veremis, Documents on the History of the Greek Jews. Records from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Athens, 1998). 84 The first document reproduced is a rebuttal of Jewish complaints about the Greek government’s handling of the rebuilding of Salonika following the 1917 fire and begins with the words “All of the Jewish allegations in Ambassador Koromilas’ telegram are false.” Constantopoulou and Veremis, Documents, p. 71. 85 See note 45. 86 I am grateful to Dr Hagen Fleischer for providing me with this figure. 87 Venas Georgakopoulou, Elephtherotypia, July 29, 1997, available at www.hri.org/ E/1997/97-07-29.dir/keimena/art/art3.htm; Stephanos Rozanis, “Observations on a Holocaust Document,” Jewish Museum of Greece Newsletter, No. 36 (spring 1994), pp. 1–2. Doubts about whether the three men had signed the documents were also raised after the war in Kostas Daphnes, Chronia polemou kai katoches. Kerkyra 1940–1944. Mia agnoste istoria (Corfu, 1966), p. 292. 88 Bernard Pierron, Juifs et Chrétiens de la Grèce Moderne. Histoire des relations intercommunautaires de 1821 à 1945 (Paris, 1996). 89 Hagen Fleischer, Stemma kai Svastika. E Ellada tes Katoches kai tes Antistases 1941–1944, Vol. 2 (Athens, 1995), p. 324 n. 85. 90 Hagen Fleischer, in Sychronos Ellenismos apo to 1941 os to telos tou aiona. Istoria tou Ellinikou Ethnous, Vol. 16 (Athens, 2000), pp. 56–7. 91 Mark Mazower, Greece and the Inter-war Economic Crisis (Oxford, 1991); Inside Hitler’s Greece; Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998); The Balkans: A Short History (London, 2000); Salonica, City of Ghosts. Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (London, 2004; New York, 2005); Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008). 92 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, p. 259. 93 Ibid., p. 261. 94 Ibid, p. 258. 95 He touched briefly on the Campbell pogrom in his 1991 book on the interwar economic crisis in Greece. See Mazower, Greece and the Inter-war Economic Crisis, p. 136. 96 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, p. 246. Simonides appeared twice in Mazower’s 1991 work because of his prewar economic role. See Mazower, Greece and the Inter-war Economic Crisis, pp. 84–5. 97 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, pp. 238–48. 98 United Restitution Organization, Judenverfolgung in Italien. Den Italienisch besetzen Gebieten und in Nordafrika. Dokumentensammlung (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1962), p. 57. 99 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, p. 403 nn. 211, 216, cites United Restitution Organization, Judenverfolgung in Italien, pp. 165, 195. 100 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, pp. 239, 259, 261, does not mention lack of sympathy. 101 Michael Matsas, The Illusion of Safety. The Story of the Greek Jews during the Second World War (New York, 1997), pp. 104–5. 102 Ibid., p. 173. 103 Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, p. 434 n. 29 and p. 441 n.43 both reference Apostolou, “‘The Exception of Salonika’,” pp. 165–96.

Strategies of evasion in Greece

165

104 Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, p. 410. 105 Molho, In Memoriam, p. 138. 106 Andrew Apostolou, “Greek Tragedy,” review of Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts,” Commentary (July–August 2005), pp. 75–7. 107 Noel Malcolm, “Hebrews who were Hellenised,” review of Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, Sunday Telegraph (London), September 26, 2004. 108 Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, p. 9. 109 Id., Inside Hitler’s Greece, p. xiii. 110 Id., Salonica, City of Ghosts, p. 9. 111 Ibid. 112 Mark Mazower, “Evil Rising,” review of Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, and Christopher R. Browning with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, “The Origins of the Final Solution. The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy”, New York Times, March 14, 2004.

Part III

Germany’s allies

10 Collaboration and collaborators in Vichy France An unfinished debate Alain Michel

As time passes and the generations succeed each other, the witnesses become ever more remote, but the fascination, the uncomfortable feeling and the doubt are still there, closely intertwined … By obsessively stirring the memory of these four interminable years, France is constantly expressing the same misgivings and doubts about itself. It keeps asking itself the same questions over and over again, failing to acknowledge – or pretending each time to discover afresh – the truths that researchers have long since identified.1

Already during the occupation period, historian Marc Bloch, founder of the “école des Annales,” was considering how a future generation of historians would retrace the thread that would lead to an understanding of the tragic events that France was going through at the time.2 As a positivist historian, he thought it obvious that the return of “freedom of thought and judgment” which would follow the liberation of French territory would act as a guarantee for historians to be able to work in a tranquil and honest fashion. Some sixty years after the tragic death of Marc Bloch, shot by the Germans in June 1944, Pierre Laborie highlights the extent to which the history of this period remains problematic, notwithstanding the undeniable progress made during the six decades that have passed since the World War II period. The complex nature of the links between France and its recent history has been underscored by Henry Rousso, one of the most eminent specialists in the construction of memory, in works eloquently entitled The Vichy Syndrome3 and Vichy: An Ever-present Past.4 The purpose of the present study is to invoke some of the most striking moments that became etched into the historical view of the peculiar world of collaboration generated between the Nazi occupier and part of France – and specifically, its leaders. It is important at the outset to make an observation about the terms employed. With regard to the occupation period, use of the words “collaboration” and “collaborators” is a delicate matter, since they may denote different phenomena, even though they may be concomitant or may partially overlap. Generally speaking, collaboration refers to three phenomena: (1) state-level collaboration that the Vichy government attempted to institute,

170

Alain Michel

particularly in the wake of the meeting between Marshal Philippe Pétain and Adolf Hitler at Montoire in October 1940; (2) ideological collaboration practiced by fascist and far right groups, which during the occupation were mainly Paris-based; (3) de facto collaboration, which existed among the ordinary French as a result of day-to-day contacts between the occupier and the occupied population. On the whole, this study will focus on the first kind of collaboration, although the two other forms will sometimes be touched upon. A priori, the evolution in the historical view of the collaborationist world in the eyes of the French in general, and of French academics in particular, can be divided chronologically into two periods: from the liberation to the end of the 1960s, and from the beginning of the 1970s to the present.

From the postwar to the post-De Gaulle period When, in the weeks following the Allied landings in Normandy and the increasing liberation of French territory, a new Gaullist power came into being, this change of political regime was immediately accompanied by the introduction of an “everyone was in the Resistance” perspective that generated a mythical view of the four years of occupation. Charles de Gaulle’s first, improvised speech on French territory, delivered at Bayeux on June 14, 1944, contains a sentence which set the tone for the line to be developed: “What the country expects of you, from the rear to the front, is that you continue the struggle today, as you have never stopped doing since the beginning of this war and since June 1940.”5 In his campaign to convince the Allies of his political independence and legitimacy,6 De Gaulle needed to forge a united front of French citizens supporting him and the Resistance. To this end, he had to show categorically that the struggle that he had waged since June 1940 had been supported from the outset by the entire French population. The upshot of this situation was therefore marginalization of the collaboration phenomenon, which now represented merely a small group of traitors detached from the country’s real situation. De Gaulle would make the same point again in October 1944, when he spoke of “a handful of worthless wretches to whom the state is meting out and will mete out justice.”7 This theory of the Vichy regime’s isolation and the insignificant extent of collaboration in the midst of a France with a wall-to-wall Resistance satisfied the needs of the main anti-Nazi forces: the Gaullist Resistance, as we have seen, therefore confirming its legitimacy by reconstructing history from the inside out, but also the Communist Party, as will be shown below. However, it also enabled the nation to close ranks by sparing it the need to examine its conscience more closely. This is undoubtedly the explanation behind the unequal treatment applied in the épuration, whereby certain sectors such as economic circles were shown leniency and were able to reintegrate rapidly into national life while others, such as intellectuals, were affected far more severely.8 As Henry Rousso puts it:

Collaboration and collaborators in France 171 At first sight, the overall outcome of France’s épuration appears to be very patchy. The process was unequal in both time and geographical terms; it was sometimes inconsistent, particularly in so far as it ignored the most important form of collaboration – economic. It was also, in many respects, unfinished.9 The marginalizing of collaboration also coincided with the political interests of the Communist Party, at the time a very powerful force in both liberation and then Fourth Republic France. The PCF (Parti communiste français), which presented itself as “the party of the 75,000 people10 who were shot,” highlighted its status as the French national party by linking the glory in which it basked as a result of its underground struggle with what was said to be an attitude of great dignity on the part of the population, and of the lower classes in particular. Another advantage of this reconstruction of history was that it allowed the Communist Party to pass over in silence its own hesitations, as well as the murky period in its history between the defeat in June 1940 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.11 Hence, despite the political competition between the PCF and the organizations which emerged from the non-Communist and in particular the Gaullist Resistance, unity was achieved over the issue of how to portray the four years of collaboration, reducing the latter to a relatively marginal phenomenon. A last point to bear in mind is that this presentation managed to satisfy the vast majority of public opinion, because it granted absolution from the recent past, including the popular support lent Marshal Pétain and his government. Historian Marc-Olivier Baruch is incisive when it comes to the épuration issue: Considered as a whole, the épuration looks like a passing phenomenon, one which generated burdensome ambiguities: it was not so much a question of excluding individuals on a long-term basis, but rather of soothing the violent passions which might have got in the way of France’s return to the concert of the victorious parties. That part of public opinion which favored such a soothing approach shared this implicit position by the authorities, who wished to avoid creating a category of pariahs whose fate would condemn them to perpetual banishment from French society.12 This fiction of a France made up almost exclusively of people involved in the Resistance, with just a minority of collaborators, constitutes the backdrop to the historical reading of collaboration up to the end of the 1960s. It would be supplemented by two additional aspects. The first took the form of the defense advanced by Vichyite circles. Known as the “sword and the shield” theory, it had been outlined earlier during the war period. According to this notion, the resistance of General De Gaulle, “the sword,” was complemented in practice by the collaboration of Marshal Pétain, “the shield.” Collaboration was merely a means of containing the enemy while awaiting France’s future liberation.

172

Alain Michel

In the only statement that he ever made to France’s High Court of Justice, Marshal Pétain elaborated on this theme: I have made use of this power like a shield in order to protect the French people … Every day, with a dagger to my throat, I struggled against the enemy’s demands. History will tell you everything that I have avoided, when my adversaries think only of blaming me for that which was unavoidable … While General De Gaulle was continuing the struggle overseas, I prepared the paths leading to liberation, by maintaining a France which was suffering but alive.13 The Vichy apologists used the shield theory on a number of occasions in the 1950s and 1960s, in an attempt to prove that the Pétain government’s double game had been justified. Furthermore, just beneath the surface the second aspect of the historical evaluation of collaboration in those postwar years can be clearly made out. This is the theory which holds that in the final analysis the measures adopted by Vichy, especially in the area of crackdowns, were implemented under the duress of the German occupiers, and on their initiative. Prior to 1970, such a viewpoint was extremely widespread, even when it came to the fate of the Jews in France, as shown very pointedly by Canadian historian Michael Marrus: Poliakov’s Bréviaire de la haine [Harvest of Hate], published in 1951, was the pioneering work on the Nazi wartime assault on European Jews. Himself a victim of Vichy and the German persecution, Poliakov nevertheless shows remarkable indulgence in the pages he devoted to the deportation of the Jews from France.14 Marrus shows how the same holds true for Gerald Reitlinger15and Raul Hilberg.16 These historiographic features are present in what would be the authoritative work on the subject for more than fifteen years. Written by Robert Aron, an essayist and literary consultant who came to historical research late in life, the very publication of his History of Vichy17 constituted an event. Robert Aron aimed at a dispassionate analysis of the regime and its policies. Since the archives were inaccessible to researchers at the time, he drew primarily on dozens of interviews that he held with the main actors of the period, as well as numerous personal archives with which he was entrusted. His documentation was supplemented by various legal sources to which he was able to have access. Adopting both the shield theory and that of German initiatives and pressures, Aron draws conclusions which in part restore the Vichy leaders’ prestige. The context in which Aron’s book was published is of considerable relevance: on the one hand, the Cold War and, on the other, the colonial wars reinstated in power a number of individuals who had in one way or other

Collaboration and collaborators in France 173 compromised themselves with the Vichy regime. Thus in 1952 Antoine Pinay became prime minister. He was one of the representatives who had voted to give Pétain full powers, and was then appointed by the latter to the National Council, a form of consultative assembly intended to replace the parliament. In this way, just eight years after the summer of the liberation, a politician who had given public support to Pétain’s regime, in its initial stages at least, was able to become the head of the French government without facing any difficulties whatsoever. In the same spirit, at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, a number of amnesties were declared. It is noteworthy that at the same time that the courts cleared René Bousquet, the Vichy chief of police, future president François Mitterand presented a parliamentary Bill granting a general amnesty to those who engaged in collaborative acts and applicable to those who were concerned when liberation came. Forty years later, the raising of new collaboration-related legal questions about Bousquet (which led to the accusation of involvement in a crime against humanity) would shed new light on the ties between this Vichy functionary and Mitterand, the left-wing politician and member of the Resistance. However, in the 1950s, reconciliation was the trend, and it is with this in mind that we must understand Aron’s desire to produce a book which he intended to be honest but, at the same time comforting: “Robert Aron’s entire body of work is an expression of this quasi-religious desire to soothe, to reconcile, to heal the wounds that History has inflicted on society.”18 The situation did not really change when De Gaulle returned to power in 1958, apart from the fact that the smokescreen which would conceal questions about collaboration from now on primarily involved underscoring the memory of the Resistance. This was expressed in acts such as the transfer of Jean Moulin’s ashes to the Pantheon; or again, in the same year, 1964, on the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris, paying tribute to the police of Paris for their ten days of resistance in August 1944, despite their collaboration in raids to round up Jews and their involvement in other crackdowns during the preceding four years. In order to understand the watershed of the late 1960s, it is worth tracing the parallels between developments in historiography and the chronology of events. The student revolution in May 1968 heralded the arrival of a new generation – one that challenged the conservative ideology, based on everyone having been in the Resistance that had taken hold in many fields. This was followed by General de Gaulle’s departure from the political arena in April 1969. The year 1968 also saw the publication in French of German historian Eberhard Jäckel’s thesis La France dans l’Europe d’Hitler.19 This challenged part of what Robert Aron purported to have shown in respect of ties between Vichy and Hitler, and although it did not sell in vast numbers, it undoubtedly marked an initial turning point. Lastly, in 1970 there took place what was indisputably the last university event conducted in the spirit of Robert Aron’s work: a symposium organized at the Fondation nationale des Sciences politiques,

174

Alain Michel

with René Remond as moderator.20 Fearing that collaboration would be subjected to a form of trivialization, historian Henri Michel (see p. 176) refused to take part in this event as a result of the massive presence of former members of the Vichy regime.21 The time of dishonest compromises and silences was coming to an end.

The Paxton revolution22 A book by the American historian Robert O. Paxton came out in France in 1973, the English original having appeared the previous year.23 Seldom has a work by a foreign historian had such influence in France. It immediately became the focus of interest in historiographic debates about the occupation period, and soon aroused lively discussion in part of the media. Generally speaking, it may be said that the community of historians was full of praise for the book, while the criticism leveled at it came largely from those who either longed for Vichy, or continued to cleave to the artificial and bipolar world of the Gaullo–Communist legend. Basing himself on newly available (especially German) archives, and using Jäckel’s work as his platform, Paxton shows that, because the Vichy regime opted for collaboration from the outset (here Paxton underscores the fact that the expression appears in the terms of the June 1940 armistice), it steered an activist path which meant that, frequently, what happened came about as a result of French initiatives rather than German demands. Not only does the shield theory prove to be devoid of any historical reality but, in addition, Paxton shows that France was no better treated in Hitler’s Europe than other countries: in fact, it often received worse treatment, despite the presence of a collaborationist government. He also makes the point that initially the new regime received general support, and that it took a great deal until the French population began to unite in resisting and rejecting the occupation. Above all, he stresses that the regime not only managed the situation brought about by the defeat but attempted, in the shadow of collaborating with the occupier, to bring about a profound reform of the country on the basis of an ideology that was radically opposed to France’s traditions as a republic. Paxton’s book leaves practically nothing standing of the former historiography of Vichy. As far as the final part of the conclusion is concerned, there are considerable differences between the English and French versions, which cannot simply be the upshot of inter-lingual transfer.24 Thus Paxton notes that most French people, forced to choose between continuing their regular jobs despite the consequences or switching to civil disobedience, opted to carry on as if nothing was happening. In the English text, he continues: The same may be said of the German occupiers. Many of them were “good Germans,” men of cultivation, confident that their country’s success outweighed a few moral blemishes, dutifully fulfilling some minor blameless function in a regime whose cumulative effect was brutish.25

Collaboration and collaborators in France 175 Tellingly, this passage is absent from the French version. An extremely interesting comparison between the obligations incumbent upon occupiers and the occupied has thus completely disappeared. Who was responsible for this censorship? And what reason might there have been in 1973 for having to avoid such a comparison? Maybe the analogy with the occupier was too threatening. Robert Paxton’s work, complemented by the book that he co-authored with Michael Marrus in 1981, Vichy France and the Jews, opened up a new era in studies of Vichy and the world of collaboration (see below). The fact that the French archives were opened in 1979 further accelerated a complete new generation of researchers, who would henceforth throw themselves into studying the period. Moreover, in the 1970s, something of a “retro”26 fashion developed, whereby a certain amount of cynicism, in keeping with the style of the day, was applied to rediscovering the occupation period, covering its most sinister and most trivial aspects alike. However, this tendency would soon be replaced by the cult of memory, particularly the memory of the Shoah,27 or Holocaust. This took place in parallel with the emergence of a new political-cultural phenomenon: whereas, prior to 1970, France had enjoyed viewing itself in the mirror of contemporary history, it now entered a period of contrition in which not only were the country’s attitudes during World War II re-examined – the process sometimes being carried to excess – but so also were many pages in history such as the question of its colonial wars. Henry Rousso is indisputably the scholar who has best demonstrated this development, in the two books mentioned above. Thus, together with Eric Conan, he writes: In recent years, however, it would appear that the so-called Vichy syndrome has developed. Today’s obsession is fed by a dual feeling of guilt, maintained not only by the voices of the younger generations but also, sometimes, by some of those who lived through the period and forget that at the end of the war they had a completely different state of mind. The French would thus be “guilty”: guilty of having accepted a regime and lionized its leadership, which committed or arranged the commission of monstrous crimes in the name of a particular idea of France, but also guilty of not having known how, or not having been able, or not having wanted to manage “differently” the aftermath of the occupation … The “duty of remembrance” has led to a situation in which no legitimacy whatsoever attaches to an individual’s “right to be forgotten.” According to this view of things, this right, which was demanded more than forty years ago, would simply have been an extension of the ambivalences and ambiguities dating back to the war, tantamount to a collective selfamnesty. The current claims are thus accompanied by the illusion that History can be remade and that, even this late in the day, it is possible to make up for all of those failings, lacunae, and simplistic mythologies which made their appearance post-1944.28

176

Alain Michel

Amidst these dramatic historiographic and cultural transformations, the Paxton book was considered so important that in 1997 Columbia University accorded Vichy France the rare privilege of organizing a conference to mark twenty-five years since its publication.29 Was this manifestation of glory justified? Perhaps it is worth placing Paxton’s work in a broader context, while at the same time identifying some of its limitations, which continue to apply to this day. First, the context. Vichy France did not appear in a complete historiographic and cultural void. In 1971, cinemas screened a film – originally made for television but censored as a result of government pressure – Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), made by Marcel Ophüls together with André Harris and Alain de Sédouy. A chronicle of the four years of the occupation in the little town of Clermont-Ferrand, it exposes to the French public the acts of cowardice, the waiting games and the difficult choices of the French population of the period. It is certainly not a historical work, and in fact does not dwell on the major figures of the collaboration. However, through its very existence, the film provided a new way of thinking about the realities of the period, and prepared minds to be receptive to the new ideas introduced by Paxton. However, in the historiographic area, too, there had been considerable progress even prior to the publication of Vichy France. Several months before Paxton’s book came out in France, historian Henri Michel, editor of Revue d’histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale, published a work entitled Pétain, Laval, Darlan: Three Policies?30 where it is striking to see how many of Paxton’s “new theses” are already present. Michel furthers the arguments of those who explained the establishment of the Vichy government as a result of what was a deeply reformist desire on the part of the National Revolution. However, as he underscores from the outset, no distinction can be made between Vichy’s very existence and the collaboration policy which Vichy implemented in order to continue. This being the case, the National Revolution, rather than being a goal in itself, became the excuse for the collaboration policy. This reasoning also lies at the heart of Paxton’s condemnation of Pétain’s regime. By way of illustration, the following extract is taken from the chapter on collaboration: Actually, in many respects, it [Petain’s National Revolution] appeared intended solely to bring France into line with Germany – the most striking and dramatic proof of this being what happened to the Jews. Its penal aspects heightened division between French people, despite the lip service paid to the need for union, and in this way it played the occupier’s game. The collaboration policy led to acceptance of defeat, subjection and submission to the conqueror, and inaction … Thus the Vichy leaders’ policy is ambiguous across the board: it does nothing whatsoever to improve the lot of the French, nor can it be definitively said to spare them even more stringent treatment.31

Collaboration and collaborators in France 177 Further on, he makes the following observations: The harmful nature of these mistakes will gradually become manifest with the passing of time. Hitler was not at all interested in voluntary collaboration between France and Germany; he gave only vague promises about the future, and in return, for the time being, he demanded greater tribute in terms of blood and sweat, money and supplies needed for the war. The only other option, apparently, was a third solution: to refuse, and if necessary, to reach the point of rupture. Resuming the struggle meant acknowledging that the Third Republic had not been wrong to declare war, that the armistice was a mistake, that the National Revolution would not have sufficed to revive France, that the marshal was not infallible, and that the “sacrifice of his person” was nothing but an attractive but empty turn of phrase.32 The fact that Henri Michel’s book did not set off the waves and controversy produced by the appearance of Paxton’s book cannot be explained solely by its publication in a paperback series intended first and foremost for history students. In fact, this very point shows that by 1972 controversy already existed about Vichy, at least in university history teaching circles. But the silence, it seems, was primarily the result of two facts, first, that Michel broke off his work in November 1942, when the southern zone was invaded by the German armies. In terms of his subject – whether there was a quintessential difference in the collaboration policy of the three Vichy leaders Pétain, Laval and Darlan – this was a logical and relevant point at which to conclude his work.33 From November 1942 onward it was no longer possible to pursue any policy, only to continue and speed up the spiral of collaboration. However, stopping at this point limited the scope of the work: it failed to shed light on what may be seen as the darkest results of the regime, ranging from the establishment of the STO34 (Service du travail obligatoire – forced labor service) and the introduction of the Milice35 (the French black-shirted fascist militia). Furthermore, Henri Michel, the historian of the Resistance, avoided confronting the French population with Vichy’s policy, highlighting instead the rise of ever stronger opposition: “This is why [this policy] will never rouse the enthusiasm of the French, and will very quickly encounter opposition on their part.”36 In contrast, Paxton focused on those whom Vichy dragged into collaborating closely with the occupier: There is, finally, the issue of complicity. Continually repurchasing its shadow sovereignty at a higher and higher price, the Vichy regime made many Frenchmen accomplices in acts and policies that they would not normally have condoned. Marshal Pétain, in particular, was a figure to whom millions of Frenchmen looked with more than usual confidence. After the total occupation of France in November 1942, or at least after

178

Alain Michel the constitutional crisis of November–December 1943, it was time to cease lending the stamp of one’s approval to an enterprise that no longer worked … These able and intelligent men led other Frenchmen deeper into complicity with the besieged Third Reich’s last desperate paroxysms: the Final Solution, forced labor, reprisals against growing resistance. What can explain such an egregious choice?37

In the prevailing cultural atmosphere, replete with contrition and questioning everything, which emerged in post-Sorrow and Pity France, Paxton’s words reverberated far more resonantly than those of Henri Michel. While Paxton’s work was responsible for decisive progress in the historiography of the Vichy regime, it certainly was not the “sacred cow” feted by the Columbia University symposium, and some of its approaches or assertions must be queried. A problematic point, in both Vichy France and Vichy France and the Jews, was the impression that there were no differences between Vichy’s collaboration policy and the way in which it was applied in situ. However, many subsequent studies would show that this overall approach did not necessarily hold true: they demonstrated the often considerable slippage that existed between the orders handed down at the top and their implementation in the field. In addition, sometimes public opinion indicated that it did not approve, and although there might well have been “40 million Pétain supporters” in 1940, as the war continued, both the attitudes and the actions of part of the French population showed that this ostensible unity behind the marshal’s name actually hid a broad spectrum of reactions, from collaboration through passiveness to resistance. As a result of Pierre Laborie’s studies, based on the social history of the period, considerable modification of this picture has become possible.38 As Laborie observes: The judgments about collective attitudes and behavior between 1940 and 1944 typically reflect this blend of respectable intentions, excess caution, sudden indignation, and clinging to the memory stakes … The problem of people’s behavior is a tremendously topical one because of its moral dimension, but all too often it is reduced to excessive generalizations, simplistic alternatives, or even outright condemnation without appeal – along the lines of “all guilty, all collaborators” – the problem of behavior is constantly at the center of a debate which, rather than seeking to address or understand the complexity of the issues at stake, is geared towards making bald rulings or even outright condemnations.39 A particularly important work in this area of placing state-level collaboration in a broader context is Philippe Burrin’s La France à l’heure allemande 1940–1944, published in France in 1995.40 Burrin, who sought to cover the full gamut of reactions in French society during this time span, made an innovation with his definition of a concept that he called “accommodation”:

Collaboration and collaborators in France 179 Total rejection of the occupiers was bound to be no more than marginal … But for the vast majority there seemed no alternative but to submit, bow before the triumphant force and adjust one’s behavior accordingly. Despite their secret defiance, even those determined to resist had to appear to compromise in the interests of their underground activities, as they waited for a superior force to bring liberation and to reset the clock. Accommodation was forced upon the French people, who had to choose the least of all evils and make concessions that might or might not prove compromising.41 However, generally speaking, his conclusion coincides with that of Paxton: “It should not be imagined, however, that without Vichy there would have been no collaboration. French society possessed mechanisms of its own accommodation. But the French state did confer a legitimacy upon them, exerting an influence which, without being unequivocal, was heavily negative.”42 It was not just on the “macro” but also on the “micro” level that Paxton’s work shed an overly general light on things. It was obvious, then, that more specific studies were needed, ones that focused on the actors, not just on the system. Thus Pascal Ory researched collaborators in an especially important work:43 We have here sought to examine this “German France” [extremist Parisian collaborators: see below]. Not collaboration, which has already been scrutinized to the nth degree, but the collaborators. Not the well-known diachrony of events, but the highways and byways which led to collaborationism and those who undertook it.44 In order to conduct this examination, Ory starts with what he calls “the prehistory of collaboration,” seeking to identify the links between the occupation period and its prewar precursor. Robert Paxton may well have begun his study with the defeat in the summer of 1940, but it must be acknowledged that at this point two phenomena may be identified: discontinuance, side by side with continuity. However, in his conclusion Ory makes the point that there were numerous ties between these extreme collaborators – often called “the Parisians” – and the Vichy regime, which enabled real excesses to take place, such as the organization of the Milice. Although the Milice was set up in the southern zone in order to bolster the Vichy government, when in the hands of the Parisian ultra-collaborationists it soon became a tool that led to a more radical Vichy regime, which ultimately fell into line with this selfsame “Parisian” competition. In light of these well-known developments, Ory also questions the amnesia supposedly suffered by the French: Collaborationist speech developed against a background of silence, from the grands corps of French democracy’s conventional guarantors, from the grands corps of the Republic to its intelligentsia who vindicated it, from the middle classes of dyed-in-the-wool radicalism to the proletariat

180

Alain Michel of the ultimate hopes. When, four years later, the same “real” France, whether in disgust or horror, was inflicting punishment on those who had simply hastened along a path which had been mapped out, what image of itself was it seeking to deny?45

While Ory particularly emphasizes the influence of “competition” with the Parisian collaborators on the radicalism of Vichy bureaucrats, his conclusions about the line of collaboration that the Vichy leadership crossed are no different from those of Paxton. In contrast, in his biography of Laval46 Fred Kupferman47 offers another approach,48 seeking simply to demonstrate the continuity and consistency of a man who thought to the very end that he had pursued the only policy that would enable France to get through this troubled period of defeat and occupation in the best possible fashion. It should be noted that while readers sense Kupferman’s feelings of sympathy and understanding for his subject, this in no way prevents the historian from describing Laval’s mistakes and blunders, particularly his use of the Jews as a card in his negotiations with the Germans. A noteworthy development that has taken place in historiography since the turn of the century is the proliferation of local studies, by means of which it is gradually becoming possible to construct the complex picture of collaboration and see whether or not the higher-level chronological outlines produced by the historians are confirmed by the facts on the ground. Since constraints of space preclude mentioning the hundreds of studies already published, a random sample follows. In his study of Calvados,49 in Normandy, Jean Quellien, citing an abundance of instances, demonstrates that the idea of public opinion overwhelmingly supporting the Vichy government up to 1941, as Paxton argues, must be called into question, for this part of the country at least, and that from the end of 1940 onward there were broad-based pro-British sympathies. He also argues for the use of the concept of “civil resistance,” as developed by Jacques Semelin,50 in a seminal work vital to a better understanding of European populations’ attitudes during the war. It is of interest to note, in this case – as in others – the extent to which this local historiography runs counter to the monolithic image of a basically collaborationist France, which had evolved in the media and in political-cum-intellectual debates in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Collaboration in the face of the Final Solution The issue of the persecution of the Jews and Vichy’s collaboration in this area has undergone major development since the 1980s. Here, too, Robert Paxton has played a pioneering role, this time in association with Michael Marrus. Nine years after the publication of Vichy France, their joint book, Vichy France and the Jews, which appeared first in French as Vichy et les Juifs, was an absolute sensation.51 Using a number of unpublished or under-used archives, they demonstrated Vichy’s profound complicity in the implementation of the

Collaboration and collaborators in France 181 Final Solution in France, particularly in view of the relatively modest Nazi police apparatus. However, here too certain sweeping assertions would come to be challenged.52 Thus as early as 1983, Serge Klarsfeld criticized the authors for failing to take account of the true extent of the protests: Marrus and Paxton failed to see or were unwilling to see what really happened: in the face of the hostile reactions of public opinion in the free zone and the decisive interventions by the senior clergy, especially Monseigneur Gerlier, Vichy felt forced to put its massive cooperation on hold at the beginning of September (1942) and to refuse to put into practice the October program for handing Jews over.53 The work of Israeli historian Asher Cohen, Persécutions et sauvetages,54 even without listing all of its conclusions, is also a good example of these corrections of perspective that were made in the 1980s and 1990s by the historiography of collaboration. Like Klarsfeld, Cohen contests the notion of widespread collaboration, providing, for instance, examples of resistance to the persecution of the Jews. However, this aspect of collaboration has tended, in the last two decades, to expand in a manner bordering on the disproportionate, in both historiography and in the public debate. It can be explained by a series of key events, beginning with the trial of Klaus Barbie in 198755 – the first in a series of trials the last of which involved Maurice Papon.56 These firmly placed the history of the Final Solution within the courtroom. Paxton even came to testify at the Papon trial. This was followed by major controversy relating to François Mitterand and his refusal to acknowledge France’s responsibility in the Holocaust of that country’s Jews. The speech made by Jacques Chirac in 1995, marking the major Vel d’hiv raid in Paris in which many of the capital’s Jews were rounded up by the Vichy police, brought this issue to the forefront of the public debate. The establishment of the Holocaust Memory Foundation and the major facelift carried out on the Holocaust memorial in Paris highlighted it even further. As a result of this state of affairs, it was only natural that major developments took place in historiography which resulted in a proliferation of studies and monographs. In light of these works, it became possible to question the way of looking at things, sometimes in a very original way. In his study of the General Board for Jewish Questions,57 for example, Laurent Joly has challenged the traditional division made between an exclusion-directed form of antisemitism, as pursued by Vichy, and a racial antisemitism instigated by the Germans and supported by the extremists of antisemitism (a theory espoused by Marus and Paxton for example): This division of “French” and “German” policies into separate categories … acts as an impediment. It makes it impossible to see that in practice, as of spring of 1941 the heads of the French State adopted a

182

Alain Michel half-way position under which there was a tendency to hand foreign Jews over to Germany (whether they were actually foreign or had once again become foreign after they had been stripped of their naturalization) who were considered “undesirables.”58

Conclusion When examining collaboration in France, we must distinguish historiographically between two very different periods. The first is dominated by an attempt to blot out the responsibilities of state-level collaboration on the part of Vichy, to reduce their scope, and to proffer ideological collaboration as a kind of scarecrow to rebuff difficult questions and push them into the shade. The turning point is very clearly to be found in the watershed years between the events of 1968 and the publication of Paxton’s work, which remains a seminal event irrespective of the criticism that may be directed at certain aspects of the book. Since then, not only has questioning those four years of occupation become a major element in French intellectual debates, but historical research in this field has increased exponentially. It goes without saying that a whole host of points still require clarification or rethinking. In the coming years discussion should focus largely on the political identity of the collaborationist world. Mainstream contemporary historians in France hold that Vichy and collaboration are primarily tied up with the antirevolutionary and anti-liberal camp, which saw in the possibilities that opened up in June 1940 the opportunity for wreaking revenge on the despised enemy: the liberal left, the Dreyfus supporters and the Popular Front. In the last analysis, Vichy was merely one episode in the French–French (liberal versus antiliberal) wars.59 From the French–French point of view, as Stanley Hoffmann suggested as early as 1968,60 the collaboration/non-collaboration confrontation intersects with the right–left division. This notion is being challenged by a number of researchers, imparting a new dimension to the historiographic debate.61 One of them, Simon Epstein, might be quoted by way of conclusion: The thesis of the “two Frances” provides the link between these two poles of memory. It posits that the collaborators are the heirs of the antiDreyfus advocates (being, like them, antisemitic and reactionary), while those who resisted are reborn pro-Dreyfus figures (fighting for the same universal ideals that France has always championed … Despite the progress I made and the closer my research brought me to wonderful things which bore out my feelings and justified my efforts, nothing corroborated this moving theory of the “two Frances” – far from it.62

Notes 1 Pierre Laborie, Les Français des années troubles (Le Seuil, 2003), p. 26. 2 Marc Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York, 1949), ch. 1, p. 1.

Collaboration and collaborators in France 183 3 The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA, 1991). 4 Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas, with Eric Conan (Paris, 1994); in English: Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, an Ever-present Past (Hanover, NH, 1998). 5 Quoted in Henri Amouroux, Joies et douleurs du peuple libéré (Paris, 1988), p. 551. 6 The Americans had intended setting up an occupation administration in France. 7 See Marc-Olivier Baruch (ed.), Une poignée de misérables. L’épuration de la société française après la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris, 2003). 8 Ibid.; also Henry Rousso, Vichy. L’événement, la mémoire et l’histoire, Folio Histoire series (Paris, 2001), pp. 487 ff. 9 Rousso, Vichy. L’événement, p. 542. 10 This expression was used by the Communist Party from the time of the liberation onward. During the occupation, the total number of people from all political backgrounds who were shot was 23,000. 11 Following the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact of September 1939, the Communist Party’s attitude to the German invader was cautious, and sometimes even hostile. One of the most characteristic events, over which silence would long be maintained, was the attempt to again bring out the newspaper L’Humanité officially at the end of June 1940. See, for example, Stéphane Courtois, Le PCF dans la Guerre (Paris, 1980). 12 Baruch, Une poignée de misérables, p. 546. 13 Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Points Histoire series (Paris, 1973). 14 Michael R. Marrus, “Vichy France and the Jews after Fifteen Years,” in Sarah Fishman et al. (eds.), France at War: Vichy and the Historians (translated as La France sous Vichy) (Oxford and New York, 2000), p. 36. 15 The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 1953). 16 The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, CT, 1961). 17 Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy (Paris, 1955); in English: The Vichy Regime, 1940–1944 (London, 1958). 18 Grégory Cingal, Fonds Robert Aron (Nanterre, 2004). 19 Eberhard Jäckel, La France dans l’Europe d’Hitler (Paris, 1968). 20 Le Gouvernement de Vichy 1940–1942: Institutions et politique (Paris, 1972). A historian, for twenty years Renè Rémond was head of the Institut d’histoire du Temps présent (Institute of Contemporary History), and was made a member of the Académie Française in 1998. 21 Jean-Pierre Azéma’s acerbic comment on Henri Michel’s motivations in his article “La révolution paxtonienne” in La France sous Vichy, p. 24, does not in our view do justice to this desire to hand back the history of Vichy to the historians. 22 This expression has been borrowed from Jean-Pierre Azéma (see previous note). 23 Vichy France., Old Guard and New Order (New York, 1972); translated as La France de Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1973). 24 This is conspicuous at the end of Marrus, “Vichy et les Juifs,” in La France sous Vichy. Since Marrus wrote his article in English, he used the American version of the book. The French translator underscores this by means of a laconic “differs considerably.” 25 Paxton, Vichy France (1982 edition), p. 383. 26 Contrary to popular opinion, this expression was not used by Rousso in The Vichy Syndrome, but was coined by the press at the beginning of the 1970s before being adopted by historian Pascal Ory in the preface to his work Les Collaborateurs, referred to later. 27 See below for the section that specifically addresses this subject. 28 Vichy, an Ever-present Past, pp. 12, 13.

184

Alain Michel

29 The papers were published in Fishman et al., France at War: Vichy and the Historians. 30 Henri Michel, Pétain, Laval, Darlan. Trois politiques? Questions d’histoire series (Paris, 1972). Philippe Pétain was the French head of state. His government was first headed by Pierre Laval, who was ousted in December 1940. Next came François Darlan, who ran the government from February 1941 to April 1942, when under German pressure he was forced to give way to Pierre Laval. The latter managed to stay in power until the regime fell when the country was liberated. 31 Michel, Pétain, Laval, Darlan, pp. 115–16. 32 Ibid., p. 119. 33 The conclusion he draws is, in fact, a negative one, showing how these three leaders pursued a similar approach. 34 The STO, or forced labor service, actually began in June 1942, but was not really instituted until February 1943. It represents French collaboration in the forced labor policy organized by the Nazis throughout Europe. 35 Created in January 1943 in the Southern Zone and then extended to the Northern Zone, the Militia became a supplementary armed force which collaborated with the Nazis in fighting the Resistance and hunting down the Jews. 36 Michel, Petain, Laval, Darlan, p. 116. 37 Paxton, La France de Vichy, pp. 353–4. 38 In particular, see L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris, 1990). 39 Les Français des années troubles, p. 27. 40 The French version was published by Editions du Seuil, Paris. The English version, published in 1996, was called France under the Germans. Collaboration and Compromise (New York, 1996). 41 Ibid., pp. 1, 2. 42 Ibid, p. 466. 43 Pascal Ory, Les Collaborateurs, 1940–1945 (Paris, 1976). 44 Ibid., pp. 9, 10. 45 Ibid., p. 274. 46 See note 26. 47 Kupferman was a brilliant historian who died suddenly at the end of the 1980s. 48 Fred Kupferman, Laval, 1883–1945 (Paris, 1987). 49 Jean Quellien, Opinions et comportements politiques dans le Calvados sous l’occupation allemande (Caen, 2001). 50 Jacques Semelin, Sans armes face à Hitler. La résistance civile en Europe, 1939–1943 (Paris, 1989). 51 Michaël Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy et les Juifs (Paris, 1981). American edition: Vichy France and the Jews (New York, n.d.). 52 When defending my Master’s thesis on the Jewish Scouts of France during World War II in the year following the publication of Vichy et les Juifs, I showed that the rescue operations undertaken by this organization depended primarily on the assistance and collusion of a large number of individuals, including various gendarmes and civil servants. Professor Antoine Prost, the chairman of the oral examination board, stated that he saw this research as partially refuting the conclusions drawn by Marrus and Paxton. 53 Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy–Auschwitz. Le rôle de Vichy dans la Solution finale de la question juive en France (Paris, 1983), p. 9. 54 Paris, 1993. 55 In 1987, Klaus Barbie, who headed the Lyon Gestapo from 1942 to 1944, was tried for crimes against humanity. 56 In 1997 and 1998, Maurice Papon, a high-ranking official, was tried for his involvement during the war in the deportation of the Jews of Bordeaux.

Collaboration and collaborators in France 185 57 Laurent Joly, Vichy dans la “solution finale,” Histoire du commissariat général aux questions juives (Paris, 2006). 58 Ibid., p. 15. 59 See Vingtième siècle 5 (1985), a special issue of the journal which deals exclusively with this subject. 60 See Essais sur la France (Paris, 1974), pp. 42, 43. 61 This is an issue about which Philippe Burrin wondered as early as his book La Dérive fasciste. Doriot, Deat, Bergery (Paris, 1986). Simon Epstein, who addressed one aspect of the subject in Les Dreyfusards sous l’occupation (Paris, 2001), is preparing a new book on this issue. 62 Epstein, Les Dreyfusards sous l’occupation, pp. 11, 16.

11 Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia in the postwar discourse Gila Fatran

Introduction During World War II Slovakia was governed by the fascist Hlinka1 People’s Party (Hlinková slovenská I’udová strana – HSL´S). From its founding as a political movement toward the end of the nineteenth century its supporters were openly antisemitic. In fact, “the Jewish question,” referring to the supposed Jewish threat to Christian civilization, as described in Slovak publications at the end of the nineteenth century, was incorporated into its earliest political activities. Thus, leaders of the movement blamed the Jews for the country’s many misfortunes and the wretched poverty from which the Slovak people suffered.2 In the 1925 elections, when the first Czechoslovakian Republic (1918–38) failed to fulfill the economic and political aspirations of the Slovaks, HSL´S grew to be the largest party in Slovakia. This was due largely to the popularity of its leader, the Catholic priest Andrej Hlinka (1864–1938), and the party’s emphasis on the interests of the Catholic Church, which singlemindedly opposed the idea of Czechoslovakian nationality and endorsed political autonomy.3 The influence of Italian fascism on the party was evident when in the 1920s it set up a militia. Although dispersed by the Prague government in 1929, by the eve of World War II its members constituted the basis of the Hlinková Garda (HG).4 HG, which was noted for its cruelty, pressed for solving the Jewish problem and for carrying out deportations. When the Nazis came to power in Germany and posed a threat to the Czechoslovak Republic, a part of the People’s Party was revealed as isolationist and antisemitic. The Munich conference (September 29, 1938), which ceded the Sudetenland to the Third Reich, was used by the party – led at the time by the Catholic priest Dr. Jozef Tiso – to declare Slovakian autonomy on October 6, 1938, before ratification by the government in Prague. The People’s Party ruled as a single-party totalitarian regime. Despite the many problems that beset the autonomous Slovak government, solving the Jewish problem was placed at the top of the national agenda.5 During the five short months of the existence of the autonomous state,6 Hitler formulated plans for the complete subjugation of a truncated Czechoslovakia: the conquest of Bohemia and Moravia and the creation of an

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

187

independent state of Slovakia. Out of the ruins of Czechoslovakia, the state of Slovakia, made independent on March 14, 1939 for the first time in its history, became a satellite of Nazi Germany.7 The price exacted for being an ally of the Third Reich was that the Germans expected their collaborators to follow their example in solving the Jewish problem, each in his own country. Little pressure was required in Slovakia, where the People’s Party leaders, extremists and moderates alike, held the same opinion on this issue, only differing on matters of execution: the extremists pressed for speedy action while the moderates insisted on more gradual implementation,8 taking into consideration the economic and social conditions of the young country. From the time of the formulation of the “solution to the Jewish problem,” local leaders never concealed the fact that this meant ridding the country of its Jews. The Slovaks hardly needed the German model; they were ready to undertake the mission on their own initiative. It was Slovak representatives of the people who planned and implemented the expulsion of the Jews in every detail.9 The Jews’ tragic fate, which made war criminals of the organizers and stained the reputation of the Slovak people, resounds to this day in the public discourse of the country. Slovak nationalists, in particular, have attempted to obscure these activities in contemporary debate and have distorted the picture of the Holocaust of Slovak Jewry. This chapter will examine the impact of the political changes that have occurred in Slovakia since the end of World War II on the way the Holocaust has been presented, and on the part played by nationalist leaders, especially Josef Tiso, in the deportation of the Jews.

Reactions to the persecution of the Jews during the war and in its aftermath Antisemitism increased in Czechoslovakia during the short-lived Second Republic (October 1938–March 1939). The Czechs blamed the Jews for the loss of the Sudetenland, claiming that Jewish adherence to German culture was an important factor in this national calamity.10 In Slovakia national consternation over the loss of the fertile southern areas to Hungary stimulated a wave of antisemitism and led to the uprooting of thousands of Jews from their homes.11 Two members of the Czech government-in-exile in London, Jan Masaryk and Hubert Ripka, used their BBC broadcasts to encourage citizens to help the persecuted Jews.12 During the war these men received letters from Czechs and Slovaks criticizing their messages, including their intercession on behalf of the Jews.13 It should also be noted that underground groups operating in the protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia came to the aid of the small number of Jews who decided not to report to Theresienstadt.14 Not a few Slovak citizens lent assistance to the Jews, chiefly between September 1944 and March 1945

188

Gila Fatran

when Slovakia was under German occupation.15 However, during the entire course of its existence, the Communist underground in Slovakia never protested the persecution of the Jews, with the exception of an underground publication of a Jewish intellectual, Alexander Markuš. He warned, as the deportations began, that not only were the Jews affected but “the entire Slovak people, in whose name these crimes were being committed … that history and reality prove repeatedly that a nation which oppresses another nation cannot preserve its own freedom.”16 At the end of the war Czechoslovakia returned to its prewar boundaries, except for Carpatho-Russia, which was annexed by the Soviet Union and is today part of Ukraine. A central government of Czechoslovakia was set up in Prague, while government posts in Slovakia were held by Slovaks. Two main political parties were formed at this time: the Slovak Communist Party and the Democratic Party. There was a large bloc of Ludaks, former members of the Hlinka Party, in the Democratic Party, while the Communists, in competition for votes, were willing to accept minor officials of the fascist regime. The Democrats viewed Tiso as a leader who worked for his people and for the strengthening of an autonomous Slovakia, which had become a vassal of Hitler under pressure of circumstances. However, the Communists, purporting to be the uncompromising foes of fascism after the war, became sympathetic to and supportive of the Jews. The attitude of representatives of the Slovak regime toward the Holocaust and its aftermath was dictated largely by the need to maneuver between maintaining public stability and preserving the memory of this genocide. Those Slovaks who feared they would be forced to return Jewish property that had come into their possession under Aryanization during the war, or which was left in their hands, did not welcome returning survivors. Far from suffering pangs of conscience for the deportation and the fatal end of the Jews, they and their families aggravated the existing antisemitism. Following the Topol’cˇ any pogrom in late September 1945, the Prague government promised to hasten ratification of the law of restitution for the return of property, and it was eventually adopted on May 16, 1946 (law No. 128/ 1946 Sb). Vociferous opposition to the law prompted Slovak leaders to promise that it would take effect only after regulations for its implementation had been published.17 This situation permitted foot dragging and local decision making, to the disadvantage of the Jews. The Communist seizure of power in February 1948 again delayed implementation of restitution, the regime using opposition to class distinctions as the excuse for not returning bourgeois property. This position had been expressed by leaders of their underground at the height of the war in correspondence with London and Moscow during the Slovak national rebellion in 1944, and published in their organ Povstalecká Pravda (The Truth of Revolution), as well as in declarations after it.18 Only during the trials of war criminals, particularly that of Tiso (1946–47), who was president of Slovakia from 1939 to 1945, did the issue of the

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

189

Holocaust of the Jews receive attention. Although the main charges against Tiso concerned his role in the break-up of the republic of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and his suppression of the national Slovak rebellion in 1944, the persecution of the Jews, his attitude toward them and his responsibility for their deportation played no small part in his conviction. Two appeals during the deportations, one from the rabbis of Slovakia and one from the Jewish communities, were emphasized in the sentence passed on Tiso. Although these petitions, presented to Tiso as a priest and as the highest authority in the state, indicated that deportation meant the destruction of Slovak Jewry. Tiso ignored them and ordered his officials to shelve them.19 In their efforts to save their revered leader from the death penalty, Tiso’s supporters went to great lengths to spare him from this accusation. Having failed in their attempt to attribute the deportations to German pressure, most of them were ready to lay the blame on Tiso’s sworn wartime rivals, prime minister and foreign minister Dr. Vojtech Tuka and Minister of the Interior Alexander Mach, who openly supported National Socialism.20 They held that, as president of state, Tiso was not permitted to intervene in matters of government. The little he could do for the Jews was limited to getting a clause included in the Jewish Codex21 and in the expulsion law22which enabled him to grant a “presidential protection document” to particular Jews, which shielded them and their families, in the first instance, from various decrees, and in 1942 from deportation. Their efforts to exaggerate the number thus saved, in fact about 1,000, led his apologists to invent absurd figures, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000. This view, which they formulated during the war, is still held by them today.23 Tiso’s many antisemitic declarations, principally his August 1942 speech at Holicˇ , in which he promised further deportations – at a time when they were subsiding – since it was “a Christian act to rid the people of its enemies,” impelled his lawyer to counsel him to express regret for these, and other acts, in the hope of a pardon. Tiso judged correctly that if he were executed his followers would consider him a martyr to the cause of Slovak nationalism, while a pardon which left him rotting in prison might weaken the memory of his fame. He chose the first path and refused to express any regret for his deeds. He went even further when he summed up his political career, stating that if he had the chance, he would do it all over again.24 Ten months after Tiso’s execution in April 1947, the Communists succeeded, through a crisis they created, in coming to power in Czechoslovakia. During their rule, supporters of Tiso who remained in Slovakia were never allowed to honor his memory, but the regime had no control over those who left the country and went west. The exiles turned his memory not only into a symbol of the first Slovak state in history, but into one of Slovak nationality. They were also at the forefront of those who trumpeted praises of this state and its leaders.25 In the three years between the end of the war and the Communist takeover, when free public discourse was possible, the Jewish issue was never

190

Gila Fatran

raised. Even Slovaks who opposed the deportations were too preoccupied with rebuilding their lives, as well as with the passage from a fascist to a democratic state, which, however, was destined to be short-lived. Support for the remnants of the activists of Tiso’s regime thus became an important factor in the raging political struggle that developed between the Communists and the Democrats. The firm stand of the Democrats behind those who venerated Tiso compelled the Communists to adopt a more liberal attitude toward former personnel of the Tiso regime. The unmistakable Democratic win (61.43 percent of the vote) in the May 194626 elections proved that this was the most effective way to garner public support. The part played by the fascist government of Slovakia in the Jewish Holocaust roused neither pangs of conscience nor mercy among the Slovak people at that time and the survivors’ requests for the return of stolen property or for bringing Tiso’s staff to trial merely intensified antisemitism. The Jews themselves were reluctant to deal with their immediate past or to talk about their terrifying experiences. When the cost of the Holocaust, in terms of decimated families and friends, became unmistakably clear to them, they gathered their battered forces to try to rebuild their lives. Thus occupied, they hardly thought of appealing or bringing their persecutors to regret their acts. Increasing antisemitism and the victory of Communism in Central European states was the signal to many survivors to sell up and leave those countries. It was not the time to try to arouse sympathy over memories of the Holocaust or to bring the perpetrators to justice.

The Communist years, 1948–90 The pro-Israel position of the Communist government in Prague and the significant military aid it proffered during Israel’s War of Independence was short-lived. The winds of antisemitism began to blow in the Czechoslovakian Communist Party as early as the trial in Hungary of the Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Lászlo Rajk, in 1949. The new attitude became clear at the end of 1949 when the Communists barred mass emigration.27 The Communist regime’s evasion of the Holocaust began during that year, a clear signal being avoiding reference to the persecution of the Jews or to “solving the Jewish problem.” These were now submerged in an anti-fascist position that stressed the persecutions carried out by fascist regimes. Communist terminology, seeking to define fascism as stemming from the corruption inherent in capitalism, went so far as to abstain from using the expression “the Nazi regime.” This was the start of detachment from the Holocaust and ignoring the antisemitic motivations of the Nazis and the tragic fate of the Jews during the war. The memorial erected at the mass grave in Kreminicˇ ka in 1949 is an early case in point of how they meant to disregard the Holocaust. After the nationalist anti-fascist rebellion in late 1944 was crushed, 747 people, over half of them Jews, were killed at this spot by the Germans and their local

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

191

collaborators. The plaque at the entrance made no mention of the Jews, nor did the artist, no doubt under state instructions, include them in his decoration, in which three large crosses, topped with the Communist five-pointed star,28 memorialized the tragic fate of those murdered there. A visitor unversed in the events of the war would never know that Jews, from a newborn infant to aged men, were killed there solely because of their origins. Communist leaders, obedient to the line of ignoring the unique fate of the Jews during the Holocaust, also quickly ceased publication of the first documentary book on the Holocaust of Slovakian Jews, Tragédia slovenských Židov, which the Jewish community had prepared to issue in March 1949.29 During the 1950s, work was under way in Czechoslovakia to prepare a permanent exhibit showing the fate of the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which would include lists of Holocaust victims from the country. The chairman of the Association of Anti-fascist Fighters (Svaz protifašistických bojovniku°), influenced by the party position on the Holocaust, justified his opposition in a message to the Department of Education: “This memorial is intended to show the cruelty of the Nazis. With due respect to the victims [Jews], it is not our object to praise those who went passively to their death without resistance.” Protests from members of Jewish associations were to no avail; the lists were not included.30 Late in 1951 Czechoslovakia witnessed the “Slánskyáda” (from Slánsky; see below), a turning point in the orientation of the show trials in the People’s Republics. Until the summer of 1951, the principal accusations had been “bourgeois nationalism” and “Titoism.” The difficulty of making those charges stick, and the change in Soviet policy toward the State of Israel from the time of the UN General Assembly vote in favor of Israel in November 1947, caused the leadership of the Soviet Union to abandon such allegations. The accusations in Czechoslovakia were therefore changed to “cosmopolitanism” and “Zionism.”31 The producers of these newly slanted trials in Czechoslovakia, manipulated by Moscow, settled on Rudolf Slánsky, the Jewish secretary-general of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, together with a number of other Jews, as the main victims to be found guilty of these trumped-up charges.32 Eleven of the fourteen accused with Slánsky were Jews, a fact utilized by Communist leaders to incite against the Jews in public institutions, schools and factories. This anti-Zionism was an obvious cover for traditional Jew-hatred.33 As a result of political changes that followed the death of Stalin in 1953, the leaders of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party had to admit that many charges in the political trials lacked all substance. Thus began a slow process of rehabilitating the convicted, slower even than in the neighboring states of Hungary and Poland because in Czechoslovakia those who had prosecuted the victims were still in power.34 The antisemitism evinced in the trials and disregard of the Holocaust were censured in the free world and by Communists in the West as well. The efforts of senior party members to blur this negative impression spurred the publication of a historical, albeit

192

Gila Fatran

tendentious, study on fascist elements in the Slovak People’s Party between the wars and on the first Slovak state as a client of Nazi Germany.35 The work contained a chapter, “The Solution to the Jewish Problem” – culminating in the deportations – where the problem was defined as “the mass tragedy of Slovak Jewry.” Condemning antisemitism, the author declared that “antisemitism was always promoted by false demagoguery aimed at deflecting the attention of the people from the real source of their poverty and exploitation and blaming the Jews for all evils.”36 Most of the book is given over to a censure of the activities of the People’s Party between the wars and during the period it held power during World War II. Although the chapter on the fate of the Jews is not free of bias, its importance lies in that it was written at all. However, the little that was recorded of the period in question was intended more to obscure the antisemitism in the show trials than to signify changes in the policy of ignoring the Holocaust; nor was any regret expressed over the annihilation of the Jews.37 The paucity of publications on the Ludaks and their collaboration with the Germans is surprising and indicates that it was not unintentional. What stopped the Communists from encouraging, or at least permitting, works of this nature, despite their criticism of fascist ideology? Perhaps it was the presence of many party members with a Ludak past who had climbed to success on the party ladder and now filled the ranks of high officialdom. They, as well as those who were ready to open the gates for the ex-fascists, had little interest in exposing the fascist past. One example of a Ludak who did well out of the Communist regime during the war was the noted writer of children’s literature L’udo Ondrejov, who came into possession of the large antiquarian bookshop that had belonged to the Steiner family in Bratislava. To secure his ownership after the war, he instigated the deportation of five Jews, four of them members of the Steiner family, in June 1942, at the height of the deportations. Four were rounded up, deported and killed; one, who had been warned in time, hid and survived.38 The high party members who were privy to his secret were rewarded by his unswerving loyalty. With the admission of Ludaks into the Communist Party, the political show trials began. Resolute anti-fascists, such as Anton Rašla, Villiam Žingor, Laco Novomeský and Gustav Husák, were found guilty of “political deviation,” given long prison sentences and one was even executed.39 Publishing a study at this time on the activities of the Ludak government would likely reawaken the image of just how authoritarian regimes functioned. Additionally, the loyalty of veteran Slovak Communists to Slovak nationalism and their struggle for an independent status within the Czechoslovakian Communist Party (which was dominated by Czechs), assured their opposition to such research.40 In the field of literature, a number of stories were published soon after the end of the war. One of the authors was Leopold Lahola, a survivor who left for Israel during the mass emigration. The political trials of the early 1950s put an end to this creative production, as artists, both Jewish and non-Jewish,

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

193

fearing the iron fist of the regime and worried about their own safety, refrained from touching on the subject of the Holocaust. Softening of this intransigence, toward the end of the decade, was signaled by the publication of a book of poetry dedicated to the Holocaust and written in the wake of tours of Auschwitz organized by the writers’ union. Under the powerful impression these writers took away with them, poems replete with sorrow and sympathy for the suffering of the victims were written by Ján Ondruš and Mikuláš Kovácˇ . Inspired by the poem Osviencˇ im 1958, by Ondruš,41 the composer Ilja Zelienka wrote a poignant cantata, which became known internationally. Ivan Kupec and František Švantner began to dedicate their creative efforts to Christian–Jewish relations, based on stories of Jews who had been rescued. Publication of works of this sort without endangering their authors hinted at a change in the government’s attitude toward the Holocaust and resulted in the production of plays and novels, some of which were dramatized and made into films or televized. Through literature these authors sought to bring alive the character of Slovakian fascism and its disastrous implications for Jewish citizens. Literature influences the outlook of cultured people, but it especially affects that of youth. Only two of the authors who used the Holocaust as a central theme in their works were Jews, the playwright Peter Karvaš and the writer Lasislav Grossman, whose book The Shop on Main Street, which dealt with Aryanization and the deportation of the Jews, became world-famous as an Oscar-winning film.42 A non-Jewish author, Rudolf Jašík, had local success with his Námestie svätej Alžbety (St. Elizabeth Square), a lyrical love story of a non-Jewish youth for a Jewish girl, whom he fails to save from deportation, set against the background of the deeply rooted fascism of a small Slovak town. A popular film was made of this book as well.43 Farska republika ( The Vicarage Republic) written by the highly acclaimed Dominik Tartarka, deals with the deep love of a young man, defined in the race-based Jewish codex in force in Slovakia as one-quarter Jewish, for a girl who is wholly Jewish. The couple seek a way to evade the decrees that stand in the way of their love. The book became compulsory reading for highschool youth because its theme was the persecution of the non-Jewish opposition to the government.44

Prague Spring As liberal forces gathered strength in the 1960s within the Communist Party, antisemitism decreased. The change in party line was felt in the conference at Liblice in 1963, which honored Franz Kafka, the Jewish writer from Prague whose works, from the time of the Communist take-over, had been banned. The conference was a major sign of the departure from Stalinism, and in the instance of Kafka, a Jew and supporter of the idea of Zionism, of a retreat from the party’s antisemitic position.45

194

Gila Fatran

The trend toward liberalization, felt in all walks of life, peaked in 1968. Even among nationalists faint efforts were being made to offer extenuating circumstances for their actions during World War II. In June 1968 Ladislav Hoffmann’s article in Kultúrny život, which defended the local Catholic Church as opposing the deportations and pictured Tiso as the defender of Slovak Jewry,46 prompted a number of reactions that appeared in this journal.47 However, far from expressing regret or sympathy for their Jewish neighbors, they were more in the nature of a discussion over the extent of collaboration and responsibility for the fate of the Jews. The debate was silenced two months later when the Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, marking the end of the reforms and the return of Communist Party discipline. Closing this journal was but one example of the new limitations. The reinstated conservative wing of the party reverted to an anti-Zionist line that was merely a cover for antisemitism and a renewed disregard of the Holocaust.

“Normalization” and Declarations of Regret “Normalization” was the term used for the period beginning with the repression of Prague Spring, August 1968, followed by the regime of Gustav Husák from April 1969, until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 and the overthrow of the Communist regime. Husák’s government tried deluding the supporters of liberalism that this time “things would be different,” but in truth their intent was the restoration of the repressive order of the 1950s. As normalization was being implemented, the hostile attitude toward the Jews reasserted itself. In light of remarks that Husák had made about them in 1944,48 his relation to the Jews when he came to power in April 1969 came as no surprise. The process of normalization became part of the history of Czechoslovakia in 1970 with the formulation of a set of guidelines: “Lessons garnered from crisis development in the party and in society after the Thirteenth Czechoslovak Party Conference.” In this document Jews were considered “traitors to socialism,” terminology reminiscent of the 1950s. According to the document: Those involved in Zionism, a tool of the imperialists, cosmopolitans and anti-Communists, became a significant influence in the battle against socialism in the CSSR [Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic]. They included: F. Kriegel, J. Pelikan, A. Lustig, E. Goldstuecker, A. J. Liehm, E. Löbl, K. Winter and others.49 Normalization failed to dampen completely all hope of freedom, which had been raised in the Prague Spring of 1968. The Helsinki Final Act Accords of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which included an undertaking to respect human rights and was signed by Czechoslovakia in 1975, provided a formal basis for the unofficial organization of a civilian

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

195

opposition whose aim was tolerance and the defense of human rights. The principal group was Charta 77, which began its activities in January 1977. Similar groups followed.50 The opposition in Slovakia was led by the Catholic Church, whose declared goal was the struggle to expand freedom to live a religious life. Their identification with the nationalists and the Tiso government precluded any real cooperation with Charta 77, which was organized in the Czech part of Czechoslavakia. The main Slovak opposition to the Communist regime appeared among refugees in Switzerland, Germany, and long-time exiles in Canada and the United States. The political actions of these expatriates were determined by whether they belonged to the separatists, who wanted an independent Slovakia, or the annexationists, who favored the continued existence of Czechoslovakia. The Congress of Slovak Democratic Emigrés, who favored remaining part of the Czechoslovak state, dissociated themselves from the Slovak World Congress, founded by the separatists, which met for the first time in 1970 in Toronto. The separatists, who were unable to break with the legacy of the Slovak state, and refused to condemn unequivocally party leaders who had ordered the deportations, found it difficult to cooperate with the Czechs, and certainly with the Jews.51 From the end of the 1970s the expatriates began to concentrate on cleansing themselves of the stain of deporting their Jewish neighbors to their death, aware that this was necessary if they were to be accepted into the political life of the West, or gain the support of the West for the plans they had held for some time for an independent Slovakia. Some Jews were even convinced to support this goal, chief among them the economist Eugen Löbl, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment at the time of the Slánsky trial and was willing to serve as one of the deputy chairmen of the Slovak World Congress.52 In spring 1987, as the forty-fifth anniversary of the first deportations drew near, Martin Zapletal, a Slovak survivor living in Canada who was active in Slovakian émigré circles, tried to persuade then president of the Slovak World Congress Štefan Roman to express regret for the treatment the Jews received at that time. He explained that this would enable their representative to participate in a memorial service at Yad Vashem. Since the Slovak World Congress president was not yet prepared to make such a statement, Yad Vashem was unwilling to have him take part.53 The desire to improve their image in the West finally brought representatives of the Slovak World Congress to publish a Declaration of Regret54 three months after the commemoration ceremony in Jerusalem. The opening sentence of the declaration indicated its lack of sincerity: “We condemn all totalitarian systems which repress the human and civil rights of the people.” Basically, their view was that the Holocaust was not unique and that their brothers in the homeland also suffered under a totalitarian regime (the Communist one). It went on to express regret for the sad fate of Slovak Jewry, which, as they phrased it, contradicted the positive values of the Slovak people. Having

196

Gila Fatran

declared “the dimensions of the tragedy of Slovak Jewry in that period would have been no smaller, no matter what the political configuration,” they proceeded to try to absolve the heads of state from responsibility for it. However, their hint that German pressure was responsible for the deportations of Slovak Jews in 1942 contradicts the facts, since clearly the Slovaks had initiated the deportations.55 Further, the self-serving aims that accompanied their regret, “to make constructive connections with the representatives of Jewish organizations,” diminished the value of the document. Perhaps the twenty-four Slovak dissidents who opposed the Communist regime and signed their own Declaration of Regret in October 1987 in Bratislava56 were already acquainted with the Slovak World Congress declaration, which had been ratified four months previously, and thus were able to avoid such failures. According to this declaration: Not only individuals, but nations, too, recognize and feel for the continuity of history. Both possess consciousness of self, within which both good and evil deeds are performed. Each has a conscience that applauds the good and disciplines the bad deeds. All this passes before our eyes when we consider the events of World War II concerning the fate of our brothers and fellow citizens who were Jews. The authors represent themselves as members of a generation which could not yet play a public role at the time of the war, and thus had no part in those inhuman crimes; however, they now felt “burdened” by them and, furthermore, condemned them and wished to express their deep sorrow and beg the forgiveness of the survivors, the families of the dead and the entire Jewish people, for up until this time, no word had been said, for various reasons, by a single individual from among those of their people who were responsible for these acts. The deportation of Jews to their death as a “burden too hard to bear” and which disturbed their rest seemed to express true regret, a sentiment absent from the declaration of the Slovak World Congress. The declaration of the twenty-four, besides making this central point, sounded another, no less important note: We do not wish to weaken the expressions of regret and our plea for forgiveness by adding any historical background. We leave it to the historians to judge … the absurd international situation of those days in which we gave in to power wielders … we do not wish to bring up the Church’s opposition to the persecution of our Jewish neighbors, nor do we wish to detail the aid given by many of our people to those who were cruelly hunted out … we refuse to use these arguments in this Declaration in order not to weaken the single issue on which we think it is important to express ourselves: profound regret and a sincere request for forgiveness for all that happened to our Jewish neighbors and brothers when they were deported …

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

197

While the declaration also stressed, albeit obliquely, mitigating historical factors and some positive actions by Slovak people, the attitude of the signatories, which is made clear and does not seek to obscure vile actions, is of greater importance and a far cry from the standpoint of the representatives of the Slovak World Congress. Holocaust historiography is replete with warnings to refrain from accusations of collective guilt against everyone in a country whose leaders ordered the deportations of Jews. There were always individuals, if only a few, who opposed, passively or actively, such measures. Similarly, the twenty-four signatories of the declaration, while not blaming society as a whole, termed the evil perpetrated by their leaders “a collective tragedy of our history.”57 With this phrase the authors came close to the heart of the matter. Although responsibility does not fall on the children for the acts of the fathers, all bear the stigma of their history. The declaration on the Holocaust, which the Communist regime tended to ignore, constituted a protest against the priorities of the government. The opposition and the signatories belonged to various groups. Besides their hope of using it to improve the poor image of Slovakia internationally,58 a goal undoubtedly sought by all the authors, some of them exploited the declaration to advance their own particular political agendas. The declaration first appeared in an unofficial publication of the Catholic Church, Náboženstvo a súcˇ asnost’ (Religion and Present, No. 5, 1987),59 distributed privately. The most prominent of the signatories who took the opportunity afforded by the declaration to goad the regime, which was despised by his Church, was Ján Chryzostom Korec, then a bishop. After the fall of Communism, Korec wrote a number of articles defending the Slovakia of the war period and its president Tiso. On July 8, 1990, he unveiled a memorial plaque to Tiso at Bánovce nad Bebravou, the city where Tiso had served as a priest and where he founded and headed a Catholic teachers’ seminary. Jewish and general public protest forced the local council to remove the plaque within days.60 On April 18, 1997, Korec, now a cardinal, held a special service in the Nitra cathedral in memory of Tiso, whose actions he praised as preventing much evil and as including a defense of the Jews.61 It was only natural that on the occasion marking the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of Tiso, now seen as a martyr, no mention was made of his ignoring the pleas of Jews to intervene and prevent the deportations, or any other of his acts which left the Jews forsaken. ˇ arnogurský,62 another signatory to the declaration whose sincerity Ján C may be questioned, advanced in post-Communist political life, becoming prime minister in 1991–92. He served as chairman of the Christian Democratic ˇ arnoParty, founded in 1990, fulfilling the aspirations of his father, Pavol C ˇ gurský, who died in 1992; Carnogurský Sr had been a central figure in the Hlinka People’s Party and was Slovak delegate to the wartime parliament; as early as 1945, he urged the promotion of political Catholicism. In 1997, when ˇ arnogurský visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, he distanced himself from Ján C

198

Gila Fatran

the negative aspects of wartime Slovakia but not from the state itself. He admitted that the party he had helped establish was the sociological heir to the Hlinka party63 led by Tiso, which had sought a solution to the Jewish question and finally brought about the deportations and the Holocaust of ˇ arnogurský published his father’s memoirs, to Slovak Jewry. That year C which he wrote the introduction. The book was filled with baseless accusations against the Jews, the most outrageous of which was the claim that since Slovak Jews who served in the US army were among those who captured Tiso, they were responsible for his death.64 These were but two of the signatories of the Declaration of Regret who went on to praise Tiso. In November 1989 a bloodless revolution spelled the end of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. In summer 1990 the Slovak people chose their own representatives to the first freely elected parliament in Slovakia. Just before Christmas, the first celebrated in freedom for many years, a Declaration of Regret was read in the House of Representatives in Bratislava, in the name of the people and the government of Slovakia, for the deportation of Jewish citizens to their death during World War II. In the main, the declaration was taken from that of the twenty-four, to which was added an undertaking by the new democratic government of Slovakia never to abandon the principles of cherishing freedom, tolerance, and democracy, as well as respect for the law and the people, regardless of nationality, race, religion or opinion.65 Possibly, the use made of the declaration of the twenty-four by the representatives of the Slovak people spurred the Slovak World Congress, whose own declaration was ignored, to renew their efforts to be recognized by the Slovak people by writing a document jointly with representatives of Slovak Jewry. This declaration, of June 14, 1991, stated that both sides had come to a mutual understanding of the nature of Slovak–Jewish coexistence past and present. They agreed that both at home and abroad the two parties wanted to see a democratic pluralistic Slovakia where there could never again be inhumane deeds such as those perpetrated during World War II.66 In contrast to the ceremonial reading of the parliamentary declaration at Christmas and its reverberations, the other declaration passed unnoticed. Although the sincerity of some of the signatories to the national declaration and that of the twentyfour may be doubted, the powerful educational effect of the statements was unquestionable.

Independent Slovakia Czechoslovakia was established as a federal government in 1969 under Basic Law No. Zb. 143/1968. However, there was little actual expression of federalism, a fact that disgruntled many Slovaks. Indeed, just after the Velvet Revolution they demanded consistent implementation of the principles of federation by the new Prague government. Promises were made to “exchange the totalitarian federation for a democratic federation in which both peoples would live side by side with equal rights.”67 The democratic federation lasted

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

199

for two years; the Federal Republic of Czechoslovakia was dissolved in late 1992, and from January 1, 1993 on, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were independent states. The toppling of the Communist regime, which had as one of its principal aims freedom of speech and assembly, brought with it the founding of groups, organizations and movements that tried to revitalize pre-Communist ideologies, including those that identified with Tiso or saw themselves as continuing the policies of the Hlinka People’s Party. The re-awakened nationalist fervor included antisemitism, both historical and contemporary. The hunger for literature forbidden during the Communist era generated many publications, some of them forgeries, of which the most well-known was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.68 The Communist ideology of refusing to acknowledge the Holocaust, which continued for forty years, gave way to a new approach. The Slovak public became acquainted with the Holocaust of Slovak Jewry, first through the book Po stopách tragédie (In the Wake of the Tragedy)69 by the historian Ivan Kamenec, which became a reliable source for those who sought the truth about this period. The administration of the museum of the Slovak National Revolution, which dealt with the subject of the fate of the Jews, brought out a small pamphlet in 1991 on the fate of Slovak Jewry which served as a resource for teachers and historians. At the same time they began organizing an international symposium there for the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of Slovak Jewry. Publication of the proceedings of the conference,70 which opened on March 25, 1992, was of special importance, since for the first time there were articles from the Jewish viewpoint.71 In May that year the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences together with the parliament held a conference devoted to Tiso, his work and personality. Several lectures also dealt with how much influence Tiso actually wielded in determining the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust. These attempts were aimed at arriving at an objective evaluation, devoid of demonization and glorification. The many participants, representing all aspects of the political spectrum, held such different historiographic positions – particularly between critics of Tiso and his supporters – that true debate was not possible and the gap between them widened even further.72 Renewed interest in the Holocaust owed more to the change of government and less, at times, to the desire for knowing the truth. One new publication, the weekly Zmena (Change), brought out a series of articles, entitled Holocaust: lož storocˇ ia (The Holocaust: the Lie of the Century), which adopted the Holocaust denial position of Robert Faurisson, a former professor at the University of Lumière in Lyon.73 Although many did not accept the gross misrepresentations of facts and erroneous conclusions, no public reaction ensued. Denial of the Holocaust did not have much influence on the Slovak majority, who sought acceptance by the European Community and wanted to rid themselves of the negative image of being a Third Reich ally during the

200

Gila Fatran

war. The more enlightened among them found the nature of this weekly publication, and the absurdity of Holocaust denial, simply unworthy of response. Possibly, they considered ignoring the issue the wisest way of dropping the subject from the public agenda. Even nationalists did not deny the Holocaust. From the end of the war on, they based their defense of Tiso on blaming the Germans as well as Tuka and Mach, Tiso’s political opponents, for the deportations and the murders. When Tiso’s public antisemitic statements became known, they argued that, as president, he had no authority to decide the issue of the Jewish problem.74 In fact, this series of Holocaust denial articles never took root among the Slovak public. Only the chairman of the Slovak National Unity Party (Slovenská národná jednota, SNJ), Stanislav Pánis, formerly representative to the federal parliament in Prague, declared when on a visit to Norway that in Nazi concentration camps “it was technically impossible to wipe out 6 million Jews.”75 However, Pánis’s efforts, and those of the radical nationalist right, continued to be focused on presenting positive aspects of Slovakia during the war period and cleansing the ideology of the Hlinka People’s Party of the stain of fascism and Nazism.76 More sinister than the articles in Znema or the doubts cast by Pánis on the Holocaust were the remarks made by Bartolomej Kunc, MP, legal advisor to the coalition member, the Slovak National Party (SNS), on Prague television on May 8, 1996. Kunc justified the deportation of Slovak Jews, claiming it was a natural reaction to many long years of the Jews’ impoverishing the Slovak people, a process that had resulted in the transfer of national wealth into the hands of the exploiters.77 Jewish leaders in Slovakia were quick to respond. Kunc, they said, “adds to a defense of the fascist president Tiso the essence of the entire spectrum of antisemitic stereotyping once disseminated by fascist and Nazi propaganda and now renewed by their present-day supporters.” They stressed that Kunc’s position represented that of his party, the Slovak National Party,78 and urged members of parliament to take action against him. In a sixteen-page reply,79 the parliamentary spokesman quoted a long list of remarks, speeches, declarations and laws indicating the abhorrence of parliament and its chairman Ivan Gašparovicˇ 80 – who was appointed president of the State in 2005 – of past and present evidence of antisemitism and adulation of Tiso, and pointing out that contemporary Slovakia was not the heir of the Slovakia of World War II. “These attitudes exist, but there is no need to refer to them and stress them on every occasion,” he concluded. This sentence was meant to justify the absence of any reaction on the part of the parliament or its chairman to Kunc’s remarks. In reply to the request for sanctions, the speaker said the parliamentary chairman had no right to influence the point of view of Kunc or of his party. Needless to say, a statement condemning a pronouncement justifying or demonstrating understanding of deportations, especially when the consequences were known, is not beyond the authority of any public official,

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

201

including the parliamentary chairman. Possibly this was an effort at preventing the acrimonious political confrontation which an attack on Kunc was liable to engender. Nonetheless, the government did deal with the issue when it convened on June 4, 1996. A decision was reached which stipulated: “The government of Slovakia dissociates itself from all expression of ideas which attempt to defend fascism.” With this formulation the government, including two Ministers who belonged to Kunc’s party, fully identified with the position of the prime minister, made public following a meeting with representatives of the Jewish community at the end of 1995, at which he said that as long as he was prime minister fascism would never become acceptable.81 Additional condemnations by other public figures and parties somewhat later did nothing to arrest the wave of events in support of Tiso and the attempts to clear his name and that of the state he headed, which were particularly numerous in 1996.

The Holocaust in textbooks During the period of normalization (1968–89) there was no discussion of the fate of the Jews in the war years, nor was the subject of the Holocaust taught in schools. In general, Slovakia under Tiso was a period covered very briefly. The following quote, from the chapter “Characteristics of the Slovak State,” in the high school history book The History of Czechoslovakia, written at the beginning of the normalization period, illustrates the treatment of these two issues: The illusion that the Ludak regime wanted to raise the standard of living of the people vanished quickly as the persecution of progressive forces intensified, with the confiscation of Jewish property, “presumably Aryanization,” and the implementation of the agrarian reforms, which were a fraud … 82 The persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust was omitted, as was mention of any challenge to the totalitarian rule of Tiso. Possibly the reason for this scant description of the fascist Slovak state stems from a reluctance to kindle the latent support for Tiso and his regime that was bubbling under the surface. The text never explains what was fraudulent about the agrarian reform that came out of the requisition of Jewish-owned land, and hardly touches on the property owned by the Catholic Church and non-Jewish landowners. In another book from that period, intended for ninth-grade pupils, the chapter dealing with concentration camps notes that “the anti-fascist hatred raged to the point of speeding up the murders by means of gas chambers, cremation and a common burial field.” As an example, they note the murder in Buchenwald concentration camp of the veteran German Communist leader Ernest Thalmann.83 There is not a word about the mass murder of Jews.

202

Gila Fatran

On the other hand, a similar book, written at the same time, designed for Czech pupils, included a section called “Concentration Camps,” in which the following appeared: Those sent to concentration camps were first Poles, Russians, Czechs, Yugoslavs and Jews. The Slavs, stubborn and uneducated, were destined for extermination. They dealt more harshly with the Jews [capital Z, for Žid – meaning the Jews perceived as a nationality]. The Germans called them the source of all evil in mankind. Few of them returned home after the war.84 The fate of Slovak Jewry was mentioned for the first time in a textbook for Slovak high school students in 1983. A section on concentration camps said: “An integral part of the German plan to control the world was the gradual extermination of the Jews [small z in židov, indicating the Jews were not seen as a nationality], Slavs and other peoples were referred to as inferior races.” For the first time a picture was added to the text showing Jews wearing a yellow patch, standing with their baggage near the wagon prior to deportation.85 This was already a small advance for the Communists, but there was no basic change in the importance they ascribed to the memory of the Holocaust. The collapse of the Communist government saved the subject of the Holocaust from oblivion. In 1990 a hastily released textbook was published for teaching the history of World War II, compiled by well-known historians for use in the eighth grade. It remained in use until 1997. There was a significant difference here from books written under the Communists. Even the introduction had the following line: “The terror of extermination in the gas chamber in concentration camps was principally applied to the Jews.”86 The book unflinchingly condemned the anti-Jewish policies of Slovak leaders during the war, declaring, “The persecution of the Jews and the part they played in their murder is evidence of the fascist nature of the policies of the Slovak Republic.”87 Another new history text, Slovakia in the New Century,88 which was more student-friendly, was completed in 1994 and aroused a political altercation even before it came out. In the new government coalition the Department of Education was in the hands of the Slovak National Party. Its members tried to prevent publication, claiming that it did not describe the struggle of the Slovak people for independence. There was also serious criticism of the author’s treatment of the Slovak national uprising and the Holocaust. The arguments raged not only among experts but also among the general public, causing the department to delay publication for two years. In contrast to the Communist position on the persecution of the Jews, the authors stressed that “the abrogation of civil rights culminated in the so-called solution to the Jewish problem. Jews were gradually deprived not only of their property but also of their fundamental political rights, as citizens and as human beings.”89 From an enormous quantity of documents designed

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

203

to demonize the Jews, the authors chose, for the section headed “What do the documents of the time tell us?” a quote from a broadside of the Hlinka Guard which read: Let us not be confused by stupid clichés that say the Jew is also a human being. The Jews are the representatives and the agents of the devil. They were not created by the hand of God, but by the devil, and they are not human, even though they look human. Whoever defends a Jew or helps him in any way will not escape Divine punishment. The book describes the distress and conduct of the Jews just before they were deported by quoting from a letter written by the rabbis to president Tiso in March 1942. The Jews of Slovakia stand before the threat of deportation to a foreign country. The consequence of this deportation in wartime is extermination. In this, our last fateful hour, we appeal to your noble and humane conscience with a despairing plea: use your influence to prevent the extermination of these people.90 Within the year a new textbook, An Ancient People – a New Country, appeared in an attempt to counter Slovakia in the New Century. The joint work of four authors,91 it reflected a Ludak view of history and was paid for and distributed free to schools by the Slovak National Bank. The chapter on the years 1939–45 blames the absence of democracy in Slovakia on historical circumstances. The deportations are mentioned, but attributed to the Germans. The persecution of the Jews that paved the way for the deportations is not mentioned. The chronology of events which sums up the contents of the book does not include “deportation” as an entry. A second nationalist reaction to Slovakia in the New Century was the commissioning of an alternative, more attractive, textbook, Slovakia in the Twentieth Century.92 In the introduction, author Robert Letz said the book did not pretend to provide the only correct interpretation of this chapter of history, which is viewed in a variety of ways. He admits that Tiso was head of a totalitarian state, but stresses the positive side of the Ludaks. He blames the Germans for exiling the Jews and, indirectly, Slovaks in the camp of Tuka and Mach, who oversaw the preparations, presumably without Tiso’s knowledge.93 Disregarding various pieces of evidence, which clearly indicate that Tiso knew of these matters, the author accuses Tiso’s enemies Tuka and Mach of withholding information from the president. This claim, contrary to the facts, was intended to ease the way for the neo-Ludaks to come to Tiso’s defense. Thus the line taken by the Slovak nationalists immediately after Tiso was executed was continued. Tiso became a myth, the symbol of Slovak nationality, who bore no blame for the deportation of Slovak Jewry: an innocent martyr who was executed unjustly.

204

Gila Fatran

ˇ urica, in his book The History of Slovakia and the Slovaks,94 Milan S. D gave an extreme formulation of the neo-Ludak view of Tiso. Durcia is considered by nationalists as the leading writer of Slovak history. This book, which resembles a lexicon more than a work of history, is made up of a collection of events in précis form and arranged chronologically. Funded by the PHARE Program of the European Union, it repeatedly minimizes and distorts the consequences of persecuting the Jews. Although experts on the staff of the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Science criticized it severely, the Department of Education accepted it as the standard reference work for teaching history in the schools. Widespread protest from public bodies and private individuals within Slovakia and especially outside it brought pressure on Prime Minister Vladimír Mecˇ iar in June 1997 to promise to cease its use in schools.95 That did not prevent its continued distribution, and, in fact, teachers continue to consult it on the history of Slovakia during World War II. It is clear from the above that even after 1989 the government of Slovakia showed little interest in bringing out reliable textbooks to teach the history of World War II and the part played by Slovak leaders in the solution of the Jewish problem. This became especially manifest when Israel and Slovakia instituted an Exchange Program on Projects and Experiments in the Fields of Culture, Science and Education for 2001–04. Two paragraphs on content are significant, from section III: 9 The parties to this agreement will cooperate in establishing a Slovak– Israel committee to evaluate the content of textbooks, particularly their viewpoint on history. 10 Upon the request of either party, textbooks used in lower schools and high schools shall be supplied to the asking party so that they may become familiar with the content, especially in history, geography and the arts.96 These paragraphs encountered such sharp debate within the government of Slovakia that ratification of the program was delayed until 2002. After ratification, no one took up the subject of textbooks, and a conception of teaching the Holocaust has yet to be formulated.

Holocaust Memorial Day in Slovakia Rudolf Šuster, president of Slovakia from 1999 to 2004, participated in the Stockholm International Forum: Combating Intolerance, in January 2001. There, in his own name and in the name of his people, he expressed deep sorrow for the sins against the Jews perpetrated during World War II. He repeated these words during an official visit to Israel a month later at the events organized in his honor, and the Holocaust was a central point in all his speeches. He dissociated his country from the Slovak Republic led by Tiso

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

205

and presented it as the heir of the democratic humanist Czechoslovakia of the interwar period. When he spoke at Yad Vashem, and before the organization of Israeli citizens from Slovakia at the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, president Šuster promised to propose to his government and the parliament a law instituting September 10, the date of publication of the Jewish Codex in 1941,97 as Holocaust Memorial Day for the Jews of Slovakia.98 In so doing, president Šuster could not foresee the difficulties that would arise in fulfilling his promise. It was not easy to find a single deputy among the 150 members of the Slovak parliament who would be willing to propose a law establishing a memorial day for the Holocaust. After many attempts, he found Robert Fico, of the left-wing SMER party. When the law was proposed and came up for a vote, most of the delegates no longer dared oppose it. The first Slovak Holocaust Day to be marked was on September 9, 2001.99 The common grave in Kremnicˇ ka, where for forty years the murder of Jews buried there had gone unnoticed, was selected for the ceremony, which president Rudolf Šuster attended. Also present was a delegation from the Israeli Knesset led by Yosef Katz. Wreaths were laid at the foot of a Jewish symbol, a seven-branched candelabrum, added to the crosses on the original monument from 1995.

Conclusion Despite the considerable progress that has been made since the advent of the new Slovakia, the majority of society has still to come to terms with the past in relation to the tragedy of the Jewish community. One of the difficulties in dealing with the Holocaust in Slovakia is the juxtaposition of the extermination of the Jews and Tiso’s role in it, at a time when he was leading his people in their first steps toward independence. Awareness of this fact makes it difficult for the Slovakian people to evaluate Tiso and the period in which he led the country or subject him to criticism. To this must be added the importance of Catholicism in the country. Not only is there an overwhelming Catholic majority, but the religion is now in the ascendant. Tiso was a priest, and many people in his wartime government were members of the clergy. It is inevitable that this should influence the people’s grasp of the Holocaust as well as how it is presented to them. The absence of the Holocaust in public discourse, not as part of a political or ideological objective but as an act perpetrated by man, may stem from these factors. There has been no discussion of the part played by the Slovak people in the Holocaust or of how they deal with the moral burden left in its wake. The trenchant debates held in Germany among public figures and intellectuals, dealing with the guilt and responsibility of the German people for the fate of the Jews, has no parallel among the Slovak people. The common tendency is to place the blame for the deportations and the deaths on Germany. As to the general question of collaboration, and the more specific one of the

206

Gila Fatran

Jewish problem, the Slovaks generally accepted the explanation given by the “martyr” Tiso that Slovakia, as a tiny satellite state, acted thus to ensure its survival and that its policies were dictated throughout its existence by that of the “lesser of two evils.” Cultivating a position of disregard for the Jewish fate and adopting the political line of Tiso and his government, together with that of their spiritual shepherds, the Church, relieve Slovak society of any share of blame for the mass murder of Slovak Jewry.

Notes 1 Named after the Catholic priest who founded this party in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Until 1905 it was part of Néppart, the Hungarian Catholic People’s Party. 2 Svetozár Hurban Vajanský, “Židovská otázka na Slovensku,” Slovenské pohl’ady, No. 4 (1881); Krest’an, No. 34 (August 25, 1895); L’udové noviny, May 25, 1901, June 7 1901. The most extreme antisemitic articles were written by the Catholic priest Andrej Rojko – see Katolické noviny, No. 5 (1882) and Krest’an, No. 6 (1900); Gila Fatran, Antisemitism in Slovakia in the Ninetenth Century (Jerusalem, forthcoming; in Hebrew). 3 L’ubomír Lipták, Slovensko v 20. storocˇ í (Bratislava, 1968), pp. 123–37. ˇ eskoslovensku 1918–1939 (Bratislava, ˇ aplovicˇ , Branné organizácie v C 4 Miloslav C 2001), p. 94. 5 Ladislav Lipscher, Die Juden im Slowakischen Staat 1939–1945 (Munich and Vienna, 1980), pp. 11–29; Ivan Kamenec, Po stopách tragédie (Bratislava, 1991), pp. 29–47. 6 From November 1938, when the Prague government recognized Slovak autonomy, Czechoslovakia was called “the Second Republic” and was spelt with a hyphen, Czecho-Slovakia. 7 Slovakia was forced to sign a defense pact (Schutzvertrag), ratified by both parties, on March 23, 1939. Akten zur Deutschen Auswaertigen Politic IV, doc. 40. 8 Kamenec, Po stopách tragédie, pp. 37–47. 9 Gila Fatran, A Struggle for Survival (Tel Aviv, 1991; in Hebrew), pp. 106–12. 10 Livia Rotkirchen, “The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, 1938–1948,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia, Vol. III (New York, 1984), p. 5. 11 Annexation was decided at the “Vienna arbitration,” November 2, 1938. The order for Jews to evacuate their homes was given by Dr. Josef Tiso, then prime minister of Slovakia. On its implementation, see Eduard Nižnˇ anský, Židovská komunita na Slovensku medzi cˇ eskoslovenskou parlamentnou demokraciou a Slovenským štátom v stredoeuropskom kontexte (Prešov, 1999), pp. 24–99. 12 Jan Masaryk, a philosemite, was an ardent combatant against antisemitism. He was the son of the first Czechoslovakian president Tomáš G. Masaryk, and was foreign minister during and after the war until his fateful death during the Communist accession to power in 1948. Dr. Hubert Ripka was Minister of Foreign Trade, 1945–48. 13 This was revealed by both these men in a Prague government session on the persecution of the Jews of Topolcˇ any in September 1945. Introduction to M. Bulínová ˇ eskoslovensko a Izrael 1945–1956. Dokumenty (Prague, 1993), p. 23. (ed.), C 14 With the end of the Nazi policy of immigration in the autumn of 1941, deportations were begun from the Czech provinces, together with the concentration of Jews in the Terezin ghetto. Their bitter experience with deportation to Nisko, Poland, late in 1939 made Czech Jewish leaders believe that concentration in

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

15 16 17

18

19

20

21 22 23 24

25 26

207

their own country reduced the possibility they would be deported to the east, hence the massive response to orders to report to places of concentration. The number of Jewish survivors as a result of underground activity was the lowest in the whole of occupied Europe. For more on aid from Czech resistance groups see Livia Rotkirchen, “The Defiant Few: Jews and Czechs – ‘Inside the Front’, 1938–1942,” Yad Vashem Studies, No. 14 (1977), pp. 35–88. See the Slovakia file in the “The Righteous among the Nations” archive, Yad Vashem; Gila Fatran, “The Expulsion of the Jews of Slovakia in 1944–1945,” Yalkut Moreshet, No. 58 (1994), pp. 63–81. Cited by Kamenec, Po stopách tragédie, p. 197. At the time of the formulation of the law, the Slovak National Council (SNR) determined that it would take effect in Slovakia too only if the Slovaks had the authority to supervise the return of property independently. The Czech provinces were conquered lands between 1939 and 1945, where mainly Germans, or Czechs who requested and were granted German citizenship, benefited from Jewish property. The Germans were exiled to Germany after the war, their property reverting to the state; thus the return of Jewish property to survivors did not affect a large sector of the Czech population. However, there were also problems in the Czech provinces. The government refused to return the property of Jews who in the past were identified with German nationalism. In Slovakia, which saw in the expropriation of Jewish property the “execution of historic justice,” it was mostly Slovaks who benefited from Jewish holdings. The antipathy to the return of Jewish property caused Slovak politicians to avoid further involvement in the ˇ eši a Slováci ve 20. století. C ˇ esko-slovenské vztahy debate. See Jan Rychlík, C 1945–1992 (Prague, 1998), pp. 66–75. Vilém Precˇ an, Slovenské národné povstanie. Dokumenty (Bratislava, 1965), p. 67, para. 9. On February 18, 1945, Gustáv Husák, who ended his career as the last Communist president of Czechoslovakia, announced during a Communist rally, “It is not in our interest to give property back to the rich people [the Jews] who never showed any understanding of the Slovak cause and always gave their personal interests preference over those of the state.” Quoted in Jesajahu Andrej Jelínek, “Komunistická strana Slovenska a Židia. Desat’ rokov 1938–1948,” in Židia na Slovensku v 19. a 20. storocˇ í (I.cˇ ast’), Vol. 1 (Bratislava, 1999). Tiso was in possession of information at that time about the mass murder of Jews by the Germans in Ukraine from Slovak General Turanec, who returned home on leave from the Russian front at the end of 1941. See the verdicts on Jozef Tiso ˇ urcˇ anskyˆ, Yad Vashem archive, M-5/136, pp. 185–7. and Ferdinand D The two devotees of National Socialism were the spearhead of the radical secular camp in the People’s Party. They were in favor of a speedy and radical solution to the “Jewish problem,” which was calculated to strengthen their political position and gain them German support. Serious conflicts arose between them and the more moderate clerical camp headed by Tiso. Law Code of Slovakia, Sl.z. 198/1941. Fundamental law Sl.z 68/1942, May 15, 1942. See the speech of his lawyer Ernest Žabkay, Proces s dr. J. Tisom, spomienky obžalobcu Antona Rašlu a obhajcu Ernesta Žabkayho (Bratislava, 1990), p. 212. ˇ eši a Slováci, pp. 90–1; Igor Daxner, L’udáctvo pred Národným Rychlík, C súdom (Bratislava 1961), p.170; L’ubomír Lipták, “Jozef Tiso: problém slovenskej politiky a slovenskej historiografie,” in Pokus o politický a osobný profil Jozefa ˇ astá-Papiernicˇ ka, May 5–7, Tisu, proceedings of scientific symposium held in C 1992, p. 15. Lipták, “Josef Tiso,” p. 15. The Czech Communist Party obtained 40.17 percent of the vote in the same elections in Czech provinces.

208

Gila Fatran

27 Robert Y. Buechler, “Znovuoživenie židovskej komunity na Slovensku po druhej svetovej vojne,” Acta Judaica Slovaca, No. 4 (1998), pp. 65–77. 28 When the Communist regime disintegrated, the five-pointed star was removed. Only in 1995 were Slovakians then living in Israel successful in adding a Jewish symbol, a seven-branched candelabrum with the word “Remember” (in Hebrew) to the existing structure. See memorial book At the Gates of Hell, by Daniela Baranová, published jointly with the Association of Slovak Jews in Israel (Tel Aviv, 2003), p. 9. 29 The book was edited by Dr. Baruch Steiner, who wrote the introduction as well, during the war crimes trials of 1946–48. The association of Jewish communities in Bratislava initiated a project called “Dokumentacˇ ná akcia,” headed by Steiner, aimed at gathering testimonies on the Holocaust. Some of these testimonies were presented during trials of war criminals. In the 1950s, copies of the testimonies documented by Steiner were handed over to Israel’s envoy in Prague, who sent them to Yad Vashem. Until the fall of the Iron Curtain they were the main source for research on the fate of the Jews in Slovakia. ˇ eskoslovenské Svobodoveˇ armádeˇ (1990), p. 12. An example 30 Erich Kulka, Židé v C of the regime’s refusal to commemorate Jewish victims related to the Pinchas Synagogue, where the names of Jews who perished were memorialized. During the period of “normalization” it was shut down by the authorities on the pretext that its walls were damp. It remained closed until the collapse of the Communist regime. Conversation with Dov Kulka, December 11, 2003. His late father Erich Kulka led the public protest to reopen the synagogue, which happened only after the Velvet Revolution. ˇ eši a Slováci, pp. 161–2. 31 Rychlík, C 32 The anti-Zionist policy adopted by the Communists at the Slánsky trial included the arrest of an Israeli diplomat, Shimon Ornstein, and a prominent member of Mapam, Mordechai Oren. Ibid. 33 Pavol Mešt’an, Antisemitism in Slovak Politics 1989–1999 (Bratislava, 2000), pp. 36–8, 125–7. ˇ eši a Slováci, pp. 191–200. 34 Rychlík, C 35 Imrich Stanek, Zrada a pád, Hlinkovští separatisté a takzvaný Slovenský stát (Prague, 1958); interview with Dr. Anton Rašla, the prosecutor at Tiso’s trial, during his visit to Israel in 1990, on the authorities’ motivation for publishing the book. 36 Ibid, p. 268–97. 37 See note 30 above, on the Pinchas Synagogue. 38 In my possession is a copy of Ondrejov’s declaration, June 12, 1942, in which he gives the names of five members of the Steiner family dispossessed by an “Aryan.” An additional member of the firm was made redundant a month later. Ondrejov’s declaration was attached to a request by the head of the bureau of the high command in the Hlinka Guard to the head of the Fourteenth department of the Interior Ministry, Dr. Anton Vašek, also on June 12, 1942, in which he orders the arrest of five Jews listed in the declaration and their transfer to the Sered’ camp. Both documents are notarized. A copy of the original document is in my possession as well. 39 See Dušan Kovácˇ , Dejiny Slovenska (Bratislava, 1998). Viliam Žingor, revered head of the partisans in the rebellion, was accused of “Titoism” and executed in 1950. Others were imprisoned. Ibid., p. 265. ˇ eši a Slováci, p. 119. 40 Rychlík, C 41 Reprinted in the anthology of Slovak literature on the Holocaust, Božia ulicˇ ka (Bratislava, 1998), p. 179. 42 The first edition came out in Czechoslovakia in 1964 when Grossman was living in Prague. The film was made in Czechoslovakia in 1965 and won an Oscar in 1966. Grossman moved to Israel during the period of “normalization.” Karvaš

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

43 44 45

46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

209

was forbidden to publish. In 2000 it was made into a play, which to date was still running with great success. Slovakian cultural figures were planning to send it to Israel during an Israel–Slovakia cultural exchange week. The first edition came out in 1958. The movie was produced in 1965. The first edition came out in 1948. Among other manifestations, the publication of two works by Holocaust survivors which dealt with their difficult experiences in Auschwitz demonstrated this new line. Manca Sehwalborá, who worked beside Mengele, dedicated her memoirs, Vyhasnuté ocˇ i (Bound Eyes) (Bratislava, 1964), to her fellow prisoners who ˇ o Dante nevidel (What Dante Never Saw) by Jozef Lánik (penname were killed. C for Alfred Wetzler) (Bratislava, 1964), was a literary recasting of the lives of Auschwitz prisoners and the author’s escape from the camp, with Rudolf Vrba, to Slovakia in April 1944. Kultúrny život, June 7, 1968, p. 6; the weekly of the writers’ union was closed down when Prague Spring was suppressed in 1969; resumed in 1990. Ibid., June 14, 1968, p. 10; June 28, 1968, p. 9; August 2, 1968, p. 9; August 16, 1968, p. 33. A passage in a report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, attributed to Husák, reads: “The Jews who joined the underground illegally proved their incompetence. Nearly everything they did failed and everything they knew was exposed. Out of their ranks about thirty-five men worked for the ÚŠB (Slovak Security Services) and the Gestapo. Therefore Jews are not accepted for any illegal work today.” Quoted by Lipscher, in Die Juden im Slovakischen Staat, p. 174. Fakty o roku 1968 (Bratislava, 1978), p. 18. All those mentioned were Jews. ˇ eši a Slováci, pp. 292–5. Rychlík, C Ibid., p. 296–7. F. Braxator, Slovenský exil (Bratislava, 1992), p. 31. Jesajahu Andrej Jelinek, Židia na Slovensku v 19 a 20. Storocˇ í, Vol. II (Bratislava, 2000), pp. 105–6. It was ratified by a plenum of the Congress in Toronto on July 3, 1987 and published that year in Bulletine, No. 77. The declaration was quoted verbatim by Jelínek, Židia na Slovensku, Vol. II, pp. 102–3. Lipscher, Die Juden im Slowakischen Staat, pp. 99–100. The verdicts of Dr. Josef Tiso and Dr. Ferdinand Durcˇ anský in the National Court in Bratislava, April 15, 1947, Yad Vashem Archive, M-; Fatran, Struggle for Survival, pp. 106–12. Quoted in full by Jelínek, Židia na Slovensku, Vol. 2, pp. 99–101. I was a lecturer when a group of Slovak teachers were doing a special course on teaching the Holocaust at Yad Vashem in the spring of 2002. When I was asked if those present bore responsibility for the acts of their predecessors, I answered, “No, but you should feel uncomfortable when you come upon this chapter in your history, so stained by them.” See Jelínek, Židia na Slovensku, Vol. II, p. 101. During the last years of Communist rule a degree of relaxation allowed the private publication of officially forbidden literature (samizdat), to which category Náboženstvo a súcˇ asnost’ belonged. See “Decision of the National Security Council of the Capital, Bratislava,” 12 October 1990; document in my possession. Mešt’an, Antisemitizmus v politickom vývoji Slovenska, p. 159. A recording of his speech is stored in my archive. A recording of his speech is stored in my archive. ˇ arnogurský, Svedok cˇ ias One of the two who captured Tiso was a Jew. Pavol C (1997), pp. 162, 166. Milan Augustín, Krátke dejiny Židov na Slovensku (Bratislava, 1993), pp. 83–4.

210

Gila Fatran

66 Ibid., p. 82. ˇ eši a Slováci ve 67 J. Suk, Obcˇ anské forum, Vol. I, pp. 76, 58, quoted in Rychlík, C 20.století, Vol. II, p. 304 68 Sales of the book were illegal but continued nonetheless. Práca, 11 November 1992, p. 2. 69 Published in 1991, it was based upon the historian’s dissertation, which was banned from publication under the Communists. 70 Robert Buechler, Gila Fatran and Stanislav Micˇ ev, Slovenskí Židia (Banská Bystrica, 1991). 71 Israel was represented at the conference by seven historians, natives of Czechoslovakia. The compilation appeared in English and Slovak. Dezider Tóth (ed.), Tragédia slovenských Židov (Banská Bystrica, 1992). When the Czech and Slovak exhibitions were installed in Auschwitz in 2003, the Polish administration of the camp brought out a corrected and expanded edition in English. 72 A large volume of lectures resulted from the conference: V. Bystrický and Š. Fano (eds.), Pokus o politický a osobný profil Jozefa Tisu (Bratislava, 1992). 73 Zmena, Nos. 40–2 (1992). 74 See note 20. 75 Mešt’an, Antisemitizmus v politickom vývoji Slovenska, p. 68. 76 Ibid. 77 Pravda, June 5, 1996, p. 1. 78 Holocaust denier Stanislav Pánis was head of the radical faction of the party at the start of his political career. In 1991 he founded a new party, the Slovak National Union (SNJ), based on Christian and nationalist ideas. Shortly thereafter the name was changed to Hlinka People’s Party. See Mest’an, Antisemitizmus v politickom vývoji Slovenska, p. 38. 79 A copy of the response is in my possession. 80 Gašparovicˇ was president at the time of writing. 81 Pravda, 6 June 1996, p. 1. Quoted by Mešt’an, Antisemitizmus v politickom vývoji Slovenska, p. 124. ˇ eskoslovenska (Bratislava, 1971), pp. 355–6. 82 Peter Ratkoš, Dejiny C 83 Valeria Dullová, “Dejepis pre 9.rocˇ ník základnej devät’rocˇ nej školy (Bratislava, 1971), p. 131. 84 Milonˇ Dohnal, Dejepis pro 9.rocˇ ník ZDS (Prague, 1970), p. 164. 85 Id., Dejepis pre 8.rocˇ ník zákl. školy (Bratislava, 1983), pp. 46–7. 86 Dušan Kovácˇ and L’ubomír Lipták, Ucˇ ebné texty z dejepisu (Bratislava, 1990); see Peter Salner and Eva Salnerová, Židovská tematika na slovenských školách (Bratislava, 1999), pp. 7–8. 87 Ibid. 88 Dušan Kovácˇ , Ivan Kamenec and Viliam Kratochvíl, Slovensko v novom storocˇ í (1994); see Salner and Salnerová, Židovská tematika na slovenských školách, pp. 9–11. 89 Slovensko v novom storocˇ í, p. 42, 90 Ibid. 91 Milan Ferko, Richard Marsina, Ladislav Deák and Imrich Kružliak, Starý národ-mladý štát. 92 Robert Letz, Slovensko v 20. storocˇ í (Bratislava, 1997). At a symposium in Banská Bystrica held in 1992, fifty years after the deportation from Slovakia, the author said that the blame for the deportations rested with the Slovakian Jews themselves, who refused to heed the call of the assimilationist Federation of Slovakian Jews to integrate into Slovakian society. 93 Tiso and Tuka were sworn political enemies. The deportations were actually carried out by Tuka and Mach without Tiso, but he knew about the preparations and also about the attempts of some clergy such as Bishop Jantausch to prevent

Holocaust and collaboration in Slovakia

94

95 96 97

98 99

211

them, as well as many missives from the Vatican and from rabbis and Jewish communities. Tiso made the decision to ignore them, knowing that inaction in respect to the Jews would strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Germans and thus at home, too. Abandoning the Jews accomplished these aims. See criticism of this book, Dejiny slovenska a Slovákov, by the staff of the Slovak Academy of Science, in Studia hisotrica nitriensia V/1996, pp. 285–91. Their close examination of the book revealed many basic errors and mistaken interpretations, not to mention its Catholic and chauvinistic outlook. The second edition alone ran to 80,000 copies, and in 2003 a third edition was published. Sme, July 2, 1997, p. l. From the minutes of the debates of the government of Slovakia, Num. UV-8407/ 2001. In the Jewish Codex, 270 previously published anti-Jewish orders were arranged and brought up to date and some new ones added. The main idea was to define the Jews as a race instead of a religion, thus requiring some changes. The law was included in the Slovak legal code, Sl.z. 198/1941. See the quoted section of Šuster’s speech in Nariadenie o právnom postavení Židov (Dokumenty), the Jewish codex, reissued by the Jewish Museum in Bratislava, 2001. September 9, the date of ratification of the codex, was approved by the Slovak Parliament, and not 10 September, the date of its publication.

12 Oblivion and denial in the Italian postwar resistance ethos Manuela Consonni

Introduction Every form of memory involves an element of reconstruction, a certain reinterpretation of the past. Memory asks questions of history, underlining problems that linger conspicuously into the present or that remain misted by emotions and values. Ideally, a critical history works through memory, attempting soberly to confront a past that is so fresh as to be not yet entirely past. This holds true for any historical event and even more so for the tragedies that stain the collective memory of the war, the deportations and the extermination of the Jews. The discourse on memory and identity presupposes an understanding that social “truths” come to be established when they are emancipated from mental suppression and can be gradually wrought into historical and cultural reality. In 1945, entire facets of reality remained adverse to conceptual integration, effectively barring identity from becoming a legitimate object of rational manipulation and rendering moot any attempt at reconstruction. Identity is a social construct; collective identity takes shape not only through the lived experience of individuals, but also, and perhaps even more so, through the way it is narrated, through the way events are composed into memory, memory into narration, narration into tradition, and tradition into identity.1 After World War II, the two great powers that collaborated to defeat Nazism and fascism developed conflicting interpretations as a basis for reference to the events of the war. The Americans and their Western allies construed the war as a violation of the principles of law and justice. Hence their strategies for dealing with Nazi criminals included prosecuting them for war crimes and crimes against peace. The Soviets, however, viewed the war in terms of political history. Hence the Nazi tribunals were perceived as part of an ideological struggle in which the main interpretative key was the confrontation between fascism and anti-fascism. For the Soviets, then, the war was an outcome of ideological tension, not a violation of law.2 In Italy, due to the major significance given to liberation ideology and resistance activity during the war, the version emphasized was actually that

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

213

promoted by the Eastern Bloc. The implication of this view was a protracted debate over the meaning of the confrontation between fascism and antifascism. The postwar structuring of Holocaust memory in Italy was profoundly affected by an anti-fascist interpretation in the political history mold, which included, under the sweeping generalization “anti-fascism,” everyone and everything on the anti-fascist side of the divide. In Italy, however, fascists and Nazi collaborators were not brought to trial. Some tribunals were held against ranking German officials, notably Marshal Kesserling, head of the Wehrmacht high command of the south-west, who was indicted under a UN War Crimes Commission initiative and whose trial began in Venice on February 10, 1947. As a result of Italy’s declaration of war against Germany, on October 13, 1943, the UN War Commission charged with investigating war crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich against Allied forces, prisoners and civilian populations could extend its jurisdiction over that country. Historian Michele Battini writes in this regard that Italy, nevertheless, was unable to participate first-hand in the preliminary investigations, owing to its prior allegiance to the hostile Axis until September 8, 1943, rendering the state a necessary target of investigation for war crimes committed by its own troops in other countries that it occupied in conjunction with Germany. The UN War Crimes Commission entrusted the Italian case to a special commission, the War Crimes Commission for Italy, while the operation of the German tribunals was left exclusively to the English courts of justice “for reasons of justice and convenience.”3 This is the context in which memory of the deportations and exterminations developed and took shape. At first, the memory of the Jews’ deportation and extermination4 did not emerge as such; rather it was assimilated into a broader sphere of memory, a general domain that included Jewish deportees, political deportees and military internees. This image had no specific place for individual “memory groups”; it dissolved the sharp lines of the concentration camp experience by blurring them into the general experience of the war against Nazism and fascism. Unlike what has been described as the “nationalization of the victims of Nazism,” the attempt to work out the specificity of the Jewish problem developed gradually, and only in time did an individual memory of the Jewish narrative begin to stabilize – in non-Jewish Italian society, of all places.5 This chapter will highlight the formative moments of clash and conflict within the memory of the deportations and the extermination of the Jews and its inclusion in the patriotic ethos of resistance in Italy immediately after the war. It will focus briefly on the historical setting of this transformation, which occurred precisely during the time in which postwar Italian national identity began to take shape, and will proceed with an examination of the cultural and political contexts that pervade this narrative so thoroughly, noting the weighty impact of the Italian cultural world on the structure of the new postwar identity. Taken for granted are the coexistence of other memories, dormant and voiceless, contemporary yet compartmentalized, whose very

214

Manuela Consonni

diversity reminds us of the omnipresent agent par excellence of memory formation, namely politics. Indeed, my starting premise is that the dominant agent shaping memory is politics in the broad and complex sense of the term. It is politics that inspires and shapes social thinking; politics that suffuses the discourse of memory with a society’s views about its past and perforce with current representations of this past. This holds true for every historical event in living memory, and especially so for the history of the trauma of Jewish deportation and extermination. The memories analyzed here represent structures that are essentially political, and which therefore vary according to the inconsistent definitions given them by the dominant identity groups within society. The intimate relationship between identity and memory implies that choosing one particular memory over another involves not only a specific memory of the groups in question – in this case the Jewish deportees, the political deportees and the military internees6 – but also the collective memory of other groups that make up society at large, namely ordinary Italian men and women who witnessed the events as contemporaries, as well as their children who were born after the war. In other words, my hypothesis is founded on the idea that the history of the memory of the deportations and exterminations must include the identity definitions that influence the history of the entire era.7 Adopting the viewpoint of the Italian historian Leonardo Paggi, I assert that any claim that assumes a reciprocity between identity and memory must take into consideration a choice that presents itself not only to the specific memory group under study – in our case the Jews and the deportees (political and military) – but also to other memory groups, that is, non-Jewish society at large.8

The resistance ethos and the question of collaboration The rising tide of political conservatism in the new Europe was a great disappointment in the immediate postwar years to those who had hoped for radical change in the revolutionary sense. Almost overnight the public lost interest in past calamities and people continued their everyday life. The anti-fascist front that had existed during the war was fractured and international tensions were mounting. The stand-off was resolved by Cold War developments which, within a short time, transformed the new Germany of Adenauer in the West from an enemy of humankind to the latter’s spearhead in the struggle against the Communism of the Soviet Union and its satellites. No category of survivors enjoyed any social or political recognition. Society, untransformed and imperfect as ever, was a long way from the postwar dream of a social utopia. Immediately after the war, the illusion of a shared destiny and global solidarity based on the common human experience in countries such as Italy and France was of scant account, not only for society at large, which had witnessed the terrible deportations and exterminations from adjacent sidelines, but also for the survivors themselves.

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

215

During the massive post-World War II repatriation the survivors were the most significant vectors of memory regarding what had occurred within the Nazi concentration camps. All of these, Jews, political detainees and military internees alike, organized themselves immediately into associations, each choosing to adopt a single aspect of collective memory – that of partisanship. The welcoming social space they were given was in truth confined within the limits of a certain paradigm – resistance – which was devoid of any real content and without which their experience would doubtless have been integrated fully into the national memory.9 The associations of survivors of the concentration camps served, therefore, as a distorted representation of the victims of the Nazi persecutions. In the mechanism of social memory the dead have no role to play and the living are hard pressed to find a representation of memory in which they might recognize themselves.10 In Italy, a patriotic memory strictly linked to the Resistance, which required the repudiation of any divergent recounting of events, permeated the collective imagination of postwar society.11 Italians were advancing singlemindedly toward a national heritage that construed the anti-Nazi and anti-fascist struggle as one in which everyone had been involved, although few had been truly active in it during the occupation. No moral distinction was made between ex-inmates who were part of the resistance and “regular” inmates, namely Jews, who were sent to the camps on racial grounds. In the process of constructing its new selfimage, freshly liberated Italian society allowed the occupation experience to be formed in one way only: through the memory of patriotic resistance and the total negation of any aspect of collaboration with Germany.12 Three types of resistance were defined and championed in the propagandist literature: civil, moral and spiritual. As a result, the term “resistance” in the public discourse in Italy no longer referred specifically to a certain group or type of action but, acquiring a new breadth of meaning, became a catch phrase indicating a value judgment regarding behavior during the war. In becoming the self-image of entire liberated societies, the Resistance ethos required active negation of the occupation experience and collaboration with the Nazi regime, just as it demanded collective denial of what the Resistance itself had in fact been: the radical choice of a particularly determined minority that was marginal in political terms. Heroism was not then the dominant collective experience of an entire society.13 In newly liberated Italy, where the Resistance effort of CLNAI (National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy) had freed the north, the war was perceived as a trauma – as is every civil war – an event unprecedented in national history. Immediately after the war, the very core of national consciousness was shaken not only by the disgrace of defeat and consequent occupation, but also by the fact that liberation was owed to the Allies. Thus a patriotic epic was composed, one that only the Resistance could inspire. This was one of the reasons that Resistance ideology was strongly uniform in Italy, perhaps even more so than in other countries. The ubiquitous catch phrase “liberation war” (or “movement”) was an expression of this uniformity, and

216

Manuela Consonni

the National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement, founded in 1949, remains the name of the sole official body whose duty it is to study the Resistance. However, it does not indicate from whom liberation was won. The persecutions, the deportations and the exterminations as fundamental experiences of the conflict were simply unmentionable in this context. Thus, the heroic nationalization of Jewish martyrdom, and not only that of Jews, was not merely a cultural attitude but a political choice.14 Immediately after the war Italian society was mobilized politically and socially to fulfill its destiny as a new democratic national identity. The people were now confronted with two paradigms: one focusing on the deportation and extermination of the Jewish minority (and the non-Jewish deportees); the other exultant in the victory of a worldwide anti-fascist resistance. The first was dropped in favor of the second; miraculously, the Resistance was discovered to have had the support of the majority throughout, and every postwar Italian became a partisan and an anti-fascist, Italian Jews included. Consequently, the differences between the various contributors to the Resistance were effectively downplayed, only to emerge more forcefully much later. In consolidating this vision of unity, its patriotic aspect was emphasized and esteemed above issues of class and even civility. In an impressive stretching of historical truth, Italian troops who, after the fall of the fascist regime were reformed into the Italian Liberation Corps under the king and General Badoglio in the Southern Kingdom and fought alongside Allied forces from September 1943 onward, came to be seen as one with the partisan effort. As of spring 1945 there was a collective attempt to rebuild political, military, judicial and psychological foundations in a land devastated by war. In the days preceding the liberation of northern Italy, both the Allies and the Badoglio army sought to hegemonize the political scene. With the liberation it seemed, initially, that indeed the aspirations and ideals of the Resistance could be realized through political and social reform, but it was not to be. Despite the promising coalition of June 1945, formed by all the parties that had been part of the CLN (National Liberation Committee) under Ferruccio Parri, a key member of the Party of Action (PdA, a liberal-socialist party under whose banner most of the Jews fought during the war of liberation) and a respected political leader, the police, the army and the bureaucratic apparatus, which were critical for the consolidation of postwar Italian society, refused from the outset to recognize his authority owing to his political orientation.15 Long-time supporters of the fascist regime were bitter over their declining socio-economic position, which they blamed not on the willing war of the fascist regime but on the dawning political reality embodied in six parties which had assumed the running of the state. Their fear of a purge due to their fascist past spurred them even more rightward, and they refused to acknowledge the northern forces freshly assembled in Rome in the spring of 1945.16 In December of the same year a new government was formed under Alcide De Gasperi, of the Christian Democratic Party (DC), comprising all the CLN parties.

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

217

The governments under Parri and De Gasperi had to tackle not only economic and social problems but also thorny matters of purges and amnesty. The purge issue and the consequent castigation of those guilty of fascist crimes, and the danger and concomitant necessity to suppress any resurgence of fascism characterized Italian political history throughout the period discussed herein. By an Act of July 27, 1944 the office of high commissioner for sanctions against fascism was invested in Carlo Sforza, a Party of Action member, who availed himself in turn of the services of an adjunct commissioner for purges, the Communist Mauro Scoccimarro. An extensive purge would have made sense only if fascism were indeed, as the philosopher Benedetto Croce noted, a footnote in the life of the country, a sudden and illfated malady in the body of a fundamentally sound society; in that case it would have been just to punish those found guilty of dictatorial excesses. However, this was far from the reality. From 1922 until the war, Italy, with the exception of a few tens of thousands of dissidents, was entirely fascist, and Mussolini’s regime enjoyed a consensus that spanned all sectors of the population. The pretentious character of the purges was also the result of a political arrangement of convenience reached in April 1944 between the Communists and the Christian Democrats. The attempt to shatter the juridical continuity of the state failed egregiously and in the immediate postwar era the left adhered instead to the value of continuity of the state. The king, who had encouraged the rise of fascism, had ceded his authority yet lingered on his throne; the crown prince, who was one of the chief commanders in Mussolini’s war, had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general of the realm, alongside Badoglio and numerous ranking officials who were exempt from any form of investigation or punishment, although they were manifestly implicated in the fascist endeavor. As a result of the dramatic absence of any purge, a new reactionary, anti-revolutionary social bloc was formed that openly opposed the ideas represented by the parties in power. The latter had cultivated an image of innovators and progressives, an impression that was essentially the outcome of a succession of statutes, which, although individually justifiable, together gave the sense of a cause, or even a desire for revenge. Consequently, as the initial momentary fear and insecurity passed, those who were touched, however ineffectively, by the purges, or who feared their vulnerability in the face of possible future persecution, gradually raised their heads and began to criticize with increasing candor the judiciary commissions and the ideological platforms of the parties deemed responsible for the institution they created. An impressive array of moderate conservatives stood ready to take advantage of this situation. From the outset, the Everyman Movement17 promulgated such ideas as “the administrative state,” solidarity among all benpensanti (mainstream thinkers) and suppression of political parties and “politickers.” Later and more decisively, the Christian Democrats, who emerged as the driving force behind the Italian political system, welcomed into their ranks the vast majority of the middle class, which had been forced to renounce the fascist experience but whose fears remained.

218

Manuela Consonni

The High Commission for Sanctions against Fascism was abolished on February 1, 1946. The Communist and Socialist parties, by this time leaning strongly toward an institutional referendum – for the republic or for the monarchy – which was set for June 2, 1946, appeared unable to counteract the government’s decision. The termination of the purges was followed immediately by a general amnesty for ordinary political and military crimes. On June 22, 1946 Palmiro Togliatti, secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and Minister of Grace and Justice, issued an amnesty declaration – an act approved by Governor De Gasperi – on the occasion of the birth of the republic. The amnesty secured the release of thousands of fascists, without discriminating between those convicted of minor offenses and those responsible for more serious ones. In the first month after its enactment, 7,000 fascist detainees were liberated. Among the first beneficiaries of the law were a colonel of the Carabinieri serving a life sentence for the murder of the Roselli brothers, and four torturers from the notorious Kock gang.18 While formulating the draft law for the amnesty, Togliatti, aware of the failure of the purges, underscored the PCI’s national aspirations and his party’s preference for the continuity of the state. However, as in the case of the purges, the catastrophic outcome of the amnesty originated in some unfortunate phrasing – the most well-known of which was “particularly brutal outrages,” which served as a kind of “get out of jail free” clause for practically all of the persecutors of the Salò Republic – but owed just as much, or perhaps even more, to the liberal interpretation of the phrase by the judiciary. All this occurred in tandem with the general suppression of the political prefects in March 1946. These had been appointed during winter–spring 1944–45 by the regional committees of the CLNAI in preparation for the liberation that seemed imminent, together with other local officials such as mayors and police commissioners. The idea was to avoid a dangerous administrative vacuum, as well as to confirm Rome, in the eyes of the Allies as well as of the governor, as a center of power capable of influencing future political developments. In the early postwar years, the political prefects maintained a certain symbolic value, as their very existence seemed to correspond with the Resistance ideal. The attack of the right wing against them swelled gradually in intensity from the early summer of 1945, and was expressed in articles published in Risorgimento liberale by liberal party bosses and through the “Ten Commandments” submitted to De Gasperi after the fall of Parri.19 The years 1945–46 prepared the ground for the ousting of the Communists and the Socialists from the government in 1947 and the crushing DC victory in the elections of April 18, 1948. Diverse historical interpretations surfaced, reconciliation with which the unitary formula proved useful. None of the parties that ran had any interest in imputing to the Resistance the character of a civil war during the years 1943–45, for neither the center parties nor the anti-fascist left had yet consolidated into a stable government leadership. They were all eager in the new Cold War climate to eliminate the more

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

219

radical aspects of the Resistance that might arouse concerns on the political level. Their objective was to muster under their new political banner those segments of the population that had not participated in the Resistance or that remained attached in one way or another to the fascist experience. Not to be outdone by the right, the left also retreated from any suggestion of civil war, above all the Communists, who, though blaming the DC for fracturing the unified Resistance, at the same time sought legitimacy as a loyal and dedicated national party in the name of that opposition force. Naturally, the Christian Democrats tried as best they could to downplay the possible Communist contribution to the patriotic Resistance. In short, such was the mood of the time that anyone who spoke of civil war would be greeted with rebuke and his arguments discounted a priori. This web of interests and motives silenced a debate that was appropriate to the Cold War climate of the period but was useless for the reconciliation of collective memory with the past. A cohesive national memory of a celebratory character with regard to the Resistance was nourished as a sine qua non for postwar recovery. This quest after heroism implied patriotic commemoration of the persecution. The left in general and the Communists in particular adopted the concentration camp into their political discourse as the epitome of the struggle against fascism, and Auschwitz came to symbolize for them the Calvary of anti-fascist martyrdom. Thus, Giacomo Debenedetti, a Jew and literary critic, expressed his representation of the Jewish extermination in 1944: And if one day, a reward should be given to those fallen for their courage, certainly we, the Jews who survived, would not refuse it them; but let there be no proper medals minted, no special diplomas stamped, but that they be the medals and diplomas of those other soldiers. Private Cohen … Private Levi … Private Abramovic … Private Chaim Blumenthal, five years old, who fell at Leopoli amongst his family while, with his hands tied behind his back, he defended still, confirmed still the cause of liberty. [Italics in original]20 The Jews preferred, for their own reasons, to adhere to this model, representing a memory of active partisanship and not of passive persecution. The Jews chosen for commemoration on the first anniversary of the liberation were those who had fallen in battle, arms in hand. In the Jewish weekly Israel a lengthy article was published under the title “Liberty’s Martyrs,” on the Jewish partisans Gilberto Cohen, Angelo Finzi and Luciano Servi,”21 seventeen columns of which were dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which was handily moved to April 25, the symbolic date of Italy’s emancipation from the Nazi-fascist yoke. Fabio Della Seta depicts Jewish heroism thus: Six million Jews were butchered, like a flock crowding docilely under the executioner’s knife. There exists no such example of passive resistance in

220

Manuela Consonni the history of the world … but though they were humiliated, martyred, exhausted and disillusioned, there is still a name that makes us shudder and makes us hope: Warsaw. The flags hoisted at Warsaw testify to the faith of the Jews in their just cause. They died to set an example to themselves, to the fighting democratic world and to the same raging enemy. They died to consecrate yet again the Jewish people’s will to live … by the holy memory of the Warsaw Ghetto, the men would have to defeat evil and set off toward the light.22

Dante Lattes, chief editor of Israel, concluded his note on the twenty-second Zionist Congress of 1946 with a reference to anti-fascist literature in order to speak of the Jewish extermination: “Six million dead. This is our contribution to the struggle against fascism.”23 Calling attention to the Shoah and the Jewish world rather than to the Zionist question and the Jewish world, Lattes took a two-pronged approach, advocating that the idea of Jewish extermination be seen as leading to the founding of the Jewish state, and also that the deaths of the six million should be viewed as passive resistance against fascism. This position was restated emphatically during a convention at the Politeama of Naples celebrating the republic, with public readings of Resistance papers by Communist Giorgio Amendola. Jewish partisan Gina Formiggini reiterated a passionate appeal from the stand to never forget, to keep the memory alive, since to forget would be a sin.24 By common agreement, the memory of the deportations and extermination was hijacked from the passive deportees and transferred to the active partisan Resistance. As of 1945 the memory of the deportations and the Jewish extermination reflects a prolonged conflict between an honest attempt at shaping a social representation of survivors’ recent tribulations, on the one hand, and the social and political reality, on the other, which found it difficult, in fact, almost impossible, to preserve a place for the former. Italian society was preoccupied with its economic, political and social rehabilitation. In those early years the war, with its deportations and exterminations, was still too close; society could not cope with the fullness of its memories. It fact, it took several years for the past to undergo historical rehabilitation and to penetrate understanding and consciousness.25 For two fleeting years after 1945, people placed increasing trust in the great project of “social solidarity” and, as a result, all survivors, Jewish and nonJewish alike, were eager to testify about the horrors. This urge, however powerful, ran up against a growing trend in society at large to treat the war events as over and done with, and to consign the suffering that had taken place to the archives. Italian society repressed memories of the deportations and exterminations much as it did the war in general,26 so that they became a vague and marginal element in its contemplation not only of the fascist past and the war but even of the liberation and the Resistance. Mainstream antifascism settled for a stylized and rather smug representation of its own narrative.27 Naturally, the paucity of space allotted to this memory and to its

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

221

written record can also be explained by the growing economic troubles, coupled with a resounding lack of support from the Italian and Jewish Italian intelligentsia, which was not uncharacteristic of the times. Government and civil service cadres did not recognize the survivors’ right to material or symbolic recompensation and consequently did not support them in any way, nor did they acknowledge the deportations and exterminations as unprecedented historic events. From May 1945 the War Crimes Commission for Italy began to collaborate with the central War Crimes Commission in relation to crimes perpetrated by the Italian government; at the behest of the former, the erstwhile Minister of occupied Italy, the Communist Mauro Scoccimarro, approached the Italian Jewish community with a request for information and documentation regarding such crimes for submission to the commission.28 Against this backdrop two charged issues regarding the fascist war disturbed the freshly founded myth of a republic raised from the blood of the Resistance. The factual record of these events had to be suppressed by denying the memories of those who had lived through them, especially the military internees, whose collective memory of both the military and ideological alliance with Germany and the civil war of the years 1943–45 was completely dissonant with the new ideology. First, Italy had collaborated with the Nazis both at the practical, government level and in forming a politico-ideological partnership with Germany.29 The war alliance with Nazi Germany, which had lasted from 1940 to 1943, remained somewhat vague in the memory of Italian society at large; the country’s utterly unheroic defeat seemed to have distanced this historic fact from consciousness. The new resistance-cum-liberation ethos would have encountered severe difficulties in gaining acceptance as authentic historic memory had it not been harnessed to serve as a sort of universal absolution even for those who did not take part in the war.30 The second issue that clouded Italy’s psyche was the period 1943–45. The Germans enabled Mussolini’s return to power within the framework of the Italian Social Republic (RSI). From September 1943 to April 1945, the RSI ruled the wealthiest, most populous and most socially developed part of the country. Hence Italian national memory regarded the civil war of 1943–45 between the fascists and the anti-fascists as a settling of scores in an ongoing struggle begun in the era of great political and social tension, 1919–22.31 Indeed, the civil war problem had to be considered in relation not only to the greater war waged by the fascist regime but also to the regime’s collaboration with the Nazis during the latter’s occupation of Italy. Until this day the collaboration problem has never been confronted explicitly, either politically or historiographically, although it is easy to identify a state-endorsed collaboration of unique proportions that stretched well beyond the proper bounds of regular cooperation. This was both a collaboration of state and collaboration of political ideology, as distinguished by Stanley Hoffmann with regard to France, a genre of collaboration native to Italy, resulting from

222

Manuela Consonni

the final manifestation of a movement that returned to power in 1943 thanks to an alliance with Hitler’s Germany, having previously governed the country for twenty years independently.32 However, instead of subjecting itself to a thorough inquiry, Italian civil consciousness adhered to a myth that refuses to die even now, that of the “good Italian.”33 Referring only to the period preceding September 8 1943 and to the behavior of the Italian army when it still asserted independent authority alongside its German ally, the former, it is believed, extended aid to Jews who took refuge in Italian occupied zones, such as the Balkans and the south of France.34 With respect to events outside Italy, it was convenient to place full responsibility on the Germans and to console themselves with the notion that the Italians were better. This stereotype was used, for example, to whitewash the massacres that Italian occupation soldiers perpetrated in the Balkans against the partisans and to diminish the role that the Italian fascist government of the RSI played in the deportation of Jews and non-Jews from Italy to the concentration and extermination camps after September 8, 1943. It should be noted that whereas the arrests of Jews and non-Jews in November 1943 were the result of Italian collaboration with Germany, from December 1943 until January 1944 Berlin scrutinized RSI policy very closely before finally deciding to let it play the principal role in organizing the arrests and in running the provincial camps, where the Jews were imprisoned until they could be deported. The most well-known Italian Durchsganglager was Fossoli di Carpi, near Modena, originally built in the spring of 1942 to hold British military personnel captured in North Africa. After the armistice of September 8, 1943, all British prisoners-of-war were taken to Germany, mostly to Bergen-Belsen. From December 1943, the RSI government reactivated the camp in accordance with Police Order 5 of Interior Minister Guido Buffarini Guidi. From then on, Fossoli came to be described as a “concentration camp for Jews” under the command of the prefect of Modena, Bruno Calzolari. As of late December 1943, ninety-seven Jews were interned in Fossoli. By January 1944 it already held 924 Jews. In mid-February 1944 the Nazis took direct control of Fossoli camp and placed it under the command of Wilhelm Harster, the Befehlshaber der Sicherheitpolizie Italian, who had been installed in Verona. Fossoli then became a Polizei-und Durchganglager, directly under the SS. Its purpose was to serve as a transit camp for racial and political prisoners awaiting deportation to concentration and extermination camps. Nearly 5,000 people passed through Fossoli; some were identified as political prisoners (2,463–2,485) and others as Jews (2,461). The camp ceased to function as a Polizie-Durchganglager in August 1944 following the opening of the BolzanoGries camp. In the autumn of 1945, at the end of the war, Fossoli become a camp for foreign war refugees and displaced persons.35 Clearly this stereotype of the “good Italian” would have been unsustainable had genuine reflection on the civil war, fought between Italians on Italian soil, been encouraged. The Italian Catholic faith, so comfortable with

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

223

self-absolution, was yet another factor in conditioning moral approval of the processes of repression and disregard.36

Conclusion According to Dominique LaCapra, historic events that are problematic enough to defy assimilation and integration into memory (such as the deportations and exterminations) create a retardation or suspension of real memory, whose influence on the belated attempts at representation of the past is irreversible.37 This reality was clearly manifested during the years 1945–50. There was much information available about the camps in the form of witnesses, as well as newspapers and journals that dealt with the issue. Nevertheless, immediately after the war neither democratic Italy nor the Jewish world that survived the Shoah succeeded in adequately addressing it. The trauma was profound. It had created an unbridgeable chasm between “before” and “after,” had become too focused on the war, the exterminations and their place in memory, so that the very trauma became a place of “nonmemory.” These processes occurred because trauma must dwell in the mind, but as memory exposes itself to trauma, it becomes almost impossible to forge and define an identity, whether personal or collective. The history of the early postwar years was expressed in the shedding of trauma, an unburdening that disturbed the delicate formation of a reconciling national identity.38 Consequently the structures of identity forged in the wake of the war defied any realistic definition and were not truly maintained as historico-cultural reality. Emanuel Levinas wrote in this regard that in 1945 entire domains of reality resisted the force of cultural annexation, hindering the identity from “preparing the [domains of reality] as an object of representation and manipulation, obstructing the possibility of restoring and redefining them.”39 In 1945 the common man chose to get on with his everyday life. Only the survivors could have given voice to so burdensome an experience, but they, too, were cowed into silence, sucked back into routine. As soon as the higher powers divided Europe, the memory of the deportations and exterminations vanished from the stage for a few years. The new cultural climate also reflected the end of the Italian dream of a radical democratic renewal, and saw a reawakening of conservative tendencies. During those years the memory of the deportations and the Jewish extermination was repressed and seemingly lost. Moreover, it has been inferred that the left – the Communist and Socialist parties, but also the Party of Action – proposed a shady deal with the Jews: in exchange for their silence regarding the special nature of their deportation and the role played by the Italian authorities in its execution, they would be included in the patriotic memory of Resistance. Granted that had the category of “Jewish deportee” or “racial deportee” been created in Italy (or in France), Jewish organizations would have protested vehemently. An instance of this sentiment was evinced

224

Manuela Consonni

by Primo Levi, in his overtly negative reaction when asked if the word “racial” ought to be affixed to ANED, the National Association of Ex-deportees; this would transform the deportations into something different, less worthy, than ideological persecution, he believed.40 The psychological representation of the deportations and extermination must be understood in light of the common efforts of Jewish and non-Jewish deportees alike to recast their memories in the falsely patriotic “clandestine movement and Resistance” mold. Many historians claim that the reason behind this phenomenon is linked either to an “absence of collective recruitment to remember” or to a “deconstruction of memory” and repression of “memories that are too realistic to bear. It is difficult to remember something that according to others never occurred at all.”41 The mechanism of the selfrepresentation of the “good Italian” myth grafts the force and weight of the patriotic and anti-fascist Italian partisan on to a “collective sense of self,” which is none other than “the other side of the typical Italian self-depreciation.”42 The Jews chose to abandon the “Jewish quality” of survivors in exchange for the ethos of partisans in order to quell their fear that beyond an assertion of their uniqueness new dangers must lurk. The atmosphere of the immediate postwar period was one of experimental reconciliation, of a will to locate oneself securely in the company of other victims by actively negating any difference. The literature of the camps took this upon itself, linking the attempts of the survivors to project a social image of their extreme individual experiences and memories, for without a real socialization of the words “deportation” and “extermination,” “a memory cannot be created,” whether personal or collective.43 In this vein Giacomo Debenedetti’s words, written in 1944, seem in hindsight to be a prophecy: In the liberated lands generous attempts were made to recompense the few surviving Jews with love. The author of this pamphlet wishes to ward off this persecution of love, which presents yet the danger of distinguishing, though it be in our favor, the Jewish race from the human race … It is clear that this abundance of love, instead of swelling into passionate discharges for lack of any other remedy, would be better employed were it diluted into an enduring, continuous solidarity, capable of steadily averting evil.44

Notes 1 P. Jedlowski, Memoria, esperienza e modernità (Milan, 1989); E. Levinas, Al di là del versetto (Naples, 1986), pp. 38–9. 2 These approaches were shaped during and immediately after the war. They became even more polarized with the development of the Cold War, and the logic that guided them prevailed until the late 1980s. 3 M. Battini, Peccati di memoria. La mancata Norimberga italiana (Rome and Bari, 2003), pp. 10–11.

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

225

4 Prior to 1938 the Jews in Italy numbered about 47,000 compared with 30,000 after the war. By 1945 the Italian Jewish population had lost over 36 per cent of its members. This drastic reduction can be ascribed to several factors: 4,000 who renounced their faith after the Nuremburg Racial Laws of 1938, and among whom only a handful reconsidered after the war; the emigration of some 11,000 foreign Jews and 6,000 Italian Jews; and 8,000 dead as a result of the persecutions, the war and the deportations. See E. I. Sabatello, “Le conseguenze sociali ed economiche delle persecuzioni sugli ebrei italiani,” in Roma Camera dei Deputi (ed.), La legislazione antiebraica in Italia e in Europa (Rome, 1989), p. 80; on the subject of renouncing faith see D. Lattes, “Coloro che sono partiti,” RMI, Nos. 8–9 (1960), pp. 347–50; on the killings, deportations and exterminations, see L. Picciotto Fargion, Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia 1943–1945 (Milan, 1991); on postwar Italian Judaism, see G. Schwarz, Ritrovare se stessi. Gli ebrei nell’Italia postfascista (Roma-Bari, 2004). 5 Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000). 6 On September 20, 1943 a covert order, Basic Directives on the Treatment of Italian Armed Forces, was issued by the state and signed by Wilhelm Keitel; it stated: “By order of the Führer all prisoners of war from this moment onward shall no longer be identified as ‘prisoners of war’ [Kriegsgefangene], but rather as ‘Italian military internees’ [Italienische Militaerinternierte].” G. Mayda, Storia della deportazione dall’Italia 1943–1945. Militari, ebrei e politici nei lager del Terzo Reich (Turin, 2002), p. 319. 7 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989); V. Foa, Questo Novecento (Turin, 1996); D. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY, 1998); D. Diner, “The Irreconcilability of an Event: Integrating the Holocaust into the Narrative of the Century,” in D. Michman (ed.), Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses (New York, 2002). 8 L. Paggi, “La violenza, le comunità, la memoria,” La memoria del nazismo nell’Europa di oggi (Florence, 1997), p. x. 9 For instance, those who were sent to forced labor camps had to confront a significant challenge. Their social and national reintegration depended on transmitting the memory of forced labor in Germany as a form of national martyrdom in the name of resistance. They were partially successful in Belgium, but failed to gain recognition in France, Holland and Italy. See P. Lagrou, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1945–1965,” Past and Present, Nos. 154–5 (1997), pp. 188–222. 10 T. Todorov, The Morals of History (Minneapolis, MN, 1995); Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation, pp. 124–35. 11 Lagrou, The Legacyof Nazi Occupation, pp. 145–80; H. Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours (Paris, 1990); H. Rousso (ed.), Stalinismo e Nazismo. Storia e memoria comparate (Turin, 2001); E. Conan and H. Rousso, Un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris, 1994). 12 R. Battaglia, “La Resistenza,” Mdl, No. 57 (1959); R. Battaglia, Storia della Resistenza 8 settembre 1943–25 aprile 1945 (Turin, 1964); C. Pavone, “La Resistenza in Italia: memoria e rimozione,” Rivista di storia contemporanea, No. 4 (1994–95), pp. 484–92; Lagrou, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory,” p. 200. 13 C. Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin, 1991). Of the 200,000 Italians who threw in their lot with the partisans, 2,000 were Jews. This is a high percentage compared with the number of Jews at the time, and even higher in comparison with the population of the only part of Italy where the partisans fought. See E. Ravenna, Ha-Tikwà (January 1965);

226

14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

Manuela Consonni L. Picciotto Fargion, “Sul contributo di ebrei alla Resistenza Italiana,” RMI Nos. 3–4 (1980), pp. 132–46. On Jewish resistance groups in the fascist period, see M. Consonni, “Between Anti-fascism and Judaism: Interview with Vittorio Foa, 5 February 2000,” Michael, No. 16 (2004; in Hebrew), pp. 203–27; Raya Cohen (ed.), European Jews: Jewish Europeans between two World Wars, GorenGoldstein Center for Diaspora Research (Michael series) (Tel Aviv, 2004; in Hebrew); M. Consonni, “Memory and Forgetting: Italian Historiography and the Fascist Past,” Zmanim, No. 81 (2002–03; in Hebrew), pp. 94–8; F. Coen, Italiani ed ebrei come eravamo (Rome, 1988), p. 137. A. Luzzatto, “Autocoscienza e identità ebraica,” Storia d’Italia. Annali 11 (Turin, 1997), pp. 1831–95; Lagrou, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory,” pp. 180–222. See: P. Togliatti, Politica comunista. Discorsi e documenti aprile 1944–agosto 1945 (Rome, 1945), p. 282. From June 1944 the main concern of the DC and the conservative parties was enabling the state to continue. DC president Alcide De Gasperi understood that this continuity could be maintained thanks to the power preserved in the bureaucratic structure and in the traditional centers of economic power. A. Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra. Dalla Liberazione al potere D.C. (Bari, 1984), pp. 51–2; F. Flora, “Il tempo epuratore”, Il Corriere d’Informazione, December 18, 1945, p. 1; December 20, 1945, p. 1. In his memoirs Parri writes that, despite the liberation, Italy had not undergone substantial change. It remained for the most part the same fascist state that it had been for the past twenty years. See “Conversazione di Antonio Gambino con Ferruccio Parri,” in Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra, pp. 100–1. V. Foa, “La crisi della Resistenza prima della Liberazione,” Il Ponte, No. 6 (1950), pp. 594–605; C. Sforza, “L’epurazione: come uscirne”, Il Corriere d’Informazione, December 8, 1946, p. 1. Partito dell’Uomo qualunque was essentially a south central Italian movement, created in early 1945. The party should be considered part of a wider conservative move for restoration, with the middle class as the main advocate. Carlo and Nello Rosselli were Jews and anti-fascists murdered at Bagnolesde-l’Orne by La Cagoule, by order of the Italian government, on June 9, 1937. Their bodies were found on June 11 of the same year. Carlo Rosselli had embraced socialism in the interwar period and along with Pietro Nenni founded the magazine Quarto Stato (Fourth State). The day after the murder of Socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti (1924), he founded, with Gaetano Salvemini, Piero Calamandrei and Ernesto Rossi, the anti-regime paper Non mollare! (Don’t let go!). During his exile in Paris he founded, in collaboration with other anti-fascist expatriates, the Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty) movement. Nello, who later joined him in forced exile in France and then in death, preferred to dedicate most of his energies to the study of history rather than politics. One of the most active and notorious gangs under Pietro Koch operated in Rome between January and early June 1944. That year Pietro Koch was personally authorized by then chief of police Tamburini to form a special police division that would function in the capital, and was given a free hand in choosing its members. The Oltremare building at Principe Amadeo 2, near Termini station, was seized from the Ministry of the Interior for the express purpose of functioning as provisional headquarters. Risorgimento Liberale, August 15, 1945; September 20, 1945; October 18, 1945. G. Debenedetti, Otto ebrei (Rome, 1944), p. 89. Israel, February 14, 1946, p. 4. Israel, April 25, 1946, p. 1. Israel, February 12, 1946. The dichotomy in the anti-fascist ethos of the memory of deportations and exterminations spoken of here appears also in non-Jewish

The Italian postwar resistance ethos

24 25

26

27

28 29

30 31 32 33

227

newspapers and periodicals, such as: L’Unità, organ of the Communist Party press; L’Avanti, organ of the Socialist Party press; Italia Libera, Party of Action newsletter; La Stampa, owned by the FIAT group; Il Corriere della Sera, mouthpiece of the industrial bourgeoisie; Il Messaggero, Roman daily; Rinascita, tri-monthly Communist Party newsletter; Il Ponte, tri-monthly Party of Action newsletter; Il Movimento di Liberazione in Italia (Mdl), magazine put out by the Historical Institute of the Resistance, as well as in the Roman Jewish community newspaper Israel, and La Rassegna Mensile di Israel (RMI), tri-monthly Union of Italian Jewish Communities newsletter. Gina Formiggini, “Non dimenticate,” Israel, June 19, 1952, p. 1. E. De Filippo, Napoli milionaria (Turin, 1950); E. Galli della Loggia, “Ideologia, classi e costume,” L’Italia contemporanea 1945–1975 (Turin, 1976); Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra; P. Ginsborg, Storia del dopoguerra a oggi. Società e politica 1943–1988 (Turin, 1989); Pavone, Una guerra civile; L. Passerini (ed.), Memory and Totalitarianism (Oxford University Press, 1992); E. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria (Bari, 1996); id., L’identità italiana (Bologna, 1998). There were exceptions among writers who were members of the Resistance, such as Italo Calvino, whose book The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno) was published in 1947; also Cesare Pavese’s Il compagno. Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Turin, 1964). The first edition came out in October 1947, in the Einaudi series I coralli, but lacked an introduction. In June 1964, Calvino wrote a very long preface for a new edition of the book in which he dwelt to some extent on the significance of neo-realistic literature, but mainly on the moral and political choices connected with his experience as a partisan in the mountains of Liguria during the war of liberation: “ … and, at the same time, the reflections about moral justice toward individuals and about the historical meaning of the actions of each of us. For many of my contemporaries, it was only a matter of deciding what side one should fight on; for many the sides changed all at once, and from Republicans they became partisans, or vice versa.” Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, p. xix; C. Pavese, Il compagno (Turin, 1947). A. Guiducci, “Sulla letteratura dei campi di sterminio,” Società, No. 1 (1955), p. 111; G. Namer, “Vers une expérience cruciale: la mémoire des déportés,” Mémoire et socièté (Paris, 1987), p. 142; C. Ginzburg, “Unus Testis. Lo sterminio degli ebrei e il principio di realtà,” Quaderni Storici 80 (1992), pp. 93–128; M. Chaumont, “Notes sur le responsabilité historique,” in Y. Thanassekos and H. Wisman (eds.), Révision de l’histoire (Paris, 1990), p. 299; M. Sarfatti, “Gli ebrei negli anni del fascismo: vicende, identità, persecuzione,” in Gli ebrei in Italia: dall’emancipazione a oggi, Vol. II (Turin, 1997), pp. 1757–9; id., Gli ebrei nell’Italia Fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin, 2000); M. Salvati, “Il Novecento,” 900. I Tempi della storia (Rome, 1997). See his article in L’Unità, October 15, 1946. European studies historian Stanley Hoffman phrased the distinction between these levels in reference to France: Stanley Hoffmann, “Chagrin et pitié,” Counterpoint, No. 10 (1973), pp. 56–88; and in Charles S. Maier, Stanley Hoffmann and Andrew Gould (eds.), The Rise of the Nazi Regime: Historical Reassessments (Cambridge, MA, 1986). E. Collotti, L’amministrazione tedesca dell’Italia occupata (Milan, 1963); L. Klinkhammer, L’occupazione tedesca in Italia 1943–1945 (Turin, 1993). N. Tranfaglia, La prima guerra mondiale e il fascismo (Turin, 1995); E. Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo. Il partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista (Rome, 1995). Hoffmann, “Chagrin et pitiè,” in Maier et al., The Rise of the Nazi Regime: Historical Reassessments. R. Siebert, “Non dimenticare. Frammenti di una tradizione ‘negativa’,” Daedalus, No. 10 (1993), pp. 117–30; L. Passerini (ed.), Memory and Totalitarianism

228

34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44

Manuela Consonni (Oxford, 1992), p. 209; D. Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan, 1994); Y. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT, 2001); D. Diner, “The Irreconcilability of an Event: Integrating the Holocaust into the Narrative of the Century,” in D. Michman (ed.), Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses (New York, 2002); M. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, NH, 1987). D. Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler: The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and in Tunisia (Waltham, MA, 1994); D. Carpi (ed.), Italian Diplomatic Documents on the History of the Holocaust in Greece, 1941–1943 (Tel Aviv, 1999). Concerning the Italian deportees, see L. Picciotto Fargion, Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia 1943–1945 (Milan, 1991); P. Vidal-Naquet, Gli assassini della memoria (Rome, 1993); G. Mayda, Storia della deportazione dall’Italia 1943–1945. Militari, ebrei e politici nei lager del Terzo Reich (Turin, 2002); R. Gibertoni, “Fossoli,” Dizionario dell’Olocausto (Turin, 2004), pp. 297–300. Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano, pp. 20–8. D. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, 1998). P. Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire. La problématique des lieux”, in Les Lieux de mémoire, Vol. I (Paris, 1984), pp. 15–16. E. Levinas, Aldilà del versetto (Naples, 1986), pp. 38–9. From private correspondence with Aldo Pavia, president of the Rome affiliate of ANED, December 18, 2001. Pavia recalls that Primo Levi refused to attach the word “racial” because he viewed his persecution as a Jew as no more than a form of political persecution. M. Sarfatti, “Gli ebrei negli anni del fascismo. Vicende, identità, persecuzione”, in C. Vivanti (ed.), Gli ebrei in Italia, Vol. II, Dall’emancipazione a oggi II (Turin, 1997), pp. 1625–764, especially pp. 1757–9; id., Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista: vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin, 2000); Battini, Peccati di memoria, p. 8. Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano, p. 54. Namer, “Vers une expérience crucial,” p. 142. Debenedetti, Otto ebrei, p. 5.

13 Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory Raphael Vago

Introduction Since the collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989, Hungarian pundits have remarked ironically that, unlike in Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland and even France, Hungarians do not have to worry about tending graves of martyred resistance fighters from World War II, since no such combatants existed. This was in spite of Communist attempts until 1989 to create a myth of a Communistled resistance movement.1 In the post-1945 discourse, which was marked by clear differences between East and West in the forging of collective memory, any discussion of forms of “resistance” was part of a wider theme that included its antithesis – “collaboration.” The Hungarian case of collaboration and resistance raises several questions within the context of the history of World War II and the struggle for historical memory in the post-Communist period. These concern collaboration with whom and when, and resistance to whom, when and by whom.2 However, since 1989 – and to some extent in the Communist period – Hungarian historians have wrestled with the problem of periodizing Hungarian history during World War II. This matter assumed new forms after 1989, when open discussions began on the nature of the Soviet “liberation” in 1945, namely, the Red Army’s behavior toward Hungarians, which included pillage, violence, rape, and the virtual kidnapping of thousands of Hungarians as postwar POWs, in addition to the tens of thousands captured prior to April 1945. Thus, the issue of periodization of the war was combined with debates over the dual aspect of “liberation” and “occupation” by the Soviet Union. Overshadowing all this was the question of the postwar trials. Postwar “justice making” was challenged from a legal and a moral point of view, and the notions of vengeance and political objectives were raised in order to rehabilitate those found guilty after the war. On the other hand, those few whose memory had been cherished by the Communist regime as resistance fighters were doomed to oblivion as part of the nationalist campaign to erase Communism and glorification of the Communist era. The postwar years, and the Communist manipulation of the past, including the drafting of so-called petty fascists – former low-ranking Arrow Cross

230

Raphael Vago

members or sympathizers – into the Communist Party, and the large number of Jews who served in the party and security apparatus, complicated the legacy of the past, which became, after 1989, an arena for the struggle over historical memory. In the words of István Deák, who summed up the dilemmas of this period and its representation in historical memory: … historical memory of this era resembles a confusing and terrifying nightmare. Did the forced laborer-turned-Communist political police officer have the right to torture Arrow Cross criminals? Whose fate was to be more bemoaned, that of the Jew gassed at Auschwitz or that of the peasant draftee who died of starvation in a Soviet POW camp? Who were the nation’s worst enemies, the fascists or the Stalinists?3 This chapter examines the various viewpoints and arguments pertaining to the basic questions raised above, utilizing case studies representing features of the Hungarian struggle for post-Communist historical memory. These are: (1) the controversy over the reburial of Miklós (Nicholas) Horthy in 1993; (2) the campaign for the retrial of László Bárdossy; and (3) the debate over the memory of Pál Teleki. These instances – the most well-known ones in the public and academic discourse – were cast into the national forum on the struggle for historical memory at different stages of Hungary’s post-Communist history and were clearly linked to the political cleavages of Hungarian society. Furthermore, they reflected the approach of political forces in Hungary toward the past in their attempts to forge a post-Communist identity.

Who opposed whom and why, or, when does collaboration become a form of resistance? In the eyes of many Hungarians the Horthy regime (1920–44), with all its complexities, is viewed as having been lawful. Leaving aside Marxist analyses and severe criticism of the White Terror (1919–20) following the brief rule of the Soviet Republic, most assessments focus on aspects such as Jewish policy but, nevertheless, agree on the regime’s legitimacy. In the periodization of Hungarian history, the date March 19, 1944, when the German occupation commenced, is crucial, since it marks the beginning of the end of the Horthy regime and overt Nazi hegemony. Thus, characterization of the Horthy regime until June 1941, when Hungary joined the war as an ally of Germany, and the period from Hungary’s entry into World War II until the end of his rule in March 1944, raise questions relating to both resistance and collaboration. Certainly, until June 1941 no factor in Hungarian society could be considered opposed to the regime.4 There was no effective, or even ineffective, Communist movement to speak of. The quasi-parliamentary regime, which tolerated some “opposition parties” such as the Social Democrats, among whom were a number of Communists,

Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory

231

kept up a facade of a pseudo-parliamentary democracy, not unlike many others in Eastern and Central Europe, where democracy was more virtual than real. Horthy was not challenged by anyone, except, perhaps, by the remnants of the Hungarian Communist Party living in Soviet exile, many of them survivors of Stalin’s purges who were more occupied with staying alive than struggling against the Horthy regime. Ironically, the only force that might have challenged the legitimacy of the regime was the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross, and even they played by the rules of the parliamentary game to a certain extent, as in the June 1939 elections, when they won some 25 percent of the vote.5 Of course, no one would dare claim that the Arrow Cross had “resisted the regime,” since that would have made the Social Democrats “collaborators,” together with the Jewish elite, which trusted it completely until their ghettoization and deportation to the death camps. Certainly, one might question the degree of actual opposition to the war against the Soviet Union from June 1941, and ask to what extent disagreeing with Hungary’s entry into the war as a Nazi ally could be considered an act of resistance against the Horthy regime. Aside from Communist myths, there was no organized opposition to the war, and even after the disaster that befell the Second Hungarian Army at the Don in the winter of 1942–43 there was no challenge to the regime. In other words, since there was no resistance, all were collaborators or bystanders who lived and benefited from the regime. As for Horthy’s continuation in power after the German occupation of March 1944, albeit with limited authority and resources, and with a new government approved by the Nazis, this did not and could not become a topic of open debate; moreover, most anti-Nazis, but certainly pro-Horthysts, probably felt that as long as Horthy was leading the nation officially, there could be some hope of further secret contacts with the West leading to a separate peace with Hungary.

Horthy’s reburial The process leading to Horthy’s reburial in 1993 constituted one of the first dramatic battles in the forging of post-Communist memory and in the attempts to build, if not to rewrite, a new narrative of national history. This more than symbolic act had to do as much with Horthy and everything he represented – which was a very wide spectrum signifying different things to different segments of Hungarian society – as with his image and that of his era, which political forces in post-Communist Hungary sought to imprint on the future. The complexities of Horthy’s own personality, that of his long era, and especially his attitudes and behavior in the war years, including his role in the destruction and/or partial saving of Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust, have been variously portrayed by Western historians.6 Almost all tend to emphasize that, in general, despite all its shortcomings – its authoritarianism, conservatism and right-wing tendencies – the Horthy regime was accepted by

232

Raphael Vago

Hungarian society. The debates over Horthy’s personality and regime are complicated by the influence purportedly exerted by the prime ministers who served under him. Thus, one might speak of the period of consolidation under prime minister István Bethlen, the pro-fascist years of Gyula Gömbõs and, even more complex, the role of wartime prime ministers Bárdossy, Mikós Kállay and Döme Sztójay. Should one judge Horthy as a figure who spanned the service of all those prime ministers under the heading “the Horthy years,” or each term of office separately, as if there were no Regent Horthy above them? Furthermore, the argument claiming that Horthy became gradually more senile, especially during the war years, should not be disregarded. Thus, the more multifarious the issues, and the more one tries to understand Horthy’s role in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, the less Horthy appears to be responsible because of his state of mind. If the country was being led to its fate by an elderly senile admiral, who, then, was responsible for the Hungarian tragedy, including the death of almost 600,000 Jewish citizens? Horthy became an issue at a very early stage of Hungary’s post-Communist development, during the József Antall-led government of the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). His post-mortem fate under postCommunism became the first case study in the battle for historical memory. The trigger for the Horthy reburial campaign was the appearance in July 1990, of Kálmán Keri, a former high-ranking officer in Horthy’s army who became a member of the MDF faction in the parliament. Appearing at one of the first sessions of the post-Communist parliament wearing his World War II uniform and decorations, Keri, eighty-nine, declared that Hungary’s “crusade” against the Soviet Union was no less legitimate than World War II was. Thus, prior to 1991, when Soviet troops were still stationed in Hungary, there was a certain continuity between the Horthy era and the first post-Communist parliament, when the ex-officer MP stressed not only the glory of the Horthy era but also its legitimate anti-Bolshevik campaign. In some of his parliamentary speeches Keri praised Hungarian soldiers in World War II, comparing them favorably with Italian and German combatants, and drew applause from members of the House when he declared that he would never have exchanged a Hungarian soldier for a German or Italian one. Keri lauded the Horthy era in general, and became one of the main advocates of Horthy’s reburial. “At the request of members of his family,” on September 3, 1993, his remains were taken from his original grave in Portugal, where he died in 1957, and reburied on the family estate at Kenderes, in a “private” ceremony, attended in an “unofficial” capacity by six members of the cabinet, along with 50,000 sympathizers. The “private” nature of the ceremony generated not only much media coverage but numerous debates on the government’s involvement, and the presence of cabinet ministers in the reburial of an ally of Nazi Germany. Whatever the merits or shortcomings of that regime, Hungary was at best an “unwilling satellite” of Nazi Germany, and for others a willing pro-fascist revisionist ally who defied the Versailles–Trianon treaties. In fact,

Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory

233

the reburial ceremony was perceived by some segments of Hungarian society, including in declarations issued by the Jewish community, as an official step sanctioned by the first post-Communist government (see below). The overall reassessment of Horthy and his era consisted of several views that accorded with the emerging post-1989 political and ideological atmosphere. This discourse, ranging from moderate revisionist to ultra-revisionist, dealt with various aspects of Horthy and everything he represented in the eyes of the beholder. On the moderate side, the emphasis was on Horthy’s attempts to exit the war, disengage from the Nazi alliance, join the Allies, and eventually save the Jewish community. Journals such as the conservative Magyar Szemle carried over the years several articles to this effect.7 The activities of top diplomats, as well as of military figures loyal to Horthy but acting to forsake the war, and their subsequent dismissal as a result of Nazi demands to remove anti-German elements after March 19, 1944, gradually created in post-1989 Hungary an interesting equation – collaboration with Horthy constituted in fact a form of “resistance” to the extreme right and the pro-Nazi line, and ultimately opposition to Nazi plans. The fact that Hitler had tried to humiliate Horthy, and “invaded” Hungary, though the term “invasion” was not factually correct, created a new myth that almost transformed Horthy and his close associates into “resistance” fighters. Certainly, that was the image created on the basis of the activities of those officers who were acting for Hungary’s exit from the war, and against German pressure on Hungary. Thus, the entire discourse on the nature of collaboration and resistance took a new turn. The image of a more moderate Horthy, or a “Horthy for all seasons,” was reinforced in the years following his reburial by articles in the popular media, in conservative-leaning newspapers such as Magyar Nemzet, and in the historical periodical Rubicon, which published numerous pieces on this period, focusing especially on social aspects and on the years 1939–41 before Hungary joined the war. This campaign had an almost nostalgic note to it, with pictures of ceremonies and social events of the 1920s and 1930s. The Horthy estate at Kenderes had an aura of well bred family life which reflected the grandeur of a world that no longer existed. Articles and photos featuring the Hungarian return, from 1939 to 1941, to most of the lands lost following the Trianon Treaty (1920), and the enthusiastic welcome of local ethnic Hungarians, gave an impression of the Horthy era as one of national pride and restoration. Horthy, riding on his famous white horse, was cast in the role of the supreme warlord, in contrast to the reality of the rather senile leader who was unable to focus on the world crumbling around him, including the extermination of more than half a million Jewish citizens with the willing cooperation of his own authorities.8 A further characteristic of this post-Communist reassessment was its portrayal of the Horthy regime as being legitimate compared with the alleged illegitimacy of the Communist one. Thus, Horthy’s reburial was cautiously presented as an act of last respects to a legitimate era which the Hungarian

234

Raphael Vago

nation had been unable to carry out during the Communist one. In the debates that raged in the Hungarian media, the Jewish community came out against the reburial of Horthy, reminding Hungarians of the antisemitic steps that led to the gradual exclusion of the Jews from Hungarian society, such as the anti-Jewish laws of 1938, the antisemitic atmosphere from the beginning of the Horthy era, the anti-Jewish atrocities in Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Ukraine, and the 1941 killings in Novi Sad after the entry of Hungarian troops.9 The milder Horthy image was strengthened following the publication in 2001 of the two-volume memoirs of Horthy’s daughter-in-law, Edelsheim Gyulai Ilona, the widow of István Horthy, the regent’s younger son, who perished as a pilot near the Russian front in August 1942 in mysterious circumstances. The volumes and the personal appearance of this elderly lady to promote the book in Hungary brought the Horthy era closer to the post-1989 public.10 Ilona, who as a young widow had been showered with love and appreciation by the Hungarian public, portrays a very cozy, intimate picture of Horthy and his wife, such as family dinners, and her shock when she heard of the deportation of the Jews. The issue was apparently brought up at those family meals, but as if the tragedy were happening on another continent, in another era, and as if the head of the family was not the supreme ruler of Hungary. Ilona was considered to have played a major role as a close confidante of her father-in-law in the secret negotiations with the West over Hungary exiting the war, and was arrested together with other members of the family by the Gestapo after October 15, 1944, with the removal of Horthy and the rise of the Arrow Cross government. Like Horthy, the young widow was also cast in the role of a resister, and like her father-in-law opposed the policy of the man (Horthy himself) who had built Hungary’s alliance with Nazi Germany and was now trying to extract it from the war. The liberal press was not impressed with Ilona’s pro-Horthy public relations campaign. Péter Nádas, one of Hungary’s leading writers, wrote a long, damning review in Élet és Irodalom, Hungary’s leading cultural weekly. Beginning with literary criticism (“She really cannot write”), he proceeded to a sarcastic deconstruction of the memoirs, noting, among others, that too many events had been glossed over, such as the atrocities committed by Hungarian forces on Soviet territory – a subject that in Hungary had been taboo for years. Nádas concluded that he would continue to hate the Horthy regime, and that he was grateful to Ilona Horthy for defending that era in her book, since it had increased his loathing even more. The hard-core pro-Horthy camp consisted of nationalists, many former émigrés and some of their newspapers, such as Nyugati Magyarság and Nemzetör, which represented factions of the post-1945 and post-1956 emigration and émigré politics in post-1989 Hungary. Although, for the nationalist camp, stressing Horthy’s anti-Nazi activities in 1943 was certainly essential, their main thrust was to gain legitimacy for the regime from 1920. One may argue, of course (beyond the scope of the present chapter), that the

Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory

235

legitimacy of the Horthy regime, which came to power after the collapse of the Béla Kun Soviet republic (1919), can be doubted, but since it enjoyed the support of significant segments of society, the nationalist discourse took pride in an administration that acted under the difficult conditions of Trianon Hungary. Horthy became a symbol not of collaboration but of Hungary’s fate in the interwar period and during the war. For the nationalist camp – which, in fact, did not reject Horthy’s secret attempts to extract Hungary from the grip of Nazi Germany – Horthy was Hungary, for better or for worse, certainly for better when compared with the Communist regime that arose after 1945.

Lászlo Bárdossy and the campaign for his retrial The controversy over Horthy and his era naturally led to debates over the responsibility of the top political and military leaders for Hungary’s fate, especially during World War II. There is no doubt that any discussion on aspects of the Horthy era must include an examination of the prime ministers who acted under him. Bárdossy Lászlo, Hungary’s prime minister in the crucial years 1941–42 when Hungary entered the war in June 1941, was convicted by the Hungarian People’s Court and executed as a war criminal on January 9, 1946 (see p. 240). He was one of the highest-ranking Hungarians to be tried and executed as a war criminal after 1945. Bárdossy (b. 1890) held various posts in the Hungarian administration in the interwar period: he was counselor at the Hungarian embassy in London, ambassador to Romania in 1934, and foreign minister from February to April 1941. Following the suicide of prime minister Pál Teleki, he was named prime minister, a position he held until March 1942, when he was removed by Horthy, seemingly because of his over-enthusiastic embrace of Nazi Germany. During his term of office Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union and joined Nazi Germany in its invasion of the former; it also declared war on Great Britain and the United States. Under Bárdossy’s administration, the Third Jewish Law of 1941 was approved, completing the removal of Hungary’s Jewry from the economy and from society. The attempt to rehabilitate Bárdossy and the call for a retrial, which ultimately failed, was initiated by István Csurka’s Hungarian Truth and Life Justice Party, the extreme right-wing MIEP, in late 2000–early 2001. Csurka’s goal was clear: the Hungarian postwar trials, like the Nuremberg ones, were “trials of the victors,” and it was not just the rehabilitation of an unlawfully convicted politician they sought but the “true evaluation” of an entire historical era. MIEP filed a petition with the attorney-general to retry Bárdossy. In numerous media events, declarations and statements, Csurka’s party made clear its main perceptions regarding the Bárdossy case: (1) that he was not a war criminal; (2) that his trial had been aimed at destroying the Hungarian middle class, which was identified with the Horthy legacy; and (3) that it was not Bárdossy on trial so much as the entire Horthy era.

236

Raphael Vago

The Bárdossy affair gradually lost momentum, but did not disappear completely from the public debate; in fact, several arguments won points for the extreme right. The criticism leveled at the Hungarian justice system which conducted the postwar trials was based on the claim that they were politically motivated and driven by revenge – that of the Communists, or, as antisemites put it, of the Jewish Communists.11 Another factor was the unprofessional nature of the People’s Courts: as right-wing publications tried to prove, the presiding judges and attorneys had lacked legal training, since they were drawn from proletarian ranks, further proof in the eyes of the nationalist camp that the trials had more to do with Communist revenge and retribution than justice.12 This argument was also raised in other countries of Eastern Europe, such as Romania, Slovakia and Croatia, which held postwar trials.13 In Hungary, however, there was no Bárdossy cult, since there was no interest in developing one around a rather mediocre, uncharismatic figure, unlike the Antonescu cult in Romania, where pro-Antonescu forces also emphasized the illegal and unprofessional nature of the war crime trials. The assault in Hungary on the legality of the war trials, which was joined to a certain extent by those who could not be classified simply as right-wingers or extremists but also by center-rightists, did not necessarily increase public sympathy for Bárdossy the person, a symbol of Hungarian collaboration with Nazi Germany, but weakened public belief in the postwar legal process. Csurka’s claim that the Bárdossy trial – as well as some of the other postwar trials – was intended to eliminate the influence of the middle class probably echoed favorably among segments of Hungarian society. Csurka was careful enough to dissociate himself from support for Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the Arrow Cross, whose trial was glossed over as being too delicate to handle by Csurka’s MIEP movement. In his few references to Szálasi, Csurka stressed that his movement had nothing in common with the Arrow Cross legacy, which had been adopted by small extremist neo-Nazi groups.14 This division between the pro-Bárdossy line and rejection of Szálasi’s legacy indicated that the Hungarian right, extending from Csurka to the conservative centerright, sought to reach a broad political consensus on the re-evaluation and eventual rehabilitation of some convicted political and military leaders of the Horthy era. Bárdossy’s legacy and the attempts to bring about a formal retrial and rehabilitation were reinforced by a wave of sympathetic historiographic and media events, the most prominent being Pál Pritz’s historical study of Bárdossy, which also appeared in an English-language edition.15 Magyar Szemle reprinted parts of the monograph in which Pritz portrayed a tragic picture of Bárdossy, perhaps the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.16 The reader is led to sympathize with Bárdossy from the first page of the book, where Pritz portrays the scene on October 3, 1945, when a small group of Hungarian military and political leaders, including Szálasi and Bárdossy, were flown from Salzburg on a US military plane to be handed over to the Hungarian authorities. On the crowded benches of the truck leading to the

Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory

237

plane, Bárdossy is described as “being physically unable but at least emotionally wishing to set himself apart from this group [including Szálasi] which to him represented physical suffering.” Pritz conveys Bárdossy’s personal, emotional and physical loathing of his fellow Hungarian leaders, with some of whom, on that specific truck and flight, he must have worked with as prime minister – though not with Szálasi. Bárdossy is cast in a tragic role, symbolized by his emotional distance from his fellow Hungarians. This sophisticated approach distinguishes Hungarian wartime leaders such as Bárdossy as having been “good” from others who were less “good.” Szálasi is rejected out of hand. Bárdossy is portrayed as having had no ambition to become prime minister, as having been disappointed at the negative British answers to Hungarian feelers toward the West, and as almost being forced to pursue a pro-German policy, since Hungary was left with no other option. As with Horthy, the pro-Bárdossy line does not seek to provide an ideological framework for his ideas; rather, there appears to be a subtext that emphasizes fate and historical determination while acknowledging one aspect of Bárdossy and his generation’s political viewpoint that is not disclaimed: that it was Hungary’s destiny since the signing of the Trianon Treaty to regain the lost territories, and this proved to be feasible only with Nazi Germany’s support. In another major work on Hungary’s foreign policy in the three fateful years 1941–44, Czettler Antal described Bárdossy as “one of the most tragic and debated figures in Hungary’s modern history,” and “neither a Quisling nor a right-winger.”17 Interestingly, Czettler’s reviewer, Gyula Borbándi, one of the grand old men of Hungarian letters and a leading intellectual figure of the Hungarian émigré community in the West, added a personal memoir on Bárdossy of his own, recalling a speech made by him as prime minister in 1941 on the 150th anniversary of the birth of István Szechenyi, a leading Hungarian of the generation of 1848, and the founder of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Borbándi recalled that Bárdossy’s speech, body language and appearance “were not those of an active politician but the words of a wise savant,” reinforcing Czettler’s views on Bárdossy’s intellectual capacities. However, thoughtfulness, fluency and eloquence do not necessarily make a good politician, he concluded.18 Czettler’s book, as reflected too in the Borbándi review, does not present Bárdossy as a symbol of collaboration; rather, he is portrayed as someone who strove to avoid transforming Hungary into a Nazi satellite and to avert the danger to the Hungarian constitutional order posed by the rise of the extreme right. However, Czettler acknowledged that Bárdossy, unlike other Hungarian leaders such as his predecessor, prime minister Teleki, or successor, Kallay, thought the war would end with a German victory. Czettler’s also claimed that Bárdossy tried to prevent Hungary’s entry into the war (see below), but once it did join, “with Bárdossy’s own contribution to the decision,” he attempted to play down Hungary’s participation. Thus, according to this historiographic school, although Bárdossy happened to be

238

Raphael Vago

prime minister when Hungary invaded the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany’s ally, he could hardly be considered a collaborator but a man who tried to prevent Hungary From joining the war. Gradually Bárdossy’s proponents adopted a definition of Hungary’s role alongside Nazi Germany as an unwilling satellite. The logical outcome of this perception was that it was very difficult to find real collaborators in Hungary – except, of course, on the extreme right – because most of the top leaders were viewed as having sought minimal cooperation with Nazi Germany. Perhaps Hungarian historical memory is shaped by this approach: that is, since there were no other options, they accepted a sort of conditional collaboration or unwilling cooperation. However, in the 1990s the Hungarian media demonstrated that the Bárdossy case was more complex than the simplistic arguments based on “fate.”19 As noted, under Bárdossy’s premiership Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union and later on Great Britain and the United States. During his period the antisemitic legislation was completed, having been expanded to include all the elements of the Nazi Nuremberg racial laws; it was passed with all due process by enthusiastic political forces which hailed Bárdossy’s leadership. Hungarian Jews were excommunicated from Hungarian society and doomed to their fate, which would come later, in 1944. The anti-Jewish legislation of the Bárdossy era was a continuation of that adopted by the Teleki government (see below). The public debates focusing on the Jewish policy of the Bárdossy administration raised the issue of responsibility for the eventual destruction of Hungarian Jewry. If the prime minister was not to blame, then who was? It was during the Bárdossy administration that the Kamenetz Podolsk massacres, when Hungary pushed almost 18,000 stateless Jews, mostly of Polish origin, into German hands, were perpetrated.20 Hungarian Jews whose legal status was unsettled or unclear were also included in the category of “foreign Jews.” The news of the massacre that took place between August 27 and 28 1941 spread to Hungary. At his trial Bárdossy claimed that although he was responsible politically, he could not be found criminally guilty. Similar arguments were repeated in the post-1989 defense of Bárdossy.21 Hungarian troops were also involved in massacres of Serbs and Jews in Novi Sad as they entered Yugoslavia after April 1941. However, the charges against Bárdossy in these atrocities were problematic, since Hungary courtmartialed some of the officers responsible for the massacres, thus freeing the political leadership from direct culpability. Hungary’s complex entry into the war, especially the issue of the much debated Kassa bombing (when unknown planes – maybe Soviet and possibly under German provocation – bombed the city of Kassa on June 26, 1941, following which Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union), is outside the scope of this work; however the “bottom line” was provided by historian Karl Benziger: “What is of little doubt is Bárdossy’s complicity with Horthy in propelling Hungary into the war on the side of the fascists.”22

Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory

239

The liberals’ answer to the pro-Bárdossy argumentation was concise: if the legal process was defective, that did not mean that Bárdossy was not guilty.23 The anti-Bárdossy line, as in the case of Horthy and in other attempts at rehabilitation, was based less on a defense of the postwar trial system, which was faulted for many reasons, than on the deeds they committed.

The bust of Pal Teleki The 2004 Teleki bust affair is interesting not only in the context of the debates over historical memory and wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany, but also in that it was one of the major “symbolic history clash[es] over public space.”24 While the Bárdossy retrial efforts concentrated more on the legality of the postwar trials of war criminals, the saga of the Teleki statue focused not only on the record of prime minister Pál Teleki and his historical legacy but also on whether a monument of some form should be erected in remembrance of the prime minister. The Teleki affair was initiated by pro-FIDESZ (center-right movement, the main opposition party to the ruling Socialists) associations and civic groups, which commissioned a statue of him, to be unveiled on April 3, 2004. The support of FIDESZ and its leader Viktor Orbán sparked off a new round of polemics on the true character of this movement, in particular its support for nationalist causes and its flirtation with the right – a delicate issue from the Jewish point of view because it positioned Jewish leaders in a critical stance toward a former and perhaps future ruling party of the country.25 Reinforced by a sympathetic press such as the daily Magyar Nemzet, the discourse over historical memory and Hungary’s role in World War II, as well as the destruction of Hungary’s Jewry, was taken to new heights, since in this case the legacy of a prime minister during that period was being praised by a former ruling party. Teleki’s historical record is mixed. He was the founder and leader of the Hungarian Scout movement, which expelled its Jewish members following the adoption of the anti-Jewish laws, the first of which was drafted as the First Jewish Law in 1938–39 by Teleki himself, a renowned geographer in the interwar period. During his first term as prime minister, 1920–21, the first numerus clausus law was introduced in Europe on limiting the number of Jews in institutions of higher learning. During his second, and last, term of office, 1939–41, the Second Jewish law was passed, another significant step in the exclusion of Hungarian Jews from society. Teleki entered history less for his active participation in the drafting of anti-Jewish legislation than for his suicide in April 1941, when Hungary, and Teleki personally, broke the commitment not to participate in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, led by Nazi Germany. Thus Teleki, in a macabre twist of fate, came to be viewed as an honest leader whose conscience had led him to commit suicide rather than face the shame of a broken promise. He did not live to see the fate of Hungary’s Jews, or how the anti-Jewish laws to which he personally had

240

Raphael Vago

contributed eased the final rupture between Hungary and its Jews, and between them and life. Thus Teleki cannot be held responsible for the later Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry; in fact, according to some pro-Teleki arguments, if he had lived, he would never had intended the destruction of Hungary’s Jews. However, does the fact that he was not alive during the Holocaust, although he personally drafted some of the main parts of the antisemitic legislation, make him a “model politician,” as then prime minister Orban referred to him on December 27, 2000?26 The positive image of Teleki was constructed in several stages in historical studies, media publications, public debates and lectures, just as the opposition to his legacy and his commemoration in a statue was built in the same forums. The extreme right launched an all-out defense of Teleki, perhaps even sharpening his ideas to a level that Teleki would not have condoned. The antisemitic and nationalist Hunnia F´´ uzetek published in 1995 a fifteen-part series on Teleki, portraying him as a leading Hungarian politician of the century. More moderate right-wingers chose to create the image of the model citizen and politician. Thus historian T´´ or´´ ok Bálint described Teleki as a true Catholic, a Boy Scout leader and an anti-Nazi politician.27 Any discussion, then, of collaboration would have come to a dead end; like Bárdossy, he might have made mistakes but his intentions were good. Pál Pritz contributed to the rehabilitation of both Bárdossy and Teleki. In a study published in Magyar Szemle,28 Pritz depicted imaginary discussions between Teleki and Bárdossy, who replaced Teleki as prime minister after the former’s suicide. In one, Teleki explains to Bárdossy that he believes Hitler will win the war for political reasons and due to his superiority in dealing with the Allies. All this takes place while Teleki orders tea and asks after Bárdossy’s health. (Bárdossy had undergone a stomach operation.) Later, Teleki expounds his views on international relations “while he raises the teacup, sipping slowly from the aromatic English tea.” This cozy talk between two top Hungarian politicians cannot but raise sympathy for the unwell Bárdossy, who was executed after the war, and Teleki, the prime minister who committed suicide because he was “a man of honor.” This is human tragedy in the best sense, in which the drift toward Nazi Germany, for whatever reason, the drafting of the anti-Jewish legislation, and the fate of the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, have no place. Teleki, though not a Nazi by ideology, was fascinated by Hitler. Speaking of the Soviets prior to April 1941, he reminds Bárdossy that “this huge army [the Red Army] is not fit today [to face] a sudden concentrated attack, to defend its borders, which run for several thousands of kilometers.” “On the other hand,” said Teleki, “Hitler rules today practically the whole of Europe. Who would have thought before May 1940 that this former Austrian corporal’s Wehrmacht would smash France in a few weeks.”29 Another apologetic study of Teleki and his legacy was published by Vigh Károly in Magyar Hirlap.30 His portrait of Teleki was criticized a week later by another historian, Ungvary Krisztian, in Magyar Nemzet (February 21–22).

Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory

241

Among other arguments, Vigh claimed that Teleki’s wish was to defend “the Christian values of Hungarian society,” and that he could not but share some of the allegations against Hungary’s Jews after 1920, referring to the Jewish role in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1920. Vigh, a member of the committee that commissioned the statue, strongly defended Teleki’s record, and tried to downplay the importance of the anti-Jewish numerus clausus legislation of 1920, and even Teleki’s role in the drafting of the antiJewish laws from 1938. Again, Teleki is portrayed as the loving, elderly Boy Scout leader who educated boys from all social orders, omitting that it was Teleki who expelled Jewish children from the movement, whose fourth principle states that “a Scout treats all Scouts as brothers.”31 Several Jews who had been expelled from the Hungarian Scout movement wrote letters to the Hungarian media describing their humiliation. Teleki’s approach toward Nazi Germany was the key that could clarify the issue of collaboration and resistance – in the sense that his suicide could be and was represented as a personal statement of opposition to Nazi behavior. T´´ or´´ ok Bálint wrote that “this small fragile person, stood up against the Nazi power breaking down the whole of Europe.”32 His Realpolitik until his suicide, as presented by Pál Pritz in his studies of Bárdossy and Teleki, indicated a pragmatic, non-ideological affinity, not to say fascination, with Nazi Germany’s advance, which left no option for Hungary but to go with the winner – thus helping to realize Hungary’s irredentist and nationalist territorial ambitions.33 However, another noted historian, Karsai Lászlo, rejected Teleki’s supposed anti-Nazi position and initiated a debate on the true circumstances of his suicide, which, he hinted, could also have been related to the prime minister’s depression and the terminal illness of his wife.34 The issue was not only whether Teleki was a collaborator in the notion of a Final Solution, which perhaps in 1941 was not yet clear to the Hungarian leadership, but his overall complex legacy, including his attitude toward the Jews, which became a very important part of the discussions. In a comprehensive academic analysis of the Teleki statue affair, wellknown historian Mária Kovács stressed the continuity rather than the break, as perceived by pro-Teleki historians, in Hungary’s anti-Jewish policies and legislation.35 As noted, Teleki was prime minister during the crucial phases of the anti-Jewish legislation. Kovacs reiterated the fact that the gradual alleviation in the enforcement of the numerus clausus was used by apologists to minimize the harm done to the Jews by such antisemitic steps. Kovács, however, emphasizes a pattern of continuity from the antisemitic policies of the interwar period, culminating in the Teleki years of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Conclusion In 2004, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Holocaust, Hungary took full responsibility for the destruction of almost 600,000 of its own citizens, who

242

Raphael Vago

since the emancipation of 1867 had been viewed as “members of the nation.” The ongoing debates about the past, some of them at the center of this study, are closely tied to the present and to the ways in which Hungarian society is striving to shape its historical memory for the future.36 Of course, the right wing is correct in pointing out that that it was the Socialists and their coalition partners the SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats) who took up the challenge of facing the past and admitted accountability for the destruction of a part of their nation. The perception, not shared by all Jews today, is that the Jews were in fact not the “other” but “one of us.” The various cases testing and shaping historical memory and its role in post-Communist Hungary continue to serve not only as a battleground for the construction of such memory but as an opportunity to re-examine the past. The nationalist right wing in its various forms, and to a certain extent the conservative camp, seek to whitewash the past by focusing on the “tragedies” of Hungarian wartime leaders such as Horthy, Teleki and Bárdossy. The relation and attitudes of these figures toward the Nazis, and emphasis on heavy Nazi pressure, which of course did exist, are easier issues for them to deal with than the weightier ones which they avoid at all costs. Any discussion of the question regarding the extent to which Hungarians were “willing executioners,” at the hands not only of the Germans but also of some of their own leaders, is deflected. The Hungarian authorities, the gendarmerie and an entire structure and network of local, provincial and national authorities were voluntary partners in the process of the removal of the Jews from Hungarian society, which entailed their ghettoization followed by deportation to the death camps. The right wing tries to portray a historical tragedy of physically frail persons trying to withstand powerful and threatening German masters. But the numerus clausus law drafted by Teleki was promulgated at a time when Hitler could not yet fill a medium-size beer hall with supporters in Munich. The road to destruction was paved through the cooperation of willing Hungarians, even if in 1920 the horrors of the Final Solution of 1944 for Hungarian Jewry could not have been foreseen. However, once a target (whether a Jew or representative of another minority group) has been singled out for discrimination, the process of removing that person or group begins, no matter how limited the vision of those who initiated the process. The Holocaust in Hungary was not the result only of political, social, and economic steps taken under wartime conditions. The procedure had started earlier, when an entire society was exposed to rising tides of extremism and antisemitism. This was collaboration, which lasted for more than two decades and permeated the very roots of society; collaboration that was based not on supporting a person or a group but on an idea: that Jews can be and should be removed from the midst of the nation. The Horthy era – spanning almost twenty-four years – is a very complex one. While there is no clear verdict, answers can be provided to certain questions regarding Horthy and the Jews: When exactly? Which Horthy are we

Hungary: continuing trials of war and memory

243

speaking about? What did Horthy know and when? What could he have known if he had wanted to know? Did Horthy really prepare – albeit unknowingly – the infrastructure for the smooth and ruthless functioning of parts of his bureaucracy and the so-called law enforcement agencies? Another aspect that the pro-rehabilitation camp tries to avoid is a direct debate over Hungary’s accountability as a state for the fate of its Jewry. If the postwar trials are perceived today as a vehicle for revenge against opponents of Communism, of being unprofessional, of having been tools of the Soviets and Communists, and as having besmirched everything about the interwar and wartime regime, does it mean that the actions of the Hungarian state before and during the war should be whitewashed because the Communists in 1946 had the political aim of destroying the previous elites? The right wing has spent more time in the past eighteen years attacking the postwar trials than dealing with the responsibility of the Hungarian state. A third and last aspect of the rehabilitation camp is their attempt to find resistance, albeit not the Communist type of popular anti-fascist resistance, but alleged opposition to Nazi pressure. In other words, this is a form of Holocaust denial based on the myth that in fact prominent Hungarian leaders “resisted” Nazi advances. However, as demonstrated in this study, the very notion of “resistance” in such a society is problematic. Thus the public and academic debates are more than mere polemics over the role of certain individuals in history, or at specific junctures of history. They have turned into weighty discussions on the role of the past and its legacy in shaping collective memory, becoming politicized as they deepened the rift in an already divided nation, where the distinction between left and right and their various shades, as well as perceptions of the Hungarian nation’s fate in the twentieth century, have become part of the present and the contemporary political discourse.

Notes 1 For the Communist version of the struggle against “fascism,” see, János Harsanyi (ed.), A magyar szabadságharcosok a fasizmus ellen (Budapest, 1966). 2 For a comprehensive debate on the issue of collaboration, see István Deák, “‘A Fatal Compromise’: The Debate over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds.), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 39–73. 3 Ibid., p. 68. 4 The miniscule Communist Party and its surviving activists in Moscow were unable to act before June 1941 because of the German–Soviet agreements. 5 Gyorgy Ranki, “Hungarian Fascism,” in Peter F. Sugar (ed.), Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918–1945 (Santa Barbara, CA, 1971). 6 Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918–1944 (Boulder, CO, 1994); Istvan Deak, “A Hungarian Admiral on Horseback,” New York Review of Books, April 8, 1999.

244

Raphael Vago

7 See, for example, Czettler Antal, Magyar Ellenállás and A. Német, “‘Végs´´ o Mególdás’ Tervével Szemben 1942–1943-ban,” Magyar Szemle, Nos. 5–6 (June 1999), at www.magyarszemle.hu/archivum/8_5–6/5. 8 Rubicon devoted a special issue to Horthy, Nos. 5–6 (2001); although not all the articles were nostalgic, most tended to portray the more positive side of the man and his era. Another special issue was devoted to “Elites during the Horthy Era.” 9 See Új Élet (September–October 1993). 10 Ilona Edelsheim–Horthy, Becs´´ ulet és k´´ otelesség, 2 vols (Budapest, 2001, 2007). 11 Péter Nádas, Élet és Irodalom, No. 38 (September 21, 2001), p. 8. 12 Lászlo Karsai, “The People’s Courts and Revolutionary Justice in Hungary, 1945–1946,” in Deák et al., The Politics of Retribution in Hungary, pp. 237–51; Pal Pritz, The War Crimes Trial of Hungarian prime minister Laszlo Bárdossy (New York, 2005). 13 See Shafir and Fatran, in this volume. 14 East European Constitutional Review 4 (fall 2001); Karl P. Benziger, “The Trial of Lászlo Bárdossy: The Second World War and Factional Politics in Contemporary Hungary,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, No. 3 (2005), pp. 465–81. 15 Pritz, The War Crimes Trial. 16 Pál Pritz, “Bárdossy es Teleki,” Magyar Szemle, Nos. 5–6 (2001), pp. 52–71. 17 Quoted in Gyula Borbándi’s review, Magyar Szemle, Nos. 7–8 (2001). 18 Ibid., p. 159. 19 See Benziger, “The Trial of Lászlo Bárdossy.” 20 On the Kamenetz-Podolsk massacre, see Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide (New York, 1994), pp. 205–14. 21 Benziger, “The Trial of Lászlo Bárdossy.” 22 Ibid., p. 475. 23 See, for example, Mécs Imre, MP of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz), Index, January 17, 2001. 24 Michael Shafir, “Hungarian Politics and the post-1989 Legacy of the Holocaust,” in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later (New York, 2006), p. 258. 25 Ibid.; see also Randolph L. Braham, “The Assault on Historical Memory: Hungarian Nationalists and the Holocaust,” East European Quarterly 33, No. 4 (January 2000). 26 Shafir, “Hungarian Politics,” p. 259. 27 T´´ or´´ ok Balint, “Értjük-e Teleki nagyságát,” Magyar Szemle, Nos. 5–6 (2001), pp. 72–90. 28 Pritz, “Bárdossy es Teleki.” 29 Ibid., pp. 70–1. 30 February 14, 2004. 31 Karsai Lászlo, in Élet és Irodalom 48, No. 11 (2004). 32 Bálint, “Értj´´ uk-e Teleki nagyságát.” 33 Pritz, “Bárdossy and Teleki,” 34 Lászlo, Élet és Irodalom. 35 Mária Kovács, “The Case of the Teleki Statue: New Debates on the History of the Numerus Clausus in Hungary,” Jewish Studies at the CEU, Vol. IV, 2004–2005 (Budapest, 2006), pp. 191–208. 36 Shafir, “Hungarian Politics and the Post-1989 Legacy.”

14 Romania’s tortuous road to facing collaboration Michael Shafir

Introduction In postwar Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain that would divide Europe, there emerged two different, yet perversely interrelated, “resistance myths.”1 In the West, one encountered what Henry Rousso termed the “Vichy syndrome,”2 which was aimed at obliterating or marginalizing from the memory of the collective “us” the true dimensions of wartime collaborationism. Individuals might have been pronounced guilty or even lynched directly after the war, but the nation as a whole would be forged into one of supposed resisters “in its overwhelming majority.” This “claim … was perforce made and pedagogically enforced all over Europe, from Italy to Poland, from the Netherlands to Romania.”3 Yet, in the east there was not only a psychological (Rousso calls it “Freudian”) but also an ideological aspect to this concept. “Race struggle” was simply unacceptable as a historical explanation, which always had to be presented in terms of “class struggle.” Thus, not only collaboration but the Jews as the primary target of the Holocaust had to yield to the “masses” under the progressive leadership of the Communist parties. What historian István Deák notes in connection with the Hungarian treatment of the Holocaust is applicable to Communist historiography in general throughout much of its initial (and in Romania, even final) period: “World War II was officially remembered as the era when ‘communists and other progressive elements’ had struggled against, or became the victims of, ‘Hitlerite and Horthyate fascism’.”4 For Romanian Communist historiography under Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, even pogroms, such as that perpetrated in Ias¸i in late June 1941, had been organized “against antifascist forces.”5 However, the perception of collaboration was also a function of the changing political environment, developments which entailed a re-evaluation not only of referential starting points but of referential symbolic historical figures. No society can function without what French political scientist Jacques Rupnik has termed “usable history.”6 In what follows I will first scrutinize what I believe to be a new analytical angle pertaining to the postwar trials of Romanian war criminals, as well as

246

Michael Shafir

to related trials of some of their supporters and/or collaborators. I will strive to demonstrate that much of the Communist and post-Communist depiction of the Holocaust has its origins in the arguments presented at those trials by both prosecution and defendants. Next, I will review the legacy of “stateorganized” forgetting and/or distortion of collaboration during the Holocaust in Communist Romania. The third part will focus on the emergence of the cult of wartime leader Marshal Ion Antonescu, while the fourth will discuss attempts to bring about the judicial rehabilitation of the marshal and of members of his government. A post-Communist taxonomy of collaboration and Holocaust representation will be introduced in the fifth section. Finally, I will deal with the impact of the international democratic community on the abortive struggle for Antonescu’s rehabilitation.

Postwar retribution Based on the Nuremberg model, People’s Tribunals were set up in Romania by a decree issued by King Michael I on April 21, 1945.7 All the defendants’ alleged crimes would fall into one or more of the four categories of indictments distinguished at the Nuremberg Trials, as defined by the August 8, 1945 charter of that International Tribunal: conspiracy to take over the country’s legal government, crimes against peace, crimes of war and crimes against humanity.8 The People’s Tribunals functioned for a short time only, and were disbanded on June 28, 1946,9 although some sentences in trials that were still in process were pronounced at a later date. Some 2,700 cases of suspected war criminals were examined by a commission formed by “public prosecutors”;10 however, only in about half of the cases did the commission find sufficient evidence to prosecute, and only 668 were sentenced, many in absentia.11 There were two tribunals, one in Bucharest and the other in Cluj. The Bucharest tribunal sentenced only 187 people;12 the rest were dealt with by the Cluj one, set up on June 22, 1945, which in general pronounced harsher sentences (thirty people condemned to death and fifty-two to hard labor for life).13 There was an obvious reason for this difference: the Cluj tribunal judged crimes committed mainly by the Hungarian occupants and their collaborators in northern Transylvania rather than atrocities perpetrated by Romanians under the rule of Marshal Antonescu. The origins of the depiction of the Holocaust as having been perpetrated by Hungarians and not by Romanians, which was to characterize much of Romanian historiographic output during the 1965–89 rule of Communist leader Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, may be traced back to the time of those trials. The first trial held by the Bucharest People’s Tribunal ended on May 22, 1945. Generals Nicolae Macici and Constantin Trestorianu, as well as Colonel Corneliu Calotescu and others, were found guilty of the massacres perpetrated in occupied Odessa and in nearby Dalnic on October 21–22, 1941 and sentenced to death; other members of the occupying Romanian forces received varying prison sentences.14 On July 1, 1945, King Michael commuted

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

247

Macici’s sentence to life imprisonment; Macici would eventually die in Aiud prison in 1950.15 Altogether, forty-eight death sentences were pronounced by “Old Kingdom” and southern Transylvania-based People’s Tribunals,16 but only four were actually carried out, the others being either commuted to hard labor for life or decreed in absentia. None of the sentences handed down in northern Transylvania were implemented, and the leading people charged there had anyway left the region together with the Hungarian authorities.17 Although the People’s Tribunals were liquidated in 1946, trials associated with “crimes against peace” and other war-related charges would continue in the following years on the basis of law No. 291 of 1947, which stipulated sentences of between fifteen years and life imprisonment for such offenses.18 In the main trial – the sixteenth in the series staged by the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest19 – thirteen of the twenty-four defendants received death sentences, but six of the sentences (including those of Iron Guard commander Horia Sima and Iron Guard Ministers Mihai Sturdza, Ioan Protopopescu, Corneliu Georgescu, Constantin Papanace and Victor Ias¸inschi) were pronounced in absentia and never carried out. Marshal Antonescu and his foreign minister, Mihai Antonescu, General Inspector of the Gendarmerie Constantin Z. (Piki) Vasiliu and Transnistria Governor Gheorghe Alexianu were executed on June 1 1946.20 Crimes committed against Jews occupied a relatively small place in both the indictment act (some 12 out of 125 pages21) and the debates at the trial. While admitting that between 150,000 and 170,000 Jews had been deported to Transnistria, Marshal Antonescu claimed in a memorandum refuting the indictment22 that this act had been intended to save allegedly proCommunist Jews from the population’s wrath and that the Iron Guardists were preparing “a St. Bartholomew” against them in cooperation with the Germans.23 Unfortunately, he claimed, implementation of the deportation order had been “destabilized” by the “then dominant spirit.” By “destabilization” Antonescu was referring euphemistically to the mass executions, death marches and starvation inflicted by the Romanian police and army while carrying out his orders. The harsh early winter conditions, “which also claimed many victims among the belligerent armies,” he maintained, had added to the number of casualties among the deported, but “this was also the reason why the Germans lost the Moscow battle.” The blame for the Jewish casualties, he said, lay with those who were executing orders. He had personally ordered an inquiry “and the result was known. A general staff colonel and a captain was [sic]24 demoted and sent to the front line as a private soldier, where he met a heroic death.” Antonescu thus placed responsibility for the crimes on the Germans, as well as on fanatical or terrorist elements in the Iron Guard; but he also blamed his subordinates, as indeed he would attempt to do when the Odessa massacres were discussed during the trial.25 In the memorandum he wrote that as chief of state he assumed “responsibility for everything that went wrong” under his governance “except for abuses and crimes.” He could not “endorse crimes” and “I respectfully bow before the

248

Michael Shafir

victims’ shadows and am begging the pardon of those who had to suffer because of them [sic].”26 Antonescu further claimed in the memorandum that “the number of dead from among the population deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria and from the country [i.e., Romania proper], as well as their treatment, is exaggerated … The region was healthy, picturesque, and very rich. Many of them did not wish to return.”27 If Antonescu (and the others accused with him) sought to minimize the dimensions of their crimes, the prosecution itself strove to deflect the focus from Jews to crimes committed against the Romanian nation as a whole. The indictment thus spoke of “hundreds and thousands of anti-fascists” and of “political suspects” interned in prisons and suffering “torture and terrible terror.”28 This was a clear attempt to exculpate collaborationism. Ostensibly, in countries that had been occupied or in those that collaborated with the Germans both in the West and in the East, the indictments were individual; in practice, the frame of reference in both was politically inspired or condoned collective self-defense. The Romanian indictment act reflected this quite clearly by emphasizing (against all recent memory and evidence) that “in fact, the country had been under German occupation” and that “Romanian public opinion received with indignation the German armies” which had entered the country under the September 15, 1940 agreement signed by Berlin and Bucharest.29 However, no evidence of this alleged indignation was produced. Under a decree passed in early 1950, those convicted of war crimes who had “demonstrated good behavior, performed their tasks conscientiously, and proved that they had become fit for social cohabitation during their imprisonment” were made eligible for immediate release, irrespective of the severity of the sentence passed.30 Among those “socially rehabilitated” were several condemned to life imprisonment for crimes against the Jews. Many of those liberated joined the Communist Party (PCR). Others, however, would have to await amnesties granted between 1962 and 1964, when the regime’s National Communist policies were being implemented and the PCR needed the support of nationalist-minded political prisoners, and in particular the intellectuals among them. It is noteworthy that both the prosecution and the defendants constructed their arguments on common ground. Thus, prosecutor Dumitru Sa˘ racu implicitly dismissed any suggestion of large-scale collaboration of Romanians with the Germans, quoting the proverb “All forests have some dead wood,” referring to the leaders of the previous regime and the Iron Guard. For the prosecution, the criminals were not representative of the Romanian people, while for the defense they were not representative of the regime. This goes well beyond the issue of individual culpability. It shows that from the outset, the defense and the prosecution rejected any suggestion of collective responsibility. As will be shown, both these perceptions would reappear in full force in the post-Communist treatment of the Holocaust. These were not the only instances in which defense and prosecution shared the same approach. According to Sa˘ racu, there was no difference between

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

249

“sending to their death” the country’s younger generation and “feeding the crematoria at Majdanek with living people [sic] or forcing those who are about to be shot to dig their own graves.”31 The prosecution also failed to make any distinction between “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”: the former, Sa˘ racu said, “will be called by us crimes against humanity.”32 Chief defendant Ion Antonescu wrote in his memorandum of May 15, 1945 addressed to the tribunal: “We must not believe that only our soldiers and Romanian officers infringed the laws of war and humanity. Everyone made mistakes in this war. These are fatal mistakes.”33 Like the prosecution, then, Antonescu told the tribunal that violence in war was unavoidable and that the innocent always fell victim to it. The difference between defense and prosecution lay only in whether the war could be considered one of aggression or one of defense. In fact, Israeli historian Jean Ancel notes that as early as the hearings that followed the Antonescu “Great National Betrayal Trial” there was a clear trend to deflect attention from the Jews as main victims of the Antonescu regime.34 This line went hand in hand with the obvious “class-struggle approach,” which occasionally verged on antisemitism and relegated Jews as victims of the Holocaust to oblivion. In October 1945, PCR Secretary Vasile Luca replied to party activists of Jewish origin who drew his attention to the wretched state of deportees who had returned from Transnistria, “There are almost no deportees left in misery. They have become multimillionaires.”35 In January 1946, Luca complained to activists in the pro-Communist Jewish Democratic Committee (CDE) that they were turning a blind eye to the fact that in Targu-Mures “the [returning] deportees received a sanatorium and now they stroll about in town engaging in profiteering and refuse to leave the sanatorium, which thus cannot be used by the sick.”36 At the October 1945 meeting Luca said, “We cannot tolerate a situation in which due to their suffering, a privileged situation would be created for the Jews.” Class struggle extended everywhere and was in fact tantamount to the “struggle against fascism.” Romanian-born historian Liviu Rotman noted that in July 1945 the PCR county branch unsuccessfully attempted to prevent commemoration of the June 1941 Ias¸i pogrom and the local party gazette Lupta Moldovei was criticized for having marked the event in a manner that “did not reflect the views of a Communist”; worse, the publication Apa˘ rarea patriotica˘ had on the occasion featured pictures “where only Romanians were visible, and no Germans.”37 Communist-supervised Romanian historiography would strive to achieve precisely the opposite: depict the atrocities as having been perpetrated mainly by the Germans with the aid of an insignificant number of déclassé elements. A few years later, Romanian Workers’ Party (PMR; formerly PCR) leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej raised objections similar to those of his erstwhile (meanwhile imprisoned) political adversary Luca. However, he added a distinction between the Jews, who did nothing to defend themselves, and the Communists, who valiantly fought the Antonescu regime. Addressing a meeting of

250

Michael Shafir

the Politbureau, Gheorghiu-Dej objected to “placing in the same bag the entire Jewish population on the grounds that it has suffered, as if it has suffered because of the Communists [and] as if our movement had not suffered. Our movement has also made sacrifices, only [our] revolutionary elements did not bow their heads and go to the slaughter house, they took a stand and fought back.”38

Representations of collaboration and the Holocaust in Communist Romania With the exception of two major studies and a translation published in the immediate postwar period, representations of the Holocaust under Communist rule suffered from distortion, manipulation or complete disregard. The two exceptions were the 1946 volume Basic Problems of Romania, by Communist Justice Minister Lucret¸iu Pa˘ tra˘s¸canu, and the three volumes of the Black Book: Jewish Suffering during the Fascist Dictatorship 1940–1944, by Jewish author Matatias Carp, published in 1947–48. Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu was executed as a traitor and an imperialist spy in 1954, in what was the last Communist show trial in East Central Europe. He was rehabilitated in 1968 by Gheorghiu Dej’s successor, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, and several books authored by him were republished,39 although not Basic Problems of Romania, the last edition of which appeared in 1946.40 The tome was placed in the Special Collections section in public libraries, to which access was restricted to those with permission from PCR censors or to a few privileged people with connections to the librarian, who would turn a blind eye. Carp’s Black Book soon disappeared even from the restricted section of Romanian libraries, to be reprinted only after the fall of Communism by Hasefer, the publishing house of the Federation of Romanian Jewish Communities (FCER).41 Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu’s Basic Problems would often be quoted in works dealing with fascism, but never the chapter dealing with the Jewish “problem” in Romania.42 The Communist approach to treating the Holocaust came to be fully reflected in the History of Romania (or eventually History of the RPR – Romanian People’s Republic) compiled by a group of party-affiliated historians headed by Mihai Roller. This textbook, which was obligatory in all high schools, embraced the Georgi Dimitrov definition of fascism, which saw “the advent of the Legionary–Antonescu dictatorship” as “the aggravation of terror measures directed against the popular masses and their leaders. Concentration camps were set up, in which thousands of democratic citizens were locked.” Although it mentioned the camps in Transnistria, nowhere did it refer to the ethnic identity of its Jewish or Romany inmates.43 Leaving aside the misleading description of the camps as having been set up under joint Legionary–Antonescu governance (the Iron Guard’s January 1941 rebellion had ended its participation in the country’s rule), the transformation of the victims into Communists and “progressives,” which was common in all historical references to World War II and fascism in the Soviet-dominated

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

251

region, was a leitmotiv that would continue to run through Romanian Communist historiography in various forms. The first work dedicated entirely to the Iron Guard and its crimes was published only in 1971. Jews were mentioned as being among the organization’s victims, but alongside members of other minorities; and the Legionnaire ideology was portrayed as having been aimed at deflecting the attention of the working class from the necessity of consolidation, regardless of nationality, in the common struggle against the joint enemy – the exploitive classes.44 Roller was Jewish, as were many historians associated at that time with the regime. He was a member of a so-called group of déclassé Bessarabian or Jewish “semi-intellectuals” who in the late 1940s and early 1950s occupied “the pinnacle of the PCR propaganda apparatus.”45 By the time he died his influence was already waning. It should be stressed that at no time did these Jewish historians perceive themselves as anything but disciplined soldiers of the party. Oblivious to their Jewish identity (which some nonetheless rediscovered after they were either purged or marginalized toward the end of the 1950s, and particularly after Ceaus¸escu’s advent to power in March 1965), they did not seem to be at all troubled by misrepresentation of the Holocaust, in which they were active collaborators. The drive for autochthonous legitimacy with Romania’s gradual distancing from the Soviet Union from the mid-1960s led to a radical change in the party’s relations with the intelligentsia, many of whom had been imprisoned for real or imaginary sins. Nationalism was not only again in vogue but was consciously promoted and encouraged. Imprisoned former members of the Iron Guard were amnestied and gradually reimmersed themselves in the country’s cultural life. Shortly after their release from prison, these former “enemies of the people” and “war criminals” were courted by high-ranking PCR officials.46 The gradual reversal to national values and its impact on the treatment of the Holocaust was analyzed in 2004 by a young Romanian scholar from Ias¸i, Adrian Cioflânca˘ .47 Based on a study of the most authoritative eight volumes dealing with World War II and the Romanian extreme right published in the 1970s and 1980s,48 he reached several conclusions. First, fascism was generally described in these works as an “import” devoid of any popular backing and “imposed from outside,” with the complicity of a small, non-representative and “retrograde” minority. Second, Romania itself was portrayed as a victim rather than as an aggressor state, a country “thrown into Germany’s arms” after its betrayal by the Western powers, which had backed down from their guarantee of Romania’s borders in 1940. Both the Iron Guard and Antonescu were described as having come to power with the help of Germany, and the decision to join the war was said to have been imposed on Romania by the Germans. Further, the atrocities committed during the war were allegedly opposed by the overwhelming majority of the Romanian people. These findings demonstrate that in the transition from the Dej to the Ceaus¸escu period of Romanian historiography the collective framework of reference was not only retained but its self-defense features were magnified.

252

Michael Shafir

In his conclusions, Cioflânca˘ also notes that Ceaus¸escu’s National Communist regime used so-called Romanian exceptionalism to add a moral dimension to its collective defense perception: not only was crime marginal and uncharacteristic of wartime Romania but Antonescu’s Romania treated its Jews humanely and even defended them from Hitler by refusing to deliver them to the gas chambers. Cioflânca˘ points out that this explains why, in the post-1970 period, Antonescu’s regime would no longer be referred to as a “fascist dictatorship” but as a “military fascist” one. Romanian historians, he states, now strove to show that the regime’s antisemitic measures stemmed not from an anti-Jewish ethos or from ethnic political criteria, as in Nazi Germany, but from military self-defense motives imposed by the conditions of war. In other words, some repressive measures against Jews were due not only to German pressure and influence but to the way in which the Jews allegedly acted against the country’s war effort. Herein lie the roots of the future redirection of blame for the Holocaust onto the Jews themselves. Remarkably, Cioflânca˘ further shows that in the 1980s even the term “military-fascist dictatorship” was replaced by “personal dictatorship” or “totalitarian regime,” thus deflecting responsibility for crimes away from the Romanian army. Further, Cioflânca˘ reveals that much of Romania’s historical output was dominated by a group of historians working under the auspices of the president’s brother, Ilie Ceaus¸escu, at the Institute of Military History and Theory. He rightly points out that the policies of the late 1980s derived from “selective negationism” and “parochial comparative trivialization” (see below).49 Both because of perceived limitations on the PCR’s “autonomy” vis-à-vis Moscow and the ideological constraints of its own doctrine, the preliminary step of rehabilitating Antonescu was undertaken “by proxy.” A leading role in this operation was played by Iosif Constantin Dra˘ gan. His Italy-based Nagard publishing house (the owner’s name in reverse) issued between 1986 and 1990 four volumes of articles and documents which would have been unattainable without the regime’s consent.50 As Victor Eskenasy wrote in reference to Dra˘gan’s function under the former regime, the materials included in the Nagard collection were all taken from the archives of the Ministry of the Interior and the Party Central Committee, and many of them “remained inaccessible to Romanian researchers even after 1989.”51 If one is to give credence to Greater Romania Party (PRM) Deputy Vlad Hogea, Ceaus¸escu was planning to erect a statue to the marshal in front of the edifice called People’s House, for whose construction he demolished a large part of old Bucharest.52 The Communist dictator did not live to see the statue in place. It would be left to Dra˘ gan to play a key role in the erection of several Antonescu busts in post-Communist Romania (see below). According to a report published in a Romanian weekly and never challenged in court by Dra˘ gan, he had been recruited as an informer for the Communist secret police some time between 1950 and 1955, originally with the purpose of gathering intelligence on the émigré Romanian community in general, and the Iron Guard in exile in particular. The Securitate had decided

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

253

to exploit Draga˘ n’s “original sin”: as a student, he had been an Iron Guard sympathizer and published a pro-Iron Guard brochure in Mussolini’s Italy. The by now wealthy Romanian émigré was put in the service of Ceaus¸escu’s National Communist drive, of which Antonescu’s rehabilitation was part and parcel.53 Dra˘ gan returned to Romania after the demise of Communism by late 1989 and, according to information published in 2003, he was the country’s wealthiest man.54 On October 16, 1990, Dra˘ gan and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, future leader of the PRM (founded in June 1991), as well as several other prominent ultra-nationalists (such as Ilie Neacs¸u, editor-in-chief of Romania’s most antisemitic publication, Europa), set up the Marshal Antonescu League, as well as a foundation bearing the same name, with Dra˘ gan as president of both. Historian Gheorghe Buzatu, with whom Dra˘gan collaborated closely in editing four volumes of documents on Antonescu, was at that stage a deputy chairman of the League. In April 2001, Buzatu (one of Romania’s leading Holocaust deniers) took over the chairmanship, while Dra˘ gan became honorary president. At the same time, the league and the foundation were merged.55 In the wake of Ordinance 31, issued in 2002, which forbade the Antonescu cult (see below), the Marshal Antonescu League changed its name (but not its conduct) into the League of Romania’s Marshals. Dra˘ gan also finances the printing and circulation of pro-Nazi and Holocaust-denying literature in Romania.56

Marshal Antonescu as a “hero model” of the post-Communist era For several not always interrelated reasons, Marshal Antonescu seemed to correspond perfectly to the “hero model” of the post-Communist era. First, his anti-Communism was undoubtedly genuine. Second, the Communist regime’s policies of “state-organized forgetting” of the Holocaust (to borrow and adapt Shari J. Cohen’s concept57) meant that with the exception of the wartime generation, the atrocities committed by Antonescu’s regime against Jews and Roma had long faded from collective memory. Third, even among those who remembered the postwar trials, many associated them with their politicized aspects and the sentencing of defendants on imaginary counts, such as “plotting,” “waging a war of aggression” or destroying the country’s economy, rather than with charges for which they would probably have been sentenced by an objective tribunal. Fourth, there was absolutely no sense of collective responsibility in Romanian society, due not only to the creeping process of Antonescu’s semi-rehabilitation that had been under way in the country since the mid-1970s, but also to the fact that prosecutors at the trials did their utmost to eradicate any notion of large-scale collaboration or bystanding (see above). Fifth, not all troops that participated in the war against the Soviet Union witnessed atrocities, since many of these acts were committed by gendarmes who never saw the front line. Many of the officer corps in particular were later imprisoned or suffered persecution at the hand of the Communist regime as

254

Michael Shafir

part of the process of obliterating the former’s political, social and intellectual elites. Many were accused of crimes they had never committed and, as a result, were inclined to believe that no crimes at all were committed. This was a fairly large category (since it included families and particularly children socialized in that spirit and now middle-aged adults). Sixth, and closely intertwined with the fifth, is the fact that memory, including collective memory, is always subjective. Thus, from their respective exiles in Paris and New York two Romanian-language writers would use a radically different prism to view the past. Bessarabia-born (1935) Paul Goma remembered Antonescu as “the liberating marshal,” the “hero” who freed the territory from the killers of his uncle and from those who deported his father (the Communists) – a teacher in a village school – and after his 1946 execution as a “martyr.”58 For Jewish writer Norman Manea, who lost his maternal grandparents in the Holocaust and was deported to Transnistria with his family, Antonescu was the person responsible for his first exile at the age of five; the perpetrator of the second (at the age of fifty) was Ceaus¸escu.59 Although no longer living in Romania, both writers are representative of their respective communities. Seventh, the call for de-communization led to trivialization of the Holocaust itself and to what Alan S. Rosenbaum dubbed “competitive martyrology,”60 based on the argument that it was nonsensical to focus on the fascist years, which spanned a relatively short period of time, instead of dealing with Communism, which lasted several decades. Stéphane Courtois demonstrated that the number of victims of Communist rule far exceeded those that perished in the Holocaust and in World War II.61 Though not necessarily made in connection with Antonescu, the so-called symmetry or double genocide argument62 played into the hands of those who for their own political reasons were converting the marshal into a hero model; they would often allege that Communism had been imported into Romania by Jews and that the Red Holocaust had been implemented under Jewish supervision. By and large, supporters of the campaign for rehabilitating Antonescu and his regime, launched after 1990, may be divided roughly into three categories. First, the public at large, including some well-intentioned intellectuals, whose backing can be attributed largely to lack of information. Second, those who genuinely believe that the marshal was a victim of injustice; this group is composed mainly, though not solely, of war veterans who fought under Antonescu’s command and are easily prone to manipulation – conducted mainly by the third category, which, unlike the second, has a political agenda: to attain power. In the period 1990–96, the governing authoritarian neo-Communist National Salvation Front (FSN) played a central role in the political campaign to rehabilitate Antonescu. In the changing political circumstances that prevailed, the government was weak and, above all, uncertain of its own legitimacy; this was one (among several) reasons that prompted the FSN into cooperating with Romania’s ultra-nationalists, indeed into becoming the

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

255

midwife of the PRM’s creation, as Tudor himself would eventually acknowledge in 1992.63 The perceived threat of a return of the monarchy (which, as it turned out, was much exaggerated), led the FSN into a campaign of vilifying King Michael I, who on August 23, 1944 had staged a palace coup against Antonescu. Paradoxically, the Communist successor party portrayed the king as an assassin who had sold out to the Soviets, delivered Antonescu into their hands and signed his death warrant.64 At the initiative of historian and FSN parliamentary deputy Petre T¸urlea in 1991, on the eve of the forty-fifth anniversary of his June 1946 execution, parliament stood for a minute’s silence in tribute to Antonescu’s memory.65 In February 1994, Sergiu Nicolaescu, a screen director who, under Ceaus¸escu had specialized in producing “patriotic” films, premiered a motion picture on Antonescu called Oglinda (The Mirror). In an attempt to discredit King Michael, Nicolaescu presented the former monarch as a somewhat frivolous young man, while Antonescu was portrayed as the embodiment of Romanian patriotism. A few months later, a documentary film produced by Felicia Cerna˘ianu, Destinul mares¸alului (The Marshal’s Destiny), included footage filmed during Antonescu’s rule, but mostly the filmed record of Antonescu’s 1946 trial. Cerna˘ianu claimed that as one of those “with a Romanian [national] consciousness,” she considered that “we must defend our national dignity in one way or another.”66 At the other end of Romania’s post-Communist political spectrum, the situation was not much different. Publications identified with what supporters liked to term the “democratic opposition” were no less emphatic in lamenting Antonescu’s fate, and transforming him into a hero model. Eight years after the FSN-initiated tribute paid by parliament to Antonescu’s memory, during the rule of a coalition formed by the Democratic Convention of Romania (CDR), Christian-Democratic National Peasant’s Party (PNT¸CD) Senator Ion Moisin proposed, unsuccessfully, that the Upper House approve a resolution describing Antonescu as “a great Romanian patriot, who fought for his country till his death.” Moisin denied that Antonescu bore any responsibility for the Holocaust, claiming that “on the contrary, he saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, refusing to carry out Adolf Hitler’s order to send them to Germany [sic].”67 In 1990, fellow PNT¸CD Senator Valentin Gabrielescu told the Romanian-born German Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent William Totok that the marshal had been one of Romania’s “great statesmen.” Under Antonescu, he said, Romanian Jews had suffered “considerably less than in Hungary or Poland” and historic accounts claiming otherwise were nothing but “fairy tales.” In fact, Jews had been privileged compared to the Romanian majority, for while “Romanian soldiers were fighting on the Volga, the Jews stayed home and were obliged only to clean the capital’s streets of snow.”68 The National Liberal Party (PNL), which together with the PNT¸CD was originally part of the CDR, has a particularly long post-1989 record in support of the Antonescu rehabilitation drive. The first chairman of the PNL,

256

Michael Shafir

Radu Câmpeanu, became one of the earliest campaigners for depicting the Holocaust in deflective terms. In 1991 he told Totok that Romania could not be accused of having participated in the Holocaust, as during the war the country had been virtually under German occupation. Antonescu himself, according to Câmpeanu, had been “a great Romanian” and among Germany’s allies Romania had the smallest number of victims – some 60,000 “at most.” It was only to Hungarian-controlled northern Transylvania that one could apply the term “Holocaust,” Câmpeanu claimed. Antonescu had tried to defend Romania’s Jews and was “as successful as possible under the prevailing circumstances,” he said.69 Once again, the defensive collective reference of these statements is striking. Just as remarkable is the legacy of the minimization of Jewish suffering both during the post-World War II trials and in Communist historiography. While parallels can and should be drawn between Romania’s two main postCommunist camps (the FSN and its allies, the successors of National Communism, and the so-called pro-Western democrats, such as the PNL and the PNT¸CD), there are differences, nonetheless. The Democratic National Salvation Front (FDSN), as the party was called after its early 1992 split, allied itself with the PRM, which was always at the forefront when it came to using Antonescu as a hero model, and around whom it hoped to rally its antisystem, democracy-undermining efforts. Under the 1992–96 coalition of these two parties (plus the anti-Hungarian extreme nationalist Party of Romanian National Unity – PUNR), the first statue of the marshal was unveiled in the southern Romanian town of Slobozia in October 1993. Financed by Dra˘ gan, who later funded several other such monumemts, it was inaugurated in the presence of Deputy Culture Minister Mihai Ungheanu (a future PRM parliamentarian), with Corneliu Vadim Tudor delivering the main speech.70 Twenty-five streets had been renamed after the marshal by 2002.71 Moreover, in 2001, at the celebrations marking ten years since the PRM’s foundation, it was proposed that the Romanian Orthodox Church canonize him.72 Marshal Antonescu is the most prominent but not the only hero model who emerged in postwar Communist Romania. There were also demands to canonize Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, founder of the League of the Archangel Michael/Iron Guard.73 After 1989, several “radical return” parties were established in an attempt to emulate the Iron Guard and rehabilitate its legacy; Iron Guardist publishing houses and periodicals cater to the nostalgic needs of the movement’s veterans and seek support among members of the younger generation. Their success, however, has been ephemeral and cannot be compared to support for the Antonescu cult.

Judicial rehabilitation attempts in the post-Communist era There have been several major attempts to abort sentences passed on war criminals and those found guilty of crimes against peace by the People’s Tribunals in 1945–46, as well as by later regular tribunals. The first initiative to

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

257

rehabilitate Antonescu came from the Pro-Marshal Antonescu League of War Veterans (not to be confused with the Marshal Antonescu League set up by Dra˘gan and his PRM-dominated group).74 The officer members of the ProMarshal League did not want to be associated with people like Dra˘ gan, since they feared that the latter’s Communist-collaborationist past would obstruct their purpose. They appealed to the prosecutor-general, to the government and to parliament for a retrial of Antonescu through a procedure known as “extraordinary appeal”. By August 1993, 180,000 signatures had been added to the petition.75 The idea, however, was hijacked by Dra˘ gan and his people, who rushed to pre-empt the other league in appealing for a retrial. This rivalry between the two associations continued into the summer and autumn of 1992. Leaks from the military section of the office of the prosecutor general seemed to indicate that a retrial was indeed being favorably reconsidered. In February 1993, in an interview with the antisemitic weekly Europa (whose editor in chief, Ilie Neacs¸u, was a member of the Marshal Antonescu League), General Ioan Dan, from that section, who was reportedly examining the Antonescu files, claimed to be uninterested in what East and West might have to say about the retrial. In his eyes, Antonescu had merely reacted to the attack on Romania by the Soviet Union and to the efforts of “foreign forces to dismember Romania.”76 This was obviously an attempt to overturn the court’s previous verdict, according to which Antonescu had plunged the country into the war and caused great harm to its army and economy. However, Dan said nothing concerning the other indictment counts, particularly those connected with war crimes. In 1993 – in what was hardly an appropriate action in light of his position – Dan published a book exonerating Antonescu of all guilt, including crimes against Jews, Roma, and the non-Jewish population in the occupied territories. He accused Antonescu’s prosecutors of conducting a political trial in what was merely a “propaganda show.”77 Post-Communist Romania could not ignore the possibility of harsh international criticism. Indeed, Washington reacted negatively to the campaign of Dra˘gan and his friends to accomplish the marshal’s de facto rehabilitation even before his exoneration de jure. In early 1994, presidential spokesman Traian Chebeleu stated that the attempts to rehabilitate the marshal were “completely irresponsible” at that particular moment in history and were causing “great damage” to the country’s international image.78 However, internal pressure for Antonescu’s judicial rehabilitation continued. Several associations, including Vatra româneasca˘ (Romanian Cradle), whose honorary chairman was Dra˘gan, and the Târgu-Mures¸ branch of the PUNR, demanded in an open letter addressed to president Ion Iliescu in November 1994, the annulment of Antonescu’s trial and rehabilitation of “the first victim of Communism.”79 In 1999, Timis¸oara-based NGOs identified with the other side of the political spectrum initiated a “rehabilitation trial,” which, as expected, ended in Antonescu’s acquittal by a “moral jury.”80 Earlier, the Timis¸oara local council,

258

Michael Shafir

on which the (now ruling) CDR had a majority, named a street after the marshal. A local judge who dismissed an appeal of the Târgu–Mures¸ branch of the Hungarian Democratic Federation of Romania (UDMR) against the intention to erect an Antonescu bust in the town, ruled that Marshal Antonescu was “rehabilitated, having been one of the greatest leaders of armies and one of the greatest politicians.” Adding insult to injury, he proclaimed that “those opposed to the initiative should be viewed as being strangers to nation and country.”81 On several occasions during his 1990–96 terms of office, president Ion Iliescu expressed his opposition to the attempts to rehabilitate Antonescu and to the growing cult of the marshal. There are no grounds to doubt his sincerity, especially since his father, an underground Communist, suffered under the Antonescu regime and was interned in the Târgu-Jiu camp. Yet utilitarian antisemitism has its own devious ways of working. In 1995, answering a letter protesting the Antonescu rehabilitation campaign by US Helsinki Committee joint chairmen Senator Alfonse d’Amato and Representative Christopher H. Smith, Iliescu wrote that one could “hardly speak” about such a thing; there were some “disparate attempts initiated mainly by war veterans, which have no antisemitic connotation.” He added that “nobody denies the negative role that Antonescu played in throwing Romania into the war against the Allies and his responsibility for the crimes committed against the Jews.”82 Here he was simply defending his political allies in general, and the PRM in particular, despite their severe criticism of the president for his attitude toward Antonescu’s rehabilitation.83 When president Emil Constantinescu replaced Iliescu in 1996, it was hoped that the Age of Utilitarian Antisemitism had come to an end. The new governing coalition no longer depended on extremist parties but encompassed a broad spectrum of center-right parties as well as the ethnic Hungarian UDMR. In a message addressed to the FCER, marking international Holocaust Memorial Day, on May 4, 1997, Constantinescu acknowledged, for the first time, Romania’s collective responsibility in the Holocaust. Constantinescu said that while the Holocaust was not “planned by Romanians” and while some Romanians risked their life to save Jews, [w]e are also aware that other Romanians, blinded by criminal furor, participated in this horrible crime, in implementing the Nazi project of the Final Solution. On more than one occasion Romania’s wartime authorities attempted to oppose the Nazi demand for the full liquidation of the Jewish population, organized the immigration of groups of Jews to Palestine, and even openly protected some individuals of the Jewish community in Romania. But the same authorities organized deportations and promoted racial legislation. Today we accept responsibility for this dramatic inconsistency. The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Romania is a burden on our heart, on all Romanians … 84

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

259

It should be noted that although Iliescu condemned the atrocities committed by the Iron Guard and the antisemitic policies of the Antonescu regime, he never spoke of Romanian involvement in implementation of the Final Solution. On this occasion, Constantinescu admitted for the first time that the individual guilt of leaders and their followers could translate into the collective responsibility of future generations. During a visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on July 18, 1998, Constantinescu once again spoke first of saving the Jews rather than the persecution that preceded it. At the same time, the president remarked that “despite these [commendable acts] no one has the right to ignore … [Romanian] responsibility for those Romanian citizens who were persecuted rather than protected by the Romanian state [a fact that] cannot and must not be eluded.”85 Between the two declarations, however, the facts on the ground did not quite match the words. On October 22, 1997, then Prosecutor General Sorin Moisescu launched an extraordinary appeal for the official rehabilitation of eight members of the Antonescu government sentenced in 1949.86 Moisescu explained that the Romanian Penal Code did not provide for collective responsibility and that by suspending the constitution, dissolving the parliament and assuming full personal power, Antonescu had by implication also abolished the principle of collective ministerial responsibility.87 While on a visit to Berlin on November 7, Constantinescu told Radio Liberty correspondent Totok that he was aware of the potentially “delicate international implications” of rehabilitation but that the officials involved had been “outstanding Romanian cultural figures” who were removed from the “negative aspects” of Antonescu’s rule.88 It should be noted, however, that while most Ministers involved had indeed been “cultural figures,” their alleged non-involvement in anti-Jewish legislation and persecutions was more than questionable.89 Moisescu’s recommendation again aroused protests from the two US Helsinki Committee co-chairmen D’Amato and Smith. In a letter to president Constantinescu, they said the officials concerned had been “cabinet members in a government that was responsible for the persecution of the entire Romanian Jewish community and the deportation and murder of at least 250,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews.” Their rehabilitation “would call into question the sincerity of Romania’s commitment to the West’s most fundamental shared values and was likely to trigger a reassessment of support for Romania’s candidacy for membership in our economic and security institutions [NATO and the EU].”90 The letter had an immediate impact. One day earlier Moisescu had attempted to explain why he deemed it proper to rehabilitate the eight officials. On November 22, closer examination, he now said, had established that “collective ministerial responsibility” did, after all, apply in all but one of the eight cases. The other seven ministers could not be absolved of the “political responsibility” they bore for “military, economic and social decisions” taken by the cabinet of which they had been members, such as “socially

260

Michael Shafir

discriminatory measures taken against some Jews on June 30, 1941 [a euphemism for the Ias¸i pogrom]” and waging war on the Soviet Union in November 1941. The only exception would be made for Toma Petre Ghit¸ulescu, who had served only briefly (April 5–May 26, 1941) as under-secretary of state in the National Economy Ministry and resigned prior to the pogrom.91 To avoid the embarrassment of international protests, the rehabilitations continued secretly. At least two prominent war criminals were rehabilitated in 1997. Colonels Radu Dinulescu and Gheorghe Petrescu had been sentenced for war crimes. In both cases it was argued that these officers had not been direct participants in the crimes for which they had been accused. This was a clear distortion: both officers had belonged to the general staff of the Romanian army’s Section II and to the Secret Information Service (SSI). Many archival documents prove beyond a doubt the involvement of these highranking officers in the deportations to Transnistria and in the persecution of tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina.92 When news of the rehabilitation leaked out, the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked Romania’s new prosecutor general, Ilie Botos¸, to annul the pardons. Botos¸ first replied that a special team of Romanian prosecutors was examining the cases; however, shortly afterward, unidentified judicial sources clarified that Botos¸ was not authorized to initiate an extraordinary appeal procedure. Romania subsequently announced that the rehabilitation of the two officers could now be appealed only at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.93

Collaboration and Holocaust representation: a taxonomy Aside from relatively few, though not irrelevant, cases of outright Westerninspired Holocaust denial,94 representations of collaboration with the Nazis in post-Communist Romania can be classified into two main groups and a related third one. Each category may be further subdivided, and broken down yet again. All these (largely heuristic) groups belong to the larger family of Holocaust denial but differ in terms of intensity, scope or basic motivation. Mobility between categories is rather common. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet put it when he spoke out against so-called Holocaust revisionists,95 “There is more than one room in the revisionist house.”96 The two categories are deflective and selective negationism, while comparative trivialization is the related third group. Rather than negating the Holocaust, deflective negationism transfers the guilt for the perpetration of crimes to members of other nations, or minimizes the participation of one’s own nation to insignificant “aberrations.” It is thus particularistic rather than universal, as well as defensive. Therefore, the main frame of reference of deflective negationists is collective. For deflective negationists, criticism of Antonescu’s policies is criticism of Romania. The roots of deflective negationism can be discerned clearly in both the arguments of the prosecution and those of the defense at the main postwar trials and in the Ceaus¸escu-era treatment of the Holocaust (see above).

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

261

Several sub-categories of deflective negation may be detected by target. The first sub-category redirects the guilt for the crimes perpetrated to the Nazis alone. For example, General Ion Alexandru Munteanu, director of the Bucharest State Archives until November 1991 and, before his death in 1995 a close friend of Corneliu Vadim Tudor, wrote that “what happened in eastern Moldova [i.e., Bessarabia] and in Transnistria in 1941–1943” was the exclusive responsibility of the Germans. A similar statement was made by historian Maria Covaci,97 as well as by Romanian politicians such as Petre T¸urlea. A second sub-category adds a local “fringe” to leading Nazi perpetrators. Mircea Mus¸at, a former Communist historiography censor who became a founding member of the PRM, labeled the Ias¸i massacres a “Hitlerite– Legionnaire pogrom,”98 president Ion Iliescu’s acceptance of this “fringe” approach was unexpected. In a speech delivered on January 21, 2001, at the Choral Temple in Bucharest, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Iron Guard pogrom in Bucharest, he said the Iron Guardist “aberration” had been a “delirium of intolerance and antisemitism.” However, the president added that with the exception of that brief episode, there had been no Romanian contribution to “the long European history” of persecution of the Jews, and it was “significant” that there was “no Romanian word for ‘pogrom’.” The alleged distorted image of Romania, according to Iliescu, would be corrected when “Romanian [rather than Jewish] historians would tackle the subject.”99 Barely six months later, with Romania anxious to join NATO and in the face of US and Israeli protests against the Antonescu cult in Romania, Iliescu attended a ceremony marking the Ias¸i pogrom where he declared that “no matter what we may think, international public opinion considers Antonescu to have been a war criminal.”100 Thus, Iliescu was not telling his countrymen that they must change their mind about Antonescu but that they must change their discourse – a subtlety with which Romanians were certainly not unfamiliar after nearly half a century of Communism.101 A third type of deflectionist negation amounts to finger-pointing at the victims. The atrocities against the Jews in Romania, according to this approach, should be blamed on the Jews themselves. Radu Theodoru – Romania’s foremost and most outspoken Holocaust denier – has thus argued that Hitler was “merely a puppet” in Jewish hands. Writer Ioan Buduca concurred, seeing antisemitism as a Zionist ploy to advance the purpose of Jewish emigration.102 Among those taking this line, one finds the defensive argument, according to which international Jewry forced Hitler to take defensive measures against them. Buduca stated in 1999 that the Jews were not only “historically guilty” for Germany’s defeat in World War I but had launched a war on Hitler in 1934 by declaring a boycott of Nazi German goods. This contention is a revisionist classic. It was first used by Paul Rassinier, then by Richard Harwood (Verrall), and was later embraced by Robert Faurisson and David Irving, and finally also by Ernst Nolte.103 According to the fourth, reactive, argument, it was Jewish disloyalty toward the Romanian nation that triggered “some repressive measures.” The

262

Michael Shafir

main claim rests on the large-scale support allegedly rendered by Jews to the Soviet occupation forces in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940, and on alleged Jewish participation not only in humiliating or torturing the retreating Romanian army but in the physical liquidation of Romanian military personnel. Viewed from this perspective, the June 1940 Dorohoi and Galat¸i pogroms, the Ias¸i pogrom, and the atrocities committed in Transnistria (whenever they are acknowledged, even in passing) can all be explained in terms of self-defense and/or spontaneous revenge on the Jews for their alleged deeds in 1940.104 These claims were raised, for example, by historians from the army’s Academy of Higher Military Studies,105 as well as by Gheorghe Buzatu.106 Far from being a perpetrator of the Holocaust, he wrote, Romania was its victim, but not of the Nazis; Romania had undergone a holocaust at the hands of the Jews, and the year 1940 marked its beginning.107 In recent years exiled writer Paul Goma has become the foremost advocate of the reactive argument.108 In a “pseudo-novel” (2002),109 and works published in Chis¸ina˘u and in Bucharest in 2003 and 2004, respectively,110 Goma insists that the “Red Holocaust” which Jews allegedly perpetrated on Romanians after the 1940 Soviet ultimatum explains the atrocities (which he does not deny) committed against them by Romanians in 1941–43.111 The last deflective manipulation – and by far the most insulting – is the incriminatory argument, which attributes Holocaust crimes to Jewish perpetrators. Ion Coja, a philology professor at the University of Bucharest, has traversed many post-Communist political parties, beginning with the FSN and ending in various formations of Romania’s ultra-nationalist side of the political spectrum. Coja has long claimed that the January 1941 pogrom by the Iron Guard in Bucharest never occurred. Its 120 victims were an invention – the best proof being that when the Communists came to power nobody was put on trial, although there were many Jews in the party leadership. Jews might have died during the January uprising against Antonescu, but nobody has ever proved that the crimes were committed by the Iron Guard, he claims.112 Coja’s conspiracy theories are legion: for example, the Jewish victims of the pogrom (suddenly they existed, after all) were liquidated by their own co-religionists, Communists serving the Soviet interest in order to compromise the Iron Guard and end its partnership with Antonescu.113 Selective negationism is outright negationism that is both deflective and country-specific – in other words, it does not deny the Holocaust took place elsewhere, but excludes any notion of participation of members of one’s own nation in its perpetration. In mid-2001, Buzatu and Coja co-chaired a symposium in Bucharest entitled “Was there a Holocaust in Romania?” One panel examined the “questionable” occurrence of the Shoah in Romania; the second, the reasons for the existence of a “powerfully institutionalized anti-Romanianism.” As an outcome of the second panel, the Romanian League for the Struggle against Anti-Romanianism, headed by Coja, was set up. The symposium’s resolutions

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

263

were published, among other places, in the Iron Guardist journal Permanent¸e.114 Its authors, it was stated: want to make clear that we have nothing to do with those people and opinions contesting as a whole the occurrence of the Jewish holocaust during World War II … [the Jews] have suffered almost everywhere in the Europe of those years, but not in Romania … the testimony of trustworthy Jews [demonstrates that] the Romanian people had in those years a behavior honoring human dignity [sic]. To support their arguments, the participants first presented excerpts from what they claimed was the 1955 testimony before a Swiss court of the former leader of the Romanian Jewish community in Romania, Wilhelm Filderman. The trial involved five Romanian exiles who had attacked the Bucharest diplomatic mission in Bern, briefly taken it over and, in the course of the attack, killed the legation’s driver. The Romanian authorities launched a large-scale campaign both at home and abroad against the attackers and against exiled Romanian figures who testified in the attackers’ defense. However, Filderman’s name was never mentioned during that campaign.115 The first reference to the alleged document presented it as being Filderman’s “testament.” The document has never been produced, and there is uncertainty as to whether it really exists.116 Filderman is said to have told the court: During the period of Hitler’s domination of Europe, I was in permanent touch with Marshal Antonescu. He did all he could to ease the lives of Jews exposed to Nazi German persecutions. I must underline that the Romanian population was not antisemitic and that the misfortunes suffered by the Jews were the work of the German Nazis and the Iron Guard. Marshal Antonescu withstood successfully the Nazi pressure that was imposing hard measures against the Jews [sic]. He is also cited as having told the Bern tribunal that, owing to Antonescu’s “energetic intervention,” the deportation of more than 20,000 Jews from Bukovina was prevented. Startling at first glance, this testimony is nevertheless dubious. At Antonescu’s orders, 90,344 Bukovinian Jews were deported to Transnistria.117 The 20,000 Bukovinian Jews allegedly mentioned by Filderman (in fact, 19,689) owed their lives to the intervention of Cerna˘ut¸i Mayor Traian Popovici and not to Antonescu.118 Above all, the Germans were never involved in the physical deportation of Jews from Romania.119 In fact, at Antonescu’s trial in 1946, Filderman testified: “[the] Antonescu governance resulted in the death of 150,000 Bukovinian and Bessarabian Jews,” and added that “the actual number of victims might be larger.”120 In another example of such distortion, Coja hinted that former Romanian Chief Rabbi Alexandru S¸afran allegedly dedicated a book to the son of

264

Michael Shafir

executed war criminal Gheorghe Alexianu, governor of Transnistria, exonerating his father of any guilt. Coja claimed the old Jewish leader had sworn Alexianu Jr. into silence for as long as he remained alive, because “the poor man” feared the reaction of his own community.121 I asked a relative of the ninety-one-year-old rabbi, now living in Geneva, to clarify the authenticity of the claim. Rabbi S¸afran, who was then almost immobilized by illness, directed me through his nephew to the relevant part of his memoirs. Alexianu, he wrote there, was “famous for his cruelty.”122 There were also other examples of Romanian deniers attempting to take advantage of S¸afran’s age and remoteness from post-Communist Romanian realities.123 The related notion of comparative trivialization refers to willful distortion of the record and of the significance of the Holocaust, either by “humanizing” the local record compared to atrocities committed by the Nazis, or by comparing the Holocaust itself to experiences of massive suffering endured by local populations or by mankind at large at one point or another in history. president Ion Iliescu himself may be said to be a comparative trivializer. In a 2003 interview with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Iliescu said the Holocaust was not unique to the Jewish population in Europe. Many others, including Poles, died in a similar way … there were others, who were labeled Communists, and they were similarly victimized. My father was a Communist activist and he was sent to a camp. He died at the age of forty-four, less than a year after he returned. Iliescu emphasized that it was “impossible to accuse the Romanian people and Romanian society” of crimes committed on Antonescu’s orders.124 For comparative trivializers, Transnistria was nothing short of a Garden of Eden; in fact, the argument goes so far as to claim that, compared with what the ethnic majority had to go through during the war, the Jews were in fact privileged. Coja denounces as “a lie” the claim that Jews were sent to the camps “just because they were Jews.” Only two sorts of Jews ended up in Transnistria: those who were not “Romanian citizens” and had “illegally crossed the border,” which was “normal due to wartime conditions”; and “Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews, suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies.” Such camps, according to Coja, had also existed in the United States during the war for Japanese suspected of disloyalty to the country.125 Further, Coja claimed, the camps in Transnistria “were never extermination camps, since practically any Jew could leave for any destination, except Romania proper.”126 Or, as he put it at the 2001 symposium, “those concentration camps … were nothing but villages. No barbed wire, no military watch … only a few gendarmerie, patrolling … during the night, in order to defend the Jews against Ukrainian civilians who, for various reasons, could have acted violently against them.”127 According to Larry L. Watts, a US historian living in Romania, the marshal had been the de facto protector of Jews against plans to implement the Final Solution, and thus he shared “Western standards …

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

265

concerning human and fundamental civic rights.”128 According to the International Commission on the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews perished in the Holocaust on territories occupied by the Romanian army. No breakdowns are available beyond this.129 An additional 135,000 Romanian Jews living under Hungarian control in northern Transylvania also perished, as did some 5,000 Romanian Jews in other countries.130 Central to the notion of comparative trivialization is the so-called double genocide or symmetry approach to the Holocaust in post-Communist East Central Europe.131 Soon after former president Constantinescu’s letter to the FECR acknowledging Romania’s collective responsibility for the Holocaust, historian Floricel Marinescu published an angry article in the weekly România libera˘ supplement Aldine, arguing that “from a strictly quantitative perspective, the number of crimes perpetrated in the name of Communist ideology is much larger than that of those perpetrated in the name of Nazi or similar ideologically-minded regimes.” He added that unlike Constantinescu, no prominent Jewish Romanian personality had apologized for the role that some Jews allegedly “played in undermining Romanian statehood, in the country’s bolshevization, in the crimes and the atrocities committed [by them].” Shortly after publication of the tract Marinescu was appointed a presidential counselor. In the same spirit of comparative trivialization a gigantic volume entitled The Red Holocaust, by Germany-exiled Florin Matrescu, was enthusiastically reviewed in the respectable Writers’ Union weekly România literara˘ in January 1996. On April 27, 1993, columnist Roxana Iordache wondered in the daily România libera˘ when Jews would “kneel down” before Romanians and ask forgiveness for what they had done to them. In this case, too, the “symmetry” approach transcends the political spectrum.132 “Radical continuity” politicians such as Tudor and Mihai Ungheanu emphasized the “holocaust of Romanians” during the Communist era and the role of the Jews in these “atrocities.”133 Prominent Romanian intellectuals living abroad since the Communist era also played a central role in the dissemination and encouragement of comparative trivialization. None, however, was more influential than Monica Lovinescu and Dorin Tudoran, due to their incontestably clean antiCommunist past.134 Both Lovinescu and Tudoran conveyed to Romanians the well-known position of Courtois and French essayist Jean-François Revel that the Communist genocide, though as terrible or worse than the Holocaust, was being purposely neglected. From Revel, Lovinescu would borrow the concept of “left-wing negationism” (denying the atrocities of the Gulag).135 The prestige enjoyed by Lovinescu and Tudoran was bound to produce local emulators. In 1997 literary critic-turned-politician Nicolae Manolescu denounced the ongoing “witch hunt” against literati who had identified with the radical right and “collaborated with Nazism or fascism, or … with the occupation, while forgetting (or pretending to have forgotten) about the others, a lot more numerous, who were Communist sympathizers in Stalin’s

266

Michael Shafir

times, as well as later, and collaborated with the Red power set in place by Soviet tanks.”136

The changing environment and Antonescu’s last stand On June 1, 2001, a major scandal shattered the Romanian military, and with it the public at large: General Mircea Chelaru, former chief of staff of the Romanian army, known for his extreme nationalist position, attended a ceremony for the unveiling of an Antonescu bust in Bucharest. The event took place on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the marshal’s execution.137 Under pressure from NATO circles, Chelaru eventually resigned from the army. Utilitarian antisemitism had thus reached a crossroads. On the one hand, what was once a bastion of the marshal’s rehabilitation – the army itself – was beginning to divest itself of some of the cult’s most ardent supporters. On the other hand, there could be no doubt that there was both resistance to and rejection of this drive within the ranks of the military. On March 13, 2002, the Romanian government issued an emergency ordinance banning the cult of Marshal Ion Antonescu. The ordinance came into force on March 28, with its publication in the official gazette Monitorul oficial. By this act, Premier Adrian Na˘ stase was fulfilling a pledge made during an October 2001 visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and at a meeting with US Jewish leaders in New York.138 On March 18, the first syllabus on the Holocaust for high-ranking officers in Romania was launched at the National Defense College in Bucharest. Teaching the first course was Radu Ioanid of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, a Romanian-born historian and author of several books on antisemitism and the Holocaust in Romania.139 Emergency Ordinance 31/2002 prohibited the display of “racist or fascist symbols,” and the erection of statues or commemorative plaques for those condemned in Romania or abroad for “crimes against peace” and for “crimes against humanity,” as well as the naming of streets and other places after those personalities. Exceptions were made only for museums, where statues could be displayed for “scientific activity” conducted outside “the public space.” It also outlawed organizations of a “fascist, racist and xenophobic character” that promoted such ideas “on ethnic, racist, or religious grounds,” including both registered and unregistered organizations, or any group consisting of three persons or more. Finally, it stipulated penalties ranging from fines to fifteen years in prison for those who infringed those regulations or denied the Holocaust.140 In other words: the ordinance reflected the response to a situation in which the country’s ruling political elite understood it could no longer procrastinate. However, for purposes of domestic consumption and in what might have been an attempt to sweeten the pill of the foreign-prescribed medicine, the country’s leadership used an idiom different from that employed outside, even after issuance of the ordinance. For example, on March 22, Na˘stase emphasized that he opposed attempts to “indict the Romanian people for the

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

267

Holocaust.”141 The prime minister, moreover, was indulging in comparative trivialization of the Holocaust when he claimed that “history has encountered situations that were a lot more grievous, yet nobody tried to indict the German, Russian or the American peoples.” Iliescu also deflected negative perceptions of Antonescu on to foreigners when he stated that the wartime leader was considered “by the states who fought in World War II for democracy and against Hitler” a war criminal and that consequently “any manifestation of an Antonescu cult” in Romania, “no matter how one tries to justify it,” is perceived there as being “in defiance of the international community.”142 The coded messages of the country’s two highest officials thus read: You can rest assured that we shall not force you into facing collective responsibility and you must understand that we do not necessarily identify with what is being imposed on us. Further, contradicting its own ordinance, the government decided to display portraits of all Romanian Premiers, including that of the marshal, at its official seat. This step triggered a letter of protest from the US Helsinki Commission, which also objected to the government’s procrastination in removing the Antonescu statues.143 More important, the fate of the ordinance itself was becoming unclear. Emergency ordinances become effective upon their issuance, but must eventually be approved by parliament in order to become law. Committee debates had shown that this could not be taken for granted. While the Senate Human Rights Committee approved the text of the ordinance without amendment on April 9, representatives of the PNL (including former party chairman Mircea Ionescu-Quintus) on the Defense Committee joined PRM deputies in demanding changes. After twice postponing approval, the committee agreed on June 5 to an amended text, based on the proposal made by PRM Deputy Chairman Senator Buzatu. Buzatu had suggested that the Holocaust be defined as “the systematic massive extermination of the Jewish population in Europe, organized by the Nazi authorities during World War II.” In other words, by definition, there was no Holocaust in Romania, since the extermination of Jews there had not been “organized by the Nazi authorities.” The committee also reduced the maximum penalty for setting up organizations of a “fascist, racist or xenophobic” character from fifteen to five years in prison.144 In an effort to calm the situation, Culture and Cults Minister Ra˘ zvan Theodorescu proposed – as he did at a special session of the Academy called to debate the issue of the Holocaust and Romania’s role in it – stipulating that while no Holocaust had taken place in Romania, “Holocaust-like” policies had been implemented by the Antonescu regime on territories under “temporary Romanian occupation.”145

Conclusion The acceptance of the Buzatu version defining the Holocaust speaks volumes of Romanians’ attempt to “have their cake and eat it too.” Moreover, the

268

Michael Shafir

Romanian leadership’s presentation of the ordinance for approval at home differed from that conveyed to the international public. Finally, there was obvious reluctance within the ranks of the ruling party itself concerning the government-initiated measures. Positions displayed by Romanian historians in the ensuing debate were no surprise either. The most militant on the rejectionist side was, of course, Buzatu. The only ethnic Romanian historian to come out clearly in favor of the ordinance was Andrei Pippidi, together with his wife, political scientist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi.146 In addition, a public opinion poll carried by the daily Ziua among readers in 2001 showed that fewer than one in four (24.59 percent) considered Antonescu to have been a war criminal.147 On June 12, 2003, a brief official government press release announced that the cabinet had that day approved a cooperation agreement between the National Archives and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The communiqué added that Romania’s government “encourages research concerning the Holocaust in Europe – including documents referring to it and found in Romanian archives, but strongly emphasizes that between 1940 and 1945 no Holocaust took place within Romania’s boundaries.”148 Again, this created an international uproar. According to Theodorescu, it was due to an oversight. A second part of the government’s June 12, communiqué, he said, had been omitted accidentally: accordingly, during 1940–44 the Romanian authorities were guilty of participation in the Holocaust but the crimes were not committed on Romanian territory, since in 1941 Bessarabia and Bukovina, as well as the Hert¸a district, had not been officially reincorporated into Romania. The communiqué immediately triggered a wave of protests by Jewish organizations in Romania and by official Israeli circles, as well as Jewish organizations in the United States and elsewhere. First, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)-affiliated Center for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism in Romania (MCA), urged the government to “reconsider its openly expressed denial of the Holocaust in Romania.”149 On June 17, the Steering Committee of the FCER released an unprecedented strongly worded communiqué, noting with “surprise and justified sadness” the government’s claim, calling it “irrelevant and out of place.”150 The Romany Center for Public Policy Aven Amenza likewise protested the statement in an open letter addressed to prime minister Na˘ stase, after a meeting commemorating the sixty-first anniversary of the first deportations to Transnistria of Romanian Roma. The center said it intended to sue Public Information Minister Vasile Dâncu, whose office had disseminated the Romanian government’s announcement, which, it claimed, amounted to denial of the extermination by the Antonescu regime of 36,000 Roma during the Holocaust.151 Romania’s ambassador to Israel, Mariana Stoica, was handed an official protest on June 16, by the Israel foreign ministry.152 The Knesset (Israeli parliament) Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Committee approved a resolution describing the Romanian government’s statement as “Holocaust

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

269

denial.” The Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority likewise condemned the Romanian declaration, drawing attention to the work of Romanian-born historian Jean Ancel, “based on worldwide archival [documentation], including Romanian archives to which access is possible,” showing “that the Bucharest Romanian government, hand-in-hand with the Romanian army and police, was directly responsible for the massacres.”153 The near universal negative reaction abroad caused the government to reconsider its position. A new statement issued by the executive acknowledges that the Antonescu regime in Romania “was guilty of grave war crimes, pogroms, and mass deportations of Romanian Jews to territories occupied or controlled by the Romanian army” and the Romanian government “assumes its share of responsibility” for the crimes initiated by that regime during the Holocaust.154 Yet, barely one month later, Iliescu provoked an even stronger scandal during an interview with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.155 In a manner reminiscent of the interwar Iron Guard or the post-Communist PRM, he warned against “skinning” poor Romanians with restitution demands, and stated that “history should be left to historians.” There was a sense of déja vu in what followed. At first, Iliescu professed to be “surprised and saddened” by the “misinterpretation” of his statements not only by Israeli officials but by Romanian journalists and commentators too.156 The statements, he said, had been taken out of context. He also said it had never been his intention to display a “lack of sensibility” or to “banalize the Holocaust.” Nor did he intend to detract from “the responsibility of those who led the Romanian state in that period. Historical truth must be fully expressed,” he said, while emphasizing the “uniqueness” of the Nazi treatment of the Jews in occupied Europe and in the countries allied with Germany. When B’nai Brith Vice-President Daniel Mariaschin visited Iliescu in Bucharest, it was agreed that Romania would implement several measures to demonstrate its readiness to move from words to deeds, including the establishment of a commission of Romanian and foreign historians that would “unequivocally establish the significance of the extermination of Jews on Romania’s territory during World War II,” teaching Holocaust courses in Romanian schools, and instituting official observance of a Holocaust Memorial Day in Romania.157 Indeed, on October 22, 2003 an international commission chaired by Elie Wiesel and including myself as a member was set up, a textbook for teaching the Holocaust in Romanian schools was being prepared by the Education Ministry and October 9 – the date when the first Jews were deported to Transnistria from northern Romania – was instituted as the official date marking the Holocaust in Romania.158 Both the June 12, cabinet statement and Iliescu’s interview with Ha’aretz should be viewed from the perspective of the immediate past and the immediate future. The framework for the former was provided by Emergency Ordinance No. 31 of March 2002, while for the latter it was the late 2004

270

Michael Shafir

parliamentary and presidential elections. It was clear to the Romanian leadership that NATO membership (a goal achieved with Romania’s admission into the organization at its November 2002 summit in Prague) would not be attainable as long as the cult continued with the tacit support of some PSD (Social Democratic Party) members and with its active promotion by the PRM, as well as by smaller political groups.159 However, with the next election approaching, the PSD and its leadership sought to signal that its posture of “defender of national dignity” had not been forsaken, especially since it feared that the PRM would not hesitate to make electoral capital out of Ordinance 31/2002. Although they could not renege on promises made to the West (culminating in the ordinance), they could intimate to the public at home that they would attempt to minimize its impact. The 1923 extension of full citizenship rights to Romanian Jews was attained under considerable Western pressure; however, this “achievement” proved short-lived.160 In the case of Romanian distortion of the Holocaust and collaboration, external pressure led Romania to adopt an official stand that is rejected by many of its citizens. The endurance of this position remains to be seen.

Notes 1 Research for this article was completed in 2004. Developments beyond that date are not covered. 2 Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy. De 1944 à nos jours (2nd edn., Paris, 1990), pp. 18–19. 3 Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds.), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ, 2000), p. 298. 4 István Deák, “Antisemitism and the Treatment of the Holocaust in Hungary,” in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), Antisemitism and the Treatment of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (New York, 1994), p. 111. 5 Victor Eskenasy, “The Holocaust and Romanian Historiography: Communist and Neo-Communist Revisionism,” in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry (New York, 1994), p. 184. 6 See Jacques Rupnik, “Revolut¸ie – restaurat¸ie,” Lettre internationale (Romanian edition), No. 4 (winter 1992–93), p. 4. 7 Monitorul official, April 24, 1945, pp. 3362–4, reproduced in Marcel-Dumitru Ciuca˘ (ed.), Procesul Mares¸alului Antonescu. Documente (2 vols., Bucharest, 1995) (henceforth Procesul). Decree reproduced in Vol. 1, pp. 54–9. This royal decree replaced laws No. 50 and No. 51 of January 21, 1945, which had targeted war criminals, war profiteers and those “responsible for the country’s disaster,” passed in line with Article 14 of the Armistice Convention signed in Moscow on September 12, 1944, which stipulated the Romanian government’s obligation to cooperate with the Allies in “arresting and bringing to justice people accused of war crimes.” Cited in Ion Ba˘ lan, Regimul concentrat¸ional din România 1945–1964 (Bucharest, 2000), pp. 48, 50–1. The tribunals were supposed to function till August 31, 1945, but, due to the “royal strike” of the same year, their term was prolonged by government decree to June 10, 1946. I am indebted to Zoltán Tibori Szabó for the latter information.

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

271

8 Conspiracy to seize absolute power for the purpose of perpetrating subsequent crimes; crimes against peace, referring to violation of international treaties and launching wars of aggression; war crimes committed by ordering and tolerating collective assassinations and torture on a mass scale, employing slave labor and looting; and crimes against humanity through the extermination of entire ethnic minorities and the persecution of political adversaries. See Joe Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, Le Procès de Nuremberg (Paris, 1959). It is clear that the parallels in some points of the indictment brought against Antonescu and his accomplices were not really warranted: the “conspiracy” charge, which occupied a large part of it, was practically an invention, since Antonescu did not reveal any ambitions to seize power before September 1940 and was in fact lawfully appointed prime minister by King Carol II shortly before his abdication; it was not Antonescu but the king who liquidated Romanian democracy in 1938, by instituting a royal dictatorship; and the arrival in Romania of German forces was due to an agreement concluded by the king, not by Antonescu. Also unwarranted was the charge of destroying Romania economically: Antonescu, in fact, left a legacy of economic prosperity which never returned in postwar Romania. As to launching a “war of aggression” against the Soviet Union, one can hardly overlook the fact that Antonescu was reacting to the annexation of northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, as well as the Hert¸a district in 1940, under the secret provisions of the August 23, 1939, Ribbentrop–Molotov pact. It is no less true, on the other hand, that Antonescu and his regime would have been found guilty of the latter two indictment counts by any objective tribunal. I am indebted to Jean Ancel for sharing with me his ideas on the trial from his unpublished manuscript “The Trial of Romania’s Dictator Ion Antonescu and his Regime.” 9 Marcel-Dumitru Ciuca˘, “Introducere,” in Procesul, Vol. 1, p. 33. 10 The public prosecutors were named by Communist Justice Minister Lucret¸iu Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu and most, if not all of them, were loyal party members, and in some cases Jews. The complete list of prosecutors included lawyers Avram Bunaciu (who would inherit Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu’s post in 1948), Ion Raiciu, Vasile Stoican, M. Mayo, Constantin Vicol, Stroe Botez, Ion I. Ioan, Petre Grozdea, Mihail Popilian, Constantin Mocanu and H. Leibovici; magistrates Ion Pora and S¸tefan Ralescu; civil servant Camil Surdu; and workers Alexandru Dra˘ ghici (who would become Interior Minister in 1952) and Dumitru Sa˘ racu (a former waiter at Bucharest’s luxurious Caps¸a restaurant). See Hary Kuller, Evreii în România anilor 1944–1949. Evenimente, documente, comentarii (Bucharest, 2002), p. 356. 11 The list of those sentenced by the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest and Cluj, with a short and strikingly apologetic introduction, can be found in Cristina Pa˘ us¸an, “Justit¸ia populara˘ s¸i criminalii de ra˘ zboi,” Arhivele totalitarismului, Nos. 1–2 (1999), pp. 150–65. The total given by Pa˘ us¸an (657) is inaccurate. A corrected list was sent to me by Dr. Radu Ioanid of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. 12 See Zoltán Tibori Szabó, “The Transylvanian Jewry during the Postwar Period, 1945–1948,” East European Perspectives, Nos. 18–19, at www.rferl.org/reports/ eepreport/2004. See also the highly interesting document of the minutes of a March 27, 1947, meeting between Communist Party officials and former public prosecutors who were party members. The participants were Justice Minister Lucret¸iu Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu (according to whom “some 200” people had been sentenced for war crimes), Interior Minister Teohari Georgescu, Alexandru Dra˘ghici and Avram Bunaciu, alongside prosecutors Alexandra Sidorovici, Dumitru Sa˘ racu, Vasile Stoican and Lepa˘da˘ escu (first name unknown). See Andreea Andreescu, Lucian Nastasa˘ and Andrea Varga (eds.), Evreii din România 1945–1965) (Cluj, 2003), pp. 311–25 (henceforth “S¸edint¸a cu fos¸tii acuzatori publici”). 13 Ibid.; and Randolph L. Braham, “The National Trials relating to the Holocaust in Hungary,” in Randolph L. Braham, Studies on the Holocaust: Selected

272

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38

39

Michael Shafir Writings, Vol. 1 (New York, 2000), p. 142. See also Randolph L. Braham, Genocide and Retribution (Boston, MA, 1983), pp. 53–224, for the English translation of the Cluj People’s Tribunal judgments. Note that in the trials held in Budapest some of the accused were sentenced for crimes committed in northern Transylvania. See Lucian Nastasa˘ , “Studiu introductiv,” in Andreescu, Nastasa˘ and Varga, Evreii din România, p. 21, and Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communist Rule (Bucharest, 1998), p. 63 n. 24. “S¸edint¸a cu fos¸tii acuzatori publici”, pp. 323–4 n. 9. American Jewish Archives Cincinnati, Ohio, courtesy of Dr. Radu Ioanid, US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Tibori Szabó, “Transylvanian Jewry.” Pa˘ us¸an, “Justit¸ia populara˘ ,” p. 150. The author wrongly dates the legislation at 1945. See interview with historian Dinu C. Giurescu, in the Group for Social Dialogue weekly Revista 22, December 2–8, 1997. Procesul, Vol. 2, p. 211. Ibid., pp. 432–9. Ibid., pp. 60–183. Giurescu, however, estimates the space devoted to racial crimes in the indictment at some 17 percent. See Revista 22, December 2–8, 1997. Procesul, Vol. 2, pp. 162–87. This contention was also raised by the marshal during the trial debates, see Procesul, Vol. 1, p. 203. Antonescu’s Romanian was surprisingly ungrammatical. He would often use the singular instead of the plural. Procesul, Vol. 1, pp. 205–7. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 184. Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 172–6. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 148. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 69. “Decret No. 72 privitor la liberarea îainte de termen a celor condamnat¸i,” Monitorul oficial, March 23, 1950. Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 103–4. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 103. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 184. See “Introduction” in Jean Ancel (ed.), Documents concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 13–19. Luca also told a meeting with representatives of party-linked mass organizations on October 15, 1945, “Above all what is needed is a serious struggle against Jewish fascist elements.” Document reproduced in Kuller, Evreii în România, p. 436. Ibid., pp. 440–3, quote, p. 442. Cited in Liviu Rotman, “Memory of the Holocaust in Communist Romania: From Minimization to Oblivion,” in Mihail E. Ionescu and Liviu Rotman (eds.), The Holocaust in Romania: History and Contemporary Significance (Bucharest, 2003), p. 206, and Liviu Rotman, “Antisemitismul-o ideologie veche (icirc} n haine noi,” in Identitatea evreiasca˘ s¸i antisemitismul î Europa centrala˘ s¸i de sudest. Simpozion internat¸ional (Bucharest, 2003), pp. 192–3. Speech at the January 1953 Politburo meeting cited in Rotman, “Antisemitismul,” p. 194. The reference here is clearly to the January 1941 Bucharest pogrom, during which thirteen (out of a total of over 120 killed) Jews were hung on meat hooks after being liquidated by the Iron Guard at the city’s slaughterhouse (abator), the cadavers labeled “Kosher meat.” See Lucret¸iu Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu, Un veac de fra˘ mînta˘ ri sociale (Bucharest, 1969), Sub trei dictaturi (Bucharest, 1970), and Curente s¸i tendint¸e î filozofia româneasca˘

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

40 41

42

43 44

45 46

47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

273

(Bucharest, 1971). The second among these three volumes was written between 1941 and 1945 and, consequently, could not address the issue of the Holocaust, although it dealt with Antonescu’s dictatorship. See Eskenasy, “The Holocaust and Romanian Historiography,” pp. 175–7. See Matatias Carp, Cartea neagra˘ : Suferiniele evreilor din România în timpul dictaturii fasciste 1940–1944, 3 vols (Bucharest, 1996; 2nd ed.). For the fate of the book under Communism and for its post-Communist fate, see also Radu Ioanid, “Romania,” in David S. Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore, 1996), pp. 236–7. See, for example, Gheorghe I. Ionit¸a˘ , “Un stra˘ lucit analist al procesului de nas¸tere s¸i evolut¸ie a mis¸ca˘ rii fasciste în România,” in Gheorghe I. Ionit¸a˘ and Aurel Karet¸chi, Intelectualii ies¸eni în lupta antifascista˘ (Ias¸i, 1971), pp. 58–86, as cited in Adrian Cioflânca˘ , “Gramatica disculpa˘ rii î istoriografia comunista˘ : Distorsionarea istoriei Holocaustului î timpul regimului Ceaus¸escu,”Anuarul Institutului de Istorie “A.D. Xenopol,” Ias¸i, Vol. 42 (2005), pp. 627–44. I am grateful to Mr. Cioflânca˘ for permission to cite from an earlier version of his excellent article. Mihai Roller et al., Istoria României. Manual unic pentru clasa a VIII-a secundara˘ (Bucharest, 1947), pp. 767–8. Mihai Fa˘ tu, Ion Spa˘ la˘ t¸elu, Garda de fier, organizat¸ie de tip fascist (Bucharest, 1971), cited in Eskenasy, “The Holocaust and Romanian Historiography,” p. 182. According to rumor, this volume was based on a tract written in prison by Nichifor Crainic (see below) but ideologically updated. The fact that Crainic wrote the tract under orders (originally, Cuibarul ucigas¸ilor [Murderers’ Nest]) is confirmed by Crainic’s son-in law Alexandru Condeescu in his introduction to Nichifor Crainic, Memorii (Bucharest, n.d.), p. 12 n. Vladimir Tismæneanu, Stalinism for all Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley, CA, 2003), p. 79. Following a late 1945 agreement between Horia Sima’s deputy, Nicolae Petras¸cu, and Communist Interior Minister Teohari Georgescu, thousands of former Iron Guardists joined the Communist Party. However, when their services and support were no longer needed, many Iron Guardists landed behind bars, among them Petras¸cu himself. Cioflânca˘ , “Gramatica disculpa˘ rii.” The volumes analyzed were the following: Miron Constantinescu et al., Istoria României. Compendiu (Bucharest, 1969); Constantin C. Giurescu and Dinu C. Giurescu, Istoria României din cele mai vechi timpuri pâna˘ asta˘zi (Bucharest, 1971); Marea conflagrat¸ie a secolului (Bucharest, 1974); Aurel Karet¸chi and Maria Covaci, Zile îsîgerate la Ias¸i 28–30 iunie 1941, introduction by Nicolae Minei (Bucharest, 1978); Mihai Fa˘ tu and Ion Spa˘la˘ t¸elu, Garda de Fier organizat¸ie de tip fascist (2nd edn., Bucharest, 1980); Mihai Fa˘ tu, Contribut¸ii la studierea regimului politic din România, septembrie 1940–august 1944 (Bucharest, 1984); Gheorghe Zaharia and Ion Cups¸a, Participarea României la îfrîgerea Germaniei naziste (Bucharest, 1985); id., România în anii celui de-al doilea ræzboi mondial, Vol. I (Bucharest, 1989); id., Istoria militara˘ a poporului român, Vol. VI (Bucharest, 1989). Cioflânca˘ , “Gramatica disculpa˘ rii.” See Iosif Constantin Dra˘ gan (ed.), Antonescu: Mares¸alul României s¸i ra˘ sboaile de reîtregire (4 vols., Venice, 1986–90). Eskenasy, “The Holocaust and Romanian Historiography,” pp. 192–3. See also article by Z. Ornea in the weekly Dilema, March 8–14, 1996. Vlad Hogea, Nat¸ionalistul (Ias¸i, 2001), p. 96. See Academia Cat¸avencu, March 7–13, 1995. Adeva˘ rul, November 12, 2003. România mare, April 6, 2001.

274

Michael Shafir

56 See Michael Shafir, “Ex Occidente Obscuritas. The Diffusion of Holocaust Denial from West to East,” Studia Hebraica (2003), p. 48 n. 6. 57 See Shari J. Cohen, Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in PostCommunist Nationalism, (Durham, NC, 1999), pp. 85–18. 58 Paul Goma, “Basarabia s¸i ‘problema’” II, Vatra, Nos. 5–6 (2002), p. 43. See also Paul Goma, Din calidor (Bucharest, 1990). 59 See Norman Manea, Casa melcului. Dialoguri (Bucharest, 1999), p. 91, and îtoarcerea huliganului (Ias¸i, 2003), pp. 68 ff. See also Michael Shafir, “The Man They Love to Hate: Norman Manea’s ‘Snail House’ between Holocaust and Gulag,” East European Jewish Affairs 30, No. 1 (2000), p. 63. 60 Alan S. Rosenbaum, “Introduction,” in Alan S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO, 1996), p. 2; Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Communism and the Human Condition: Reflections on the Black Book of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2 (2001), pp. 125–34. 61 Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA, 1999). 62 See Michael Shafir, Intre negare s¸i trivializare prin comparat¸ie. Negarea Holocaustului î t¸a˘ rile postcomuniste din Europa Centrala˘ s¸i de Est (Ias¸i, 2002), pp. 113–15 and “Between Denial and ‘Comparative Trivialization’: Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe,” ACTA (Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism), No. 19 (2002) (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), pp. 65–7. 63 See România mare, June 5, 1992. For details see Shafir, “Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era,” p. 343; also the text of a letter addressed by PRM founders C.V. Tudor and Eugen Barbu to Romanian prime minister Petre Roman, in Andrei Ples¸u and Petre Roman, Transforma˘ ri, inert¸ii, dezordini: 22 de luni dupa˘ 22 decembrie 1989. Andrei Ples¸u s¸i Petre Roman î dialog cu Elena S¸tefoi (Ias¸i, 2002), pp. 226–8 and different versions of this episode presented by Ples¸u and Roman, respectively, in ibid., pp. 118–26. 64 See Shafir, “Marshal Antonescu’s Post-Communist Rehabilitation,” pp. 353–4. 65 Monitorul oficial al României, May 31, 1991. 66 Interview in Observator military, No. 44, November 2–8, 1994. 67 Mediafax, June 14, 1999. 68 William Totok, “Rumänien wird zur Hochburg der Antisemiten,” Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), October 27, 1998. 69 Interview registered on November 2, 1990. Fragments were broadcast on RIASBerlin, February 5, 1991. I am grateful to William Totok for the information. 70 See Michael Shafir, “Marschall Ion Antonescu: Politik der Rehabilitierung,” Europaeische Rundschau 2 (1994), pp. 61–2, and id., “Marshal Antonescu’s PostCommunist Rehabilitation,” pp. 351–2. 71 Mediafax, July 31, 2002. 72 William Totok, “Sacrificarea lui Antonescu pe altarul diplomat¸iei,” I–IV, Observator cultural, Nos. 74–77, June 24–August 14, 2001. 73 Shafir, “Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era,” pp. 355–68; id., “The Mind of Romania’s Radical Right,” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 214–20; and id., “Marginalization or Mainstream? The Extreme Right in Post-Communist Romania,” in Paul Hainsworth (ed.), The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream (London, 2000), pp. 248–52 and 255–9. For the proposal to canonize Contreanu, see România mare, January 29, 1993. 74 See the interview with Pro Marshal Antonescu League spokesman, Major General Marin Popescu, in the weekly Flaca˘ ra, May 27, 1992. For details on this group see Shafir, “Marshal Antonescu’s Post-Communist Rehabilitation,” p. 358. 75 Rompres (in English), December 15 1992 and România libera˘, August 11, 1993. 76 Europa, February 16–23, 1992.

Romania’s road to facing collaboration 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93

94

95

96 97 98 99

275

See Ioan Dan, “Procesul” Mares¸alului Ion Antonescu (Bucharest, 1993). Dimineat¸a, January 8–9, 1994. See text of the letter in România mare, January 6, 1995. Ziua, October 22, 1999. See Revista 22, December 22–28, 1993. See the text of the letter in the official government daily Vocea României, September 8, 1995. Echoing the same line, presidential spokesman Traian Chebeleu said in early March 1996 that the drive to rehabilitate Antonescu was “unwarrantedly” associated abroad with antisemitism, while in reality those who pursued the rehabilitation were primarily motivated by “his personality as antiCommunist fighter, as soldier and as a politician who attempted to regain the territories that had become part of the USSR as a result of the Ribbentrop– Molotov pact.” Hence, according to Chebeleu, foreign reactions to the drive were “exaggerated.” See the weekly Dilema, March 8–14, 1996. For details see Shafir, “Marshal Antonescu’s Postcommunist Rehabilitation,” pp. 364–71. Realitatea evreiasca˘ , April 16–May 15, 1997. Realitatea evreiasca˘ , July 1998. Ziua, October 22, 1999. Adeva˘ rul, November 21, 1997. RFE/RL Newsline, November 10, 1997. See Lya Benjamin, “Dreptul la convertire s¸i statutul evreilor convertit¸i î perioada antonesciana˘ in Studia et acta historiae iudeaorum romaniae (Bucures¸ti), Vol. 3 (1998), pp. 245–62, and Michael Shafir, “Paradigme, parademonstrat¸ii, partra˘znete” III, Sfera politicii (Bucharest), No. 86 (2000), pp. 29–39. RFE/RL Newsline, November 17, 1997. ARPress, November 23, 1997. See Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania, pp. 64–5, 119, 127–8, 155–6, 158, 273, and Divers (April 2004). See Mediafax, January 30 and July 15, 2004; AFP, January 29, 2004; AP, April 21, 2004; “RFE/RL Newsline,” January 30, February 3 and July 16, 2004. The annulment of the procedure was not connected with the rehabilitation of war criminals. Rather, Romania was acting in the wake of considerable EU pressure resulting from the misuse of that procedure in appealing decisions on property restitution and on prison sentences pronounced against former FSN Ministers. See, for example, Radu Theodoru, A fost sau nu Holocaust? (Bucharest, n.d. [2003]). Theodoru is by far the most productive and blatant Romanian denier. For a discussion of his earlier works, see Shafir, “Between Denial and ‘Comparative Trivialization,’” pp.14, 23, and ître negare s¸i trivializare, pp. 33–45. For the Western source of inspiration of these views, see Shafir, “Ex Occidente Obscuritas.” I employ the concept “Holocaust denial” to include all shades of explicit and implicit references to the Holocaust that question either its very existence or its significance as an unprecedented atrocity in the history of mankind. Except for indicating its improper usage by using quotation marks, I do not use the concept “revisionism,” for reasons largely exhausted in arguments presented by Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, 1994) and by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley, CA, 2000). Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York, 1992), p. 18. Both cited in Eskenasy, “The Holocaust and Romanian Historiography,” p. 215. Mircea Mus¸at, 1940. Drama României Mari (Bucharest, 1992), p. 217. Realitatea evreiasca˘ , January 16–February 15, 2001.

276

Michael Shafir

100 RFE/RL Newsline, June 26, 2001. 101 There is a good discussion of duplicity in Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, CA, 1998), pp. 13–18, 37–41. Unfortunately, it largely ignores my own pioneering work on this important aspect of Romanian political culture, antedating all other works mentioned in Kligman’s impressive study. See Shafir, “Political Culture, Intellectual Dissent and Intellectual Consent,” Orbis, No. 2 (1983), pp. 393–420. 102 See George Voicu, Zeii cei ra˘ i. Cultura conspirat¸iei î România postcomunista˘ (Ias¸i, 2000), p. 129 (for Theodoru) and Ioan Buduca, “Care-i buba?” România literara˘ , April 22–28. 103 See Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, pp. 38–42 and 88; Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, p. 40; Ernst Nolte, “Standing Things on Their Heads: Against Negative Nationalism in Interpreting History,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1993), pp. 149–54 (originally published under the title “A Mere Inversion: Against Negative Nationalism in History: A Response to Jürgen Habermas and Eberhard Jäckel” in Die Zeit, October 31, 1986): and François Furet, Trecutul unei iluzii. Eseu despre ideea comunista˘ în secolul XX (Bucharest, 1996; this volume is a Romanian translation of Furet’s original Le passé d’une illusion. Essai sur l’idée communiste au XXe siècle). 104 Alex Mihai Stoenescu, Armata, mares¸alul s¸i evreii (Bucharest, 1998), p. 280. 105 Ioan Scurtu and Constantin Hlihor, Anul 1940. Drama românilor dintre Pruts¸i Nistru (Bucharest, 1992). 106 Gheorghe Buzatu, As¸a a îceput holocaustul împotriva poporului român (Bucharest, 1995). 107 Ibid. 108 For a detailed analysis, see Radu Ioanid, “Paul Goma între Belville s¸i Bucures¸ti,” Observator cultural, July 15–21, 2003. 109 Paul Goma, Basarabia (Bucharest, 2002). I call this a “pseudo-novel” because Goma attempted to write a novel about a Bessarabian (Moldovan) man conscripted into the Soviet army in Afghanistan and being unable to carry on because of an obsession with what happened in his native Bessarabia during the war. 110 Paul Goma, Sa˘ pta˘ mâna ros¸ie 28 iunie–3 iulie 1940 sau Basarabia s¸i evreii (Chis¸ina˘ u, 2003; Bucharest, 2004). Citations are from the Bucharest version. Excerpts were also published by the Târgu-Mures¸-based monthly Vatra under the title “Basarabia s¸i ‘problema’,” Nos. 3–4 and 5–6 (2002), pp. 34–43 and 32–46, respectively, and in the Bucharest-based Jurnalul literar (March–April–May 2002); parts were serialized in Aldine, a supplement of the daily România libera˘ . 111 Goma, Sa˘ pta˘ mâna ros¸ie, p.171. 112 Ion Coja, Legionarii nos¸tri (Bucharest, 1997), pp. 156–69. 113 România mare, September 26, 2003. 114 Permanent¸e (July 2001). 115 See Mihai Pelin, Culisele spionajului românesc (Bucharest, 1997), pp. 15–25. Furthermore, since the Romanian authorities wrongly sought to attribute the attack on the legation to the Iron Guard, it would have made little sense to have Filderman testify at the trial in favor of Marshal Ion Antonescu, who liquidated the Legion. 116 The volume was Sabin Manuila˘ and Wilhelm Filderman, Populat¸ia evreiasca˘ din România în timpul celui de-al doilea ræzboi mondial (Ias¸i, 1994), where the editor, Kurt Treptow, referred to the alleged testimony as being Filderman’s “testament” (see “Editor’s Notes,” pp. 8–12). Treptow also quoted from it in an edited History of Romania volume, where he failed to source the citations attributed to

Romania’s road to facing collaboration

117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

277

Filderman. See Kurt W. Treptow (ed.), A History of Romania (Ias¸i, 1995), pp. 485, 499–500. The alleged document was also reproduced in Hogea, Nat¸ionalistul, pp. 63–5, but in somewhat altered form, no more credible than that cited by Treptow. Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania, p. 274. Carp, Cartea neagra˘ , Vol. 3, p.189. See Lya Benjamin, “Dr. Filderman s¸i regimul antonescian ître realitate s¸i mistificare,” Buletinul Centrului, Muzeului s¸i Arhivei istorice a evreilor din Romania 7 (2001), pp. 40–6. Procesul, Vol. 1, p. 412. Ion Coja, Marele manipulator s¸i asasinarea lui Culianu, Ceaus¸escu, Iorga (Bucharest, 1999), pp. 299–300. Alexandru S¸afran, Un ta˘ ciune smuls fla˘ ca˘ rilor (Bucharest, 1996), p. 86. For example, Ra˘ zvan Codrescu, Spiritul dreptei (Bucharest, 1997), pp. 171–2. For further discussion of the implications of the interview see Michael Shafir, “Negation at the Top: Deconstructing the Holocaust Denial Salad in the Romanian Cucumber Season,” Xenopoliana 11, Nos. 3–4 (2003), pp. 90–122. România mare, July 26, 2002. Coja, Marele manipulator, p. 183. Id., “Simpozion internat¸ional: Holocaust î România,” (1–7), România mare, July 13–August 24, 2001. Larry L. Watts, O casandra˘ a României. Ion Antonescu (Bucharest, 1993), pp. 392–3. See International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report (Ias¸i, 2005), p. 381. Ibid., pp. 381–2. Vygantes Vareikis, “‘Double Genocide’ and the ‘Holocaust–Gulag’ Rhetoric in Lithuania,” in Leon Volovici (ed.), Jews and Antisemitism in the Public Discourse of the Post-Communist European Countries (Lincoln, NE, forthcoming). See Alexandra Laignel–Lavastine, “Fascisme et communisme en Roumanie: Enjeux et usage d’une comparaison,” in Henry Rousso (ed.), Stalinisme et nazisme. Histoire et mémoire comparées (Brussels, 1999), pp. 201–46. România mare, June 22, 2001. For details, see Shafir, “The Man They Love to Hate.” See Monica Lovinescu, “Negat¸ionis¸tii de stîga,” in Monica Lovinescu, Diagonale (Bucharest, 2002), pp. 212–14. Nicolae Manolescu, “Vîa˘ toarea de vra˘ jitoare,” România literara˘, June 11–17, 1997. Mediafax and AP, June 1, 2001. See RFE/RL Newsline, October 31, November 2, 2001; Cotidianul and Curentul, November 5 2001. România libera˘ , February 27, 2002. RFE/RL Newsline, March 19, 2002; Cotidianul, March 19, 2002; Monitorul oficial al României, March 28, 2002. Romanian Radio, March 22, 23, 2003. Adeva˘ rul, March 26, 2002. Ibid., June 29–30, 2002. Ibid., June 5, 2002. For Theodorescu’s argument, see Romanian Television’s First Channel and Mediafax, May 8, 2002; Mediafax, May 27, 2002; Rompres, June 28, 2002. See the couple’s interview with Reuter’s, May 6, 2002. RFE/ RL Newsline, June 26, 2001. Rompres, June 12, 2003; Adeva˘ rul, June 13, 2003; RFE/RL Newsline, June 13, 2003.

278

Michael Shafir

149 MCA press release, June 12, 2003. 150 Realitatea evreiasca˘ , June 6–23, 2003. 151 Rompres, June 17, 2003, and Curentul, June 17, 2003; RFE/RL Newsline, June 19, 2003. 152 Mediafax, June 16, 2003, citing a press release of the Israeli embassy in Bucharest; Ziua, June 17, 2003; RFE/RL Newsline, June 17, 2003. 153 Mediafax, June 16, 2003. 154 Ibid., June 17, 2003; Reuter’s, June 18, 2003; RFE/RL Newsline, June 19, 2003. 155 Ha’aretz (English edition), July 25, 2003, at www.haaretzdaily.com. See also RFE/RL Newsline, July 28, 2003. 156 Mediafax, July 27, 2003. 157 See the interview with Mariaschin in România libera˘ , August 4, 2003. 158 See Felicia Waldman, “Coming to Terms with the Recent Past: Holocaust Education in Post-Communist Romania,” RFE/RL East European Perspectives, 6, Nos. 14–15 (2004), at www.rferl.org/reports/eepreport/2004. 159 For a discussion see Michael Shafir, “Memory, Memorials and Membership: Romanian Utilitarian Antisemitism and Marshal Antonescu,” in Henry F. Carey (ed.), Romania since 1989: Politics, Culture and Society (Lanham, MD, 2004), pp. 67–96. 160 See Carol Iancu, Evreii din România de la excludere la emancipare 1866–1919 (Bucharest, 1996) and Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1995).

Bibliography

Abrahamsen, Samuel, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust: a historical perspective (New York, 1991). American Jewish Year Book 2004 (New York, 2004). Ancel, Jean (ed.), Documents concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1986). Andersen, Steen, Danmark I det tyske storrum: Dansk økonomisk tilpasning til Tyskland nyordning af Europa 1940–41 (Copenhagen, 2005). Andreescu, Andreea, Nastasa˘ , Lucian and Varga, Andrea (eds), Evreii din România (1945–1965) (Cluj, 2003). Andrzejewski, Jerzy, Wielki Tydzien´ (Warsaw, 1993). Antal, Czettler, Ellenállás, Magyar and A Német, “‘Végs´´ o Mególdás’” Tervével Szemben 1942–1943-ban,” Magyar Szemle, nos. 5–6 (June 1999), available at www. magyarszemle.hu/archivum/8_5–6/5. Aphieroma teuchos gia to Olokautoma ton Evraion tes Ellados (Athens, 2006, also 1985, 1992); available at http://www.kis.gr/chr_olokautoma_eisag.pdf. Apostolou, Andrew, “Greek Tragedy,” review of Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950,” Commentary (July–August 2005), pp. 75–7. ——, “‘The Exception of Salonika’: Bystanders and Collaborators in Northern Greece,” Holocaust Genocide Studies 14, no. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 165–96. Apostolou, Leuteres, E parodia tes dikes ton dosilogon kai e autokatadike tes dexias (Athens, 1945). Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: a history (Kiev, 2006). Arad, Yitzhak, Gutman, Israel, and Margaliot, Abraham (eds), Documents on the Holocaust: selected sources on the destruction of the Jews of Germany, Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union (Jerusalem, 1982). Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil (New York, 1963). Aron, Robert, The Vichy Regime 1940–1944 (London, 1958). Augustín, Milan, Krátke dejiny Židov na Slovensku (Bratislava, 1993). Averbukh, S., “Gitlerovskaia yudofobia v proklamatsiakh i karikaturakh,” Ukrainskii Tsentr izuchenia Kholokosta (Kiev, 2005). Azéma, Jean-Pierre, “La Révolution Paxtonienne” in Sarah Fishman et al. (eds), France at War. Vichy and the historians (Oxford/New York, 2000). Bak, Sofie Lene, Jødeaktionen oktober 1943. forestillinger i offentlighed og forskning (Copenhagen, 2001).

280

Bibliography

Balace, Francis, “Collaboration et repression en Wallonie, un regard particulier?” in José Gotovitch and Chantal Kesteloot, Collaboration, repression: un passé qui résiste (Brussels, 2002). Ba˘ lan, Ion, Regimul concentrat¸ional din România 1945–1964 (Bucharest, 2000). Balint, T´´ or´´ ok, “Értjük-e Teleki nagyságát,” Magyar Szemle, nos. 5–6 (2001), pp. 72–90. Bank, J., Oorlogsverleden in Nederland (Baarn, 1983). Bankier, David (ed.), The Jews Are Coming Back (Jerusalem, 2005). Baranová, Daniela, At the Gates of Hell (Tel Aviv, 2003). Barnouw, D., de Keizer, M. and G. van der Stroom (eds), 1940–1945: onverwerkt verleden (Utrecht, 1985). Baruch, Marc-Olivier (ed.), Une poignée de misérables: l’épuration de la société française après la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris, 2003). Battaglia, R., Storia della Resistenza: 8 settembre 1943–25 aprile 1945 (Turin, 1964). ——, “La Resistenza,” Mdl, no. 57 (1959). Battini, M., Peccati di memoria: la mancata Norimberga italiana (Rome/Bari, 2003). Bauer, Y., Rethinking the Holocaust (Yale, 2001). Bednarczyk, Tadeusz, Obowia˛ zek silniejszy od s´mierci (Warsaw, 1982). Belinfante, A.D., In plaats van bijltjesdag: de geschiedenis van de bijzondere rechtspleging na de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Assen, 1978), pp. 513–40. Benjamin, Lya, “Dr. Filderman s¸i regimul antonescian între realitate s¸i mistificare,” Buletinul Centrului, Muzeului s¸i Arhivei istorice a evreilor din Romania 7 (2001). ——, “Dreptul la convertire S¸i statutul evreilor convertit¸i în perioada antonesciana˘ in Studia et acta historiae iudeaorum romaniae (Bucures¸ti), Vol. 3 (1998), pp. 245–62. Benziger, Karl P., “The Trial of Lászlo Bárdossy: the second world war and factional politics in contemporary Hungary,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 3 (2005), pp. 465–81. Berenbaum, M. and Peck, A. J., (eds), The Holocaust and History (Bloomington, Ind., 1998). Berkhoff, Karel C., Harvest of Despair: life and death in Ukraine under Nazi rule (Harvard, 2004). Berserk, R., De tweede generatie: herinneringen van een NSB-kind (Utrecht/Antwerp, 1985). Beyen, Marnix, “Comment s’est forgée l’image de l’occupation et de la répression en Flandre (1945–2000),” in José Gotovitch and Chantal Kesteloot, Collaboration, repression: un passé qui résiste (Brussels, 2002). Bezanson, Alen, Bedstvie veka (Moscow, 2000). Bidussa, D., Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan, 1994). Bloch, Marc, L’étrange défaite, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York, 1949). Blom, J.C.H., In de ban van goed en fout? Wetenschappelijke geschiedschrijving over de bezettingstijd in Nederland (Bergen, 1983). ——, ‘t Hart, A.C. & Schöffer, I., De affaire-Menten 1945–1976: eindrapport van de commissie van onderzoek betreffende het opsporings-en vervolgingsbeleid inzake Menten vanaf de bevrijding tot de zomer van 1976 en de invloeden waaraan dat beleid al dan niet heeft blootgestaan (The Hague, 1979). Błon´ski, Jan, “The Poor Poles Look At the Ghetto,” in A. Polonsky (ed.), My Brother’s Keeper? Polish debates on the Holocaust (London, 1989), pp. 34–52. Bolhuis, J., Brandt, C.D.J., van Randwijk, H.M. and Slotemaker, B.C. (eds), Onderdrukking en verzet. Nederland in oorlogstijd, Vol. I. (Nijmegen, n.d. [1949–54]).

Bibliography

281

Braham, Randolph L. (ed.), The Holocaust in Hungary: sixty years later (New York, 2006). ——, “The Assault on Historical Memory: Hungarian Nationalists and the Holocaust,” East European Quarterly 33, no. 4 (January 2000). ——, “The National Trials Relating to the Holocaust in Hungary,” in Randolph L. Braham, Studies on the Holocaust: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (New York, 2000). ——(ed.), Studies on the Holocaust: selected writings, Vol. 1 (New York, 2000). ——(ed.), Antisemitism and the Treatment of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (New York, 1994). ——, The Politics of Genocide (New York, 1994). ——(ed.), The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry (New York, 1994). ——, Genocide and Retribution (Boston, 1983). Braxator, F., Slovensk exil (Bratislava, 1992). Brilman, P.M., “Een strafrechtelijke nalatenschap,” in D. Barnouw, M. de Keizer and G. van der Stroom (eds), 1940–1945: onverwerkt verleden (Utrecht, 1985). Brustin-Berenstein, Tatiana, “The Historiographic Treatment of the Abortive Attempt to Deport the Danish Jews,” Yad Vashem Studies, no. 17 (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 181–218; Danish edition, 1993. Buechler, Robert Y., “Znovuoživenie židovskej komunity na Slovensku po druhej svetovej vojne,” Acta Judaica Slovaca, no. 4 (1998), pp. 65–77. ——, Gila Fatran and Stanislav Micˇ ev, Slovenskí Židia (Banská Bystrica, 1991). ˇ eskoslovensko a Izrael 1945–1956: Dokumenty (Prague, 1993). Bulínová, M., (ed.), C Burrin, Philippe, La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1995; NY, 1996). ——, La dérive fasciste. Doriot, Deat, Bergery (Paris, 1986). Buzatu, Gheorghe, As¸a a început holocaustul împotriva poporului român (Bucharest, 1995). Bystrick, V., and Fano, Š. (eds), Pokus o politick a osobn profil Jozefa Tisu (Bratislava, 1992). Calvino, Italo, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Turin, 1964). Cambanis, Thanassis, “Forgotten History, Fragile Future: a belated tribute to Greece’s fascinating Jews,” Odyssey (January/February 1998). ˇ eskoslovensku 1918–1939 (Bratislava, 2001). ˇ aplovicˇ , Miloslav, Branné organizácie v C C Carey, Henry F. (ed.), Romania since 1989: politics, culture and society (Lanham, MD, 2004), pp. 67–96. Carp, Matatias, Cartea neagra˘ : suferiniele evreilor din România în timpul dictaturii fasciste 1940–1944, 3 vols (Bucharest, 1996; 2nd ed.). Carpi, D. (ed.), Italian Diplomatic Documents on the History of the Holocaust in Greece (1941–1943) (Tel Aviv, 1999). ——, Between Mussolini and Hitler: the Jews and the Italian authorities in France and in Tunisia (Waltham, MA, 1994). Charles, J.B., Volg het spoor terug (Amsterdam, 1984 [1953]). Christensen, Claus Bundgård, Lund, Joachim, Olesen, Niels Wium and Sørensen, Jakob, Danmark besat. Krig og hverdag 1940–45 (Copenhagen, 2005). Chaumont, M., “Notes sur le responsabilité historique,” in Y. Thanassekos and H. Wisman (eds), Révision de l’histoire (Paris, 1990). Cingal, Grégory, Fonds Robert Aron (Nanterre, 2004). Cioflânca˘ , Adrian, “Gramatica disculpa˘ rii în istoriografia comunista˘ : Distorsionarea istoriei Holocaustului în timpul regimului Ceaus¸escu,”Anuarul Institutului de Istorie “A.D. Xenopol,” Ias¸i, Vol. 42 (2005).

282

Bibliography

Ciuca˘ , Marcel-Dumitru (ed.), Procesul Mares¸alului Antonescu: Documente, 2 vols (Bucharest, 1995). Coates, Paul, “Observing the Observer: Andrzej Wajda’s Holy Week” (1995), Canadian Slavonic Papers (March-June 2000). Codrescu, Ra˘ zvan, Spiritul dreptei (Bucharest, 1997). Coen, F., Italiani ed ebrei come eravamo (Rome, 1988). Cohen, Asher, Persécutions et sauvetages (Paris, 1993). Cohen, Raya (ed.), European Jews, Jewish Europeans between Two World Wars, Goren-Goldstein Center for Diaspora Research (Michael series) (Tel Aviv, 2004; in Hebrew). Cohen, Shari J., Politics without a Past: the absence of history in post-Communist nationalism, (Durham, NC, 1999). Coja, Ion, Marele manipulator s¸i asasinarea lui Culianu, Ceaus¸escu, Iorga (Bucharest, 1999). ——, Legionarii nos¸tri (Bucharest, 1997). Collotti, E., L’amministrazione tedesca dell’Italia occupata (Milan, 1963). Conan, Eric, and Rousso, Henry, Vichy, an Ever-Present Past (Hanover, NH, 1998). Connerton, P., How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989). Consonni, M., “Between Anti-fascism and Judaism: interview with Vittorio Foa, 5 February 2000,” Michael, no. 16 (2004; in Hebrew), pp. 203–27. ——, “Memory and Forgetting: Italian historiography and the fascist past,” Zmanim, no. 81 (2002–3; in Hebrew), pp. 94–98. Constantinescu, Miron, et al., Istoria României: compendiu (Bucharest, 1969). Constantopoulou, Photini and Veremis, Thanos (eds), Documents on the History of the Greek Jews: records from the historical archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Athens 1998). Conway, Martin, Degrelle: les années de collaboration (Brussels, 2005). Courtois, Stéphane, et al., The Black Book of Communism: crimes, terror, repression (Cambridge, MA, 1999). ——, Le PCF dans la Guerre (Paris, 1980). Crainic, Nichifor, Memorii (Bucharest, n.d.). Czech, Danuta, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945: from the archives of the Auschwitz memorial and the German Federal Archives (New York, 1990). Dahl, Hans Fredrik, Vidkun Quisling: en fører for fall (Oslo, 1992). ——, Hjeltnes, Guri, Nøkleby, Berit, Ringdal Nils Johan and Øystein Sørensen (eds), Norsk krigsleksikon (Oslo, 1995). Dan, Ioan, “Procesul” Mares¸alului Ion Antonescu, (Bucharest, 1993). Daphnes, Kostas, Chronia polemou kai katoches: kerkyra 1940–1944, mia agnoste istoria, (Corfu, 1966). . Datner, Szymon, “Eksterminacja ludnos´ci zydowskiej w Okre˛ gu Białostockim,” Biu. letyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce (1966). Daxner, Igor, L’udáctvo o pred Národnm súdom (Bratislava 1961). Deák, István, “‘A Fatal Compromise’: the debate over collaboration and resistance in Hungary,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe – World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000), pp. 39–73. ——, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe – World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000). ——, “A Hungarian Admiral on Horseback,” The New York Review of Books, 8 April 1999.

Bibliography

283

——, “Antisemitism and the Treatment of the Holocaust in Hungary,” in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), Antisemitism and the Treatment of the Holocaust in PostCommunist Eastern Europe (New York, 1994). Debenedetti, G., Otto ebrei (Rome, 1944). de Haan, Ido, “Een wereldbeeld in grijstinten,” bespreking van Chris van der Heijden, Grijs verleden, Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 2001), in Vrij Nederland 62 (2001), pp. 62–63. ——, “The Construction of a National Trauma. The Memory of the Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands,” Netherlands Journal for Social Science 34 (1998), pp. 196–217. ——, Na de ondergang. De herinnering aan de Jodenvervolging in Nederland, 1945–1995 (The Hague, 1997). De Filippo, E., Napoli milionaria (Turin, 1950). de Jong, L., Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Vol. 12 (The Hague/Leiden 1988). Deletant, Dennis, Romania under Communist Rule (Bucharest, 1998). Derksen, W. and van der Sande, M.L. (eds), De burgemeester, van magistraat tot modern bestuurder (Leiden, 1984). ——, “Wij waren niet op heldendom geselecteerd,” in W. Derksen and M.L. van der Sande (eds), De burgemeester, van magistraat tot modern bestuurder (Leiden, 1984). Dethlefsen, Henrik, “Ud af mørket – den danske modstand og redningen af jøderne i oktober 1943,” in Hans Sode–Madsen (ed.), “Føreren har befalet!” Jødeaktionen oktober 1943 (Copenhagen, 1993). de Vries, Theun, W.A.-man (Amsterdam, 1982 [1944]). Dialeksa te zoe … apo ti Thessalonike sto Auschwitz (Salonika, 1997). Diner, D., “The Irreconcilability of an Event: integrating the Holocaust into the narrative of the century,” in D. Michman (ed.), Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000: German strategies and Jewish responses (New York, 2002). Dohnal, Milonˇ , Dejepis pre 8.rocˇ ník zákl. školy (Bratislava, 1983). ——, Dejepis pro 9.rocˇ ník ZDS (Prague, 1970). Dra˘ gan, Iosif Constantin (ed.), Antonescu: Mares¸alul României s¸i ra˘ sboaile de reîntregire, 4 vols (Venice, 1986& ndash;90). Driever, Jan and Brauer, Jan, Perszuivering. De Nederlandse pers 1944–1951 (Weesp, 1984). Dullová, Valeria, “Dejepis pre 9.rocˇ ník základnej devätˇrocˇ nej školy (Bratislava, 1971). Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska, Małgorzata, “Main Issues in Polish-Jewish Relations,” 1999 Yearbook of the Polish foreign ministry (Warsaw, 2000). Edelsheim-Horthy, Ilona, Becsulet ´´ és k´´ otelesség, 2 vols (Budapest, 2001, 2007). Enepekides, Polychrones, Oi diogmoi ton Evraion en Elladi, epi te vasei ton mystikon archeion ton ES-ES (Athens, 1969; 2nd ed., 1996). Engel, David, “Jan Karski’s Mission in Historical Context,” in Esther Webman and Laurence Weinbaum (eds), Jan Karski, The Man and His Mission (Tel Aviv, 2006; in Hebrew), pp. 23–31. ——, Facing a Holocaust: the Polish government-in-exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill/London, 1993). ——, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: the Polish government-in-exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill/London, 1987).

284

Bibliography

. . Engelking, Barbara, Tych, Feliks, Zbikowski, Andrzej and Zyndul, Jolanta, Pamie˛ c´, . Historia Zydów Polskich przed, w czasie i po Zagładzie (Warsaw, 2004). Epstein, Simon, Les dreyfusards sous l’occupation (Paris, 2001). Eriksen, Anne, Det var noe annet under krigen: 2. verdenskrig i norsk kollektivtradisjon (Oslo, 1995). Eskenasy, Victor, “The Holocaust and Romanian Historiography: Communist and neo-Communist revisionism,” in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry (New York, 1994). Ezergailis, Andrievas, “Folklore versus History: a problem in Holocaust studies, in the issues of the Holocaust research in Latvia,” The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, Reports of an International Conference (Riga, 2001; in English). Fasseur, Cees, Wilhelmina: krijgshaftig in een vormloze jas (Amsterdam, 2001). Fatran, Gila, Antisemitism in Slovakia in the 19th Century (Jerusalem, 2009; in Hebrew). ——, “The Expulsion of the Jews of Slovakia in 1944–45,” Yalkut Moreshet, no. 58 (1994), pp. 63–81. ——, A Struggle for Survival (Tel Aviv, 1991; in Hebrew) Fa˘ tu, Mihai, Contribubuii la studierea regimului politic din România (septembrie 1940– august 1944) (Bucharest, 1984). ——,and Spa˘ la˘ t¸elu, Ion, Garda de Fier organitazie de tip fascist (Bucharest, 1980; 2nd ed.). ——,and, Garda de fier, organizatie de tip fascist (Bucharest, 1971). Ferko, Milan, Marsina, Richard, Deák, Ladislav, and Kružliak, Imrich, Star národ– mlad štát (Bratislava, 2005). Finklestein, Norman, The Holocaust Industry: reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (New York, 2000). Fishman, Sarah, et al. (eds), France at War: Vichy and the historians (translated as La France sous Vichy) (Oxford/New York, 2000). Fleischer, Hagen, Stemma kai Svastika: e ellada tes katoches kai tes antistases 1941–1944, Vol. 2 (Athens, 1995). Foa, V., Questo Novecento (Turin, 1996). ——, “La crisi della Resistenza prima della Liberazione,” Il Ponte, no. 6 (1950), pp. 594–605. ——, “Griechenland,” in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: die zahl der jüdischen opfer des nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1991), pp. 241–74. Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original documents of the Historikerstreit concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1993), pp. 149–54. Frederiks, K.J., Op de bres 1940–1944: overzicht van de werkzaamheden aan het Departement van Binnenlandse Zaken gedurende de oorlogsjaren (The Hague, 1945). Frei, Norbert, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past (New York, 2002). Friedlander, Saul, The Years of Extermination (New York, 2007). Friedman, Towiah, Dokumentensammlung ueber “Die Deportierung der Juden aus Norwegen nach Auschwitz” (Ramat Gan, 1963; Haifa, 1994). Friedman-van der Heide, Reine, Drie processen (Amsterdam, 1946). Frisch, Hartvig, Danmark besat og befreit, Vol III (Copenhagen, 1948). Galli della Loggia, E., La morte della patria (Bari, 1996). ——, L’identità italiana (Bologna, 1998). ——, “Ideologia, classi e costume,” L’Italia contemporanea 1945–1975 (Turin, 1976) Gambino, A., Storia del dopoguerra: dalla liberazione al potere D.C. (Bari, 1984).

Bibliography

285

Gentile, E., La via italiana al totalitarismo: il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista (Rome, 1995). Georgakas, Dan, “Safe Havens: sheltering Jews during the German occupation of Greece,” Odyssey (July/August 1995). Gibertoni, R., “Fossoli,” Dizionario dell’Olocausto (Turin, 2004), pp. 297–300. Ginsborg, P., Storia del dopoguerra a oggi: società e politica 1943–1988 (Turin, 1989). Ginzburg, C., “Unus Testis: lo sterminio degli ebrei e il principio di realtà,” Quaderni Storici 80 (1992), pp. 93–128. Giurescu, Constantin C., and Giurescu, Dinu C., Istoria României din cele mai vechi timpuri pâna˘ asta˘ zi (Bucharest, 1971). Gli ebrei in Italia: dall’emancipazione a oggi (Turin, 1997). Glucksmann, Andre, The Discourse of Hatred (St. Petersburg, 2006). Goma, Paul, Sa˘ pta˘ mâna ros¸ie 28 iunie – 3 iulie 1940 sau Basarabia s¸i evreii, (Chis¸ina˘ u, 2003; Bucharest, 2004). ——, Basarabia (Bucharest, 2002). ——,“Basarabia s¸i ‘problema’”(II), Vatra, nos. 5–6 (2002). ——, Din calidor (Bucharest, 1990). Gon, M., Z krivdoiu na samoty, Ukraynsko–evreiisky vzaemini na Voliny v 1926–1939 rokakh (Rivne, 2005). Gotovitch, Jose, “Resistance Movement and the Jewish Question,” in D. Michman (ed.), Belgium and the Holocaust, (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 285–73. ——and Kesteloot, Chantal (eds), Collaboration, repression: un passé qui résiste (Brussels, 2002). Le gouvernement de Vichy: 1940& ndash;1942, institutions et politique (Paris, 1972). Greenberg, Irving, “The Righteous Rescuers,” in Carol Rittner and Sondra Myers (eds), The Courage to Care: rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York, 1986). Grimnes, Ole Kristian, Norge under okkupasjonen (Oslo, 1983). ——, Et flyktningesamfunn vokser fram: Nordmenn i Sverige 1940–1945 (Oslo, 1969). Gritsak, Ia., Strasti za natsionalizmom – Zbirka stateii (Kiev, 2004). ——, Ukraintsy v anti evreiiskikh aktsiakh pid chas Drugoy svitovoy vyini (Lvov, 1996). Groen, Koos, Als slachtoffers daders worden: de zaak van de joodse verraadster Ans van Dijk (Baarn, 1994) ——, Landverraad: de berechting van collaborateurs in Nederland (Weesp, 1984). ——, Landverraders, wat deden we met ze? (Baarn, 1974). Gross, Jan T., Sa˛ siedzi (Sejny, 2000). Grüter, Regina, Een fantast schrijft geschiedenis: de affaires rond Friedrich Weinreb (Amsterdam, 1997). Grynberg, Henryk, “Appropriating the Holocaust” Commentary (November 1982). Guiducci, A., “Sulla letteratura dei campi di sterminio,” Società, no. 1 (1955). Gutman, Y., and Krakowski, S., Unequal Victims (New York, 1986). Hæstrup, Jørgen, … til landets bedste. Hovedtræk af departementschefstyrets virke 1943–45, Vols 1–2 (Copenhagen, 1966). Haidia, Eleni, “The Punishment of Collaborators in Northern Greece, 1945–1946,” in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over: reconstructing the family, nation and state in Greece, 1943& ndash;1960 (Princeton/Oxford, 2000), pp. 42–61. Hainsworth, Paul (ed.), The Politics of the Extreme Right: from the margins to the mainstream (London, 2000). Harsanyi, János (ed.), A magyar szabadságharcosok a fasizmus ellen (Budapest, 1966).

286

Bibliography

Hasquin, Hervé, Les séparatistes wallons et le Gouvernement de Vichy (1940–1943): une histoire d’Omerta (Brussels, 2004). Hassid, Samuel, The Trial of Max Merten in the Changing Mirrors of Time and Place (Haifa, 2002), available at http://hcc.haifa.ac.il/Departments/history-school/conferences/holocaust_greece/Samuel _Hassid.pdf. Helger, Bendt, Ravaitaillement de la Grèce pendant l’occupation 1941–1944 et pendant les premiers cinq mois après la libération: rapport final de la Commission de Gestion pour les Secours en Grèce sous les auspices du Comité International de la CroixRouge (Athens, 1949). Heller, Celia, On the Edge of Destruction (New York, 1977). Herbert, Ulrich, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996). Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York/New Haven, 2003). ——, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: the Jewish catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York, 1992). Hirschfeld, G., Bezetting en collaboratie: Nederland tijdens de oorlogsjaren 1940–1945 in historisch perspectief (Haarlem, 1991 [1984]). Hoffman, Stanley, Essais sur la France (Paris, 1974). ——, “Chagrin et pitié,” in Charles S. Maier, Stanley Hoffmann, and Andrew Gould (eds), The Rise of the Nazi Regime: historical reassessments (Harvard, 1986). Hofland, H.J.A., Keller, H. and H. Verhagen, Vastberaden, maar soepel en met mate: herinneringen aan Nederland 1938–1948 (Amsterdam, 1976). Hofman, J., De collaborateur. een sociaal-psychologisch onderzoek naar misdadig gedrag in dienst van de Duitse bezetter (Amsterdam, 1981). Hogea, Vlad, Nat¸ionalistul (Ias¸i, 2001). Houwink ten Cate, J.Th.M., “De justitie en de Joodsche Raad,” in E. Jonker and M. van Rossem (eds), Geschiedenis & Cultuur: achttien opstellen (The Hague, 1990), pp. 149–68. Huyse, Luc and D’hont, S., La Répression des Collaborateurs (Brussels, 1993). Iancu, Carol, Evreii din România de la excludere la emancipare (1866–1919) (Bucharest, 1996). Ingwersen, A., Open brief aan Zijne Excellentie de Minister-president Prof.Ir. W. Schermerhorn (n.p., n.d. [Amsterdam, 1945]). Institute for the Study of Saloniki Jewry, Ginzach Saloniki (Tel Aviv, 1961). International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report (Ias¸i, 2005). Ioannou, Giorgios, To diko mas aima, (Athens, 1978). Iones, E., Evrei Lvova v gody Vtoroii Mirovoii voiiny (1939–1945) (Jerusalem/Lvov, 2000). Ionescu, Mihail E., and Rotman, Liviu (eds), The Holocaust in Romania: history and contemporary significance (Bucharest, 2003). Ioanid, Radu, “Romania,” in David S. Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore, 1996). Ionit¸a˘ , Gheorghe I. and Karet¸chi, Aurel, Intelectualii ies¸eni în lupta antifascista˘ (Ias¸i, 1971). ——, “Un stra˘ lucit analist al procesului de nas¸tere s¸i evolut¸ie a mis¸ca˘ rii fasciste în România,” in Gheorghe I. Ionit¸a˘ and Aurel Karet¸chi, Intelectualii ies¸eni în lupta antifascista˘ (Ias¸i, 1971), pp. 58–86. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona, Neutralizing Memory: the Jew in contemporary Poland (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1989). The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, Reports of an International Conference [sic] (Riga, 2001; in English).

Bibliography

287

Istoria militara˘ a poporului român, Vol. VI (Bucharest, 1989). Jäckel, Eberhard, La France dans l’Europe d’Hitler (Paris, 1968). Jedlowski, P., Memoria, esperienza e modernità (Milan, 1989). Jelínek, Jesajahu Andrej, Židia na Slovensku v 19 a 20. Storocˇ í, Vol.II (Bratislava, 2000). ——, “Komunistická strana Slovenska a Židia: Desatˇ rokov (1938–48),” in Židia na Slovensku v 19 a 20, Storocˇ í (I.cˇ astˇ), Vol. 1 (Bratislava, 1999). Jensen, Mette Bastholm and Jensen, Steven L. B. (eds), Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen, 2003). Johansen, Per Ole, Oss selv nnærmest: Norge og jødene 1914–1943 (Oslo, 1984). Joly, Laurent, Vichy dans la “solution finale,” histoire du commissariat général aux questions juives, (Paris, 2006). Jonker, E., and van Rossem, M., (eds), Geschiedenis & Cultuur: achttien opstellen (The Hague, 1990). Judt, Tony, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its aftermath (Princeton, 2000). Kadikis, A., et al. (eds), My Obvinnaen (Riga, 1967). Kamenec, Ivan, Po stopách tragédie (Bratislava, 1991). Kapralski, Sławomir, “Battlefields of Memory” History and Memory 15, no. 2 (2001). Kardaras, Christos D., Boulgarike Propaganda ste Germanokratoumene Makedonia: boulgarike lesche Thessalonikes (1941–1944) (Athens, 1997). Karet¸chi, Aurel and Covaci, Maria, Zile însîngerate la Ias¸i (28–30 iunie 1941) (Bucharest, 1978). Karsai, Lászlo, “The People’s Courts and Revolutionary Justice in Hungary, 1945–1946,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe – World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000), pp. 237–51. Katus, J., Volkstelling in opspraak: een studie naar de overheidsvoorlichting met betrekking tot de volkstelling van 1971 (Leiden, 1984). Khonigsman, Ia., Katastrofaevreev Zapadnoii Ukrarainy (Lvov, 1998). Kirchhoff, Hans, “Endlösung over Danmark,” in Hans Sode-Madsen (ed.), I Hitler– Tysklands skygge (Copenhagen, 2003). ——, “Det værste skal undgås,” Politiken, 20 September 1993. ——, Augustoprøret. Samarbejdspolitikkens fald, Vols 1–3 (Copenhagen, 1979). ——, “Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz: skitser til et politisk portræt,” Lyngy–Bogen (1978). Kitroeff, Alexander, War-Time Jews: the case of Athens (Athens, 1995). Kjelstadli, Sverre, Hjemmestyrkene: hovedtrekk av den militære motstanden under okkupasjonen, (Oslo, 1959). Klarsfeld, Serge, Vichy-Auschwitz: le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France (Paris, 1983). Klemann, Hein, Nederland 1938–1948: economie en samenleving in jaren van oorlog en bezetting (Amsterdam, 2002). Kligman, Gail, The Politics of Duplicity: controlling reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, 1998). Klinkhammer, L., L’occupazione tedesca in Italia 1943–1945 (Turin, 1993). Knegtmans, Peter Jan, Een kwetsbaar centrum van de geest: de Universiteit van Amsterdam tussen 1935 en 1950 (Amsterdam, 1998). ——, Paul Schulten and Jaap Vogel, Collaborateurs van niveau: opkomst en val van de hoogleraren Schrieke, Snijder en Van Dam (Amsterdam, 1996).

288

Bibliography

Kortenhorst, L.G., Was samenwerking met de vijand geoorloofd? (The Hague, 1945). Koukounas, Demosthenes, O Archiepiskopos Damaskinos (Athens, 1991). Kovácˇ , Dušan, Dejiny Slovenska (Bratislava, 1998). ——, Ivan Kamenec and Viliam Kratochvíl, Slovensko v novom storocˇ í (Bratislava, 1994). Kovács, Mária, “The Case of the Teleki Statue: new debates on the history of the numerus clausus in Hungary,” Jewish Studies at the CEU, Vol. IV, 2004& ndash;5 (Budapest, 2006), pp. 191–208. ——and Lipták, L’ubomír, Ucˇ ebné texty z dejepisu (Bratislava, 1990). Krajzman, Maurice, The Image of the Jews and Judaism in Belgian History Textbooks (Brussels, 1973). Krausnick, Helmut, Hitlers Einsatzgruppe: die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges 1938–1942 (Frankfurt, 1985). Kreth, Rasmus and Mogensen, Michael, Flugten til Sverige: aktionen mod de danske jøder oktober 1943 (Copenhagen, 1995). ˇ eskoslovenské Svobodoveˇ armádeˇ (1990). Kulka, Erich, Židé v C Kuller, Hary, Evreii în România anilor 1944–1949: evenimente, documente, comentarii (Bucharest, 2002). Kupferman, Fred, Laval, 1883–1945 (Paris, 1987). . Kurek, Ewa, Stosunki polsko-zydowskie 1939–1945 (Kielce, 2006). Kyevshchina v roky nymetsko–fashistskoi okupatsii (Kiev 1948). Laborie, Pierre, Les francais des années troubles (LeSeuil, 2003). ——, L’opinion française sous Vichy (Paris, 1990). LaCapra, D., History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY, 1998). Lagrou, Pieter, Mémoires patriotiques et occupation nazie (Brussels, 2003). ——, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: patriotic memory and national recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000). ——, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1945–65,” Past and Present, nos. 154–155 (1997), pp. 188–222. Laignel–Lavastine, Alexandra, “Fascisme et communisme en Roumanie: enjeux et usage d’une comparaison,” in Henry Rousso (ed.), Stalinisme et nazisme: histoire et mémoire comparées (Brussels, 1999), pp. 201–46. Lammers, Cor, “Levels of Collaboration: a comparative study of German occupation regimes during the Second World War,” Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences 31 (1995), pp. 3–31. ˇ o Dante nevidel (Bratislava, 1964). Lánik, Jozef (Alfred Vetzler), C Lehrman, Hal, “Greece: ‘Unused Cakes of Soap’: the pattern of Jewish fate repeats itself,” Commentary (May 1946). Lendvai, Paul, Antisemitism without Jews (Garden City, NJ, 1971). Letz, Robert, Slovensko v 20. storocˇ í (Bratislava, 1997). Levinas, E., Al di là del versetto (Naples, 1986). Lewkowicz, Bea, The Jewish Community of Salonika: history, memory, identity (London/Portland, OR, 2006). Libionka, Dariusz, “The Catholic Church in Poland and the Holocaust, 1939–1945,” in Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith and Irena Steinfeldt (eds), The Holocaust and the Christian World (London, 2000). Lidegaard, Bo, Kampen om Danmark 1933–1945 (Copenhagen, 2005). ——, Overleveren. Dansk Udenrigspolitiks historie, Vol. 4 (Copenhagen, 2003). Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. I, (Paris, 1984).

Bibliography

289

Lingås, Gunnar, “Kan vi lære av historien?” in Torald Tveiten (ed.), Kan vi lære av historien? Ti år med Hvite busser til Auschwitz (Porsgrunn, 2002). Lipscher, Ladislav, Die Juden im Slowakischen Staat 1939–1945 (Munich/Vienna, 1980). Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory (New York, 1994). Lipták, L’ubomír, “Jozef Tiso – problém slovenskej politiky a slovenskej historiografie,” in Pokus o politick a osobn profil Jozefa Tisu, proceedings of scientific symposium ˇ astá-Papiernicˇ ka, 5–7 May 1992 held in C ——, Slovensko v 20. storocˇ í (Bratislava, 1968). Livezeanu, Irina, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: regionalism, nation building & ethnic struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, 1995). Lomfors, Ingrid, Blind flack: Minne och glömska kring Röda Korsets hjälpinnsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm, 2005). Lovinescu, Monica, Diagonale (Bucharest, 2002). Lozowick, Yaacov, Hitler’s Bureacrats (Jerusalem, 2001; in Hebrew). Luzzatto, A., “Autocoscienza e identità ebraica,” Storia d’Italia – Annali 11 (Torino, 1997). Maier, Charles S., Hoffmann, Stanley and Gould, Andrew (eds), The Rise of the Nazi Regime: Historical Reassessments (Harvard, 1986). Majerus, Benoît, “Logiques administratives et persécution anti-juive la police bruxelloise et les arrestations de 1942,” Cahiers d’Histoire du Temps présent, no. 12 (2003), pp. 181–217. Manea, Norman, Întoarcerea huliganului (Ias¸i, 2003). ——, Casa melcului (Dialoguri) (Bucharest, 1999). Marea conflagrat¸ie a secolului (Bucharest, 1974). Marrus, Michael R., “Vichy France and the Jews: after fifteen years,” in Sarah Fishman et al. (eds), France at War. Vichy and the historians (translated as La France sous Vichy) (Oxford/New York, 2000). ——, The Holocaust in History (London, 1988). ——, and Paxton, Robert, Vichy et les Juifs (Paris, 1981). Mason, Henry L., The Purge of the Dutch Quislings: emergency justice in the Netherlands (The Hague, 1952). Matsas, Michael, The Illusion of Safety: the story of the Greek Jews during the Second World War (New York, 1997). Mayda, G., Storia della deportazione dall’Italia, 1943–194: militari, ebrei e politici nei lager del Terzo Reich (Turin, 2002). Mazower, Mark, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (London, 2004; New York, 2005). ——, (ed.), After the War Was Over: reconstructing the family, nation and state in Greece, 1943–1960 (Princeton/Oxford, 2000). ——, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998). ——, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven/ London, 1993). ——, Greece and the Inter-War Economic Crisis (Oxford, 1991). Meershoek, Guus, Dienaren van het gezag. de Amsterdamse politie tijdens de bezetting (Amsterdam, 1999). ——, “The Amsterdam Police and the Persecution of the Jews,” in M. Berenbaum and A. J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), pp. 284–300.

290

Bibliography

Meihuizen, Joggli, Noodzakelijk kwaad: de bestraffing van economische collaboratie in Nederland na de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 2003). Mendelsohn, Oscar, Jødenes historie i Norge gjennom 300 år, Vol, I (Oslo, 1969). Mešt’an, Pavol, Antisemitism in Slovak Politics (1989–1999) (Bratislava, 2000). Meyer, Arnold, Pruisische practijken in herrijzend Nederland (Oisterwijk, 1945). Micheels, Pauline, Muziek in de schaduw van het Derde Rijk: de Nederlandse symfonieorkesten 1933–1945 (Zutphen, 1993). Michel, Henri, Pétain, Laval, Darlan: trois politiques? Questions d’histoire series (Paris, 1972). Michlic, Joanna, “The Holocaust and Its Aftermath as Perceived in Poland: voices of Polish intellectuals, 1945–47,” in David Bankier (ed.), The Jews Are Coming Back (Jerusalem, 2005). Michman, D. (ed.), Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000: German strategies and Jewish responses (New York, 2002). ——(ed.), Belgium and the Holocaust, (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 285–73. Milosz, Czeslaw, Selected Poems, 1931–2004 (New York, 2006). Mogensen, Michael, “October 1943 – The Rescue of the Danish Jews,” in Mette Bastholm Jensen and Steven L. B. Jensen (eds), Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen, 2003). Molho, A.L., “The Situation of the Jews in Greece,” World Jewish Congress (New York, February 1944). Molho, Michael, In Memoriam: Hommage aux victimes juives des Nazis en Grèce, 2nd ed. revised and augmented by Joseph Nehama (Thessaloniki: 1973; 1st ed., 3 vols, Salonika, 1948, 1949, Buenos Aires, 1953). Molho, Rena, Salonica and Istanbul: social, political and cultural aspects of Jewish life (Istanbul, 2005). Mulisch, Harry, De zaak 40/61: een reportage (Amsterdam, 1961). Mus¸at, Mircea, 1940: Drama României Mari (Bucharest, 1992). Mussert, Anton Adriaan, Het proces Mussert (‘s-Gravenhage, 1948). Myrchuk, P., Dokumenti pro dialnist UPA (Lvov, 1992). Namer, G., “Vers une expérience cruciale: la mémoire des déportés,” Mémoire et socièté (Paris, 1987). Nar, Albertos, Meletes kai arthra gia ten Ebraïke Koinoteta tes Thessalonikes (Salonika, 1997). Nariadenie o právnom postavení Židov (Dokumenty) (Jewish Museum in Bratislava, 2001) Nastasa˘ , Lucian, “Studiu introductiv,” in Andreea Andreescu, Lucian Nastasa˘ and Andrea Varga (eds), Evreii din România (1945& ndash;1965) (Cluj, 2003). De Nederlandsche Unie en haar Driemanschap: rapport uitgebracht door de daartoe op verzoek van het Driemanschap door Prof.Ir.W. Schermerhorn benoemde Commissie (Schiedam [1946]). Neimark, Norman M., “The Holocaust in Latvia in the Context: problems of comparison and historicization,” in The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, Reports of an International Conference (Riga, 2001). Nerbøvik, Jostein, Norsk historie 1870–1905 (Oslo, 1986). Nieuwe encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging (NEVB) (Tielt, 1998). Niornbergskii protsess v dokumentakh i materialakh (Moscow, 1957). Nižnˇ ansk, Eduard, Židovská komunita na Slovensku medzi cˇ eskoslovenskou parlamentnou demokraciou a Slovenskm štátom v stredoeuropskom kontexte (Prešov, 1999).

Bibliography

291

Nøkleby, Berit, Josef Terboven – Hitlers mann i Norge (Oslo, 1992). Nolte, Ernst, “Standing Things on Their Heads: against negative nationalism in interpreting history,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original documents of the Historikerstreit concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1993), pp. 149–54. Nora, P., “Entre mémoire et histoire: la problématique des lieux”, in Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. I, (Paris, 1984). Novitch, Miriam, Le Passage des Barbares, Contribution à l’Histoire de la Déportation et de la Résistance des Juifs grecs (1st ed. Paris, 1967; 2nd ed. Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, 1982). . Nowak, Jerzy R., 100 kłamstw J.T. Grossa o zydowskich sa˛ siadach i Jedwabnem (Warsaw, 2000). Oerbakh, R., “Oif di felder fun Treblinke” (Warsaw-Lodz-Krakow, 1947). Ory, Pascal, Les collaborateurs, 1940–1945 (Paris, 1976). Paggi, L., “La violenza, le comunità, la memoria,” La memoria del nazismo nell’Europa di oggi (Firenze, 1997). Paldiel, Mordecai, “The Rescue of Jewish Children in Belgium during World War II,” in Dan Michman (ed.), Belgium and the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 307–25. Palies, A. L.C., De politieke delinquent. Enige sociale en psychiatrische aspecten bij de berechting en reclassering van politieke delinquenten: met een voorwoord van P.J. Bouman (Assen, 1948). Papastratis, Procopis, “Purging the University after Liberation,” in Mark Mazower, After the War Was Over: reconstructing the family, nation and state in Greece, 1943– 1960 (Princeton/Oxford, 2000), pp. 62–72. Passerini, L. (ed.), Memory and Totalitarianism (Oxford, 1992). Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu, Lucret¸iu, Curente s¸i tendint¸e în filozofia româneasca˘ (Bucharest, 1971). ——, Sub trei dictaturi (Bucharest, 1970). ——, Un veac de fra˘ mînta˘ ri sociale (Bucharest, 1969). Paulsson, Gunnar S., “Bridge over the Øresund: the historiography on the expulsion of the Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark,” Journal of Contemporary History, no. 3 (1995). Pa˘ us¸an, Cristina, “Justit¸ia populara˘ s¸i criminalii de ra˘ zboi,” Arhivele totalitarismului, nos. 1–2 (1999), pp. 150–65. Pavese, C., Il compagno (Turin, 1947). Pavone, C., “La Resistenza in Italia: memoria e rimozione,” Rivista di storia contemporanea, no. 4 (1994–95). ——, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin, 1991). Paxton, Robert O., Vichy France, Points Histoire Series (Paris, 1973). ——, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order (New York, 1972); translated as La France de Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1973). Pelin, Mihai, Culisele spionajului românesc (Bucharest, 1997). Picciotto Fargion, L., Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia (1943–1945) (Milan, 1991). ——, “Sul contributo di ebrei alla Resistenza Italiana,” RMI. nos. 3–4 (1980), pp. 132–46. Pierron, Bernard, Juifs et Chrétiens de la Grèce Moderne: histoire des relations intercommunautaires de 1821 à 1945 (Paris, 1996). ——, Histoire des relations entre les Grecs et les Juifs de 1821 à 1945, Ph.D. dissertation, l’Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Etudes Hébraiques et Juives (Paris, 1993).

292

Bibliography

Pinto, Diana, “Fifty Years after the Holocaust: building a new Jewish and Polish memory,” East European Jewish Affairs 26, no. 2 (1996). Polonsky, A. (ed.), My Brother’s Keeper? Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London, 1989). Popovich, M., Evreiiskii genotsid na Ukraine, Filosofskaia i sotsiologicheskaia mysl’, no. 4 (1994). Precˇ an, Vilém, Slovenské národné povstanie, dokumenty (Bratislava, 1965) Presser, J., Ondergang. De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom (1940–1945), Vol. 2 (The Hague, 1985 [1965]). Pritz, Pal, The War Crimes Trial of Hungarian prime minister Laszlo Bárdossy (New York, 2005). ——, “Bárdossy es Teleki,” Magyar Szemle, nos. 5–6 (2001), pp. 52–71. Proceedings of a Conference on Holocaust Studies and Teaching in Europe, under the auspices of the Council of Europe (Warsaw, 1996). Pryser, Tore, Norsk historie 1800–1870 (Oslo, 1985). Quellien, Jean, Opinions et comportements politiques dans le Calvados sous l’occupation allemande (Caen, 2001). Ramet, Sabrina P. (ed.), The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 (Philadelphia, 1999). Ranki, Gyorgy, “Hungarian Fascism,” in Peter F. Sugar (ed.), Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918–1945 (Santa Barbara, 1971). Ratajczyk, Dariusz, Niebezpieczne tematy (Opole, 1999). ˇ eskoslovenska Bratislava, (1971). Ratkoš, Peter, Dejiny C Redlikh, Sh., Razom ta naryzhno v Berezhanakh (Kiev, 2003). Reisel, Berit and Bruland, Bjarte, The Reisel/Bruland Report on the Confiscation of Jewish Property in Norway during World War II: part of official Norwegian report 1997: 22 (Oslo, 1998). Reitlinger, Gerald, The Final Solution: the attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 1953). Rijke, Rinnes, Niet de schuld, wel de straf: herinneringen van een N.S.B.-kind (Bussum, 1982). Ringdal, Nils Johan, Mellom barken og veden: politiet under okkupasjonen (Oslo, 1987). Rittner, Carol, Smith, Stephen D. and Steinfeldt, Irena (eds), The Holocaust and the Christian World (London, 2000). Roller, Mihai, et al., Istoria României: manual unic pentru clasa a VIII-a secundara˘ (Bucharest, 1947). Roma Camera dei Deputi (ed.), La legislazione antiebraica in Italia e in Europa (Rome, 1989). România în anii celui de-al doilea ræzboi mondial Vol. I (Bucharest, 1989). Romijn, P., “The Image of Collaboration in Post-war Dutch Society,” in Bulletin du Comité international d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 27/28 (1995) Special Issue: 1945: consequences and sequels of the Second World War, pp. 311–24. ——, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig: politiek beleid inzake de bestraffing en reclassering van ‘foute’ Nederlanders. 1945–1955 (Groningen, 1989). Rosenbaum, Alan S. (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on comparative genocide (Boulder, CO, 1996). Rotkirchen, Livia, “The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: 1938–48,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia, Vol. III (New York, 1984). ——, “The Defiant Few: Jews and Czechs – ‘Inside the Front’ (1938–42),” Yad Vashem Studies, no. 14 (1977), pp. 35–88.

Bibliography

293

Rotman, Liviu, “Antisemitismul-o ideologie veche în haine noi” in Identitatea evreiasca˘ s¸i antisemitismul în Europa centrala˘ s¸i de sud-est: simpozion internat¸ional (Bucharest, 2003). ——, “Memory of the Holocaust in Communist Romania: from minimization to oblivion,” in Mihail E. Ionescu and Liviu Rotman (eds), The Holocaust in Romania: history and contemporary significance (Bucharest, 2003). Rousso, Henry, Vichy. L’événement, la mémoire et l’histoire, Folio Histoire Series (Paris, 2001). ——(ed.), Stalinisme et nazisme: histoire et mémoire comparées (Brussels, 1999; in Italian, Turn, 2001). ——, Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas, with Eric Conan (Paris, 1994). ——, The Vichy Syndrome: history and memory in France since 1944 (Harvard, 1991). ——, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours (Paris, 1990). Rozenblum, Thierry, “Une cité si ardente. L’administration communale de Liège et la persécution des Juifs, 1940–1942,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 179 (September– December 2003) (Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris), pp. 9–74. Ruge, Boris (ed.), Tyskere mod Hitler: fem diplomater i København (Copenhagen, 1999). Rupnik, Jacques, “Revolut¸ie – restaurat¸ie,” Lettre internationale (Romanian edition), no. 4 (Winter 1992/93). Rusiniak, M., “Paradoks Treblinki,” Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, Kiev, (September 2007). ˇ eši a Slováci ve 20.století – C ˇ esko-slovenské vztahy. 1945–1992 (Prague, Rychlík, Jan, C 1998). Sabatello, E. I., “Le conseguenze sociali ed economiche delle persecuzioni sugli ebrei italiani,” in Roma Camera dei Deputi (ed.), La legislazione antiebraica in Italia e in Europa (Rome, 1989). Saerens, Lieven, Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad. Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en zijn joodse bevolking, 1880–1944 (Tielt, 2000). S¸afran, Alexandru, Un ta˘ ciune smuls fla˘ ca˘rilor (Bucharest, 1996). Safrian, Hans, Eichmann und seine Gehilfen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1995). Sakmyster, Thomas, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918–1944 (Boulder, CO, 1994). Salmerová, Eva, Židovská tematika na slovenskch školách (Bratislava, 1999). Salvati, M., “Il Novecento,” 900: I Tempi della storia (Rome, 1997). Sandberg, H.W., Grote advies-commissie der illegaliteit: witboek over de geschiedenis van het georganiseerde verzet voor en na de bevrijding (Amsterdam, 1950). Sarfatti, M., Gli ebrei nell’Italia Fascista: vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin, 2000). Schöffer, I., “Weinreb, een affaire van lange duur,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 95 (1982). Schram, Laurence, “La mémoire des rescapés juifs d’Auschwitz,” unpublished dissertation (Brussels, 1992–93). Schreiber, J.Ph. and van Doorslaers, R. (eds), Les curateurs du ghetto: l’association des Juifs en Belgique sous l’occupation nazie (Brussels, 2004). Schwalbová, Manca, Vyhasnuté ocˇ i (Bratislava, 1964) Schwarz, G., Ritrovare se stessi: gli ebrei nell’Italia postfascista (Roma–Bari, 2004). Scurtu, Ioan and Hlihor, Constantin, Anul 1940: drama românilor dintre Prut s¸i Nistru (Bucharest, 1992). Semelin, Jacques, Sans armes face à Hitler – La résistance civile en Europe, 1939–1943 (Paris, 1989).

294

Bibliography

Semiryaga, Mikhaik, Collaboration (Moscow, 2000). ——, The Nazi Prison Empire and Its Collapse (Moscow, 1988). Senje, Sigurd, Ekko fra Skriktjenn: en dokumentarroman basert på Feldmann-saken 1942–1947 (Oslo, 1982). Shafir, Michael, “Hungarian Politics and the Post-1989 Legacy of the Holocaust,” in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), The Holocaust in Hungary: sixty years later (New York, 2006). ——, “Memory, Memorials and Membership: Romanian utilitarian antisemitism and Marshal Antonescu,” in Henry F. Carey (ed.), Romania Since 1989: politics, culture and society (Lanham, MD, 2004), pp. 67–96. ——, “Negation at the Top: deconstructing the Holocaust denial salad in the Romanian cucumber season,” Xenopoliana 11, nos. 3–4 (2003), pp. 90–122. ——, “Ex Occidente Obscuritas: the diffusion of Holocaust denial from West to East,” Studia Hebraica (2003). ——, “Between Denial and ‘Comparative Trivialization’: Holocaust negationism in post-Communist East Central Europe,” ACTA (Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism), no. 19 (2002). ——, “The Man They Love to Hate: Norman Manea’s ‘Snail House’ between Holocaust and Gulag,” East European Jewish Affairs 30, no. 1 (2000). ——, “Marginalization or Mainstream? The extreme right in post-Communist Romania,” in Paul Hainsworth (ed.), The Politics of the Extreme Right: from the margins to the mainstream (London, 2000). ——, “Paradigme, parademonstrat¸ii, partra˘znete” (III), Sfera politicii (Bucharest), no. 86 (2000), pp. 29–39. ——, “The Mind of Romania’s Radical Right,” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 (Philadelphia, 1999). ——, “Marschall Ion Antonescu: Politik der Rehabilitierung,” Europaeische Rundschau 2 (1994). ——, “Political Culture, Intellectual Dissent and Intellectual Consent,” Orbis, no. 2 (1983), pp. 393–420. Shermer, Michael and Grobman, Alex, Denying History: who says the Holocaust never happened and why do they say it? (Berkeley, CA, 2000). Siebert, R., “Non dimenticare: frammenti di una tradizione ‘negativa’,” Daedalus, no. 10 (1993), pp. 117–30. Sleutelaar, Armando and Sleutelaar, Hans, De SS’ers: Nederlandse vrijwilligers in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1967). Skodvin, Magne, Striden om okkupasjonsstyret i Norge fram til 25. september 1940 (Oslo, 1956). Smirin, Grigory and Meler, Meyer, “The Tragedy of Jewish People in the Latvian Countryside, during the Holocaust in the Summer of 1941,” The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, Reports of an International Conference (Riga, 2001). Smolar, Aleksander, “Tabu i niewinnos´c´,” Aneks, no. 41 (1986). Sode-Madsen, Hans (ed.), I Hitler–Tysklands skygge (Copenhagen, 2003). ——(ed.), “Føreren har befalet!” Jødeaktionen oktober 1943 (Copenhagen, 1993). Sovershenno sekretno – documenty i materialy (Moscow, 1961). Spiliotis, Susanne-Sophia, “‘An Affair of Politics, Not Justice’: the Merten trial (1957–1959) and Greek-German relations,” in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over: reconstructing the family, nation and state in Greece, 1943–1960 (Princeton/ Oxford, 2000), pp. 293–302.

Bibliography

295

SS v deiistvii – dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1959). Stalin, I., O Velikoii Otechestvennoii Voine Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1950). Stanek, Imrich, Zrada a pád, Hlinkovští separatisté a takzvan Slovensk stát, (Prague, 1958). State of Israel, Ministry of Justice, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, Vol. V (Jerusalem, 1994). Stauber, Roni, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s: ideology and memory (London/Portland, OR, 2007). Steen, Sverre (ed.), Norges krig 1940–1945 (Oslo, 1947–50). Steinberg, Maxime, La persécution des Juifs en Belgique, 1940–1945 (Brussels, 2004). ——, “Le paradoxe français dans la solution finale à l’Ouest,” Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisation 3 (May–June 1993), pp. 567–82. ——, Les yeux du témoin ou le regard du borgne, L’histoire face au révisionnisme (Paris, 1990). ——, La traque des Juifs, 1942/44 (Brussels, 1986). ——, Les cent jours de la déportation des Juifs de Belgique (Brussels, 1984). ——, L’Etoile et le fusil (Brussels, 1983). Stoenescu, Alex Mihai, Armata, mares¸alul s¸i evreii (Bucharest, 1998). Straffesak mot Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssoen Quisling (Oslo, 1946). Stroumsa, Jacques, Tu choisiras la vie: violiniste à Auschwitz (Paris, 1998). ——, Dialeksa te zoe … apo ti Thessalonike sto Auschwitz (Salonika, 1997). ——, Ubeharta behaim, Mesaloniki leyerushalayim derech Auschwitz veParis (Tel Aviv, 1995). Strzembosz, Tomasz, “Inscribed in Professor Gutman’s Diary”; Israel Gutman “‘Them’ and ‘Us’: in reply to Professor Tomasz Strzembosz,” Yad Vashem Studies, no. 30 (2002). Sugar, Peter F. (ed.), Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918–1945 (Santa Barbara, 1971). Sychronos Ellenismos apo to 1941 os to telos tou aiona, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ethnous, Vol. 16 (Athens, 2000). Szabó, Zoltán Tibori, “The Transylvanian Jewry during the Postwar Period, 1945–1948,” East European Perspectives, nos. 18–19, available at www.rferl.org/reports/eepreport/ 2004. Szuchta, Robert and Trojan´ski, Piotr, Holokaust. Zrozumiec´ Dlaczego (Warsaw, 2003). ten Have, Wichert, De Nederlandse Unie: aanpassing, vernieuwing en confrontatie in bezettingstijd 1940–1941 (Amsterdam, 1999). Thanassekos, Y., and Wisman, H. (eds), Révision de l’histoire (Paris, 1990). Theodoru, Radu, A fost sau nu Holocaust? (Bucharest, n.d. [2003]). Tismaneanu, Vladimir, “Communism and the Human Condition: reflections on the Black Book of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2 (2001), pp. 125–34. ——, Stalinism for All Seasons: a political history of Romanian Communism (Berkeley, 2003). Todorov, T., The Morals of History (Minneapolis, 1995). Todorov, Ts., Oblichiam do extremism (Lvov, 2000). Togliatti, P., Politica comunista, discorsi e documenti, aprile 1944-agosto 1945 (Rome, 1945). Toth, Dezider (comp.), Tragédia slovenskch Židov (Banská Bystrica, 1992). Totok, William, “Sacrificarea lui Antonescu pe altarul diplomat¸iei,” I-IV, Observator cultural, nos. 74–77, 24 June–14 August 2001.

296

Bibliography

Tranfaglia, N., La prima Guerra mondiale e il fascismo (Turin, 1995). Transforma˘ ri, inert¸ii, dezordini: 22 de luni dupa˘ 22 decembrie 1989. Andrei Ples¸u s¸i Petre Roman în dialog cu Elena S¸tefoi (Ias¸i, 2002). Treptow, Kurt W. (ed.), A History of Romania (Ias¸i, 1995). Truska, Liudas and Vareikis, Vygantas, The Preconditions for the Holocaust: antiSemitism in Lithuania (Vilnius, 2004). Tsarinnik, M., “Zolochiv movchit,” Kritika 8 (Zhovten, 2005). Tveiten, Torald (ed.), Kan vi lære av historien? Ti år med hvite busser til Auschwitz (Porsgrunn, 2002). Ulstein, Ragnar, Jødar paa flukt (Oslo, 1995) ——, Englandsfarten and Svensketrafikken (Oslo, 1979, 1974). Unichtozhenie evreev SSSR v 1941& ndash;1944 godakh, Sbornik documentov i materialov (Jerusalem/Moscow, 1992). United Restitution Organization, Judenverfolgung in Italien, den Italienisch besetzen Gebieten und in Nordafrika: dokumentensammlung (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1962). Vajansk, Svetozár Hurban, “Židovská otázka na Slovensku,” Slovenské pohl’ady, no. 4 (1881). van der Vaart, H.W., Kamptoestanden 1944–’45–1948 (Haarlem, 1949; 4th ed.). van der Zee, Nanda, Om erger te voorkomen: de voorbereiding en uitvoering van de vernietiging van het Nederlandse jodendom tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1997). van der Zee, Sytze, Potgieterlaan 7: een herinnering (Amsterdam, 1997). ——, Voor Führer, Volk en Vaderland. De SS in Nederland (Amsterdam, 1992). van het Kamp, A., Kamptoestanden 1944–1952 (The Hague, 1973). van Randwijk, H.M., In de schaduw van gisteren: kroniek van het verzet in de jaren 1940/1945 (Amsterdam/Baarn/The Hague, 1967). ——, “‘Fout’ en ‘goed’,” in J. Bolhuis, C.D.J. Brandt, H.M. van Randwijk, B.C. Slotemaker (eds), Onderdrukking en verzet: Nederland in oorlogstijd, Vol. I. (Nijmegen, n.d. [1949–54]). Vareikis, Vygantes, “‘Double Genocide’ and the ‘Holocaust – Gulag’ Rhetoric in Lithuania,” in Leon Volovici (ed.), Jews and Antisemitism in the Public Discourse of the Post-Communist European Countries (Lincoln, NE, forthcoming). Veld, NCKA in ‘t Veld, De Joodse Ereraad (Amsterdam, 1989). Veldkamp, J.T., Het Amsterdamse bevolkingsregister in oorlogstijd (Amsterdam [1954]). Venema, Adriaan, Blommeldingen (Amsterdam, 1990). ——, Schrijvers, uitgevers & hun collaboratie, 5 vols (Amsterdam, 1988–92). Venezis, Elias, Archiepiskopos Damaskinos (Athens, 1952). Veth, Gilthay D. and van der Leeuw, A.J., Rapport door het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie uitgebracht aan de minister van Justitie inzake de activiteiten van drs. F. Weinreb gedurende de jaren 1940–1945, in het licht van nadere gegevens bezien, 2 vols (The Hague, 1976). Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, Gli assassini della memoria (Rome, 1993). ——, Assassins of Memory: essays on the denial of the Holocaust (New York, 1992). Viksne, Rudite, “The Destruction of the Auce Jews, July 1941,” The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, Reports of an International Seminar (Riga, 2003). Vinnichina v roki nymetsko–fashistskoi okupatsii (Vynnitsa, 1948). Vinokurova, F., Osobennosti genotsida evreev na territorii Transnistrii, Kholokost i covremennost’, nos. 4–6 (2003–4). Voicu, George, Zeii cei ra˘ i: Cultura conspiraçiei în România postcomunista˘ (Ias¸i, 2000).

Bibliography

297

Volovici, Leon (ed.), Jews and Antisemitism in the Public Discourse of the PostCommunist European Countries (Lincoln, NE, forthcoming). Waldman, Felicia, “Coming to Terms with the Recent Past: Holocaust education in post-communist Romania,” RFE/RL East European Perspectives, 6, nos. 14–15 (2004), available at www.rferl.org/reports/eepreport/2004. Walichnowski, Tadeusz, Israel and the German Federal Republic (Warsaw, 1968). Watts, Larry L., O casandra˘ a României: Ion Antonescu (Bucharest, 1993). Webman, Esther and Weinbaum, Laurence (eds), Jan Karski, The Man and His Mission (Tel Aviv, 2006; in Hebrew). Weinbaum, Laurence, “Jewish Communities in the Diaspora and Antisemitism in Poland,” Moreshet – Journal for the Study of the Holocaust and Antisemitism, no. 6 (Spring 2009), 161–75. ——, “Prejudice and Penitence: the Roman Catholic Church and Jedwabne,” Jewish Political Studies Review, nos. 3–4 (Fall 2002). ——, “The Struggle for Memory: Auschwitz, Jedwabne and beyond,” WJC Policy Study, no. 22 (Jerusalem, 2001). Weinreb, Friedrich, Collaboratie en verzet 1940–1945: een poging tot ontmythologisering, 3 vols (Amsterdam, 1969). Wiesenthal, S., Moordenaars onder ons (Amsterdam/Brussels, 1967 [1966]). Wolfswinkel, Rolf, Tussen landverraad en vaderlandsliefde: de collaboratie in naoorlogs proza (Amsterdam, 1994). Wyman, David S. (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore, 1996). Yacoel, Yomtov, Apomnemoneumata 1941–1943 (Salonika, 1993). Yahil, Leni, Test of a Democracy: the rescue of Danish Jewry in World War II (Jerusalem, 1966; Danish edition 1967). Žabkay, Ernest, Proces s dr. J.Tisom, spomienky obžalobcu Antona Rašlu a obhajcu Ernesta Žabkayho (Bratislava, 1990). Zaharia, Gheorghe and Cups¸a, Ion, Participarea României la înfrîngerea Germaniei naziste (Bucharest, 1985). ——, România î anii celui de-al doilea ræzboi mondial, Vol. I (Bucharest, 1989). ——, Istoria militaraˇ a poporului român, Vol. VI (Bucharest, 1989). Židia na Slovensku v 19 a 20, Storocˇ í (I.cˇ astˇ) (Bratislava, 1999).

Index

Aantjes, Willem 83 Abrahamsen, Samuel 132 “accommodation” 9, 77, 84–6, 178–9 Across the Border (film) 132 Adenauer, Konrad 214 Alexianu, Gheorghe 263–4 Amendola, Giorgio 220 Amenza, Aven 268 amnesties 78, 173, 217, 218 Amsterdam 73, 77, 84 Ancel, Jean 249, 269 Andrzejewski, Jerzy 32 Antall, József 232 antisemitism 8–9, 16, 26–7, 32, 36–8, 45, 55–9, 65–6, 99, 119, 127, 142–3, 146, 153–4, 158–9, 171, 186–93, 199–200, 234, 238, 249, 252, 258–61, 266 Antonescu, Ion 16–19, 236, 246–56, 256–69 Antonescu, Mihai 247 Antoniuk, Zinoviy 50 Antwerp 6, 91–2, 98–9, 104–5 Apa˘ rarea patriotica˘ 249 Archbishop of Malines 105 Arendt, Hannah 82, 150–1 Aron, Robert 172–3 Asscher, Abraham 82 Athens 8, 11, 138–40, 143–51, 155–7 Auce 62 Auschwitz-Birkenau 8, 34, 139–40, 154, 191, 219 Avineri, Shlomo 35–6 Babi Yar (1941) 45 Badoglio, Pietro 12, 216 Balaban, Majer 27 Bálint, Török 240–1 Baltic States see also Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, 4–5, 20, 53–66

Bánovce nad Bebravou 197 Barbie, Klaus 181 Bárdossy, Lászlo 235–40 Barnevelders 77 Baruch, Olivier 171 Battini, Michele 213 Baudouin, King of Belgium 95 Bednarczyk, Tadeusz 28 Beel, Louis 74 Belgium 6, 9–10, 91–105: Association of Jews in (AJB) 104; CEGES 104; Christian Socialist Party (PSC) 95; Collège des Secrétaires generaux des ministères 91–2; Consistoire Central Israélite 105; Fondation du Judaisme de Belgique 103; Leopoldists/antiLeopoldists 94, 95; Rexism and Rex party 93, 94; Verdinaso 92–3; Vlaams Belang 105; Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV) 93, 97 DeVlag 93; Volksunie 96 Belinfante, August David 80 Belorussia 46–7, 53–4, 63–5, 126 Belzec 4, 46 Benziger, Karl 238 Berenstein, Tatiana 114–15 Berggrav, Bishop 128 Bernadotte, Folke, Count 134 Berry, Burton 145, 158–9 Bessarabia 16, 248, 251, 254, 260–4, 268 Best, Werner 7, 113–19 Bethlen, István 232 Bilgoraj 37–8 Blix, Ragnvald 131 Bloch, Marc 169 Blokzijl, Maz 73 Blom, Hans 84–6 Błon´ski, Jan 1, 29 Bobelis, Yurgis 61 Bologne, Joseph 97

Index Borbándi, Gyula 237 Botos¸, Ilie 260 Bousquet, René 173 Boutos, Vasilis 156–7 Bowman, Steven 144 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 142–3, 187 Broszat, Martin 84 Brussels 6, 91–4 Bubnis, Arunas 63 Bucharest 246–8, 252, 261–3, 266, 269 Buduca, Ioan 261 Bukovina 16, 248, 260–3, 268 Bulgaria 8, 16, 53, 139, 143–4 Burger, Jaap 71 Burrin, Philippe 178–9 Buysse, Lucien 103 Buzatu, Gheorghe 253, 262, 267–8 Calotescu, Corneliu 246 Calzolari, Bruno 222 Câmpeanu, Radu 255–6 ˇ arnogurský, Ján 197–8 C ˇ arnogurský, Pavol 197–8 C Carp, Matatias 250 Carynnyk, Marco 47 Cassulo, Andrea 16 Catholic Church 34, 105, 186, 194–7, 201, 205 Ceaus¸escu, Ilie 252 Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae 18, 245–6, 250–4 census records 83 Cerna˘ ianu, Felicia 255 Charles, J.B. 79 Chebeleu, Traian 257 Chelaru, Mircea 266 Chirac, Jacques 99, 181 Chrostowski, Fr 35 Chrysochoou, Athanasios 147, 150 Church attitudes 157; see also Catholic Church Cioflânca˘ , Adrian 251–2 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea 256 Cohen, Asher 181 Cohen, David 82 Cohen, Shari J. 253 Coja, Ion 262–4 compensation payments 101–2 Conan, Eric 175 confiscation of Jewish property 13, 47, 73, 128, 201 Constantinescu, Emil 258–9, 265 Constantopoulou, Photini 156 Copenhagen 110, 113–16, 120

299

Corfu 138–9, 156–7 Courtois, Stéphane 254 Covaci, Maria 261 Croatia 14, 45, 236 Croce, Benedetto 217 Csurka, István 235–6 Czechoslovakia 186–91, 194–5, 198–9 Czettler, Antal 237 Dahl, Hans Fredrik 130 Dalnic 246 Damaskinos, Archbishop 145–7 d’Amato, Alfonse 258–9 Dan, Ioan 257 Da˘ ncu, Vasile 268 Danneels, Cardinal 105 Deák, István 230, 245 death camps see under names of individual camps Debenedetti, Giacomo 219, 224 de Clercq, Staf 93 de Coster, François 103 “deflective negation” of the Holocaust 261–2 de Gasperi, Alcide 17, 216–18 Degrelle, Léon 93–4 de Jong, Louis 79, 84 della Seta, Fabio 219–20 de Man, Henri 92 Demeyer, Willy 104 Denmark 7–8, 11, 110–23 deportations 4–18, 65, 74–82, 91, 98–105, 113–22, 129–32, 139–46, 153, 156–60, 172, 186–206, 213–16, 220–4, 231, 234, 242, 247, 258–60, 263, 268–9 de Quay, Jan 76, 81 Destexhe, Alain 104 de Vries, Theun 81 Dhondt, Steven 94 Dieckmann, Christoph 60 Dijkgraaf, Frans 81 Dimitrov, Georgi 250 Dinulescu, Radu 260 Dmowski, Roman 37–8 Dorohoi pogrom 262 Dra˘ gan, Iosif Constantin 252–3, 256–7 Drosakes, Eleutheria 153 Duckwitz, G.F. 113–15, 118 ˇ urica, Milan S. 204 D Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska, Małgorzata 26 Edelsheim, Ilona 234 Eichmann, Adolf 15, 81, 117, 150 Einsatzgruppen 59–61, 66

300

Index

Enepekides, Polychrones 151 Engel, David 33 Epstein, Simon 182 épuration 170–1 Erichsen, Bente 132 Eriksen, Anne 134 Eskenasy, Victor 252 Estonia 60, 64–5; Forest Brothers 64; see also Baltic States Ethnososialistike Enosis tes Ellados see Greece: Ethnike Enosis Ellas Europa 253 Ezergailis, Andrievas 63–4 Farfal, Piotr 38 fascism 14, 95, 187–90, 193, 200–1, 212–13, 217–20, 246, 249–51, 265 Faulkner, William 25 Faurisson, Robert 199, 261 Feldmann, Rakel and Jacob 132 Fico, Robert 205 Filderman, Wilhelm 263 Flanders 10, 74–5, 92–7 Fleischer, Hagen 140, 156–8 Formiggini, Gina 220 Fossoli di Carpi 222 France 12–13, 17–20, 91, 169–82, 221–2; Communist Party of (PCF) 170–1; forced labor service (STO) 177–8; Gaullist resistance and party 170; Milice 177, 179 Frederiks, Karel Johannes 76–7 Gabrielescu, Valentin 255 Galat¸i pogroms 262 Galicia 45–7, 83 Gašparovicˇ , Ivan 200 Gaulle, Charles de 17, 77, 170–3 Gazeta Wyborcza 31 genocide 54, 97, 101, 188 Georgakas, Dan 155 Georgescu, Corneliu 247 Gerlier, Monseigneur 181 Germany see Nazi Germany; West Germany Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe 249–51 Ghit¸ulescu, Toma Petre 260 Giertych, Roman 37–8 Godlewski, Jack 37 Goma, Paul 254, 262 Gõmbõs, Gyula 232 Gracheva, Sofia 49 Greece 8, 12, 20, 138–60; Campbell pogrom 142, 158; Central Board of

Jewish Communities in (KIS) 153, 156; Ethnike Enosis Ellas (National Union Hellas) 141 Grinevich, V. 49 Gritsak, Yaroslav 44–5, 49 De Groene 75 Gross, Jan 4, 30–1, 38 Grossman, Lasislav 193 Guidi, Guido Buffarini 222 Gutman, Israel 3, 30, 37 Haakon, King of Norway 126–7 Hæstrup, Jørgen 119 Harris, André 176 Harster, Wilhelm 222 Harwood, Richard 261 Hasson, Vital 146–8 Heinemann, Gustav 150 Heller, Celia 36 Helsinki Final Act 194–5 Henriques, Carl Bertel 118 Herbert, Ulrich 116 Hermans, Willem Frederik 82 Het Parool 75 Heydrich, Reinhard 59–60 Hilberg, Raul 15–16, 172 Himmler, Heinrich 134 Hirschfeld, Gerhard 84 Hirschfeld, Hans Max 77 Hitler, Adolf 13, 53, 58, 93, 115, 127, 131, 169–70, 173, 177, 186, 233, 240, 242, 261 Hlinka, Andrej 186 Hoffmann, Ladislav 194 Hoffmann, Stanley 182, 221–2 Hofman, Jacob 86 Hogea, Vlad 252 Holodomor 46 Horthy, István 234 Horthy, Miklós 15–16, 19, 230–5, 239, 242–3 Hungary 12, 15–16, 19, 229–43; Arrow Cross 231, 236; Democratic Federation (UDMR) 258; Democratic Forum (MDF) 232; FIDESZ 239; Truth and Life Justice Party (MIEP) 235 –6; White Terror 15, 230 Husák, Gustav 194 Huyse, Luc 94 Ias¸i pogrom 18, 245, 249, 251, 260, 261, 262; Ias¸inschi, Victor 247 Iliescu, Ion 257–61, 264, 267, 269 Ioanid, Radu 266

Index Ioannou, Giorgios 153–4 Ionescu-Quintus, Mircea 267 Iordache, Roxana 265 Irving, David 261 Israel, State of 35–7, 55, 154–5, 190–1, 268–9 Italy 12, 14–15, 17–18, 212–24; Christian Democratic Party (DC) 17, 216; Communist Party of (PCI) 218; Everyman Movement 217; Liberation Committee of Northern Italy (CLNAI) 215, 218; Liberation Corps 216; National Liberation Committee (CLN) 215–18; Party of Action (PdA) 216; Italian Social Republic 14, 18, 221 Jäckel, Eberhard 18, 173–4 Jagala camp 65 Jašik, Rudolf 193 Jedwabne massacre (1941) 30–1, 33–4 Jewish Agency 143, 145 Johansen, Per Ole 10, 132 Joly, Laurent 171 Kaczyn´ski, Lech 37 Kafka, Franz 193 Kalbarzin, Jan 54 Kalevi-Liiva 65 Kamenec, Ivan 199 Kamenetz–Podolsk 234, 238 Karamanlis, Konstantinos 150 Karski, Jan 33 Karvaš, Peter 193 Katz, Yosef 205 Keri, Kálmán 232 Kesselring, Albert 213 Kirchhoff, Hans 8, 11, 111, 114, 119 Kitroeff, Alexander 155 Kjelstadli, Sverre 131 Klarsfeld, Serge 181 Klemann, Hein 84 Klooga concentration camp 65 Kollas, Spyridonos 138, 156–7 Komianos, Ioannes 138 Kontopoulou, Phaedon 144 Korec, Ján Chryzostom 197 Koretz, Zvi 11, 144, 146, 155 Kortenhorst, Leonardus Gerardus 77 Kossmann, Ernst 84 Koukounas, Demosthenes 147–8 Kovácˇ , Mikuláš 193 Kovács, Mária 241 Kovno 60–3 Krajewski, Stanislaw 31

301

Krakowski, Shmuel 3 Kreth, Rasmus 115–16 Krisztian, Ungvary 240 Krupnikov, G. 44–5 Kuiphof, Herman 73 Kun Béla 235 Kunc, Bartolomej 200–1 Kupec, Ivan 193 Kupferman, Fred 180 Kurek, Ewa 38 Kwasniewski, Aleksander 31, 36 Kyriakopoulos, Ilias 12, 151 Laak, Alexander 65 Laborie, Pierre 169, 178 LaCapra, Dominique 223 Lachmann, Karl 118 Lages, Willy 78 Lagrou, Pieter 95–6, 100 Lahola, Leopold 192 Lászlo, Karsai 241 Lattes, Dante 220 Latvia 54–66; see also Baltic States Laval, Pierre 13, 180 Lendvai, Paul 28 Leopold III, King of Belgium 9, 94–5 “lesser of two evils” theory 5–6, 9–10, 20, 92, 97–9, 206 Letz, Robert 203 Levi, Primo 223–4 Levinas, Emanuel 223 Lidegaard, Bo 120 Liège 104 Lind, Victor 133 Lithuania 4, 54–66; Activist Front (LAF) 57; Lithuanian Police Battalions 63; see also Baltic States Löbl, Eugen 195 Logothetopoulos, Kon-stantinos 147 Lovinescu, Monica 265 Luca, Vasile 249 Luns, Joseph 83 Macedonia 8, 139–48, 154–8 Mach, Alexander 13, 189, 200 Macici, Nicolae 246–7 Mahoux, Philippe 104 Maidenek 63 Maingain, Olivier 104 Malcolm, Noel 159 Manea, Norman 254 Manolescu, Nicolae 265 Mariaschin, Daniel 269 Marinescu, Floricel 265

302

Index

Markuš, Alexander 188 Marrus, Michael 13, 18, 172, 175, 180–1 Masaryk, Jan 187 Mason, Henry L. 79–80 Matrescu, Florin 265 Matsas, Michael 159 Mazirel, Lau 83 Mazower, Mark 141, 156–60 Mecheln collection camp 100, 105 Mecˇ iar, Vladimir 204 Meershoek, Guus 84 Meihuizen, Joggli 85 Meler, Mayer 62 memory, historical 212–15, 229–30 Mendelsohn, Oscar 132 Menten, Pieter 83 Merten, Maximilian 150–1 Meyer, Arnold 75 Michael I, King of Romania 246–7, 255 Michel, Henri 18, 174–8 Michnik, Adam 32 Miłosz, Czesław 1, 29 Mitterand, François 173, 181 Moisescu, Sorin 259 Moisin, Ion 255 Moissis, Asher 150 Molho, Michael 144, 148–9, 159 Molho, Rena 141 Morgensen, Michael 115–16 Moulin, Jean 173 Muijlwijk, Peter 83 Mulisch, Harry 82 Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina 268 Munteanu, Ion Alexandru 261 Mus¸at, Mircea 261 Musial, Bogdan 31 Mussert, Anton 73 Mussolini, Benito 12, 14, 217, 221 Nádas, Péter 234 Nagel, Willem 79 Na˘ stase, Adrian 266–8 nationalism 6, 10, 16–19, 31–2, 45, 50, 62, 95–6, 195, 199–200, 251 Nazi Germany 2–6, 9–21, 29, 32, 37, 44–58, 62, 65, 71–6, 83, 86, 91–104, 110–28, 142, 155–6, 160, 169–81, 186–92, 200, 212–15, 219–22, 230–43, 252–7, 258–69 Neacs¸u, Ilie 253, 257 Netherlands 5–6, 9–10, 71–87; Besluit Buitengewoon Strafrecht (BBS) 72; Jewish Council 82; National Socialist Movement (NSB) 73–6, 80–3, 86; Nederlandse Unie (NU) 76 Nicolaescu, Sergiu 255

Nolte, Ernst 261 Norway 6–7, 10–11, 20, 37, 125–34; National Unity Party 7, 127–30 Novogrudok 64 Odessa 246–7 Omakaitse 64 Ondrejov, L’udo 192 Ondruš, Ján 193 On Such a Night (film) 125, 131 Ophüls, Marcel 83, 176 Orbán, Viktor 239–40 Ory, Pascal 179–80 Oslo 37, 115, 125–34 Paggi, Leonardo 214 Palies, Albert Lourens Cornelis 80 Pánis, Stanislav 200 Papanace, Constantin 247 Papandreou, Damaskinos 8 Papandreou, George 156 Papon, Maurice 181 Pappas, Dimitres 144 Parri, Ferruccio 216–17 Pa˘ tra˘ s¸canu, Lucret¸iu 250 Paxton, Robert O. 13, 18, 174–82 Pétain, Philippe 2, 13, 77, 169–73, 176–8 Petrescu, Gheorghe 260 Pierron, Bernard 146, 156–7 Pinay, Antoine 173 Pinto, Diana 38–9 Pippidi, Andrei 268 Pius XII, Pope 78 pogroms 4, 18, 20, 46–7, 53, 58–62, 96, 142, 158, 188, 245, 260, 262, 269; see also under individual locations Poland 2–4, 25–39, 142; Academy of Sciences 35; Jewish Historical Institute 35; Law and Justice Party 37; Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Families, LPR 37); National Institute of Remembrance 29; Solidarity movement 28–9 Popovici, Traian 263 Presser, Jacques 82 Pritz, Pál 236–7, 241 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 199 Protopopescu, Ioan 247 purges 74–80, 85, 94, 96, 216–18 Quellien, Jean 180 Quisling, Vidkun 7, 127–33 Radio Maryja 35 Rajk, Lászlo 190 Rallis, Ioannes 147

Index Rassinier, Paul 261 Reitlinger, Gerald 172 Remond, René 173–4 rescue of Jews 1, 3, 7–8, 11–12, 26–8, 32, 37–8, 45, 77, 113–25, 133, 139, 143, 149–52, 157, 193 resistance and resistance myth 17, 20, 94–7, 170–1, 215–16, 243 Revel, Jean-François 265 Riisnæs, Sverre 128 Ringdal, Nils Johan 130 Ringelblum, Emmanuel 27 Ripka, Hubert 187 Robinson, Jacob 142 Rød, Knut 130, 133 Roller, Mihai 250–1 Roman, Štefan 195 Romania 16–19, 245–70; Christian Democratic National Peasants’ Party (PNT¸CD) 255; Communist Party of (PCR) 248; Democratic Convention of (CDR) 255–8; Democratic National Salvation Front (FDSN) 256; Greater Romania Party (PRM) 252–8, 261, 267–70; Iron Guard 16, 21, 247–63, 269; Jewish Democratic Committee (CDE) 249; League of Marshals 253; League for the Struggle against Anti-Romanianism 262; National Liberal Party (PNL) 255–6, 267; National Salvation Front (FSN) 254–6, 262; Party of National Unity (PUNR) 256–7; People’s Tribunals 246–7, 256; Pro-Marshal Antonescu League of War Veterans 256–7; Social Democratic Party (PSD) 270; Vatra româneasca (Romanian Cradle) 257; Workers’ Party (PMR) 249 Romijn, Peter 80 Romsée, Gerard 97 Rosenbaum, Alan S. 254 Rosenberg, Alfred 127 Rotman, Liviu 249 Rousso, Henry 169–71, 175–6, 245 Rozanis, Stephanos 157 Rozenblum, Thierry 97 Rubinstein, Renate 82 Rupnik, Jacques 245 Rydzyk, Tadeusz 35 S¸afran, Alexandru 263–4 Salò Republic see Italy: Italian Social Republic Salonika 139–60

303

Samothrace 139 Sa˘ racu, Dumitru 248–9 Schermerhorn, Willem 75 Schokking, Frans 78–9 Schram, Laurence 100 Schreiber, Jean-Philippe 105 Schudrich, Michael 31 Schutzstaffel (SS) 6–8, 15, 60, 62, 65, 46, 147 Scoccimarro, Mauro 217, 221 Sédouy, Alain de 176 Semelin, Jacques 180 Senje, Sigurd 132 Sergiichuk, V. 49 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur 5 Sforza, Carlo 217 Shafir, Michael 30 Shapoval, Iu 49 Shchekin, Giorgii 49–50 “sword and shield” theory 18, 77, 171–4 Sima, Horia 247 Simon Wiesenthal Centre 260 Simonides, Vassilis 140–1, 147, 150, 158 Singer, I.B. 37–8 Skancke, Ragnar 128 Skodvin, Magne 131 Slánsky, Rudolf 191 Slovakia 13–14, 18–19, 186–206; Charta 77 195; Congress of Democratic Emigrés 195; Hlinka People’s Party 13–14, 186–8, 197–200, 203; Kreminicˇ ka 190; Liblice 193; National Party (SNS) 200; National Unity Party (SNJ) 200; World Congress 195–8 Smirim, Grigory 62 Smith, Christopher H. 258–9 Smolar, Aleksander 27 Snechkus, A. 54 Sobibor 4, 46 The Sorrow and the Pity 176, 178 Spiliotis, Susanne-Sophia 151 Stahlecker, Franz Walter 59–61 Stalin, Joseph (and Stalinism) 3, 46–8, 53–6, 65, 265–6 Steinberg, Maxime 101–2 Stichting Toezicht Politieke Delinquenten 80 Stoica, Mariana 268 Strijd, Krijn 76 Stroumsa, Jacques 152

304

Index

Struycken, Teun 78 Strzembosz, Tomasz 30 Sturdza, Mihai 247 Šuster, Rudolf 204–5 Suziedelis, Saulius 60 Švantner, František 193 Svenningsen, Nils 118–19 Szálasi, Ferenc 12, 16, 236–7 Szechenyi, István 237 Sztójay, Dome 15 Targu-Mures 249, 257–8 Tartarka, Dominik 193 Teleki, Pál 235–42 Terboven, Josef 127–8 Thalmann, Ernest 201 Thassos 139 Theodorescu, Ra˘ zvan 267–8 Theodoru, Radu 261 Theresienstadt 4, 65, 77, 116–17, 120–1, 187 Thrace 8, 139 Timis¸oara 257 Tiso, Jozef 13–14, 19, 186–90, 194–206 Todorov, Tsvetan 44 Togliatti, Palmiro 218 Toornstra, Klaas 80 Totok, William 255–6 Transnistria 16, 45, 247–50, 254, 260–4, 268–9 Transylvania 246–7, 256, 265 Treblinka 4, 46, 50, 139, 142 Trestorianu, Constantin 246 trials see war criminals Trianon Treaty 233 Truskas, Liudas 57 Tsolakoglou, Giorgios 147 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim 253–6, 261, 265 Tudoran, Dorin 265 Tuka, Vojtech 13–14, 189, 200 Turlea, Petre 255, 261 Turowicz, Jerzy 29 Tygodnik Powszechny 1, 3, 29 Ukraine 4–5, 44–51; auxiliary police 45, 47; Insurgent Army 45; Inter-regional Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP) 49–50; NKVD 46–8, 57; Rebel Army (UPA) 50; Reichscommissariat 45

Ulstein, Ragnar 133 Ungheanu, Mihai 256, 265 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 34 van den Brande de Reeth, Adrien 100 van Dam, Jan 77 van Dijk, Ans 72–3, 78 van Doorslaer, Rudy 104–5 van Genechten, Robert 73 van der Heijden, Chris 86 van Maarseveen, Johannes Henricus 78 van Randwijk, Henk 71–2, 81 van Severen, Joris 92–3 van der Vaart Smit, Hendrik Willem 75 van der Zee, Nanda 85 Vasilu, Constantin 247 Veldkamp, J.T. 77 Venema, Adriaan 85 Venezis, Elias 145–6 Veremis, Thanos 156 Verhofstadt, Guy 99, 105 Vichy regime 13, 17–18, 169–82 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 260 Vigh, Karoly 240–1 Viksne, Rudite 62 Waal, Nic 125 Wagner, Wilhelm 130 Wajda, Andrzej 36 Waldheim, Kurt 159 war criminals, trials of 81, 83, 187–8, 239, 245–6, 251, 256, 260 Warsaw Ghetto and the Uprising 32, 38, 142, 219–20 Watts, Larry L. 264–5 Wehrmacht 7, 46, 111, 116–17, 125, 127, 213, 240 Weinreb, Friedrich 82 West Germany 9, 28, 150–1 Westlie, Bjorn 132 Wierzejski, Wojciech 38 Wiesel, Elie 265, 269 Wiesenthal, Simon 81; see also Simon Wiesenthal Centre Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands 9, 72, 85 Wolfswinkel, Rolf 83 World Jewish Congress 34

Index Yacoel, Yomtov 149, 152 Yahil, Leni 114 Yugoslavia 153, 229, 238–9 Zaglada 35 Zapletal, Martin 195

Zelienka, Ilja 193 Zizas, Rimantas 54 Zmena 199 Zolochiv pogrom 47 Zuiveringsbesluit 74 . Zycin´ski, Józef 34

305