Facing the Catastrophe: Jews and Non-Jews in Europe during World War II

Facing the Catastrophe

This book is part of the European Science Foundation (ESF) programme ‘Occupation in Europe: The Impact of National Socialist and Fascist Rule’. ISSN: 1753-7894

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This series includes: Vol. 1 Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe Edited by Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka and Anette Warring Vol. 2 The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture 1936–1946 Edited by Martin Conway and Peter Romijn Vol. 3 People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and its Aftermath Pertti Ahonen, Gustavo Corni, Jerzy Kochanowski, Rainer Schulze, Tamás Stark and Barbara Stelzl-Marx

Facing the Catastrophe Jews and Non-Jews in Europe during World War II

Edited by Beate Kosmala and Georgi Verbeeck

Oxford • New York

English edition First published in 2011 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

© ESF 2011

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Contents Notes on Contributors

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala

1

1

Jews and Non-Jews in the Aryanization Process: Comparison of France and the Slovak State, 1939–45 Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Eduard Nižňanský

13

2

Pogroms and Massacres during the Summer of 1941 in the Łomża and Białystock District: The Case of Radziłów Andrzej Żbikowski

41

3

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces: Case Studies of Jurbarkas and Utena Christoph Dieckmann

73

4

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands: Survival in Hiding Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala

97

5

Jews and Their Social Environment: Perspectives from the Underground Press in Poland and France Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski

159

6

Cultural Memory and Legal Responses: Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner

229

Index

261

Contributors Daniel Blatman is the head of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry and the Max and Rita Haber Professor in Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published books and articles on the Jewish Labour movement in Eastern Europe, the holocaust and its aftermath and Nazi Germany. Marnix Croes, PhD, is a researcher at the Scientific Research and Documentation Centre of the Netherlands’ Ministry of Justice. His research and publications focus on the chance of survival of Jews in the Netherlands during the German occupation of 1940–1945. Christoph Dieckmann, Lecturer for Modern European History at the University of Keele in the UK, has published on concentration camps, Himmler’s appointment calendar and widely on Lithuania under the German occupation. He was a researcher for the Lithuanian State Commission Investigating Soviet and Nazi Crimes in Lithuania. Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a graduate of the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon – Sorbonne, is a specialist in the economic Aryanization of property during the Holocaust. Currently he is a Lecturer in Holocaust Studies in the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester. Mariana Hausleitner, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of History and Cultural Studies at the Free University of Berlin and is currently working for the Berlin-based project ‘The Police in the National Socialist State’. She has published on inter-ethnic relations in the twentieth century in Romania, Hungary, the Republic of Moldova and the Ukraine, and on the Holocaust and its aftermath in Romania. Beate Kosmala, PhD, is a historian and senior researcher currently working for the German Resistance Memorial Centre, Berlin, and was previously at the Centre for Research on Anti-semitism, Berlin. She also assisted in creating the new Silent Heroes Memorial Centre, Berlin. Her research focuses on the history of Jews in hiding during the Holocaust.

vii

viii  •  Notes on Contributors Eduard Nižňanský is Professor in the Department of History at the Comenius University in Bratislava. He was a member of a team of Slovak historians who edited seven volumes of documents on the Holocaust in Slovakia, which cover almost all basic aspects of the history of the anti-Jewish measures and policies in Slovakia from 1938 to 1945. He is editor of Acta historica posoniensia-Judaica et Holocaustica. Renée Poznanski is the Yaakov and Poria Avnon Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University (Beer Sheva, Israel), which she created and has headed for several years. She was born and studied in France and graduated from the Sorbonne and the Institute of Political Science (Paris). She has published books and many articles on the Shoah in France. Georgi Verbeeck is Professor of German History at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and a Senior Lecturer at Maastricht University (the Netherlands). His research and publications focus on modern and contemporary German history, the theory of history, historiography and political culture. Andrzej Żbikowski is Professor of History at the University of Warsaw. He is associated with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute and the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research. He has been chief specialist in the Public Education Office of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw. His research focuses mainly on the persecution of the Jews in Northern and Eastern Poland during the Second World War.

Acknowledgements The process of producing this book has been highly complex. The project has been part of the European Science Foundation (ESF) programme ‘Nazi Occupation in Europe: The Impact of National Socialist and Fascist Rule in Europe’. As the first result of our collaborative work, the volume Facing the Nazi Genocide: Non-Jews and Jews in Europe (Berlin: Metropol Verlag) appeared in 2004. Various editorial meetings have been held in such places as Trento (2000), Loveno di Menaggio (2001), Budapest (2002), Warsaw (2003), Bratislava (2004) and Amsterdam (2005). Additional meetings took place in Berlin and Maastricht. Special thanks go to the project initiators, Wolfgang Benz and Hans Blom, and the project management of the European Science Foundation, in particular Madelise Blumenroder. Decisive support was provided by Conny Kristel of the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation in Amsterdam, and substantial editorial assistance by Simone Labs and Paul Stephenson. Our thanks also go to colleagues with whom we have collaborated at earlier stages of the project but whose contributions are not included in the book. The editors wish to honour the memory of our distinguished colleague Karl Stuhlpfarrer, who passed away too early in his life in 2009. Beate Kosmala and Georgi Verbeeck

ix

Introduction Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala

Studying the Holocaust The Holocaust and the historical era of National Socialism, which have since become the darkest symbols of the twentieth century’s crimes, are subjects of numerous historical, psychological, sociological, literary and philosophical studies. All types of scholars have tried to explain what appears as the most irrational act of the Western world, which, until at least the dawn of the previous century, had been so sure of its eminent superiority to other civilizations and cultures. The writing of the history of the Holocaust therefore touches one of the nerves of Europe’s twentieth-century political and cultural identity. Studying and explaining the mass destruction of the Jews during the Second World War by Nazi Germany stretch the historian to the limits in his central task of providing rational explanation of complex historical developments. Simply to pose the question of how a civilized nation and an economically and technologically advanced modern state could carry out the systematic destruction of an entire people for no other reason than that they were Jews suggests a scale of irrationality that is hardly susceptible to historical understanding.1 The apparent incomprehensibility of the Holocaust has, however, in no way diminished the continuing interest of both scholars and the wider public in the topic. Numerous studies have been published on various aspects of the persecution and murder of the Jews under the Nazi occupation in Europe. Many aspects of the Holocaust have been studied in detail, but many others still deserve further scholarly attention. This volume elaborates on the relations and interactions between Jews and non-Jews in the process of the persecution, deportation and annihilation of the Jews between 1939 and 1945. It wishes to describe the vital interplay between the victims’ suffering and the responses and reactions of their social environment during these crucial years of repression and death. The conceptual triangle between perpetrators, victims and bystanders serves as the central perspective of this book. Introducing the perspective of perpetrators, victims and outsiders in an interactive way has enriched our knowledge and understanding of such a complex phenomenon as mass violence and suffering under extreme circumstances. It is a way of looking at events that brings up serious moral and philosophical questions. For the historian in particular it enables a deeper insight into the mechanisms and the complex social and psychological conditions under which violence can take place.

1

2  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala The execution of the Jewish genocide by Nazi Germany would hardly be imag­ inable in times of peace. The context of the Second World War provided optimal conditions for its implementation. With the introduction in the summer of 1941 of state-organized genocide, the war gave the opportunity to complete the programme of racial cleansing that had begun immediately after the National Socialist seizure of power. The conquest of continental Europe provided the circumstance for a drastic change in direction in German race policy away from formal discrimination and arbitrary terror to the active implementation of mass murder. Historians have found no evidence of any master plan for annihilation prior to 1939, but it is now generally accepted that the whole Nazi conception of the war was one of racial struggle in which the Jewish people above all were the enemy of the German Volk. When the German Reich found itself ruling very large Jewish populations after the conquest of the east, the regime began to explore more extreme solutions to the so-called ‘Jewish problem’. The war saw a progressive barbarization of Nazi policies towards the Jews – not necessarily as a result of a clearly laid out plan, but as a function of conflicting objectives among the various Nazi power blocs which found resolution only in more and more radical measures. But the barbarization of the war also played an important role in the attitude of bystanders and collaborators in occupied territories. The implementation of the genocide was certainly not only a top-down initiative; it was triggered by a great variety of circumstantial contexts as well. The war undoubtedly delivered the conditions for carrying out killings on a massive scale. It freed the National Socialists of all restraints on violence and provided the necessary cover to implement their programme to exterminate all undesired elements. War also gave credibility to Hitler’s charges that the Jews constituted dangerous enemies of the Reich. According to his conspiracy theory, propagated for more than two decades, the Jews had been responsible for the German defeat after the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. National Socialist policies of social purification and mass resettlement played an equally important role in the incitation of the genocide. The creation of an ethnically and socially purified society, involving the implicit destruction of disabled or alien elements, had always been at the heart of Nazi ideology. Physical destruction was equally inherent in resettlement schemes. Ethnic cleansing and changes of borders in Central and Eastern Europe had created a breeding ground for exterminationalist violence, of which Jews in particular would become the target. There has been intensive debate about whether Jews are to be seen as a unique category of victims of the Nazi regime or not. The German New Order had indeed developed a complex hierarchy of races that included not only Jews but other population groups that were deemed to be unworthy of existence (lebensunwertes Leben) as well. Sinti and Roma (gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war and large proportions of political, religious and social minorities suffered brutal persecution too. Many will argue, however, that Jewish suffering still deserves special acknowledgement, given both the magnitude of the human losses and the centrality

Introduction  •  3 of virulent anti-Semitism to the Nazi ideology. Jews were not only killed in a series of specially designed camps, but also perished in pogroms, in ghettos and in work camps. Furthermore, Jewish suffering included the experiences of expropriation and expulsion, physical hardship during hiding, resistance, arrest and deportation. Our knowledge and remembrance of what is commonly labelled ‘the Holocaust’ therefore need constant refinement and sometimes revision. What happened to the Jews under Nazi rule should not be portrayed as a monolithic or one-dimensional event but as a complex process with many human actors and contextual factors. Many aspects of the Holocaust have been the focus of exceptionally intensive investigation, such as the genesis of the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish question, the seat of its responsibility, the direct role of Hitler and the intersection with other branches of Nazi policy. Lots of research has been conducted into the role and responsibility of the perpetrators on a macro level, which is a perspective that tends to neglect the interaction between the committed crimes and their social environment. The Holocaust cannot be understood from this particular point of view alone. This volume, therefore, wishes to draw attention to the various lower levels of historical experiences, including the role of innumerable anonymous actors. Smallscale initiatives that took place in many places and localities throughout occupied Europe will be at the heart of each contribution to this book, which is a plea to broaden our knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust by including the microhistorical approach of local historical experiences. This will be done by offering comparative (regional or national) case studies that highlight the various aspects of persecution, violence, deportation and extermination. Although there have been mass murders in many other places and times in human history, the genocidal attack on Europe’s Jews had a uniquely modern scale and scientific organization, which partly explains why it has produced such painful memories and questions for future generations. How could such murderous events take place in the heart of civilized Europe? The fact that the Holocaust was carried out by ordinary people and law-obeying bureaucrats raises questions about individual and collective responsibilities, about the use and abuse of modern technologies, and about the consequences of particular ethnocentric ideologies. All these questions are of vital importance for our contemporary attitude towards the aftermath of the Holocaust. The psychological legacies of the Holocaust, for perpetrators as well as for survivors and their descendants, have by no means been exhaustively examined, although the research on the intergenerational transmission and legacies of the Holocaust has been growing rapidly.

Final Publication of the Research Team on ‘The Persecution of the Jews’ This book is part of a larger research project entitled ‘The Impact of NationalSocialist and Fascist Rule, 1938–1950’ (INSFO), consisting of six research teams

4  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala and funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The project provided an opportunity to exchange ideas and approaches among historians and to overcome the ideological split between West and East since 1945. After several meetings of the research team on ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, the members decided to develop a comparative approach through predominantly collaborative essays that concentrated on six main themes. The first chapter, ‘Jews and Non-Jews in the Aryanization Process: Comparison of France and the Slovak State, 1939–45’, deals with the question of whether and how the Aryanization procedure and the experience of robbery from the Jews differed in France, the first European country to accord the Jews the status of citizens with equal rights in 1791, and Slovakia, where in the course of the nation-building process anti-Jewish propaganda had a powerful impact on national policy, and where a negative stereotype of ‘Jew’ had been established. By 1939 the Jews had been declared enemies not only of the new state, but also of the Slovak nation.2 The description of the economic Aryanization process and the confiscation of Jewish assets in France and Slovakia, a collaborative effort written by JeanMarc Dreyfus and Eduard Nižňanský, illuminates how the process was carried out in both countries by national and non-German administrations. Civil servants in various branches of government, temporary administrators as well as buyers were integral parts of the process. In Slovakia, where the Jews represented 40 per cent of the whole economy but only 4 per cent of the total population, economic Aryanization consisted of a massive transfer of Jewish assets and companies to the small, militant and most influential part of the Hlinka Party, whereas in France the Jews’ proportional weight in the economy was much more limited except in a few sectors such as textiles and leather. Whilst in France the reaction of the non-Jewish population in general could be characterized as one of indifference, in Slovakia people were much more in favour of the expulsion of the Jews from their economic position. The process was much more brutal in Slovakia than in France, where a certain margin of manoeuvre was possible for the Jews, at least until the autumn of 1941. They could endeavour to put some of their valuables, in the form of liquid assets, in a safe place or make arrangements with temporary custodians. Lastly, the authors stress that one must look at the respective place of economic Aryanization in France and in Slovakia in the genocidal process. In isolating the Jews, in impoverishing them and in furnishing perpetrators with economic motivations, Aryanization was a central element of the genocide. The intensity of the economic persecution was closely correlated with that of extermination. In 2001, when the ESF project came into being, Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbors had just been published, in which it was revealed that in the summer of 1941, after the beginning of the German–Soviet war on 22 June, pogroms against Jews were carried out by some of the local Polish population in the small Polish town of Jedwabne near Łomża in north-east Poland and in some other localities of the

Introduction  •  5 region. Gross’s book, and the following heated debate especially in Poland, raised new questions about the Holocaust and gave rise to new and further research. The Polish Institute for National Memory (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) published its findings in two extensive volumes in 2003. The general conclusions of these studies underline the overall trend of violence perpetrated against Jews by Poles that surfaced in the first few weeks of the German–Soviet war in this particular region of Poland occupied by the Soviets since 1939. The violence subsequently swept across the entire region between the Baltic and the Black Sea.3 The second and third chapters of the current volume deal with violence and pogroms – namely, a case study of the town of Radziłów and a comparative study of two municipalities in Lithuania. In his contribution ‘Pogroms and Massacres during the Summer of 1941 in the Łomża and Białystok District: The Case of Radziłów’, Andrzej Żbikowski, who also presented the findings of his research on the pogroms in the territory of western Belarus in the IPN publication,4 focuses on an event that took place on 7 July 1941, before the Jedwabne massacre. The pogrom of Radziłów, a shtetl thirty kilometres from Jedwabne, was the second of twenty outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence that occurred in the Polish north-eastern borderland between the time of the German attack on the Soviet Union and mid-September of that same year.5 The author contrasts the testimonies of Jewish survivors with eyewitness accounts compiled between April 1945 and September 1948 and some of the case papers regarding the participation of Poles in the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1941 in Radziłów from the sixty-one legal investigations and trials in Poland between 1945 and 1958. He seeks to question patterns of remembrance among the Jews who survived the massacres and to reconstruct both the course of the anti-Jewish outbursts in the given locality and the atmosphere surrounding the trials that were held after the war. In his conclusion the author argues that the oldest motives for the anti-Jewish pogroms that have recurred throughout history – greed and envy – were also key to the pogroms that took place in the summer of 1941 in the Łomża region, in the absence of a strong administrative authority. The desire to plunder Jewish homes is evident in practically every Jewish account as being a factor in the sudden eruption of aggression among long-standing neighbours. Mass anti-Jewish events exploded in the summer of 1941 in the ethnically diverse belt of territories previously occupied by the Soviets, wherever hatred towards the Jews had a long tradition and where the local population had sustained vast losses as a result of active resistance to the Soviet occupation. It seems that, at least from the 1930s onwards, a considerable proportion of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the Podlasie region regarded the Jews as their greatest enemies owing to the influence and propaganda of extreme nationalist groups whose ideologies contained definitions of the most dangerous enemy. Ever present is the link between the pogroms and the desire of local communities to take revenge on those who had allegedly been guilty of collaborating with the former Soviet occupation authorities. According to the author, in Radziłów, even

6  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala more clearly than in Jedwabne, alleged collaboration with the Soviets was the pretext which helped the murderers justify their actions and in so doing break down resistance to these acts. The Germans affirmed that it was the Jews’ fault that so many Poles had been deported to Siberia by the Soviets. Now they could take revenge. They understood this to mean that they could murder all the Jews. The chapter ‘Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces: Case Studies of Jurbarkas and Utena’, by Christoph Dieckmann, presents illuminating insights into the situation in two small towns, one located in the south-west on the banks of the Neman River (Nemunas) near the German border, the other in the north-east at a considerable distance from the German border and therefore not invaded quite so rapidly by the Germans.6 The crucial underlying question is obviously that of the German influence on the murderous violence on the one hand and the impact of radical Lithuanian nationalism on the other. Whereas there was little room for a Lithuanian initiative in Jurbarkas, there was more time for action in Utena. On the question of identifying who took the initiative in the violent actions against the Jews, the comparison of Jurbarkas and Utena reveals that the persecution and massacres in these towns did not differ from each other much. No evidence was found of a large-scale Lithuanian-led campaign of murder against the local Jewish community before the arrival of the Germans. Only at the end of July/beginning of August did the situation escalate in Utena, where 800 Jews were shot. Further mass murders took place in the region at the end of August and beginning of September 1941, for which German initiative and command were necessary. However, the Germans could count on the willing support of part of the local population. In the eyes of many Lithuanians, the Jews had been collectively deprived of their human rights. In virtually all cases, two groups of people participated directly in the mass murders of the Jews by the German occupiers: first, the regular death squads of the German and Lithuanian police, which had been formed within a few weeks, and, second, the local police as well as partisans who were transformed into an auxiliary police force. Very often the control and ultimate authority did not belong to the political leadership. In Lithuania, too, there is a link to the period of Soviet rule that had a major impact on the relations between Jews and non-Jews. Already under the Soviet occupation local partisan groups were prepared to take action against the Soviets and Jews, identifying both Jews and communists in an anti-Semitic way. The author argues that the extent of the violence, the number of ghettos and the timing of their establishment, the means of expropriating and robbing, and the actual groups and individuals involved in the killing, all depended on local circumstances and initiative. The ultimate fate of the victims in individual cases always depended on the behaviour of the local population. The fourth chapter, ‘Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands: Surviving in Hiding’, is a collaborative essay by Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala. Taking into account the impact of persecution on Jews in Nazi Germany since 1933,

Introduction  •  7 the authors compare the procedures of persecution used in both countries during the war in order to examine the possibility of survival against this backdrop. Although there were important differences between Germany and the Netherlands, the general conditions at the outset of the Holocaust appear to have been quite similar. The Jews still living in Germany when the deportations to the east throughout the Reich began in October 1941 were trapped. What was left of the Jewish community there after almost nine years of persecution and forced emigration was a vulnerable group of people: isolated, impoverished and relatively old. The Jews living in the Netherlands had become targets of National-Socialist policies shortly after the Wehrmacht had occupied the country in May 1940. The introduction of an Aufsichtsverwaltung (supervisory administration) in which the SS had a strong representation did not immediately result in anti-Jewish policies, but the groundwork was laid soon enough. The registration and thus the identification of Jews from the beginning of 1941 made the implementation of anti-Jewish policies all the easier and allowed for a speedy harmonization of the persecution in both countries. It was not long before the development of anti-Jewish policies in the Netherlands started closely to follow the course set out in Berlin. From October 1941 in Germany and from July 1942 in the Netherlands, train­ loads of Jews were deported to the east to be killed. Unlike the situation in France or Belgium, the persecuting bureaucrats in Germany and the Netherlands were unrelenting and persistent in their efforts to implement the Final Solution. In both countries, contact with gentiles who were willing to help appears to have been the main key to survival. But in Germany the Nazi idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, which was based on racism and anti-Semitism, had led after nine years of propaganda to dynamic social processes of changes. Germans helping Jews acted not only under restrictions but also against the predominant changed frame of values in their country. What is more, German citizens were probably less likely to help Jews who were trying to hide than the citizens of the countries that were under Nazi occupation. However, in Germany, too, thousands of Jews attempted to survive in hiding. Since there was no large-scale organized resistance movement in the Third Reich, they had to rely on their own social networks. This was in fact also the case in the Netherlands. The deportation of the Jews started in July 1942 at a time when organized resistance networks had not been developed, and so Jews had to rely on their gentile family members, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. One could draw the conclusion that in this respect in particular survival in hiding was more difficult in Germany than in the Netherlands. There are several indicators for this. Unlike in the Netherlands, many Jews who wished to go underground in Germany waited until the very last moment, just before or during the ‘Factory Operation’ at the end of February 1943. This could be seen as an indication of the difficulty they had in finding a place to hide. One of the reasons for this was the fact that, as result of the elimination of almost all resistance groups and opponents of the regime since 1933, there was no strong

8  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala or integrated resistance movement in the Third Reich, which is underlined by the comparatively small number of Jewish children who went into hiding in Germany. In the Netherlands in contrast, although a real resistance movement emerged only after the bloody suppression of the April–May strike in 1943, there were already several small resistance organizations that specialized in saving Jewish children before that time. They managed to rescue many hundreds. The difficulty in finding places to hide in Germany was probably a result of the danger perceived by potential helpers and real helpers in the overwhelming atmosphere of fear. The comparatively low number of survivors among the Jews in Germany who hid as well as the high percentage of Jews who were arrested in hiding resulted in a much higher attrition rate for Jews in Germany than for Jews in the Netherlands or Warsaw. These numbers underline the even greater danger Jews faced in Germany. Although the risks that hidden Jews in Germany and the Netherlands had to face were grave, this does not mean that the helpers of Jews ran the same risks. In the Netherlands helping Jews could be punished with a concentration camp sentence, but it appears that this kind of punishment was not often meted out to people who only sheltered Jews. Often enough, these people where not punished at all. It ought to be stressed that this was the case in Germany too. The systematic research on the rescuers and helpers of Jews in Nazi Germany, which was started in the 1990s, disproves the often repeated myth that non-Jewish Germans could not act against the measures of the regime. It also refutes the argument that German Jews resigned themselves to deportation. As was the case in the Netherlands, thousands desperately tried to survive. Although tens of thousands of gentiles in both countries helped them in their efforts to attain this goal, only a minority proved successful. In the chapter ‘Jews and Their Social Environment: Perspectives from the Under­ ground Press in Poland and France’, which deals with the strategies of clandestine publications, Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski explore the extraordinarily varied underground press (non-Jewish and Jewish) in both countries in order to measure the devastation produced by anti-Semitic propaganda within political circles that might be seen as sheltered and to investigate the dialogue between the Jews and the resistance movements. Although taking into account the fact that France and Poland suffered very different fates under German occupation, and recognizing the fact that Jewry in both countries differed, there are important points of reference for comparisons of how and to what extent the persecution and annihilation of the Jews were given coverage. It was in Poland, a country characterized by virulent popular anti-Semitism, that the underground press monitored the anti-Jewish persecution during the initial years of the Nazi occupation and, in most cases, condemned it. But writers continued to view the Jews through the lens of the inter-war period. Until the start of the mass exterminations in 1942, members of the Polish underground found it difficult to relate to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy as a unique phenomenon that suggested an

Introduction  •  9 intention to wipe out Polish Jewry. Only in early 1942, when the exterminations began (in the Warthegau and then in the Lublin district), did the underground press begin constantly to report about the murder of the Jews and its significance, whereas the right-wing press did not see the annihilation of the Jews as substantially different from the terror directed against the Poles. The situation in France was different and very special in that the far right, which was forced underground in Poland, held the reigns of power. The French people, though initially opposed to the German presence, offered broad support to General Pétain’s Vichy regime and were easily persuaded of the necessity of his ‘National Revolution’. That influenced the resistance’s choice of propaganda. Until the spring of 1942, the persecution of the Jews was very rarely addressed. When it was alluded to, reference was made only to the French Jews, and the German enemies were generally held to be responsible for their treatment. The way in which the majority of the underground papers dealt with the persecution of the Jews was to adopt a strategy of ‘palpable discretion’ – at least until the summer of 1942, in accordance with the image of public opinion. Only when the imposition of the yellow badge in the occupied zone was followed by round-ups of Jews in the summer of 1941 was there unanimous protest – expressed in all of the underground publications. It was claimed that the Germans or the Nazis were the instigators of these atrocities and that French police officers were forced to act under duress and force. But within a few weeks the protests were transformed into total silence. In July 1942 L’Humanité was the last publication to refer to the fate of the Jews, who then disappeared completely from its columns, as they did from the entire underground press after the autumn of 1942. In both countries the communist press proposed an interpretation based on class theory. In Poland, for example, where the communists had formed a distinct minority, they analysed – in accordance with their ideology – the situation in the Warsaw ghetto as a class issue. The resistance fighters were identified as affiliated exclusively with the political left and as supporters of the Soviet Union. In France the underground publications of the Jewish communist organizations were strongly linked to the rest of the communist press. But the mass of information about the fate of the Jews published by the Jewish communist organization Mouvement national contre le racisme (created in 1940), in its two papers J’accuse and Fraternité, was exceptional. It is striking that they praised the unqualified support the Jews were ostensibly receiving from the French people, ‘a classic example of autosuggestion’ according to Renée Poznanski. It is highly remarkable what can be observed in Catholic messages in the two countries. In France the only dissenting voice of the underground press was that of two Catholic journals. In May 1942 La France continue published a detailed account of how the Nazis had put the Final Solution into practice in various occupied countries, also mentioning the anti-Semitic legislation enforced in France and the situation in the internment camps. The first 1943 issue of Témoignage

10  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala Chrétien, devoted entirely to Poland, published descriptions of the ‘mass shootings and poisoning by gas’, concluding that more than 700,000 Jews in total had been murdered on Polish soil and that there was no doubt ‘concerning Hitler’s plan to totally exterminate the Jews of the European continent’. In Poland the Catholic press published as much information as it could about the killings of Jews in small towns and the deportations to the death camps. It also wrote about peasants who had discovered Jews in various hiding places and stolen their property before handing them over to the Germans. In both France and Poland it was argued that the country was at risk of losing its soul if it failed to vigorously denounce the persecution of the Jews. It can be concluded that a moral code based on absolute values replaced social prejudice. In the analysed Jewish underground publications a strong feeling of isolation prevailed everywhere, but in Poland the Jews’ sense of isolation and physical segregation from the rest of the Polish nation was absolute. This difference was related to the pessimism that ultimately won out in Poland, whereas in France optimism never vanished. The Jews in France had to face a less hostile social environment. This can be seen – the authors conclude – as an expression of clearheadedness about the very different characters of the two societies, which the events of the immediate post-war period only reinforced. The Holocaust in Europe has not merely reconfigured our understanding of and thinking about post-war international jurisprudence; since the Nuremberg trials in 1945/6 genocide and crimes against humanity have constituted new criteria in international law. But the Holocaust also measures the moral standing of those who pronounce upon it. In certain European countries there even exists a legal framework that determines the way the Holocaust should be remembered. To deny or to minimize is to place oneself beyond the pale of civilized discourse. The acknowledgement of the Holocaust became the quintessence of contemporary political and cultural identity, the ultimate proof of civilized behaviour and morally correct convictions. As Tony Judt states, ‘the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity’.7 By the end of the previous century the centrality of the Holocaust to European – particularly Western European – identity and public memory seemed irreversible, demonstrating the omnipresence of the past in contemporary political actions. The awareness of gross crimes and human rights violations in the past and the acknowledgement of moral responsibility are seen as essential tools for opening new perspectives on restored relations between people and states. After the war there was hardly any mystery about what had happened to Europe’s Jews. That an estimated six million Jews had been put to death was widely accepted within a few months of the war’s end. The handful of survivors, whether in the displaced persons’ camps or in their countries of origin, paid implicit witness to the number of dead. Remembering the Holocaust soon became a key to understanding the divergences in post-war Europe’s political culture. Different political developments

Introduction  •  11 have created different paths of commemoration. By the end of the twentieth century, however, Holocaust recognition has become a general entry ticket to the community of civilized European nations. The destruction of the European Jews has moreover become the central point of reference for judging other forms of genocide and mass killing in the remote and recent past. Other examples of mass destruction – the Armenian genocide, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, ethnic genocide in Central Africa, war crimes in former Yugoslavia, etc. – are perceived and judged trough the lens of the Holocaust as the epitome of the most horrific crime of the twentieth century. The reason these crimes, both in the near and more remote past, carry such a political charge is that the Holocaust serves as a benchmark measure in our understanding and awareness of other major crimes and wrongdoings. It is in this respect that the last chapter of the book, by Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner, elaborates on the precarious nature of collective memory and the legacy of the Holocaust in two different countries, Belgium and Romania. Their detailed analysis of the political and legal aspects of Holocaust denial sheds an intriguing light on crucial elements of both countries’ political cultures and their different ways of dealing with the past.

Notes 1. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 93. 2. Ivan Kamenec, ‘The Slovak Population and the “Solution to the Jewish Ques­ tion”’, in David Bankier and Israel Gutman (eds), Nazi Europe and the Final Solution (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remem­ brance Authority, International Institute for Holocaust Research, 2003), pp. 327– 36, here p. 328. 3. The cases of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus are discussed in Elazar Barkan and Elizabeth A. Cole (eds), Shared History – Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet Occupied Poland, 1939–1941 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts­ verlag, 2008). 4. Andrzej Żbikowski, ‘Pogromy i mordy ludności żydowskiej w Lomżyńskiem i na Białystocczyźnie latem 1941 roku w świetle relacji ocalałych Zydów i doku­ mentów sądowych’, in P. Machcewicz and K. Persak (eds), Wokół Jedwabnego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 159–271. 5. In an earlier article he showed the close connection between the German ‘pacification operations’ and violence by the local population, but he made clear through the accumulation of evidence that the underlying hostile attitude of the

12  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Beate Kosmala population was undeniable. See Andrzej Żbikowski, ‘Pogroms in Northeastern Poland – Spontaneous Reactions and German Instigations’, in Barkan and Cole (eds), Shared History – Divided Memory, pp. 315–54. 6. In an earlier contribution on the pogrom in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas in late June 1941 the author emphasized, on the one hand, the importance of the German influence and, on the other hand, outlined the emergence of radical Lithuanian nationalism and anti-Semitism and their impact on the murderous violence against the Jews in the last days of June 1941. See Dieckmann, ‘Pogroms in Northeastern Poland – Spontaneous Reactions and German Instigations’, in Barkan and Cole (eds), Shared History – Divided Memory, pp. 354–85. 7. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 804.

–1– Jews and Non-Jews in the Aryanization Process Comparison of France and the Slovak State, 1939–45

Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Eduard Nižňanský

At first glance France and Slovakia appear to be very different countries with divergent or even opposing histories, both before the Second World War and during the Holocaust. Their Jewish communities might seem to have very little in common. A quasi-independent national state under German ‘protection’ (Schutzstaat) since 14 March 1939, Slovakia was a small, mountainous, scarcely industrialized Central European country. It owed its ephemeral existence to the Nazi policy that had carved up democratic Czechoslovakia, itself born of the collapse in 1918 of the AustroHungarian Empire. France, on the other hand, was a Western European country that had operated as a parliamentary republic since the promulgation of constitutional laws in 1875, and whose creation can be traced back to the tenth century, and which grew by successive annexations of surrounding regions, culminating in the annexation of the county of Nice (taken from Italy in 1860) and the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918. Moreover, in 1940 France had an immense colonial empire, second only to the British, an empire that was at the height of its powers on the eve of the Second World War. Slovakia, by contrast, came into existence following a dual partition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Czechoslovakia. The destiny of the Jews in the two countries needs to be differentiated. Out of the some 89,000 Jews living on Slovakian territory in 1940, 70,000 were deported, which amounts to a rate of 79 per cent.1 The cold statistics of the Shoah were more ‘favourable’ in France, where, out of the 330,000 Jews living on the metropolitan territory in 1940, 76,000 were deported or assassinated, amounting to a rate of 25 per cent.2 Beyond the differences there are similarities. It is these similarities that are the focus of this chapter, which aims to compare the processes of economic Aryanization and confiscation in France and in Slovakia. The two countries entered the German camp and as such their governments and national administrations took measures to implement the Final Solution. Slovakia, however, was not occupied by German troops until the autumn of 1944, whereas three-fifths of France was conquered and occupied in June 1940. The Vichy government in France turned over Jews to the Germans from the non-occupied zone in August and September 1942. The comparison in deportations can be stretched back even further in that the Slovakian

13

14  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský Jews, like the French Jews, were first arrested by the national police force (in 1942) and then, as the collaboration of the state in the police field grew, by national militia (French militia, Hlinka Guard and the German Freiwillige Schutzstaffeln3) and by the Gestapo. Although France never collaborated militarily, whereas Slovakia was part of the Axis, both governments were of an authoritarian nature in which the Catholic Church played a great part. It can also be added that both the French and the Slovakian governments had a certain freedom of action in their anti-Jewish policy towards Germany. However, it might also be argued that the historical conditions for the Jews in these two countries were in fact rather dissimilar. While both Jewish communities lived under democratic and liberal conditions before the Second World War, French Jews were much more integrated in mainstream society. They nevertheless had to deal with strong popular anti-Semitic movements in the 1930s.4 Anti-Semitism in Slovakia was strongly intertwined with the issue of nation-building. Jews were therefore associated with the Hungarians or the Czechoslovak state. This chapter attempts to compare the policies of economic Aryanization (understood as the legalized process of the looting of Jews) in France and Slovakia. It is not a question of comparing the processes as a whole but rather of isolating specific points and contrasting these in both countries, in order to draw out some conclusions.

The Political Situation in France and Slovakia: Two Satellite Countries? Slovakia under Tiso The Munich Accord of September 19385 brought a major and unexpected rupture in the history of Czechoslovakia. Following the Nazi dominance of Central Europe, a rapid internal stagnation of Czechoslovak parliamentary democracy occurred, followed in Slovakia by the transfer to an authoritarian regime with fascist features. Momentous changes took place in the country. The Catholic and nationalist Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana (Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, HSPP),6 which during the First Czechoslovak Republic had emerged as the representative of all of Slovakia and all Slovaks (while never winning more than one-third of the votes in parliamentary elections), took advantage of the weakening of the First Republic. Jozef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest and prominent member of the HSPP after the First World War, declared Slovakian autonomy on 6 October 1938 and became the prime minister of an autonomous Slovak state. With the consent of the Czechoslovak government, a Slovak autonomous government was instituted and parliamentary elections were to be held. Czechoslovakia was to be gradually federalized. Thanks

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  15 to the active participation of HSPP representatives, the autonomous government quickly became a one-party regime with a single vision of the political, cultural and even religious and spiritual development of the state. The bases of a liberal society and pluralistic democracy – political opposition, a quest for consensus and debate, a tolerant approach to minorities – were consistently eroded until such values disappeared from Slovakian political life. In the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, there was an attempt to form a national ‘authoritarian state’ with two political parties. Czechoslovakia was also changed by the acceptance of the law on the autonomy of Slovakia7 and an empowering law passed in December 1938, which essentially rendered powerless the parliament of Czechoslovakia. The HSPP was not satisfied with merely seizing power; it very quickly imposed a repressive regime, for example interfering in the activities of other political parties (made all the easier in that the ‘Czechoslovak’ party could not turn for help to the ‘Czech’ side, which was dealing with its own problems and gradually forming a two-party system). There were two aspects to the changes in priorities of the parties: a ‘voluntary’ merger and a ban on activities. The loss of pluralism meant the introduction of censorship, the liquidation of all organizations except for the Hlinka Guard (the paramilitary HSPP party organization), the ‘unification’ of trade unions, and so on. It also led to widespread interference in local and legal organizations in Slovakia.8 The result of the First Vienna Arbitration of 2 November 1938, when largely Magyar-populated territories in southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian-Russia were separated from Czechoslovakia and awarded to Hungary, provoked an anti-Jewish campaign and riots against Jews. According to the official version in Slovakia, the Jews were to be blamed for the territorial losses. This was the era of the ‘purification’ of Slovakia, a search for enemies and ‘non-Slovaks’. In such an atmosphere, elections were held in December 1938 to the parliament of the Slovak country (later called the parliament of the Slovak Republic), for which only one candidate list was permitted. For better control, special electoral districts for the individual nationalities in Slovakia (Slovaks, Czechs, Germans, Hungarians and Jews)9 were secretly formed. According to government results, the united candidates received 97.5 per cent of the votes cast. For every 20,000 voters there was one representative, and of sixty-three deputies fifty were from the HSPP. There were attacks against the Czech community in the country – direct ‘Czechophobia’, to be understood as opposition to, or even hatred of, the Czechs. In October and December 1938 this manifested itself in purges against the Czech community in Slovakia in education,10 including the universities, as well as in the civil service, the judiciary, the police, etc. The attitudes of the German minority in 1938, and the post-Munich territorial demands of Hungary and Poland, were less of a surprise for the Czechs.

16  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský

Vichy France In spite of all the differences between France and Slovakia, there are some inter­ esting similarities after 1939. France had a new political regime, dictatorial and reactionary, brought about by the circumstances of the May–June 1940 debacle. The cabinet, presided over by Paul Reynaud and meeting in Bordeaux, voted to ask Germany what the conditions were for an armistice and appointed Marshal Pétain, the 84-year-old victor of Verdun, to negotiate with the Germans.11 The armistice of 23 June imposed very hard conditions on France, which was divided into zones. Threefifths of the territory was occupied, but the illusion of a free zone remained, with Vichy as its capital, which is where the government had set itself up. The Republic was not immediately dissolved, but the new government, taking advantage of the military defeat, soon accomplished a veritable coup d’état. On 10 July 1940 the two legislative assemblies met in the Vichy casino and voted full constitutive powers to Marshal Pétain’s government.12 The very next day, 11 July, the government assumed full powers. The Republic was dead, replaced by an authoritarian, dictatorial regime, but one which could not be termed fascist in the strict sense of the term. For the first time in France, the supporters of the counter-revolution were in power. Meanwhile, the Germans were putting a military occupation authority in place in Paris (based at the Hotel Majestic), under the direction of General Otto von Stülpnagel. Oldguard military officers13 were in the majority – the new Nazis did not hold the most important posts, even if the head of the administrative section was Werner Best,14 an ideological lawyer belonging to the fanaticized young guard. The Vichy regime, as the American historian Robert O. Paxton has shown, had a certain autonomy, at least in the early years of its existence. Its policy manifested itself in two distinct, but linked, ways. First, it considered it necessary to reform the country through policies directly inspired by the tradition of the nineteenth century reactionary right (the ‘National Revolution’) and the ideas of Charles Maurras. It advocated collaborating with Nazi Germany, whose victory it believed to be certain. The idea was to assure conquered France of its place in a Third Reich-dominated Europe. Second, Vichy developed an organicist vision of French society, seen as a sick body that had to be purged of its harmful elements.15 In 1940 and 1941, with the press effectively muzzled, the credo of the regime was spelled out in the Marshall’s speeches (of which there were about fifty in less than two years). He lashed out at ‘the spirit of pleasure’ and advocated an ‘intellectual and moral straightening out’. It is clear that, in this context traditional French anti-Semitism, of which xenophobia was not the least of its components, would thrive. But the Vichy regime’s originality was expressed in the appointment of ‘technocrats’, high-level, rapidly promoted, civil servants who dreamt of putting into effect, without counter powers, their own programme of modernization. These new men – of whom Jean Bichelonne, State Secretary of Industrial Production, was the epitome – were particularly effective in implementing anti-Semitic measures.

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  17

The Jews of Slovakia and of France Slovakia According to the 1930 census, 136,737 Jews were living on Slovakian territory, corresponding to 4.11 per cent of the population. There were Jews in 1,435 out of the 2,658 municipalities of the country. The greatest concentrations of Jews were in Bratislava (about 15,000 people), Nitra (4,358), Prešov (4,308), Michalovce (3,955), Žilina (2,917), Topol’čany (2,459), Trnava (2,445), Bardejov (2,441), Humenné (2,172) and Trenčín (1,619).16 There were 167 organized Jewish communities, of which 107 were Orthodox, 29 reform and 31 so-called ‘status quo’.17 Following the territorial losses after 2 November 1938 and the occupation of part of the south of Slovakia by Hungarian troops, there remained about 89,000 Jews within the new frontiers. The Jews of France had a different history and had been emancipated in 1791. The community, very small at the time of the Revolution (at most 40,000 people, half of whom were in Alsace and Lorraine), grew constantly as a result of the waves of immigration coming from Germany, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. 18 In the inter-war period, a liberal immigration policy in France and anti-Semitism in Central Europe encouraged many Jews to settle in France, mainly Paris.19 The community was very divided between native-born Jews, some of whom were even attracted by the sirens of the most virulent nationalism, and the recent emigrants who made up approximately half of the 300,000 Jews in 1939. The latter were Yiddish speaking and poorer; a proportion were Orthodox, while others were tempted by various leftwing groups from Zionism to communism.20 After the establishment of the Slovak state in March 1939, anti-Semitism proved a very important factor, lurking behind the anti-democratic steps taken by the new regime. Traditional domestic anti-Semitism in Slovakia could be recognized on various levels: religiously inspired Catholic anti-Judaism denounced the Jews as deicides, while the language argument marked the Jews as foreigners and even anti-Slovak, who allegedly had helped to Magyarize the Slovaks under the AustroHungarian Empire. This idea was supported by the fact that, after the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, not all the Jews acknowledged Slovak national identity. Some changes occurred in this period concerning the national orientation of the Jews in Slovakia.21 Anti-Semitism at the national level was part of the general culture in that Jews were perceived as a foreign element. It must be pointed out that, in addition to Hungarian, the Jews in Slovakia used German and Yiddish for communication, which relates to the question of the acculturation of the Jewish community in the former Habsburg Empire and is therefore not typical of Slovakia alone. The twenty-year existence of the First Czechoslovak Republic was insufficient time for any dramatic changes. However, Jews were not the only citizens to undergo

18  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský a slow process of integration into Slovak culture. From the historical point of view, it is difficult to accuse the Jewish community of ‘non-assimilation’. Unlike the situation in France, a Slovak culture was only just being formed in the inter-war period through the schooling system and the creation of specific institutions that had not been allowed to exist under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Economic anti-Semitism had been spread in Slovakian politics by the HSPP in the 1930s by mixing classic religious anti-Judaism with economic anti-Semitism, going back to the nineteenth century.22 Jews in Slovakia were mostly members of urban communities and the middle class, whereas the non-Jewish Slovaks were mainly farmers, which meant that the owners of businesses, factories, inns and shops were often Jewish. Thus, Slovak propaganda perceived them as usurers and exploiters, arguing that the cause of all evil is not capitalism but ‘Jewish capital’. According to statistics of the Central Economic Office (Ustredny hospodarsky urad), the main Slovak Aryanization agency, on 1 January 1941 Jews owned about 38 per cent of the national property in Slovakia. As the Jews accounted for only 4 per cent of the total population of Slovakia, the Jews allegedly had a disproportionate importance in the economy due to their position in society. In the anti-Jewish HSPP propaganda, Jews were perceived not only as capitalists and exploiters but also as leftists.23 Right at the start of the Autonomy in the Slovak Nation Manifesto, the HSPP political elite declared in Goebbels’ style: ‘We shall persist on the side of nations fighting against the Marxist-Jewish ideology of revolution and violence.’24 Thus, the religious authorities of the country bore a great responsibility for not opposing the HSPP’s anti-Semitism during the war and the persecution. On the ‘Jewish question’, there were two approaches. The radicals (Vojtech Tuka, Alexander Mach) wanted to eliminate the Jewish community in Slovakia at all costs, regardless of the economic and professional losses to the Slovak state, whereas the ‘moderates’ (Jozef Tiso, head of government and a Catholic priest) wanted to use the so-called numerus clausus principle – the lessening of Jewish influence to 4 per cent. The ‘Jewish question’ in Slovakia therefore became a battleground in domestic politics. Through their slogans and ideas about their ‘Final Solution’, the radicals tried several times to gain the support of Nazi Germany so that they could acquire a greater share of political power over the moderates. One of their leaders, Ferdinand Durčanský (later foreign minister), told Hermann Göring as early as October 1938 during a conference in Berlin that Slovakia wanted to solve the ‘Jewish question’ in a similar way to Germany.25 In 1940 the political struggle between the radicals and Tiso led to a strengthening of the radicals’ position. After Germany’s war successes on the western front Hitler intended to bind the whole of south-east Europe closer to the Reich. Following his interference in Slovakia’s domestic affairs in Salzburg in July 1940 (through the so-called ‘Salzburg Dictates’),26 the radicals gained even more political importance (in addition to being prime minister, Tuka became minister of foreign affairs, while Mach, who was commander-in-chief of the Hlinka Guard,

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  19 also became minister of the interior), which led to a radicalization of anti-Jewish policy.

France The situation in France in the 1930s was different. Here the political organization of anti-Semitism remained more limited: the republican tradition made it difficult to base a political career on an anti-Semitic programme alone (except in the French Algerian departments). There were no elected anti-Semites in parliament, which did not, of course, mean there was no anti-Semitism. As of 1936 and the victory of the Popular Front, anti-Semitism expressed itself more and more obviously; the tirade of Xavier Vallat, deputy of Ardèche, against Léon Blum in the National Assembly made a great commotion.27 In Vichy France, Xavier Vallat became the first head of the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions, with the rank of secretary of state, in April 1941.28 At the Paris Municipal Council of Ministers in 1938, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a notorious agitator, had presented a plan concerning the status of Jews.29 Meanwhile, as the economic crisis took hold in the 1930s, France went through a strong anti-Semitic phase, carried by the leagues and other extraparliamentary movements.30 There was no absence of anti-Semitism from parties of the left, in particular the socialist parties, with a wing that openly opposed Léon Blum and conflated Jews and capitalists. But its scope was limited. In the late 1930s there were anti-Semitic and very violent newspapers with wide circulation.31 This intense propaganda, systematically countered by both Jewish and non-Jewish publications committed to the defence of the republic but which reached only a part of intellectual and political life, nevertheless succeeded in making the ‘Jewish question’ a political issue. This forced some intellectuals and Jewish politicians into silence, while Léon Blum, in an exceptional speech given in 1938, had to explain that he really was French, originally from Alsace but born in Paris, so violent were the attacks in the press accusing him of being a foreigner.32 To put an end to this festering civil war, the Marchandeau decree, named after the minister of the interior, was promulgated in spring 1939. It forbade xenophobic and anti-Semitic writing.33 In 1939 Jews made up less than 1 per cent of the French population and, unlike in Slovakia, they didn’t carry much weight in the economy. It was certainly possible to make a list of great Jewish industrialists but it was not a long one. André Citroën, automobile industry pioneer, had sold his factory in 1934, and Marcel Bloch’s aeroplane factory had been nationalized in 1936. In the banking sector, Jews were not very significant, much less so, for example, than in Germany before 1933. Fewer than 5 per cent of private banks were considered Jewish by the anti-Semitic laws promulgated in September 1940.34 There was a handful of important Jewish-owned companies but most were medium-sized and small.35 Apart from some highly visible successes – the ‘André’ shoe of the Lévy brothers, for example – and a few great

20  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský fortunes – the French branch of the Rothschild36 family, the Louis-Dreyfus family, owners of one of the major companies in the world grain trade, and the Deutsch de la Meurthe family, heir to the pioneers of the petroleum industry – the Jews of France held more modest positions as traders in skins or textiles,37 or piecework artisans for foreign-born Jews. Jews occupied remarkably diverse positions in the French economy; no sector was closed to them, even the upper reaches of the civil service.38 There were, however, proportionally more of them with the independent status of artisan or tradesperson, as the statistics of economic Aryanization show. In all, 52,000 files were opened by the directors of economic Aryanization of the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions.39 Anti-Semitic laws hit the Jewish populations of both France and Slovakia hard, in particular in the economic field. In both countries their assets were placed under temporary administration and confiscated. In the next section, these processes will be described (and compared).

The Legal Process of Economic Aryanization Slovakia The new Slovak state had started to promulgate and implement an anti-Semitic policy as early as March 1939. The Slovak state’s anti-Semitic legislation was its own. As the country was not occupied, the Germans had to use the official diplomatic channels to pressure the Slovak government; this was the role of the German embassy in Bratislava. The key people in Jewish issues were the German ambassador Hans Ludin and the German ‘adviser’ on Jewish affairs to the Slovakian government Dieter Wisliceny, who arrived in Bratislava on 1 September 1940. The main phases of the legal approach to the ‘Jewish question’ in the period of the Slovak state were as follows. From 14 March 1939 until the passage of the Constitution on 21 July 1939, anti-Jewish regulations were passed in the form of governmental decrees based on act number 1/1939 of the Slovak Code (SlC) regarding the independent Slovak state. Paragraph 4 of this law vested the government with the authority, by means of decrees, to perform all that was deemed necessary for the preservation of public order and for securing the interests of the Slovak state in this transitional period.40 From the passage of the Constitution on 21 July 1939 until 11 September 1940, a great many anti-Jewish regulations, based on §44 of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic, were passed in the form of decrees with the force of law.41 Relatively few anti-Jewish regulations were passed in the form of laws in this period, notably act 113/1940 SlC regarding Jewish enterprises and Jews employed in enterprises (the so-called ‘First Aryanization Act’).

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  21 The next phase began on 11 September 1940, after Wisliceny’s arrival, when constitutional act 210/1940 SlC came into force, authorizing the government for one year ‘to solve’ the issue of Jews.42 Paragraph 1 stated: The Government is authorized to undertake through the decrees all the measures necessary: a) to exclude Jews from Slovak economic and social life; b) to transfer Jewish property into Christian ownership. This authorization according to §1 is valid for one year from the day of this law coming into force.

By passing this constitutional law, the president and the Assembly of the Slovak Republic authorized the government to ‘resolve the situation of the Jews’ according to their own convictions. As a result, these two constitutional authorities did not interfere in the Jewish question for almost a year. In fact, the constitutional law prevented the Assembly of the Slovak Republic from deliberating on individual governmental decrees for a period of three months, as the Constitution empowered the Assembly to do in the case of ‘ordinary’ governmental decrees. From 11 September 1940 until 11 September 1941 almost no anti-Jewish regulations were passed in the form of decrees based on this constitutional act. Even decree 198/1941 SlC – the so-called ‘Jewish Code’ passed on 9 September 1941 and based on the Nuremberg laws – was not a consequence of this constitutional act. After the passage of constitutional act 210, later in the autumn of 1940 the gov­ern­ment passed decree 222, by which the government delegated its authority to the Central Economic Office (CEO). The CEO thus took charge of enacting all that was necessary to exclude Jews from Slovak economic and social life and to transfer Jewish property into the ownership of Christians.43 It was on the basis of this law that most of the anti-Jewish agenda was subsequently put in force – including the liquidation and Aryanization of Jewish shops and enterprises according to decree 303 (the so-called ‘Second Aryanization Act’). The ‘Jewish Code’ (decree 198/1941) – the rascist basis of the Slovak anti-Jewish policy – gave extensive authority to some administrative offices. The Central Economic Office was given power over Aryanization and economic matters, while the Ministry of the Interior (in the form of the newly created department number 14 – the so-called ‘Jewish Department’) was authorized in police and security matters. Based on this authorization, both offices issued statutes of implementation in the form of edicts published in the newspaper Úradné noviny. Until the ‘Jewish Code’ was passed, the Ministry of the Interior issued its statutes on the basis of act 190 of 1939 on public domestic administration.44 After 11 September 1941, i.e. after the expiry of the government authorization under act 210/1940 SlC, the situation went back to that which had existed prior to 11 September 1940.

22  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský Regulations on the modification of questions regarding the retirement insurance of self-employed Jews were passed in the form of a law (act 278/1941 SlC), as were regulations on securing husbandry at agricultural estates maintained by Jews (act 108/1942 SlC) and regulations limiting the number of Jewish children to be made available for adoption (act 138/1942 SlC). At first the government enforced regulations related to deportations on the basis of paragraph 22 of decree number 198/1941 (the ‘Jewish Code’).45 Since the deportations of Jews required a partial change in the provisions of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic, they were ‘amended’ by the enactment of constitutional act 168/1942 SlC.

France In Slovakia, building the legislative arsenal of Jewish confiscation took more than a year. This was also true in Paris, where economic Aryanization really began in September 1940, five months after the first law in Slovakia. As of September 1940, the German occupation authorities introduced a series of measures against the Jews in occupied France, first attacking their earnings and then their properties, increasingly weakening the Jews.46 On 30 September the Germans issued a decree47 defining who was Jewish and ordering a census. This was passed to the French authorities, who implemented it rapidly. Any individual defined as Jewish by the decree had to register with the police station nearest to his or her home. In Paris the Police Prefecture, a powerful institution in the city, undertook the creation of a gigantic index. On 3 October 1940 the French government at Vichy, bearer of the new regime’s policy, promulgated its first Jewish statute, without any German pressure; it defined the individuals considered as Jewish and barred them from many professions in the public service, politics and the media. The statute was only in part a law of economic scope, and the Aryanization policy was, in fact, German. But as the German military headquarters at Avenue Kléber in Paris appointed German administrators to oversee Jewish companies, the Ministry of Industrial Production decided to name nonJewish French administrators.48 In early December 1940 a new and wholly French institution was created within the Ministry of Industrial Production, the Department of Control of Temporary Administrators (SCAP).49 From then on, the temporary administrators were French. As of January 1941 they had the right to sell or liquidate the Jewish businesses they were in charge of, and without the owners’ agreement. In April and May 1941 German orders,50 reworked into French law, froze the owners’ accounts in Jewish businesses as well as private accounts. The second Jewish statute (of 2 June 1941) added to the list of forbidden professions: the vice was tightening on the Jews of France, who were becoming poorer and poorer and being driven into unemployment, making them even more vulnerable at the time of the great round-ups. The construction of the Aryanization programme was completed by the major law of 22 July 1941,51 which took up the German orders and the French laws

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  23 and extended them to the non-occupied zone, which had been spared until then. Moreover, the destination of the proceeds of Aryanization – arising from the sale and liquidation of businesses, buildings and portfolios – was decided: the money was supposed to be held in accounts in the name of the Jewish owners at the Caisse des dépôts et consignations (Deposit and Consignment Office). The last important act in the setting up of this edifice was the German ordinance of 8 December 1941. Among other things, this announced, in retaliation for attacks by the resistance, the deportation of hostages to the east as well as the imposition of a one billionfranc fine on the Jewish community of France, a repetition of what had happened in Germany after Kristallnacht (‘the night of broken glass’) in November 1938.52 The construction of the legislative apparatus for the confiscations in France and Slovakia seems at first sight to be divergent in terms of the rhythm of the build-up and the structure of the administration. In France, certain, though limited, Jewish assets managed to escape complete confiscation: securities from the French state, for example, were frozen but could not be sold by the administrators. In the non-occupied zone, even after its invasion by the Wehrmacht on 11 November 1941, accounts were never frozen, and insurance policies as such were not seized.53 Economic Aryanization appears therefore to have been harsher in Slovakia than in France, if the detail of its application is considered. However, the extensive scope of these policies in both countries must be emphasized, with the notable difference that in France the legalized confiscation of Jewish assets was a German initiative, taken over in its implementation by the French state, whereas in Slovakia it was a specific endogenous national policy by a formally independent state.

Economic Aryanization: Players and Results Slovakia In Slovakia, the state provided the main impetus for the Aryanization process. Around one billion one hundred million crowns from the sale and liquidation of Jewish assets entered the state’s coffers. The Aryanization and liquidation of Jewish property in Slovakia did not mean its transfer into ‘Aryan’ hands but its actual theft. The many actors in the economic Aryanization process will be briefly described here. The first steps in the preparation of the Aryanization process were taken by the Ministry of Economy, the county offices, the district offices (in the Slovak Republic there were sixty-three district departments) and the trade-district offices. On 31 January 1940 Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka established the Economic Office of the Prime Minister’s Office, which was charged with coordinating all the work connected with the ‘solution of the Jewish question’ in Slovakia. But the ‘old’ institutions (Ministry of Economy, etc.) did not lose their influence immediately.

24  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský The Land Reform Act passed on 22 February 1940 concerned almost exclusively the land owned by Jews. According to the register of Jewish agricultural properties, land reform affected 101,423 hectares, including 44,372 hectares of arable soil, owned by 4,943 Jewish people.54 The State Land Office organized and directed the land reform. By a declaration of the State Land Office in May 1942 all Jewish agricultural property was automatically transferred to the Slovak state. The First Aryanization Act of 1940 (113/1940 SIC) was implemented in practice for only three months. The struggles over Aryanization decisions involved the Ministry of Economy, county and district offices, and also some political organizations – the HSPP, Hlinka Guard and Deutsche Partei.55 After Wisliceny, the German adviser on Jewish affairs and Eichmann’s representative, had arrived in Slovakia, the radicals of the HSPP started implementing the ‘solution of the Jewish question’ in September 1940. Following the issue of decree 203/1940 SlC, Jewish property was registered. As a result, 54,669 individuals declared their belongings, which were valued at 4,322,239,000 Ks (Slovak crowns), representing 38 per cent of the national wealth. The largest share consisted of capital property (34.89 per cent), followed by domestic property (31.14 per cent), business property (18.08 per cent) and agricultural property (15.89 per cent).56 The Central Economic Office57 under the leadership of Augustín Morávek was directly responsible to the prime minister and had dictatorial power over Jewish affairs.58 In autumn 1940, of the 12,500 Jewish shops and businesses in Slovakia 10,000 were put into liquidation and 2,223 businesses were Aryanized, i.e. sold. Up to July 1942 the liquidation value of Aryanized property was determined in only 288 cases.59 The banks in Slovakia declared to the Central Economic Office the amount of money held in deposit accounts by Jewish citizens. In August 1941 the deposits amounted to 245 million Slovak crowns. Following the October and November 1940 decrees, all Jewish money was to be deposited into frozen accounts from which a maximum of 1,000 Slovak crowns and later only 150 Slovak crowns could be withdrawn weekly by the Jewish owner. In general, stocks and shares belonging to Jews were confiscated by the Slovak state. There was no further arrangement in this regard. The Aryanization of Jewish domestic property began in October 1940, with the appointment of provisory administrators of Jewish houses. At the end of October 1941 all Jewish domestic property was transferred to the possession of the state.60 But the Aryanization of houses owned by Jews was a very slow process, and the movable property of Jews in Slovakia was confiscated only after the 1942 deportations.61 Most Jewish domestic properties were Aryanized only after 1944. Concerning the proceeds from the sale of Aryanized assets, little money entered the state’s accounts. Despite the expectations of the government, the Slovak Aryanization policy resulted in enormous financial losses for the country. Only the Aryanizers themselves – the buyers of Jewish goods – became rich. Prior to July 1942, only 288 liquidated

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  25 companies yielded any assets. The belated confiscation of real estate initiated in 1944 had similarly disappointing results. Following the 1942 deportations, many apartments owned by Jews were either destroyed or damaged. It can be concluded that the Slovak state benefited only from the confiscation of bank accounts, securities and the public sale of furniture in 1944. The benefits of Aryanization thus amounted to 1.1 billion Slovak crowns, whereas the cost of financing the process was 900 million. Of the 1.1 billion, 300 million were paid to the Germans to finance the deportation of 58,000 Jews.62 The Aryanization process brought about an enormous destruction in value. The beneficiaries were mostly the numerous middlemen and the bargain hunters who acquired Jewish-owned goods. Aryanization was carried out in a thoughtless and bureaucratic fashion, dis­­ regarding the country’s economic life. Only leading functionaries of the state, party and Hlinka Guard, along with the actual Aryanizers (who were almost exclusively members of the HSPP, Hlinka Guard, pro-Nazi Deutsche Partei and the Central Economic Office) profited from the looting. The majority participated in so-called ‘cheap’ Aryanization for personal gain or through their extended families and friends.63 According to Wisliceny’s testimony, leading HSPP figures and members of the Deutsche Partei and its Freiwillige Schutzstaffel (paramilitary troops) ‘were not concerned with taking over Jewish businesses according to commercial criteria, but were only interested in Jewish property. Every state functionary strove to obtain a prosperous shop for himself or for his family and friends.’64 The Aryanization and liquidation of Jewish businesses in Slovakia turned the ‘Jewish question’ into a severe poverty problem. The pauperization of the Jews in Slovakia, initiated by the enactment of decrees 113/1940 and 303/1940 (the Second Aryanization Act), culminated in the deportation of Jews from the territory of Slovakia. Dieter Wisliceny testified as follows before the Nuremberg tribunal in May 1946: ‘Jewish property in Slovakia must not be dissipated because it has to be clear that when the shops and property are confiscated from Jews, there must be some solution found for them. This solution can be the deportations on a great scale.’65 The Slovak state, unwilling to address the problem of the large number of pauperized Jews, simply turned to a more ‘pragmatic’ solution. The need to get rid of the impoverished Jews thus constitutes one of the social and economic aspects of the ‘solution of the Jewish question’ in Slovakia. Some official Slovak data support this claim. According to a spring 1942 report, there were 88,951 Jews (as per governmental decree 198/1941 89,053 Jews) representing approximately 22,000 households, out of which 32,527 people (36.3 per cent) were gainfully employed.66 Another 4,000 Jews lived off their property without engaging in any gainful employment (total 41 per cent). Some 22,267 Jews were economically eliminated and 2,500 persons were no longer able to make a living from their property (giving a total of 24,767 – 71.1 per cent) as a result of the Aryanization and liquidation of Jewish businesses, the refusal of work permits, etc. The report concludes that

26  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský 16,000 households (72 per cent out of the original number of 22,000), i.e. 64,000 Jews, were left without any means of earning a living. If we compare this number to the approximately 60,000 deported Jews and add about 4,000 Jews confined in Jewish work camps, we come to the conclusion that the government conceived the deportation of the Jews as the ultimate consequence of its envisaged ‘final solution of the Jewish question’.67 After the start of the deportations of German Jews from the Reich in October 1941, the Slovakian ‘solution of the Jewish question’ was initiated in the spring of 1942, eventually resulting in the deportation of the impoverished Jews from the country.

France In France, the process of economic Aryanization appeared to be more bureaucratic but also more controlled. The aim of the French Vichy state was to promote ‘clean Aryanization’, with no room for corruption or favouritism. There was also an interesting process of both constant state control and an ‘externalization’ of work, as if the central state’s traditional structures had quickly become reluctant to take up this task, considered necessary but not very prestigious. It is obviously difficult to evaluate this perspective through reading the administrative documents of the period, which are even less telling than those of the pre-war era, as they were produced under a dictatorial regime. But a hint can perhaps be found in PierreEugene Fournier’s resignation in March 1941 as director of the SCAP (Service de contrôle des administrateurs provisoires) of the Department of Control of Temporary Administrators. While head of this new administration, Fournier was also general director of the SNCF (the national railway company). Working for the SCAP, he had created various categories of administrative anti-Semitism (the problem of Jewish spouses of Aryans, of ‘mixed-marriage’ assets, etc.), and his resignation could be seen as a sign not of rejection but of the precautions taken by top civil servants when it became clear that putting Jewish businesses under temporary administration could only mean pure and simple confiscation in the long run.68 The SCAP was incorporated into the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, of which it became the biggest department, the Department of Economic Aryanization, with nearly 800 civil servants.69 The personnel of the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was, as a general rule, slightly more ideological than the traditional French civil service,70 but it was not a model of efficiency. There were attempts at reform, in particular to speed up the liquidations of Jewish businesses, but to no avail. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, named in spring 1942 to replace Xavier Vallat, was a poor administrator. The management of economic Aryanization remained under the tight control – even though about twenty civil servants at most were involved – of the German military headquarters, in fact of the W-I section (Economy, Jewish and Foreign Goods). The German director was Dr Kurt Blanke, whose effectiveness

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  27 was remarkable considering the means at his disposal.71 Most of the economic Aryanization work was done by about 800 members of a newly created profession: the provisory administrators of Jewish properties. They were non-civil servants, mostly professionals in the economic sector of the business in question. They were chosen either by the sector’s professional trade organization72 or by the chambers of commerce, or they themselves applied for the newly available jobs. These men (less than 5 per cent were women) have been branded in historiography and the popular memory as profiteers or even crooks who tried to enrich themselves at the expense of the companies they were in charge of. However, numerous recent studies have shown that most were in fact basically honest and docile executers of antiSemitic policy.73 They were certainly paid by the business itself, which obviously encouraged them to prolong as much as possible the sale and liquidation period. But cases of outright robbery were quite rare (which does not at all absolve them as accomplices in confiscation and genocide). Their work was in any case overseen by comptrollers and, in theory, by the civil servants of the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs. Many control measures ordered by the Vichy government apparently limited the most flagrant robberies and the most obvious abuses; they also slowed down the Aryanization process. The traditional state administrations were also active. The administration of the Domains, in charge of managing the assets belonging to the state and the admin­ istrations, was responsible for managing and liquidating the portfolios of securities. It fulfilled its job conscientiously until the eve of the liberation of Paris, selling securities for 1.5 billion francs. But the busiest administration was the Caisse des dépots et consignations (Deposit and Consignment Office), where the money from the sales and liquidations74 was centralized. This enormous institution, theoretically independent from the state but with a very particular status, received four billion francs into its accounts from Aryanization. One billion francs were progressively transferred out for the payment of the fine imposed collectively on the Jews of France in December 1941, and other sums were also taken out, in particular to finance the Central Jewish Council, the Union générale des Israelites de France, which needed large sums of money to help the impoverished Jews of France. In France, the confiscation process produced in all seven billion francs (some of which remained frozen at liberation in the notaries’ accounts or in the Jewish businesses themselves). It was a considerable sum, but more than three-quarters of it remained frozen in various accounts and were not gathered in one single state account, apart from the billion francs of the levy. Out of about 42,000 Jewish enterprises, most of them small, 60 per cent were put into liquidation and 40 per cent were sold. Of this 40 per cent (16,800 companies), for about half of them the process wasn’t ‘approved’ at the time of liberation (i.e. was not officially recognized by all the control authorities, including the German military headquarters), so that the liberation of the money to the Deposit and Consignment Office had not been enabled. Legally, the confiscation process did not reach its end. Besides, the

28  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský number of players in the process was enormous because of the control imposed by the French state, which sought – with moderate success – to prevent corruption, misappropriation and theft. The differences between the processes in France and in Slovakia can also be explained in terms of the social environment in which Aryanization took place in the two countries.

Responses to Aryanization The Social Context of Aryanization in Slovakia – A Case Study The process of Aryanization in Slovakia can be studied at the local level. The town of Topoľčany in the Nitra region of Slovakia serves as a good example of Jewish urban life (like Trnava, Piešťany, Hlohovec and Trenčín) and has been well studied and documented. Out of a total population of 8,768, there were 2,192 Jews (25.1 per cent), and Jews owned 384 of the town’s 879 businesses (43.7 per cent).75 In 1939 there were about thirty Slovak administrators of Jewish firms active in various corporations. According to the law, administrators were to be appointed only to firms with a turnover in excess of 500,000 Ks. However, they did not stay in these positions for long and were usually replaced after two or three months. This rotation of people can be explained by the fact that each administrator tried to pressure the firm as much as possible for his self-enrichment, and that, once this had been achieved, he was eager to find a new business opportunity. In 1940 the total number of temporary administrators in Topoľčany reached fifty-four. Of the Jewish businesses in this town, 108 were textile companies, 72 foodprocessing companies, 22 wood-processing companies, 33 leather-processing companies, 10 construction corporations, 9 iron corporations and 130 others. By the beginning of 1941, 103 enterprises had already been liquidated. Only 74 of them were Aryanized (19.2 per cent), i.e. sold. These numbers are almost identical to the statistics for the overall process in the country. Out of 12,500 Jewish enterprises, 1,888 were aryanized (about 15 per cent) and 85 per cent were closed. Liquidation resulted in substantial undervaluing of the assets and products of the businesses involved and therefore in considerable damage to the state economy. This was the only means for Slovak citizens, who mostly lacked substantial capital, to acquire previously held Jewish property. Aryanization caused the destruction of the Jewish property that was transferred to non-Jewish Slovak citizens. In Topoľčany, most of the Aryanized enterprises were obtained by a very small group of citizens. In terms of party membership, they were representatives of the HSPP and Hlinka Guard; in the case of state officials, their wives and relatives were the ones who carried out the Aryanization. Aryanization was recommended by the HSPP, and in seven cases also by the Hlinka Guard. The social stratification of the Aryanizers has not yet been

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  29 thoroughly studied. According to the present state of research, we can identify them as small traders (46) and employees of Jewish companies (2), who by this means acquired or widened their own enterprises. There were four local officials among the Aryanizers, three of them mayors appointed by the government, three wives of the highest officials of the Hlinka Guard, and one co-owner of an Aryanized company was a Roman-Catholic priest.76 If an individual applied to buy an Aryanized property (there were thousands of such applications in Slovakia), he expressed his free choice (in the context of the totalitarian regime) to acquire certain property and therefore participated in larceny supervised by the state. He also had to realize that this step drew him deeper into the regime. If the regime of the Slovak state offered him the possibility of attaining some property, he had to take into consideration the fact that he could, at any moment, be asked by the regime for real support or at least, as an accomplice, to keep quiet. One example of such behaviour by an ‘ordinary person’ is provided by a veteran of the war, A. Morvai from Svätý Beňadik, who on 10 February 1943 asked for a radio set confiscated from Jews. The local notaries’ office wrote to the district office in Nová Baňa: ‘As no other people were interested, radios confiscated from the Jews could be given to the gendarmerie, schools and to other institutions, I suggest granting this request.’ This example highlights not only the voluntary participation in Aryanization (the state-supervised larceny of Jewish property) but also the fact that the behaviour of the institutions (schools, offices, etc.) that had already acquired items must have had an effect on the public as well. This case is mentioned here in order to show the involvement of many ordinary Slovaks in the process of Aryanization, even in such minor issues as radio sets. On the one hand, the leading local perpetrators’ needs were satisfied (members of the Hlinka Guard, the HSPP and the Deutsche Partei), and on the other the leftovers of the spoils were also given to schools and various social institutions.77 The widespread willingness to cooperate with the Aryanization process was certainly encouraged by pre-war anti-Semitic propaganda, which included overtly racist elements. The success of this propaganda and the influence of the example set by members of the HSPP and Hlinka Guard elite are demonstrated by the numerous applications for the appropriation of former Jewish property (movables as well as immovables) made by ordinary people (including after the 1942 deportations). The Aryanization policy, even at the most local and administrative level, was closely linked to the course of war. This was shown during the short period of the Slovak National Uprising (end of August to October 1944), an armed insurrection by parts of the Slovak regular army and partisan units against the collaborationist regime of President Jozef Tiso. In the temporarily liberated territory the Slovak National Council repealed all anti-Jewish decrees passed by the Slovak state. Jews were released from work camps and they got back their civil, political and economic rights. But this situation only lasted for about two months, until the uprising was put down by Wehrmacht units. The Germans then established an occupation regime

30  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský that persecuted the fighters of the insurrection and all real and assumed enemies, especially the Jewish population. But it is striking that, whereas there were merely acts of solidarity in the early years of anti-Jewish measures, Slovaks risked their lives at the end of the war to rescue Jews whose fate they had not previously cared about.

The Social Context of Aryanization in France In France too, and possibly even more directly than in Slovakia, the progress of the Aryanization policy was linked to the war because, as will be seen, the process was less determined by strongly ideological elements. This was especially true in the case of the large and medium-sized companies, whose buyers, shrewd businessmen sometimes in contact with the administration or even the government, carefully assessed the movements of the military fronts and understood that if Germany lost the war and General de Gaulle came to power, the anti-Semitic policy would be revoked. The purchase of a Jewish asset was therefore seen not as a bargain but as a risky investment. The result was that there were many fewer attempts to buy Jewish businesses after 1942, even if it is difficult to determine precisely when the turn occurred. The bigger a Jewish business was, the greater the chance that its fate remained undecided after 1942. The turning point seemed to have been the summer of 1942, that is before the Anglo-American landing in North Africa. On the other hand, in the case of very small Jewish companies, stores, shops and workshops, transactions continued until the end of the occupation. An interesting example to illustrate this is provided by the case of the business Pierre Lévy & Cie in Troyes, Champagne (department of Aube). This medium-sized hosiery company was well established in the region’s industrial landscape. It was put up for sale in April 1941 and the temporary administrator recorded the purchasing offers. There were seven, and most were local competitors of Pierre Lévy.78 For bureaucratic reasons, the sale could not take place and a second tender was put out one year later. There was then only one potential buyer of the business, which shows clearly that the status of the Aryanization policy had changed in the eyes of local entrepreneurs, and probably not as a result of a sudden conversion to philo-Semitism or a rejection of the Vichy government, especially as this was before the great round-ups of summer 1942 which turned public opinion in favour of the Jews.79 The little that is known about the state of public opinion on economic Aryanization suggests that reactions of acceptance were as infrequent as those of rejection. As in the case of the expulsion of Jews from the administration, the economic Aryanization policy and confiscation were able to develop in a context of public apathy or even indifference. Nonetheless the most determined collaborators found it hard to get their piece of loot. Certain signs indicate that they considered it their right to be able to obtain material advantages from Jewish confiscation, as pro-Nazis and bearers of a strong

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  31 anti‑Semitic ideology. When the members of the clearly fascistic French Popular Party (PPF), led by Jacques Doriot, tried to obtain control of well-placed Parisian Jewish stores so as to install propaganda and recruitment offices, they did not benefit from any special treatment from the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs,80 which was Vichyist and anti-Semitic but not necessarily pro-German. How­ever, the movements of fascist collaboration benefited from the plunder of movables in Jewish apartments through the operation called ‘Furniture Operation’.81 Another interesting example showing the social environment of Aryanization and confiscation in France is offered by bankers’ attitudes. The profession was traditional and professed a deeply rooted and substantial anti-Semitism;82 it did not baulk at accepting the liquidation of the few Jewish banks in order to ‘streamline’ the very scattered banking landscape. The possibility of getting rid of little banks, which were also competitors, was welcomed, if not enthusiastically.83 Within the Permanent Committee of the Bank Organization, which had been given a lot of power to reorganize the banks and French finance companies, anti-Semitic comments were not rare, and the committee encouraged the liquidation of small Jewish businesses. However, at the same time, medium-sized Jewish companies found support, in particular from voluntary buyers who had made an agreement, usually tacit, with the Jewish owners: in the case of a change in the situation, the sale could be cancelled. It is difficult to put a figure on these ‘complaisant Aryanizations’, to use a term from the period, since, by definition, they don’t appear in the archives of the occupation period, but the percentage might have reached 20 per cent of all the sales of Jewish companies. The attitude of the big French bankers also has to be noted towards the payment of the billion-franc fine. They were asked to participate in the payment of the first phase of 250 million francs, since the Union générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) – the central Jewish organization – did not have such a sum at the beginning of 1942. A pool of banks was constituted to grant a loan to the UGIF.84 The French banks received interest on this loan but decided not to keep it. They donated it to the Secours National (and not to the UGIF, whose financial needs were growing more and more pressing by the day), the gigantic para-state aid agency that gave aid to war prisoners’ wives, widows and orphans, victims and refugees. The Secours National was also the regime’s propaganda tool around the figure of Marshal Pétain. A final example is taken from the leather industry, which has been thoroughly studied by Florent Lebot.85 The companies in the leather sector, from tanning to the sale of shoes, were very scattered. They were present in many French provinces, such as Choletais and the Rhone Valley. Only two companies were significant: André Shoes and Bata.86 The former belonged to a Jewish family, the Lévy brothers, while Bata was foreign (of Czech origin). Continuing the pre-war policy, the strongly protectionist owners’ trade associations, which had succeeded in 1935 in getting passed a xenophobic law forbidding the installation of new leather businesses without authorization, welcomed the Aryanization policy and tried to control it, without, however, achieving total mastery of the process. It was more a question of

32  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský seeing potential or real competitors liquidated than of getting rich at the expense of Jewish businessmen. The policy here was protectionist, somewhat Malthusian and motivated by envy at the success of a few pre-war Jewish industrialists, especially André Shoes. To conclude this section on the social environment of Aryanization in France, it is worth mentioning that the mass of archives available for almost every busi­ ness is impressive, unlike what exists in Slovakia. The bureaucratic aspect, the control demanded by the state and the number of players and middlemen led to the production of a great number of documents. For a medium-sized business, it is not unusual to find documents in about ten different archival centres.87 The contrast with Slovakia is in this sense great.

Conclusion Analysis of the economic Aryanization process and the confiscation of Jewish assets in France and Slovakia reveals both similarities and differences. In both countries the process was legal, administrative and even bureaucratic. In both countries the process was carried out by national, not German, administrations. In both countries segments of the non-Jewish population played an integral role in the process, civil servants at various levels, temporary administrators, as well as buyers. But if in France buyers could not put their ideological motivation forward (they were not asked, and the most exalted collaborationists were removed from the temporary administrator jobs and could not easily declare themselves buyers of companies), this was not the case in Slovakia. Here economic Aryanization consisted in the massive transfer of Jewish assets and companies to a small, militant and influential clique of the HSPP, those that benefited from the most government support. As for the reaction of the non-Jewish population in general, it could be characterized as indifferent in France but much more in favour of the expulsion of the Jews from their economic position in Slovakia. It is true that in Slovakia the potential benefits to be gained from economic Aryanization and confiscation were far greater than in France. In Slovakia the Jews represented 38 per cent of the whole economy but only 4 per cent of the total population, whereas in France their proportional weight in the economy was much more limited except in a few sectors such as textiles and leather. The Aryanization process was much more brutal in Slovakia than in France. The margin of manoeuvre for Jewish owners was non-existent in the face of the pressure and violence of the Hlinka Guard, supported by the government and the various fascist or fascist-leaning parties. In France there was certain room for manoeuvre for the Jews, at least until autumn 1941, and they could try to put at least some of their valuables, in the form of liquid assets, in a safe place or make arrangements with the temporary administrators; this is a blank page of history as these arrangements left little trace in the archives, although numerous post-war testimonies confirm them.

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  33 In all, Aryanization in France, while rigorous and leaving no assets targeted by the law outside its field of vision, was more controlled, which made it possible to avoid a complete devaluation of capital. In Slovakia Ayanization considerably modified the structure of the economy, resulting in the disappearance or bankruptcy of many medium-sized businesses and trades, which were the backbone of the country’s economy (and one must look at the consequences of confiscation for Slovakia’s economic difficulties when returned to the Czechoslovak Republic in the post-war years). In France economic Aryanization did not modify the economic fabric. Lastly, one must look at the respective place of economic Aryanization in France and in Slovakia in the genocidal process. It is now clear, in the light of much work on confiscation in Europe since the mid-1990s, that the economic side of the Shoah was far from negligible; rather, it was a determining factor in the annihilation process. In isolating the Jews, in impoverishing them and also in furnishing perpetrators with economic motivations, Aryanization was a central element of the genocide.88 In Slovakia 85 per cent of Jewish companies were put into liquidation, and in France 60 per cent. In Slovakia 79 per cent of the Jews were deported, and in France 25 per cent. The intensity of the economic persecution was correlated with that of extermination.

Notes 1. Eduard Nižňanský, ‘Die jüdische Gemeinde in der Slowakei 1938/1939’, in Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Jahrbuch (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 2000), pp. 116–33; Ivan Kamenec, ‘Die jüdische Frage in der Slowakei während des zweiten Weltkrieges’, in Juden im Grenzraum: Schleiniger Gespräche (Eisenstadt: Burgenländisches Heimatmuseum, 1993), pp. 317–27; Livia Rothkirchen, ‘The Situation of Jews in Slovakia between 1939 and 1945’, in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, vol. 7 (Frankfurt on the Main/New York: Campus Verlag, 1998), p. 63. 2. For these figures, see Serge Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la déportation des juifs en France 1940–1944 (Paris: ‘Les Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France’, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1993), p. 1125. 3. The paramilitary organization of the Deutsche Partei, the Slovak Nazi Party. 4. See the chapter by Renée Poznanski and Daniel Blatman in this volume. 5. As a result of the Munich Accord, signed on 29 September 1938 in Munich by Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain, the First Czechoslovak Republic lost 28,000 km² and 3.8 million citizens in favour of Nazi Germany. With this accord, Great Britain and France accepted the great power dominance of the Third Reich

34  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský   6.   7.

  8.

  9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

in Central Europe and sacrificed the only genuinely democratic state in Central Europe. Hlinka Slovak People’s Party (HSPP). See details in Robert Kvacek, ‘Negotiations on the Czechoslovak National Status in the Year 1938’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et Historica 1 (1977), pp. 105–43; V. Bystricky, ‘National Status and State-Juridical Programs in Slovakia in 1938’, Historical Magazine 40(1) (1992), pp. 52–67. Eduard Nižňanský, ‘Intervention into Autonomous Bodies during the Period of the Slovak Autonomy in 1938/39’, Studia Historica Nitriensia 9 (2001), pp. 121–51. Eduard Nižňanský, ‘The Votes to the Concilium of the Slovak Country in the Year 1938’, Studia Historica Nitriensia VII (1998), pp. 163–204; Eduard Nižňanský, ‘Czech Community in Slovakia and Votes to the Parliament of the Slovak Country in December 1938’, Modern History 7 (1999), pp. 231–68. See the article ‘A New Era for Slovak Educational System Has Begun: In the Spirit of Andrej Hlinka! – Paľo Čarnogurský in Place of Kalousek’, Slovák, 13 Oct. 1938, p. 2. For the conditions of the Armistice, see Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972). For the controversial circumstances of this vote, see Pierre Miquel, Les Quatrevingts (Paris: Fayard, 1985). For a description of the corridors of the Majestic, see Walter Bagatzsky, Hotel Majestic: Ein Deutscher im besetzten Frankreich (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 1987). For Werner Best, see Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 1996). For a detailed analysis of the regime, see Marc-Olivier Baruch, Le Régime de Vichy (Paris: La Découverte, 1996); Denis Peschanski, Vichy, 1940–1944: Contrôle et exclusion (Brussels: Complexe, 1997). Rothkirchen, ‘The Situation of Jews in Slovakia between 1939 and 1945’. Ibid., p. 65. On the history of the Jews of France, see Simon Schwarzfuchs, Les Juifs de France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1975); Esther Benbassa, Histoire des juifs de France (Paris: Le Seuil, 2000). Michel Roblin, Les Juifs de Paris: Démographie, économie, culture (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1952). For an overview of the situation of the Jews in France on the eve of the war, see Renée Poznanski, Être juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Hachette, 1994), pp. 22–34. In 1921, 16.5 per cent of Jews registered as members of the Hungarian nationality; by 1930 this figure had fallen to only 9 per cent. The opposite

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  35

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

occurred in the case of Czech and Slovak nationality (or Czechoslovak nationality as stated in the statistics): in 1921 only 22 per cent of Jews registered as Czechoslovak, but by 1930 the number had risen to 32 per cent, while 7 per cent registered as German and 48 per cent as Jewish. See Robert Buechler, ‘The Jewish Community in Slovakia before the World War II’, in Toth Dezider (ed.), Tragedy of the Slovak Jews, Proceedings of the International Symposium in Banska Bystrica (Banska Bystrica: Museum, 1992), p. 23. See also Rothkirchen, ‘The Situation of Jews in Slovakia between 1939 and 1945’, pp. 46–70. According to statistics from 1940, the population of Slovakia was 73.64 per cent Roman Catholic, 6.91 per cent Greek Catholic and 15.13 per cent Protestant of various denominations. See A. Štefánek, The Basics of Sociography in Slovakia (Bratislava, 1945), pp. 178–180. On 27 January 1939 Prime Minister Jozef Tiso wrote in Slovenská Politika (p. 2): ‘The Jewish question will be solved in such a way that the Jews in Slovakia will be left only with such influence as is appropriate to their number in relation to the rest of the population. The Slovaks will be brought up in such a way that they could assume their position in economic and industrial life and gradually take over all the positions which have been held by the Jews.’ There was a change in the attitude of the Catholic Church as a whole from 1943, when a pastoral letter was issued in which the Church in Slovakia defended not only Jewish converts to Catholicism but also other Jews. However, by then the deportations of 1942 were already finished, in which approximately 58,000 Jews had been deported from Slovakia. Eduard Nižňanský, ‘Der Holocaust in der Slowakei’, in U. Hagemann, J. Kayser and H. Scheller (eds), Angewandte Prinzipien des Lehrens und Lernens im Unterricht zum Holocaust (Berlin: Cultus e.V. and Auswärtiges Amt, 2005) , pp. 7–15. Slovenská Pravda, 8 October 1938, p. 1. Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik (ADAP), 1918–45, Serie D (1937– 45), vol. IV, p. 76. L. Lipták, ‘Preparation and the Process of Salzburg Negotiations in 1940 between the Representatives of Germany and the Slovak Republic’, Historický časopis 13(3) (1965), pp. 325–65. Laurent Joly and Tal Bruttmann, La France antijuive de 1936: L’Agression de Léon Blum à la Chambre des Députés (Paris: Equateurs, 2006). Laurent Joly, Xavier Vallat: Du nationalisme chrétien à l’antisémitisme d’état (Paris: Grasse, 2001). Carmen Callil, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006); Laurent Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l’antisémitisme français, 1891–1972 (Paris: Berg, 2002). These leagues were strong in the late nineteenth century. For a description of them, see Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire: 1885–1914. Les Origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978). On anti-Semitism see Ralph

36  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

Schor, L’Antisémitisme en France pendant les années 1930: Prélude à Vichy (Brussels: Complexe, 1992). Renée Poznanski, Propagandes et persecutions: La Résistance et le problème juif 1940–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 2008), pp. 29–50. Ibid., p. 60. Law-decree of 21 April 1939. Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Pillages sur ordonnances: Aryanization et restitution des banques en France 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 2003), p. 125. We base this on Philippe Verheyde’s work. Philippe Verheyde, Les Mauvais Comptes de Vichy: L’Aryanisation des entreprises juives (Paris: Perrin, 1999). Jean Bouvier, Les Rothschild (Paris: Club français du Livre, 1960). On the economic Aryanization in the leather sector, see Florent Lebot, La Fabrique réactionnaire (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2007). Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République: Histoire politique des juifs d’Etat de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992). Joseph Billig, Le Commissariat général aux questions juives: 1941–1944 (Paris: Editions du Centre, 1957–60), vol. 3, p. 127. Slovak Code of 1939, first law of 14 March 1939 on the independent Slovak state: ‘§ 4. Government is empowered through its decrees to enact all that is necessary for the preservation of order and securing the interests of the Slovak state in this transitional period.’ Slovak Code of 1939, constitutional law number 185/1939 SlC, § 44: • I f in order to forestall irrecoverable damage, the important economic, financial or political interests of the state require immediate measures, the government can pass them in the form of a decree with the force of law with the exception of the issues that belong to the sole authority of the Assembly or that according to the Constitution should be ruled by law. • This decree is valid only after being signed by the majority of the members of Government as well as by the President. • The decree with the force of law simultaneously with its proclamation will be presented to the Assembly by the Prime Minister.

Slovak Code of 1940, constitutional law number 210/1940 SlC. Slovak Code of 1940, decree number 222/1940 SlC. Slovak Code of 1940, act number 190/1939 SlC. Slovak Code of 1941, ordinance number 198/1941 SlC. Compulsory labour service, § 22. 46. Michael M. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 113–40. 47. Verordnungsblatt des Militärbefehlshabers in Frankreich, 30 September 1940. See all the German and French anti-Semitic texts of the period in Les Juifs sous l’occupation: Recueil des textes officiels français et allemands 1940/1944

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  37

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

(Paris: Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, Association ‘Les Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France’, 1982); Claire Andrieu (ed.), with Serge Klarsfeld and Annette Wieviorka, working with Olivier Cariguel and Cécilia Kapitz, La Persécution des juifs de France 1940–1944 et le rétablissement de la légalité républicain: Recueil des textes officiels 1940–1999 (Paris: Mission d’étude sur la spoliation des juifs de France, La documentation française, 2000). For a description and complete report on the economic Aryanization policy, see Antoine Prost, Rémi Skoutelsky, Sonia Étienne, with Fabrice Cardon, Fabrice Launay and Sylvain Lebreton, Aryanisation économique et restitutions, 2 vols (Paris: Mission d’étude sur la spoliation des juifs de France, La documentation française, 2000). Martin Jungius, Der verwaltete Raub: Die ‘Arisierung’ der Wirtschaft in Frankreich 1940–1944 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2008). Verordnungsblatt des Militärbefehlshabers, 5 May 1941. Journal officiel de l’état français, 26 July 1941. On the fine payment conditions, see specifically Caisse des dépôts et consignations (Deposit and Consignment Office), La Spoliation antisémite sous l’Occupation: Consignations et restitutions, rapport définitif (November 2001), pp. 45–76. Claire Andrieu with Cécile Omnès, David Charron-Murat and Christophe Dubois, La Spoliation financière, 2 vols (Paris: Mission d’étude sur la spoliation des juifs de France, La documentation française, 2000). Ivan Kamenec, On the Trail of Tragedy: The Holocaust in Slovakia (Bratislava: Hajko and Hajkova, 2007), p. 62; Eduard Nižňanský and Ivan Kamenec (eds), Holokaust na Slovensku 2: Prezident, vláda, Snem SR a Štátna rada o židovskej otázke 1939–1945 (Bratislava: Nadácia M. Šimečku, 2003), pp. 38–40. The fascist political party of the Germans in Slovakia. Kamenec, On the Trail, pp. 87–8. In connection with the activity of the Central Economic Office, a new central Jewish organization, the Jewish Centre (JC – Ústredňa Židov), was created. As of September 1940 this became the only (obligatory) organization for all Jewish citizens in Slovakia (Judenrat). Slovak Legal Code, 234/1940 Sl. z. Yad Vashem Archives, Fund M 59, NAUS Washington, T-175 Serial 523, Record Group No. 1010, EAP 173 g – 12 – 18/38, SD-Leitabschnitt Wien (Microfilm JM 4809). Morávek was a civil servant in the Ministry of Industry in Bratislava. He made a fortune from Aryanization. At the end of the war, he disappeared (probably emigrated) and was never heard of again. Kamenec, On the Trail of Tragedy, pp. 112–13. Slovenský zákonník, 1941, vyhláška (Slovak Legal Code, 1941, decree), 238/1941 Sl. z. Nižňanský, Holokaust na Slovensku 5. Deportácie 1942 (Bratislava: Nadácia M. Šimečku, 2005).

38  •  Jean-Marc Drefus and Eduard Nižňanský 62. See Eduard Nižňanský, ‘Payment for the Deportations of Jews from Slovakia in 1942’, in Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Eduard Kubu and Jiři Sousa (eds), Discourses – diskurse: Essays for Mikulás Teich and Alice Teichova (Prague and Vienna: Nova tiskarna Pelhrimov, 2008), pp. 317– 31. 63. For example Augustin Morávek, together with members of his family, Aryanized up to 40 Jewish businesses and shops. 64. Kamenec, On the Trail of Tragedy, p. 113. 65. Slovak National Archives (Bratislava), Fund ‘National Court’, Dr A. Vašek, Tnľud 17/46/43. 66. Report on the government bill on the fund for establishing and keeping enterprises intended for the fulfilment of the working duty of Jews. This bill was put forward by the Ministry of the Interior on 1 April 1942. 67. Slovak National Archives, Fund ‘The Ministry of the Interior’, carton 267, 406560-13; Nižňanský and Kamenec (eds), Holokaust na Slovensku 2, pp. 180–81. 68. On the specific role of Fournier at SCAP, see Jungius, Der verwaltete Raub, pp. 55–60. 69. Inventaire des archives du Commissariat aux questions juives et du Service des restitutions des biens des victimes des lois et mesures de spoliation, sous-série AJ38 (Paris: Archives Nationales, 1998), XII. 70. For a general view, see Laurent Joly, Vichy dans la solution finale: histoire du Commissariat général aux questions juives (Paris: Grasset, 2006). 71. Martin Jungius and Wolfgang Seibel, ‘The Citizen as Perpetrator: Kurt Blanke and Aryanization in France’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22(3) (Oxford: University Press, 2008), pp. 441–74. 72. For banking and finance, for example, see Dreyfus, Pillages, pp. 123–35. 73. For example, Martine Soëte, ‘L’Aryanisation économique: Commissaireséerants et administrateurs provisoires’, thesis under the direction of André Kaspi, Paris, Université de Paris I, 1985. 74. On this institution during the Second World War and more particularly on its role in economic Aryanization, see Alya Aglan, Michel Margairaz and Philippe Verheyde (eds), La Caisse des dépôts et consignations, la Seconde Guerre mondiale et le Xxe siècle, Actes du colloque, Paris, 28–30 November 2001 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003). 75. State District Archives Topoľčany, Fund District Free-lancer Committee 3465/1938. See Andrea James, ‘Changes in the Status of the Jewish Community in the Topoľčany District under the Slovak State’, Česko-slovenská historická ročenka (Brno: 2001), pp. 123–33. 76. State District Archives Topoľčany, Fund District Free-lancer Committee Topoľčany, 3465/1938, 308/1942, Fund District Office Topoľčany, carton 486, 20 151/1941 adm, SNA, Fund Ministry of Economy, carton 404 (without number). See A. Jamrichová-James, ‘Zmeny v postavení židovskej komunity

Aryanization: France and the Slovak State  •  39

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

v okrese Topoľčany v spojitosti s arizáciou a deportáciami židov’, in Československá ročenka. Nižňanský (ed.), Holokaust na Slovensku 7, pp. 16–17, 67–8. Archives Nationales, Paris, AJ 38 3248, dossier ‘Pierre Lévy’. Pierre Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990). See an example in Jean-Marc Dreyfus, ‘L’Aryanisation économique des banques: La Confiscation des banques juives en France pendant l’Occupation et leur restitution à la Libération, 1940–1952’, PhD under the direction of Antoine Prost, Paris, Université de Paris I – Panthéon – Sorbonne, September 2000, vol. 1, pp. 321f. Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensburger, Des Camps dans Paris: Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, juillet 1943–août 1944 (Paris: Fayard, 2003), pp. 35f. Philippe Burrin, Living with Defeat: France under the German Occupation, 1940–1944 (London: Arnold, 1995), p. 230. Claire Andrieu, Les Banques sous l’Occupation: Paradoxes de l’histoire d’une profession, 1936–1946 (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1990). On the details of this complicated financial operation, see Caisse des dépôts et consignations (Deposit and Consignment Office), La Spoliation antisémite sous l’Occupation, pp. 45–76; Dreyfus, Pillages, pp. 97–101. Florent Lebot, La Fabrique réactionnaire (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2007). On the Aryanization of André Shoes, see Verheyde, Mauvais Comptes, pp. 124f. See the detailed inventory of these sources in Caroline Piketty, Guide des recherches dans les archives des spoliations et des restitutions (Paris: Mission d’étude sur la spoliation des juifs de France, La documentation française, 2000). Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 395–6.

–2– Pogroms and Massacres during the Summer of 1941 in the Łomża and Białystok District The Case of Radziłów

Andrzej Żbikowski

Questions and Sources Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbors: The History of the Extermination of a Jewish Town,1 dedicated to the mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne, has provoked one of the most serious historical debates in post-war Poland. Gross maintains that the Jews of Jedwabne, a town in north-eastern Poland previously invaded by the Red Army in September 1939, were murdered in the summer of 1941 by Polish residents with only the passive participation of a small group of Germans – ordinary policemen, as well as Gestapo officers. He also wrote that the conditions at the time were conducive to creating a situation in which more than one resident of the eastern Mazovia and Podlasie regions forgot all moral and religious principles, such as the biblical virtues of the Ten Commandments as taught every Sunday in the local church, and eagerly carried out – indeed often anticipated – German directives regarding the physical extermination of Jewish men, women and children. Gross was writing not about individuals or small groups demoralized by the war but about an entire local community, which had suffered the consequences of two years of Soviet occupation. Thanks to much recent work on the anti-Soviet underground resistance in Podlasie,2 we know that the Poles did not easily submit to Soviet rule and, despite massive oppression, managed to maintain their national identity. Gross added, however, that Poles continued to exclude their Jewish compatriots from their local communities. The subject of my research pre-dates the Jedwabne massacre, focusing on an event which took place on 7 July 1941 in Radziłów, a shtetl thirty kilometres from Jedwabne. It was the second of twenty excesses which occurred in the Polish northeastern borderland. These events happened between the German attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 and mid-September of that same year when German administrative structures were finally imposed on the former Polish territories, which were then incorporated into what was the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1939–41 period.3 In the summer of 1941 this area was attached to East Prussia and known as the Białystok District (Bezirk Bialystok).

41

42  •  Andrzej Żbikowski Of course, I was interested in all available source materials. The basic selection criterion I adopted was the time the source was created: the closer to the events, the greater the importance given to the source. I assumed that accounts which had arisen many years after the war (generally as from the 1960s) were of far less relevance. The testimonies of Podlasie and Mazovian Jews are of exceptional significance. These were the direct eyewitness accounts of the events of the summer of 1941 by those who survived the war, either in hiding or in labour camps. The accounts were collected by members of the Jewish Historical Commission (active from August 1944), mainly its provincial department attached to the Jewish Committee in Białystok. They were compiled between April 1945 and September 1948. Today they are kept in the Jewish Historical Institute’s archives in Warsaw. The same collection also contains second-hand reports by individuals who survived the war in the USSR. These, too, would appear relevant. The Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem have an extensive memoir by Chaja Finkelsztejn of Radziłów, composed between 1946 and 1947. The comparative material for the Jews who were saved are the case papers of the sixty-one legal investigations and trials between 1945 and 1958 regarding the participation of Poles in the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1941 in this area. These trials were based on the Polish National Liberation Committee (PKWN) decree of 31 August 1944. In over a dozen of these trials, besides accounts given by the Poles, testimonies were deposited by thirty-eight Jews, mostly eyewitnesses of pogroms. In others, only gentile Poles testified – several hundred people all told. Only a few of them concern the town of Radziłów. A somewhat sparse collection of German documents, including orders and reports by the military and police authorities, was also analysed, as were similar documents produced by the Polish underground state. The participation of the local population of eastern Mazovia and Podlasie in violent actions against Jews is a complicated issue. There were many incidents of a very varied nature. Gross recalls that the murders in Jedwabne and Radziłów preceded the anti-Jewish excesses in other places. Some historians and commentators participating in the discussion on his book jumped to the conclusion that all incidents were similar in nature, intensity and consequence. Others, on the other hand, tended to stress the uniqueness of both massacres. The sources available do not allow for such far-reaching simplifications. Reading the accounts of the survivors as well as the legal records, we learn of the sheer variety of hostile responses, which frequently, though not always, led to physical aggression. In certain places, a relatively small number of ‘activists’ indulged in violence and repressions; in others, wide circles from local society were involved. I will briefly describe both the course of the antiJewish outbursts in a given locality and the patterns of social remembrance among the Jews who survived the massacres. The most valuable sources will be dealt with by referring to the more clearly differentiated picture that emerges from the testimonies of non-Jewish Poles during the trials.

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  43 Those convicted after the war of having participated in pogroms were nearly all members of Polish auxiliary police formations or inhabitants of small villages unknown to witnesses by name. These two groups of active participants are very clearly identified in the sources; the collective social memory also clearly dis­tin­ guishes between active participants and a host of ‘ordinary’ neighbours, who were merely ‘bystanders’ during the persecution or killing of Jews. However, during the inquiries and at the trials, statements were sometimes made from which one could deduce that neither group was necessarily separated by a wall, and that the policemen were merely in the front line. The notion of dividing the local community into a small minority of evil wrongdoers and a majority of good righteous citizens cannot be upheld. The available sources – personal reports and trial-cum-inquiry documents – do not provide any degree of certainty as to the chronology of the increasing violence against Jews occurring in any given place. There is the problem, on the one hand, of the reliability of memory and, on the other, of a poor historical awareness of the court and its investigative authorities. Immersing oneself in the memoirs and court materials today, one attaches great importance to what occurred in July and August 1941. However, we now have a better understanding thanks to the examination of those sources left behind by the occupiers, of which key witnesses and judges were not aware. The surviving accounts and testimonies from Jews, Polish witnesses and Poles accused of involvement are all linked by the fact that they were largely given by simple, poorly educated people. Individual episodes were captured as on a blurred photograph. Sharply defined are the front-rank participants, such as the victims and murderers; the rest are unidentifiable. From the testimonies, it is not clear exactly how many victims there were, nor how many people participated in a pogrom. Nonetheless, the common characteristic of Jewish testimonies is that local Poles participated in such events on a mass scale. Confirmation of this can also be found in certain Polish testimonies. But we cannot always assert that the most important or even the most typical episodes were the ones recounted. This depreciates their credibility as far as establishing the guilt of a specific person is concerned. It does not, however, disqualify or exclude them from the process of trying to reconstruct the course of a given event. The simplest method of verifying sources is by crossreferencing them with other, independent sources, but in this case the sources usually come from a related inquiry, and sometimes even the same one. Often testimonies were provided by people who knew each other. A more difficult but very effective method is that of ascertaining the reliability of the information contained in the sources under investigation through a structural analysis of the statement. The possibility of mass-scale falsification of such copious materials, on a highly specific issue, can, in my opinion, be excluded. Even if such falsifications did occur, they tended to concern the role the accused played in events and not the course of the events themselves or their background. This appears to

44  •  Andrzej Żbikowski be confirmed by the very specific descriptions of secondary issues preserved in the statements, as well as their often very precisely detailed accounts. Also, rarely does one encounter opinions of a clearly ideological character. It is worth pointing out the frequent use by the witnesses of phrases and figures of speech taken from colloquial speech.

The Pogrom of Radziłów The basic Jewish source concerning the events in Radziłów is the extensive memoir of Chaja Finkelsztejn, mother of Menachem Finkelsztejn, quoted in the book by Jan T. Gross, which was written immediately after her departure for Palestine in 1946. Also found were the case records of the trials of eight participants in the pogrom, which were conducted on the basis of the above-mentioned August decree.4 I quote only brief fragments from the sources, essential to the reconstruction of the events of the summer of 1941 and the atmosphere surrounding the trials that were held. Most of these documents are published in full in the second volume of the publication Wokół Jedwabnego. The reconstruction of the events of Radziłów starts with the case papers. In my article of 1992 I did not appreciate the significance of Menachem Finkelsztejn’s account and concluded, probably frightened by the blunt descriptions of violence, that the facts he brought to bear were exaggerated.5 Researching the court papers later, I stumbled on the testimonies of those same Jews who deposited accounts with the Provincial Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok, or who related the events in Radziłów to the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. I was startled by the fact that, on principle, the court did not refer to these testimonies, clearly giving credence to the denials of the defendants and the testimonies of the Poles defending them.

The Case of Leon Kosmaczewski The first trial in post-war Poland was held in 1946–7 before the Regional Military Court in Białystok.6 On 17 November 1945 Sub Lieutenant Eugeniusz Kęsik, who was in charge of the Internal Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego, KBW), arrested Leon Kosmaczewski on suspicion of ‘collaborating with the Gestapo and of active participation in exterminating Jews in the district of Radziłów’. Handed over to the provincial Public Security Office (Wojewódzkie Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, WUBP), Kosmaczewski was first interrogated about these allegations. On 17 and 19 November 1945 Kosmaczewski testified that at the end of June 1941 he had been chosen by the Germans as the soltys (village chairman) of Radziłów. He enumerated his duties as being ‘to ensure that the peasants delivered their quota, and I supplied people for deportation to work in Germany, and also I watched to prevent any anti-Nazi occupation gangs forming up’. Asked about the pogrom of the Jewish

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  45 population, he asserted that it took place in mid-July 1941. The Gestapo arrived in Radziłów in three cars and flushed the Jewish inhabitants out of their houses. Eight hundred people were led off to a barn. There, according to Kosmaczewski, the fifteen-year-old Józef Ekstowicz was given a bottle of petrol, and he then ‘set the barn on fire in which the Jews locked inside were burnt’. The remaining Jews were locked up after a few days in a specially set up ghetto, and later taken off to an estate in the village of Wierzbowo nearby. From Kosmaczewski’s testimony it does not emerge unambiguously that the Germans committed these crimes. He himself did not admit to participating ‘in this extermination’. Kosmaczewski’s testimony provoked a whole avalanche of investigations. The case was taken over by Feliks Walaszczyk from the Białystok WUBP. On 3 Dec­ember 1945 he interviewed four Jewish witnesses, former residents of Radziłów, who were in Białystok at the time. Their testimonies were consistent, seriously incriminating a large group of Radziłów residents. The first to testify, Menachem Finkelsztejn, included Kosmaczewski among the main persecutors of the Radziłów Jews. He knew him from before the war as an ‘Endek’ activist (of the National Democratic Party, the largest right-wing formation). According to him, during the Soviet occupation Kosmaczewski had been in hiding. He belonged to a partisan group which carried out ‘numerous acts of terror on Soviet citizens and Poles in Soviet service’, shooting, among others, the NKVD chief of the Jedwabne district in June 1941.7 Kosmaczewski also ‘participated in disarming retreating Soviet forces. He also participated in blowing up the bridge over the river Biebrza at the fort of Osowiec, as a result of which the whole front line was broken.’ When the Germans invaded, Finkelsztejn testified how ‘Kosmaczewski began to smash up Jewish homes. He selected a pack of people with whom he organized raids.’ Finkelsztejn recalled two raids, that of 3 July 1941 and the murder on 7 July of Mojzesz Perkal and his daughter in a field near the village of Brodowo. That same day Leon Kosmaczewski, armed by the Germans with a rifle, took part in rounding up the town’s Jews in the market square and then escorting them to a barn ‘which he destroyed by fire with his people’. On 8 July Finkelsztejn was an ‘eyewitness to how he [Kosmaczewski] publicly raped the Berezowskas, mother and daughter, whom he found in a hiding place in their house, and then killed them’. After the pogrom, according to Finkelsztejn, Kosmaczewski must have become village chairman; the village knew ‘he was famous for his riches which he stole during the pogrom’. The investigator – whether accidentally or in accordance with instructions – also raised the topic of the defendant’s participation in the anti-communist partisan movement in 1945. Finkelsztejn admitted that, to the best of his knowledge, ‘Kosmaczewski was active in the Home Army [Armia Krajowa, AK] or National Armed Forces [Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ], partisan groups which began to roam around and terrorize the civilian population. They did not allow new civil authorities to be established and smashed the Citizens’ Militia [Milicja Obywatelskwa, MO] stations in Radziłów, killing its commander and an officer.’

46  •  Andrzej Żbikowski Likewise, a second Jewish survivor, Berek Wasersztejn, testified against Kosmaczewski and bore witness to his involvement in the pogrom of the Jewish population, describing it in a similar way to Finkelsztejn: Kosmaczewski, belonging to an assault group armed with rifles, raided Jewish homes. ‘He raped citizen Borozowska and her daughter on 30 June 1941 and killed them.’ Finkelsztejn added more details to the description of the pogrom of 7 July: ‘At about 9 a.m. Gestapo men arrived in three cars, who issued an order to the town’s representatives [the paramedic Mazurek, the parish priest Aleksander Dołęgowski and Adam Grzymkowski] that they could do whatever they wanted to do with the Jews.’ The Gestapo men ‘went back after issuing the order; meanwhile the residents of the town herded all the Jews into a barn outside town, and there, having doused it in petrol, burnt it down’. Finkelsztejn named the three Kosmaczewski brothers (Leon, Antoni and Józef) as the main perpetrators, along with twenty more people. He claimed that Leon and Antoni Kosmaczewski brutally cut into ‘the head of an eighteen year old girl named Dora Dorogoj with a saw, and did so while she was still alive’.8 In Wasersztejn’s opinion, the chief ringleaders of the pogrom were the paramedic Mazurek, the ‘commander of the German police known as Dienstpolizei9 and the commander of the entire gang, citizen Kiluk Konstanty’, as well as the priest Aleksander Dołęgowski. Wasersztejn described in precise detail the tragic death of his wife and daughter in the barn and how it was recounted to him by a sixteen-year-old girl from the village of Mścichy. It was Leon Kosmaczewski ‘who ordered her into the barn together with the child, but because of the powerful flames and the barn being boarded up, he put a ladder up for her and ordered them to climb it and go inside … Kosmaczewski caught the child by its legs, threw it into the barn through the roof and stabbed my wife with a bayonet and also threw her in.’ Chemia Suraski testified before the same investigator on 3 December 1945. He confirmed the description of the pogrom in Radziłów given by the previous witnesses, speaking of the rape of the ‘Borowieckas’10 and the murder of Dora Dorogoj. He watched the rounding up of the Jews in the market square from an attic hideout and claimed that he saw how, when ‘a young girl ran out of the burning barn, one of the residents stabbed her right through with a pitchfork and threw her back into the flames’, which seems most unlikely. Izrael Finkelsztejn (Menachem’s father) was the last of the Jewish witnesses to testify on 3 December 1945. His version of the events differs in no way from the previous ones. In Radziłów a twenty-strong gang roamed about at night for two weeks until 7 July 1941: That day the gang forced all Jewish residents up to the market square and there, after giving them preliminary beatings, herded them into the barn where they burnt everybody. For a further three days after this the dragnet continued, and whoever they caught they killed immediately. When they ran out of rifle ammunition, they began to kill with spades and similar things. I sat in hiding at the time and survived.

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  47 He also testified against the anti-communist partisans and Kosmaczewski’s role in the latter, both in the 1939–41 period and after the war. Two days later the investigator, Walaszczyk, was interrogating Leon Kosmaczewski. He denied most of the allegations. During a subsequent inter­ rogation of 14 December 1945, Walaszczyk inquired only into Kosmaczewski’s conspiratorial activities. He admitted that in 1940 he had been persuaded by his neighbour Jan Wierzbicki to join the underground organization the Polish Insurgent Union (Polski Związek Powstańczy), but said he only really took part himself from 1945. He continued to maintain that he had had nothing to do with the raid on the Citizens’ Militia), a state police institution outpost in Radziłów, a few months after the liberation. Such a turn in the investigation was clearly not what the Białystok WUBP had had in mind. From 17 December 1945 the investigators were changed and the case gained momentum. The investigation methods applied came to light during the trial. What is more important, however, is that at that moment the trial into the pogrom of the Radziłów Jews almost completely broke down. Neither the WUBP workers nor the military prosecutors were in any way interested in it. Kosmaczewski was asked almost exclusively about his underground contacts and was accused of participating in assaults on the Citizens’ Militia. Investigation records into the Radziłów pogrom issue only survived in the file concerning the other case. Nonetheless, they were not referred to during the trial which began on 9 August 1946. Accordingly, the sentence passed on 23 May 1947 was relatively mild. Leon Kosmaczewski was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. At the same time, he was also given three years’ remission on the strength of the amnesty granted by the government to former underground activists. On 25 October 1947 the public prosecutor’s office in Elk prepared the charges against Leon Kosmaczewski based on the August decree.11 The trial took place on 3 March 1949 and the Circuit Court found him not guilty. During the trial Kosmaczewski consistently denied participating in the pogrom of the Radziłów Jews. He testified: ‘at the time I was in the meadows beyond the [river] Biebrz, where I was raking hay’. His brother-in-law, Wincenty Piotrowski, confirmed this during the trial.

The Cases of Antoni Kosmaczewski and Zygmunt Skrodzki The testimonies of Berek Wasersztejn and Chemia Suraski regarding the murder of the Dorogoj family formed the basis for launching an investigation into Antoni Kosmaczewski and Zygmunt Skrodzki. The first of these men was interrogated in Grajewo District Office of Public Security (Powiatowy Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, PUBP) on 6 April 1948.12 He had been arrested a week earlier in the village of Siodłomie in the district of Słupsk, were he was found going under the assumed name of Antoni Rejno.

48  •  Andrzej Żbikowski Together with Zygmunt Skrodzki, Antoni Kosmaczewski admitted to the murder of Dora Dorogoj, one of the daughters of a Jewish shoemaker from Radziłów. The Germans took the victim’s mother and one of her brothers to the camp in Bogusze. According to Kosmaczewski, in April 1940 he had tried to protect two residents of Radziłów – Jadwiga Wiśniewska and Barbara Napartowa – from deportation to Siberia. He was prevented from taking them out of town by Dora Dorogoj, a certain Milberg of the NKVD and Barbinski, the chairman of the rural council (sielsoviet). Kosmaczewski was confined for four days. From that time on, he said, he felt ‘hatred’ towards Dora Dorogoj. When the Germans arrived, he began looking for her in order ‘to take revenge on her’. Together with Zygmunt Skrodzki, a tailor from Radziłów, he went to Słucz, where they took Dora Dorogoj out of a house and ordered her to dig a grave. When she had dug it, they killed her with stones and a flail. Kosmaczewski also admitted that in February 1945 he killed the father and brother of Dora Dorogoj in that same place in Słucz. The reason was fairly clear – fear of revenge for Dora’s murder. As the defendant put it, when the Germans began to withdraw in 1944, the Jews came out of hiding and, on meeting people (Poles), ‘expressed their joy that the Red Army was coming and that a time of retribution would come when they would take revenge on their enemies’. Skrodzki and one of the Ramotowskis warned Antoni Kosmaczewski that the Dorogojs had a Nagan pistol: ‘watch out because Dorogoj is out to get you’. Kosmaczewski reported this to the commander of his Home Army (AK) company, who allegedly advised him: ‘if you have witnesses for this, then you get them’. So Antoni Kosmaczewski went with his brother Józef to Słucz and called both Dorogojs outside under the pretext that he wanted to make up to them and then murdered them with an axe. With his brother and Feliks Mordasiewicz, he took the bodies to the forest and left them in the snow. He did not find their weapons. From the subsequent part of the transcript, it emerged that these were the only wartime ‘successes’ of Antoni Kosmaczewski. Asked whether he had killed any Germans during the war, he admitted that he had not. He did not admit to participating in the burning of the Radziłów Jews, though for five days he served in the police. He had reported the murder of Dorogoj to his Home Army battalion commander Teofil Kosmaczewski.13 The first trial of Antoni Kosmaczewski and Zygmunt Skrodzki was held on 21 October 1948. Kosmaczewski denied having had anything to do with the murder of the Dorogojs; he asserted that he could not recall having ever been interrogated in the matter. The Germans were held responsible for this amnesia because they beat him up twice, and he had had typhus during the war. The court adjourned the case and Antoni Kosmaczewski was submitted for psychiatric tests. Skrodzki, too, as during the investigation, denied the charges. The second trial was held on 24 January 1949. Kosmaczewski once again did not admit to the murder of the Dorogojs. Skrodzki also denied the charges, claiming that they were the fantasy of Kosmaczewski, who was by then full of ill will towards

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  49 him. Franciszka Kopańczyk had been staying in the house with Dora Dorogoj on that day in July 1941. He testified that she had been taken out by two young men of nineteen to twenty years of age; they were tall and with undisguised dark hair, but they were not the defendants. The court found the defendants not guilty, believing in the testimony of Franciszka Kopańczyk.

The Case of Ludwik Kosmaczewski In 1948 five penal procedures were instigated against the presumed participants in the pogrom and burning of the Jewish population of Radziłów. The inquiry concerning the pogrom began, in the summer of 1947, by investigating the connection of Leon Kosmaczewski with the affair. Ludwik Kosmaczewski, born in 1920 in Radziłów, was arrested on 18 August 1947. The investigation was run by the Public Security Office (PUBP) in Grajewo.14 As his first witness, the reporting officer, Kazimierz Tchurz, on 15 August 1947 interrogated Henryk Dziekoński, a postman by trade (arrested on 12 August). Dziekoński, born in 1911 and also an inhabitant of Radziłów, seriously incriminated Kosmaczewski, claiming that the latter belonged to the Citizens’ Watch from early in the German occupation. But his testimony on the pogrom itself was enlightening. ‘When two cars with Gestapo men arrived in Radziłów in June 1941, they began to incite the Polish population against the Jews, claiming that it was because of them that the Poles suffered under the Soviets.’ The Germans ordered the Citizens’ Watch to round up all the Jews in the market square in Radziłów. Ludwik Kosmaczewski took part in this. According to Dziekoński, Kosmaczewski ‘participated in rounding up the Jews in the market square’ even though his family had not been deported to the Soviet Union. He stood guard over the local Jews, ‘walking about with a rifle, beating them with the butt of his rifle from time to time’. About 600 Jews were rounded up in the market square, ‘children, old people, women and men, [and] the Germans ordered them to be slaughtered or burnt’. Kosmaczewski, ‘together with others, looked out to prevent Jews from escaping from the barn’, and also part­ icipated in looting the Jewish property for his own material gain. ‘After a month or so, Kosmaczewski gave up his activities, returned his weapon to the Germans and worked at home as a tailor’, said Dziekoński. Kosmaczewski gave a completely different version of events. He admitted, how­ever, that he did join the police. After four months, he discharged himself from service and later, until 1943, worked as a tailor. Then in the period 1943–4 he went into hiding, evading the Germans. Upon capture he was placed in a labour camp near Elk, from where he managed to escape. In 1946 he was arrested by Security Service (PUBP) officers in Grajewo for Home Army activities. In June of that year he was released. In 1947 he turned himself in. In response to the question of how the police was organized from late June to early July 1941, Ludwik Kosmaczewski asserted that he was pulled in by Jan Wierzbicki,

50  •  Andrzej Żbikowski who was acting on the orders of an underground organization. In addition, he gave the names of five policemen. He revealed that ‘there were two Russian rifles at the outpost that local people had handed in. Whenever anyone did sentry duty, he took a rifle and went off.’ Kosmaczewski also fired them frequently. The auxiliary police (Hilfspolizei) was dissolved upon the setting up of an outpost of the German gendarmerie. As regards the events of 7 July 1941, Kosmaczewski testified that on that day he had gone to the village of Wierzbowo, where he stayed until the evening: ‘When we entered Radziłów, I noticed smoke from the dying flames of Sutkowski’s barn, I don’t know the first name. The streets were full of people. And in the market square there stood a taxi with Gestapo men.’ A person of unknown identity informed him that the Jews had been burnt in the barn. At the investigator’s suggestion of ‘Don’t lie, but tell the truth’, he consistently denied participating both in the pogrom and in the subsequent looting of Jewish property. On 27 February 1948 the first session against Ludwik Kosmaczewski was opened by the court in Elk. The prosecutor, in his justification of the charges, gave his own interpretation of the course of events on 7 July 1941: ‘two cars of Germans, Gestapo men, arrived in Radziłów, who ordered the Citizens’ Watch to round up all the Jews in the market square and then destroy them. Among the executors of this order was Ludwik Kosmaczewski, with about 600 Jews being burnt in the barn.’ The court cross-examined six witnesses. Henryk Dziekoński revoked his earlier testimonies, asserting that he was ‘like a mindless dummy’ in the hands of the Security Service, and ‘on the day of the burning of the Jews in Radziłów he was ill and confined to bed, at Buczynski’s’. The witness Jan Kosmaczewski gave the defendant an alibi. He testified that on that fateful day he had gone with Ludwik Kosmaczewski to Wierzbowo and that they had only returned late in the evening. The court found the defendant not guilty, discrediting the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn that had been read out. On 17 October 1949 the Supreme Court waived the judgment and ordered a new investigation and the temporary arrest of Ludwik Kosmaczewski, in light of new evidence: the testimonies of Józef Ekstowicz, interrogated in Elk on 30 June 1948. Ekstowicz incriminated, among others, two people on trial at the time as having been involved in the events of 7 July 1941 – Ludwik Kosmaczewski and Feliks Godlewski.

The Case of Józef Ekstowicz As established by Jan Milewski in Wokół Jedwabnego (second volume), Józef Ekstowicz, known also by his mother’s maiden name of Klimaszewski, was sought by the Security Service. In September 1947 he was found in Elk thanks to a tipoff by a neighbour.15 He was interrogated and formally arrested on the charge of having participated in a pogrom. The trial, at which he was found not guilty, was held on 21 October 1948. In his testimony during the inquiry and trial, Ekstowicz

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  51 seriously incriminated Antoni, Leon and Ludwik Kosmaczewski, as well as Henryk Dziekoński and Feliks Godlewski, who were tried on that occasion and again later. Other persons mentioned by him were either dead or had eluded the law enforce­ ment agencies. Ekstowicz, only fifteen years old in 1941, refused to admit his guilt. He maintained that he had climbed onto the roof of the barn under duress, together with another youth. They poured about thirty litres of petrol from a glass vessel or metal canisters. His testimony regarding the causes of the murder was quite vague. When the Gestapo arrived in Radziłów and asked ‘whether there were Jews, people said yes, so they asked why they had not sorted them out so far. If they did not bring order, then they would do the same to them as to the Jews.’ The Germans ordered the Jews to be rounded up in the market square, but they were herded to the barn by the Poles alone. Of the witnesses participating in Ekstowicz’s trial, Piotr Przestrzelski is the only one worthy of mention here. He gave a few details which one does not come across in other testimonies concerning Radziłów: When the Gestapo came, the Germans gathered the children and ordered them to show them where the Jews lived. The children showed them and then ran away. They then caught Ekstowicz. He came to us with the Germans, asking if there were any [Jewish] children with us. I said that we have no Jews, they left, and Ekstowicz stayed; when they came back for him, he had already escaped via the porch.

The Case of Ludwik Kosmaczewski – Act Two It was difficult to bring Ludwik Kosmaczewski to court again because he went into hiding and had not been found by the time the trial got under way on 20 June 1955. The chief witness at this trial was Józef Ekstowicz. He testified that one day the Gestapo arrived by car in Radziłów. The residents realized that this was a special unit ‘by their clothes, on their hats they had skulls’. The Germans ordered the Poles of the auxiliary police to assemble the Jews, who were then ‘herded into the barn and burnt. The barn belonged to Sutkowski, its walls were made of stone, its roof a straw thatch.’ The Jews were escorted by ‘the auxiliary police – local and from outside, from the town of Wąsocz and Szczuczyn’. The police from outside had arrived in Radziłów before the Gestapo, and some had rifles. Some of the Jews were ‘forcibly pushed’ into the barn. Ekstowicz and another boy were ordered by Marian Kozikowski, one of the policemen, to ‘douse the roof in oil’ from a canister. The next day, on this spot, Jews that were caught were shot. Ekstowicz clearly did not want to accuse anyone, and defended himself by arguing that in Radziłów there lived five Kosmaczewski families, and he was confused by events. He said, however: ‘I would clarify that, upon rounding up the Jews in the market place, the Gestapo itself drove off, and the Jews were guarded in the market place by the Poles.’

52  •  Andrzej Żbikowski After that, Henryk Dziekoński testified, but he refused to describe the events of 7 July. He claimed that, due to ‘memory loss’ caused by his term in jail, he could not remember many of the details. Jan Kosmaczewski repeated the story of having gone to Wierzbowo. He merely added that they ‘returned home about three hours before sunset’ and got out of the cart in the settlement outside the town. Other witnesses had little to add. The court recognized the importance of Ekstowicz’s testimonies, particularly those made during the investigations. It sentenced Ludwik Kosmaczewski to six years in prison. In his justification of the verdict, the judge emphasized that the testimonies of Dziekoński and Ekstowicz from the inquiry gave the impression of being authentic accounts of witnesses ‘or rather active participants’ in the event, which ‘was for the residents of Radziłów … an extraordinary, spinechilling event’.

The Case of Feliks Godlewski A further defendant in the proceedings against the assumed participants in the mass murder of Radziłów was Feliks Godlewski.16 The testimony of Henryk Dziekoński given on 15 August 1947 was most harmful to him. From it we learn a few new details concerning the origins and course of the events of 7 July 1941. Dziekoński testified that the NKVD had deported his and Feliks Godlewski’s families in June 1941, two days before the beginning of the German–Soviet War. He stated that Godlewski and a group of his colleagues were kept imprisoned in Białystok. Upon returning to Radziłów after the Soviet retreat in June 1941, at least ten of them set up a militia. ‘Each of us found himself a rifle, and there were a lot of weapons abandoned by the Soviet forces, and put on a red and white armband, and so we formed a police force.’ The Gestapo that arrived in town on 7 July added more weapons and said ‘that the perpetrators of these arrests of your families and yourselves were the Jews’. The further part of the testimony contains a description of the rounding up of the Jews in the market square and their being burnt in the barn. It ends with the comment: ‘After burning the Jews, the looting of Jewish houses and shops began. Feliks Godlewski, together with his brother Aleksander, took over a rich colonial goods shop after the Jew, Zandler. This and the stock it contained Godlewski took for himself, for his private possession.’ On 19 August 1947 Feliks Godlewski from Radziłów was interrogated at the PUBP in Grajewo. He testified that, upon returning from internment in Lithuania in December 1939, he worked on his father’s smallholding until 17 June 1941, when he was arrested and put in prison in Białystok. The Soviets also deported his family to Russia. Godlewski returned to Radziłów on about 28 June 1941. On 3 July he travelled to Wolkowysk (Belarus) in search of his family. He came back in August. From January until April 1944, on the order of a member of the Home Army, he became a German gendarme. In September 1944 he crossed the front to the Soviet

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  53 side and enlisted in the Polish army, where he served until 1945. According to Feliks Godlewski, he learnt of the pogrom of 7 July 1941 from his brothers Stanisław and Aleksander when he returned to Radziłów from Wolkowysk in August 1941. The prosecutor from Elk, Antoni Gizo, preparing the charges of 15 November 1947 against Feliks Godlewski and taking into account not only the testimonies quoted above but also copies of witness statements from Menachem Finkelsztejn and Berek Wasersztejn, also referred to the testimony of Zygmunt Dybikowski.17 This added a handful of new facts. According to him, the Germans who arrived in July 1941 in Radziłów, intent on staging a pogrom, handed Feliks Godlewski a rifle and a box of ammunition: ‘Upon rounding up the Jews, the Germans departed in the direction of Jedwabne, while Godlewski, Feliks together with his brother and Statkiewicz, Henryk … herded the Jews into the barns of Sutkowski, Antoni … where they doused the barn in petrol and set it on fire; about a thousand Jews were burnt.’ They also fired on escapees. Probably the next day, Dybikowski testified, the pogrom’s organizers ‘caught the Jew Nagórka, I don’t know his first name, took him to the burnt place and shot him. Next day they caught the Jew Chomek, I do not know the surname, who was a militiaman under the Soviets, took him to the burnt place and shot him.’ The trial in the Circuit Court in Elk against Feliks Godlewski took place on 20 February 1948. The defendant basically testified in the same way as he had during the inquiry, though there may be doubts about his sense of the timing of events: On the next day, after the outbreak of war [23 June 1941], I returned to Radziłów and met coachmen … who maintained that a means of transport with deportees had been stopped in Wolkowysk. I went to Wolkowysk thinking that I would find my old folks there. I didn’t find them. This search took me a week.

If he had departed for this search on 23 June, he would have been back in Radziłów by 1 July. The witness Henryk Dziekoński asserted that he did not understand why he was being accused of participating in the pogrom. He added: ‘I heard [that] the Jews of Radziłów had been burnt by the Germans themselves. Who helped them, I don’t know.’ Other witnesses called upon to testify also knew nothing about the course of the pogrom. Zygmunt Skrodzki said he left for Przytuły on 7 July for an auction of meadowland. Along the way to Przytuły he saw ‘several taxis with Gestapo men, who asked us the way to Radziłów’. During the return journey he noticed a Jew running cross country. ‘To our question he answered that the Germans were rounding up and murdering Jews. Later we noticed that something began to burn in Radziłów. Upon reaching the town, it was all over, the remnants of the barn and bodies were still smouldering, and continued to do so for another two days … The Jew-boy we met was called Rzeczko, I don’t remember his first name, he is now dead.’ Skrodzki’s testimony provides a full alibi for Godlewski, whom his

54  •  Andrzej Żbikowski colleagues, during the interrogation, accused of murdering a Jew by the name of Rzeczko a day after the burning of the Radziłów Jews in the barn. Marianna Ramotowska, of Jewish origin, admitted during the trial that she had heard a lot of good about Godlewski: ‘He protected my husband, who would have also been executed by the Germans if they had found out that his wife was Jewish. He helped him in getting [false] documents for himself and for me.’ Taking into account this testimony, among others, the court found him not guilty. However, the verdict was not recognized by the judges of the Supreme Court for procedural reasons. On 12 November 1949 the court ordered procedures to be reinstigated. The testimonies of Józef Ekstowicz weighed on this decision, and several new witnesses were interviewed. The testimony of Witold Krajewski concerned the activities of Józef Lendo of the village of Słucz (municipality of Radziłów) during the German occupation. Krajewski also showed his somewhat broader knowledge on the topic of Polish– Jewish relations in Radziłów and its environs. According to him, in July 1941 Feliks Godlewski and Leon and Ludwik Kosmaczewski were among the inhabitants of the town who had participated in the Radziłów pogrom (in the testimony it was erroneously dated June): ‘Upon burning these citizens, Lendo, Józef looted their property, taking the looted property to his mother-in-law Bieńkowska … together with his brother-in-law Bieńkowski, Wincenty, who is currently in Argentina … Then he took the looted property to his mother in Słucz, it was mostly clothes and furniture.’ The witness also learnt from somebody that Lendo ‘came to the house of a Jewish woman named Juda, who had a mercer’s shop, took her from the house and led her to the barn where they were burning Jews’. Henryk Przyborowski, a member of the Communist Party (PZPR), declared in an interview that he ‘saw with his own eyes’ the murder of about six hundred ‘citizens of Jewish nationality’ from Radziłów. Armed men made sure that no one escaped from the fire, and Feliks Godlewski was said to have been among them. ‘I did not see Germans with them at the time, but I cannot deny it, they might have been there.’ The witness explained that he did not remember more details because he was barely fifteen years old at the time. But he remembered something: ‘In the months of June– July 1941 many murders were committed against citizens of Jewish nationality and Poles who had sympathized with the Soviet authorities. They murdered those Polish citizens, that is, the residents of Radziłów.’ On 21 December 1953 Przyborowski testified again, confirming his previous testimony and supplementing it somewhat. He knew that Godlewski’s family had been deported to the Soviet Union, and that Godlewski, after his return from prison, had joined the German police in Radziłów. He saw the defendant among the Poles rounding up the Jews in the market square and at Sutkowski’s barn. Police chief Kiluk ordered Godlewski ‘to guard the houses of Jews, whom they herded into the market square. The idea was that no one should take Jewish jewellery.’ Standing in the market square, Przyborowski saw Feliks Godlewski ‘armed, and a red and white armband on his sleeve, taking part in the

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  55 above’. He remembered Godlewski because he later saw him quite frequently in uniform and armed. During the interview a characteristic sentence was uttered: ‘Although at the time lots of children participated too, and some stared at how they rounded them up and burnt them in the barn.’ The record of the interview with Helena Klimaszewska on 14 April 1949, before the acting circuit judge in Elk, was also added to the case papers of Feliks Godlewski. She testified: ‘In August 1941 I came from Goniądz to Radziłów, in order to find lodgings for my husband’s parents, since I knew that after the execution of the Jews there would be empty accommodation.’ Godlewski, however, told her that ‘the accommodation is already occupied’. Klimaszewska recounted his words: ‘When the Jews had to be executed there was nobody, and now you are arriving for accommodation.’ Her mother-in-law reacted sharply to this: ‘Now they don’t want to give accommodation, but they sent my grandson [Józef Ekstowicz] to douse the barn in petrol.’ Dziekoński, who had an armband on his arm, reacted similarly to her request. In 1953 Helena Klimaszewska declared that in Radziłów she learnt that ‘Jewish accommodation was governed by Godlewski’. When she turned to him to ask him to offer some to her family, Godlewski refused. She said: Mr. Godlewski has four houses at his disposal and I none. He answered: It’s none of your stinking business, my brother is to come to me from Russia, where he was taken by the Soviets and he must own a house. When I continued to demand accommodation he answered: When the Jews had to be liquidated there was no one, and now you want accommodation.

In 1954 the prosecutor H. Winnicki of Białystok18 accused Feliks Godlewski of active participation ‘in the murder by burning of about five hundred people of Jewish nationality’. In the justification of the charges he presented his unambiguous view of the course of events in Radziłów. It was the Gestapo that had arrived and ‘declared to the assembled members of the police, that the reason for the deportation of their families to the Soviet Union and their imprisonment were the Jews. So they recommended that all the Jews should be gathered up and destroyed.’ And that’s what happened: the Polish policemen carried out the directive and ‘next, of their own initiative, after the departure of the Gestapo men for Jedwabne, locked them up in Strudkowski’s [sic; actually Sutkowski’s] stone barn, dousing the thatched roof with petrol and setting it ablaze’. They ‘shot from their rifles at the doors all those trying to escape’. The trial of Feliks Godlewski was held on 15 June 1954. Many witnesses test­ ified; the prosecutor called upon sixteen people. Several of them gave different testimonies from the ones they had given under interrogation. Henryk Dziekoński admitted this time that he had seen the defendant near the burning barn, but unarmed: ‘Only the Germans had arms, and we had none whatsoever. The Germans organized

56  •  Andrzej Żbikowski everything … Godlewski stood by the others, together. Whole crowds of people stood like spectators. How many Germans there were, I don’t remember. Several taxis (five or six) arrived.’ Another witness, Antoni Pachucki, testified that ‘in this crowd that was there, I saw Godlewski. There were those Poles who looked on and those who herded the Jews … The defendant did not have arms in hand, only a cudgel.’ Henryk Przyborowski, too, testified that ‘the defendant took part in the burning’. He also added something important, a comment on the behaviour of the policemen: ‘Even before they gathered up the Jews and tormented them etc. When the Germans arrived, they asked about the Jews etc. During the burning of the Jews there was no German.’ This statement was challenged by Pachucki, who commented somewhat differ­ ently on the issue of the German presence: ‘There were Germans at the time, they arrived in taxis (two or three taxis) – when they herded the Jews into the barn they left in the direction of Knyszyn.’ After a while Przyborowski added: ‘That day they were there to the moment of lighting the flame, and then they left … I saw Godlewski right up until the moment of lighting.’ Again the witness Pachucki joined the discussion: ‘The Germans helped in rounding them up in the market square and the Poles herded them themselves into the barn. The Poles did it voluntarily.’ He heard, however, from his observation point on the steps of the station, the Germans issuing threats and the commander of the Polish police translating their words as follows: ‘If you don’t destroy them, then we will come and burn you.’ Przyborowski then also spoke of the Poles being threatened: ‘When the Jews started to be rounded up, the Jews asked me to look after their houses and I stood there, when they set them on fire, I fled because the Germans said that we’ll burn you as well, old man.’ The judge pointed out to the witness that he was testifying differently from during the inquiry. The remaining witnesses testified in favour of the defendant. The court found Godlewski guilty of involvement and condemned him to three years’ imprisonment. The lenient sentence stemmed from the court’s acceptance that ‘the consequence of belonging to the militia was that the defendant, like others in his situation, in the first instance, had to carry out German directives consisting of providing help in conveying the Jews to the barn’. As in several of the penal cases already discussed, the progressive ‘thaw’ in the political climate of the repressiveness of the justice system also extended to cases of collaboration with the German occupiers. The Supreme Court somewhat increased Feliks Godlewski’s sentence, after considering the prosecutor’s review, to a total of up to four years in prison, adding a year owing to his blameworthy attitude toward several Polish residents of Radziłów who were suspected of having pro-Soviet sympathies.

The Case of Henryk Dziekoński Let us now examine the documents relating to the inquiry and several trials in the case of Henryk Dziekoński, mentioned frequently in the previous case.19 During

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  57 the inquiry, he was interrogated at the PUBP office in Grajewo. Testifying for the first time, he asserted that he had been arrested with his whole family by the Soviet authorities on 20 June 1941. He returned to Radziłów from prison a few days later, after the outbreak of the German–Soviet war. He did not find his family there and ‘as a lone man he joined his colleagues building organized authorities’. He served in the police force until 1941. From the very start the outpost possessed several Russian rifles. He admitted: ‘As a policeman I participated myself in rounding up the Jews and burning them.’ He also said: ‘Our attitude to the orders issued by the Gestapo was willing and favourable.’ It was him ‘that one of the Gestapo men appointed as the group leader, whose task was to liquidate the Jews; at the same time the Gestapo men issuing the directive for me to become leader stressed that we can slaughter the Jews with knives and chop them with axes’. One of his colleagues took from this ‘that there would be bloodshed on both sides; then one of the Gestapo men said to Godlewski, Aleksander (who is at present in prison): You have a barn, you can burn them all.’ The further part of the testimony contains descriptions of the subsequent activ­ ities of the members of the police force. The Jews were grouped in fours; Dziekoński stood at the head of the column and led them ‘from the market square toward the barn which was four to five hundred metres away’. ‘Over six hundred Jews’ were herded into the barn, which was doused in highly flammable liquid and set ablaze. So that the Jews did not escape, the policemen – ‘we were all armed with Russian issue rifles’ – formed a cordon around the barn. Later a mass looting of Jewish homes came to pass, in which Dziekoński did not take part, being of the view that ‘Jewish property should be burnt, like the Jews. However, others did not agree with this, so those who took part with me in burning the Jews also started to loot the Jewish houses.’ In the autumn of 1949 Dziekoński again found himself an object of interest to the enforcement authorities. On 4 October 1949 the prosecutors in Elk interrogated him as a witness in the cases of Ludwik Kosmaczewski and Feliks Godlewski. He repeated that he had seen how both the suspects, and Feliks Mordasiewicz, herded the Radziłów Jews into the barn. He presented the course of events on 7 July 1941 somewhat differently from before: ‘It is untrue that Klimaszewski [i.e. Ekstowicz – A.Ż.], who was a minor at the time, set fire to the barn under duress, since he did it of his own free will. The petrol was handed to Klimaszewski by Modzelewski of Radziłów.’ Whether or not it was petrol, Dziekoński was uncertain; whatever it was, the fire spread instantaneously over the straw roof. ‘After a while, some man with his clothes burning on his back fell out from under the burning thatch. Mieczysław Strzelecki, who is now dead, threw himself in convulsions or jumped up, I felt ill and walked off.’ According to Dziekoński, about two to three hundred people were burnt then. This time he testified: ‘The Jews were rounded up on foot in the market square by German gendarmes, who had arrived in several saloon cars.’ Among the Germans were some civilians. Several uniformed gendarmes of stout build turned to

58  •  Andrzej Żbikowski the people and, in broken Polish, delivered the following message: ‘You have knives and axes; ensure that by our next visit there’s none of them left, otherwise we’ll do the same to you. The gendarmes, together with the accompanying civilians, then departed.’ The policemen started to consider how to carry out the Germans’ order. Dziekoński quotes their words: ‘So as not to stain our hands with Jewish blood, burn them in the empty barn. I remember the words to do with the empty barn being uttered by Aleksander Godlewski.’ ‘Almost the entire population of the settlement participated’ in conveying the Jewish population to the barn. ‘There were men, women and children. The Jews did not try to escape, at least I didn’t notice. They went like sheep. Right by the barn one Jew started to run away. Feliks Mordasiewicz caught up with him, hit him over the head with the cudgel he was holding so that blood appeared, after which that Jew turned back in the direction of the barn.’ Later there was looting: ‘The entire population of the settlement looted the Jewish homes. I felt such disgust that I walked down to the river and spent the whole day there, until the evening.’ He saw, however, how ‘Klimaszewski or Ekstowicz led an old Jewish woman on a lead and sang her praises almost like a calf being led to the fair’. The change in opinion about Ekstowicz is interesting. Probably, however, it was fear that had looked Dziekoński in the eyes. On 30 June 1948 Józef Ekstowicz had testified to the prosecutors in Elk that Dziekoński belonged to the chief perpetrators of the crime and, together with Godlewski, Kosmaczewski and Mordasiewicz, had ordered him to douse the barn in petrol. Dziekoński’s trial was opened on 21 February 1950 and lasted, with adjournments, until 4 October 1951. Besides participating in the burning of the Radziłów Jews, he was also accused of delivering several Poles into the hands of the German gendarmerie. This time, however, he admitted to nothing other than serving in the police force. Eleven witnesses were called in total, the majority of whom remained rather evasive, providing little real detail,although Ekstowicz confirmed in full his version of events. Marianna Ramotowska’s testimonies were surprising: ‘In the period of occupation I was in hiding because I am of Jewish extraction. My husband is a Pole, who used to frequently meet the defendant, Dziekoński, who would alert my husband.’ Stanisław Ramotowski testified loosely: ‘On one occasion the defendant met me and said: take your wife from the village because she’s in danger and I did so. After some time, the Germans came to the village where my wife had been and searched for her. As far as the Jews are concerned, I know nothing in this case.’ Sixty years later, no longer fearing anything, Ramotowski publicly described the events in a completely different way.20 Helena Klimaszewska elaborated on her earlier testimony: ‘When I arrived in Radzilów, I wanted to take up residence in the village. One of the Germans did not let me live there. So Godlewski ordered me to call on a certain Dziekoński to sort out the matter. After a while, two individuals came and ordered me to be expelled from the village.’

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  59 By 4 October 1951 the court had reviewed the papers of previous penal cases concerning the burning of the Jews in Radziłów. This procedure brought nothing new, and Dziekoński was sentenced to six years in prison; it was concluded that, in defending himself by incriminating the co-perpetrators, he was trying to completely cover up his part in the crime. There was great belief placed in the testimony he gave to the prosecutor.

The Case of Henryk Statkiewicz The anti-hero of yet another penal case concerning the events in Radziłów was Henryk Statkiewicz, born in 1905. In the charges he was recorded as ‘semi-literate’.21 His crimes were known to the Security Service from as early as 1945. Statkiewicz, as a German confidante and murderer of a certain affluent Jew, was mentioned in the testimony of the witness Jan Przestrzelski, deposited on 23 August 1945. He was finally arrested and formally charged on 29 April 1950. The accusation was: ‘In July 1941 in Radziłów, acting on behalf of the authorities of the German state, he committed homicide against Lejb Wasersztejn, a Polish citizen of Jewish nationality, depriving him of life by the shot from a rifle.’ He also had other offences on his conscience, such as misappropriating someone’s house, in which he had opened a beer hall, and that he was a confidante of the Gestapo and had signed the so-called ‘Volksliste’. Upon arresting Lejb Wasersztejn, who was hiding in a field, he ordered Piotr Mordasiewicz, a country-man from Radziłów, to kill him with a scythe. When the latter refused, Statkiewicz shot Wasersztejn ‘before the eyes of the witness Piotr Mordasiewicz and children who were looking on at the spectacle’. In 1942 he began collaborating with the German police on a permanent basis, evidence of which came by way of a preserved data card from 1944. The notes on this card indicate that he had, without any shadow of doubt, informed on his neighbours. Numerous witnesses were interviewed during the inquiry. Several fragments are worth recounting because they supplement our knowledge about certain episodes contributing to the annihilation of the Radziłów Jews. All the witnesses consistently claimed that Statkiewicz had been guilty of Wasersztejn’s death. Józef Sapielski testified that he saw how he ‘with a rifle shot a Polish citizen of Jewish nationality … by the dairy’. He asserted that he could ‘indicate the spot where Wasersztejn lies [buried] together with many other murdered Jews’. He even heard that ‘Statkiewicz … bought Wasersztejn from somebody, so that he could later shoot him’. He named Wincenty Kozikowski as a witness. The latter, interviewed on 12 May 1950, initially denied any knowledge of this fact. However, when Sapielski confirmed his testimony the next day when confronting him, he changed his mind and asserted: ‘Yes, I confirm the testimony of citizen Sapielski in all its details, I was present when Statkiewicz shot the Jew Wasersztejn Lejb. I even dug a hole on Statkiewicz’s orders.’ In a subsequent

60  •  Andrzej Żbikowski testimony, Kozikowski described the situation more precisely. He admitted that he was coming ‘from Karwowo to Radziłów’, when a large number of Polish citizens of Jewish nationality were being burnt in the barn. When I arrived at the barn, I saw a crowd there, in the middle of this crowd stood Statkiewicz Henryk … and he held a ‘pyta’ in hand. Statkiewicz saw me, gave me a shovel and ordered me to dig a grave … When I saw the shot Jew, I ran off out of fright, that is, to Karwowo, since Statkiewicz was shouting for more Jews to be rounded up … Who later rounded up Jews and who murdered them, that I don’t know.

From the quoted testimony it may be deduced that the murder occurred on 8 July, in the course of burying the bodies of the Jews burnt the day before. Władysław Hermanowski, who was interviewed as a witness, divulged that Statkiewicz had collaborated with the Gestapo. Apparently, he had told him himself that ‘about forty people of Jewish nationality had perished by his own hand’. He had also heard that after the pogrom Statkiewicz had many things belonging to the Jews. Hermanowski told the investigator: ‘And the wardrobe which he wanted to sell me was also Jewish.’ It is difficult to assess how much truth there was in the testimony of Henryk Dziekoński.22 He claimed: Feliks Godlewski and Ludwik Kosmaczewski told him that Statkiewicz had himself told them, or maybe somebody else, that he had murdered about twenty-five people of Jewish nationality in Radziłów, immediately after the arrival of the Germans. During the occupation, indeed right up until April 1947, I belonged to the AK. I know that a death sentence for close relations with the Germans had been issued on Statkiewicz, Henryk by the AK. The sentence was not carried out during the occupation out of concern for the local population.

During the trial,23 Statkiewicz only admitted having worked as a coachman for the German commissar to whom he supplied milk. He denied any connection with the murder of Wasersztejn; he claimed that he had merely heard about it ‘from people’. The court gave credence to the witnesses for the defence and the defendant was found not guilty. In the justification we read: ‘In July 1941 the defendant Statkiewicz, Henryk took part in burying the murdered Polish citizens of Jewish nationality. Most of the residents of Radziłów helped bury the dead.’ The trial did not establish that the defendant Statkiewicz killed Lejb Wasersztejn, though he did fire his rifle during the burial of the unnamed victims. It was assumed that Wasersztejn died in the ghetto in Stryj. Such ‘careful’ deductive methods seem typical of cases involving the participation of Poles in the murders of the Jewish population.

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  61

The Recollections of the Finkelsztejn Family Among the Radziłów Jews who survived the German occupation were Berek Wasersztejn (his daughter also survived the pogrom but was killed before the end of the war), Chemia Suraski and the miller Izrael Finkelsztejn’s family of six. The most valuable record concerning the experience of this reasonably affluent Jewish family is the memoir of Chaja Finkelsztejn, wife of Izrael and mother of Menachem, written up in the years 1946–7, directly after reaching Palestine. Extensive extracts (the whole manuscript is over 300 pages long) have been published (with the other testimonies mentioned) in the second volume of Wokół Jedwabnego by Sylwia Szymańska and Andrzej Żbikowski. Such a considerable number of recollections of people who were close to each other, and who remained together, provides valuable material for considering the way in which these individuals, who varied considerably in age, remembered the wartime trauma.24

The Account of Menachem Finkelsztejn In the discussion about the book Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross numerous critical remarks were made concerning the objectivity of Menachem Finkelsztejn, who, alongside Szmul Wasersztejn, was the chief witness against the Poles. It should be stressed, however, that all of Menachem Finkelsztejn’s observations – apart from the description of the circumstances of the murder of Dora Dorogoj – can be confirmed by the accounts of the remaining members of his family. I cannot be certain precisely why it was he who deposited testimonies with the Jewish Commission in Białystok several times over. I presume the reason was his maturity and the fact that he was one of the better educated Jewish survivors. From his mother’s memoirs we learn that, prior to the summer of 1941, her son, born in 1923, had gone to secondary school in Białystok. We have three accounts by Menachem Finkelsztejn, as well as his testimony at the inquiry into the case of Leon Kosmaczewski.25 In the first account he writes of mass arrests and deportations on the part of the NKVD in mid-June 1941. After the outbreak of the German–Soviet war some of those arrested by the Soviets managed to escape from prison (chiefly from the one in Łomża). Finkelsztejn described what happened in this way: ‘The arrested bandits got out of jail, and the remainder, who were in hiding, came out (into the open) and started to collaborate officially with the Germans in acts of sabotage.’ Finkelsztein wrote of a probable initiative by the collaborating bandits: ‘That same day a triumphal arch was erected in Radziłów along the Łomża road, to greet the German army.’ A portrait of Hitler was put up with the message: ‘Long live the German army which has liberated us from cursed Judeo-communism!’ Of course, one wonders where the men liberated from Soviet prisons got hold of a portrait

62  •  Andrzej Żbikowski of Hitler – possibly, quite simply, from the invading Germans. Nonetheless, the celebratory welcome was for Finkelsztejn the harbinger of a wider phenomenon. He noted: ‘Together with the arrival of the first German tanks many civilian Poles began to help them.’ Finkelsztejn consistently stressed the close links between some of the Radziłów residents and the Germans. ‘At their command, all the trusted people ready to settle scores with the Jews were summoned. These people rounded up 1,700 Jews, men and women, children and the old, in the Radziłów market square. The market square was surrounded by bandits so that no one could escape.’ According to Menachem Finkelsztejn, the first pogrom came as early as 24 June.26 Its initiators were the Germans, who ‘issued the order that all Jewish men are to gather by the synagogue … [People] began to flee from town, but the Poles watched every road and forcibly turned back all fugitives.’ Only a few managed to escape, among others Menachem Finkelsztejn and his father. The descriptions of violence do not, however, give us certainty that Finkelsztejn was witness to them. The subsequent opinions expressed in the account, startling and uncorroborated by reference to other accounts and testimonies, seem to indicate that in 1945 Finkelsztejn was trying somehow to comprehend the causes of the wave of aggression and was working through his thoughts by noting them down in a consistent and comprehensible manner. He noted: Higher Polish spheres began to influence the crowd that the time had come to deal once and for all with those who crucified Jesus Christ, who use Christian blood for matzos and who are the cause of all that is evil in the world, namely the Jews. Enough of this pussyfooting about. It’s time to cleanse Poland of the oppressors, the plague that pollutes the air. The seeds of hatred toward the Jews fall on well-cultivated soil, well-prepared by the clergy, over many years. The wild and bloodthirsty crowd took this up as a holy invocation, a mission – entrusted to them by history – to kill the Jews. The desire for Jewish profits and riches further increased the robbers’ appetites. The Poles were the rulers since there was not even one German around.

Later Finkelsztejn gives an extensive report on the events of 6 and 7 July 1941. The first day there was fear, because of the arrivals from nearby Wąsocz, where a day earlier ‘they murdered … in a terrible way, with axes and knives, all the Jews in their town, not sparing even small children’. The second day was, for most Radziłów Jews and numerous fugitives in the area, their last day. Chana Finkelsztejn, who was a ten-year-old girl in 1941, remembered much less about the tragic events of July than her brother.27 The picture that had become lodged in her memory forever was that: ‘We were perhaps a hundred metres from the barn when we heard a shot and saw smoke. The barn with the Jews inside had been set on fire. The boys left us. We then escaped into the field.’

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  63

The Recollections of Chaja Finkelsztejn Chaja Finkelsztejn described in her memoirs not only her experiences of the occupation period but also earlier events, concentrating her attention on the prewar activities of the none-too-numerous, but fairly active, Zionist community in Radziłów, the reality of the Soviet occupation and the hell of hiding in the villages.28 She recounted the fate of her family during the German occupation in exceptional detail, making it clear which events she had witnessed personally and which ones she had merely heard about. Thanks to her, we know that the Germans had appeared in Radziłów three times before 7 July 1941, each time sowing the seeds of dread and fear. The levels of aggression among the local Poles grew too, clearly emboldened by the activities of the Germans. The villagers plundered Soviet shops and stores, some took to weeding out Soviet marauders, while others, mainly women, built a triumphal arch. Undoubtedly, the Germans refused to allow a greater wave of robberies; they defended, among other things, the mill that belonged to the Finkelsztejns before the war and the store of flour within it, and also the warehouse set up by the Soviets in the synagogue. The first pogrom, a fairly limited one, came on 25 June. Its main protagonists were ‘ordinary’ German soldiers who – as one of their commanders said – wanted to have a bit of fun. As we already know, Jewish men were forced out of their homes and to burn their holy books. The effect of the provocative behaviour of the German soldiers was not long in manifesting itself: The Poles, seeing what the Germans did, became even more insolent … Right away that morning a delegation of Poles came up to the Germans and asked whether there was any fear of punishment for killing a Jew. The Germans responded that the Jews were not protected by any law and that one could do what one liked with them.

The pogrom atmosphere thickened. Chaja Finkelsztejn went to the countryside to look for her husband and son, who were in hiding. The atmosphere of denunciation was becoming unbearable: ‘Even extremely small Christian children would point and shout: Jew! Jew! When a German did not hear, or rather chose not to hear, they would come up and tug at a Jew’s clothes: There, Jew. They set dogs on Jews, shouting: Go on, get the Jew!’ After two days the German detachment departed, but a fresh one arrived the next day. They only stopped to feed their horses, but for Chaja Finkelsztejn their stay ended with a severe beating, the loss of the remnants of food she had, and the devastation of her home. The third stay of German forces in Radziłów was connected with taking cows belonging to Jews. Emboldened by this act of violence, ‘the peasants started going from cowshed to cowshed; they were looking to see who had not taken their cow

64  •  Andrzej Żbikowski [out to pasture], taking it and allocating it to whoever they wanted’. The Finkelsztejn cow was one of those taken. For nearly two weeks thereafter, relative calm prevailed in the town. The Jews attempted mediation. Chaja Finkelsztejn made a note of all her visits to the influential townsmen; she was sent from one to another and finally even the parish priest refused help, as if predetermining the fate of the Jews. Then: ‘[On 6 July] our former maid came and told us that many cartloads of peasants had arrived from nearby Wąsocz, to help the Radzilovians kill the Jews in town. She intended to take things from our house before the others came.’ It was already clear what would happen. One Jewish woman told Chaja Finkelsztejn ‘that the murderers told her that the previous day they had slaughtered her whole family in Wąsocz like lambs, enumerating the names of her brothers and sisters at the same time. Now they had come to finish her off and then they would murder all the Radziłów Jews. Go away!! Go away!!, she shouted in an inhuman voice.’ The locals chased the Wąsocz arrivals out of Radziłów. The next day (7 July) the Germans arrived again. Chaja Finkelsztejn reported that the Jews were herded into the market square. ‘Although the Gestapo men gave orders to round up people over fourteen years of age, the Polish bandits rounded up everyone except the really small children.’ Then the locals formed up in rows either side. ‘Nearly all the town’s Christian residents gathered round the huge square.’ At a certain moment ‘the Gestapo stopped issuing orders. They took wine and snacks out of their taxis. When they had finished eating and drinking, they moved in the direction of the victims, who filled the square, with rubber truncheons, like hooligans … The tormenting began.’ A detailed description of the treatment of the Jews ends with the scene of the whole Finkelsztejn family being freed and allowed to return home, thanks to Christians whose name Chaja Finkelsztejn did not want to divulge. Finkelsztejn describes a further episode on the day of 7 July 1941 in Radziłów: ‘Several boys, whose leader was the son of our laundress, who had done our wash­ ing for 22 years, tore their way into our house.’ They led them toward the market place. On the way they heard shots, and in the distance they saw white smoke. The laundress’s son let them return home. When they got back, ‘the Polish neighbours were already carrying packages out of it. It was quiet in the street, there was no crying of children ambling about nor the shouts of Jewish neighbours.’ The Finkelsztejns left town. Chaja Finkelsztejn found out about the last moments of her more distant relatives and acquaintances from residents of the village of Konopki-Błonie, where the whole family hid. The town was gripped by frenzied looting: The Gestapo had given the Poles a free hand for three days. In the course of those three days they searched and turned over every nook and cranny in our town where, in their opinion, Jews could have been hiding. Whoever they found, they killed. All the children and babies were thrown into the burning barn … There were cases where

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  65 Christian neighbours hid Jews but later handed them over to the murderers, or killed them themselves.

The whole town took part in the looting, without any reservations. Chaja Finkelsztejn noted: We saw how they carried the booty from the town’s Jewish houses, and we recognized our things. But, as God was our witness, we did not breathe a word. The peasant woman told me that the people of Radziłów had simply gone mad. They have so much because of the Jews and would not let the villagers take anything. They chased us away and would not let us in because there were no villagers when the Jews were being killed, only now they turn up to take!

According to Chaja Finkelsztejn, about thirty Jews belonging to two families surv­ ived the pogrom and were deported by the Soviets to Russia.

Conclusion The answer to the question whether German units behaved in the same way in the Podlasie and Mazovia regions as in the whole of the former Soviet-occupied zone may only become clearer after broader comparative research. As many Polish historians have stressed in the Jedwabne debate, the Germans acted in accordance with their detailed instructions. I can merely confirm the clear existence of a set model of behaviour by the German soldiers toward the Jewish population. In this behaviour what was striking was arrogance and the wish to humiliate the victims and to take out aggression on the victims. All the accounts describe the recurring theme of physical abuse – beatings, shaving off of beards, forcing the Jews to do humiliating physical exercises. The places where such abuse was inflicted were frequently the synagogues or prayer houses. The soldiers would take the holy books and destroy them, or force the Jews, dressed in their religious vestments, to do so themselves. Sometimes they also burnt down the synagogues. Regarding the discussion provoked by Gross’s Neighbors, it is sufficient to recall the opinion of Tomasz Strzembosz.29 Strzembosz, historian of the Polish underground movement in north-east Poland under the Soviet occupation 1939–41, suggested that the pogrom of Jedwabne should be understood as an act of revenge for the alleged participation of Jews in Stalinist repression in 1939–41, when NKVD terror touched many Polish citizens of various nationalities. He wrote of the ‘ignored collaboration’ of the Jews with the Soviets. In this regard, it is important to consider the sources that shed light on the attitude of some of the Jews during the Soviet occupation, or, generally, the link between the pogroms and the wish on the part of local communities to exact revenge on those who had been allegedly guilty of collaborating with the former Soviet authorities.

66  •  Andrzej Żbikowski Some German documents on the Białystok and Łomża regions leave us with the image of the German Wehrmacht units being greeted by the Polish population. Both in the accounts presented above (for example those concerning Radziłów) and in German documents (of a general character) there are also some indications of military cooperation between the advancing German units and small groups of Polish partisans – or, more precisely, saboteurs and guides. This exceptionally interesting issue still needs further investigation. Other sources, such as the war log book of the 221 st Cover Division, which contains general descriptions of German attitudes, inform us that the residents of the village of Kleczkowo (near Łomża) greeted the Germans with ‘flowers, salt and bread as liberators from Soviet oppression’. This enthusiasm found expression in various grass-root initiatives, of which many bore the characteristics of collaboration. There were few Germans here, and those Poles who had not compromised themselves by collaborating with the Soviet occupants sought posts in the administration and auxiliary police. These German impressions are corroborated in reports produced by the Polish underground structures. At the same time, information on the question of Polish attitudes towards Germans is frequently combined with that about the extremely negative attitude of Poles towards Jews. It seems that this information elicited the serious concern of the High Command of the Union for Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej [ZWZ], the underground army founded in Poland in November 1939). ZWZ commander General Stefan Rowecki (later commander of the Home Army) wrote in a telegram of 4 July 1941 to the Polish government in London that many Poles were preparing themselves for ‘administrative and economic cooperation with the Germans in these areas’. In his assessment, this was due to ‘a knee-jerk reaction of gratitude to their liberators from the Bolshevist oppression in which the Jews had played a big part’.30 In German plans, the confrontation with the USSR was intended as a war of extermination (Vernichtungskrieg). Accordingly, a considerable number of the tasks connected with ‘pacification’ by the German army had to be carried out by special operational groups (Einsatzgruppen) of the Security Police. Some of these tasks concerned the persecution of the Jewish population. As in the Generalgouvernement, Jews were to be registered, forced to wear easily identifiable badges and isolated from the Christian population. The Jewish intelligentsia, above all ‘Jews in party and state posts’, were to be executed immediately. In line with orders issued by Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) chief, to the operational group commanders in late June/early July 1941,31 the tasks included ‘cleansing actions’ against Bolsheviks and Jews, in addition to ‘self-cleansing actions’, in other words pogroms instigated by local anti-communist forces. ‘Cleansing actions’, that is the execution of groups regarded as potentially hostile, were not to involve the Polish population, at least initially. The Poles were seen ‘as an initiating element (though in a limited way, in accordance with local conditions) of … particular significance for pogroms, and also as informants’.32 In my opinion, Heydrich and his henchmen

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  67 anticipated a wave of score-settling by the local population against the Jews as well as against any Poles who had sympathized with the Soviet regime. However, it seems the scope and level of violence of the pogroms took them by surprise. Supplementary instructions were issued by the operational group commanders after the first pogroms. To reiterate this point, the repressions, or the patterns of general behaviour by the Germans towards the Jews, were very varied at the end of June and in the first half of July 1941. One should distinguish between the activities of members of the special German police units, which arrived in order to ‘pacify’ successive areas, and the operations of gendarmes who remained in some towns for an extended period and of the Wehrmacht units that merely passed through settlements. The police units had a planned and systematic approach to their activities. Their aim was to detect and execute sympathizers of the preceding authorities, whose effectiveness was dependent on the assistance of the local Polish population. By definition, communist sympathizers were sought primarily in the Jewish com­mun­ity. Sometimes arrests made according to proscriptive lists compiled by locals were sufficient. At other times, great ‘spectacles of fear’ were organized, which in two instances, in Radziłow and Jedwabne on 7 and 10 July 1941 respectively, culmin­ ated in the mass murder of the local Jewish populations. In other places, too, special German police commandos sought out ‘communists’, chiefly Jewish ones: in Stawiski (about 5–7 July), Szczuczyn (13 July), Grajewo (30 June and 3 July), Rajgród (early July), Goniądz (3–4 July), Suchowola (6 July), Jasionówka (6 July), Zaręby Kościelne (5 July), Choroszcze (20–21 July) and Bielsk Podlaski (5–7 July); the anti-Jewish events there, however, were limited in scope. Mayors, village chairmen (soltyses) and members of temporary urban and municipal authorities were elected quite arbitrarily in that period; where there were no people claiming German nationality, the Germans sought out pre-war Polish officials or accepted individuals put forward by the local communities in the short interregnum, after the retreat of the Soviets.33 Sometimes representatives were nominated by the local elite, most frequently upon consultation with the parish priest. The attitude of the Polish clergy in these dramatic days was – according to Jewish sources – varied. In Radziłow and Jedwabne, they took a passive stance with regard to the Jewish tragedy. We know next to nothing about the stance of other representatives of the Polish elites, other than those who joined the temporary local authorities. Moreover, we know nothing about the Citizens’ Watches being subject to any special vetting procedures in June to July 1941. However, the German civil auth­ orities probably assessed the local administration boards and then enlisted members of the Polish auxiliary police in the second half of August and early September 1941, when they were taking over control of the Białystok District from the military administration. From the court testimonies it emerges that many people who had

68  •  Andrzej Żbikowski previously been active in the local administration and Citizens’ Watch then resigned from further cooperation. After the war they all testified consistently that they had resigned from service in the auxiliary police voluntarily; it seems that this was possible and did not have any particularly negative consequences for them subsequently. The oldest motive for the anti-Jewish pogroms recurring in history has been covetousness. It seems that this was also the case this time. However, pogroms erupted when specific ingredients were mixed together. The basic factor was the absence of a strong administrative authority and of a lucid system of principles regulating penal responsibility that was strictly observed by the authorities. The desire to plunder Jewish homes is evident in practically every Jewish account as being a cause of the pogroms. This was the most easily comprehensible interpretation of the sudden explosion of aggression among long-standing neighbours. The second strand linking the accounts of survivors is the memory of the extremely violent and brutal course of events. Women were commonly raped and killed. Both men and women were killed with axes, knives and pitchforks. There was no reflex of compassion, at most a head turned away in shame. It is no surprise that the accounts contain words such as ‘savages’, ‘hoodlums’ and ‘bandits’. The situations in which the testimonies were deposited did not of course allow for straight answers; however, on the whole it seems fair to conclude that those testifying remembered their Jewish neighbours above all as a group of defenceless people and not as a community whose existence threatened their own group. In modern times – even in periods of chaos and anarchy – anti-Jewish pogroms have erupted mainly in territories whose residents had been long exposed to the influences of nationalist groupings. The ideologies proclaimed by those parties contained definitions of the most dangerous enemy to the community, whose characteristics were described by way of contrasting them with their own positive characteristics. It seems that, at least from the 1930s, a considerable proportion of the inhabitants of the town of Łomża and of the Podlasie region saw Jews to be their greatest enemies. In the summer of 1941 mass anti-Jewish events exploded in the ethnically diverse belt of territories occupied by Soviet Russia in the period 1939–41. This was always possible wherever hatred towards the Jews had a long tradition and where, because of active resistance to the Soviet occupation, the local population had sustained vast losses. Dariusz Stola, in one of the most important pronouncements published in the course of the debate on Gross’s book in Poland, observed that the mass murder in Jedwabne – and I think the same is true of Radziłów – was possible mainly because of the well-organized group of perpetrators, led by a self-proclaimed elite.34 Organization meant distributing appropriate roles to the participants in a complex, phased enterprise, consisting of concentrating the victims in one place; overpowering them; depriving them of all hope of help; making their escape impossible; first executing those people capable of offering resistance; and, finally, herding up the

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  69 remaining Jews from the town into the barn and burning them alive. As I see it, those who wanted to murder did the murdering, ensuring that the Jews did not escape; and those who refused to kill participated in the spectacle of the event. The passive witnesses who formed a cordon, which was terrifying for the victims if only because of the sheer number of participants, were the most numerous. Some of the men in this latter group most certainly acted under the duress of the activists and the dozen or so Germans present in town. However, without that specific division of labour the murder of so many hundreds of people would not have been possible. We know that the few Germans present in Jedwabne and in Radziłów did not shoot or set houses on fire; nor did they terrorize the residents in any other way. There is a close correlation between the division of labour and the social standing of the perpetrators of the Radziłów mass murder. In this case, even more clearly than in Jedwabne, revenge for alleged collaboration with the Soviets was the pretext which helped the murderers justify their actions and in so doing break down resistance to this act. If we are to believe the testimonies of Henryk Dziekoński, the SS men arriving in town prompted the members of the Citizens’ Watch to adopt the position that it was the Jews’ fault that such a large group of Poles had been deported by the Soviets to Siberia. Now they could take revenge. They understood this to mean that they could murder all the Jews.

Notes 1. Polish edition: Jan T. Gross, Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2000). This chapter is based on my contribution ‘Pogromy i mordy ludności żydowskiej w Łomżynskiem i na Białostocczyźnie latem 1941 roku w świetle relacji ocalałych Żydów i dokumentów sądowych’, in P. Machcewicz and K. Persak (eds), Wokół Jedwabnego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2002), vol. 1 ‘Studia’, pp. 159–272. In the second volume of that book I published, with Sylwia Szymańska, a collection of Jewish testimonies entitled ‘Relacje ocalałych Żydów o losach ludności żydowskiej w Łomżyskiem i na Białostocczyźnie po 22 czerwca 1941 roku’. 2. See M. Gnatowski, W radzieckich okowach: Studium o agresji 17 września 1939 r. i radzieckiej polityce w regionie łomżyńskim w latach 1939–1941 (Łomża, 1997); Niepokorna Białostocczyzna: Opór społeczny i polskie podziemie niepodległościowe w regionie białostockim w latach 1939–1941 w radzieckich źródłach (Białystok, 2001); ‘Radziecka polityka okupacyjna na Białostocczyźnie w latach 1939–1941’, in M. Giżejewska and T. Strzembosz (eds), Społeczeństwo białoruskie, litewskie i polskie na ziemiach północno-wschodnich II

70  •  Andrzej Żbikowski

  3.

  4.   5.

  6.   7.

  8.   9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1939–1941 (Warsaw, 1995), pp. 103–19; A. Głowacki, Sowieci wobec Polaków na ziemiach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej 1939–1941 (Łódź, 1998); K. Jasiewicz, Zagłada polskich Kresów: Ziemiaństwo polskie na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej pod okupacją sowiecką 1939–1941 (Warsaw, 1997); T. Strzembosz (ed.), Okupacja sowiecka (1939–1941) w świetle dokumentów (Warsaw, 1996). More in A. Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego: Żydzi na Kresach PółnocnoWschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej – wrzesień 1939–lipiec 1941 (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2006). Only the case papers of Józef Lendo have not been found. A. Żbikowski, ‘Lokalne pogromy Żydów w czerwcu/lipcu 1941 r. na wschodnich rubieżach II Rzeczypospolitej’, Biuletyn ZIH [Jewish Historical Institute Bulletin] 2(3) (1992): xxx. Archiwum Państwowe w Białymstoku (APB), Wojskowy Sąd Rejonowy (WSR) in Białystok, Sr 386/47. The person referred to is Wasilij Szewielew, an operation staff member of the NKGB Regional Department. See Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. X, document no. 3, fn. 1; the account of Menachem Finkelsztejn in Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. V, document no. 18. The murder of Dora Dorogoj is discussed further below. The reference is most probably to the auxiliary police known as Hilfspolizei. According to the witnesses Wasersztejn and Finkelsztejn, the surname was Borozowska or Berozowska. The issue of rape also appears in the testimony of the Pole Henryk Przyborowski, which is with the case papers of Feliks Godlewski: ‘at approximately the same time, Kosmaczewski Leon raped a Jewish woman … resident of Radziłów, from whom he took the gold she possessed, and then he murdered her’ (further details below). Leon Kosmaczewski’s case papers are deposited in the State Archive in Suwałki, Department in Ełk (APE), Sąd Okręgowy w Ełku (SOE), V K 790/47, pp. 1–190. APE, SOE, V K 154/48, 1944–1950, pp. 1–290. The killing of Icchak and Mordechaj Dorogoj (in reality Akiwa and Mojżesz), two Jews from Radziłów, on 28 Jan. 1945, as ‘Soviet spies’, was reported by Lt. Franciszek Warzyński, pseudonym ‘Wawer’, commander of the Home Army (AK) District Grajewo, to Lt.-Col. Władysław Liniarski, pseud. ‘Mścisław’, commander of the Home Army Region Białystok. Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (AIPN), Sąd Wojewódzki w Białymstoku (SWB), 183, 1947–1960, pp. 1–310. APE, SOE, V K 139/48, pp. 1–37. AIPN, SWB, 142, 1945–1955, pp. 1–315. Deposited with the Wojewódzki Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego (WUBP) in Białystok on 20 Sept. 1947.

Pogroms in the Łomża and Białystock  •  71 18. 22 April 1954. 19. AIPN, Sąd Apelacyjny w Białymstoku (SAB), 86, 1947–1953, pp. 1–183; see also Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. X, document no. 37. 20. A. Bikont, ‘Mieli wódkę, broń i nienawiść’, Gazeta Wyborcza (a daily news­ paper), 15 June 2001. 21. AIPN, SAB, 179, 1945–1952, pp. 1–228. 22. He testified on 17 March 1950 while in prison in Ełk. 23. 22 March 1951; on 5 July 1951 after an adjournment. 24. The Radziłów Parish Book of 21 July 1941 gives the ages of Chaja and Izrael’s children, which testifies that that day they had been baptized: Bolesław (Izrael) Finkelsztejn, born 1888, his wife Anna (Chaja), maiden name Wasersztejn, born 1896, and children Józef (Menachem), born 1922, Marianna (Szejna), in Hebrew – Jaffa, born 1927, Jan (Szolem), born 1929, Jadwiga (Chana), born 1931. 25. The accounts of Menachem Finkelsztejn, kept at the Jewish Historical Institute Archive in Warsaw, were written before 27 June 1945, 27 Sept. 1945 and 14 June 1946 (see Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. V, document nos. 18, 19 and 21); during the inquiry into the case of Leon Kosmaczewski, Finkelsztejn testified on 20 November 1945 (Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. X, document no. 3). 26. His mother, Chaja Finkelsztejn, wrote that it was 25 June 1941 (Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. V, document no. 22). 27. Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. V, document no. 20. 28. Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. V, document no. 22. 29. T. Strzembosz, ‘Inny obraz sąsiadów’, Rzeczpospolita, 31 March 2001; ‘Zstąpienie szatana czy przyjazd Gestapo’, Rzeczpospolita, 12 May 2001. 30. Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. III, document no. 3. 31. Peter Klein (ed.), Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin: Metropol, 1997), pp. 318–28. 32. Ibid., pp. 323–8; Reinhard Heydrich’s order no. 2 of 1 July 1941. 33. The status report for the period 15 Aug. to 15 Nov. 1941, produced by the Polish government’s Home Delegate, contains the following reference to the Białystok region (Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, sec. III, document no. 18): ‘The situation changed the moment civil administration was introduced. At present nearly all administrative posts, with the exception of supervisory ones which have been assumed by Germans, have been filled by Polish hands since the occupier has taken it upon itself to return to work those people who were previously in those offices in 1939. In any event, the lack of Belorussian professionals has forced the occupier to lean on the Polish element.’ 34. Dariusz Stola, ‘Pomnik ze słów’, Rzeczpospolita, 1–2 June 2001.

–3– Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces Case Studies of Jurbarkas and Utena

Christoph Dieckmann

Questions and Sources When the Germans occupied Lithuania in June 1941, about half of the Lithuanian Jews lived in provinces outside the four big cities of Vilnius, Kaunas, Šiauliai and Panevėžys. According to the Lithuanian statistical office, more than 104,000 Jews lived in the four cities and more than 104,000 Jews in the Lithuanian provinces.1 Of the estimated 200,000–206,000 Jews murdered in Lithuania, about 100,000 had been living in the Lithuanian provinces.2 The most disturbing questions encountered whilst detailing the Holocaust in the Lithuanian provinces are clearly related to the fundamental issue that in those shtetls one half of the population was persecuted, robbed and eventually murdered by a significant proportion of the other half. A century-long common history, which had not seen any major internal violence, was turned upside down within an extremely short period of time. Obviously German central policy decisions played a major role in initiating and implementing the almost complete annihilation of Lithuanian Jews in the provinces in the summer and autumn of 1941. But how can we explain the involvement of Lithuanian neighbours, local administrators and even teachers and pupils of schools and church members? In order to understand the history of the provincial towns of Jurbarkas and Utena, a combination of German, Lithuanian, Yiddish, Hebrew and Soviet sources need close evaluation. The two case studies will illustrate that it is unfortunately extremely difficult to answer most of the mentioned questions on the basis of the available source material. If one does not want to replace arguments based on adequate evidence with speculations and assumptions, the possible insights to be derived from the sources seem simply too limited. But the sources do allow us to reconstruct the various processes of persecution and mass murder, to identify the agencies, groups and some of the individuals involved and to gain a better understanding of the relevant issues. Our expectations should not be too high when researching mass crimes on a local level. But the more we know about the how of the processes, the more we might approach an answer to the why of the mass murder. One of the most important debates in the historiography on the Holocaust in Lithuania is centred on the question of whether Lithuanians launched pogroms

73

74  •  Christoph Dieckmann against the Jews even before the arrival of the Germans, and how and when the transition to the annihilation of the Jews occurred. This question has been extensively discussed for Kaunas.3 In this case study of two provincial towns I would like to continue researching this problem. Jurbarkas fell into the hands of the Germans within hours of the invasion. This was not the case in Utena – the Germans captured the district and town only on the fifth day. Was the behaviour of those local Lithuanians who were not, at least at the outset, directed by German anti-Semitic institutions any different? Apart from the first few days of German rule, this study is driven by the search for comparative aspects. What similarities, differences and variants can be identified in the two regions, which principally belonged to the same context?

The Murder of the Jews of Jurbarkas The small town of Jurbarkas is located in south-western Lithuania on the banks of the Neman River (Nemunas) near the Lithuanian–German border, in Raseiniai county of the Šiauliai region (Apskritis). Jews had lived here since the sixteenth century and, by the end of 1940, they numbered more than 1,300 out of a total population of 4,400 inhabitants, almost a third of the town’s citizens.4 The Jews of Jurbarkas were a vital community; in 1790 they erected a striking wooden synagogue.5 They fostered strong religious and secular traditions, which encompassed Jewish schools, sports associations, scouting organizations, political parties, as well as success­ ful trade and manufacturing businesses. After the First World War, following the creation of the independent state of Lithuania, no serious problems troubled the town’s various ethnic groups. 6 However, at the end of the 1920s more serious difficulties began to emerge. The Smetona regime aimed at Lithuanianizing the economy on nationalist grounds. In 1931 some sixty-nine of the seventy-five shops in Jurbarkas were Jewish; furthermore, there were many Jewish tradesmen, and all of the light industrial enterprises, except for one, were owned by Jews. As a result of the nationalist economic policy, the larger Jewish firms were forced to close, their place being taken by cooperatives supported by the state.7 The smaller shops owned by Jews also went into decline, a situation which encouraged the rise of the already broad and active Zionist movement.8 One of the town parks was called Tel Aviv, and the Jewish school was named after Theodor Herzl. The political orientation of the Jews in Jurbarkas may be seen from the distribution of the votes during the Seimas (parliament) elections of the 1920s: 62 per cent of all eligible Jewish voters cast ballots for the Zionist parties, and 26 per cent and 12 per cent for democratic and religious parties respectively. Zionism was clearly dominant, and Jews were active on the local council.9 During the 1930s there were periodic outbreaks of violence against the Jewish middle class. For example, a Jewish petrol station was torched, and a few young Lithuanian nationalists attacked Jews in the street.

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  75 When it became clear in the summer of 1940 that the Soviet Union would annex Lithuania, ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and Lithuanians set fire to the Jewishowned mill, and the flames spread to Jewish houses.10 But these attacks were still exceptions to the rule. The first politically motivated, systematic and serious attacks experienced by the Jewish community occurred in the autumn of 1940, after the Soviet Union’s annexation of Lithuania. All the larger enterprises and banks were expropriated and cultural and political organizations were banned. A few Jews were assigned to the new state and party offices. In mid-June 1941 the Soviets deported no less than sixty persons from Jurbarkas, including several Jewish families (twentynine people).11 In the early morning hours of 22 June 1941 the town was quickly captured by the Wehrmacht, leaving scarcely any time for escape. The local German commandant, Captain Baar, ordered that everyone should obey the orders of the Lithuanian mayor, who was placed under his command. Sabotage and plunder would be subject to the death penalty.12 The town mayor was the Lithuanian Jurgis Gepneris. In the autumn of 1942 he Germanized his surname into Höpfner. During the Soviet period he had been in charge of public eateries (öffentliche Küchen) and had supported the local communists, facts the Germans were unaware of.13 After the German invasion of Lithuania, important levers of power in Jurbarkas were taken over by Lithuanian anti-Soviet rebels, the so-called partisans. They represented various strata of local society, including teachers, school and university students, the owner of a kiosk, and a well-known nationalist. Their leader was the secondary school teacher Ausiukaitis. Similarly, the Lithuanian police, which was quickly reconstituted, was commanded by a 32-year-old secondary school teacher, Mykolas Levickas. At the same time, Levickas was the Germans’ translator, informer and agent, along with the 26-year-old policeman Mykolas Urbonas and a few others.14 It was on 26 June 1941 that the Germans began controlling the distribution of arms. In mid-July the local partisans became a paramilitary organization subordinated to the police.15 On 23 June SS Captain (SS-Hauptscharführer) and Secretary for Criminal Affairs Gerhard Carsten, the chief of the nearest German border police station in Smalininkai (Schmalleningken), arrived in Jurbarkas and had a meeting with Levickas and ten other Lithuanians at the home of Levickas’s friend, a priest. A local committee was established.16 Carsten ordered the group to compile a list of local communists and Jews, and then chose the Jewish cemetery as the site for the planned massacres.17 For his part, Carsten was subordinated to the Tilsit state police unit (Staats­ polizeistelle). This latter office also controlled the German security police and SS Security Service (SD) unit, which, along with the Klaipėda city police (Schutzpolizei), executed the first mass killings of Jews on former Soviet territory on 24 June 1941. With the approval of Franz Walther Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, and with some local assistance, these men shot 201 Jews from Gargždai. Furthermore, Stahlecker had assigned the head of the Tilsit SS and police unit, Major (SS-Sturmbannführer) Hans-Joachim Böhme, to carry out ‘all necessary

76  •  Christoph Dieckmann operations’ within a designated twenty-five kilometre strip along the border.18 As a result, on 25 June 1941 some 214 Jewish men and one woman were murdered in Kretinga; two days later 111 Jewish men were shot in Palanga. During the course of these initial killings, an additional Einsatzkommando was created, jointly operating with Wehrmacht units, the Klaipėda border police and the Tilsit state police, led by its ambitious commander Böhme.19 On 4 July 1941 Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, officially delegated enormous powers to all of his operational units to carry out ‘cleans­ing operations’ in the designated Lithuanian border areas, which had earlier been envisaged as applying only to Erich Ehrlinger’s Sonderkommando 1b and later Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3 (EK 3). According to Heydrich, in order to ensure the free movement of the Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando units, the state police units ‘were authorized to perform cleansing operations … in the recently occupied territories which are situated in their part of the border area’.20 By October 1941 these units had killed more than 5,200 people in the designated Lithuanian border regions.21 This figure includes the killings in Jurbarkas. On 3 July 1941 a squad of the Tilsit state police unit arrived in Jurbarkas and shot about 250 Jewish men and 70 Lithuanians; according to the German security police, they killed 322 persons in total, 5 women among them.22 The Lithuanian police arrested most victims with the help of the lists. Böhme had ordered that sixty more Jewish men be arrested and brought to the execution site. Jewish men were arbitrarily torn out of queues in front of bakeries and taken from their homes.23 Among them were two of Carsten’s agents. Böhme released one of them, the Lithuanian Matulevičius, but not Berlowitz, a Jew.24 During the shootings, there were instances of Jews attacking their killers; how­ever, this was not mentioned in the reports to the security police in Berlin. One example was Emil Max, who had fled Klaipėda in 1939, a recipient of the Knight’s Cross from the First World War. He attacked the SS officers and injured one of them in the leg before he was killed.25 SS Second Lieutenant (SS-Untersturmführer) Wiechert, who was in charge of the grave-digging detail, forced some of the Jews to beat each other before they were murdered.26 Two men were buried alive, and during the night they succeeded in getting out of the pit. One of them, Antanas Leonavičius, testified against the killers after the war. Soon after, the post-war antiSoviet Lithuanian partisans killed him, along with Povilas Striauka.27 Abel Vales managed to escape when the other victims were forced to dig pits.28 The Jewish victims killed on 3 July 1941 represented the local elite.29 The lists were supposed to have recorded the names of influential and educated individuals, but the persistent further searching for more men suggests that the German security police intended to kill as many able-bodied men as possible. The Lithuanian victims were mostly people who had actually worked for the Soviet authorities or were accused of having done so. 30 Among them was one of Lithuania’s best-known sculptors, Vincas Grybas.

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  77 In contrast to the earlier shootings, which had been organized in the Lithuanian– German border strip by the Tilsit state police unit, in Jurbarkas the police battalion from Tilsit was to participate in the shootings instead of the police commando from the more distant town of Klaipėda; the local adjutant had expressed such an interest to the Tilsit SD.31 However, the commander of the Tilsit police battalion, Major Bernhard Griese, did not prioritize this massacre and so the said police unit did not arrive. This time the security police and Tilsit SD did not receive help from the regular German police and had to shoot the people themselves with the assistance of Lithuanian policemen and partisans. The valuables stolen from the Jews served to pay for food and drinks for the Jurbarkas killers that same evening; later, the German police used the money taken from victims to pay for their week-long vacation in the Palanga resort.32 After these shootings, Police Chief Levickas went to Raseiniai and asked to be discharged. On 7 July 1941 he was replaced by Povilas Mockevičius.33 Carsten ordered the aforementioned policeman Urbonas to organize the guarding of the Jews who were still alive: the relatives of the dead, elderly people, and fifty men and their families who had been spared as a labour force. Beginning on the second day of the German occupation, the Jews aged between fifteen and fifty were driven to forced labour, supervised by Friedman, a Jew, who would later be killed as well.34 The women had to sew and mend German military uniforms.35 The Jews of Jurbarkas suffered many brutal humiliations at the hands of the Germans and Lithuanians.36 Town cantor Alperovitz was mistreated. A brick was fixed to his beard and he was thus led through the streets. As was the case everywhere in Lithuania, Jews were forced to wear the identifying badge, were banned from pavements, were permitted to leave their homes only under certain conditions and had to give up their radios. The Jews were forced to destroy, by their own hand, the historic wooden synagogue and the small Jewish slaughterhouse. Lithuanians forced the old Rabbi Khayim-Reuven Rubinshtein and others to bring holy books and scrolls to the synagogue yard and burn them. Jews were forced to march, sing and dance publicly while carrying the busts and portraits of Stalin and Lenin, which were burned after the Jew Friedman was forced to read out in Lithuanian a speech which insulted the Jewish community. Jews were made to swim in the Neman River (Nemunas) ‘to be baptized’.37 Germans photographed these public humiliations. The Jews were systematically deprived of food. The Lithuanian administration, which from the end of June 1941 was under German orders to supply civilians with food, severely limited food sales to Jews.38 The Jews were allowed to purchase only what was left unsold in the evenings. When at the end of July and the beginning of August the German civilian administration (Zivilverwaltung) replaced the military authorities, the district commissariat (Gebietskommissariat, GBK) banned Jews from shopping in the markets, claiming that this was to prevent the ‘increasing buying up of goods and foodstuffs by the Jews’.39 Only a few shops were allowed to open to Jews in the evening, from 5 to 6 p.m. – in principle legitimizing the already prevailing practice. The military administration had earlier fixed the minimum food

78  •  Christoph Dieckmann rations for Lithuanian Jews; two weeks earlier it had also issued an order to compile a list of persons who needed foodstuffs by 1 August 1941. The Jews were to be listed in a separate column. The Raseiniai county chief (Kreischef) promulgated such an order on 21 July.40 The second wave of large-scale killings in Jurbarkas was perpetrated at the end of July and the beginning of August. On 27 July 45 elderly men, together with Jews from nearby localities, were killed, and on 1 August 105 elderly women.41 By 21 August there were still 684 Jews living in town, of whom sixty-four were engaged in forced labour. It is impossible to ascertain the fate of roughly 200 Jews, who seem to be missing from the figures obtained through a comparative study of the documentary evidence.42 Some may have escaped, others may have gone into hiding; still others may have been killed in actions which are difficult to document. On 16 August 1941 the Lithuanian authorities were directed by the Germans to issue two more orders: that all Jewish property be registered, including that already stolen by Lithuanians, and that the labour force be recorded as well, with an indication of the registrants’ professional skills.43 Three days earlier, on 13 August, the mayors of all Lithuanian towns and the county chiefs of Šiauliai district met with Gebietskommissar Hans Gewecke, who ordered the officials to establish ghettos in each town.44 The Jews of Jurbarkas were crowded into a few houses located on two streets, sustained only by some bread and cabbage. After the war, Mayor Gepneris testified that Gewecke had explained the purpose of those small ghettos – to isolate the Jews until they were to be shot. According to Gepneris, this political guideline was ostensibly confirmed by Aleksas Grigalavičius, who worked in Raseiniai for the German security police and said that a regular ghetto need not be established since, in any case, the Jews would be killed soon.45 There were a number of meetings between the responsible German border police and the local German military commandant, a certain Lieutenant Groschütz.46 Within three days, 4 to 6 September, the Lithuanian police under German supervision murdered those Jews who were not needed for work – over 400 women and children. They were murdered in a most brutal manner, in conditions which defy the imagination, related after the war by a few young women who had managed to escape the killing fields.47 On 12 September some 272 Jews, including 73 at work, were still living in the town. They were murdered thereafter by a small killing squad from Kaunas, once again with the assistance of the local Lithuanian police. At least thirty-one Lithuanian men were directly involved in the shooting and torture of the Jews.48 By December 1941 out of more than 4,400 inhabitants only 2,900 were left – about a third of the population had been murdered.49 Many among the local population enriched themselves with Jewish assets: 245 land allotments and 208 houses had been left without owners or tenants. 50 By the end of July a number of officials had already received their share of Jewish property, for example an apartment or a cow, while the furniture of the murdered Jews was sold to the people.51 Jewish shops were taken over by Lithuanians, many of them by Lithuanian

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  79 policemen and activists. On the edge of the town a sign was erected: ‘Georgenburg ist judenfrei’ (Jurbarkas is free of Jews).52 The names of seventy-six Jews who, in various ways, survived the German occupation are known.53 Eight Lithuanian families in the vicinity helped the Jews, despite the threat of capital punishment against the entire family of any would-be rescuer, which the Raseiniai county chief announced at the end of August 1941.54 Some Jews, among them the Fainshtein brothers, acted within a partisan group.55 The course of events in Jurbarkas reveals that relations between Jews and non-Jews were quite peaceful until the 1930s, when they began slowly to deteriorate due to the increasingly nationalist policy and mood in Lithuanian society. But open outbreaks of violence were still an exception. The Jews were overwhelmingly supporters of various Zionist parties; only very few considered themselves as com­mun­ists. Moreover, half of the deportees to the Soviet Union on 15 June 1941 were Jews. After the German invasion and the ending of the one year of Soviet rule, a coali­ tion of conservative and radical nationalists took power in Jurbarkas, comprised of large segments of the local Lithuanian elite. Immediate discrimination against Jews, humiliating behaviour and anti-Jewish violence were widespread during the first days of war, but there were no pogroms of the kind Jews suffered in Kaunas. Clearly the initiative for mass murder on all levels came from the Germans, and the killings took place in several stages. At first, members of the Jewish elite were methodically registered and killed; as many Jewish men and other alleged supporters of the Soviet authority as possible were murdered as well. German anti-Semitic security policy stood in the foreground. To be able to murder this group of potential resisters, the Germans demanded that Lithuanian officials and police officers, as well as the committees of insurgents, compile the requisite lists, a task which the latter would usually undertake quite willingly. Furthermore, the German security police wanted to include in this victim-group as many able-bodied male Jews as possible, even if they were not part of the Jewish elite or had nothing to do with the Soviet authorities. This intention is made clear in the persistent search for Jewish men in Jurbarkas. The next to be killed were the people who could not be used for labour, that is, the weakest groups: the elderly women and men, and in other places orphans and mentally ill persons were often included. The days at the end of July and the beginning of August mark the turning point which widened the range of Jewish victims. Finally, the Jewish workforce was to be murdered as well, especially if it was no longer needed for the military industry or if, according to the German occupiers, it posed a threat to security. Accompanying the isolation and exclusion of Jews from the local community was the escalating onslaught on Jewish property. This was systematized in August 1941 and was linked to the establishment of an improvised ghetto in town, whose purpose was simply to assemble and concentrate the surviving Jews for the final stage of mass murder. The preparations for murder and the actual killings involved considerable coop­ eration among not only German civilian institutions and police agencies but also

80  •  Christoph Dieckmann Lithuanian ones. The involvement of Lithuanian people in the persecutions and killing actions was multifaceted. Many Lithuanian regional and local officials, as well as policemen and civilians, were involved in the entire gamut of activities which aimed to identify, select, separate and isolate the victims; plunder their property; and finally participate in their murder. Although the initiative did not come from the Lithuanians, many made use of the impunity and the lawlessness made possible by German anti-Semitic policies. At the same time, there was room for individual choice among both the German and the Lithuanian actors. The chief of the German Tilsit police battalion did not permit his units to take part in the massacres, even though his adjutant pressed him strongly on the matter. The chief of the Lithuanian police in Jurbarkas resigned his office after the first shootings. However, we do not know the circumstances in greater detail. Large parts of the Lithuanian population took over Jewish property, and only very few Lithuanians showed enough courage actively to provide help to Jews. The Jews of Jurbarkas, like most of the Jews in the provinces, had virtually no time to react to the unforeseen and brutal threats, due to the speed with which the arrests, plunders and murders were carried out. There was no room for collective action or organization; the Jews were trapped. They were deeply shocked by what was, for most of them, the utterly unexpected outbreak of violence from Lithuanians. A few of the Jurbarkas Jews managed to resist or escape and others attempted to do so, but the majority saw no way out and had no chance to escape or resist – the terror from the Germans and Lithuanians was too overwhelming and the environment too hostile.

The Murder of the Jews in Utena The town of Utena, the main town in the county of the same name, is located in the north-east of Lithuania, on the main road from Kaunas to Daugavpils (Dünaburg). A considerable distance from the German–Lithuanian border, the town is only fifty kilometres away from the Latvian border. It took the Germans five days to get to Utena. Were there significant differences in the behaviour of Lithuanians who were not immediately subjected to German rule? Approximately 115,000 people lived within the county in 1941, of whom no more than 10,000 lived in Utena itself, including 3,000 to 4,000 Jews. The number of Jews in the entire county of Utena was 5,443 in January 1941.56 In the nineteenth century the Jews had accounted for as much as 70–80 per cent of the population of Utena and the smaller towns of the region. The unfavourable economic and political conditions in the tsarist empire had forced many Jews to emigrate, mostly to South Africa and the United States. The most important turning point in the life of the Jews during the early twentieth century occurred during the First World War, when many Jews were evacuated to Russia; of these only about two-thirds returned

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  81 to the county. However, before the Second World War they made up about half of the population of Utena and small towns such as Molėtai and Anykščiai. The Jews possessed hardly any land and were mainly employed in trades, crafts and small businesses. In 1931 Jews owned 84 of 97 shops, 25 of 40 light industrial enterprises and about 150 workshops. Most non-Jews in Utena worked either in agriculture or in state and educational institutions. Many of the Jews were poor. The Jewish community supported a number of schools, as well as public, cultural and political organizations.57 Relations between Jews and non-Jews in Utena were described as normal and friendly, but gradually deteriorated in the second half of the 1930s.58 In the municipal council elections of 1931, seven Jews out of twelve council members were elected.59 The political orientation of Utena’s Jews was overwhelmingly Zionist. Only a few Jews were active under Soviet rule, which disbanded all Zionist parties and youth organizations. Dozens of Jewish families were deported to the Altai region in June 1941.60 The first documented evidence concerning partisans dates back to May 1941; the two Streižys brothers in particular, from the village of Nemeikšys, agitated against and chased ‘Jews and Chekists’.61 These anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic partisans received a large influx of members only during the first Soviet deportations that started on 14 June 1941, when hundreds of men fled into the region’s forests, many with arms at their disposal. Most of the men had been members of the Riflemen’s Union before 1940. Over the radio these men learnt that the long-awaited war had begun, Kaunas had been taken, and the Provisional Government had proclaimed the country’s independence. Most Lithuanians greeted the news of the war with great joy, raising Lithuanian flags and ringing church bells.62 On 23 June 1941 the two Streižys brothers gathered together forty men, including thirty pupils from the local grammar school, and took over Utena on 24 June. The insurgents disarmed a few Soviet activists and retreating Red Army soldiers and released prisoners from Soviet custody.63 The Germans arrived in the region four days after the outbreak of war. On 26 June 1941 the 56th Army Corps of the German Fourth Panzer Group passed through Utena on the way to Daugavpils. By then there was continuous fighting between Soviet units and anti-Soviet rebels, with casualties on both sides. Dozens of people were arrested for their alleged sympathy with the Soviets in the villages; in some places the rebels had seized control before the arrival of the German Wehrmacht. Some villages were burnt by the retreating Soviet army and NKVD units; other areas were destroyed by the German bombs, including the Jewish neighbourhood of Utena. Young Lithuanians assisted the Germans as guides.64 The 31-year-old Lieutenant Alfonsas Patalauskas was in command of a group of between seventy-six and eighty partisans. In messages sent to Kaunas, the partisans referred to themselves as peasants-partisans and characterized their actions as a peasant’s uprising against Bolshevik power. By 27 June 1941 some 484 men had been registered as partisans and had obtained German permits for carrying arms.65 Most local officials and policemen obeyed the entreaties sent out by

82  •  Christoph Dieckmann radio and returned to the positions and offices in which they had served before the Soviet occupation of 1940. On 25 June Malinauskas, member of the extreme rightwing group of the Voldemarists and Gestapo agent, again became chief of police in Utena.66 Captain Benediktas Kaletka was Lithuanian military commandant of the town and the first mayor was Žukas, considered a supporter of former president Antanas Smetona. Throughout July 1941 the German military administration in Utena underwent constant rotation, staffed by personnel drawn from the 691st Military Gendarmerie unit.67 During the first days of the German invasion many refugees from western Lithuania arrived in the district. The Lithuanian partisans arrested many of them. The refugees were confined under harsh conditions, for example in the synagogue of Anykščiai, where they were guarded by Lithuanian units; afterwards, they would usually be sent back to their home towns.68 All the roads leading from Kaunas to the north-east, which passed Ukmergė and Utena in the direction of Daugavpils, were clogged with retreating Red Army troops and refugees. On this stretch of road an unspecified number of Jews were killed by the rebels.69 A Jewish refugee from Jonava later talked about his experiences in Utena during the first days of the war, when Lithuanian rebels ruled in the town and chased refugees and local Jews.70 The majority of Utena’s Jews stayed and did not attempt to flee. Misha Garber, who had fled with his family from France in 1940, reported that Germans did not like Jews, but that life was still possible.71 Attacks against Jews began immediately after the outbreak of the war throughout the entire district. The Lithuanian rebels would break into Jewish homes, searching and plundering and also abusing the home owners. On 22 June 1941, the very first day of the war, a young Jewish woman was raped and then murdered.72 Above all, the arrests targeted the so-called Jewish intelligentsia, the communists, the Komsomol and alleged supporters of the Soviet regime.73 Using the files found in the deserted Soviet offices, a list of suspects with detailed information was created.74 After the arrival of the German occupiers, the anti-Semitic policy was system­ atized. On 4 July 1941 the local media, now under German censorship, called on the region’s populace to support Germany’s war and ‘to cleanse the homeland of Bolsheviks, Jews, and of other traitors of the Lithuanian nation’.75 The Jews were forced to perform humiliating labour. They were ordered to search for mines, some perishing as a result.76 Within a few days all Jewish houses were marked with the sign indicating ‘Jew’; in this way they became easy targets for Lithuanians and Germans. The plunder of Jewish property and the violence perpetrated against Jews went unpunished. The three synagogues and the prayer houses were desecrated; the rabbis, who refused to burn the Torah, were publicly tortured and severely injured. The damaged religious sites were turned into prisons for Jews, refugees, communists and members of the Komsomol.77 On the morning of 14 July 1941 the Lithuanian municipal authorities ordered all Jews to leave the town by noon; any Jew discovered there would be shot. The

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  83 Jews were given a few hours to assemble in the Šilinės forest on the outskirts of town; there they would be registered and their valuables taken away. For more than two weeks nearly 2,000 Jews were confined in the forest, suffering the dirt, adverse weather conditions and the taunting of their Lithuanian guards. There was hardly anything to eat. The younger people were taken to forced labour during the day. All men and women aged seventeen to fifty-five were registered once again.78 Two weeks later mass shootings began. During the two large-scale shooting operations of 31 July and 7 August 1941 in the Rašė forest three kilometres away, 718 Jewish men, 103 Jewish women and 3 other persons were murdered.79 The German and Lithuanian police carried out the killings in the presence of local Lithuanian officials. Hamann’s ‘flying squad’ (Rollkommando) travelled here twice from Kaunas. Zadok Bleiman and Kalman Katz attacked the German shooters. Katz was killed, but Bleiman succeeded in escaping. Later, he had a chance to report on the mass killings.80 A further improvised ghetto was established in the synagogue in Utena, where Jews were forced to live in miserable conditions behind barbed wire and gates. Food remained in very short supply and an epidemic of typhus broke out.81 The press and radio announced that Utena was ‘cleansed of Jews’ (judenrein).82 On 29 August 1941 the surviving Jewish old men, women and children from Utena and its surroundings were shot in the Rašė forest – from Utena and Molėtai alone 582 men, 1,731 women and 1,469 children. Julia Vitkova and Anna Klapinske reported after the war: The most horrorful day was 29 August 1941. We saw how the Jews were led to their execution. At first the men with bonded hands, then partisans, then women, children and old people. They walked in nice dresses, the children on their arms, with toys. It was a hot sunny day. When the shootings began, crying and weeping broke out. The screams stay in your ears forever.83

This time the local killers were reinforced by Lithuanian units from elsewhere, and probably by several Germans from the security police led by Hamann as well as the Third Company of the Lithuanian Auxiliary Police battalion from Kaunas.84 The partisan group under Patalauskas participated in various anti-Jewish actions. They arrested the Jews, brought them to the Šilinės forest and also participated in establishing the ghetto within the town, where they appointed A. Jodėnas as the ghetto’s commandant; finally, they guarded the killing sites. At the beginning of September the partisan unit was dissolved.85 In 1944 the Extraordinary Soviet Commission estimated the number of victims in eight mass burial sites in the Rašė forest at approximately 9,000, which has been acknowledged as the largest extermination site of the Jews in the district of Utena.86 However, the actual number of victims is more likely to be near 4,600. In the nearby villages of Anykščiai and Molėtai, Lithuanian units under the command of the Germans killed another 1,500 and 700 victims respectively on

84  •  Christoph Dieckmann the same day as the aforementioned murders – 29 August 1941. In Anykščiai the mass murders of nearly 2,000 Jews also began with arrests and expropriations, which intensified after the arrival of the Wehrmacht.87 Some Jews in Anykščiai had felt relief when the Soviets took over in 1940, because they hoped to see an end to discrimination and anti-Semitism.88 Balys Baltranas, a peasant and former captain in the Lithuanian army, organized the local anti-Soviet Lithuanians, became mayor of the village and ordered the locals to help the Germans.89 The local Jews and refugees were confined in prisons, synagogues and schools, where they were terrorized by Lithuanian guards for two weeks. There were dozens of victims and numerous rapes. The 14-year-old Elija Berkovič was confined to the synagogue and miraculously survived the shootings by Germans and Lithuanians; she crawled back out of a mass grave, fled to Daugavpils and in 1943 on to Riga.90 After the non-local Jews in Anykščiai had been released, those that remained, as in Utena, were forced to move to the nearby forest, where they had to live for weeks and were horribly mistreated. Some Lithuanians, just twenty or twenty-one years old, were widely known for their barbaric behaviour.91 Seven-year-old Bronė Bičkauskienė remembered how Lithuanian guards prevented her from bringing water to the ghettoized Jews.92 The Lithuanian Antanas Tuskenis tried to help the starving Jews by bringing them food and considered the shootings and murders to be profoundly ‘unchristian’. He talked to the local priest, Čepėnas, who had sought unsuccessfully to put an end to the violence against the Jews. Tuskenis wanted to persuade individual Jews to flee from the ghetto, but they would not leave their families behind.93 At the end of July 1941 the men were shot on the Liudiškės (Hasenberg) hill. The remaining Jews were killed a month later, after they had spent weeks in the local improvised ghetto. The Lithuanian woman Domicelė Kunčinienė did not approve of supposedly ‘Jewish’ behaviour under Soviet rule, on the one hand, but, on the other, she was horrified by the deeds of Lithuanians who considered themselves to be ‘patriots’ and were remembered after the war as ‘murderers’. Domicelė Kunčinienė believed there could be no justification for murdering thousands of innocent Jews or for the participation in claiming Jewish property that was soaked with blood.94 Jonas Uzdonas spoke of efforts by Lithuanians at the end of the German occupation not to talk about their deeds in 1941. Uzdonas had seen with his own eyes how the twelve-year-old Srolke Zilberis was shot next to the synagogue.95 In the nearby village of Molėtai eight insurgents met on the eve of 23 June, including the priest Jonas Žvinis, the former leader of the local cooperative Žalėnas and the head of the local post office, the latter two having already worked as agents for the Germans during the time of independence under Smetona. They spent the next days trying to obtain weapons and fight the ‘red terror’. Arrests of young Jewish men, forced labour and robberies began very soon after the outbreak of the war.96 The first weeks resulted in about sixty victims; those arrested were taken to Utena, where they shared the fate of the prisoners there. In the second half of August all the Jews of Molėtai were confined in the synagogue, and on 29 August 1941 they were

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  85 shot at a nearby site.97 At Molėtai some victims made drastic attempts to escape from the shooting sites, but only a few succeeded. Even these individuals did not manage to survive for much longer in the hostile surroundings. On 21 and 27 December 1941, while in Molėtai prison awaiting execution, father and son Natelevič wrote two farewell letters in Yiddish to their relatives, which tell us about their experiences: Dear sister and brother-in-law, I write to you the last blessed letter before death and I leave it with a Christian, who will send it to you after the war. I write to you on our unfortunate death. All shtetl Jews were shot on seventh day of Alul. We were able to run away, me and Yudken, Sharke and Itsiken. We ran tumultuously and lost each other. Selden and Bamelin-Navelen were shot with all other Jews. They lie in a mass grave with all Molėtai Jews behind the Molėtai farmyard near Lakese. I was hiding with Yudken for sixteen weeks in a cave. We really suffered. When I left the cave, I heard that eight Jews were imprisoned in Anamisler farm, among them Shnipelisker with his family. They came from the other world, meaning they suffered hunger and cold. We fled without anything; it was still warm at Rosh ha-Shone and now it is the tenth day in Tabat (1941). It is very cold. At the end we had to report and we were caught. Tomorrow we will be shot. I just don’t know whether they will shoot us in Molėtai or Utena. The others were sent to Utena at night. We did not find them and they were shot on 21 December 1941 … Ale Gutsh drove away to Shavli. There is not one Jew left in any shtetl. We see today what the world looks like without Jews.

Natelevič wrote further that he would ask the police for permission to say Kaddish at the grave of his father. He ends the letter: ‘Stay healthy, the last words from me, your perished brother and son Yudl Natelevič.’ In an addendum he wrote: ‘I write this letter as a prisoner. We count the minutes until they will come and shoot us. [unreadable words] the minutes are counted.’98 His son Yudke wrote on the same day: Dear aunt and uncle, I am sentenced to death and write to you my last blessed letter from prison. I am judged by a murderous barbaric hand – innocent victims. Thousands and thousands of human beings perished. The blood of the murdered shall not be silent to the responsible barbarians. One has to let go the bright and beautiful world and cannot go on living; we perish, me and my father and my family. You won’t know where our bodies will lie. I stop writing; live happily, enjoy the beautiful sides of the world. Your outcast nephew, the perished Yudl Natelevič. Molėtai, 21/12 1941 from prison, a few days before death.

In an addendum on 27 December the father added: ‘Children of Lavender were shot at Nowo Shventshian on 22/7 1941, that means all Lavenders. And Khaimken Bentses was deported by the Russians; it is unclear whether he was shot or not. Surely shot. Yudke had a photo, which he adds to the letter. Tomorrow they will shoot us, close to Utena, 27.12.41.’

86  •  Christoph Dieckmann German institutions were in command of the killings: at first, the local com­­ mandant’s office (OK) of the Wehrmacht, and then, from the beginning of August 1941, the civil administration of the Šiauliai Gebietskommissariat, in coop­eration, and on occasion in disagreement, with both the Teilkommando of Einsatzkommando 2 and 3 of the security police and SD.99 On 10 September 1941 District Commissar Hans Gewecke boasted to General Commissar Adrian von Renteln that, in accordance with instructions, ‘nearly all the districts have been cleansed of Jews’ and that ‘the Jewish question in the Šiauliai district had been resolved with the necessary intensity and National Socialist severity’. In saying this, Gewecke had in mind the counties of Rokiškis, Panevėžys, Kretinga, Raseiniai, Biržai, Mažeikiai, Telšiai, Tauragė, Utena and Zarasai.100 When the killings of Jews in the county of Utena were completed at the end of August, the local military commandant’s office of Utena ordered the disarming of the former Lithuanian partisans on 2 September 1941.101 Now, on the initiative of the German military commandant in Utena, the German security police demanded the dismissal of County Chief Pranas Grebliauskas, as well as Mayor Žukas, who did not work ‘according to German guidelines’ and was to be replaced by the ‘impeccable’ partisan leader and former Lithuanian army lieutenant Palauskas.102 Their enrichment as a result of the seizure of Jewish property, which the Germans claimed for themselves, was the motive behind the dismissals. Nevertheless, at the end of 1943 Žukas became the county chief of Utena district.103 Pranas Grebliauskas was arrested on 14 November 1941 and accused of failing to transfer Jewish property to the appropriate authorities and of the misappropriation of goods which had been in the possession of Jews.104 The Lithuanian activists had often robbed Jewish homes in the course of the frequent searches.105 The pattern of crimes in the county of Utena is very similar to that in Jurbarkas. Yet here there was more time for larger-scale and more brutal excesses against the Jews, leading to humiliations, robberies and killings. From the very first days, arrests became a prevalent occurrence, although, again, the scope of the violence was smaller than in Kaunas.

Conclusion Soviet rule had a major impact on the relations between Jews and non-Jews; local partisan groups were prepared to take action against Soviets and Jews already under the Soviet occupation, identifying Jews and communists in an anti-Semitic way. The resentment and rage directed against the Soviet occupation in this region manifested itself as early as the spring of 1941, as evidenced by the appearance of the first anti-Soviet underground groups. The deportations of June 1941 resulted in a further influx of men into the forests, in preparation for an insurrection. In Utena the issue of Jewish refugees played a bigger role than in Jurbarkas and the fighting

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  87 with the retreating Red Army lasted several days. Within a few weeks the Jews had been isolated and forced to live in unbearable conditions; only a few received help from Lithuanian friends. The police and rebels were led by radical nationalists, some of whom had been in close contact with Nazi Germany before the war. The fact that mayor Žukas was a Christian democrat of conservative orientation, and did not belong to the radical right-wing camp, had no influence on the course of the persecutions and murders. As in many other places, attacks on symbols of Jewish culture played a significant role: the synagogue was destroyed, sacred books were burned and local rabbis were singled out for public torture. Nevertheless, the German initiative to kill all the Jewish inhabitants of the region is obvious. The widespread willingness to cooperate with the Germans on the part of the Lithuanian administration and police, as well as the hostile neutrality characteristic of most nonJews, are also noteworthy. In Utena two provisional ghettos were erected, one in the forest and one in the town. Again, a major escalating step was taken at the end of July and beginning of August, when 800 Jews were shot, including over 100 Jewish women. Complete mass murder struck the region at the end of August and beginning of September 1941. Jewish property had been expropriated, and over this issue we encounter the only documented conflict between Lithuanians and Germans, leading to the replacement of key functionaries. In reference to the question raised earlier concerning the problem of identifying whose initiative was important in the persecution of Jews, the comparison of Jurbarkas and Utena reveals that, despite all the varying circumstances, the persecutions and massacres in these towns did not differ very much. There was very little room for any Lithuanian initiative in Jurbarkas, while in Utena there was more extensive room for action. Before the arrival of the Germans, there were several murders and rapes in Utena, but a large-scale Lithuanian-led campaign of extermination against the local Jewish community cannot be documented. For such an outcome, German initiative and command were necessary, although the Germans could count on the considerable willingness of the relevant Lithuanian administrators and police force for help. In the eyes of many people within the Lithuanian population, the Jews had been collectively deprived of their human rights: the right to personal security, the right to the inviolability of home and property, and, eventually, the right to life itself. Most accepted the deaths of the children, women and men in silence. Such an attitude facilitated the process: the German occupiers and the active minority of right-wing radicals, as well as certain anti-Semitic functionaries who did not necessarily belong to the extreme right, were more easily able to murder the entire Jewish community. Virtually in all cases, two groups of people participated directly in the mass murders: first, the regular death squads of the German and Lithuanian police, which had been formed within a few weeks and systematically traversed the country, and, second, the local police, as well as partisans who were transformed into an auxiliary police force. Most often, control and the highest authority were exercised not by the police but by the political leadership.

88  •  Christoph Dieckmann Many of the key elements of German and Lithuanian policy can be identified in these small towns: a reckless racist security policy by the German military and police, a humiliating forced-labour policy by the local military commandant and the Lithuanian administration, a policy of near starvation towards Jews from the very beginning, and finally the mass murder of entire Jewish communities. Both German and Lithuanian institutions were deeply involved. Case studies at the local level show both the extent to which the Lithuanian administration and population were involved and the range of options available to local administrators in implementing anti-Jewish policy. The degree of violence, the number of ghettos and the timing of their establishment, the means of expropriating and robbing, the actual groups and individuals involved in the killing, all depended on local circumstances and initiative. At the same time, the overall trend of rapid exclusion and mass destruction is unequivocal and developed in very similar ways in the Lithuanian provinces. After December 1941 large ghettos existed only in the bigger cities, owing their existence exclusively to the German need for manpower and forced labour. This difference between local peripheries and local centres was down not to local initiative but to political decision processes at a higher level. Nevertheless, the concrete fate of the victims in individual cases still depended on local behaviour. The bitter fate of Jews who managed to escape at first but were unable to find any kind of shelter and so were eventually also murdered compels us to reach this conclusion.

Notes 1. Lithuanian statistical office, 1 January 1941, Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas (LCVA), R 743-5-46, p. 172. 2. See the first comprehensive report ‘Holocaust in Lithuanian Province in 1941’ by Arūnas Bubnys on the website of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania (http:// www.komisija.lt/en/). 3. See Christoph Dieckmann, ‘Lithuania in Summer 1941: The German Invasion and the Kaunas Pogrom’, in Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole and Kai Struve (eds), Shared History – Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941 (Leipzig: Uni-Verlag Leipzig, 2007), pp. 355–86; Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis, The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941 (Vilnius: Margi rastai, 2006). 4. As of 26 December 1940, 1,319 Jews were registered as living in the town; cf. the data of summer 1941 (undated). LCVA, R 1753-3-13, p. 28. Other figures are in Arūnas Bubnys, ‘Mažieji Lietuvos Žydų Getai ir Laikinos Izoliavimo Stovyklos

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  89

  5.

  6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

1941–1943 Metais’, in Lietuvos Istorijos Metraštis 1999 (Vilnius, 2000), p.166. For the history of the Jews of Jurbarkas before the German occupation, see Dov Levin and Josef Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita: Entsiklopedia shel haYishuvim min Hivasdam ve-ad le-akher Shoat Milkhemet ha-Olam ha-Sheniyah (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 324–9; Josef Rosin, Preserving Our Litvak Heritage: A History of 31 Jewish Communities in Lithuania, ed. Joel Alpert (League City, TX: JewishGen, Inc., 2005), pp. 52–69. A shorter account of the murder of the Jews of Jurbarkas is published in Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis, Persecution, pp. 157–64. Photos of the synagogue in Jurbarkas, its artistic interior and the Jewish cemeteries are in Ephraim Oshry, The Annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry (New York: Judaica Press, 1995), p. 286, and Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas haKehillot, Lita, p. 325. Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita, pp. 326–8. Cf. Zevulun Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron le Kehilat Yurburg, Lita (Jerusalem: Society of Yurburg Emigrants in Israel, 1991), pp. 55–67. Ibid., pp. 123–8 (Hislovitz family); ibid., pp. 129–44 (Petrikansky family); ibid., pp. 163–6 (Frank family). Rosin, Litvak Heritage, p. 57. Ibid., pp. 167–70 (the story of Rachel Hess-Greenstein whose house was burnt down). The message sent to the Germans by Mayor Gepneris omits the names of the Jewish deportees. For the list [undated], see LCVA, 1753-1-3, p. 212. Meanwhile, the previous message sent to the Lithuanian head of the district contained references to deportations of Jews, as in the message of 21 August 1941, LCVA, 1753-3-13, p. 22. The most comprehensive list provided to date is that by Rūta Puišytė, ‘Holocaust in Jurbarkas’, thesis, Vilnius University (1997), pp. 23–4, published at http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Yurburg/ bathesis.html. Announcement of the local commandant of 24 June 1941, LCVA, 1753-312, p. 9. In July 1941 the military administration had been taken over for a few weeks by Reserve Police Battalion 323 under Police Major Bernhard Griese. See Griese interrogation of 1 October 1959, Trial against Lechthaler, Staatsanwaltschaft Kassel, 3a Ks 1/61 and 3 Js 72/60, vol. 1, pp. 75–9. Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, p. 388. Customs inspector Georg Oselies interrogation, 3 April 1957. Trial against Fischer-Schweder, State Archiv (StA) Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 11, p. 2821; Indictment Fischer-Schweder, 25 June 1957, ibid., pp. 3472f. See Zvi Levit, ‘Khurban Yurburg’, in Mendel Sudarsky and Uriah Katzenelenbogen (eds), Lite, vol. 1 (New York: Jewish Lithuanian Cultural Society ‘Lite’, 1951), pp. 1849–54. Order no. 3 of the Šiauliai district magistrate (Landrat), 13 July 1941, LCVA, R 1099-1-1, p. 33.

90  •  Christoph Dieckmann 16. See the exhaustive interrogations of Gerhard Carsten, 5–12 February 1957, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 9, pp. 2199–2240; Krumbach interrogation, 17 October 1958, Zentrale Stelle zur Aufklärung von NS-Gewaltverbrechen (ZStL), II 207 AR-Z 51/58, vol. 1, pp. 111f, 127f, 130, 132; detailed description in the indictment, 12 August 1960. Trial against Krumbach and Gerke, ibid., vol. I, pp. 62–4. 17. Hans-Joachim Böhme interrogation, 18 December 1959, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 7, p. 1564. 18. Tilsit state police to Reich Security Main Office, 1 July 1941, ZStL, collection UdSSR, file 245 Ag, No. 254–257, pp. 2–5. 19. Christoph Dieckmann, ‘Der Krieg und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden’, in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1998), pp. 292–8. 20. It had already been announced on 27 June 1941 that: ‘The Tilsit state police unit is organizing the cleansing operations against snipers in the 25-km border area.’ Ereignismeldungen (EM), No. 6, 27 June 1941, Bundesarchiv (BArch), R 58/214, 6. Order No. 6, Heydrich to chiefs of Einsatzgruppen, 4 July 1941, Special Archive Moscow 500-5-3, 48; EM, No. 11, 3 July 1941, BArch, R 58/14, 7. 21. On the first killings in the border areas, see also Konrad Kwiet, ‘Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (1998), pp. 3–26; Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Jenseits der Grenze: Die ersten Massenerschießungen von Juden in Litauen (Juni– August 1941)’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 44 (1996), H. 2, pp. 101–17; Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich/Zurich: Piper, 1998), pp. 326–31; Joachim Tauber, ‘Garsden, 24. Juni 1941’, Annaberger Annalen 5 (1997), pp. 117–34. The indictment is published in Christiaan Frederik Rüter und Dick W. de Mildt (ed.), Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Die deutschen Strafverfahren wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen (Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag, n.d.), vol. 15. 22. EM, No. 19, 11 July 1941, BArch, R 58/214, 123. 23. Levit, ‘Khurban Yurburg’, p. 1851. 24. Gerhard Carsten interrogation, 12 December 1956, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 6, p. 1537; Krumbach interrogation, 17 October 1958, ZStL, II 207 AR-Z 51/58, vol. 1, pp. 102–4. 25. Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot Lita, p. 328; Carsten interrogation, 8 March 1957, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 9, p. 2297; see also the aforementioned Krumbach interrogation, vol. 1, pp. 105–6. 26. Wilhelm Gerke interrogation, 23 June 1958, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 21, p. 14; Krumbach interrogation as cited above, vol. 1, pp. 104, 109f.; Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, p. 382.

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  91 27. Cf. Puišytė, ‘Holocaust’, p. 19. 28. Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, pp. 419–28. After a few months, Vales found shelter with a Lithuanian peasant with whom he lived for two-and-ahalf years, hiding in the loft. The peasant took care of him, even though his neighbour, who had previously hidden Jewish escapees, was discovered and shot. 29. Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, pp. 389, 395, 404–5. 30. The names of twelve murdered persons are given in Masinės žudinės Lietuvoje (1941–1944), Dokumentu Rinkinys (Vilnius, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 208f. The wife of one of the victims from a neighbouring village testified in court in 1947; ibid., pp. 207–8. 31. Werner Hersmann interrogation, 6 November 1956, 7 January 1957 and 19 January 1957, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 6, pp. 1311–17, 1728, 1774f.; Eugen Obremski interrogation, ibid., vol. 18, p. 4797. 32. Gerke interrogation, 7 July 1958, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 21, pp. 61–3. 33. Bubnys, ‘Getai’, p. 167. 34. Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, pp. 380, 392; Levit, ‘Khurban Yurburg’, p. 1850. 35. Ibid., pp. 117–22 (Leipziger family). 36. Ibid., pp. 404–5; Oshry, Annihilation, pp. 287–8. 37. Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, p. 381, pp. 388–90, esp. p. 388; cf. Solomon Atamuk, Juden in Litauen: Ein geschichtlicher Überblick, ed. Erhard Roy Wiehn (Constance: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 2000), p. 164; Rosin, Litvak Heritage, p. 64. Levit, ‘Khurban Yurburg’, pp. 1850–1, says the date of the burning of books and scrolls was shabbat, 27 June 1941, and the public humiliation with Soviet-style portraits took place on 28 June 1941. 38. Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, p. 404. 39. GBK Šiauliai, Announcement No. 4, 6 August 1941, Amtsblatt 2 (1941), p. 32. Cf. Levit, ‘Khurban Yurburg’, p. 1849. 40. Raseiniai county chief to all mayors, 21 July 1941, LCVA, R 1753-3-13, p. 4. The military authorities had earlier ordered the entire district of Šiauliai to provide food registration rolls through the local magistrate. See order of the district magistrate of Šiauliai, 8 July 1941, LCVA, R 1099-1-1, p. 15. 41. Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, p. 406. The dates and numbers of victims of those massacres are based on oral testimonies and some of them give slightly conflicting numbers. Contemporary documents have not yet been found. 42. Mayor Gepneris’s reply of 21 August 1941 to Raseiniai county chief’s message of 16 August 1941, LCVA, R 173-3-13, p. 22. This file contains five queries in the summer and autumn of 1941 concerning the composition of Jurbarkas’s population. 43. Two messages from the district magistrate of Šiauliai, LCVA, R 1099-1-1, pp. 135f.

92  •  Christoph Dieckmann 44. Gewecke’s written order on ghettoization of 14 August 1941 reached Jurbarkas on 27 August 1941, LCVA, R 1753-3-4, pp. 36f. For his part the Lithuanian magistrate sent messages to the mayors as early as 22 August 1941; ibid., p. 156. 45. On Aleksas Grigalavičius and his close contacts with Hamann from EK 3, see GBK Šiauliai, note of 9 September 1941, BArch, R 90/146. Gepneris interrogation by the NKVD, 23 August 1945, published in Puišytė, ‘Holocaust’, pp. 23–4. 46. See Carsten interrogation, 5 February 1957, and his undated letter to Ulm’s prosecutor’s office, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, vol. 9, pp. 2217 and 2265. 47. See the accounts of Leib Koniuchowsky in Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, pp. 392f. and the story of Zvi Levit, ibid., pp. 407f.; first published in Sudarsky and Katzenelenbogen (eds), Lite, vol. 1, pp. 1850–4. The first report by Jäger lists 412 victims from Jurbarkas; the same figure is recorded in the second Jäger report of 1 December 1941. However, there it is incorrectly recorded that by 6 September 1941 all the Jewish men, women and children had been killed; BArch, R 70 Sowjetunion 15, 80 and 84. This is inconsistent with population figures on Jurbarkas provided in Gepneris’s letter of 12 September 1941 to the Raseiniai county chief, LCVA, R 1753-3-13, p. 58. 48. Puišytė, ‘Holocaust’, lists 31 persons who took part in the killings of the Jews in Jurbarkas (Appendix 3). 49. Gepneris to Raseiniai county chief, 14 December 1941, LCVA, R 1753-3-13, p. 190. After the war, there were four mass graves found in Jurbarkas and its surroundings containing over 1,200 bodies: in the Jewish cemetery, in the village of Kalnėnai, another forest nearby, and in the forest of Šilanės; see Masinės žudynės, vol. 2, p. 400. A statistical summary is provided by the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), 7021-94-427, 1ff. An incomplete list with the names of victims is housed in the Jewish museum in Vilnius. 50. Gepneris to Raseiniai county chief, 24 October 1941, LCVA, R 1753-3-13, p. 101. On 5 January 1942 the housing department of Jurbarkas obtained the list of houses which had belonged to Jews, LCVA, R 1753-1-3, p. 3. The list of nationalized and expropriated Jewish land contains 107 names and addresses; ibid., pp. 182f. 51. For an entire list of distributions, see LCVA, R 1753-3-12, pp. 5–8. On 27 March 1942 and on 14 April 1942 Mayor Gepneris transferred 2,908.82 Reichsmarks from the sale of Jewish furniture to a special account of the Gebietskommissariat. 52. Cf. indictment against Fischer-Schweder, especially the one issued on 25 June 1957, StA Ludwigsburg, EL 322, p. 3472. Interrogation of Julius Stanat (Mayor Gepneris’s employee), 9 June 1959, Main State Archive (HStA) Wiesbaden, Abt. 461.324438, vol. 4, p. 1509.

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  93 53. See Poran (ed.), Sefer ha-Zikaron, Yurburg, pp. 186–221, on the survivors and dead members of thirty families. 54. Puišytė, ‘Holocaust’, pp. 25–8, refers to the research of the survivor Chaim Jofė, who provides the names of the Lithuanian families who had rendered help to the Jews; in two appendices, Puišytė lists the names of the Jews who survived. The farmer K. Blažys was shot in the spring of 1943 because he had been hiding M. Liubinaitė, who had managed to escape the killings of 4–6 September 1941. Blažys’s neighbour had informed on him. On the death penalty, see the order of the Raseiniai county chief of 29 August 1941, LCVA, R 1753-3-4, p. 25. 55. Rosin, Litvak Heritage, p. 65. 56. Lithuanian statistical office, 1 January 1941, LCVA, R 743-5-46, p. 172. 57. Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita, pp. 121f.; on the history of Jews in Utena, see Rosin, Litvak Heritage, pp. 566–99; on the life of Jews in Utena from 1921 to 1936, see Bella Lown, Memories of My Life: A Personal History of a Lithuanian Shtetl (Malibu, CA: Joseph Simon/Panglos Press, 1991). 58. L. Bekeris, ‘Gibel’ evrejskogo naselenija uteny i okrestnostej v 1941 g.’, Archive Igud Jotsei Lita, No. 3002, p. 3. 59. Rosin, Litvak Heritage, p. 571. 60. See the range of Zionist votes from 1925 to 1935, and for Soviet rule ibid., pp. 580, 582. Students from the Radin Yeshivah arrived in Utena as refugees from Poland. 61. First report from occupied Lithuania, written by a Lithuanian in Berlin, 7 August 1941, National Archives Record Administration (NARA), RG 226, M 1499, Roll 258, 17. The Soviet chief of the NKVD in Lithuania reported on 21 June 1941 that in Utena, Rokiškis and Šiauliai armed anti-Soviet groups had been reinforced by refugees from the deportations; Kazys Škirpa, Sukilimas Lietuvos suverenumui atstatyti (New York: Franciscan Fathers, 1973), p. 266. The Lithuanian woman Valerija Žemaitytė, born 1925, remembers relations between Jews and non-Jews in Anykščiai as friendly until 1940; Rimantas Vanagas, Nenusigręžk nuo savęs (Vilnius: Vyturys, 1995), pp. 96–101. 62. For reports by the evacuated Soviet functionaries of September 1942 concerning the first day of the war in Molėtai, Užpaliai and Daugaliai, see Valentinas Brandišauskas, 1941 m. birželio sukilimas: Dokumentų rinkinys (Vilnius: Lietuvos Gyventojų Genocido ir Rezistencijos Tyrimo Centras, 2000), pp. 319–25, 347f.; cf. Škirpa, Sukilimas, pp. 269–70. 63. Report from Gabrielius Miliūnas on the uprising in Utena county, 5 July 1941, ibid., pp. 156–8. Some 102 people were in the Soviet prison in Utena on 10 June 1941; Arvydas Anušauskas, Lietuvių tautos sovietinis naikinimas, 1940–1958 metais (Vilnius: Mintis, 1996), p. 111.

94  •  Christoph Dieckmann 64. See the story of Valerija Žemaitytė in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 101; Arūnas Bubnys, Vokiečių okupuota Lietuva (1941–1944) (Vilnius: Lietuvos Gyventojų Genocido ir Rezistencijos Tyrimo Centras, 1998), p. 43. 65. Lists are in LCVA, R 1652-1-1, pp. 1–6, published in Brandišauskas, 1941 m., pp. 163–74; Order No. 1 of Commandant Captain Benediktas Kaletka, 26 June 1941, LCVA, R 1444-1-9, p. 56. 66. Malinauskas to security police in Kaunas, 16 March 1943, LCVA, R 1399-1-9, p. 179. From 24 September 1941 the security police chief was Jonas Čėsna. The first security police chief was Bronius Ìsevičius. For his order regarding the persecution of communists, 13 July 1941, see Masinės žudynės, vol. 2, p. 310. 67. Local Military Command (OK) 862 (7.7.–16.7.1941), OK II 349 (16.7.– 20.7.1941); OK II 350 (20.7.1941). War Diary Security Division (Sich.Div.) 281, Order 16 and 19 July 1941, National Archives Record Administration (NARA), RG 242, T 315, Roll 1869, 745f.; report Sich.Div. 281, Department VII, 10 July 1941, ibid., Roll 1870, 498. For less than a week (10–15 July) the divisional headquarters of Sich.Div. 281 were in Utena; War Diary Sich.Div. 281, report IV a, 25.3.–31.12.1941, ibid., Roll 1869, 5. 68. Dimitrijus Gelpernas, ‘O aš buvau sinagogoje’, in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, pp. 86–8; V. Butėnas statement, 7 June 1951, Masinės žudynės, vol. 2, p. 310f. 69. Solly Ganor, Das andere Leben: Kindheit im Holocaust (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1997), pp. 39–51; Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 6. 70. Eliezer Yerushalmi, Pinkas Shavli, Yoman mi-Geto Litai, 1941–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1957), p. 335. 71. Bekeris, ‘Gibel’, pp. 4–5. 72. See the story of Domicelė Kunčinienė in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 111; Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita, p. 154. 73. Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 47; Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita, p. 124. 74. Cf. Kazys Rukšėnas, ‘Hitlerininkų Politika Lietuvoje 1941–1944 Metais’, typewritten MS, Vilnius, 1970, p. 137. 75. Išlaisvintas Panevežietis, 4 July 1941, in Masinės žudynės, vol. 1, p. 51. 76. Zadok Bleiman, in Oshry, Annihilation, p. 268. 77. The order of the Utena security police chief on the confinement of thirty Jewish men in the synagogue on 14 July 1941 is in LCVA, R 715-1-1, p. 2; the names of twelve arrested individuals, including two Jews, are in ibid., p. 19. Cf. Bubnys, ‘Getai’, pp. 176–7. 78. Musja Burštenaitė survived and reported on 16 March 1945 on this ‘forest ghetto’ to the Soviet commission, GARF, 7021-94-433, 56–57R. 79. List of executions in the first Jäger report, BArch, R 70 Sowjetunion 15, 78; on 31 July: 235 men, 16 women, 1 Lithuanian communist, 1 double murdererrobber; on 7 August: 483 men, 87 women, 1 Lithuanian.

Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces  •  95 80. Oshry, Annihilation, pp. 268–71; Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita, pp. 124–5. 81. Bubnys, ‘Getai’, p. 177. 82. Oshry, Annihilation, p. 268. 83. Extraordinary Soviet Commission, Act 15 November 1944, GARF, 7021-94433, 1R. 84. On 26–31 August 1941 the Third Company, Second Lithuanian Police Battalion, is recorded as carrying out the ‘mission’, while the murders committed in Utena district in August, recorded in the reports of the German security police, were ascribed to Hamann’s unit. See Auxiliary Police Battalion Order No. 68, here the copy from Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem, No. 59/60. ‘Activists’ from Šiauliai took part in the killings in nearby Anykščiai; Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 47. 85. Bubnys, ‘Getai’, p. 177. 86. The testimonies of witnesses concerning the Jews’ journey to the killing site are in the Commission’s Acts of 15 November 1944, GARF, 7021-94-433, 1–2R. 87. Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita, pp. 151–5. Leib Koniuchowsky’s account, Yad Vashem Archives, O 71/167, pp. 150–241, is consistent with the recollections of the survivor, Motl. Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, pp. 6–7, gathered witness accounts on Anykščiai from Jews and Lithuanians, not trying to be ‘objective’ but to present many different voices and perspectives. Most of the survivors had managed to flee to the Soviet Union and reported on the fate of their families back in Anykščiai; ibid., pp. 82–93. 88. Story of Ona Balaišiėne, born 1911, in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 106. 89. Testimony of the convicted Lithuanian perpetrator Bronius Janickas, born 1921, in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 122. 90. Story of Elija Berkovič in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, pp. 74–7. 91. Story of Ona Balaišenė, in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 107, refers to Lithuanian perpetrators in the ‘forest ghetto’ who claimed that a Jew is not a human being. 92. Story of Bronė Bičkauskienė, in ibid., p. 113. 93. Story of Antanas Tuskenis, born 1906, in ibid., pp. 108–11. Cf. Bubnys, ‘Getai’, p. 71. 94. Story of Domicelė Kunčinienė, born 1913, in Vanagas, Nenusigręžk, p. 111–12. 95. Story of Jonas Uzdonas, in ibid., pp. 116–19. 96. Levin and Rosin (eds), Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Lita, pp. 374–7; Albinas Umbrasas on partisan activity in Molėtai, testimony given in Soviet trial, printed in Brandišauskas, 1941 m., pp. 160–2. Adomas Jasiūnas on the first days in Molėtai (July 1942), printed in ibid., pp. 319–25. A third agent in the village, Vyžinis, was shot when the Red Army retreated. 97. Bubnys, ‘Getai’, pp. 74–7; Alfonsas Eidintas, Lietuvos Žydų žudynių Byla: Dokumentų ir straipsnių rinkinys (Vilnius: VAGA, 2001), pp. 140–1. 98. Farewell letter by Natelevič, December 1941, typed copy in Archive Igud Jozei Lita, No. 3181.

96  •  Christoph Dieckmann   99. For the role of the local commandant’s office, see Rukšėnas, ‘Hitlerininkų Politika’, p. 115. Zadok Bleiman, witness to the mass killings in Utena on 29 August 1941, related that the mayor stood as a spectator near the mass grave; Oshry, Annihilation, p. 271. 100. Gewecke to von Renteln, 10 September 1941, BArch, R 90/146. 101. Zarasai self-defence unit’s chief to all partisan commanders, 2 September 1941, LCVA, R 1106-2-18, p. 82; contains a handwritten remark by Norkus on implementation, dated 15 September 1941. 102. Hamann to Jäger, 31 August 1941, LCVA, R 1399-1-9, p. 278; Jäger to von Renteln, 3 September 1941, LCVA, R 1399-1-7, p. 89 (quotation). 103. Bubnys, Lietuva, p. 396. 104. Ibid.; EM, No. 154, 12 January 1942, BArch, R 58/220, 78. 105. Report Sich.Div. 281, Department VII, 27 July 1941, NARA, RG 242, T 315, Roll 1870, 522. In this report Grebliauskas was singled out as the exception among the Lithuanian Kreischefs, who would not cooperate willingly with Security Division 281.

– 4– Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands Survival in Hiding

Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala

Introduction: Why and How to Compare Germany and the Netherlands? The Jews who were still living in Germany at the start of the genocide in October 1941 were very unlikely to survive the Nazi onslaught. There were several reasons for this. First, National Socialism ruled Germany and had the persecution of the Jews as one of its main ideologically driven aims from 1933 onwards. Second, all that was left of the Jewish community in Germany in 1941, after almost nine years of persecution and forced emigration, was a vulnerable group of people, isolated, impoverished and relatively old. Third, Germany was at war, a fact that increased the popular support for, or at least the acceptance of, its regime and its policies by the German public. Furthermore, from the beginning of the summer of 1941 the Nazis did their best through their propaganda channels to make the war look like a ‘struggle for existence’ of the German people against ‘the Jews’. Fourth, Jews in Germany were unlikely to be able to escape abroad. Not only were Germany’s borders closed and guarded, but the military occupation of the neighbouring countries meant that safe territories were even further away. Fifth, German citizens were probably less likely to help Jews who were trying to hide than the citizens of the countries that Germany had occupied. To Germans, helping and supporting Jews did not constitute part of the resistance against an occupying foreign power; these were activities against their own government and the so-called Volksgemeinschaft. Related to this, the risk of denunciation was probably higher in Germany than anywhere else and, what is more, after almost nine years of persecution of the opponents of the regime any resistance circles that still existed were isolated, weak and scattered. Nonetheless, Jews did survive the Holocaust in Germany: some 5,000 emerged from hiding after the downfall of Nazism. The fact that Jews survived in hiding might not seem particularly unusual; they did the same in many countries in Europe. However, if one takes into account all the negative factors that decreased the chances

97

98  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala of survival for Jews in Germany, it appears more remarkable. How can we explain the fact that they managed to do this? Comparing the unlikely survival of Jews in Germany with their survival in other countries can be instructive. As with any kind of behaviour, we should take into account the will, the ability and the circumstances that did or did not create opportunities to act, and not only of the Jews living in Germany but also of their persecutors, the bystanders and the people that actively tried to rescue the Jews. Comparing in this sense is not only intended to differentiate and underline differences, as historians often do, stressing the uniqueness of any situation and any event; it is also meant to improve our understanding of which differences were, generally speaking, meaningful for the chance of survival, and which were not. Here, we will compare the situation in Germany with that in the Netherlands. The Netherlands appears to be a good candidate for comparison. Once the Wehrmacht had occupied the Netherlands in May 1940 and an Aufsichtsverwaltung (supervisory administration) in which the SS had a strong representation had been established to rule the country, the Jews living there became the target of National-Socialist policies. This was especially the case from the beginning of 1941, when the Jews in the Netherlands were registered. As in other countries, this registration laid the groundwork for the persecution of the Jews since it made the identification of Jews possible. Policy measures modelled, on the one hand, on the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 and, on the other hand, on the developments in ‘Jewish policy’ in Germany were increasingly aimed at the Jews in the Netherlands too. In this way, the implementation of the persecution of the Jews in both countries was harmonized. This was not only true for its first stage; the development of the whole anti-Jewish policy in the Netherlands closely followed the course set out in Berlin. Not only did department IV-B4 of the Sicherheitspolizei in The Hague, which played the leading role in Jewish affairs in the Netherlands, coordinate its policies with the corresponding department IV-B4 in the headquarters of the Sicherheitspolizei in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in Berlin, but IV-B4 in Berlin closely supervised the implementation of its strategies in the Netherlands. The case of Jews in so-called mixed marriages, who were exempted from deportation, underlines this. When in the Netherlands anti-Jewish policy in 1943 diverged from the strategies that emanated from the RSHA with the initiative to free Jews in mixed marriages who had agreed to be sterilized from the duty of wearing the yellow Star of David on their clothes and to deport any male Jewish husband who refused, IV-B4 Berlin put an end to the initiative. The case of Jews in mixed marriages would be dealt with at the appropriate time, and IV-B4 Berlin would decide when. Before then, it was inadmissible for IV-B4 The Hague to adopt policies that were not, or not yet, on the agenda in Germany.1 From October 1941 in Germany and July 1942 in the Netherlands, trainloads of Jews were deported to the east to be killed. Unlike the situation in France2 or Belgium,3 this attempt at Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  99 question) in Germany and the Netherlands was implemented uncompromisingly and persistently by the persecuting bureaucracies. The transports from Germany to the Theresienstadt ghetto continued until the end of March 1945. The last train with deportees from the Netherlands left for Bergen-Belsen on 13 September 1944. At the outset of the Holocaust, the general conditions in Germany and the Netherlands seemed similar in some respects. Both countries had a Jewish com­mun­ity of considerable size, with the largest concentration located in the capital; both countries were ruled by a Nazi regime which worked relentlessly to deport this com­mun­ity; and in both countries the opportunities for Jews to escape to neutral countries, available to Jews in Denmark and Norway for example, were very limited. This is not to say that there were no differences between the two countries in terms of the conditions relating to the survival of the Jews; indeed, it is those differences that we are interested in here. By focusing on the differences, we aim to identify the factors that might explain the variation in the survival rates of Jews in Germany and the Netherlands. In this way, we hope to shed more light on the history of the Jews in hiding throughout Nazi-dominated Europe. In section two we will focus on the position of the Jews in Germany and the Netherlands before the Second World War. Section three touches upon the Nazi persecution of the Jews up to their deportation to the death camps in Eastern Europe. The long section four deals with the attempts at survival in hiding of Jews in Germany and the Netherlands: who hid, who survived and what influenced the chances of survival? Section five looks at the unsuccessful attempts, the Jews that were arrested in hiding. In section six, a comparison of the arrest rates over time, based on Gunnar Paulsson’s example for Warsaw, shows that Germany was an exceptionally dangerous place for Jews, whether in hiding or not. The final section draws some conclusions.

Jews in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1930s Size and Composition of the Jewish Population in Germany, 1933–9 When examining the chances of survival Jews in Germany had from October 1941 – the beginning of the deportations throughout the Third Reich – to the liberation in spring 1945, it is important to take into account Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policies and persecution practices since 1933. In January 1933 around 500,000 members of Jewish congregations lived in the German Reich, or 0.76 per cent of the German population (of more than 66 million).4 Seventy per cent of these Jews lived in cities5 – most, more than one-third, lived in Berlin; 160,564 or 6.3 per cent of the German capital’s population of four million were Jews. Until 1933 Frankfurt on the Main was the city in the German Reich with the largest percentage of Jews: of its 470,000 inhabitants, 30,000 (6.6 per cent) were

100  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala members of the Jewish community. Further noteworthy Jewish populations in the German Reich existed in Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, Leipzig and Munich, each with more than 10,000 people.6 In 1933 Jews were active in almost all fields of the economy, particularly in com­merce and small trades. A higher concentration of Jews could be found in several academic professions, especially the medical professions and law, because of the autonomy they offered.7 Regarding their religious and political orientation, the Jewish population in Germany was highly differentiated and divided. During the short Weimar Republic period, when German Jewry reached its brief and to date final cultural apex, the pursuit of emancipation and assimilation seemed to have been successful. Jews were German-national or national-liberal, liberal, left-wing liberal or social democratic.8 After Hitler came to power in 1933, the tallying and bureaucratic segregation of Jews began. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (7 April 1933) already introduced a racist definition. The population census of 16 June 1933 determined definitely an individual’s religious affiliation and citizenship. But at this point in time it was not yet possible to make calculations using the criterion of ‘race’ because the term ‘of Jewish ancestry’ had not yet been clearly defined. After the Nuremberg laws of 1935, the National Socialists differentiated between Volljuden and Geltungsjuden, as well as Halbjuden and Vierteljuden. In the middle of 1936, after the first waves of mass emigration, 415,000–425,000 Glaubensjuden (Jews by faith) still remained in Germany. For the ‘race engineers’ of the Third Reich the result of the 1933 census – which established the number of Jews only in terms of faith – was unsatisfactory as it did not include all ‘racial Jews’. In 1935, at the instigation of the Race Political Office of the Nazi Party (Rassenpolitisches Amt), the number of Rassejuden in the German Reich was estimated as a temporary measure. Important for the identification and segregation of Jews was the introduction of the obligatory identity card for Jews in July 1938. As of October 1938 the passports of Jews also had to be marked with a big red ‘J’. The 1939 census was the pinnacle of the precise registration of German Jews. According to the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) – founded in 1939 and bringing Gestapo, Criminal Police and Security Service under one roof – a ‘general and comprehensive survey of descent’ was carried out in order to establish the current exact number of ‘racial Jews’. German Jews and Jewish Mischlinge (people of mixed blood) were now fully registered. They were forced to state the religious affiliation of all four grandparents. Whenever the religion of any grandparents was declared as ‘Jewish’, German civil servants copied this into the column ‘descent’ on police registration cards. The Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), after having worked for years on a Reich card index of Jews and Jewish Mischlinge, was now able to complete its index card system almost without gaps, with the support of the Reich Office for Statistics (Reichskartei der deutschen Juden am Statistischen Reichsamt). Although

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  101 the deportation of the Jews was not yet planned, this completeness was later essential for the smooth administration of the deportations.9 After the November pogroms in 1938, during which more than 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps, emigration rates again rose as individual Jews took every opportunity to escape.10 However, many Jews, who had been expelled from the economy and had their assets expropriated, were impoverished and dependent on social welfare and therefore had no choice but to stay in Germany. Now the regime switched over to enforcing the segregation of Jews from the non-Jewish population and developed a community in forced isolation (Zwangsgemeinschaft). Jewish organizations had to take over the organization of the cultural life and social welfare of the Jewish population; Jewish pupils had to leave German schools. The (spatial) separation of Jews was accomplished through their concentration or ghettoization in Judenhäusern, Judenwohnungen or barrack camps and the enforced administration of their assets in trust. In Berlin at the end of April 1939 the expulsion of Jews from their homes started. Beginning in March 1941, Hitler’s architect (Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt) Albert Speer evicted thousands of Berlin Jews from their apartments in order to free them up for ‘Aryan’ tenants. Within a few weeks, the expelled Jewish tenants had to find alternative accommodation with relatives or acquaintances, or the housing service of the Jewish Congregation had to provide quarters for them as sub-tenants of other Jews.11 Membership of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany), founded at the beginning of 1939, was made compulsory and, as of October 1940, forced labour was introduced. Already in 1938 a geschlossener Arbeitseinsatz (total labour duty) was set in place for unemployed Jews and those supported by Jewish social welfare.12 Beginning in May 1940, non-needy Jews were also included. After October 1940 almost all Jews fit for work aged between eighteen and fifty-five were appointed to forced labour. Shortly afterwards, the limitations on age and fitness were repealed: more and more minors as well as old and sick people were obliged to work in the factories. By the end of July 1941 up to 90 per cent of all people capable of work were employed, a total of 51,000 to 53,000; the remainder were employed in Jewish institutions.13 In 1941 only 163,696 so-called Rassejuden lived in the Altreich (i.e. within Germany’s borders of 1937), around 40 per cent of whom (72,872 people) resided in Berlin.14 More and more Jews from smaller towns had moved to the capital, hoping for some protection against persecution in the anonymity of the metropolis.

Size and Composition of the Jewish Population in the Netherlands before the Second World War In the 1930s the size of the Jewish community in the Netherlands was already declining from its peak of 115,223 in 1920. This decline was the combined result

102  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala of secularization and a low fertility rate, and the increasing popularity of mixed marriages. In Amsterdam, where over half of the Jews in the Netherlands lived, the proportion of mixed marriages increased from 6 to almost 17 percent during the first decades of the twentieth century.15 However, most of the Jews in the Netherlands did not assimilate via mixed marriages or baptism. Their Jewish identity remained important to them, whether or not the gentile environment reinforced their awareness of being Jewish. Jews were on average well integrated into Dutch society. As far as the Jewish religion still meant something to them, which was less the case for the workers (socialists) among them, they saw it as a private affair with little direct relevance for political or social behaviour. Jews worked in every occupation, with an overrepresentation in commerce, the intellectual professions and certain industries (for example diamonds) and an under-representation in the agricultural sector of the economy. Regarding income, there was not much difference between Jews and gentiles.16 In the pillarized society that the Netherlands was in this period of time, segmented along denominational lines, the Jews did not form their own pillar. Instead, they participated in the liberal and socialist political parties, and they were often members of socialist labour unions. At the same time, assimilation and integration did not fully transpire. In part, this was because of anti-Judaism and antiSemitism. Both were relatively mild: extremism was thought indecent, the equality before the law introduced in 1796 was never questioned and at the societal level Jews encountered little hindrance to the development of their talents.17 Anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, however, did show themselves in personal relationships, where stereotypes and discrimination played a role. There were also political consequences. Independent of the total number of inhabitants of the Dutch municipalities, it appears that the percentage of votes for the Dutch National Socialist Movement (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, NSB) during the elections of 1935, 1937 and 1939 correlates significantly with the number of Jewish inhabitants as well as the percentage of Jewish inhabitants, that is, their absolute and relative presence.18 Although the NSB did not start out as an anti-Semitic movement, it began to radicalize in 1934 and grew more and more anti-Semitic.19 In this regard, the statistical correlation between the percentage and number of Jewish inhabitants and the percentage of votes for the NSB suggests that an aversion to Jews influenced voting behaviour. The fact that the NSB won almost 8 percent of the votes in 1935 and still 4 percent in 1937 and 1939 suggests that this aversion might have been quite widespread. Together with the general pillarization of Dutch society, the orientation of people towards their own religious community, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism influenced the extent to which Jews and gentiles had contact as well as the nature and intensity of that contact. While it is likely that such attitudes reduced the chances Jews had of finding a place to hide when the deportations to the death camps started, their influence should not be overstated. There is no evidence that the local degree of

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  103 anti-Semitism, again measured as the percentage of votes for the NSB, influenced the chances of survival that Jews had.20 Pillarization in this regard appears more important, since its local strength influenced the local survival rate of Jews in a negative way.21 The most important source regarding the size and composition of the Jewish community in the Netherlands on the eve of its annihilation is the registration of 1941. From the start of the occupation in May 1940, the Germans were very keen to register the Jews in the Netherlands. Local initiatives by units of the Sicherheitspolizei resulted in registrations in two cities, Middelburg and Vlissingen by June 1940.22 Apart from that, the bureau of the Sicherheitspolizei in Arnhem saw its solo attempts at registration blocked twice by its headquarters in The Hague. Meanwhile, a full registration of Jews was in preparation. On 10 January 1941 Reichskommissar Dr Arthur Seyss-Inquart, head of the German administration in the Netherlands and the personal representative of Hitler, proclaimed that people ‘of Jewish blood’ had to go to the local register office to have themselves registered. The fateful consequences of this registration were apparently not foreseen, or perhaps the fact that Israelites had already been registered during the previous census before the occupation also played a role. Anyway, apart from a few dozen people everybody obeyed the decree.23 The registration process took place during the first months of 1941 and revealed in October of that year a total of 140,001 Jews, that is, people with three or more Jewish grand parents who belonged or had belonged to the Jewish religious community. People with two Jewish grandparents were also viewed as Jews as long as they were married to a Jew on or after 9 May 1940 or were Israelite on or after 9 May 1940. People with two Jewish grandparents who did not meet these conditions were considered to be half-Jews (14,549 in total). The 5,719 people with only one Jewish grandparent were designated as quarter-Jews. Of the full Jews, i.e. those who were singled out for persecution and had their identity card marked with a ‘J’, about 15,000 had German nationality. They were refugees who had fled Nazi Germany before the war. A further 7,000 had another foreign nationality.24 At the beginning of the German occupation, Jews resided in almost half of the 1,054 municipalities that the Netherlands counted. Their distribution across these municipalities was, however, quite irregular. With 79,497 Jewish inhabitants, about 10 percent of its total population, Amsterdam housed almost 60 per cent of the Jews in the Netherlands. Together with The Hague (13,862 Jews), and Rotterdam (8,368 Jews), the three largest cities were the domicile of almost three-quarters of the Jews in the Netherlands. Outside of these cities, there were only a few communities that numbered 1,000 Jews or more: Apeldoorn (1,549), Arnhem (1,874), Enschede (1,310), Groningen (2,781), Haarlem (1,202), Hilversum (2,209) and Utrecht (1,866).25 Until the beginning of the deportations to the death camps in the east in July 1942, this distribution of Jews over the country for the most part did not change.

104  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala

Comparison of the Position of German and Dutch Jewry on the Eve of the Second World War In order to compare in a meaningful way the position of the persecuted Jews facing the Holocaust in Germany and the Netherlands,26 it is necessary to observe their behavioural choices in the context of the specific conditions that influenced their will, capability and opportunity to act. By ‘conditions’ we mean not only the char­ acteristics of the Jews themselves, which could result in better or worse choices regarding whether or how to attempt to survive in hiding, but also the gentile social environment and the policies of the Nazis in both countries. Both shaped the context in which the Jews had to try to survive. In this section, we sketch the Jewish communities in Germany and the Netherlands at the outset of the Second World War. On the eve of the deportations, the communities were of comparable size: 163,696 people in Germany as against 140,001 in the Netherlands. In both countries, Jews were not evenly spread over the country. In Germany slightly under half and in the Netherlands slightly more than half were living in the respective capitals. When their positions in the gentile German as well as the Dutch social order are considered, the high degree of assimilation in both societies becomes apparent. Regarding their religious and political orientation, the Jews in both countries were differentiated and divided. There were important differences too, though. The Nazis had targeted the Jewish community in Germany since their takeover in 1933, while in the Netherlands the Jews were safe until the German occupation became a fact in May 1940. As a result, the composition of the Jewish community in Germany was different: around two-thirds of the Jews in Germany had already fled abroad by October 1941, leaving behind a relatively impoverished and aged Jewish community. This was not the case in the Netherlands. Few Jews managed to escape the sudden and rapid occupation in May 1940 that brought almost the whole Jewish community under Nazi control. The Dutch Jewish community therefore included a relatively high number of young and middle-aged people who were more likely and more capable of taking action to save themselves and who, at the beginning of the occupation, were probably less impoverished than their German counterparts. However, the unemployment that was increasingly forced upon the Jews and the final confiscation of their belongings were going to change that before the deportations to the death camps started. So the relative difference in vulnerability between Jews in the Netherlands and in Germany decreased over time. A second difference relates to knowledge about the intentions of the Nazis. Because they had first-hand experience of Nazi persecution since 1933 and because information about what was happening to the Jews living in and deported to Eastern Europe was widespread in Germany from the summer or autumn of 1942, it is likely that Jews in this country in general had a better idea of what to expect of the future than Jews in the Netherlands. Taking their age and resources into account, it is not

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  105 unlikely that more Jews in Germany put greater effort into trying to prepare for that future (for example by looking for more trustworthy hosts with whom to hide) than similar Jews in the Netherlands did. This difference in knowledge could have been compounded by the fact that gentiles in Germany will also have known better what to expect from the Nazis, with mixed results. On the one hand, this awareness will have scared people away who felt it would be too risky to give help to Jews who wanted to hide, but on the other hand it might have convinced others to offer assistance Jews and have strengthened the convictions of people who were already willing to do so.

The Road to Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands Germany: From Collective Expulsion to Deportation, 1939–41 On 28 and 29 October 1938 the first collective deportation of Jews from the German Reich took place. Some 12,000–17,000 people of Polish descent, mostly men, were violently expelled, with police, Reichsbahn and the fiscal authorities working in close cooperation – a paradigm for later deportations. Since it was clear that not many German Jews would be able to flee or emigrate during the war, the Nazi leadership revised their anti-Jewish policies after the war began: the aim became to ‘cleanse’ the German Reich by violently ‘resettling’ the Jewish population and pillaging their property. Already in September 1939 plans were made – and later abandoned – for a ‘Jew reservation’ in the occupied Polish territory to the east of Nisko on the San River. The deportation of the Jews from the Prussian province of Pomerania (Stettin and Schneidemühl) in February 1940 remains an almost forgotten singular case of Nazi anti-Jewish policy: more than 1,000 people were carted from Pomerania to Lublin and its vicinity in the Generalgouvernement of occupied Poland.27 At the end of October 1940, as part of the Madagascar Plan, the RSHA organized the deportation of at least 6,500 Jews from Baden and the Saarpfalz to the internment camp of Gurs in the south of France.28 The fact that those deported from Germany were ‘settled’ in overcrowded Nazi-occupied areas and denied any means of making a living, not to mention deprived of their assets, shows that the 1939 and 1940 policy against German Jews was already deadly.29 Finally, in the spring of 1941 the RSHA intensified preparations for the deportation of German Jews prior to the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. In August 1941, however, as the war against the Soviet Union entered a serious crisis and at the same time mass executions on Soviet soil by Einsatzgruppen and other German killing units began to include the entire civilian Jewish population, Hitler spoke against large-scale deportations during the war and ordered partial deportations from the large German cities to the Warthegau, as the originally envisaged destinations – the Soviet territories and the Generalgouvernement – were blocked.

106  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala In this context the decision was made to have the German Jews wear the yellow star, which was comparable to the obligation placed on Jews in Poland as early as November 1939 to wear a white badge with the Star of David. The medium-term plan was to deport the Jews ‘to the east’ after the expected military victory over the Soviet Union; in the short term the star should isolate them once and for all from the German public and make their impending deportation easier. At the same time, ‘the Jews’ were portrayed as the ‘main enemies’ in the war. The yellow star decree of 15 September 1941 was linked to the prohibition on Jews leaving their place of residence without permission. These were all basic prerequisites for the forthcoming deportations throughout the Reich.30 At that time – September 1941 – in many cities and towns the segregation of the Jews in Judenhäusern or barrack camps was almost total; many of them were doing forced labour. Between 14 and 18 September 1941 Hitler approved beginning the deportation of German Jews to the east. Nazi officials now discussed with renewed intensity the European dimension of the deportations, parallel to the partial deportations from Germany.31 The RSHA had to determine who, where, how and when to deport, to prescribe the dates of transports, rates and the places from where Jews would be deported, and to inform the respective State Police offices (Stapoleitstellen). Usually the local Gestapo itself (or the local Jewish communities on the Gestapo’s orders) had to select the victims to be transported. The Gestapo offices carried out the selection and collection of the victims in close cooperation with employment offices, armament inspections and party and municipal authorities, and the transports had to be coordinated with the regular police and the regional Reichsbahn (railway) management. Perfidiously, the Nazi authorities forced Jewish representatives and their employees to cooperate with the Gestapo in organizing the deportation transports. After clarifying all the plans and technical details in August and September 1941, the RSHA informed the Jewish Reichsvereinigung on 1 October 1941 of the forthcoming allegedly ‘partial evacuation’.32 The deportation of Jews from Berlin, Frankfurt on the Main, Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Vienna and Prague was to be started on 15 October by train. The first transport left Berlin on 18 October.33 Some 9,194 Jews from the Altreich had been transported to the Łódź ghetto by 5 November 1941.34 From this time on at the latest, there was no more escape. On 23 October 1941 a decree was issued announcing a prohibition on the emigration of Jews, to go into force immediately. This decree was received not only by offices in Germany and Austria but also by Gestapo offices in the occupied countries such as Belgium, France35 and the Netherlands.36 Obviously the intention was to extend the ‘partial transports’ to total deportations, in the future on a European scale as well. In a Stuttgart Gestapo decree of 18 November 1941 it was stated for the first time: ‘Within the scope of the pan-European de-Judaization, transports continuously leave for Reichskommissariat Ostland.’37 In a second deportation phase between

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  107 8 November 1941 and 6 February 1942, transports from the Reich went to Minsk, Kaunas and Riga in the occupied Soviet territories. Among the first deportees to Łódź was a group of forced labourers working in the armament industry in Berlin and Frankfurt on the Main. This elicited protest from the Wehrmacht High Command (Oberkommando). The Wehrmacht Economy and Armament Office was of course interested in the health of the war economy.38 As a result of this protest, guidelines for the ‘realization of the evacuation of Jews’ disseminated at the end of October made it clear that forced labourers were not to be deported ‘in the event that the fulfilment of urgent armament orders is uncertain’. In reality, however, the fate of forced labourers came to depend on the local balance of power between the Gestapo, employment office and Wehrmacht.39 At the time of these first transports from throughout the Reich to Łódź, Minsk, Riga and Kaunas beginning in the autumn of 1941, the Nazi rulers did not yet have a definite intention to exterminate. The rapid deportation of Jews to the east was to make German cities judenfrei, as Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels announced in mid-August 1941.40 Those people who were intended for ‘evacuation’ in October 1941 and the following months were not able to foresee the deadly implication of the deportations. In numerous testimonies survivors stressed that, in the main, people assigned to these first transports, as well as their relatives who remained behind, believed that they would have to work very hard as slave labourers but would have a chance of survival. This view was supported by the Nazi authorities. Nevertheless, after years of persecution and increasingly anti-Jewish policies, forebodings were widespread, and even during the first stages of deportation in autumn 1941 many tried desperately to avoid being deported – though usually without taking the risk of going underground. The numerous large payments made to ‘agents’ demonstrate the many attempts made in Berlin to escape evacuation.41 In one instance, a staff member of the district housing office for Jews was to postpone the deportation of more than eighty Berlin Jews in return for payments that were to last at least for the duration of the forthcoming winter.42 Also, employers tried to obtain exemptions from deportation for their forced labourers, and many petitions were sent to the Gestapo.43 For most people who were able to avoid deportation in this way, it meant only a delay. In some cases, however, individuals used the time gained to make plans and were able to go into hiding at a later point in time. Charlotte Bamberg only went into hiding at the beginning of 1943. She reported: In October 1941 a trusted acquaintance came to me and asked whether I had enough money to have my name struck off the list for transport to Poland. I answered in the affirmative and my friend gave me the name of a member of the Speer Ministry who needed money and had enough influence. I paid up and escaped the transport in January 1942 – my roommate was deported to Riga at that time.44

108  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala Only 5 per cent, at most, of those who went underground in Germany did so between autumn 1941 and spring 1942.

The Role of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland The so-called Reich’s Association of the Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, RV) was a compulsory organization, established on 4 July 1939 as the successor to the earlier body representing German Jews, the Reichsvertretung, which had been disbanded by the Nazi authorities in 1938. From the outset, the RV was under the strict control of the RSHA and the Gestapo. The fact that the RV was used by the persecuting authorities to help organize the deportations made it even more difficult for the Jewish population to appreciate the real meaning of the deportations. In the capital, where the Jewish community continued to exist as a sort of Berlin branch of the RV until January 1943, two board members and the lawyer Martha Mosse, director of the Housing Advice Office, were summoned by the Gestapo in early October 1941. They were informed that the ‘resettlement’ of Berlin’s Jews was about to begin, and that the Jewish community was required to help in the process. If they failed to cooperate, the ‘resettlement’ would be handled by the SA and SS alone.45 Despite considerable misgivings, they finally opted for the strategy of cooperation in order to avert a ‘greater evil’. The areas of cooperation can be described as ‘assistance with recording’ and ‘assistance with assembling’. In the Berlin RV office, reports were filed by district offices throughout Germany on the dates, sizes and costs of transports. In this way, representatives of the RV were always fully informed of events in the Altreich, often in advance, and put the matter on the agenda of board meetings, avoiding too much detail in the minutes. Within the organization itself, employees and helpers were required to maintain strict silence. One of the clauses that each employee was required to sign warned that ‘any violation of the obligation to secrecy will be severely punished’.46 Aside from registration, assistance in gathering people at collection points was also a task assigned to the Jewish community. A community bulletin informed members of ‘the apparel appropriate for travel’, the correct way to attach the oblig­ atory Jewish star to clothing, the contents of luggage permitted, and the option of depositing personal documents with the community. When the deportations began, RV representatives may have been of the opinion that deportation indeed meant a bad fate for those affected. At the same time, they also believed – like most Jews – that as responsible cooperating organizers they could alleviate the bitter fate of deportation by providing responsible organization, achieving postponements or even exemptions in cases of particular hardship. The decision to cooperate, to remain silent and to deceive, under threat of death, led to an irresolvable dilemma: it had ‘a life-threatening effect on community members’.47

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  109 The forced cooperation of the Jewish representatives made it even more difficult for individual Jews to make the decision to go underground. Herbert A. Strauss, who lived in hiding in Berlin from October 1942 until his escape to Switzerland in June 1943, wrote in his autobiography: The routine quality of the procedure, the presence of Jewish helpers, and the use of routine legal formalities to initiate mass murder on a genocidal scale had the effect of minimizing impulses to flee or resist – and made the risk of refusal or flight seem greater than falling in with the law-and-order procedure and the bureaucratic calm in which it was practised. Resistance was not likely in any event, given the advanced age of most Berlin Jews at that time, their ignorance of what awaited them, and the absence of preconditions (arms, organization, leaders, communication, plan of action) that would have made resistance possible.48

While people ‘evacuated’ in the first transports were fetched away unexpectedly, later the Jewish community reminded in writing those who were to be deported to appear at the collection points, where they had to fill in a form declaring all of their assets. As the functionaries of the Berlin centre of the RV received from the district offices the dates, number and costs of the transports, they had exact information in advance. Silence and cover-ups were maintained even when the hope that deportation meant only a partial evacuation turned out to be an illusion and the intention of the deportations became obvious. They adhered strictly to their vow of secrecy until their own deportation.49 Within the first months, many functionaries and employees in Berlin may have regarded their work as protection against their own deportation. No later than the summer of 1942, however, these hopes were dashed. On 19 June 1942 the Gestapo detained fifty RV employees – among them some leading functionaries50 – and sent them to Majdanek or Minsk after a few days.51 By the autumn of 1942 at the latest, it was clear that an only partial evacuation was an illusion.52 On 20 October 1942 some 533 employees – men and women – together with 328 family members were arbitrarily selected for deportation in the so-called Gemeindeaktion (community action). Twenty of them resisted and went into hiding. As an immediate consequence, the Gestapo arrested eighteen leading functionaries as hostages and threatened to shoot them. Most of those who had gone underground turned themselves in, and the rest were caught. Nevertheless, the Gestapo shot eight of the arrested hostages.53 The ‘inescapable dilemma’ which the RV faced regarding the deportations was the impossibility of fulfilling the requirements of the Gestapo while also protecting the interests of their members; of maintaining their own organization while serving the Jewish community at the same time. The goals of the regime proved to be incompatible with the will to save their members.54 When the RV was liquidated in June 1943, three months after the conclusion of the deportation of the Volljuden, 16,600 Jews still lived in mixed marriages in the

110  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala German Reich. A small RV rump organization was made to organize the deportation of those Jews who had lost their ‘Aryan’ marriage partners to death or divorce55 and of those caught in hiding. We know that many Jewish partners of mixed marriages went into hiding at a late stage, even as late as February 1945.

The Netherlands: From Isolation to Deportation, 1940–2 Although the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 did not result in the organized pogrom that many expected, 56 Dutch Nazis and individual German soldiers did smash up a few synagogues and Jewish cemeteries and did commit street violence against Jews. Meanwhile, the Reichskommissariat Niederlande planned to bring its policies regarding the Jews in line with those of the Reich. During the first few months, however, only a few measures were taken. Jews had to leave the air-raid precaution service on 1 July 1940, and ritual slaughter was banned on 31 July 1940. Starting in September, the measures became more severe. That month the Dutch secretaries-general, the ministry chiefs who replaced the Dutch government that had fled to London, were ordered not to appoint any Jews in the civil service any more. After the registration in October 1940 of the ‘racial’ background of all civil servants, any Jewish civil servants were sent home and officially fired in February 1941. Also in October 1940 the businesses owned by Jews were registered, followed in January 1941 by the registration of all people of ‘Jewish blood’.57 The year 1941 saw a range of measures that were instrumental in socially isolating the Jews as well as preparing the ground for their expropriation and deportation. Jewish physicians, apothecaries, lawyers and translators were not allowed to work for gentiles any more; many Jewish businesses were placed under a Verwalter (administrator), while others had to close or were sold; Jews were banned from visiting swimming pools, public parks, cafés, restaurants, hotels and guest houses, theatres, cinemas, concerts, libraries and non-Jewish markets; Jews had to organize their own schools; Jews were barred from all non-economic organizations and associations, etc. Of special importance were the ‘reprisal’ arrests of at least 838 Jewish men in Amsterdam and the eastern part of the Netherlands in February, June and September 1941, allegedly for violence or acts of resistance. These Jews were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where they were killed or driven to suicide soon after their arrival. The death notices that arrived in the Netherlands terrified many people and convinced them that it was fruitless to resist and better to cooperate – a message that the Germans also tried to communicate through the bloody suppression of a strike by Dutch gentiles in reaction to the arrest of 425 Jews in Amsterdam in February 1941.58 Other important measures were the establishment of a Judenrat, the Jewish Council for Amsterdam and, at the end of March 1941, the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  111 At first this Zentralstelle was supposed to function like the Zentralstellen in Vienna and Prague. It was meant to assume responsibility for the registration of the Jews, which was already in progress since 10 January 1941, the monitoring of the Jewish community and central control of the ‘voluntary’ emigration of the Jews from the Netherlands.59 In preparation for this, its leader, SS-Sturmbannführer Hellmuth Reinhard, who later headed the Gestapo in Oslo and organized the persecution of the Jews in Norway,60 sent SS-Hauptsturmführer Ferdinand aus der Fünten to Prague to get some administrative experience. In September 1941 the German authorities started to prepare for the forced emigration of the German Jews in the Netherlands. Through the Jewish Council for Amsterdam all German Jews in the Netherlands, later followed by all non-Dutch Jews, were told that they had to apply for ‘voluntary’ emigration. This meant that they had to fill in thirty-two questionnaires and have all their possessions registered.61 The thousands who applied for emigration did not in fact get permission to move abroad. ‘Voluntary’ emigration remained limited to the few hundred Jews who had the necessary documents to enter the countries of destination and were able to pay the necessary sums of money or valuables the Nazis demanded for their travel to safety.62 Another group of about 400 Jews that was able to travel abroad did so with help of the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German army. G.W. SchulzeBernett, an officer of the Abwehr, and H.W. Hamacher, a German businessman living in Amsterdam and owner of the transport company Brasch und Rothenstein, were both opponents of the Nazis and their anti-Jewish policies. In order to save as many Jews as they could, they thought of a scheme that would allow a few hundred German Jews to escape. Allegedly, their emigration provided cover for several German Jewish agents of the Abwehr who would travel abroad with this group of emigrants, but of course once abroad these agents could not be supervised. Anyway, the RSHA accepted the plan and in six transports to Spain 486 Jews managed to get out, the last ones in January 1942.63 For the remaining multitudes ‘voluntary’ migration became even more difficult after 23 October 1941, when Himmler prohibited the emigration of Jews in general; emigration was only to be allowed in ‘ganz besonders gelagerten Einzelfällen, zum Beispiel bei Vorliegen eines positiven Reichsinteresses’ (‘very particular individual cases, for example where there is a positive Reich interest’).64 This was the case, for instance, when large sums of foreign currency could be paid. Generally speaking, however, Himmler’s decree signalled the end of emigration, and the Nazis started to get ready for other measures. Just two weeks later, at the beginning of November 1941, Jews were prohibited from moving house or travelling without a permit. Starting in January 1942, Jews living in several municipalities, especially in the provinces of Noord-Holland and Zeeland in the west of the Netherlands, were ordered to move to Amsterdam if their nationality was Dutch, or to the transit camp of Westerbork if they where German immigrants.

112  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala In 1942 the isolation of the Jews was taken a step further. Jews were banned from certain professions; had to turn in their radios; were forbidden from using the telephone, from employing non-Jewish domestic servants or visiting gentiles, and from buying fruit and vegetables in non-Jewish shops; and were not allowed to have Post Office accounts, etc. Some were (temporarily) consigned to forced labour camps in the Netherlands. More and more measures were now taken to prepare for the coming deportations. The identity cards of all Jews had to be marked with a ‘J’ as of January 1942; Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David from the beginning of May 1942; they were not allowed to use or own motor cars and bicycles or to use public transport any more; and they had to be at home during Jewish curfew hours (from 8 p.m.). Since after deportation their belongings would fall to the German Reich, they were not allowed to sell or dispose of furniture or household goods any longer and were forced to hand over to a special bank all their assets valued at more than 250 Dutch guilders. On 3 February 1942 the tasks of the Zentralstelle were aligned with those of the Sicherheitspolizei in the Netherlands in preparation for the coming deportation of the Jews to the death camps. While SS-Sturmbannführer Willy Lages, the chief of the Sicherheitspolizei in Amsterdam, became head of the Zentralstelle, Aus der Fünten was made responsible for its daily affairs. These affairs included the production of the lists of Jews that were to be taken to the transit camps in Westerbork and Vught and the coordination of these transports.65 In these tasks, the Zentralstelle was assisted by the Jewish Council for Amsterdam. The Jewish Council was established in the wake of the death of Hendrik Koot, a Dutch Nazi. Koot and his companions had ignored German prohibitions on entering the quarters of Amsterdam where many Jews were living. In February 1941 they went there to engage in violent clashes and to ‘conquer the street’ during which Koot was mortally wounded.66 In reaction, the Germans temporarily sealed off the quarter and ordered the founding of a Judenrat to represent the Jews living there and to function as an intermediary between the German authorities and the Jewish community. Within a few days this resulted in the installation of the Jewish Council for Amsterdam.67 Gradually, this Jewish Council evolved from a local council into a kind of administration for all the Jews in the Netherlands, an administration that took German orders. While the Jewish Council tried to mitigate or hinder the implementation of these orders, the Nazis in turn tried to turn the Jewish Council into a tool for their policies. Since the German authorities had the means to enforce cooperation and implement their wishes, they were inevitably much more successful in their strategy than the Jewish Council was in achieving its aims.68 In the end, it cooperated with the Nazis, even when it came to the deportations to the east. It did so ‘to prevent worse’, but without attaining that aim for the greater number of Jews in the Netherlands. Although, as it is said, the Jewish Council did not bring about more harm than the Germans intended, it did make the organization and implementation

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  113 of the persecution a lot easier for them. And it continued to do so in spite of signals that the Germans were aiming for the destruction of the Jews, or rather most Jews. The Jewish Council’s closest circle of members, and the relatives of these members, were spared for their services and deported to Theresienstadt rather than Auschwitz or Sobibór. The position of the Jewish Council can be illustrated by analysing the events surrounding the labour camps for Jews in the Netherlands. The measures that the Nazis took to isolate the Jews economically and socially resulted in growing numbers of Jewish unemployed. Since the German authorities had already excluded the Jews from labour drafts to Germany in 1940 and since they did not want the Jews to enrol in the labour projects for the unemployed Dutch gentiles either, the decision was taken in October 1941 to organize labour camps solely for Jews. For the most part these labour camps were situated in the northern and eastern parts of the Netherlands. At first, the Jewish unemployed that were sent to these camps came solely from Amsterdam. The Jewish Council did not want to have anything to do with the selection of who had to go and who could stay. This meant that the regional employment office was given the job of deciding which Jews would be called up for medical examination, an inspection by Jewish physicians that work camp candidates had to pass. However, when the German authorities decided in February 1942 that employed Jews could also be sent to the labour camps, the Jewish Council thought it was better to pre-select the candidates in order to be able to prevent people who were important for the functioning of the Jewish Council or the Jewish community from being selected. While doing so, the Jewish Council also tried to limit the number of labour camp candidates and to delay the whole process. The German authorities, however, were always able to intensify their pressure. When they asked in May 1942 for 3,000 Jews and the Jewish Council replied that these could not be found in Amsterdam, they decided they could come from other parts of the country as well. And when, during the following selection procedures, Jewish physicians in Groningen decided they did not want to cooperate and test the candidates, 69 the Nazis took the opportunity to teach the Jewish Council a lesson. Ignoring the list of pre-selected candidates drawn up the Jewish Council, they called up all Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five in the provinces of Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe and had them medically examined by physicians who were also members of the NSB. They found practically all the candidates fit for work. Some 850 of them, from the cities of Groningen, Leek, Stadskanaal and Winschoten, were sent to the labour camps only a few days before the deportations to the death camps started.70 On 4 July 1942 the first call-up orders for the so-called labour service in Germany were distributed. The first train with Jews bound for the Westerbork transit camp left Amsterdam ten days later, and on 15 July 1942 the first train with 1,135 Jews left

114  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala Westerbork for Auschwitz. By 13 September 1944 a further 100 trains had deported a total of 107,000 Jews, of whom 102,000 were killed.71 This means that 73 per cent of the Jews in the Netherlands who were registered at the beginning of 1941 did not survive the German occupation. This mortality rate was, however, an average: the survival rate in the almost 500 municipalities where Jews were living varied between 100 and 0 per cent.72 In the case of the latter deportations, the Jewish Council actively cooperated from the start in their preparation and execution. In return, it was given the opportunity to exempt from deportation those Jews it deemed necessary for the functioning of the Jewish Council or the Jewish community as a whole. While the numbers of exempted Jews at first ran into tens of thousands, over time the Germans reduced these numbers. To the Germans, the temporary exemptions proved an important instrument: by giving hope to the Jewish Council they could keep the cooperation going. At the same time, the system of exemption is suggested to have been instrumental in sapping the will of Jews to resist, diverting their efforts into getting an exemption instead of finding a place to hide.73 In the end, all the exemptions from deportation turned out to be temporary.

Comparison of the Situation of German and Dutch Jewry on the Eve of the Deportations During the period of time between the beginning of the Second World War and the start of the mass deportations to the death camps in Eastern Europe, the conditions under which the Jews in Germany and the Netherlands lived had become more alike. Many of the anti-Jewish regulations aimed at isolation and expropriation that were already in effect in Germany, such as the Nuremberg race laws, were also introduced in the Netherlands. Step by step, Jews became socially segregated and cut off from gentile society. The relentlessness of the persecution of the Jews in both countries is an important similarity that becomes apparent when Nazi policies in Germany and the Netherlands are compared to those in France74 and Denmark.75 Unlike in these two countries, the Nazis had fewer reasons to mitigate their anti-Jewish policies in Germany or the Netherlands. In order to be able to control and organize the emigration of the Jews in Germany in an efficient way, the Nazis set up the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (RV). Founded in the summer of 1939, this was an organization imposed upon the Jewish community and all people defined as Jews by the regime. It succeeded an earlier body representing the Jews (the Reichsvertretung) that had been disbanded by the Nazi authorities in 1938. From the outset, the RV was under the strict control of the RSHA and the Stapoleitstellen. Its most important use from October 1941 was to help the Nazis select the Jews for transport and to organize the deportations, giving them the reassuring air of an orderly and regulated process.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  115 In the Netherlands, the counterpart of the RV was the Jewish Council for Amsterdam. Founded at the beginning of 1941 on the orders of the Nazis, it was to play a key role in the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands. As the isolation of the Jews progressed through 1941 and the first half of 1942, the Jewish Council turned into a kind of administration for the Jewish community, taking over responsibility for tasks and services that were formerly performed by the Dutch government. In addition, it was responsible for the implementation of many of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis, including assisting in the preparation of the deportation of the Jews in the Netherlands to the transit camps in Westerbork and Vught, although – and in contrast to the RV – only in The Hague does this assistance appear to have meant selecting the Jews for deportation. As in the case of the RV in Germany, the Jewish Council for Amsterdam coop­ erated with the Nazis as it was expected to, in spite of rumours about what was really happening to the people who were deported to the east. The ideas that it could ‘prevent worse’ and ‘avert a greater evil’ in this way were compelling enough reasons to ensure that both organizations cooperated in the registration and assembling of the Jews for deportation. The temporary exemption from deportation that the members of the RV and the Jewish Council received played a role too. The decision to cooperate led to an irresolvable dilemma.

Jews in Hiding in Germany and the Netherlands Germany: Who Went Underground, When and Where? Only estimates exist of the numbers who went underground in Germany:76 approx­ imately 10,000–12,000 Jews went into hiding,77 5,000–7,000 of them in Berlin.78 As demonstrated in the preceding section, at the beginning of the deportations in autumn 1941 people were afraid of the forced labour they feared awaited them in the east. Eichmann’s instructions of 31 January 1942 regarding exemptions from ‘evacuation’ (Jews working in industries vital to the war effort and Jews over sixtyfive years of age) were merely deceptions.79 Analysis of numerous survivors’ testimonies shows that only after the summer of 1942 did Jews become increasingly aware of the real meaning of the transports to the east. They understood that deportation was similar to a death sentence. Nevertheless, the decision to go into hiding was dramatic and terrifying in every respect, since it meant relinquishing the last vestiges of a normal existence, however impoverished and oppressive, and the chances of survival in a state of illegality in a hostile environment seemed slim. However, as the consciousness of the implications of deportation developed, so the readiness to risk living underground grew.80 Most of those in Berlin who tried to escape postponed the moment of going into hiding until very late. Of the people recorded as having been in hiding in the capital, in around

116  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala 1,000 cases the exact point in time (month and year) that they went underground could be established.81 Only 3 per cent went underground before December 1941 and just under 34 per cent in the course of 1942, mostly between October and December.82 At that time, in autumn 1942, the deportation procedure was radicalized. In October 1942 Gestapo members from Vienna under the control of SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner were sent to Berlin in order to make progress in deporting the Jews using their ‘Vienna methods’.83 During round-ups, the SS sealed off streets without warning and went from house to house with Jewish security officers to fetch Jews; deportations were no longer announced in advance. Old and sick people and pregnant women were also loaded on the trucks indiscriminately. The pretence of a regular and bureaucratic procedure was given up.84 After the departure of Brunner and his men in January 1943, the methods used remained the same. On the one hand, these methods made it impossible for many to escape; on the other hand, the brutality definitively convinced people of the character of the deportations and caused rapid flights into hiding. Ludwig Collm, a former highschool teacher – his aged mother and mother-in-law having been deported at the beginning of September 1942 – wrote about his forthcoming deportation as follows: ‘The transport was designed for Poland. The meaning of this, however, we knew only too well. After long deliberations we made the decision to bear the illegality and try to rescue our lives … On 12 December [1942] we locked up our apartment facing an incalculable fate.’85 The majority (52 per cent) of those who went into hiding in Berlin went under­ ground in 1943, predominantly in January, February and early March, most of them as a result of the Fabrik-Aktion (Factory Operation) of 27 February 1943.86 This development indicates the gradual transition from suspecting to knowing about the consequences of deportation and also reflects Jewish hopes of an impending end to the war.87 At this time, around 11,000 forced labourers working in the armament industry still lived in Berlin with their families, a total of some 18,000 Jews (including those in mixed marriages). Numerous accounts by survivors indicate that they began to see signs of the approaching Factory Operation in late 1942 and looked feverishly for opportunities to go into hiding. Fritz Pagel, who did forced labour for Siemens & Halske, observed: ‘In the autumn of 1942 they put Polish forced labourers in our Jewish section, and we had to train them … I’ve got a feeling that the day will come when they close all the Jewish sections and come to get all the Jews. I don’t want to be here then.’ He stayed in contact with his former non-Jewish neighbour, who listened to ‘foreign radio programmes’ and supplied him with news. This neighbour had let Pagel know that he could count on him if he needed to save his family from deportation. In January 1943 the four-member Pagel family went into hiding with his help.88 Lola Alexander, too, succeeded in escaping before the Factory Operation:

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  117 My sister and I worked in armaments factories. My foreman at the Deutsche Hydraulikund Präzisionswerke Alfred Teves GmbH in Berlin-Wittenau, who supervised the Jewish section, was a marvellous person … In late January 1943 he came to me and asked whether I might want to go into hiding. He let me know quite plainly that it would not be long before all Jews were evacuated.89

Shortly after 20 February 1943 the RSHA ordered the Gestapo to carry out the planned large-scale raid ‘without warning on 27 February 1943 at the beginning of working hours’.90 The so-called Fabrik-Aktion was the largest police raid against Jews within the Reich territory. For many, it was the final signal to go into hiding. While the transports from other German cities and towns assembled only relatively few people,91 around 7,000 individuals from Berlin were deported within six days in five transports to Auschwitz. The Armaments Inspection (Rüstungsinspektion) stated that, following the withdrawal of all Jewish forced labourers, 11,000 workers had been lost.92 These numbers indicate that at this time more than 4,000 Jews must have escaped the raid, some together with children and other relatives, and gone into hiding in the city, even though the Gestapo, assisted by the Waffen-SS, conducted the raid with lightning speed and extreme brutality. The reason such a relatively large number of Jews were able to escape this complex operation in Berlin is that many people were informed in advance of the impending action, and some of them passed this information on to potential victims. The firms themselves were informed and mobilized company security personnel. From the reports of numerous survivors we know that many people stayed away from their workplaces because of these warnings and disappeared from their homes.93 However, it is important to note that it was really only the Jews in Berlin who had the opportunity to become certain of the true meaning of deportation and the time to make the decision to go underground. In many other cities the deportations had been virtually completed by the autumn of 1942. This was the case in Hamburg, for example, where barely more than fifty Jews survived under false identities, many of them partners in mixed marriages who went into hiding relatively late.94 The situation in Frankfurt on the Main, the city with the second largest Jewish community in Germany before the Second World War, is also striking. Here the deportations of Volljuden were almost completed by September 1942, that is well before people in Berlin began to go underground in large numbers.95 During the stage of rapid deportations up to September 1942, only about twenty-five people – Jews not protected by marriage – went into hiding. In 1943 perhaps thirty people hid, all of them partners in or children of mixed marriages; in 1944 some seventyfive people; and in February 1945 up to eighty people.96 As mentioned above, the majority of the Jews who still remained in Germany in autumn 1941 were impoverished and aged, and there were more women than men.

118  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala Many of those deported in October and November 1941 depended on Jewish social welfare – an important selection criterion for deportation. Wealthy people threatened with deportation at this early stage tried to get an extension by paying someone off. In the autumn of 1942 the criterion of receiving welfare support from the Jewish authorities became a deciding factor for the compilation of transport lists. To that extent, the survival chances for paupers were minimal. However, the most decisive factor was not prosperity, but rather fitness and the ability to work in an armament factory. Due to ‘Reklamation’ by the High Command of the Wehrmacht, it was decided not to deport Jewish workers necessary to fulfilling urgent armament orders and ensuring the smooth functioning of the war industry.97 But ultimately neither the labour administration, nor the armament inspection, nor members of the private economy could completely prevent the deportation of forced labourers. Their fate depended on local power struggles with the Gestapo.98 Nevertheless, in Berlin employment in armament factories or other businesses vital to the war effort increased the survival chances of Jewish labourers more than former wealth or any still partly available financial resources. The fact that the war effort had priority over persecution – albeit only temporarily – is evident from the month-long gaps in transports in 1942 and 1943.99 However, we should not underestimate the life-saving meaning that holding money or valuables could have: it could be used to buy faked papers and army documents. The latter were almost a requirement for men. Without these papers, people could not leave their hiding places. But in many cases Jewish men received false papers from helpers. Gerd Ramm, a wealthy businessman, tried to protect Jewish forced labourers working in his factory in Berlin. He even hid people in his company and in his apartment and – of immense importance – paid for their forged ID papers. Children formed a very small group among the German Jews in hiding. The rescue of Jewish children in Germany after the beginning of the deportations in October 1941 took a different course than in the countries under Nazi occupation. Since in the Reich itself there was no strong or coordinated resistance movement but rather a diversity of heterogeneous resistance circles, there were no large initiatives to arrange hiding places in convents or elsewhere for a multitude of Jewish children as there were in the Netherlands or in Poland. Nevertheless, there are examples of children being hidden in monasteries in Germany as well, but only individual cases. Jewish parents only had rare opportunities to hand their children over to the custodial care of non-Jews. Usually one parent – for the most part the mother – fled into hiding together with her child or children. During their odyssey through many hiding places, children might at times be quartered alone with helpful people, sometimes for a long time. But we also know of whole families in hiding together.100 In many cases the father did not survive. Herta and Ernst Goldstein went underground with their four-year-old daughter Evelyn in early March 1943 in Berlin. After a time they had to separate. A young single woman, Hildegard Knies, took Evelyn in for several

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  119 months. After a few months Ernst Goldstein was caught in a Gestapo trap. He was deported to Auschwitz in August 1943 and murdered there. In June 1943 helpers found safe lodgings for Evelyn in East Prussia, in the country house of a German family, where she stayed until 1945. Her mother also survived.101 Of the 3,600 people known by name who went into in hiding in Berlin (including those who did not survive) there were 300 children born between 1928 and the beginning of 1945 – 50 of them did not survive.102 They were sent to Auschwitz, usually together with their mother or both parents. Among those deported from Berlin and murdered were 3,400 children born between 1928 and 1944.103 Well over half of those in hiding – almost 60 per cent – were female, which fairly accurately mirrors the make-up of the Jewish population. Women had somewhat better chances of survival underground than men. Childless women could at least move around less conspicuously in public and could more easily find work than men – as household helps, for instance. As a result, they were not only more (financially) independent of the help of non-Jews but also better camouflaged by the work they performed. And we know from many reports and testimonies that men ran a greater risk of being checked, since every man of combat age would be suspected of being a deserter, a danger that intensified in the course of the Volkssturm during the final month of the war, which affected all men between 16 and 60 capable of bearing arms. Jewish men thus had either to refrain from appearing in public or to acquire papers that would withstand thorough inspection. The age spread of those in hiding was approximately as follows: 12 per cent were 14 years old or younger, 7.5 per cent were 15–19 years old, 16.4 per cent were 20–30 years old, 14.6 per cent were 31–40 years old, 22.5 per cent were 41–50 years old, 16.5 per cent were 51–60 years old and 8.5 per cent were older than 60.104 Unfortunately, at present it is not possible to say exactly how each group survived, with the exception of the children.

Interaction of Non-Jewish Germans and German Jews The main key to survival for German Jews was contact with non-Jews who – for whatever reason – were willing to provide help, despite the regime’s prohibition, and who offered resistance to the persecution of the Jews. This leads to the central question of non-Jewish Germans’ attitude towards their Jewish neighbours, which became decisive after October 1941,105 and also to the question of how much German civilians knew about the Holocaust as of 1942.106 In the summer of 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi propagandists increased their efforts to portray the war as ‘Juda’s war’ – the Germans had to destroy ‘Juda’ in order not to be destroyed by the Jews (‘The Jews are guilty’). Print media and newsreels propagated the idea of ‘Bolshevist Untermenschen’, and the ‘Bolshevist Soviet paradise’ was portrayed as a Jewish world.107

120  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala Despite the official silence in the press on the start of the deportations from Germany in October 1941, newspaper readers were nevertheless able to find at least some references to the fate of the Jews. They could read news about deportations from Romania and Slovakia and about the anti-Jewish legislation in Slovakia.108 However, since serious misgivings about transporting Jews to the east had been noticed within the population (called by Goebbels ‘humanitarian feelings of the intellectual and social classes’ and ‘a lack of instinct in the Jewish question’), the Minister of Propaganda began an anti-Semitic campaign at the end of October 1941 to guide non-Jewish Germans’ conduct towards German Jews in the desired direction. ‘The Jews’ were held responsible for the war in order to ward off possible guilt feelings within the Volksgemeinschaft (German national community) and at the same time to create an atmosphere of fear and compliance. Goebbel’s November 1941 formula reads as follows: ‘Every Jew is a sworn enemy of the German people … Anyone who still deals with him privately is one of them and must be judged and treated as a Jew.’109 Simultaneously, the meaning of the police ordinance of 24 October 1941, which had at first been internal, was widely disseminated. It threatened ‘people of German blood’ who ‘continued to maintain friendly relations with Jews’ with so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft) in a concentration camp for a duration of up to three months. This criminalized contact with Jews and laid the foundation for Gestapo actions against Judenbegünstigung (preferential treatment of Jews). Jews were branded as ‘the internal enemy’. In these weeks, Goebbels was clearly able to create an atmosphere of fear. This atmosphere quite obviously changed at least the public behaviour of the majority of the population towards the Jews in the months to come.110 At the end of 1941 German propaganda prepared for the final battle: the war was portrayed as the German people’s ‘struggle for existence’ against the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’. ‘World Jewry’ was to suffer a ‘process of destruction’ (Vernichtungsprozess).111 Although the murder of the Jews was treated by the regime as Geheime Reichssache (top Reich secret) and Einsatzkommando (mobile killing squad) members and, later, guards in extermination camps were subject to a strict vow of confidentiality, in the course of 1942 more and more rumours of mass crimes in Eastern Europe against the Jews circulated among the German population. Alongside the forbidden but widely practised activity of listening to enemy broadcasts, reports from soldiers and policemen who returned from the eastern front, wrote letters home or talked during their periods of leave about what they had seen were the most important sources of knowledge for non-Jewish Germans, some of whom passed this knowledge on to Jewish friends, acquaintances, neighbours or even strangers.112 Despite the regime’s many measures to ensure separation, contact between German Jews and non-Jews was more prevalent than has been assumed. In Berlin, where a relatively large number of Jews still resided throughout the city in houses in which non-Jewish tenants also lived, contact had not been lost completely, even though the majority of

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  121 Germans in the end followed the regime’s instructions, kept their distance and were indifferent if not hostile towards the Jews. Occasionally, soldiers returning from the front addressed Jews directly in order to warn them, as in the case of Rosel Bibo. A neighbour’s son on special leave in Berlin told her of mass murder in gas vans and begged her not to acquiesce in deportation. This was the ‘confirmation of all my dark forebodings’, according to Rosel Bibo: ‘We gathered all our energy to shake ourselves from our lethargy and decided to act.’ In December 1942 the destitute Jewish couple left their ‘Jewish flat’ without a star and went to non-Jewish friends in another neighbourhood.113 Mark Roseman’s study on a rescue network in North Rhine-Westphalia tells how a member of the Wehrmacht in 1942 spread news from Izbica near Lublin about those who had already been deported from Essen, which led to Marianne Strauss’s flight underground.114 Erna Segal as well, who survived in hiding with her husband and two grown children in Berlin, refers to an encounter with a soldier whom she did not know.115 The man advised her to turn to Aryan friends and go ‘into illegality’.116 As these examples show, in the course of 1942 knowledge about the crimes against the Jews in the east was widespread. The question of the ethical, religious or political character or motives of those people who ignored the regime’s attempt to criminalize and intimidate them in order to help Jews is difficult to answer.117 After 1933 the National Socialists obviously succeeded very quickly in creating a new frame of reference and a new definition of who belonged to German society (Volksgemeinschaft) and who did not. The portrayal of mankind (Menschenbild) shaped by the Enlightenment was changed to one based on racism and anti-Semitism. This caused dynamic social processes of change. The segregation of the Jews resulted in their exclusion from the moral frame of reference. Helping Jews in Germany meant acting against the framework laid down by the regime and its laws.118 Essentially, one had to rely on one’s personal convictions and moral values. Obviously attitudes and opinions differing from the official line of the regime could be established, although only rudimentarily, within milieus or remnants of milieus that still had reasonably intact and strong moral principles – often made up of people with close links to the churches, civic milieus and remnants of socialist or communist circles.119 The average age of those who helped Jews was between forty and fifty. Helpers came from all social classes, belonged to various religious and political groups, or were neither religious nor political. In earlier studies, the role of resources, such as financial means or a large flat, has been overestimated.120 Many helpers were not particularly well educated, and nor did they have important contacts. Not all of them acted selflessly. Some exploited the Jews’ plight and their dependency and demanded services in return, including sexual favours as mostly Jewish women report. In many cases, chance played a role in the offer of help. Herbert Strauss, who lived illegally in Berlin from October 1942 to June 1943 writes:

122  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala Paradoxical as it appears, living ‘underground’ had won us new friends among Berliners. … Weimar culture, after all, was only a decade away. Now, isolated anti-Nazis across the political and cultural spectrum found each other everywhere. Links with Jews had become badges of rebellion … I was saved by a … diverse group that was not politically homogeneous … and did not know one another. They included the daughter of a Westphalian industrialist … a journalist of Swedish nationality; a former Berlin tradeunion leader; and a factory worker.121

Of those helpers presently known by name, almost 60 per cent were women – which is not surprising as so many men were at the front. The predominance of women is perhaps one of the reasons why this type of resistance has attracted interest only relatively recently. Most of these women had to act on their own because there were no resistance organizations to provide financial or moral support. However, in researching the help given to Jews, more and more informal networks can be reconstructed, such as those around Elisabeth Abegg. A teacher at a Berlin secondary school and a committed opponent of the Nazi regime, Abegg was forced into early retirement in 1941. That same year she joined the Quaker religious community. When a close friend, a Christian woman of Jewish heritage, refused her offers of help and was deported in July 1942, Abegg decided to try to help as many Jews as possible. She and her sister temporarily hid twelve people in their apartment in Berlin-Tempelhof and arranged for others to stay with friends. She regularly provided meals for people in hiding, helped them financially and procured them forged documents. In this network, there were at least forty-five participants (twenty gentile helpers and twenty-five people in hiding, including three children).122 Although the official Church failed completely in the face of the destruction of European Jewry, individual members and pastors of the Confessing Church, some Catholic priests and believers as well as employees of church institutions are among those who helped. A well-known example of a socially committed person whose early action distinguishes her is Gertrud Luckner, a welfare officer at the Freiburg office of the German Caritas, who in 1940 did her utmost for the Jews deported from Vienna to the Lublin district as well as for those Jews transported from Baden to Gurs. She used her position as representative of the Catholic archbishop in Freiburg to rescue people by making contacts with members of the Confessing Church and with Quakers as well as with Catholic circles in Berlin (‘Sommer’s office’). Luckner passed on messages, had passports forged and helped Jews to flee from Germany. At first she exerted herself for Catholic non-Aryans, but from 1942 she also helped Glaubensjuden (Jews by faith) in hiding. When an attempt to bring a Jewish child to safety in Düsseldorf failed, she was imprisoned in March 1943 and interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for ‘pro-Jewish activity and association with subversive circles’.123 Harald Poelchau, protestant prison chaplain in Berlin, is well known as a member of the resistance group called the Kreisau Circle. His successful actions to save Jews

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  123 were, however, long disregarded. Poelchau was able to motivate people around him to help and established a widespread helping network made up of people from diverse political backgrounds who held varying religious beliefs. Jews in hiding received help irrespective of their political orientation, including the communist Lotte Holzer, who was wanted as a member of the Herbert Baum resistance group.124 Poelchau’s connections reached far beyond Berlin.125 He worked closely with an independent group of dissidents formed around the journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich in 1938. It monitored Hitler’s policies and also took action. The group gave diverse support to Jews, deserters and forced labourers.126 Some of the helpers were among those who, from the very beginning, had no illusions about the criminal character of the regime and were declared opponents of National Socialism. They were able to interpret the signs of the Jews’ fate and accordingly took the initiative to support Jews early on. Often they were able, for example by virtue of their occupations, to provide aid and act within networks based upon earlier connections (churches, social democrats, communists, national conservatives), which were expanded to include other people. Many helpers were Mitläufer who first went along with the regime and later summoned up the courage to resist in the face of ever more drastic persecutions.127 Since the beginning of 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad, a segment of the German population seemed more willing to help Jews in hiding, not least because their belief in the regime’s omnipotence was fading and the end of the war seemed to be in sight. The regime reacted by producing more propaganda claiming that ‘the Jews’ were responsible for the air raids and stoking fears of ‘Jewish revenge’.128 No small percentage of those who helped took the initiative in protecting Jews they knew, or even Jews they didn’t know.129 On the other hand, a considerable amount of the help given took place because Jews who had resolved to go into hiding asked directly for help from Aryan friends and acquaintances, former colleagues, patients, business partners, clients or domestic staff, and sometimes even from people whom they did not know at all. When at the end of 1942 the Berlin seamstress Wanda Feuerherm was asked by Erna Segal, whom she knew from before the war, to hide her eighteen-year-old daughter, she agreed. Her example illustrates important aspects of the help given to Jews. The helpers and the Jewish family knew each other before the war. Erna Segal, who was determined to escape deportation with her fourmember family, addressed the seamstress directly. Without Segal’s initiative, this woman probably would not have become a rescuer. Wanda Feuerherm is one of the many female helpers whose husbands were at the front.130 The risk for non-Jewish helpers was difficult to calculate. It could result in being sent to a concentration camp (in some cases leading to death), prison or penitentiary sentences, a relatively short period of imprisonment in a Gestapo prison, warnings and intimidation, or simply a small fine. Sometimes it happened that Jews in hiding were arrested in their non-Jewish helpers’ flat, without anything happening to the latter. After Stalingrad, when the German population increasingly began to doubt

124  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala the coming of the ‘final victory’, the regime redoubled its propaganda efforts and attempted, with increasing aggression against its own population, to undermine ‘defeatism’ through harsh measures. Not only the fear of concentration camps but also the shame of being pilloried at a Special Court and of standing outside the Volksgemeinschaft and the prospect of social isolation and loneliness all made offering help to Jews seem an extremely risky undertaking.131 We can assume that 7,000 people from Berlin were in hiding at least for a time (often only for two to three months) and can calculate approximately seven helpers for one Jew. Even taking into account the fact that some of the helpers supported more than one person, we can conservatively estimate that there were around 30,000 helpers for Berlin Jews alone.132 However, in no way were all rescuers inhabitants of Berlin; many Jews in hiding left the capital and found help either in the state of Brandenburg outside the city or in other German cities and regions. The exact reconstruction of numerous stories of ‘life underground’ shows not only that Berlin Jews owed their survival to the willingness of Berliners to help, but also that a single Jew, living illegally, often had an odyssey through Germany behind him or her when liberation came in 1945.133 This makes it difficult to determine the chances of survival in individual cities or regions.

How Many Jews Survived in Hiding in Germany? Only for Berlin can we establish approximately how many of those who went underground actually survived. One basis is the list of the Allies (Liste der Alliierten) which records the Jews registered in Berlin in the summer of 1947. It includes 1,441 people who declared that they had survived illegally.134 But this list only takes account of those who belonged to the Jewish religion. People persecuted as Rassejuden, that is baptized Jews or dissidents, are not included. Additionally, some of Berlin’s Jews who went into hiding and found help in other localities did not register in Berlin after liberation.135 Finally, Jewish partners in mixed marriages who were threatened with deportation and went underground in 1944/5 are often not counted in the category ‘survived in hiding’. If we assume that in October 1941 approximately 73,000 Jews lived in the German capital – almost half of the Jews in the Altreich – and estimate that around 7,000 people in Berlin fled from the deportations, then almost 10 per cent of Berlin’s Jews made an attempt to live illegally. The number of people who went underground in Berlin and actually survived in hiding may be as high as 1,700 or even up to 2,000. In 1943 around 16,600 Jews in the Altreich were partners in mixed marriages, and at the end of 1944 around 12,500.136 Many of them also decided to go into hiding during the months after the Fabrik-Aktion or in 1944 or even 1945. Facing the arbitrary procedure of individual Gauleiter or Gestapo charges, they could not be sure that their marriage to a non-Jewish partner would protect them from

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  125 deportation. Many of those to be deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto went into hiding as late as February 1945. The Gauleiter of Hesse, for instance, tried to exterminate Jews in general from his Gauhauptstadt (Gau capital) of Frankfurt on the Main after the end of the large waves of deportations in September 1942, even though the RSHA rules protected members of mixed marriages. From January 1943, the Jewish partners, mostly men, were frequently called to the Gestapo and then arrested and sent to Auschwitz – a specific persecution of mixed marriages in Frankfurt. But Jewish women with an ‘Aryan’ husband were also endangered. In July 1943, for instance, Walter von Scheven from Frankfurt feared the worst for his Jewish wife, Elisabeth. His friends in Berlin agreed to protect her from deportation. The couple’s two children remained with their father. Elisabeth did indeed find hiding places in Berlin. Her husband’s friends, however, belonged to a resistance group. When they were detected and arrested in September 1943, all Jews hidden by them were detained too and later sent to Auschwitz.137 Owing to the difficult source problems, many years of research notwithstanding, the number of Jews who went into hiding in Germany can only be estimated. As mentioned above, we estimate the number to have been between 10,000 and 12,000 in the Altreich. It is important to stress once again the fact that only the Jews in Berlin had enough time to realize the meaning of deportation. In the German capital, where almost half of the Jews still in Germany in October 1941 resided, the whole deportation procedure took much more time than in other cities and towns. In Berlin the persecuted who underwent the change from presentiment to certainty about the meaning of the deportations since the summer and autumn 1942 were in a position to make a decision and, potentially, to prepare for a life of illegality, while in many other places the bulk of the deportations were already finished. This is an important reason why a considerable proportion of those Jews who decided to flee from deportation did so in Berlin. Needless to say, the anonymity of the big city (of almost four million inhabitants) was helpful for those who wished to disappear.

The Netherlands: Who Hid, Where and When? In view of the number of Jews that survived in hiding in the Netherlands, 16,100 out of a total of 140,000,138 it is sometimes argued that the number of hideouts made available to Jews by Dutch gentiles was insufficient and instrumental in producing the low rate of survival in comparison to other countries. It is possible this was the case, but one should take into account that it was not just the number of hideouts that influenced the rate at which Jews survived in hiding.139 Before Jews could go into hiding, they had to be able to get in touch with gentiles who were willing to provide them with a place to stay or other kinds of help, such as forged identity papers, food, clothes and money. Many Jews were not successful

126  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala in this regard. They lacked relationships with gentiles who could and were willing to provide help, or they lacked relationships with other Jews who could and were willing to act as social ‘bridges’ between the Jewish and gentile communities in the Netherlands, channelling the demand for and supply of help.140 Other obstacles were often financial. Many Jews lacked money, while giving shelter brought expenses that many hosts were not able or willing to burden. Apart from not having the means to go into hiding, many Jews also decided against it, even if they had the opportunity to do so. Some overestimated the dangers of going into hiding and underestimated the dangers of deportation to Poland; some were too afraid to go into hiding and distrusted their own strength; some did not want to leave relatives behind; others did not want to endanger gentiles; some simply lacked the energy to look for a way to survive and thought they just had to accept their destiny. Any one of these reservations might have been enough to convince Jews not to resist and to go along with their deportation, as the Germans – in part through the Dutch authorities – demanded and the Jewish Council advised them to do. Nevertheless, some Jews did go into hiding. Who were they? Questions pertain­ing to the background characteristics of Jewish onderduikers (‘submergers’, i.e. those who went underground) are not easy to answer since the currently available informa­ tion mostly concerns the Jews that survived in hiding. Information regarding the ones whose attempt to survive in hiding was not successful is lacking. A failed attempt at survival could be a case of coincidence, but it might also be something else. Maybe their abilities or opportunities to survive were generally less favourable than those of the survivors. We can only be sure that the background characteristics of the Jews that survived in hiding can be generalized to all the Jews that hid when we are in a position to verify whether the characteristics of the Jews arrested in hiding were the same. At the moment it is still not possible to perform this check because the Jews arrested in hiding are not yet researched well enough. This means that a rephrasing of the question ‘who went into hiding?’ to ‘who survived in hiding?’ is unavoidable. Recast in this way, there are a number of background characteristics that appear to have been influential: age, nationality, social class and social capital. The fact that going into hiding and staying hidden entailed costs (e.g. food, clothing, false papers, compensation for the hosts) that had to be paid has already been mentioned. From the second half of 1943 onwards the National Support Fund (Nationaal Steunfonds, NSF) paid many of the expenses. The NSF, the bank of the resistance, grew out of private initiatives to support the 4,700 families of Dutch nationals who were working on Dutch merchant ships that were at sea when the occupation of the Netherlands became a fact. Under the direction of the Dutch government in exile in London, they started to sail for the British, something the Germans tried to dissuade them from doing by curtailing the allowances that were paid to their families. In order to protect these families from the financial backlash, officials of the Holland-America line and a banker, Walraven van Hall, founded

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  127 an organization that, eventually backed by a guarantee of the government in exile, borrowed money and received gifts from wealthy and not so wealthy individuals, tax offices in Leeuwarden and Rotterdam, and several banks and life insurance companies. This money was redistributed to the affected people. At first only the families of the sailors were supported, but in March 1943 it was decided that the families of people in hiding and resistance networks also ought to get financial help. This included the Jews in hiding, and in the second half of 1943 some help became available to several resistance networks that supported Jews in hiding. Towards the end of the occupation, section ‘J’ (Jews) of the NSF paid out 400,000 guilders every month, with a maximum of 100 guilders per Jewish onderduiker, in support of approximately 8,000 Jews in hiding.141 That was a minority of all the Jews who were hidden during the occupation, because the majority of the helpers of Jews never managed to get in touch with the NSF.142 As stated above, the financial help of the NSF became available in the second half of 1943 and was not yet offered in July 1942, when the deportations started and Jews began to hide. This probably means that at that time Jews had to rely more on their own financial reserves, or those of their helpers,143 than onderduikers that went underground during the later stages of the occupation. One of the first researchers that took the wealth of Jews into account when researching their chances of survival was Van der Boom.144 For The Hague his finding was that Jews from the more well-to-do neighbourhoods had a higher survival rate than Jews from workers’ quarters. In addition, he found that the Jews from the more well-to-do neighbourhoods who did not survive the occupation died at a later point in time than Jews from workers’ quarters. Both findings could be seen as corroboration of the idea that Jews needed to be well off to go into hiding: some of the more well-to-do Jews were caught while hidden and because of this were murdered at a later time, while Jews from the worker’s quarters were deported straight away. However, it’s still too early to draw such a conclusion because the findings could also be the result of the policy of the Sicherheitspolizei in The Hague. It allowed the Jewish Council in the city to decide who was going to be deported each time another group of Jews from the Hague had to leave for Westerbork. Given this choice, the Jewish Council tried to preserve the more ‘valuable’ members of the Jewish community in the Hague for as long as possible.145 In the end, most of them were deported as well, but the policy of the Sicherheitspolizei and the Jewish Council bought them more time to find a safe (and affordable) hideout, and it helped them to shorten the period they had to bridge before requiring help from the National Support Fund. Besides, the Jews who were deported at a later moment in time were more likely to be taken to Theresienstadt ghetto or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and, therefore, had a higher chance of survival. Those who were in the end deported from there to Auschwitz had a small chance of survival, but still higher than the Jews from the workers’ quarters who had been deported at an earlier date

128  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala and were either murdered straight away or exposed for longer to the appalling conditions in Auschwitz. Another problem in determining the role of wealth, or social class, is raised by Houwink ten Cate.146 Researching the background characteristics of Jews who were arrested (presumably in hiding) by the Kolonne Henneicke, a group of Dutch National Socialists who hunted down Jews for bounty, he found that in terms of social class his sample of 534 Jews did not differ from the general Jewish population of Amsterdam. To measure their social class, Houwink ten Cate used the average value of the houses in the neighbourhoods where the Jews were living. For a group of 105 Jewish onderduikers arrested in the second half of 1942 by the Bureau of Jewish Affairs of the Amsterdam police force, he used a more precise measurement: their earnings. Only nine out of the 105 captives earned as much as or more than a skilled worker did. Houwink ten Cate concluded from this that wealth played no role in determining who went into hiding, but that appears a rather hasty judgement. It could be that the financial position of the Jewish onderduikers was related to their arrest rate, or perhaps they were hidden at relatively cheap but vulnerable locations. Or maybe they were given away because they had no money left.147 The activities of E., who started a commercial hideout organization during the occupation, provide a chilling example of this. Acting as a middleman, he recruited people willing to act as hosts for Jews in hiding in exchange for money. The Jews involved had to pay E. hefty sums in advance. Later on he pressured Jews to hand over all their money, and he would then administer it for them. But instead of administering it, he and his colleague used the money to live like kings. When they ran out of money, E. could no longer pay the hosts for their services. In the end he solved this problem by giving away the Jews who did not have any money left to a Dutch police officer who was also a member of the NSB and who headed the detective force in Utrecht that hunted down Jews in hiding.148 A bit more conclusive is some research on the province of Utrecht. While taking other factors into account, it was found that, of the Jews in the province of Utrecht, those who belonged to the highest social class survived to a greater extent. Since the Jewish Council in Utrecht did not select the Jews for deportation, this can be interpreted as an indication that social class did matter. In addition, the relatively well-to-do Jews that did not survive the German occupation died on average at a later moment in time. This can be seen as an indication that the highest social class was over-represented among the hidden – but caught – Jews.149 According to Houwink ten Cate, age was probably the most important factor influencing the survival chances of Jews in the Netherlands. He found that almost half of his sample of arrested onderduikers was between twenty-one and forty years old. It might have been that this age group was arrested in greater numbers because of German policies that singled them out, but Houwink ten Cate choose an alternative explanation: the Jews in this age range hid to a greater extent and where thus arrested more often. He had good reason to do so. When the Germans started

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  129 to deport Jews to the death camps, they announced it was for the Arbeitseinsatz in the east and called up the Jews in the age categories that were most likely to be able to work. In response, the Jewish Council recruited many of the Jews in the same age category to work for the Council. Since workers of the Council got a temporary exemption from deportation, they had more time to find a safe hideout and arrange false papers. This produced a relatively high number of people in this age category among the hidden.150 Houwink ten Cate’s findings correspond with those of the Netherlands Red Cross. After the war it concluded that Jews below sixteen years of age and above forty years of age were almost completely annihilated.151 Other researchers have reached similar conclusions. Croes and Tammes, for instance, suggested that, in general, the chance of survival rose with the age of the Jews, but this was not a linear relationship: with the increase in age the improvement in the chance of survival grew smaller and smaller.152 At the same time, researchers who concentrated on particular age groups came to somewhat different conclusions. Apparently, children under the age of ten had a higher chance of surviving the German occupation than other age groups.153 For a number of reasons, survival in hiding was actually easier for small children than for adults, and indeed there were several resistance networks 154 that specialized in saving Jewish children, each of which saved hundreds. Furthermore, many Jewish parents sought to find a safe place for their children even if they did not want to go into hiding themselves. Not knowing what awaited them in Poland, they expected to be sent to work camps, where small children were definitely less likely to survive. Others wanted to evade deportation and foresaw a difficult and dangerous future of fleeing and hiding from the German police. Some Jews attempted to change their identity and started to work as servants, miners, nurses in old people’s homes, etc. However, because these Jews showed themselves in public, the risk of possible recognition loomed large, especially for those who had an obvious Jewish appearance. In these circumstances, it appeared better to many Jews to find a safe hideout for their children. 155 Their parents wanted to spare them a life on the run from the police, apart from the fact that an escape from the claws of the Nazis was less likely to succeed with the children around. Another factor in the decision to separate from their children was the perception that many people were reluctant to help Jews, especially adult Jews, out of fear of the possible consequences. Many people believed that helping Jews meant risking their freedom or even their life. Indeed, supporters of Jews on a large scale were usually sent to concentration camps in Germany when caught, where the chance of survival was not high. In other cases of help, people were usually sent to Vught concentration camp in the Netherlands, which had a less brutal regime. However, people who only housed Jews in hiding were often not punished at all. Especially in 1943 and 1944 they frequently were left alone and only the onderduikers were arrested.

130  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala In retrospect, the fear that kept people from helping Jews was in many cases not borne out. Interestingly enough, this fear appears not to have been evenly spread across the Dutch population. There are a few circumstantial indications that Catholics were, comparatively speaking, either more willing to help the Jews or less willing to help the Germans. Compared to the adherents of other denominations, Catholics were less inclined to have voted for the Dutch National Socialist movement before the war; Catholics were less likely to join the Auxiliary Police Force – a volunteer police force that assisted the Germans in rounding up Jews – and Jews survived to a higher extent when the percentage of Catholics in their domicile was higher.156 These findings are interesting, since in Dutch historiography it has long been assumed that Catholics were less likely to have resisted the German occupation of the Netherlands.157 Anyway, it appears that all people, irrespective of their denomination, were more easily convinced to give shelter to Jewish children. A Jewish child did not yet have an identity card, and under the age of six they also did not have to wear the Star of David. Besides, an excuse for the stay of a child was more easily found than for an adult. It has been suggested that help was easier to come by for girls, who were not circumcised like Jewish boys and who could also work in the household.158 Nonetheless, numbers from the province of Utrecht, where many Jewish children survived the war, show that females did not survive to a higher degree,159 so if this last point did play a role, it did not translate into better chances of survival in general. Finding an address for the children was, however, not the end of the matter. Often one address was not enough. It is known that during the occupation some Jews had up to twenty-six hiding addresses.160 Many of the addresses where Jews hid were only meant to serve as a hideout for a short while and served their purpose only while a more suitable or safer place was being sought. Other addresses were meant to be more permanent, but often enough they turned out not to be. Hidden Jews had to change their address quite often, for security reasons or because of the growing fear of arrest on the part of the hosts and incompatibilities of character. Research into the four resistance groups that specialized in saving Jewish children, especially those from Amsterdam, leads to the estimation that every hidden Jewish child used three to four addresses during the German occupation.161 The distribution of the addresses per child was uneven though. Ed van Thijn stayed at at least eighteen addresses during the two years he was in hiding,162 and there are examples of children who used even more. Nonetheless, it appears that the almost one thousand children saved by four resistance networks did not use more than four thousand addresses. The owners of these addresses were recruited by about 100 resistance workers, especially in the province of Limburg in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands and especially among Catholics and orthodox protestant gentiles.163 In most cases their attempts at rescue were successful: probably not more than 6.4 per cent of the almost one thousand children in hiding were arrested and, of those, slightly more than three-quarters were deported and slightly more than half were killed before the end of the war.164

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  131 Nationality is often thought to have been influential regarding the will of Jews in the Netherlands to go into hiding. Jews from Eastern Europe, and especially those from Germany, are supposed to have been more ‘in the know’ regarding what could (would) happen in the event of German occupation. They are therefore supposed to have made a greater effort to find a hideout and were more successful in concealing themselves than Dutch Jews.165 Besides, German Jews held key positions within the Jewish Council in Amsterdam and the Jewish administration of the Westerbork transit camp, and because of this they were able to postpone the deportation of their compatriots and thus increase their rate of survival.166 However, the survival rate of the German Jews in general does not correspond with this general idea. Although it is higher than that of Dutch Jews in larger cities like Amsterdam and, to a lesser extent, Rotterdam, it is lower in the smaller municipalities.167 In a province such as Utrecht, with a comparatively high rate of survival, nationality played no significant role for German and Dutch Jews. The cause of this difference between the smaller municipalities and the larger cities is still unclear. For the city of Amsterdam it might be true that the Jewish Council influenced the outcome. Unlike in The Hague, the Jewish Council in Amsterdam was not able to determine who was going to be deported when, but it could give temporary exemptions from deportation to Jews deemed necessary for community life. German Jews held key positions within the Jewish Council for Amsterdam, and some authors suggest that they used their positions to favour compatriots when these temporary exemptions were handed out.168 That gave these German Jews more time to find a safe hideout and increased their chances of surviving the occupation. This brings us to the question of timing. It is sometimes argued that the Jews who hid are the same Jews that had been exempted from deportation before.169 It is indeed likely that the Jews who were able to extend their stay ‘above’ ground had a higher chance of survival than Jews who were not exempted: they were exposed to the dangers of hiding for a shorter period of time and they had a better chance of finding a safe hideout, especially after the April–May strike of 1943. When on 29 April 1943 the commander of the forces of the Wehrmacht in the Netherlands, General Christiansen, proclaimed that former members of the Dutch armed forces would be called up for work in the German industries, the Dutch in the northern, eastern and southern parts of the country called a general strike. The Germans reacted violently: during raids ninety-five people were killed, over four hundred were seriously injured, and many hundreds of strikers were arrested, of whom eighty were summarily tried and executed. The proclamation of Christiansen and the violent reaction to the strike proved for many people to be a tipping point: it gave a strong stimulus to the resistance networks, as many people changed their attitude and became more willing to house onderduikers. Jews who were looking for a hideout around this time had less trouble finding one, and of course they also had to spend a shorter period of time in hiding prior to the liberation. This doesn’t mean, however, that Jews did not hide before the spring of 1943.170 Indeed, a considerable

132  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala number did so. Some were alerted to the fact that, in August/September 1992, the Nazis radicalized their procedures: instead of calling up Jews for deportation they had them arrested at home by German and Dutch police officers. Others, however, had already chosen to hide before that time. This point will be stressed further below when we calculate the number of Jews who attempted to survive in hiding. The question of where to hide was of high importance for the Jews in the Netherlands, since the risk of being caught was not the same everywhere. Jews in hiding were especially vulnerable in the larger cities, not just because it was harder to remain unnoticed with so many people around or because it was harder to get extra food for hidden people, or even because the houses in the cities provided less space to accommodate them, but especially because the policing organizations of the Germans concentrated their efforts in the cities.171 In addition the Germans set up special branches of the Dutch police force in large urban areas to search for hidden Jews. In the countryside there were fewer problems getting food, hosts had more indoor space, there was less policing, and the higher level of social control meant it was easier to keep likely betrayers under control. In this sense, the problem for the Jews appears to have been to get out of the larger cities in the western part of the country and flee to the countryside. To be able to do that, the first thing one needed was an address to head to. To find one, people for the most part had to rely on their own social networks since the resistance networks capable of finding hideouts for onderduikers in the safer parts of the country were not yet up and running when the deportations started in July 1942.172 However, people’s social networks tended to be based locally. Furthermore, once an address had been found, people had to travel to get there. The German policing agencies and their Dutch collaborators concentrated their efforts on catching Jews who were using public transport. Train stations and trains were regularly checked for Jews, who were often enough singled out on the basis of their looks. Many Jews did not in the end make it and were arrested while using public transport or while hidden. But some were able to escape from the cities and hide in the countryside, especially in the provinces of Gelderland, Limburg, Noord-Brabant and Overijssel.173

How Many Jews Survived in Hiding in the Netherlands? A study of the number of Jews who attempted to survive in hiding has to include the Jews who succeeded and the Jews who failed. While the number of Jews who survived the occupation of the Netherlands in hiding is generally estimated at approximately 16,100,174 it is more difficult to put a figure on the number of Jews who tried to survive this way but failed. To calculate the number of Jews that were arrested while hidden, we use the number of ‘punishment cases’, i.e. Jews that were registered in the Westerbork transit camp for having committed a ‘crime’ like

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  133 hiding. Around 80 per cent of the ‘punishment cases’, or Straffälle as the Germans called them, were Jews arrested in hiding; the others broke some other rule.175 These Straffälle got special treatment. They were locked up in a special shed in Westerbork, their heads were shaven, they had to wear special overalls and usually they were deported from Westerbork to the death camps at the earliest possible opportunity. When they arrived in the death camps however, the treatment they got was no different from that which the other Jews had to endure. The number of Straffälle is not precisely known, so it has to be estimated. For the period of time from mid-July 1942, when the first train left for Auschwitz, until 21 April 1943 we rely on the transport list of Jews deported to Auschwitz that indicate the Straffälle.176 Unfortunately, it has not been possible to retrieve most of the lists of this type. The extant lists mention 2,046 Straffälle, or 8.8 per cent of the deportees. Extrapolated to the total known number of Jews deported between mid- July 1942 and 20 April 1943 8.8 per cent would mean 5,222 Straffälle.177 For the period between 21 April 1943 and the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945, another source can be used. Starting on 21 April 1943, a different way of registration was introduced by the Germans, probably related to the fact that from 23 April 1943 onwards Jews in the Netherlands were no longer allowed to reside outside of Amsterdam (or the transit camps in Vught and Westerbork). Beginning on 21 April 1943, the lists of the transports to Westerbork and/or the secondary lists regarding the allocation of Jews to the barracks in Westerbork, which were based on these lists, denoted whether people were straffällig or not. Using these lists, it is possible to establish that between 21 April 1943 and the liberation of Westerbork 9,096 straffällige Jews arrived in the transit camp.178 However, these figures only comprise the straffällige Jews who were sent to Westerbork and deported from there. Including the 358 Straffälle that were deported directly to Auschwitz from Vught transit camp, this gives a total of 14,676 Jews.179 If 80 per cent of them were previously hidden Jews, the number of the latter would be 11,740. Together with the 16,100 Jews that survived in hiding, the total number of Jews that attempted to hide would therefore be 27,840, based on these figures. However, there are at least two reasons why the total of 11,740 Jews arrested in hiding should be considered a minimum number. First, at least in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, many hidden Jews were arrested but did not arrive in Westerbork as Straffälle.180 Apparently, the Germans were rather sloppy about registering these cases. This is understandable, since it did not really matter to them whether the Jews were caught in hiding or not. They were Jews and they were going to be killed anyway. Second, until the end of April 1943 the German procedure was to mark the identity cards or call-up orders of the Jews who had been designated Straffälle with an ‘S’ before they were sent to Westerbork. In this way, the administration in Westerbork knew that the individuals involved were straffällig and to be treated accordingly. However, Jewish officials working in the administration obstructed this system since they feared that the Straffälle might be worse off after their deportation

134  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala to the east than other Jews. As mentioned above, this was not in fact the case, but they did not know that. In order to cut the number of Straffälle, they warned Jews on entry to Westerbork to get rid of their identity cards and/or call-up orders if they were marked with an ‘S’. An unknown number of Jews followed this advice and were therefore not registered as Straffälle. This means that more than 11,740 Jews were arrested in hiding, and compared to Belgium, for instance, this number is already quite high.181 The question of why the Germans were so ‘successful’ in arresting hidden Jews in the Netherlands is intriguing. It is often thought to have been the result of betrayal by Dutch gentiles: how else could the Germans have known where to look for hidden Jews? However, the fact that the success of the Germans in hunting down Jews in hiding appears to have been very localized, and was especially concentrated in the cities of Amsterdam and The Hague, suggests that something else was going on.182 Apart from that, the German Sicherheitspolizei did not depend on betrayal by gentiles. The infiltration of resistance networks; the help of organized crime lured by blood money and the possessions of their victims; the violent interrogation of arrested Jews and, sometimes, their cooperation in the arrest of fellow onderduikers meant that the German police had other ways to realize its aims. Although this was the case in Amsterdam and The Hague, it did not apply in a city such as Maastricht – with a predictable lack of ‘success’ as a consequence.183

Comparison The Nazi persecution and deportation of the Jews in Germany and the Netherlands show many similarities. In both countries, things started out as bureaucratic processes: deportations were announced beforehand and at a given time, and the selected Jews had to show up for deportation. In September 1942 in the Netherlands and in October 1942 in Berlin, the system was changed. In the Netherlands, deportations stopped being announced beforehand, and the selected Jews were taken out of their homes by Dutch and German police officers. In Berlin, the procedure changed one month later and went even further than in the Netherlands. During round-ups the SS sealed off streets and, together with Jewish Ordner, went from house to house to fetch Jews. Indiscriminately, old and sick people or pregnant women were loaded on the trucks too. This had also become the practice in Amsterdam, although in other Dutch municipalities poor health sometimes remained a reason to postpone deportation. In both countries, the changing of the deportation method signalled to the Jews that what the Nazis had in store for them was something other than labour camps, a message compounded by the information coming from the east about what was happening to the Jews. The numbers of Jews going into hiding started to increase from that time in both countries, although the number that went into hiding in the Netherlands between the start of the deportations in July 1942 and September 1942 was – unlike in Germany – already considerable.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  135 In Germany, women appear to have had somewhat better chances of survival underground than men. Childless women in particular could move around less conspicuously in public and could more easily find work than men. As a result, they were not only more (financially) independent of the help of non-Jews, but also better camouflaged by the work they performed. Men ran a greater risk of being checked, since every man of combat age not at the front was suspected of being a deserter, especially during the final months of the war. Jewish men thus had either to refrain from appearing in public or to acquire papers that would withstand thorough inspection. In the Netherlands, the situation was different. Dutch men were not conscripted into the German armed forces, so Jewish men in hiding did not run a higher risk of being arrested than Jewish females. Numbers from the province of Utrecht suggest that females did not have a higher chance of survival. Another marked contrast between Germany and the Netherlands concerns the number of children that went into hiding. In Germany, children were the smallest group among the Jews in hiding. Of the 3,600 people known to have gone into hiding in Berlin only 300 were children born between 1928 and 1944. Probably 250 of them survived. Meanwhile, there were 3,400 children born between 1928 and 1944 among the murdered deportees from Berlin. In the Netherlands, young children especially appear to have gone into hiding more often than adults. A further important difference between Germany and the Netherlands is that in the Third Reich there was no strong or integrated resistance movement, but rather a diversity of heterogeneous resistance circles. There were no sizeable initiatives to arrange hiding places in convents or with other people for large groups of Jewish children, as was the case in the Netherlands. Although there are some examples of rescued children in monasteries in Germany, Jewish parents did not have much opportunity to hand their children over to the custodial care of non-Jews. In the Netherlands, the Red Cross concluded after the war that Jews under sixteen years of age and above forty years of age were almost completely annihilated. 184 This conclusion was, however, too sweeping. Research that concentrated on particular age groups showed that children under the age of ten had a better chance of surviving the German occupation than any other age group.185 Contrary to the situation in Germany, Jewish parents had more opportunity to entrust their children to the care of gentiles. In addition, several resistance networks specialized in helping Jewish children to survive the occupation in hiding, making children the group with a disproportionately high chance of surviving the occupation. Some of the resistance networks even smuggled children out of the day-care centre that the Germans used in combination with the Hollandse Schouwburg in Amsterdam as a collection point for Jews before their transport to the transit camp Westerbork and beyond. Money probably played a similar role in both countries. It has already been mentioned that going into hiding and staying hidden entailed costs (food, clothing, false papers, compensation for the hosts) that had to be paid. In the Netherlands from the second half of 1943 onwards the National Support Fund (Nationaal Steunfonds)

136  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala could pay many of these expenses,186 but this financial help was not yet available in July 1942, when the deportations started and Jews began to hide themselves. That means that they had to rely more on their own financial reserves, or those of their helpers, than onderduikers who went underground during the later stages of the occupation. People with greater financial reserves therefore had better survival chances than those who had little, as research focused on The Hague – with a role for the local branch of the Jewish Council – and Utrecht indicates, though the situation may have been different in Amsterdam. In Germany, many of those who were already deported in October 1941 had depended on Jewish social welfare; this was an important selection criterion for deportation. In autumn 1942 the receipt of welfare support from the Jewish authorities became a decisive factor for being selected for deportation, so it follows that the survival chances for the poor were indeed minimal. We know that people who still had considerable financial resources and who were threatened with deportation at this early stage tried to buy exemptions, but this was not possible for the poor. However, independently of an individual’s financial situation, the most important factor for obtaining temporary exemption from deportation was work in a factory that was considered to be ‘important for the war effort’ (kriegswichtiger Betrieb). The deportation of such workers was delayed, which gave them more time to decide to go underground and to prepare for doing so. Since this kind of (temporary) exemption from deportation was not related to wealth, the Jews who did hide in Germany depended on their gentile helpers to a relatively high degree. At any rate, it should be stressed that money and valuables could be life saving once the decision to hide had been made. Money could buy one faked papers and army documents. Without these papers, it was extremely dangerous for men to leave their hiding places. Again, it is important to stress that in Germany there did not exist any central funding by resistance groups. Jews in hiding as well as their helpers usually received no financial support from outside. In both countries, contact with gentiles who were willing to help appears to have been the main key to survival. In the case of the Netherlands, Jews needed a place to hide at a time when the resistance networks were not yet up and running. In both countries, therefore, Jews had to rely on their own social networks instead of the more institutionalized help of resistance networks. As mentioned earlier, in Germany helpers came from all social classes and different religious and political backgrounds. Many had no special resources, such as financial means or a large flat. Most of them were what we usually call ‘common’ Germans, although the average age at the time help was offered was relatively high at between forty and fifty. Not all of them acted selflessly. Some exploited the Jews’ plight and their dependency, although they still resisted the regime’s persecution of the Jews. This portrayal also fits many of the helpers in the Netherlands, although there are indications that Catholics were, comparatively speaking, more willing to help the Jews and sometimes less willing to help the Germans. When compared to adherents

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  137 of other denominations, Catholics were less inclined to have voted for the Dutch National Socialist movement before the war and less likely to join the Auxiliary Police Force – a volunteer police force that assisted the Germans in rounding up Jews – and Jews survived to a higher extent when the percentage of Catholics in their domicile was higher. From this comparison, one could draw the conclusion that to survive in hiding was more difficult in Germany than in the Netherlands. There are several indicators for this. In Berlin, many Jews considering going into hiding waited until the very last moment, just before the ‘Factory Operation’. This could be seen as an indication of the difficulty they had in finding a place to hide. One of the reasons for this was the fact that there was no strong or integrated resistance movement in the Third Reich, something that is underlined by the comparatively small number of Jewish children that went into hiding in Germany. In the Netherlands, by contrast, there were several resistance networks that specialized in saving members of this particularly vulnerable group. The difficulty in finding places to hide in Germany is probably a result of the danger that potential helpers and real helpers perceived. Although gentiles in the Netherlands were also reluctant to help Jews out of fear of the potential consequences, it is reasonable to assume that this reluctance was higher in Germany where helpers had to act against their own authorities. The low number of Jews who survived in hiding in Germany as well as the high percentage of Jews arrested in hiding illustrate that the risk of being taken into custody was higher in Germany than in the Netherlands. Other indications are the high number of addresses that some Jews had to use during their time in hiding as well as their odysseys through Nazi Germany. Both give the impression that the ‘submarines’ in many cases did not stay at one address for long, because of the threat to either their own safety or that of their hosts. In the Netherlands Jews in hiding also used several addresses, but the impression still holds that the number was lower than that for their German counterparts. In part this could have been because of the absence of the ‘searchers’ used in Berlin, Jews who collaborated with the Gestapo in apprehending hidden Jews (see below). The hunt for hidden Jews in the Netherlands was a task for the German police and the special pro-German or National Socialist bureaus of the Dutch police force. Apart from that, bounty hunters were also employed. Although the policemen involved as well as the bounty hunters used Jewish informers to find Jews in hiding, the role of the Jewish ‘searchers’ in Berlin went much further. Compared to Belgium the Netherlands was a more dangerous country to attempt to survive in hiding, but it was still quite a lot safer than Germany. That trying to survive in hiding and helping Jews to do so appear to have been more risky (and less successful) enterprises in Germany than in the Netherlands does not mean that there were no Germans willing to help. But it is likely that fewer gentiles dared to do so. Those willing to help Jews were predominantly friends, acquaintances, neighbours or former neighbours. However, it should be stressed

138  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala that this is only true for the first hiding place. For the follow-up addresses, other people, including perfect strangers, had to be included in the networks of rescuers. Amazingly extensive informal rescue networks could be found in Germany. The group between forty and sixty years of age was over-represented among the Jews that survived as ‘submarines’, as Jews in hiding called themselves. This is not that surprising, since at this age the social network of people is usually largest. That fact that many of the helpers of Jews were found outside of Berlin – either in the state of Brandenburg outside the city or in other German cities and regions – while the Jews that went into hiding had this city as their domicile corroborates this.

Attrition Rate: The Number of Hidden Jews in Warsaw In this section we focus on the attrition rates of Jews in hiding in the Netherlands and Germany. By ‘attrition rate’ we mean the percentage of hidden Jews who were arrested each month after the beginning of their stay underground. This percentage gives an impression of the level of the gravest danger that faced Jews in hiding: arrest by the Nazi authorities. At the same time, it is a measure to quantify the effort expended by the persecution machine in hunting down Jews in hiding. The first study to use this measure was Secret City, a study by Gunnar S. Paulsson of the Jews that hid in the ‘Aryan’ part of German-occupied Warsaw.187 We will first introduce this study to make the reader acquainted with the use of, and problems of working with, measures like ‘attrition rates’. It will also make clear that this kind of measure allows for comparisons that give greater insight into the nature of persecution regimes, comparisons that are not limited just to the Netherlands and Germany.

Warsaw In his study of survival in hiding in Warsaw, Paulsson tried to quantify as precisely as possible the number of Jews who went into hiding and the number who lived to see the liberation of what remained of Warsaw on 17 January 1945. To calculate the numbers involved, Paulsson first estimated the number of Jews under the care of the different resistance organizations that aided Jews in hiding on the basis of their surviving records. Using these records and memoirs, he furthermore estimated the total number of Jews in hiding during the period to which the records pertain, that is late 1943 until June 1944. This in turn leads to an estimation of the number of Jews on the eve of the Warsaw uprising that started 1 August 1944. Additional estimates of the number of Jews who died before and during the uprising finally result in the total number that went into hiding as well as the number that survived in this way.188 By making use of the incomplete records of the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy – ZKN), the ‘Felicja’ cell of the Polish Council to Aid the Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom, also known as Zegota) and the Jewish Labour

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  139 Bund (‘union’), which refer to 6,515 hidden Jews in the period from late 1943 to mid-1944; war-time estimates of the chairman of the ZKN, Dr Berman, regarding the number of Jews supported by the ZKN and the Bund; and research of Teresa Prekerowa regarding the number of Jews helped by Zegota, Paulsson estimated the number of Jews who were financially supported by these three organizations during 1943 and 1944 at 10,000 individuals. However, a comparison of the recipients of support showed that some Jewish individuals were helped by more than one of the three organizations. Taking an overlap of 20 per cent into account, he reduced the number of supported individuals to 7,900. Adding another estimated 1,000 Jews who were helped by other organizations, Paulsson’s final number reached 8,900 people.189 To estimate the total number of Jews in hiding, Paulsson compared the names of 2,356 known aid-receivers with the names of 131 Jews who, according to memoirs, were in hiding at the start of the Warsaw uprising. Only fifteen names matched exactly while a further six possibly matched, that is, between 11 and 16 per cent matched. Extrapolating, this meant that the 2,356 supported Jews represented between 11 and 16 per cent of the total number of Jews in hiding, giving for the latter a figure of between 15,000 and 20,000. Paulsson simplified this estimate to 17,000 Jews in hiding before the start of the Warsaw uprising.190 To calculate the number of Warsaw Jews that went into hiding but failed to survive, Paulsson used the memoirs again. Some 3,500 Jews fell into the German trap at Hotel ‘Polski’ in the summer of 1943, giving themselves up to be exchanged for German detainees or so they thought.191 Of the 3,500 who were caught, 24 are mentioned in Paulsson’s memoirs of 113 Jews. Using these figures he estimated the total number of non-survivors – one person from the memoirs represented 146 persons (3,500/24). The total number of non-survivors who had gone into hiding but were then caught is estimated to be 16,500 (146 × 113). Using the accounts of how and when Jews died in the memoirs, Paulsson also estimated that 5,400 Jews who were caught in hiding were killed from the beginning of the Warsaw uprising.192 Extrapolating the number of survivors among the Warsaw Jews hidden on the ‘Aryan’ side, Paulsson estimated the number to be around 11,600.193 This estimate was further corroborated. Using the inventory of another collection of 170 memoirs, supplemented by published digests and summaries as well as research by Helen Fein into the number of surviving Warsaw Jews, and making some adjustments based on other sources, Paulsson concluded that some 12,000 Jews had survived on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw.194 He simplified these numbers to 11,500 survivors. Since Paulsson had previously estimated that about 5,400 hidden Warsaw Jews were killed between the beginning of the Warsaw uprising and the liberation from German occupation, the fact that 11,500 had survived meant that before the uprising there were about 17,000 hidden Jews on the ‘Aryan’ side, in close accordance with his estimate mentioned above. The total number of hidden Jews could be estimated by adding together the number of survivors, 11,500, and the number of Warsaw Jews

140  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala who did not survive, 16,500. This gives a total of 28,000 Jews who attempted to survive in Warsaw by going into hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side of the city. If we exclude the 3,500 Jews who would fall into the Hotel Polski trap as well as the Jews who died already or returned to the ghetto before May 1943, there were still 22,500 in hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw on 1 May 1943. Paulsson estimated that, between May 1943 and August 1944, the hidden Jewish population had an average attrition rate of 1.9 per cent (370 people) per month 195 compared to the attrition rate for the Netherlands, which he estimated at 2.2 per cent (370 people) per month.196 The fact that the attrition rate is the same between these two countries is interesting. It does not correspond to the general picture of fiercer antiSemitism among the local population and the far more ruthless German occupational regime usually thought to characterize the situation in Poland when compared to the Netherlands.

Persecution and Attrition Rate in Germany In October 1942 the organization of deportations in Berlin underwent a fundamental revision, as mentioned above. At this time a group of experienced Austrian deportation experts under the leadership of SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, head of the ‘Central Office for Jewish Emigration’ in Vienna, was transferred to Berlin in order to apply ‘Viennese methods’ (cordoning off streets and blocks of buildings and making surprise arrests) in the German capital. The ruthlessness and unusual brutality of the Viennese SS men destroyed any remaining illusions about an orderly ‘evacuation’.197 The Jewish ‘fetchers’ received daily house or street lists with the names of Jews, and they had to report ‘nominal’ and ‘actual’ numbers at the end of the day. If they ‘failed’, they faced being sent to a concentration camp. And if the squads of officials and guards did not find their victims at home, Jewish guards had to check the apartments every two to three days in the evening. The ‘fetchers’ themselves had to carry out controls and provide reports. In other cases, they were to wait in apartments in the dark until the residents returned.198 After the Factory Operation (Fabrik-Aktion), the authorities knew in March 1943 that many thousands of Jews in Berlin had fled and were for the most part still within the city limits. Now the Gestapo started in addition to exploit victims of persecution as persecutors: they recruited the so-called ‘Jewish Investigation Service’, which was made up of Volljuden (full Jews) and Mischlinge (people of mixed blood) who had previously lived illegally themselves and been arrested – mostly men but also some women. The Gestapo promised them that they and their families would be exempted from deportation; they received money and food ration cards, living quarters and valid papers, and they could move about as they pleased. Their exact knowledge of life in illegality and their often large circle of Jewish

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  141 friends and acquaintances made the work of these Greifer (‘searchers’), as they were called, extremely successful. In addition to these searchers, Jewish Ordner acted on the orders of the Gestapo. They worked as security officers at the collection and deportation points and also accompanied Gestapo officers when they apprehended Jews, or they apprehended Jews themselves. However, while Jewish searchers, who were armed, took the initiative themselves and handed Jews over to the Gestapo who might have otherwise escaped, security officers or ‘retrievers’ only carried out direct orders from the Gestapo, which they could hardly have avoided. The searchers kept watch over public spaces, as many ‘illegals’ were forced to leave their hiding places during the day and spend their time in the open air. They combed streets, eateries and cafés. Many arrests took place in pubs and cafés that acted as meeting places for underground Jews. They also searched theatres and cinemas. Even well-forged identity papers offered little protection against an informed Greifer.199 They even set up observations of flats in order to catch Jews in hiding. Jews who were found and brought to collection points were interrogated and often tortured in order to discover the whereabouts of other ‘submarines’. The exact number of Jews living in hiding who were arrested and deported by the Jewish Investigation Office cannot be ascertained, as no official lists of the Jews arrested by searchers exist.200 It is estimated, however, that up to one thousand arrests were made by approximately thirty Jewish searchers. But even without the Greifer, many Jewish men in particular, who had to leave their quarters to search for a means of earning money and to buy food on the black market, were caught in the frequent checks made by members of the field constabulary, police and the Gestapo at train stations, in public squares and in air-raid shelters in their search for deserters. It should be borne in mind, however, that many of the arrest actions took place after information had been reported anonymously to the Gestapo. In one of the post-war trials, the secretary of Walter Dobberke, head of the detention camp Judensammellager Große Hamburger Straße in Berlin, stated: When the hiding place of one of the Jews underground became known as a result of anonymous information, the ‘Jewish investigation unit’, that is to say these Jews who stooped to snooper activities, also called ‘Greifer’, were put in action by Dobberke. These ‘Greifer’ fetched out the hidden Jews from their hiding place and took them to the collection places. They were fitted out with official cards of the State Police Office Berlin. Subsequently Dobberke interrogated the Jews placed in prison in particular to find out the addresses of other Jews in hiding.201

After the Factory Operation, apart from the underground Jews, 31,800 Jews were still living ‘legally’ in Germany at the end of March 1943, most of them partners in ‘mixed marriages’.202 Heinrich Himmler ordered that the deportations of German Jews were to be completed by the end of June 1943. This order related to those Jews

142  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala still living legally in Germany, for instance members of the administration of the Jewish communities, but not to those living in mixed marriages.203 On 28 June 1943 the forty-first transport to Auschwitz left Berlin carrying 319 people. After June 1943, time and again Jews in hiding who had been arrested were deported; most were sent directly to Auschwitz and some to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Between 4 August 1943 and 5 January 1945, twenty-two transports with some 900 Jews left Berlin for Auschwitz, mostly people arrested in hiding.204 Early in 1944 the Gestapo sent to Theresienstadt all those in mixed marriages who had lost their ‘Aryan’ partners to death or divorce. One year later the RSHA finally gave the order to tear apart any ‘mixed marriages’ still in existence and to deport the Jewish partners. It was at this late date that numerous men and women decided to flee from deportation. It is interesting that many of the known cases of rescue in North Rhine-Westphalia (Düsseldorf, Bonn, Dortmund, etc.) concern people who went into hiding only in the last month of the war.205 Approximately 10,000–12,000 people persecuted as Jews in Germany tried to escape deportation by going underground;206 around half of them – 7,000 – were in Berlin and the vicinity. It is difficult to estimate the survival rate of hidden Jews in Germany. The number of those who lived ‘illegally’ in Berlin and survived is a bit easier to approximate and was probably 2,000. If we were to use this number as a yardstick for the whole of Germany, overlooking for a moment the likely differences in the survival rate in Berlin and elsewhere,207 we could estimate a total survival rate of Jews in hiding in Germany of 26 per cent. If we take the higher estimate of the number of Jews who attempted to survive in hiding and base the percentage of survivors in Germany on the percentage in Berlin, the result is an estimated 3,857 survivors and 11,143 Jews arrested while in hiding. Another difficulty is pinpointing the date when people went into hiding. As mentioned above, probably only 3 per cent went underground before December 1941 and just under 34 per cent in the course of 1942. Although the majority of these people went into hiding between October and December 1942, others went earlier. Perhaps the start in July 1942 of the deportations from Western Europe to the death camps played a role in the decision, since what was happening to the Jews was quite widely known in Germany at least from late autumn 1942.208 This would mean that the number of months that those in hiding were at risk of being killed was thirty-two, from July 1942 until March 1945. On average, this results in an attrition rate of 3.95 per cent per month, more than double the one that Paulsson calculated for the Jews in Warsaw. Choosing October 1942 as the starting point for our calculation would result in an even higher German attrition rate. Most likely a very large number of hidden Jews in the end became victims of air raids in the large cities. Many stayed away from public air-raid shelters because of the danger of checks. They often also avoided the cellars of blocks of flats because of the risk of being recognized and denounced.209

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  143

The Hunt for Hidden Jews and the Attrition Rate in the Netherlands Recently it has been shown that the estimated number of Jews in the Netherlands who tried to hide is substantially higher than used to be thought.210 This alters the general picture regarding the persecution of the Jews. Apparently, although they knew that their attempts would mean certain death if they failed,211 more Jews tried to resist by going into hiding and, in doing so, presumably received more help from gentiles than has previously been appreciated. The number of gentiles arrested for helping Jews illustrates this. The exact number is unknown, but it is clear that in May 1943 1,604 gentiles were imprisoned in jails and (concentration) camps, awaiting trial because they had helped Jews to survive.212 That was 29.8 per cent of the total number of detainees awaiting trial at that time. On 13 August 1944 the figure was 1,997 gentiles or 20.4 per cent of the total number of detainees awaiting trial.213 However, given that the number of Jews who survived in hiding is still estimated to be around 16,100, the fact that more Jews in the Netherlands tried to hide than has previously been estimated means that the Sicherheitspolizei and its Dutch collaborators were much more ‘successful’ in apprehending hidden Jews than was previously thought: at least 11,740 Jews, instead of the previously estimated 6,300,214 were arrested. Below it will be shown what this means for the attrition rate in the case of the Netherlands. There are some problems with Paulsson’s argument when comparing the attrition rate of Warsaw and the Netherlands. First, the assumption that there were still 22,500 hidden Jews in Warsaw in May 1943 is questionable. Accepting that a total of 28,000 Jews went into hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw during the course of the German occupation, it appears highly unlikely that no hidden Jews were arrested before 1 May 1943. In fact, it is clear that this did happen, although the Germans concentrated their efforts in the period after the liquidation of the ghetto on 16 May 1943. Granted that a large proportion of the hidden Jews did not go into hiding until the conclusion of the second Aktion against the ghetto in the second half of January 1943 and therefore could not have been arrested in hiding before this date,215 this would mean that there were still 22,500 hidden Jews after the Hotel ‘Polski’ affair in the summer of 1943, the plot that lured 3,500 hidden Jews out of their hideouts, leaving ‘only’ 2,000 hidden Jews that could have been arrested between 15 November 1940 and the summer of 1943. The supposed number of arrestees is, however, even lower since the figure of 2,000 includes Jews that died or returned to the ghetto.216 Can we trust this number? It appears that it would be better to use all of the 28,000 who went into hiding, while limiting the period of time to the months that the deportations were happening. There are other questionable details. When computing the attrition rate for the Netherlands, Paulsson chooses the time period starting with the deportations of the Jews to the death camps in July 1942. In this way, the hidden Jews were supposedly

144  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala under threat of arrest for twenty-seven months, although there are indications that Jews in the Netherlands went into hiding in smaller numbers during the early stages of the deportations and in larger numbers during the later stages. For Warsaw, however, Paulsson starts to count the number of months that hidden Jews were under threat of arrest almost a year later, in May 1943, although some 14,000 Jews were already under the threat of arrest a considerable number of months earlier. Second, the numbers Paulsson used to estimate the attrition rate in the Netherlands are not correct. At least 27,840 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands, and of this group at least 11,740 Jews were arrested and killed.217 Assuming, with Paulsson, that the 27,840 Jews all went into hiding at the same time, i.e. at the moment the deportations started, the number of months they ran the risk of being arrested and killed was 26 (15 July 1942 to 13 September 1944). This gives an average monthly arrest rate of 452, which roughly corresponds with the official German estimates of the numbers of arrested Jews for 1944: 600 per month at the beginning of 1944 and 500 per month in June 1944.218 Based on these figures, the average monthly attrition rate for the Netherlands was 2.1 per cent. Our recalculation of the attrition rate is only marginally different from the rate Paulsson estimated for the Netherlands. Recalculating the Warsaw attrition rate using the same assumption that the hidden Jews all went into hiding at the start of the deportations, which means that the Jews ran the risk of being arrested for a period of twenty-four months (22 July 1942 to 1 August 1944), and including all the 28,000 Jews that went into hiding,219 we arrive at an average monthly attrition number of 458 people and an average monthly attrition rate of 2.1 per cent. Although our numbers are different to Paulsson’s, we arrive at the same conclusion he wished to make, i.e. that the attrition rate in the Netherlands was similar to the one in Warsaw. The question of why this was the case is intriguing. Clearly Radzilowski has a point when he states in his review of Secret City that ‘if we accept “for the sake of argument” that Poles are/were more anti-Semitic than the Dutch, then it is clear that survival was much less dependent on the level of antisemitism in a particular society than we have heretofore been led to believe. In short, antisemitism is an imperfect and perhaps even poor predictor of Jewish survival and other factors need to be considered.’220 All the same, what needs to be stressed here is that the attrition rate for Germany is almost twice as high as it is for either Warsaw or the Netherlands.

Conclusion In the introduction to this chapter, we repeated five of the most commonly cited reasons why few Jews in Germany survived the Nazi dictatorship. First, National Socialism ruled Germany and had the persecution of the Jews as one of its main ideologically driven aims from 1933. Second, what remained of the Jewish community in Germany at the start of the deportations to the death camps was a vulnerable group of people, isolated, impoverished and relatively old. Third,

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  145 since Hitler-Germany was at war, a war that the Nazis portrayed as a ‘struggle for existence’ of the German people against ‘the Jews’, public support for, or at least acceptance of, the anti-Jewish policies was supposedly quite high. The new Nazi Menschenbild, based on the racism and anti-Semitism propagated since 1933, had caused dynamic social processes of change. Those Germans who helped Jews acted not only under restrictions but also against the predominant changed frame of reference in the country. Fourth, and related to this, German citizens were probably less likely to help Jews who were trying to hide than the citizens of the countries that Germany had occupied. Fifth, Jews in Germany were unlikely to escape abroad. Not only were Germany’s borders closed and guarded, but the military occupation of the neighbouring countries meant that safe territories were even further away. These circumstances should not, however, obscure the fact that in Germany 10,000–12,000 Jews attempted to survive in hiding, approximately 7,000 of them in Berlin, or almost 10 per cent of the Jews who lived in the capital in October 1941. In the Netherlands, the number of Jews that went into hiding was at least 27,840, or 20 per cent of the Jewish population of the Netherlands. The comparison with the Jews in the Netherlands in this chapter serves to make clear why, in a relative sense, fewer Jews in Germany attempted to survive in hiding and why, of those that did try, so few were successful. To make this comparison meaningful and not one of apples and pears, it was first shown that the size, composition, distribution and societal position of Jews in the Netherlands and Germany was not really all that different. During the two years between the start of the occupation of the Netherlands and the start of the deportations of Jews to the death camps in the east, the Nazis endeavoured to make the circumstances under which Jews in both countries had to live more equal. Nevertheless, important differences remained and are significant regarding the Jews that survived in hiding. In Germany, women appear to have had somewhat better chances of survival underground than men, who ran a greater risk of being checked since every man of combat age not at the front was suspected of being a deserter. Jewish men thus had either to refrain from appearing in public or to acquire papers that would withstand thorough inspection. In the Netherlands, the situation was different. Dutch men were not conscripted into the German armed forces, so Jewish men in hiding did not run a higher risk of being arrested than Jewish females. Numbers from the province of Utrecht suggest that females did not have a higher chance of survival. Another marked contrast between Germany and the Netherlands concerns the number of children that went into hiding. In Germany, children formed the small­est group among the Jews in hiding. Of the 3,600 people known by name to have gone into hiding in Berlin, there were only 300 children born between 1928 and 1944; probably 250 of them survived. Unlike in Germany, Jewish parents in the Netherlands had more opportunity to entrust their children to the care of gentiles. Apart from that, several resistance networks specialized in helping Jewish children to survive the occupation in hiding, making children the group with a disproportionately high survival rate.

146  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala The role of money was probably similar in both countries; it therefore could not have been responsible for differences in the survival rates. In both countries, contact with gentiles who were willing to help appears to have been the main key to survival. In Germany there were no resistance organizations to which Jews could turn, and in the Netherlands Jews needed a place to hide at a time when the resistance networks had not yet been established. In both countries this meant that the Jews had to rely on their own social networks instead of the institutionalized help of resistance networks. One could draw the conclusion that, relying on these social networks was more difficult for Jews in Germany than in the Netherlands. There are several indicators that this was indeed the case. In Germany, many Jews postponed going into hiding until the very last moment, i.e. until just before or even during the ‘Factory Operation’ at the end of February 1943. This could be seen as an indication of the difficulty they faced in finding a place to hide. The difficulty in finding places to hide in Germany was probably a result of the danger – often overestimated in the atmosphere of fear – that potential helpers and real helpers perceived. Officially, helping Jews was punished with a concentration camp sentence, but in reality the hosts of hidden Jews were often not punished at all: the severest punishments were mostly reserved for those helpers that did more than provide Jews with a hideout. At the same time, however, the danger was probably higher in Germany than in the Netherlands. The low number of survivors among the Jews that hid in Germany, as well as the high percentage of Jews that were arrested in hiding, resulting in a much higher attrition rate for Jews in Germany than Jews in the Netherlands (and Warsaw), both underline the dangers. A third indication is the high number of addresses that some Jews had to use during their time in hiding in Germany, as well as their odysseys through Nazi Germany. Both give the impression that hidden Jews moved frequently, because of (perceived) threats either to their own safety or to that of their hosts. A last point ought to be mentioned. In this chapter it has been argued that the number of Jews who attempted to survive in hiding was higher than previously thought, both in the Netherlands and in Germany. At the same time, this means that the number of gentiles that were involved in helping them must have been higher as well. Both numbers should be seen as part of the resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. In both countries, the number of people involved in this kind of resistance ran into several tens of thousands.

Notes 1. Marnix Croes and Peter Tammes, ‘Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan’: Een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen van de joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten, 1940– 1945 (Amsterdam: Aksant 2006), p. 193.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  147   2. Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, ‘Anti-joodse politiek en organisatie van de deportaties in Frankrijk en Nederland’, in Henk Flap and Marnix Croes (eds), Wat toeval leek te zijn maar niet was: De organisatie van de jodenvervolging in Nederland (Amsterdam: University Press, 2001), pp. 15–38.   3. Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, ‘The Persecution of the Jews: Comparing Belgium and the Netherlands’, Netherlands’ Journal of Social Science 34(2) (1998), pp. 126–64.   4. Together with the so-called ‘non-Aryans’ (baptized persons of Jewish origin) approximately 529,230 persons. See Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Juden–Christen–Deutsche, vol. 1: 1933–1935 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1990), p. 262.   5. Ino Arndt and Heinz Boberach, ‘Deutsches Reich’, in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1991), pp. 23–65.   6. Friedrich Battenberg, Das Europäische Zeitalter der Juden, vol. 2: Von 1650– 1945 (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1990), p. 239.   7. Günter Plum, ‘Die Situation der deutschen Juden zu Beginn der NS-Zeit’, in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Die Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1988), pp. 268– 71, here p. 268.   8. Ibid., pp. 35–6.   9. Ibid., p. 32 and pp. 95–6. 10. The enormous impact of the mass arrests on emigration is delineated by Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 1996), pp. 217–18. 11. Susanne Willems, Der entsiedelte Jude: Albert Speers Wohnungsmarktpolitik für den Berliner Hauptstadtbau (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 2000), pp. 186–7. 12. Wolf Gruner, Der Geschlossene Arbeitseinsatz deutscher Juden: Zur Zwangsverfolgung als Element der Verfolgung 1938–1943 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1997), pp. 55–63. 13. Ibid., p. 339. 14. Statistics of the Reichsvereinigung. After the RV ‘register adjustment’: Altreich 158,586, Berlin 69,915. 15. Johannes C.H. Blom and Joel J. Cahen, ‘Joodse Nederlanders, Nederlandse joden en joden in Nederland (1870–1940)’, in Johannes C.H. Blom, Rena Fuks-Mansfels and Ivo Schöffer (eds), Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland (Amsterdam: Balans, 1995), pp. 247–312, here p. 251. 16. Johannes Th.M. Houwink ten Cate, ‘Het jongere deel: Demografische en sociale kenmerken van het jodendom in Nederland tijdens de vervolging’, in David Barnouw, Dick van Galen Last, Marion de Keizer, Remé Kok et al. (eds), Oorlogsdocumentatie 40–45: Tiende Jaarboek van het Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie 1999 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1999), pp. 9–66, here pp. 13–16.

148  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala 17. Blom and Cahen, ‘Joodse Nederlanders’, pp. 257–87. 18. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 368–9. 19. Ronald Havenaar, De NSB tussen nationalisme en ‘volkse’ solidariteit: De vooroorlogse ideologie van de Nationaal Socialistische Beweging in Nederland (’s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1983), pp. 101–6. 20. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 516–25. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 32. 23. Louis de Jong, Het koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, fourteen parts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969–91), part 4, pp. 874–5. 24. Rijksinspectie van de bevolkingsregisters, Statistiek der bevolking van joodschen bloede in Nederland samengesteld door de Rijksinspectie van de Bevolkingsregisters aan de hand van de formulieren van aanmelding ingevolge verordening no. 6/1941 van den Rijkscommissaris voor het bezette Nederlandsche gebied (Landsdrukkerij, 1942). 25. Ibid. 26. By ‘compare’ here is meant ‘compare with’ or measure up to, an activity that should result in conclusions as to what extent conditions, events or developments can be grouped together as similar or contrasted as different in terms of their most important characteristics. It is not meant as ‘to compare to’, or to note similarities in dissimilar things. 27. Alfred Gottwald and Diana Schulle, Die ‘Judendeportationen’ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945 (Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2005), p. 33–4. 28. Wolf Gruner, ‘Von der Kollektivausweisung zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (1938–1945)’, in Birthe Kundrus and Beate Meyer (eds), Die Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland: Pläne – Praxis – Reaktionen (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2004), pp. 21–62, here p. 60. 29. Ibid., p. 61. 30. Peter Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Bonn: Siedler, 2006), pp. 166f. 31. Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, p. 50; Christian Gerlach, ‘Die WannseeKonferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden und Hitlers politische Grandsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermorden’, Werkstatt Geschichte 18 (1997), p. 10. 32. Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, p. 50. 33. Freie Universität Berlin (ed.), Gedenkbuch Berlins der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus: ‘Ihre Namen mögen nie vergessen werden!’ (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1995), p. 98. 34. ‘Bericht der Schutzpolizei aus Litzmannstadt vom 13.11.1941’, in Kurt Pätzold and Erika Schwarz, Tagesordnung: Judenmord (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1992), pp. 87–8. 35. Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, p. 55. 36. De Jong, Het koninkrijk, part 5, p. 986, pp. 1001f.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  149 37. Paul Sauer (ed.), Dokumente über die Verfolgung jüdischer Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das nationalsozialistische Regime 1933–1943 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), vol. 2, no. 462, pp. 272–3. See also Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, p. 55. 38. Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, p. 52. 39. Gruner, Der Geschlossene Arbeitseinsatz, pp. 273–93. 40. See Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II, Diktate 1941–1945 (Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1987), entry of 18 August 1941, p. 266. 41. Susanne Willems, Der entsiedelte Jude, pp. 327–55. A real estate agent, a tax accountant, a former housing office employee and a merchant with contacts in the Berlin Gestapo office had attempted to pay to be taken off deportation lists as of December 1941. 42. Ibid., p. 333. 43. Christian Gerlach, ‘Wannsee-Konferenz’. 44. Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem (hereafter YVA), sign. 02/34, 7 p., here p. 1. 45. See Beate Meyer, ‘Das unausweichliche Dilemma: Die Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, die Deportationen und die untergetauchten Juden’, in Beate Kosmala and Claudia Schoppmann (eds), Überleben im Untergrund: Hilfe für Juden in Deutschland (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2002), pp. 273–97, here pp. 295f. 46. Ibid., p. 281. 47. Ibid., p. 295. 48. Herbert A. Strauss, In the Eye of the Storm: Growing up Jewish in Germany 1918–1943 – A Memoir (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), p. 186. 49. Meyer, ‘Dilemma’, p. 281. 50. Martina Voigt, ‘Die Deportation der Berliner Juden 1941 bis 1945’, in Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannseekonferenz, Landesbildstelle Berlin (eds), Die Grunewaldrampe: Die Deportation der Berliner Juden (Berlin, 1993), p. 38. 51. Gottwald and Schulle, Die ‘Judendeportationen’, pp. 230 f. 52. Meyer, ‘Dilemma,’ p. 294. 53. Ibid., p. 287. 54. Ibid., p. 296. 55. Beate Meyer, ‘Between Self-Assertion and Forced Collaboration: The Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939–1945’, in Francis Nicosia and David Scrase (eds), Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), pp. 149–69. 56. See, for instance, the peak in suicides among Jews in May 1940; Wout Ultee and Ruud Luijkx, ‘De schaduw van een hand: Joods-gojse huwelijken en joodse zelfdoding in Nederland in 1936–1943’, in Henk Flap and Wil Arts (eds), De organisatie van de bezetting (Amsterdam: University Press, 1997), pp. 55–76. 57. For a timetable of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, see Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940–1945 (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 261–7.

150  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala 58. Friso Roest and Jos Scheren, Oorlog in de stad: Amsterdam 1939–1941 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1998), pp. 247–305. 59. De Jong, Het koninkrijk, part 5, p. 1016. 60. Robert Bohn, Reichskommissariat Norwegen: ‘Nationalsozialistischer Neuord­ nung’ und Kriegswirtschaft (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000) pp. 82, 85. 61. De Jong, Het koninkrijk, part 5, pp. 1048–52. 62. Bettina Zeugin and Thomas Sandkühler, Die Schweiz und die deutschen Lösegelderpressungen in den besetzten Niederlanden: Vermögensentziehung, Freikauf, Austausch 1940–1945. Beiheft zum Bericht die Schweiz und die Flüchtlinge zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz – Zweiter Weltkrieg, vol. 24 (Zurich: Chronos, 2004). 63. De Jong, Het koninkrijk, part 5, pp. 1006–7. 64. Ibid., p. 986. 65. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 128f. 66. Roest and Scheren, Oorlog, pp. 229–30, 253–5. 67. Ibid., pp. 234–40. 68. Abel J. Herzberg, Kroniek der jodenvervolging 1940–1945 (Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1985 [1950]), pp. 188–256; Jacob Presser, Ondergang: De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940–1945, 2 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 452–526. 69. Isidor van der Hal, Het mesje: De oorlog van een joods Groninger arts (Groningen: Stichting Geldersboek, 1994), pp. 12f. 70. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 248–50. 71. Gerhard Hirschfeld, ‘Niederlande’, in Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords, pp. 137–66, here pp. 162–5. 72. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 39–41. 73. Griffioen and Zeller, ‘The Persecution of the Jews’. 74. Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, ‘Anti-Jewish Policy and Organization of the Deportations in France and the Netherlands, 1940–1944: A Comparative Study’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20(3) (2006), pp. 437–73. 75. Cornelis J. Lammers, ‘Collaboreren op niveau: Een vergelijkende studie van Duitse bezettingsregimes gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog’, Mens en Maatschappij 69 (1994), pp. 366–99; Jørgen Haestrop, ‘The Danish Jews and the German Occupation’, in Leo Goldberger (ed.), The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Moral Courage under Stress (New York: University Press, 1987), pp. 13–54; Leni Yahil, ‘Methods of Persecution: A Comparison of the “Final Solution” in Holland and Denmark’, Scripta Hierosolymitana, Studies in History 23 (1972), pp. 279–300. 76. After the Second World War in Germany no general survey was undertaken of Jews who had lived illegally. A new ‘Gedenkbuch’ (2006) contains the names of victims of the persecution of Jews from 1933 to 1945 in Germany within the borders of 1937. The focus is on the time after the beginning of the deportations in October 1941; in it are also the names of former refugees deported from

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  151

77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86.

other European countries, but there is no information on people who tried to escape deportation: Gedenkbuch: Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945, 4 vols, ed. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 2nd extended edition (2008). According to research in the database of the Gedenkbuch Berlins (1995), there are references to around 3,600 people who had been at least temporarily in hiding. However, this figure includes only a fraction of those actually in hiding. See Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 203. She suggests 10,000–12,000; Wolfgang Benz, ‘Überleben im Untergrund 1943–1945’, in Benz (ed.), Die Juden in Deutschland (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), p. 660, gives a figure of 10,000; Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um die Existenz und Menschenwürde 1933–1945 (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1984), p. 150, propose 10–12,000 (including the occupied territories). Gerald Reitlinger, Die Endlösung: Hitlers Versuch der Ausrottung der Juden Europas 1939–1945, 7th edition (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1956), p. 180, mentioned around 9,000 Jews as living underground in Berlin. Kurt Lindenberg, a young Jew from Berlin, who went underground on 27 February 1943 and escaped from Berlin to Sweden via Denmark at the end of 1943, reported in April 1945 that in February 1943 around 7,000 Jews were living illegally in Berlin. See Kurt Lindenberg, ‘Illegalität in Berlin, Flucht nach Dänemark und Schweden, April 1945’ (Vienna Library), YVA, sign. 02/33, p. 7. Peter Longerich and Dieter Pohl (eds), Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden: Eine umfassende Dokumentation des Holocaust 1941 bis 1945 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1989), p. 166. Beate Kosmala, ‘Zwischen Ahnen und Wissen: Flucht vor der Deportation (1941–1943)’, in Kundrus and Meyer (eds), Die Deportation, pp. 135–59. Database of the research project‚ ‘Rescue of Jews in National Socialist Germany 1933–45’, based at the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University Berlin (1997–2002). Claudia Schoppmann, ‘Die “Fabrik-Aktion” in Berlin: Hilfe für untergetauchte Juden als Form humanitären Widerstands’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 2 (2005), pp. 138–48, here pp. 141–2. This change occurred after the discovery of corruption by employees of the Judenreferat (Gestapoleitstelle Berlin). See Christian Dirks, ‘“Greifer”: Der Fahndungsdienst der Berliner Gestapo’, in Beate Meyer and Hermann Simon (eds), Juden in Berlin 1938–1945 (Berlin: Philo, 2000), pp. 233–57, here p. 234. Doris Tausendfreund, Erzwungener Verrat: Jüdische ‘Greifer’ im Dienst der Gestapo 1943–1945 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2006). YVA, sign. 02/965. Of the 2,600 people known by name who went into hiding in Berlin to escape deportation, the exact date is known in around 1,000 cases. Of these, only 3 per

152  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala   87.   88.

  89.   90.

  91.

  92.   93.   94.

  95.

  96.

  97.   98.   99.

100.

101.

cent went underground in the autumn of 1941, almost 34 per cent in the course of 1942 (most between October and December) and 52 per cent in 1943. Kosmala, ‘Zwischen Ahnen und Wissen’, pp. 135–59. YVA, sign. 02/1028. The Pagel family was able to hide for several months outside of Berlin in the weekend house of helpful neighbours. After a denunciation, they lost this hiding place. Later they were arrested in the street in Berlin and deported to Auschwitz. The father Fritz Pagel was the only survivor. YVA, sign. 02/430, p. 1. See Wolf Gruner, ‘Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Ereignisse in der Berliner Rosenstraße: Fakten und Fiktionen um den 27. Februar 1943’, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 11 (2003), pp. 83–177, here p. 146. Only small transports left for Auschwitz at that time from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, Trier, Bielefeld and other cities. Several hundred people were deported from Breslau, however. Gruner, ‘Die Fabrik-Aktion’, pp. 152–3. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 150. The author shows through a number of examples how Jewish forced labourers managed to escape if warned in time. Beate Meyer, ‘“A conto Zukunft”: Hilfe und Rettung für untergetauchte Hamburger Juden’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 88 (2002), pp. 205–33. Beate Kosmala, ‘Robert Eisenstädts Flucht aus Majdanek: Über Frankfurt am Main in die Schweiz’, in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Überleben im Dritten Reich: Juden im Untergrund und ihre Helfer (Munich: Beck Verlag, 2003), p. 113–30. Petra Bonavita, Mit falschem Pass und Zyankali: Retter und Gerettete aus Frankfurt am Main in der NS-Zeit (Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 2009). Unfortunately the author does not give the figures in her book, but she provided the results of her research viva voce. Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, p. 50. Gruner, Der Geschlossene Arbeitseinsatz, pp. 273–93. Wolf Gruner, Forced Labour of Jews: Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims in Germany, Austria, the Protectorates and the Occupied Territories of Poland 1938–1943/44. A Comparative View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Beate Kosmala, ‘Rettung und Verrat: Jüdische Kinder in Deutschland 1941– 1945’, in Miriam Gillis-Carlebach and Barbara Vogel (eds), ‘So spricht der Ewige: … Und die Straßen der Stadt Jerusalem werden voll sein mit Knaben und Mädchen, die in ihren Straßen spielen.’ Das jüdische Kind zwischen hoffnungsloser Vergangenheit und hoffnungsvoller Zukunft (Munich and Hamburg: Dönitz and Galitz Verlag, 2008), pp. 62–84. Evy Goldstein Woods, unpublished manuscript (Albuquerque, US, 1996), Archives of the German Resistance Memorial Centre, Berlin.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  153 102. Database ‘Widerstand gegen die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945’ of the German Resistance Memorial Centre in Berlin. 103. Database of the Gedenkbuch Berlins. 104. Of the 3,600 people in hiding known by name (including those who did not survive), the date or year of birth is known of 2,900. These figures are reference values. 105. Moshe Zimmermann, Deutsche gegen Deutsche: Das Schicksal der Juden 1938–1945 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2008). 106. Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’; Bernward Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2007). 107. Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’, p. 160. 108. Ibid., pp. 187–9. 109. Quoted by Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’, p. 191. 110. Ibid., p. 193. 111. Ibid., p. 191. 112. See also Kaplan, Dignity, pp. 194f. 113. Interview with Rosel Bibo by Beate Kosmala (Berlin, 2000). 114. Mark Roseman, In einem unbewachten Augenblick: Eine Frau überlebt im Untergrund (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2002). 115. Yad Vashem Jerusalem, Department of the Righteous Archives, ger 3783. 116. Collection Erna Segal, L.B.I. Archives New York, ME 594, 319 S., here p. 152. 117. In contrast to Jewish survivors, few helpers wrote testimonies. Examples are Ruth Andreas Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 1938–1945 (New York, 1946), published in Germany one year later under the title Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1938–1945 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1947); Harald Poelchau, Die Ordnung der Bedrängten (Berlin, 1963); Maria Gräfin von Maltzan, Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht: Erinnerungen (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1986). 118. Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2005). 119. See Hans-Rainer Sandvoß, Die ‘andere’ Reichshauptstadt: Widerstand aus der Arbeiterbewegung in Berlin von 1933–1945 (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2007). 120. Ute Klingemann and Jürgen W. Falter, ‘Hilfe für Juden während des Holocaust: Sozialpsychologische Merkmale der nichtjüdischen Helfer und Charakteristika der Situation’, in Günther B. Ginzel (ed.), Mut zur Menschlichkeit: Hilfe für Verfolgte während der NS-Zeit (Cologne: Rheinland Verlag, 1993), pp. 115– 48. 121. Strauss, In the Eye, p. 208. 122. Martina Voigt, ‘“Grüße von Ferdinand”: Elisabeth Abeggs vielfältiger Einsatz für Verfolgte’, in Beate Kosmala and Claudia Schoppmann (eds), Sie blieben unsichtbar: Zeugnisse aus den Jahren 1941–1945 (Berlin: Gedenkstätte

154  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala

123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130.

131.

132. 133. 134. 135.

Deutscher Widerstand, 2007), pp. 104–16. The Abegg network is also presented in the permanent exhibition of the Silent Heroes Memorial in Berlin (www.gedenkstaette-stille-helden.de). A Berlin-based network of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans supporting Jews in hiding was reconstructed by Katrin Rudolph, Hilfe beim Sprung ins Nichts: Franz Kaufmann und die Rettung von Juden und ‘nichtarischen’ Christen (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2005). The resistance group ‘Community for Peace and Reconstruction’ in Berlin and Luckenwalde (Brandenburg), unknown until the 1990s and composed of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, was an example of the connection between political resistance to the Nazi regime and help for Jews. The members mobilized resources for the accommodation of Jews and simultaneously distributed leaflets against the Nazi regime. People whose motives and worldviews differed greatly (Nazi Party members, soldiers, apolitical people and communists) all belonged to the group. See Barbara Schieb, ‘Die Gemeinschaft für Frieden und Aufbau’, in Johannes Tuchel (ed.), Der vergessene Widerstand (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), pp. 97–113. Hans-Josef Wollasch, Gertrud Luckner: Botschafterin der Menschlichkeit (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 2005). Beate Kosmala, ‘Zuflucht in Potsdam bei Christen der Bekennenden Kirche’, in Benz (ed.), Überleben im Dritten Reich, pp. 113–30. Klaus Harpprecht, Harald Poelchau: Ein Leben im Widerstand (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 2004). Andreas Friedrich, Schattenmann. Kosmala, ‘The Rescue of Jews, 1941–1945: Resistance by Quite Ordinary Germans’, in David Bankier and Israel Gutman (eds), Nazi Europe and the Final Solution (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 2003), pp. 93–107, here p. 106. Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’, p. 285. Reha and Al Sokolow, Defying the Tide: An Account of Authentic Compassion during the Holocaust (Jerusalem and New York: Devora Publishing, 2003). Collection Erna Segal. Altogether the Segal family, who looked for shelter in and around Berlin, needed around 50 helpers and almost the same number of hiding places. Beate Kosmala, ‘Missglückte Hilfe und ihre Folgen: Die Ahndung der “Judenbegünstigung” durch die NS-Verfolgungsbehörden’, in Kosmala and Schoppmann (eds), Überleben, pp. 205–22. In approximately 10 per cent of cases, the names, dates and in many cases also the background story could be investigated. See the example of Susanne Veit, YVA, 02-363 (Vienna Library). ‘Account of Registered Jews in Berlin after the Liberation through the Allies’ (August 1945), Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin (Library). Many cases are reconstructed in the database ‘Rescue for Jews’ (1997–2002), continued as a work in progress since 2005.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  155 136. See Beate Meyer, ‘Jüdische Mischlinge’: Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungser­ fahrung 1933–1945 (Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz Verlag, 1999) pp. 24–95. 137. Simone Hannemann, Robert Havemann und die Widerstandsgruppe ‘Europäische Union’ (Berlin: Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, 2001). 138. Johannes Houwink ten Cate, ‘Mangelnde Solidarität gegenüber Juden in den besetzten niederländischen Gebieten?’, in Wolfgang Benz and Juliane Wetzel (eds), Solidarität und Hilfe für Juden während der NS Zeit: Regionalstudien 3. Dänemark, Niederlande, Spanien, Portugal, Ungarn, Albanien, Weißrussland (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1999), pp. 87–133, here p. 125. 139. Marnix Croes, ‘The Holocaust in the Netherlands and the Rate of Jewish Survival’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20(3) (2006), pp. 474–99. 140. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 407–14. 141. Bert Jan Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak: Geschiedenis van de georganiseerde hulp aan joodse kinderen in Nederland 1942–1945 (Amsterdam: Kok Kampen, 1996), pp. 415–17, found that out of a group of 142 Jewish children who were in hiding during the occupation 55 (39 per cent) were financially supported by resistance networks. The amounts paid to their hosts were, however, never high. Based on his calculations, one would conclude they amounted to between 22 and 100 guilders per month. 142. De Jong, Het koninkrijk, vol. 7, p. 465, pp. 808–27. 143. Many cases of benevolence are known, but there were also cases of exploitation. Some Jews ran up debts that they had to pay off after the war, others lost their place to stay and fell into the hands of the Germans. De Jong (Het koninkrijk, vol. 6, p. 346) thinks that the benevolent cases outnumber the cases of exploitation. 144. Bart van der Boom, Den Haag in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (The Hague: Seapress, 1995). 145. Ibid., pp. 171–3. 146. Houwink ten Cate, ‘Het jongere deel’, pp. 17–20. 147. Furthermore, it is not really clear to what extent the Jews arrested were really Jews in hiding. See Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 183–7. 148. Marnix Croes, ‘Jodenvervolging in Utrecht’, in Flap and Croes (eds), Wat toeval leek te zijn, pp. 39–68, here p. 64. 149. Ibid., pp. 45–7, 56–7. 150. Houwink ten Cate, ‘Het jongere deel’, pp. 37–9. 151. J. van de Vosse, Auschwitz: Deel 1: het dodenboek van Auschwitz, published by the Dutch Red Cross in 1947, p. 6, pp. 11–12. 152. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif”, pp. 517, 519. 153. Croes, ‘Jodenvervolging in Utrecht’, pp. 52–4; Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak. 154. See Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak, for the history of ‘het Utrechts kindercomité’, ‘de Amsterdamse Studenten Groep’, ‘de Naamloze Vennootschap’ and ‘de Trouwgroep’.

156  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala 155. See Bloeme Evers-Emden, Geschonden bestaan: Gesprekken met vervolgde Joden die hun kinderen moesten ‘wegdoen’ (Amsterdam: Kok Kampen, 1996), pp. 52f., for examples. 156. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, chapters 4, 7, 8 and 11. See also Croes, ‘Gentiles and the Survival of Jews in the Netherlands’, in Beate Kosmala and Feliks Tych (eds), Facing the Nazi Genocide: Non-Jews and Jews in Europe (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2004), pp. 41–72. 157. Ibid. 158. Bloeme Evers-Emden, Geleende kinderen: Ervaringen van onderduikouders en hun joodse beschermelingen in de jaren 1942 tot 1945 (Amsterdam: Kok Kampen, 1994), p. 97. Given the fact that for gentiles it was less risky to provide shelter for Jewish children than for Jewish adults, it is likely that this will have resulted in a smaller chance of Jewish children being arrested in hiding. Perhaps the small number of Jewish children in Houwink ten Cate’s sample of arrested Jews indicates that they were less likely to get caught and not, as might be assumed, less likely to hide. 159. Croes, ‘Jodenvervolging in Utrecht’. 160. Presser, Ondergang, part 2, p. 251. This does not mean that every single one of these twenty-six hideouts was used only once by one and the same Jew, as some historians appear to assume when they calculate the help Dutch gentiles gave to Jews. See, for instance, Dick Verkijk, Die slappe Nederlanders – of viel het toch wel mee in 1940–1945? (Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2001). 161. Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak, pp. 397–400. 162. Ed van Thijn, Achttien adressen (Amsterdam: Augustus, 2004). 163. Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak, pp. 397–400. 164. Ibid., p. 422. 165. Moore, Victims and Survivors, p. 215. 166. Ibid., pp. 217f. 167. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 518–19. 168. Moore, Victims and Survivors, p. 217. 169. Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak, pp. 392–5. 170. Marnix Croes, ‘The Netherlands 1942–1945: Survival in Hiding and the Hunt for Hidden Jews’, Netherlands’ Journal of Social Sciences 40(2) (2004), pp. 157–75. 171. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 199–204. 172. The results reported in Peter Tammes, ‘Survival of Jews during the Holocaust: The Importance of Different Types of Social Resources’, International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 36 (2007), pp. 330–5, support this assertion: having gentiles as relatives was the most important factor in helping Jews in Amsterdam to survive the German occupation. 173. Bert Jan Flim, ‘Joodse onderduikers en de drievoudige tragiek van de onderduikorganisaties’, in Flap and Croes (eds), Wat toeval leek te zijn, pp. 145–61, here p. 150.

Facing Deportation in Germany and the Netherlands  •  157 174. Houwink ten Cate, ‘Mangelnde Solidarität’, p. 125. 175. Croes, ‘The Netherlands 1942–1945’, p. 164. 176. Collection of deportation lists by the Netherlands Red Cross, archive Informa­ tion Bureau, archive Westerbork. 177. Including 355 special Straffälle deported to Mauthausen. See Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, p. 180. 178. The Netherlands Red Cross, archive Information Bureau, archive Westerbork, boxes 3 and 4. 179. Transport list Vught-Auschwitz, dated 15 Nov. 1943. The Netherlands Red Cross, archive Information Bureau, archive Vught, box 2. 180. Croes and Tammes, ‘Gif’, pp. 182–96. 181. Croes, ‘The Netherlands 1942–1945’. 182. Ibid. 183. Marnix Croes, ‘Verscherpt verhoord: Mishandelingen door de Duitse politie in Limburg tijdens de bezetting’, in Gerard Aalders, David Barnouw and Hans Daalder (eds), Oorlogsdocumentatie ’40-’45: Zevende jaarboek van het Rijksin­ stituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1996), pp. 111–31. 184. Van de Vosse, Auschwitz. 185. Croes, ‘Jodenvervolging in Utrecht’, pp. 52–4; Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak. 186. De Jong, Het koninkrijk, vol. 7, p. 465, pp. 825f. 187. Gunnar S. Paulsson, The Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 188. Ibid., pp. 200–1. 189. Ibid., pp. 201–8. 190. Ibid., p. 209. 191. Ibid., p. 139. 192. Ibid., pp. 212–13. 193. Ibid., p. 212. 194. Ibid., pp. 213–20. Paulsson’s methodology is not always clear. 195. Ibid., p. 222. 196. Ibid., p. 230. His calculation is based on 22,500 Jews who went into hiding, of whom 12,500 survived with a time period at risk of 27 months. 197. See Dirks, ‘“Greifer”’, p. 234. 198. Doris Tausendfreund, ‘Jüdische Fahnder: Verfolgte, Verfolger und Retter in einer Person’, in Benz (ed.), Überleben im Dritten Reich, pp. 239–56. 199. Doris Tausendfreund, Erzwungener Verrat: Jüdische ‘Greifer’ im Dienst der Gestapo 1943–1945 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2006), p. 90. 200. In their witness accounts after the war, the erstwhile ‘searchers’ tried to minimize the number of arrested Jews, if they admitted their activities at all. Witness accounts of involved erstwhile Gestapo functionaries are not available. See Tausendfreund, Erzwungener Verrat, pp. 259–60. 201. Witness account of Johanna Heym on 14 June 1966, in Landesarchiv Berlin, Strafsache gegen Bovensiepen u.a., StA LG Berlin, vol. XIX, p. 129f.

158  •  Marnix Croes and Beate Kosmala 202. See Meyer, ‘Jüdische Mischlinge’. 203. Wolf Gruner, Judenverfolgung in Berlin 1933–1945: Eine Chronologie der Behördenmaßnahmen in der Reichshauptstadt (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1996), p. 101. 204. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, p. 99. 205. Collected cases in the database ‘Rescue of Jews’; also previously unreleased results of a regional research group. 206. See Kaplan, Dignity, p. 203. She suggests 10,000 to 12,000; Wolfgang Benz, ‘Überleben im Untergrund 1943–1945’, in W. Benz (ed.), Die Juden in Deutschland, p. 660: approximately 10,000; Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um die Existenz und Menschenwürde 1933–1945 (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1984), p. 150: 10,000 to 12,000 (including the occupied territories). 207. The survival rate for Amsterdam, however, resembles the national average. 208. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany. An Oral History (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 209. I (B.K.) would like to thank my colleagues Claudia Schoppmann and espe­ cially Martina Voigt for their support and their cautious proofreading. 210. Croes, ‘The Netherlands 1942–1945’. 211. On 7 August 1942 the Joodsche Weekblad warned that Jews who failed to show up when ordered to report for the Arbeitseinsatz in the east would be punished with deportation to Mauthausen. The same applied to Jews who did not wear their Star of David or who left their municipality without a permit. That Mauthausen meant death was well known. 212. Meldungen aus den Niederlanden, no. 143 (9 May 1943), Netherlands Institute on War Documentation (NIOD), 77–85: 37B. 213. Meldungen aus den Niederlanden, no. 18 (13 August 1944), NIOD, 77–85: 37B. 214. Houwink ten Cate, ‘Mangelnde Solidarität’, p. 125. 215. According to Paulsson’s own numbers (The Secret City, p. 57), 50 per cent of the Jews who went into hiding did so after the second Aktion. 216. Ibid., p. 221. 217. Croes, ‘The Netherlands 1942–1945’, pp. 159–65. 218. Meldungen aus den Niederlanden, no. 162 and no. 171, NIOD, 77–85: 52B. 219. Including the 2,000 Jews who died or returned to the ghetto and including the Jews that fell into the Hotel ‘Polski’ trap. 220. John Radzilowski, ‘Review of Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945’, H-Holocaust, H-Net Reviews, October 2003, URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8353 (accessed 8 Feb. 2009).

–5– Jews and Their Social Environment Perspectives from the Underground Press in Poland and France

Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski

During the Second World War, France and Poland suffered very different fates. Although both countries were occupied by Nazi Germany, their rank in the hierarchy of nations postulated by the occupier’s ideology subjected them to forms of oppression that are scarcely comparable. Nevertheless, time and again, BBC French broadcasts from London offered extremely detailed descriptions of the occupation regime in Poland, which always concluded with a warning: ‘Don’t have any illusions; what is assailing Catholic Poland today will reach the French tomorrow; your worth in the eyes of the Nazi overlords is not much greater than the Poles.’ With regard to the Holocaust, the differences are no less striking. The death camps were located on Polish soil, sometimes on the very outskirts of villages whose residents could hardly be unaware of what was taking place inside them. That horror was far removed from the daily reality of the French. What they witnessed was statutory persecution of the Jews of their own country, sometimes on the initiative of their own government, followed later by their being hunted down and confined in deplorable conditions before being deported to an unknown destination that was certainly terrifying, but which remained unknown. We can provide multiple examples of such differences, beginning with the cult­ ural and political backgrounds that preceded the changes caused by the war and the defeat in the two countries. At the same time, the resistance movements that emerged in both countries produced an extraordinarily varied underground press. In both countries, Jewish organizations, too, produced clandestine publications intended for their own community or for the population at large. Instead of focusing on radical anti-Semitic streams in these two societies, we investigate, through the medium of underground publications, the dialogue between the Jews and the resistance movements in order to learn, from its nuances and scope, about the nature of the connections between Jews and non-Jews and to measure the devastation produced by anti-Semitic propaganda within political circles that might be seen as sheltered. We believe that the comparative approach, with the cross-illumination it provides, can avoid a Francocentric or Polonocentric view and allow us to identify beyond the differences – precisely because they are so vivid – the points of tangency that explain the social phenomena characteristic of those years.

159

160  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski

Jews in France, Jews in Poland: A Basis for Comparison? All the same we must justify the relevance of a comparison of the wartime situations in the two countries by first defining limits that derive, above all, from the vast differences between the two societies and that meant that the Jews in France and Poland lived in social environments that did not have much in common.

Inter-war Poland as a Multi-ethnic State and the Jews In Central and Eastern Europe before the war, the problem of national minorities was one of the main sources of political tension and instability. Quite naturally, the Jews were the national group most identified with the minorities problem, because they were a significant minority in almost all of the new states that had risen on the ruins of the empires destroyed by the First World War. There were also other large minorities in these states – Germans, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Tatars, Gypsies and others.1 Of all the new states in inter-war Eastern Europe, it was in Poland that the issue of national minorities was probably most complex and difficult. In the situation that emerged in 1918, after nearly 150 years of partition and lost sovereignty, and taking into account the fact that many national minorities had been included in the territory of the newly independent Polish state, it was necessary to find a theoretical basis for defining affiliation with the Polish nation. Who was a Pole? Someone born to Polish parents? Someone who speaks Polish? Someone who lives on sovereign Polish territory and is entitled to Polish citizenship? The debate about these weighty questions focused on whether the Polish nation should be defined according to political or ethnic criteria. The political and constitutional structure of the state tugged in the political and civic direction, but highly influential forces, mainly the Roman Catholic Church, pulled towards a definition of Polish national affiliation in ethnic and Catholic terms. The latter group identified the Jews with everything that could never be Polish and that threatened the stability of Polish society and its traditional way of life. Anti-Semitism that called for excluding the Jews was a levee to safeguard the Polish nation against those who would destroy it from within.2 In the Second Polish Republic (1918–39) the border–territory–nation nexus was complex. The borders of Poland in 1918 did not fully correspond to those of the territory occupied by the Polish people before the First Partition in 1772. Nor did they correspond to the territory inhabited by ethnic Poles in 1918. The lack of clarity about the borders of the Polish state and their correlation with the territory of the Polish nation heightened the tensions over Polish identity and its link with the national territory.3 The dissonance between the constitutional foundations of the Second Republic and how the Polish nation viewed the state also created an impassable barrier for the

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  161 formulation of an egalitarian definition of the minorities’ membership in the Polish nation. David Engel believes that the root of the problem was the perception of the state as a national enterprise or national property, in accordance with the ideas of the political theoretician Olgierd Górka.4 In a 1937 work Górka (who was by no means anti-Semitic) defined the state as a super-enterprise (nadprzedsiębiorstwo) intended to realize the goals of its ‘owners’, which may change from time to time as a function of their needs. This approach sees the state as an economic asset whose legal owners can do with it as they wish. In this logic, decisions about political issues are similar to the choices made by the owner of a factory or business. What distinguishes the state from a private enterprise, according to Górka, is the nature of the property and not the nature of the ownership. The state belongs to the major groups that exercise their ownership of it in accordance with standard political procedures.5 As for the identity of these owners, Górka had no doubts: As in every well-managed enterprise, so too in the Polish state we cannot … object that those who constitute a united and conscious two-thirds majority can exercise their property rights … In practice, they are the owners of the state … In this specific case the Polish nation is the true owner of the entire state.6

The identity of the two-thirds majority to which the Polish state belongs is crystal clear: the ethnic Poles. All members of the national minorities that made up approximately one-third of the citizens of Poland are deemed to be second-class citizens, their civic status subject to the whims of the true owners of the state. In practice, from the day in November 1918 that the Second Republic was established, members of the various national minorities were considered to be aliens, even though they held Polish citizenship. A series of directives from the early years of Polish independence emphasize the extent to which the bureaucratic and political apparatus was permeated by the idea that national minorities were aliens in the Polish state. Ethnic Poles enjoyed priority in the supply of essential commodities in times of shortage; ‘aliens’ were sometimes required to have special residence or visiting permits for various regions; and the state, acting in the name of the Polish nation, maintained its right to deny goods and services to those considered to be ‘foreign’.7 This tradition and practice was much stronger and more deeply rooted than the high-minded discourse in the Polish declaration of independence of 7 November 1918, which granted equal political and civic rights to all citizens of the Polish republic, whatever their origins, religion or ethnic affiliation.8 The minorities policy of Polish inter-war governments was strongly coloured by Polish ethnic exclusivism and very far from national and cultural pluralism.9 Although it rested on constitutional foundations, it was influenced by cumulative outside pressures and economic interests. The deterioration in the international political situation that began in the late 1920s, as well as the pressures on the Polish government in its relations with Germany to the west and the Soviet Union to the

162  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski east, exacerbated the hostility towards the national minorities, notably the Ukrainians and Jews. This is a familiar phenomenon; between the two world wars, real or imagined outside threats led to an intensification of extreme policies against national minorities in countries where the latter had a large presence. Despite Józef Piłsudski’s desire, especially in the early 1930s, to avoid internal friction and animosity among the various ethnic groups in the state, it was precisely in those years that the state launched a campaign of continual pressure in an effort to Polonize the Ukrainian minority in Eastern Galicia, especially in the villages. Concentration camps were set up in Poland in 1934 for communists (many of them Jews), as well as for Ukrainian and Belarussian nationalists.10 The evolution of the minorities policy was intimately related to economic issues by the overt policy that aimed at the creation of a national economy. For example, the fact that districts of major economic importance, such as the industrial and mining regions of Upper Silesia, were home to a large German population, and the agricultural regions on the eastern frontier (kresy) to many Belarusians and Ukrainians, influenced the government’s minorities policy in the early days of the Second Republic.11 But the treatment of the Jews, more than that of any other minority, was significantly influenced by the economic interests of the state and the propertied classes, which advocated policies that would deprive the Jews of their sources of livelihood. This was one of the important factors in the intensification of the anti-Semitic atmosphere in the country, especially from the mid-1930s on. In Poland, as in other countries in Central and Eastern Europe between the wars, the brunt of the economic struggle fell on the middle class, which was making a huge effort to improve its economic standing in a state that intensively encouraged the construction of a modern capitalist system. It was an urban middle class, nationalistic in its politics and motivated by Christian and conservative values. This class viewed the Jews as its main enemy, both because of their economic position and competition and also because they were the main supporters of the introduction of Western liberal and democratic values into Polish society. It is true that anti-Semitism was far from rare in other economic strata in Poland, including among craftsmen, farmers and members of the liberal professions; but (except in the case of the intelligentsia) this was chiefly the traditional Christian anti-Semitism rather than the economic and political anti-Semitism of the middle class. From the mid-1930s this economic anti-Semitism, supported by Piłsudski’s successors, deteriorated into outright social pathology.12 The regime, which during the first years of Polish independence had not paid close attention to the Jewish issue, changed its attitude towards them radically, especially with regard to their economic function. It placed itself at the head of those calling for dispossessing the Jews of their economic resources and for creating a situation in which emigration would be their only option.13 The need to instigate a mass exodus of Jews from Poland and to devise mechanisms that would push them out of the country ranked high on the agenda of politicians, journalists and public figures, and not just those on the anti-Semitic right.14

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  163 An important role in the Jews’ transmogrification into a foreign and hostile element, politically and morally corrupt and a threat to Polish society, was played by Church spokesmen and Catholic publications. They exerted a decisive influence on the public discourse about the future of the Jews in Poland. Like the publications of right-wing nationalist and anti-Semitic circles, most of the Catholic press referred to the Jews’ presence as the ‘Jewish problem’ in a way that purged relevant points from any discussion of the subject. Instead of dealing with the friction and weighty questions associated with the relations between Poles and Jews in a multinational state and finding ways to resolve them, the Catholic press bannered a problem whose existence was axiomatic and need not be proved, a problem that must be solved without delay or Poland’s fate would hang in the balance.15 The campaign of anti-Jewish incitement by right-wing circles and Church elements reached unprecedented heights in the mid-1930s. The results were evident in legislative initiatives that sought to start erecting a legal wall between Jews and Poles and to limit Jews’ ability to make a living.16 Anti-Jewish violence began spread­ing around the same time. Terrorism was a fundamental element in the overall campaign against the Jews in fascist circles.17 Such violence was deemed legitimate self-defence against this menacing domestic enemy. The radical right-wing press lauded the anti-Semitic hooligans who assaulted Jews and were put on trial for their acts as national heroes and martyrs. There were more than a hundred pogroms and attacks on Jews in Poland in the pre-war years. The anti-Semitic discourse focused on the need to remove as many Jews as possible from Poland and to relegate those who remained to quasi-ghettos, whose nature was not precisely defined, in order to isolate the Jews from the Polish population.18

The Jews and the Polish State The establishment of the independent Polish republic after the First World War stirred many hopes among the Jews. Until 1918 the Jewish political parties active in Congress Poland and Galicia had not had to deal directly with the existential problems of their ‘constituents’. The regimes in tsarist Russia and Habsburg AustriaHungary left them little room to manoeuvre in this domain; the Jews’ life and their relations with official authorities were subject to the authority of provincial functionaries. In independent Poland, by contrast, the Jewish political system had to offer ways for Jews to lead a reasonable life and maintain normal relations with the state in which they lived. The political democratization of the country created the illusion that the Jews, too, could enjoy the fruits of democracy; Jewish parties ran candidates in elections, established political alliances, tried to set up parliamentary blocs and endeavoured to be a factor that had to be taken into account on the Polish political scene. This was the main reason behind the illusion that Jews might ultimately achieve political equality in the country.

164  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski But this was a sham. The Jewish parties and ideologies in inter-war Poland actually worked in a very narrow space, isolated and estranged from the Polish public at large. The political system did not allow the Jews to exert any real influence on how Polish society related to them or on their own destiny in independent Poland.19 The central axis of the activity of all the Jewish political groups was the Jews’ position in the state and relations with non-Jewish society. All of the political and ideological currents that emerged among Eastern European Jews from the second half of the nineteenth century on, and which continued to exist as political parties and movements in inter-war Poland, recognized the fact that the Jews were a distinct national group and that their distinctiveness had to find an outlet for expression. They disagreed about how this national identity should be manifested: in a separate national territory in Eretz Israel or elsewhere, through national and cultural autonomy in Poland, or by finding a way to exist alongside the state while ensuring the vital interests of the Jewish minority. These were the lines demarcating the diverse ideological movements: Autonomists, Folkists, Bundists, the various Zionist parties and the Territorialists. Still, despite the broad ideological gulfs that separated them, all of them demanded that the Polish state grant full and equal rights to its Jewish citizens.20 As early as the 1920s the Jewish political groups were confronted by the frus­ trating reality that accompanied their activity until 1939 and whose influence continued to be felt under the Nazi occupation: their inability to chalk up any real gains for the Jewish sector or to improve the Jews’ condition in any way through partnership with Polish political actors. Instead of political efforts aimed at bettering the Jews’ lot in the multinational Polish state, there was an ideological debate that focused on a vision of the future, sometimes almost utopian, and that was rooted in ideas and platforms consolidated in the late nineteenth century. The future of the Jewish national home in Eretz Israel or the heroic struggle against Polish antiSemitism, as part of the creation of a socialist and egalitarian multinational Polish society, were the main expressions of the politics of helplessness in which the political leadership of Polish Jewry operated. Some Jewish intellectuals, especially in the 1930s, entertained a sombre vision of a threatening future with no real hope for change. The Jewish poet and publicist Yitzhak Katzenelson, a conscious Zionist, wrote anguished articles about what the Jewish people could expect in the future. He foresaw an impending catastrophe that the Jews were powerless to avert. He felt a growing despair in the face of what was taking place in Germany after the Nazis came to power there and began taking measures against the Jews, as well as the intensification of anti-Semitism in Poland. His work from the last years before the war is laden with a sense of a ‘house on fire’ and an imminent cataclysm. The Jews of Germany – indeed of Europe as a whole – were a group devoid of political power and the victims of an unprecedented campaign of persecution. The means employed by the persecutors and their horrifying racist zeal should be provoking revulsion – but a hypocritical world stood idly by. The near

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  165 future was dark indeed, and the confidence that ultimately the human spirit would triumph could not provide a practical solution to the present tribulations.21 From the mid-1930s on Poland endeavoured to encourage as many members as possible of its Jewish national minority to emigrate. This was not merely government policy; the idea of a drastic reduction in the number of Jews, to be accomplished by means of planned mass emigration, took root at the heart of Polish public space. There were debates and conferences about it, articles were written and petitions circulated, and many approaches were made to the government, asking it to take practical steps to accelerate the process of finding a solution to the problem. The Jewish political scene found itself swept up in internal squabbling against the vocal supporters of emigration in the Polish public sphere, who saw that as the only solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ in Poland.22 But despite the lively and uncompromising debate about the Jews’ future in the country conducted by Jewish circles in inter-war Poland, the ability of the Jewish parties and leadership to find a solution to the problem was negligible, if not indeed non-existent. The effort to better the Jews’ condition in a given political reality required correlation between political action and its underlying ideology. In Poland, however, because the Jews were an unwanted national minority, political action and the political leadership progressively lost their ability to exert any real influence and became all but irrelevant even before the Nazis arrived.23 What survived under the occupier was chiefly the illusion that the traditional ideologies were still valid.

Inter-war France as a Mono-ethnic State and the Jews A priori, in France all the problems were posed in other terms. After the First World War it seemed that the victorious nation, whose spiritual families had united to achieve victory, no longer had anything to do other than to tend its wounds and see to its reconstruction. There were no national minorities to trouble this unity. The Jews of the country had been emancipated in September 1791; France had been the first European country to accord the Jews the status of citizens with equal rights. The meritocracy installed by the Third Republic (1870–1940) had made it possible for many Jews to climb the social ladder. They became army officers; they held important positions in the civil service; they developed new disciplines in the universities; they penetrated the liberal professions.24 Witnessing and expressing this harmony, the notion of a specific Franco-Judaism underlined the natural harmony between the spirit of France and the spirit of the prophets. At the conclusion of a crisis that had torn society in two, the French state had proclaimed Captain Dreyfus innocent, granting a victory to justice over the honour of the army – even though it meant absolving a Jew. This was indeed the triumph of universal principles, a direct heritage of the French Revolution, which gave its particular colouring to French patriotism. The Jews’ enthusiastic involvement in the First World War25 seemed to

166  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski hold the promise of removing the last remnants of resistance, as demonstrated by their inclusion in Maurice Barrès’ spiritual families of France. For many French Jews, with their profound patriotism, the random outbursts of anti-Semitism were hardly more than relics of bygone times, caused by foreign influence. This glorious harmony, however, encountered rough treatment in the 1930s. The conjunction of several crises called into question everything that seemed to have been achieved. When the depression began, xenophobia came home to roost and promoted the enactment of a plethora of laws to restrict immigration and limit the employment of foreign workers, or to send back home all those now deemed undesirables, even though only a few years earlier they had played a major role in restarting an economy badly bloodied by the Great War. The middle classes, feeling their security in jeopardy, and on which the political class rested, allowed themselves to be won over by an anti-Semitism of economic origin26 that was nourished by the effects of the international crisis. The new fascist (Italy, Spain) and Nazi (Germany, Austria) regimes, just across the borders from France, and the rising tide of antiSemitism in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe (especially Poland) turned France into an asylum for the persecuted, the political victims of oppressive regimes and the Jewish victims of official anti-Semitism. On the eve of the Second World War, half of the 330,000 Jews in France were immigrants or the children of immigrants, a third of them of very recent date. Although ‘foreign’ Jews accounted for less than 0.4 per cent of the population (and all Jews for only 0.7 per cent), antiSemitism, so virulent and so blatant in the countries from which they had fled, had been taken up so effectively by the local champions of anti-Judaism that the Jews came to be viewed as the quintessential foreigner, the crystallization of all the threats that lay in wait for France. They were a political threat: these refugees were often endowed with extensive political experience; they hardly had any choice but to be oppositionists or even revolutionaries in societies that had offered them no place. What is more, following the brief episode of the Popular Front, which increased the polarization between right and left, Léon Blum had become the symbol of a left that was particularly detested by some circles, adding fuel to the fire for those who denounced the Jews’ political stranglehold on the country. They posed an economic threat: look how many Jews there were in the medical profession, for example. Many physicians asserted as much in noisy protests. They constituted a cultural threat: hadn’t they warped the movie industry in the United States, where they had snatched up every position?27 The literary class circulated and legitimized a ‘rational’ anti-Semitism that sometimes explicitly demurred at the outrages of the radical antiSemites, who, for them, were in full accord with the violent talk circulating on the other side of the Rhine. Finally, in those days when war seemed to be imminent, the Jews could be denounced at will: by supporters of a militant approach as a potential fifth column, given their origin, and by pacifists as warmongers who would spare no effort to drag France into a war that was not its own and whose only objective was to help their persecuted co-religionists.

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  167 Of course the Jews had their defenders in French society. But the climate that emerged in the 1930s, which allowed itself to be contaminated by the ethnic notion of national identity that prevailed then in most countries of Europe,28 spread the idea, which soon became a consensus, that France had a ‘Jewish problem’. The historian Marc Bloch was quite alone in his denunciation – in private correspondence in April 1936 – of what he called an anti-Semitism ‘of the numerus clausus’, in which he discerned a latent anti-Semitism and which he later denominated the ‘spirit of distinction’.29 The profile of this ‘Jewish problem’ that emerged from many texts whose authors took exception to, condemned, and were even outraged by anti-Semitism was formulated around a number of main ideas.30 The Jews were a distinct group, marked by easily identifiable traits. They were naturally linked to the Jews of foreign coun­ tries: locals and foreigners were surreptitiously confounded, so that every gesture of solidarity among them was viewed as suspect and morally reprehensible. They were attracted by money and power, tended to stick to themselves and help only one another, and were not put off by subversive ideas. They congregated in certain fields – the press, politics, finance, cinema – where they occupied a disproportionate place. It was consequently only natural for people to take offence at them, especially after their power was reinforced by the arrival of refugees. It was legitimate for people to wonder – without necessarily approving of the idea – about the possible benefits of the adoption of a numerus clausus. In the eyes of these writers, none of this had anything in common with anti-Semitism, which was violent, abhorrent, irrational and based on the idea of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world and which considered the Jews to be an utter nuisance. Anti-Semitism or racism, as fundamental ideologies, as a global and foundational Weltanschauung, was widely condemned. The horror and barbarism of the anti-Semitic acts being perpetrated on the other side of the Rhine triggered genuine indignation. But in the overview of the structural cultural codes of the 1930s, an identification of Jews and foreigners took root: the Jews were not – could not be – French; the spirit of distinction could not be avoided. Traces of the deep penetration of this idea could be found in many cartoons published in those years, even in the left-wing press, which – under the pretext of opposition to the plutocracy – were often a visual rendering of the standard stereotypes.31

A Jewish Political Bloc in France? Although Marc Bloch – a typical representative of French citizens of Jewish origin – had noted the extent to which the Jews’ status in French society had become delicate, this did not make him any less faithful to the French model of emancipation. Even when the anti-Semites presented the Jews as a collective bound by common interests and thus common political objectives, nothing could have been further removed

168  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski from the political culture of French Jews. Some of them were affiliated with the Consistoire Central, which ran only religious and welfare matters, but these were a minority. The idea of a Jewish political bloc repelled them, just as it was rejected by the leaders of the Consistoire, who served as a conduit between the Jewish community and the institutions of the French republic. Solidly integrated into French society, whose cultural values they had enthusiastically assimilated, their involvement in politics could hardly have been other than as individuals; they were motivated exclusively by clearly formulated French and national interests. All of them saw the community’s political neutrality as an absolute imperative. This was not the case with Jews whose identity had been formed in Eastern Europe. They were the product of a diametrically opposed political culture, whose influence had not evaporated when they entered France. That influence was, if anything, enhanced, because they had been attracted by the image of a France that was heir to the French Revolution, the homeland of the rights of man, and endowed with a strong revolutionary identity.32 They were often grouped into Landsmannschaften, organizations of immigrants from a particular region or town. But it was mainly through an extremely dense network of social, cultural and sports institutions that the various political currents exercised their hold on the Jewish immigrant sector. All of their activities taken together could be understood only in the larger framework of a broad political perception of the world and the Jews’ place in it. The Bundists of France, although they developed some links with the French Socialist Party, remained strongly attached to the Polish Bundists. The communists benefited when, in 1926, the French Communist Party created the Main d’Œuvre étrangère (MOE; renamed the Main d’œuvre immigrée or MOI in 1932), which organized militant immigrants by language groups. Jews constituted a majority in the Romanian and Hungarian language groups, to note just two examples. There were also many Jews in the Polish group – despite the fact that the Polish Communist Party was dissolved in 1938 on Stalin’s orders.33 But there was also a Yiddish-speaking Jewish section, which, starting in January 1934, published a Yiddish daily, the Naye Presse. The French Zionists had their own Yiddish paper, the Pariser Haynt; in fact, an overwhelming majority of Zionists of all stripes came from the immigrant sector. These journals, like the French-language publications that championed all these diverse ideologies, kept their eye, depending on the circumstances, on the situation of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe or on the disturbing anti-Semitism that had gained a foothold in France. Their analyses were sometimes quite different but, as the 1930s drew to a close, pessimism was general. The deterioration in how the French viewed the Jews, evident in the last few years before the war, attests to a more general climate that, influenced by Nazi ideology, had washed over all of Europe. Of course, the ‘Jewish problem’ was not viewed in the same way in France as it was in Poland, and nor was it analysed in the same terms, but the idea that the Jews posed a threat to their host society was widespread in both countries. What is more, the immigration to France of many

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  169 Jews from Eastern Europe, and especially from Poland, had reinforced the equation of Jew and foreigner. At the same time, though, it had forged a direct link between the two Jewish communities. This link was shattered when the Nazis occupied Poland and the defeats of both countries by the German forces transformed what had been vague influence into direct action. The nature of the occupation was quite different in Poland from what it was in France, but in both countries the Nazis were the ones who determined the Jews’ fate. The Jews in both countries had good reason to be pessimistic.

The Jews in Occupied Poland The outbreak of the war in September 1939 and the swift dismemberment of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union created a new context for Polish society’s attitude towards the Jews. The double occupation stimulated a renewed debate about the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis, on the one hand, and the Jews’ response to the Soviet takeover of eastern Poland, on the other. German brutality and terrorism against the civilian population in Poland was evident from the very first days of the occupation. The military campaign had had a strong ideological component from the outset: Poland was intended to serve as the basis of the future evolution of German racial policy and demographic engineering that the SS planned to implement in the east. The creation of the German Lebensraum, in which Poland was an important element, required a special policy towards the Jews, but also an iron fist and uncompromising intimidation of the Poles.34 From the start of the occupation the Poles were the victims of repeated atrocities and murders, including the execution of large groups of the intelligentsia, the remnants of the political leadership and Polish prisoners of war, which were intended to pacify the occupied territories without delay. The unrelenting terrorism, killings and deportations of civilians, as well as the brutal exploitation of manpower and the Polish economy, increased throughout the years of German control.35 In this atmosphere of terror it quickly became obvious that the Germans’ policy towards the Jews was developing in a different direction. Heydrich’s directive of 21 September 1939 (the Schnellbrief) set off a process that continued until 1942, in which the Jews were isolated from the surrounding population by means of confinement in ghettos, close surveillance and control of their economic resources, impressment for forced labour in cities or camps throughout the Generalgouvernement, the confiscation of community property and the systematic plundering of private property. Within months, more than two million Polish Jews who lived in the German zone lost their economic underpinnings and ability to support themselves on even a minimal level – and this even before the start of the liquidation of the ghettos and the deportations to death camps in the spring of 1942.36

170  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski Most of Polish society remained apathetic to the Jews’ situation or reacted with conspicuous hostility, even though they were the main victims of the German reign of terror in Poland. The residues of the animosity of the 1930s and the fact that the Poles themselves were suffering under a particularly brutal occupation regime and engaged in a struggle for survival were supplemented by reports of the Jews’ attitude towards Soviet rule in what had been eastern Poland. Both Polish and Jewish sources indicate that the invading Red Army was received enthusiastically and sympathetically by the Jews in many places. There were several reasons for this warm welcome, ranging from fear of the Germans and a clear preference for Soviet rather than Nazi control to the hope that the Soviet regime would open for Jews many education and employment channels that the hostile Polish state had been progressively closing off in the second half of the 1930s.37 This encounter between the Jews and Soviet rule had major repercussions on relations between Jews and Poles during and after the war. The Jews were accused of betraying the Polish state, condemned as agents of one of its bitterest enemies and collaborators with a regime that persecuted and murdered Polish patriots, and held responsible for the severe deterioration in relations among the ethnic groups that lived on the eastern frontier of Poland.38 The harsh effects of this resentment were manifested in the shocking pogroms and murders of Jews by Poles, Ukrainians and Lithuanians in the summer of 1941, in the first weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.39 The debate about the situation of the Jews in Poland took place in a climate different from that in any other occupied country in Europe. The Germans eradicated all institutions of the Polish state and liquidated every aspect, even symbolic, of Polish nationalism and Polish self-rule. The state was replaced by a complex underground network that included a military and civilian wing, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) alongside an intricate network of underground cells planted by the Delegatura, the representative in occupied Poland of the London-based government in exile. This network functioned as an underground administration whose various branches dealt with social problems, the organization of underground education and the establishment of clandestine law courts. The Delegatura also dealt with the issue of the national minorities, including the Jews. This unique and multitentacled system eventually produced the so-called underground state (państwo podziemne).40 The question of the Jews under the German occupation, especially when the deportations and mass killings began, requires consideration of all of the political groups that operated in the underground, whether they saw themselves as partners in the policy drafted by the institutions of the underground state or conducted propaganda that opposed it.

Vanquished France and the Jews As in Poland, the collapse of France before the German onslaught was rapid – it was all over within six weeks – and overwhelming: the total rout of the army, the 92,000

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  171 soldiers killed in battle, the more than 200,000 wounded,41 the more than one-anda-half-million prisoners of war held by the Germans, the disorder and misery of the refugees who took to the roads. France was in shock. It was then that Marshal Pétain, the ‘Saviour of Verdun’, by ‘making a gift of his person to France’, appeared as the man of the hour, sounding the voice of reason and making it possible for France to recover. Under the terms of the armistice he signed with the victorious Third Reich, France was carved up, the Germans occupied the capital, the eastern provinces were snatched away, and economic exploitation loomed on the horizon; he even accepted shameful clauses including one that called for the return to Germany of militant anti-Nazis who had taken refuge in France. But for Pétain this was the starting point of a ‘National Revolution’ that, applied in the free zone – that part of France governed from Vichy – would save France from itself and its past sins. The National Revolution and collaboration with Nazi Germany were inevitably linked. The Jews of France would be the victims of this double choice. The new regime was legally constituted on 10 July 1940, a large majority of the elected representatives of the French republic granting Pétain the authority to institute a new order in a state which was even more jealous of its sovereignty because much of its territory was now under foreign occupation, and which lay the blame for the debacle on the Jews. Within the space of a few months the Jews were transformed into second-class citizens. They were required to register as Jews, barred from many professions and despoiled of their property. Jewish students were subjected to a numerus clausus. A special ministry, the Commissariat général aux questions juives, was created to apply and refine the persecutory legislation. Jewish organizations (except for the Consistoire) were dissolved and replaced by a single government-controlled organization with which all Jews were required to affiliate. We are not talking about an odd assortment of haphazard texts. Their number – several dozen laws, decrees, bulletins and orders – is evidence of an undoubted resolve. Taken as a whole, these laws, most of them adopted by the leaders of France without German prompting, formed a coherent strategy and expressed the public policy of the anti-Dreyfusards who were now in power.42 That was the message that official communiqués as well as commentaries in the press, both national and local, endeavoured to circulate to the public. The French origin of each of these measures was loudly insisted on and the urgent need for them underscored. But the Germans were not idle either, and a dual system of anti-Semitic legislation, one for the occupied zone and the other for all of France, came into being. The rivalry in this domain that developed between the Germans and the French led to each side’s copying of the other and amplified the effects of their respective policies.43 Collaboration between the French government and German occupier took a more serious turn in the spring of 1942 and facilitated the application of the Final Solution to the Jews of France. Although the French government, carrying on its own anti-Jewish policy, had never been loath to send foreign Jews back to where they had come from, the emerging collaboration employed methods based on a very

172  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski different logic. To make certain that the occupier would react favourably in matters of importance to the Vichy leaders, the latter were willing to make concessions on what they viewed as marginal points. The Jews were a commodity to be traded. It was, indeed, the Germans who decided to deport the Jews of France to the camps in the east and who were the chief perpetrators of the extermination of a quarter of them; but it was the French police who hunted down and arrested the Jews, French guards who maintained discipline in the detention camps, French gendarmes who escorted them, and French trains that carried them out of the country. Given the determination of Nazi agents in France to carry out their genocidal enterprise and the assistance they received from the Vichy government, the survival rate – 75 per cent of the Jewish population of France – which is quite incommensurable with the figures for Eastern Europe, and especially for Poland, requires explanation. Let us say at the outset that there is no consensus on this point; some praise the French population for sheltering Jews, others assign the credit to the Jewish rescue organizations, and still others observe that the bulk of France was liberated in the summer of 1944.44 For us here, with the focus on the resistance movements and the message they wanted to convey to the population at large in order to rally its support, this question is crucial. Stunned by the magnitude of the defeat, the French people, though initially opposed to the German presence on their soil, even while adjusting to it in their daily lives, offered broad support to Pétain and were easily persuaded of the necessity of his National Revolution. They could listen to De Gaulle broadcasting from London over the BBC, calling them to join the resistance, yet agree that the policies of the Vichy government were putting France back on the right path; some even nourished the illusion that Pétain was playing a double game and secretly negotiating with Britain. The resistance movements, unable to ignore this situation, went easy on the Vichy government and focused their attacks on the occupier, whom they knew was universally detested. This was not so difficult, because some members of the resistance, although violently opposed to the armistice and occupation and embarked on their dangerous course precisely for that reason, were not far from thinking the same thing and believed that their role was to implement what Pétain could not himself do or suggest out loud. This hypothesis was shattered in the spring of 1942. But it is clear that the existence of a French government, legally invested with power and considered to be legitimate by the vast majority of the population, created a special situation in France that often dictated priorities in the resistance’s choice of propaganda. This was clearly different from the situation in Poland, totally under the Nazi heel, where all political streams, from left to right, had been forced underground and enjoyed the support of the entire population. The resistance movements in Poland targeted the harsh occupation that victimized them, fighting the Germans as well as the Soviets. The resistance in France had to deal with a legally constituted French government that was supported by some of the people. Furthermore, whereas the

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  173 Germans were the agents of the persecution, in France the perpetrators were both German and French. Above all, though, the extent to which the local population was exposed to the Nazis’ anti-Semitic measures was very different in the two countries. Hence the need for the underground press to react to the anti-Jewish persecution was expressed in different terms in France and in Poland.

The Persecution of the Jews as Covered by the Polish Underground Press The Clandestine Press in Poland Clandestine publications were the main mouthpiece of the European resistance to the Nazi occupation. They existed in almost every country. In countries under direct German rule and in those whose governments collaborated with the Nazis, illegal underground journals were published by political movements and organizations that resisted the occupation authorities or the collaborationist policies. We know of 1,193 different titles in the Netherlands, 1,106 in France, 55 in Denmark and a similar number in Italy.45 But the largest number of underground titles was produced in Poland. From October 1939 until 1945, 1,123 publications that survived were distributed; including items that are known to have been published but of which not a single copy is extant today, the total approaches 1,400.46 A further fifty-two titles, with a total of 250 issues, were produced by the Jewish underground press in the Warsaw ghetto.47 Another publication, of which ten issues survived, was produced by the Jewish resistance movement in Cracow.48 The historiography of the illegal publications of the Polish resistance emphasizes their importance in forming the various underground groupings and consolidating an awareness of the struggle and disseminating it to the public at large. The history of Polish resistance to foreign rulers, going back to the 1860s, includes myths of the anti-Russian struggle for independence, which were a powerful factor in moulding the Polish national identity. These myths also shaped the consciousness of the struggle against the foreign conqueror, which emerged from the beginning of the German occupation. The loss of freedom and independence in September 1939 returned the Poles to their martyred past and catalysed a radical attitude towards the present, which took the form of an uncompromising fight for national freedom. This was not necessarily because the Poles were more active on this front than other occupied nations, but because they saw their history as constituted chiefly by this principle.49 It was prominent from the very beginning of the occupation. Already in the first few months the Polish underground press decided that Poland had never been betrayed as it had been in this war. Poland had become a mere episode in world politics; the Poles were paying, yet again, the price for European intrigues and treachery, which had subjugated them to a double yoke, German and Soviet. All that

174  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski remained was to fight to the death for national independence, which the Poles knew very well how to do, because they would never be saved by others.50 The Polish underground press did not emerge from political decisions by members of the organized resistance or by the politicians who congregated first in France and then in London after the defeat of September 1939. Rather it was a spontaneous reaction by civil circles, political activists, teachers and members of labour unions in the occupied country. The idea was not necessarily to issue a call for military resistance, but to satisfy the initial need to disseminate basic information to the population, which, after the collapse of the Polish state, was left with no periodical press or radio and was totally at the mercy of German propaganda. The intention was to try to halt the danger of total disintegration and atomization that threatened the battered and humiliated Polish society. Already during the German siege of the capital in September 1939, information was distributed by means of leaflets, radio broadcasts and street posters, or by means of notices pasted up on the walls of houses in Warsaw. That same month (in Cracow) and the next month (in Warsaw) two groups began publishing newspapers with the identical title Polska Zyje (Poland lives). These were the first clandestine papers in the country.51 These publications soon began addressing a broad range of topics and problems and came to cover all areas of Polish life during the war years. They were the main source of information about what was going on in the country, about German policy, about developments in the Free World and especially about the actions and decisions of the London-based Polish government in exile. Of course extensive space was devoted to ideological and political discussions of the situation in Poland, the minorities problem, the Nazis’ Jewish policy and the future of Poland after the war. As such, the clandestine press was the authentic voice of Poland, reflecting the diverse opinions and ideologies of Polish society. It was an underground press whose authors, printers and distributors faced great dangers, though these did not curtail its mass circulation throughout the war. The number of titles increased steadily as the years went by: 290 in 1941, 380 in 1942, 500 in 1943 and finally some 600 underground titles in 1944.

‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto?’ The Polish underground press devoted a fair amount of attention to the Jewish issue, which had been a prominent element of the public and political debate in Poland before September 1939. It wrote about the ‘Jewish question’, if not as an issue of special national importance, from the perspectives that concerned it. The press, like all underground publications during the occupation, had political and ideological messages it wanted to spread. Consequently, any examination of the Jewish issue must take into account the character and outlook of the organization responsible for a particular publication.

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  175 The establishment of the ghettos was covered by underground publications on both the left and right. The creation of the Warsaw ghetto severely disrupted urban life in that city. In addition to the confinement of Jews to the sealed quarter set aside for them, tens of thousands of Poles were forced to leave their homes there and their property, workshops and businesses. It was true, as the organ of the underground Polish socialists, Wolność-Równość-Niepodległość (Freedom, Equality, Independence), noted, that Poles with means, contacts and status had been able to take full economic advantage of the Jews’ removal to the ghetto and the seizure of their assets. But for the most part the Poles left made no distinction on a national basis among the victims of the German occupation. This attitude was reflected in the coverage of the ghetto, too. When the Warsaw ghetto was established, the paper declared that it was an ‘urban tragedy’ (tragedia miast) whose main victims were the Jews. It described the stark situation of the Jews who were being crowded into the ghetto and the terrible conditions in which they lived.52 Right-wing publications also wrote about the ghetto. One of the most extreme among them, Szaniec (Stronghold), observed, several months after the sealing of the Warsaw ghetto, that ‘only a few days have passed since the hermetic closure of the ghetto … and some Polish “bleeding hearts” are already hastening to express their sympathy with the Jews’ misery’.53 The right-wing press did not ignore the significance of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda. ‘It seems’, wrote Szaniec, ‘that the Jewish question occupies a prominent place in Hitler’s political plans. He intends to solve this question all over Europe and not just in Poland. This is why the Jews are being confined in ghettos and deprived of their property and money.’ But the right-wing underground press did not feel that the Germans’ policy towards the Jews required the Poles to pay any special attention to their suffering. Poles, too, were being murdered en masse and thousands were being deported for forced labour in Germany. In the territories of eastern Poland occupied by the USSR, Soviet security agents were persecuting Poles, and the Jews there were helping the Soviets carry out their harsh anti-Polish terror.54 Despite reports in the Polish underground press about the Jews’ life in the ghettos and the anti-Jewish reign of terror, most writers continued to view the Jews through the lens of the inter-war period. In practice, until 1942 and the start of the mass extermination, members of the Polish underground found it difficult to relate to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy as a unique phenomenon that evidenced or foretold an intention to wipe out Polish Jewry. This is most evident in papers that were not necessarily identified with any definite political orientation and represented a broad consensus of Polish public opinion and the intelligentsia. For example, these publications were particularly interested in what the Jews in the ghetto thought about international politics and especially the major powers. One paper wrote that there were two main political currents in the Warsaw ghetto, one pro-British and pro-American and the other pro-communist and sympathetic to the Soviet Union. It differentiated the leading political currents in the ghetto from those prevalent among

176  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski the Polish Jewish political émigrés in London. This distinction was important; a pro-British orientation was shared by Jews and Poles and could serve as the basis for a partnership with representatives of the Polish government and as the foundation, after the war, for cooperation with American and British Jewry, as well as with the Jews of France. On the other hand, underground Jewish organizations in Poland openly supported communism and disseminated information about the antiSemitism that prevailed in the state and among underground circles. The Jews here needed to understand, according to the paper, that the Poles did not accept all of the slogans circulated by the Comintern.55 The history and the cultural legacy of Poland could not be cut off from the spirit and culture of Catholicism. And, the paper added, it was clear that Poland could not be part of the German camp or the Soviet camp. The only available alternative was the Anglo-American camp, which, however, had to free itself from the considerable Judeo-Masonic influence that swayed it.56 All of this appeared in the paper Fakty na tle idei (Facts in the mirror of ideas), a right-wing theoretical publication that rejected any post-war existence of German and Jewish minorities on Polish soil. To a large extent it represented a broad national consensus that was acceptable to major sectors of Polish society. It did not preach a demagogic anti-Semitic and fascist message, but addressed ideological questions from a national perspective, focusing mainly on the issue of the reconstruction of the new Poland after the war and on the minorities problem. The discussion of the Jewish question in its columns, until 1942, is evidence of the extent to which the pre-war current that saw the Jews as alien to the Polish national organism had ripened and the degree to which the early years of the German occupation had reinforced it. Writers in the paper fiercely assailed the ideas and programmes floated by political circles in exile about the political structure of Poland after the war, with an elected assembly, multiple parties, parliamentary government and full and equal rights for national minorities, including the Jews. Those who issued these proclamations had forgotten, the newspaper went on, the Jews’ ruinous effect on the Polish economy, which had begun to recover only recently, after the Jews’ confinement to ghettos. Was the idea that the new democratic Poland would see the return of the cartels controlled by Jewish artisans and Jewish merchants? Or perhaps the Soviet economic system should be imported to the Bug and Vistula?57 The underground press dealt at length with the question of the Jews’ status after the war. Left-wing and liberal circles held that, after the war, Jews and the other national minorities must enjoy equal rights with all Polish citizens.58 As early as 7 November 1939, a publication of the underground Polish socialists wrote that the consequences of the war would produce a change in the political and economic structure of the republic. In the Poland of the future, all national minorities would have full and equal rights, with no difference of religion, race or nationality. Racism and anti-Semitism must disappear from political life in the country.59 By contrast, the Polish right continued to view the ‘Jewish problem’ as one of the fundamental issues that the Polish state would have to resolve after the war. It saw the task of

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  177 the government in exile being formed in London as conducting an appropriate information campaign and taking intelligent political action to convey to the British that they must find a suitable territory for the Jews, in Palestine or elsewhere: ‘They have to understand, in London, that we have too many Jews in Poland.’60 Among the many underground publications, special importance attaches to those of ‘official Poland’, the Armia Krajowa and the Delegatura, the representative of the government in exile on Polish soil. Their publications, Biuletyn Informacyjny (Information Bulletin), Rzeczpospolita Polska (Polish Republic) and Kraj (The Land), are free of ideological anti-Semitism and generally cover current events in a moderate, balanced and consensual manner.61 These publications, especially Biuletyn Informacyjny, were printed and circulated in tens of thousands of copies; Biuletyn Informacyjny even had local editions in Cracow, Lviv (starting in 1942) and other places.62 Their contributors made an effort to understand the meaning of the Germans’ policy towards the Jews and its implications for the life of the Polish nation. They were seriously disturbed by the question of where the German anti-Jewish policy was leading and where the repression and terrorism instituted in Poland as a whole would eventually end. In May 1941 Biuletyn Informacyjny published a long piece on what was happening to the Jews in Poland. It was a detailed and accurate account of the lives of the Jews in the country since the start of the German occupation. The paper surveyed the Jews’ economic situation, dismissal from their jobs and the expropriation of their property. It also described their expulsion from all forms of cultural life, for example the fact that they had been deprived of the right to go to the theatre, use libraries and attend school. Then the paper reviewed the German policy of ghettoization and described how the Jews lived in the ghettos of Łódź and Warsaw. The ghetto was a source of disease, unemployment and misery, and a den of smugglers. It also reported on the brutal deportation to the ghetto of the Jews from the small towns in the Warsaw district and their harsh lives as refugees there. In sum: What is the impending solution of the Jewish problem in Poland? What will the future bring? We have no answer to this. The Germans keep saying that the Jewish problem in the Generalgouvernement will be solved … What we know now is that the disease and misery are becoming worse. This is the Jewish tragedy that is taking place on Polish soil.63

In another issue, Biuletyn Informacyjny dealt with the world-view of Hitlerism and also addressed the topic of anti-Semitism. According to the author, anti-Semitism was a core principle of Hitlerian racism, but the Jews were not its only targets: German sources indicated that the population of the Generalgouvernement must be thinned significantly. The publications that represented the voice of official Poland did not see Nazi racism as an existential threat to the Jews alone. They saw it as a danger to everyone

178  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski in Poland, even though for the moment the Jews were suffering most acutely. To a large extent, these papers saw it as manipulative: the Germans were trying to win the support of Semitic peoples, including the Turks, Arabs and Tatars, and enlist them as allies in the war against Britain. But their policy against Poles and Jews alike was one of cruel terror and violence.64 Rzeczpospolita Polska, the organ of the Delegatura, responded vigorously to any manifestation of Polish collaboration with the Germans against Jews. In a 1941 article it reacted to reports that Polish prisoners of war were volunteering to help the German police guard the barracks where Jewish prisoners of war were housed. The paper angrily attacked this phenomenon: voluntary service by Poles under German command was national treachery (‘dobrowolna służba Polaków pod komendą niemiecką zdradą narodową’). This was a phenomenon that every proud Pole condemned. When Poles volunteered to serve in the gendarmerie, they were taking part in the war alongside the Germans, who could then send more soldiers to the front. It also served the Germans’ goal of blackening the Poles’ reputation abroad and presenting the Poles as persecuting the Jews themselves.65 The coverage of the ‘Jewish question’ in the Polish underground press continued more or less along the lines of the pre-war political debate. The anti-Semitic right, which had called for a radical solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ by encouraging mass emigration, continued to do so during the early years of the German occupation. Its publications incessantly parroted the slogans and clichés about Jewish economic domination that had ostensibly ruined the Polish state between 1918 and 1939 and about the corruption of the Polish national organism by Jews who had seized influential positions in culture, the media, higher education and the liberal professions. Indeed, one newspaper wrote that the Polish nation had not truly been reborn (in 1918) because it was controlled by the Judeo-Masonic spirit and not by its own national Catholic heritage. In the radical margins of this anti-Semitic writing one could even find the claim that Hitlerism was heir to the Jewish legacy: the traditional Jewish theory about the inferiority of the gentiles and the Chosen People was the theoretical basis of National Socialism!66 Until the Final Solution began, the Polish underground press continued to treat the Jews as a long-standing and painful problem that would have to be resolved once and for all when the current national calamity was over. The radical right presented this as a categorical precondition for the very existence of the Polish nation, without which reconstruction would be impossible. But even for circles that did not cultivate anti-Semitism as an integral component of their world-view, the German occupation and the exposure to the Nazis’ unvarnished anti-Semitism served as the points of departure for a moral reckoning about the ‘Jewish problem’ in Poland. For example, the underground publications of the Peasants’ Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) wrote more than once about the desirability of the Jews’ mass emigration to Palestine and about the need for a far-reaching change in the economic activity and attitude towards the state of those who stayed behind. The organ of the Democratic Front

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  179 (Stronnictwo Demokratyczne), which championed full and equal rights for the Jews, observed that the dangerous anomaly of the Jews’ economic life hindered their integration into the life of the nation. According to this article, it was incumbent on the Jews to resist their co-religionists who were middlemen and moneylenders and to concentrate on developing a stable and productive economic life. The Jews must also fight against chauvinist and nationalist currents within their ranks. Those who wished to had the right to emigrate to the Jewish national homeland, but this must not be accompanied by blatant anti-Polish propaganda. The socialist press, too, criticized the Jews’ economic activity and what was referred to as the ‘Jews’ unnatural and unbalanced concentration in commerce, petty trades, peddling and so on’.67 The internal debate about the ‘Jewish question’ was put to the test when the extermination of the Jews got under way. The Polish underground press, mainly on the left, published the reports that reached Warsaw about the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet territories overrun by the Wehrmacht. According to Barykada Wolności (Freedom Barricade), the German perpetrators were being assisted by Lithuanians and Ukrainians. In Vilnius (it reported in November 1941), where Jews had formed 40 per cent of the population, only a few thousand survived. In Stanisławów (East Galicia), 7,000 men, women and children had been murdered. Faithful to its political line, however, the newspaper continued to look for ‘a fraternity of victims’ and chose not to see the killing of Jews as a unique element of the Nazis’ murderous policy. Similar atrocities were being conducted against Poles too, it insisted. Lithuanians were attacking Poles, and Ukrainians were murdering Poles. These killings were the sequel to those taking place all over Europe; the prisoners were being murdered in the concentration camps in Germany and in Auschwitz. It was all part of the Hitlerian plan to build a new Europe. Solidarity among the victims was the only defence against the Nazis’ barbarism. Newspapers with nationalistic propensities juxtaposed the information about the murders of Jews in the east with false reports, circulated by anti-Semitic circles, that the Jews had greeted the German invaders with bread and salt, just as they had received the Soviet troops two years earlier. 68 Only in early 1942, when the extermination of the Jews of the Warthegau in western Poland began, and after that in the Lublin district, did the underground press begin to report consistently about the murder of the Jews and its significance. Then, however, the Jews’ deportation to the death camps forced the Polish under­ ground press to adopt, without delay, a new stance on the ‘Jewish question’. In the first phase of reacting to and internalizing the Germans’ intention for the Jews of Poland, which lasted from the spring of 1942 until after the major deportations from the Warsaw ghetto in July to September of that year, writers groped for an appropriate way to present the Jews’ fate, in keeping with the newspaper’s worldview. Information about the death camps and killing fields to which the Jews of Poland were sent was published from early 1942. During the first months there were reports about the extermination of Jews in Chełmno (Kulmhof) and the death camp in

180  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski Bełżec. Several months later, in the autumn of 1942, there were fairly accurate details about the other death camps to which the Jews were being sent, Treblinka and Sobibór. These reports included information about the killing techniques employed by the Germans: electric shocks (false, of course) and gas chambers.69 In the autumn of 1942 underground groups linked with the AK and the Delegatura published information about the gassing at Auschwitz of tens of thousands of Jews from all over Europe, and not only from Poland.70 The reports about the spread of the Nazi Final Solution from the occupied Soviet Union, where it had begun in the summer of 1941, to the Generalgouvernement in the spring of 1942 were highlighted in Polish socialist publications. That sector regularly conveyed all the information it received about small towns from which the Jews had been deported, mainly in Lublin province, where the deportations began in the Generalgouvernement. These were the only newspapers that conjectured that this expansion of the genocide in late 1941 was the sequel to what had begun in the east and was now spreading to Poland.71 The right-wing press did not see the extermination of the Jews as substantially different from the terror and repression directed against the Poles. For example, Treblinka was presented as a camp for Jews and Poles. The report does not distinguish between the forced labour camp, which had been operating in the vicinity since 1940 and most of whose inmates were Poles, and the separate extermination facilities in Treblinka in 1942. In other articles, the killing in Treblinka and Auschwitz was spoken of in the same breath as the Soviets’ massacre of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyń Forest. Another report, in 1943, dealt with the murder of two million Jews in Treblinka (an exaggerated figure, of course), perpetrated by the Germans and Ukrainians with assistance from Jews who served as auxiliaries at the mass murder sites.72 Catholic publications occupy a special place in any examination of how the underground press related to the extermination of the Jews. The small underground organizations that produced them were composed chiefly of members of the Catholic intelligentsia. There were several such groups, some liberal and others more conservative; they were the heirs of the small Catholic party that had operated in Poland in the 1930s, the Labour Front (Stronnictwo Pracy). Their memberships were not large and their publications had correspondingly small print runs, rather than the tens of thousands of copies produced by the organs of the AK and the major underground movements. They were influenced by several intellectuals and political activists of the pre-war era who wrote for them, notably Jerzy Braun, the historian and philosopher Feliks Koneczny and the author Zofia Kossak (who edited one of them). Although these intellectuals were by no means devoid of anti-Semitism, they nevertheless held to a distinctive and vigorous moral position on the murder of the Jews.73 The Catholic press published as much information as it could about the killings of Jews in small towns and the deportations to the death camps.74 It supplemented

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  181 this with reports about the deportations from France in the summer of 1942 and the deportations of Jews from the Netherlands and Belgium to Sobibór, and with fierce criticism of the Vichy government for its policies and collaboration with the Germans to deport the Jews. It noted that the leaders of Great Britain and the United States had protested to the Vichy government about this collaboration.75 It also wrote about the Germans’ mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war.76 But it offered more than harsh and detailed descriptions of the killing. Articles in these newspapers, especially in Zofia Kossak’s Kadra Polskiej Niepodległej (Polish Independent Cadre), presented the Germans’ actions as murderous barbarism whose like human civilization had never known before. They clearly expressed deep shock, a sense of the moral collapse that Nazism had brought to the Christian nations, and a strong fear of how this massacre would influence the soul of the Polish nation, which, in the words of one of these newspapers, ‘lives outside the fence of the death camp’.77 This fear was shared by many underground groups that were not anti-Jewish. The massacre was taking place in front of the eyes of the Polish population, wrote Biuletyn Informacyjny. The Polish people were witnessing the extermination of millions but had to survive and endure. 78 The greatest fear evinced by these underground circles was that the mass murder would lead to the disintegration of the Christian cultural legacy that distinguished the Polish nation, and that a land in which millions of innocent citizens were being killed could not continue to be the home of a spiritually healthy Polish nation. For the killing would not end with the Jews and would soon touch the Poles as well.79 Despite the sympathy for the Jews who were being sent to their deaths and the utter horror at the Germans’ activities, conspicuous in most of the underground press, its main concern in 1942 and 1943, when most of the Jews of Poland were being murdered, was to maintain a clear distinction between the Poles and the crimes com­mitted by the Nazis. Unflagging criticism of the non-Polish collaborators with the Germans – the Ukrainians, who were stealing Jewish property and serving as auxiliaries in the death camps, and the Lithuanians, who were taking an active part in the extermination – juxtaposed with the decent behaviour expected of the Poles, was one way to erect such a barrier.80 The right-wing papers emphasized the role of Jewish collaborators with the Germans: the Jewish police, castigated for helping the Germans liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, members of the Judenrat and especially informers working for the Gestapo.81 On the anti-Semitic and fascist right there was a conspicuous fear that horror at the murder of the Jews would strike from the agenda and render illegitimate what they had been promoting since the start of the war: Poland’s need to get rid of as many Jews as possible in order to heal the nation after the war. The publications of these groups advanced a number of proposals to avoid this scenario. Particular effort was invested in whitewashing the fact that the Jews were the Nazis’ main victims. Between 1942 and 1944 the right-wing underground press did everything it could to trumpet the extent to which Poles, and especially members of the Polish

182  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski resistance movement, were victims of the Nazis’ reign of terror. At the height of the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, in August 1942, one of these publications wrote that Poles must never forget that when the German occupation began, the Poles had been the Nazis’ main victims.82 In 1943 the brutal deportations of Polish civilians from Lublin province, especially the Zamość region, were given wide coverage to prove that the Poles were paying in blood no less than the Jews were;83 note was also taken of the fact that many Jews supported communism.84 Above all, however, the right-wing publications emphasized that the Poles were the Germans’ main target. They quoted remarks made by Hitler in 1940 concerning the need to exterminate the Polish nation and predicted that the Germans would start on the Poles as soon as they had finished wiping out the Jews.85 During the months when the killing was at its peak, the thorniest discussion regarded the implications of the liquidation of Polish Jewry for the future. The various attitudes on this question exerted significant influence on the newspapers’ positions concerning the behaviour that Poles should be displaying in view of the genocide being perpetrated on Polish soil and the issue of helping Jews who sought refuge from their murderers. For the publications of the underground Polish state, the first lesson that Poland had to learn from the murder of the Jews was the need for national unity. The squabbles and selfishness of political and social groups would merely weaken the nation’s ability to stand against Nazi barbarism. Another conclusion related to the world’s reaction. The Jews were being murdered but the entire world was not lifting a finger to stop the killing. The Jews had been abandoned by everyone who could have helped them. It followed that only united resistance by the Polish nation could deal with the threat to its own survival.86 Several weeks before the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and in the wake of the initial armed resistance by the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (the Jewish Fighting Organization) in January 1943, Biuletyn Informacyjny took a clear stand on how every Pole should react to what was taking place. The murder of the Jews, it wrote, was a deed that the entire Polish population viewed with shock and horror. Every Pole protested against the world’s failure to extend assistance to the Jews who were being murdered. There was a duty to help the persecuted Jews, despite the death penalty awaiting any Pole caught doing so. Beyond this, the newspaper fiercely condemned those who collaborated with the Germans or who blackmailed Poles who were hiding Jews or the Jews themselves. When the day came, wrote the newspaper, the leadership of the Polish resistance would settle accounts with these criminal elements. Similar statements could be found in left-wing newspapers, in the organ of the Peasants’ Movement (Wieś) and in publications of the Catholic underground groups.87 The right-wing underground press had quite a different perspective on the implications of the Jews’ murder for the future of Poland. In the words of one of them:

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  183 The liquidation of the Jews has vast significance for our future development, because it frees us from millions of parasites. We must not forget that the solution of this issue, in the sense of the Jews’ removal from our territory, was inevitable. It would have been no easy task, taking account of the fact that we would not have employed the Germans’ barbaric methods, although (it must be acknowledged) they achieve the goal swiftly. Using our own means and methods, the job would have taken generations. The Germans have rendered us most valuable assistance in this matter.88

In 1943 the position of nationalist and anti-Semitic groups on the liquidation of the ‘Jewish problem’ in Poland had scarcely shifted from their pre-war outlook. Even at the zenith of the period when the Jews were being murdered, they continued to be represented as despoilers of the Polish nation, who had concentrated economic power in their own hands, controlled the media, civil service, universities and intellectual life, and spread the communist gospel.89 On the other hand, these groups could not openly support the German genocide of the Jews and certainly could not call on Poles to cooperate in it, since that would have earned them the condemnation of ‘official Poland’ and destroyed their anti-Nazi bona fides. Consequently they tried to have it both ways: to oppose the Nazis’ barbaric killing methods while maintaining that the outcome was a welcome boon for the future of the Polish nation: Everyone must know who the Jews are, who they have been for us, and who they are liable to become. The Jews swarm among us like a plague; Poland has become a Jewish breeding ground … We cannot rejoice at the murder of the Jews and we condemn the German murderer, whatever the identity of the victims; but we do not want the Jews here … A million Jews, most of them young, will return with the Soviet army when it approaches our borders. Jews will spring up at the critical moment and wreak vengeance on us, trying to steal the fruits of victory through their influence in the West.90

Of course there was also the question of Jewish property. As the end of the war grew closer and the apprehension increased that, despite the mass murder perpetrated by the Germans, many Jews would return to Poland from the Soviet Union, the rightwing press forged a united front on this issue. Jewish property that had passed into Polish hands during the war must by no means be restored to Jews who returned or to their heirs. Ultimately, despite the Jews’ title to it, it was really the property of the Polish nation and must revert to its legal owners.91 The extermination of the Jews and the Poles’ attitude towards it were also addressed by the underground communist press. This sector got a later start than other political movements, because the underground Polish Communist Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR) did not organize until early 1942. Its main organ, the Trybuna Wolności (Independent Forum), appeared for the first time on 1 February 1942.92 This means that by the time the Polish communists took up the ‘Jewish question’ the implementation of the Final Solution was already in progress.

184  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski The communists’ main dilemma involved the gulf that had emerged between their political propaganda and the actual situation that dictated their actions in the underground. Their fundamental attitude was ‘anti-anti-Semitic’. They held that all nations, including the Jews, had a right to self-determination, liberty and equality.93 But this principle and the accompanying denunciation of discrimination against the Jews often came into conflict with the need to take the mental disposition of Polish society into account, all the more so because the communists were a small (at least at first) and unpopular group. One result of this was their preference that Jews who joined the partisans operate in separate Jewish units rather than in integrated units with Polish communists. Clearly they were uneasy about the stereotype of Żydokomuna (‘Jewish communism’) that was so prevalent in Polish public opinion.94 Thus the communists’ campaign for legitimacy was beset by a far-from-simple incompatibility with their ideological criticism of the rampant antiSemitism of Polish society. This dialectic tension was conspicuous in their attitude towards the genocide then proceeding apace. The communist press published details of the atrocities and reported on the gas chambers.95 Faithful to their ideological line, however, the Polish communists analysed the situation in the Warsaw ghetto as a class issue and contrasted the Jewish police, denounced bitterly and portrayed as Nazi collaborators who represented the assimilated and self-interested bourgeois circles, with the masses who were resisting the Nazis with all their might. 96 Despite the obvious imprecision of this classification, the rigid communist ideology kept them from seeing the Jewish masses in the ghetto as a group that did not resist and whose passivity seemed to created the conditions that made the deportations possible. This, as we know, was the attitude of many in Polish right-wing underground circles. Klaus-Peter Friedrich, who has studied the attitudes of the Polish underground press to the Nazi genocide, holds that the communists’ attitude towards the murder of the Jews was essentially instrumental.97 Stories of Jewish resistance to Aktionen and of the bravery of young Jews, whether true or fabricated,98 were grist for their propaganda mill, serving to emphasize the need for general resistance to the occupation, everywhere and always, in keeping with the Soviet line.99 It goes without saying that the resistance fighters in the ghetto were identified as affiliated exclusively with the political left and as supporters of the Soviet Union. The communist press also made sure to emphasize the clear link between the extermination of the Jews and the future treatment of the Poles after the Germans had finished killing off the Jews. It reported on German atrocities against Poles, for example in the Lublin district.100 But this presentation was not determined solely by the need to enlist the masses in the struggle; it also suited the ideological line that Nazism and its biological anti-Semitism posed a threat to the entire Polish population, so that there could be no distinction between the fate of one group of victims and that of another. Whereas the communists perceived anti-Semitism as one more attribute of fascism that would disappear with its political liquidation, the animosity towards the Jews

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  185 that was widespread in Polish society caused extreme concern in other underground circles. They feared the repercussions of this tacit support for the removal of the Jews on the future of Polish society and on its moral image after the war. This was most conspicuous in the Catholic press, which seems to have been the only sector that, as early as late 1941, deplored the fact that in the eastern provinces Poles were collaborating with the Germans in the murder of the Jews. These newspapers printed detailed reports, with the help of local Poles, about places where the Jews had been murdered: Kolno, Stawiski, Jagodne, Szumów, Dęblin and other locations. They also wrote about peasants who had discovered Jews in various hiding places and stolen their property before handing them over to the Germans, and even about a priest who encouraged his flock to notify the Germans about Jews who had escaped from the ghetto. During the major deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, these same underground circles condemned the involvement of the Polish police.101 In its sharp criticism of the behaviour of some sectors of Polish society towards the genocide the Catholic press did not spare the Jews either. It expressed its astonishment at the Jews’ passivity during the deportations and asked why they did not resist when being led to the railway cars (the same idea appeared in publications of other political groups as well). The Catholic press also censured the disappearance of the well-known international Jewish solidarity. How was it possible that world Jewry in Britain and the United States was not turning the world upside down but on the contrary was doing almost nothing to stop the murder of the Jews in Poland?102 This is of course a manifestation of the pervasive anti-Semitic canard that ascribed major influence and power to the Jews, who ostensibly manipulated the politics of the English-speaking democracies. The Catholic press’s complex attitude towards the Jews was clearly illustrated in a leaflet by Zofia Kossak, published in August 1942, while the deportations from Warsaw were going on, on behalf of the underground Front for the Rebirth of Poland (Front Odrodzenia Polski). The author addressed the conscience of the Poles, calling on them to put aside their justified antagonism towards the Jews and not to stand idly by while they were being murdered by the Germans. The Polish literary historian Jan Błoński attempted to understand how such hostility and compassion could coexist in a single person and a single political view. He found the answer in the complex dialectic between Catholicism and Polish nationalism: ‘Zofia Kossak was willing to give her life for the Jews; but if, in some miraculous fashion, the Jews had disappeared without suffering any injustice she would certainly have felt relief.’103

Anti-Semitism, Genocide and Rescue Did these anti-Semitic attitudes, especially those expressed in the right-wing underground publications, facilitate the acceptance of the Final Solution by Polish public opinion? Did they serve as a barrier to any attempt to enlist more Poles to help the persecuted Jews?

186  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski Polish scholars have studied the differences between the racist character of Polish anti-Semitism in the 1930s and the Nazi racism that led to genocide. Włodzimierz Mich calls the former ‘psychological racism’ (rasizm psychiczny). It was directed exclusively against the Jews and was thus unlike the Nazi version, which was based on an ostensibly complex racial theory that targeted not only the Jews but other ‘races’ as well. The Polish racism of the 1930s laid greater emphasis on the foreignness of the Jewish character, Jewish spirit and Jewish way of thought, and not necessarily on biological differences. But it parted company with traditional Catholic anti-Semitism in that it saw no possibility for the Jews to change their spots and ever become real Poles; they were an intrinsically dangerous and corrupting factor that had to be removed from the Polish nation.104 Andrzej Friszke maintains that Polish anti-Semitism did not adopt the concepts of Nazi biological racism. It was a ‘spiritual racism’ (rasizm duchowy), typical of the cultural, political and national mentality of the Polish right, and had been deeply rooted and acceptable in Polish society for years before the Nazi occupation. It was based on opposition to what was perceived as the Jewish way of thought (żydowskie myślenie) in the life of the Polish national organism, in politics, culture, art, science and economic matters. But it did not have any implications that pointed to extermination and did not call for the physical annihilation of the Jews.105 The interest that the Polish underground press evinced in the ‘Jewish question’ was limited to one central point – how the Jewish issue would affect the situation of Poland during the war and especially after it. Most of the groups that produced underground publications did not make light of the Jews’ appalling situation and of the tragedy that had overtaken them. But, asserts Andrzej Żbikowski, one really cannot say that these publications took a vigorous, clear and unequivocal moral stand against the Jews’ fate, one that could have shocked the Polish conscience into a real effort to help them. The political line of each group dictated its publications’ approach to the Jews’ tragedy, in what was more of an internal discourse of the Polish nation than an attempt to understand the Jewish situation. It was a discussion about the relations between Jews and Poles before the war, about the future of Poland after the war, and about providing concrete assistance to Jews when the Poles, too, were suffering acutely. The burning moral question that should have been addressed was swallowed up in this political debate.106 Hostility towards the Jews and apathy about their situation had existed even before the war. Most Poles and, correspondingly, a majority of the underground publications found ways to live with the fact that the Jews were disappearing from the fabric of Polish society. It is true that only radical fringe groups openly supported the genocide or encouraged Poles to collaborate in it. Ultimately, however, the Jews’ removal from Poland suited the world-view of broad swaths of the political spectrum and was an element of how they understood the relations between Jews and Poles. This attitude was fully formed even before the German occupation. In the end, the murder of the Jews did not set off any major trauma in the Polish

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  187 underground press, except insofar as it was considered to be a preliminary to the massacre of the Poles.107 Similarly, most Poles deemed helping themselves to the property of the Jews dispatched to their deaths to be perfectly justified, because a priori the latter had no legitimate claim to this property, which was in fact being restored to its rightful owners.108 The underground groups’ anti-Semitism had no effect on their legitimacy as an anti-Nazi resistance. Poland was an occupied country that emblazoned resistance to Nazism on its flag, but no contradiction was felt between anti-Nazi activity and extreme anti-Semitism that viewed the Jews as the bitter enemy of the Polish nation.109 It was legitimate to fight against the Nazi enemy, the Soviet enemy and the Jewish enemy – the three traditional foes of Poland – all at the same time.110 This attitude paved the way for the brutal assaults on Jewish survivors that began as soon as the country was liberated from the Nazis in the second half of 1944.111

‘The Polish Street Fell Short in Its Relations with the Jews’ The Jewish underground press tracked what the Polish press was writing about the Jews’ fate and discussed the extent to which Nazi policy influenced Polish attitudes towards the Jews. Until the start of the Final Solution the Jewish publications concentrated their fire on the anti-Semitic right, which continued its pre-war antiJewish propaganda almost without modification. They reported on anti-Semitic incidents at the beginning of the occupation, such as the violent attacks on Jewish businesses in Warsaw by gangs of Polish hooligans at Easter 1940.112 Within the Jewish underground, the sector that was most sensitive to what the Polish newspapers were writing about the Jews was the socialist Bund. This move­ ment saw itself as the partner of left-wing and liberal Polish underground groups in the anti-fascist struggle against the Germans and in the post-war construction of a democratic and egalitarian Poland. Its publications reacted fiercely to the antiJewish pieces in the Polish anti-Semitic right-wing press, not because they were a new phenomenon but chiefly because of the fear that such ideas might be accepted outside Poland as legitimate and as representative of the mood of Polish society. The Bundists strenuously opposed the notion that after the war there would be a pressing need to resolve the problem of national minorities once and for all and to encourage mass emigration by the Jews. One Jewish newspaper responded to these anti-Semitic publications as follows: It might have been assumed that the terrible destiny that has struck Poland would lead all parties – or at least the most important ones – to sober up and recognize their nonsense for what it is and realize the terrible damage they have wreaked on Poland with their insane anti-Semitic propaganda. It seems, however, that they are continuing in their old vein. The period and its terrible experiences have not taught the Polish reactionaries anything.

188  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski   How would the Endeks [National Democrats] solve the Jewish problem in tomorrow’s Poland?   They begin by stating that the Germans’ Jewish policy is at least a riddle; in any case, they are treating the Jews better than the Poles. To what cynicism, to what baseness one must sink to say this. From the very first moment the Germans set themselves the goal of destroying the two million Jews of Poland who, to their bad luck, had fallen into their hands.   Only a depraved soul could speak of the Germans’ treating the Jews better. We will not set the suffering of the Polish people in one pan of the balance and the suffering of the Jews under the German occupation in the other to see which is worse. We leave this to the peddler souls of the Endeks. We will mention only the word ‘ghetto’, which suffices to indicate the ‘better’ treatment enjoyed by the Jews.113

The monitoring of the Polish underground press by the Jewish publications stimulated the latter to ask many questions about the prospects for any restoration of relations between the two peoples after the war. They concluded that even advocates of Polish–Jewish cooperation now understood that their colleagues on the other side of the wall who rejected the extreme anti-Semitism of the right had miscalculated the scope of the danger posed by the continued anti-Semitic propaganda, not only for relations between Poles and Jews but also for Polish society in general: ‘Nor can one ignore the fact that the Hitlerites’ constant anti-Semitic propaganda has left an ineradicable mark on the Poles’ minds and souls.’114 ‘Let us say candidly that, for the most part, the left-wing and democratic Polish underground press has passed over the anti-Semitic problems in silence. It has not given them the place they deserve and has not warned the Poles against cunning ideological traps.’115 But there were some assessments that there had been an overall decline in antiSemitism in Poland as compared to the years immediately before the Nazi invasion. One publication believed that diverse political groups had sobered up from the inebriation produced by the Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda after experiencing for themselves the occupier’s oppressive measures, especially in the western districts of Poland annexed to the Reich. Many problems remained, nevertheless, and had even become worse – notably the fact that numerous Poles had commandeered Jewish businesses and property when the Jews were shut up in ghettos. The plunderers held to slogans about reducing the number of Jews in Poland after the war, fearing that they would demand their property back. There was also the question of the Jews’ attitude towards the Soviets in the east and the depiction of the Jews as an antiPolish element there. Only a genuine effort to deal with these problems could create hope for a new atmosphere in the lives of the two peoples after the war.116 But the Jews’ sense of isolation and physical segregation from the rest of the Polish nation were absolute. Even those political groups that had desperately wanted to believe that, in the end, Nazi policy would not manage to sever the bond between these two peoples who had lived together for centuries came to recognize the painful fact that it had done so. The walls between Jews and Poles were not limited to the

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  189 physical barriers erected by the Nazis. The gap between the two peoples was now so wide that it was difficult to speak of a single Polish national unit: We are separated from the Polish population by walls and barbed wire … In practice we are isolated from each other. We do not influence each other in culture, society or economics, as we did formerly … Our way of life is different now. We do not really know what the true attitude of the Polish masses to the Jewish masses may be.117

When the Final Solution descended on the Generalgouvernement, it created a new reality. The Jewish underground press devoted much less attention to the Poles’ attitude to the extermination of the Jews than it had to monitoring Polish anti-Semitism. Now it focused chiefly on trying to understand what was taking place, in real time, and on how to react to it. Nevertheless, left-wing Jewish political circles never abandoned their hope that the apathy and hostility evinced by some Poles to the Jewish tragedy was not writing the final chapter in the long relationship between the two peoples, who still had a common interest in fighting Nazism and its supporters to the death: There is no doubt that the Polish street fell short in its relations with the Jews. But with no connection to the question of whether the anti-Semitic tradition prevalent among the Poles is responsible for this, or the Polish masses’ insufficient acquaintance [with the true situation] and the German incitement, it is clear that at this moment the Jewish people and the Polish people are linked by a deeper shared interest: a common struggle against the hated occupier.118

But the disappointment, pain and anger at how some Poles were reacting to the sight of Jews’ being deported to their deaths were acute. Nowhere does the Jewish press come out and attack the Poles for failing to provide adequate assistance to the Jews or for making insufficient effort to stop the Nazi extermination machine. It was very clear to Jewish underground groups that that was not possible. The disappointment had to do with the Poles’ glee at the Jews’ fate and the scorn and mockery with which they watched the Jews’ departure on their final journey. In the words of one newspaper: ‘Hitler is doing at least one good thing for Poland – he is freeing it from the Jews.’ Statements like this are heard on the train and in the market place, on the tram and in the street. Eyewitnesses provide shocking reports about how Poles behaved during the deportation and massacre in Hrubieszów (a district of Lublin). Even more conspicuous against this background is the decent conduct of those Poles who have not lost their humanity. But we must not delude ourselves about this … We want to believe in a different Poland. For now, though, the facts speak for themselves. And they do not speak only in the language of newspaper articles, but chiefly in day-to-day actions, in the betrayals, in the glee at our tragedy, in the mocking of old people condemned to death, in the singing of ‘Żyda bij, bij, bij’119 on the trains of the Generalgouvernement.120

190  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski

The Persecution of the Jews as Covered by the French Underground Press The Jews who were deported from France – whose fate at the end of their long journey was not always known – did not face such a hostile social environment. The reaction of the underground press to each stage of the persecution in France must be set in the general context described above. Its development over time closely followed the perceived evolution of French public opinion.

The Clandestine Press in France The development of an underground press in occupied France was extremely rapid. For the communists, publishing an underground sheet was nothing new. L’Humanité had been banned from the news-stands even before the armistice, when communist publications were outlawed on 25 August 1939 in the wake of the German–Soviet pact. The first issue of the underground L’Humanité appeared three months later.121 ‘The university returns to itself’ proclaimed the opening sentence of the lead editorial in the first issue of L’Université libre, in November 1940.122 Following its example, other titles, such as L’Avant-garde and La Voix ouvrière, which began publishing in August 1940, and Unzer vort, whose earliest surviving issues are dated September 1940, provide evidence of another aspect of communist activity, that of tailoring propaganda to the target audience. The first act of resistance by all political currents was the distribution and then the production of underground texts – first flyers and then newspapers – which in turn facilitated the crystallization of movements that could diversify their activity. Underground publications made it possible to recognize one’s own group, to consolidate teams, to test shared ideas and to define objectives – but especially to act in a period when apathy was everywhere. At the same time, it supported the emergence of an ‘invisible community of readers’ 123 that was distinct from the official community that the Vichy regime claimed to represent. Some of these publications evolved and gave birth to movements; others had an ephemeral existence. Pantagruel (sixteen issues between September 1940 and December 1941), Arc (twenty issues, each with seven to eight pages, between October 1940 and January 1941),124 Libération (nord), which first appeared on 1 December 1940,125 Valmy, which came out a month later,126 La France continue, which published thirteen issues starting in June 1941, and Défense de la France, whose first issue dates from July 1941127 – this short list of titles provides a very incomplete account of the scattered initiatives, of the changing reality and of a fierce desire to stand out from the prevailing discourse. The publication of underground newspapers was not limited to the Germanoccupied north. In the Vichy zone, underground speech was no less crucial for those who wanted to persuade, recruit or organize the nascent opposition. General

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  191 Cochet’s Appels à la France in September 1940;128 the first issue of Libertés, edited by François de Menthon, on 25 November 1940;129 Henri Frenay’s Bulletin d’information et de propagande, also in late 1940; on 17 May 1941 Les Petites Ailes de France, which metamorphosed into Vérités in August 1941 and spawned Combat in December of the same year;130 Libération (sud) in July 1941 and Franc-Tireur on 1 December 1941:131 south of the line of demarcation, as north of it, some of these isolated initiatives led to something, while others did not. Distributing reports, reliable information that could give the lie to the falsehoods disseminated by the captive press and persuade readers that nothing was beyond change – not even the German victory – governed everything else. Shaking people out of their apathy by evoking multiple instances of a fundamental refusal to accept the situation, as proof that ‘France [was not] defeated’,132 would make it possible, subsequently, to unite in joint action all those willing to make an effort to hasten the liberation of France and to assemble a large body of sympathizers who could be slowly won over to this idea. The tasks of organization and propaganda were thus tightly interwoven: persuasion and recruitment went hand in hand. Collecting the reports to be published, editing the articles, finding paper, ink and a printer or duplicating machine, actually producing the newspapers, transporting copies from one place to another and, finally, their actual distribution: the successive steps posed complex problems and often constituted the core of some movements’ activities.133 But neither this complexity nor the increasingly systematic repression hampered the expansion of a press that became more and more diversified. By 1944 there were easily a hundred large periodicals and four or five times that many regional, local or professional organs, which printed some three million copies all told. Défense de la France, which had printed no more than 20,000–25,000 copies in mid-1942, had a circulation of some 40,000 copies an issue immediately before liberation; FrancTireur, which had begun with 6,500 copies, reached 100,000 in 1944. The examples can be multiplied.134 The newspapers that focused on winning over public opinion allow us to grasp the essence of the mindset of the population as these movements imagined it to be and kept in view when choosing the themes to develop. There is no doubt that, both north and south, the message of the resistance was polyphonic, in keeping with the various motives that led individuals to join it, as well as with their diverse ideological options and political convictions. Nevertheless, if we leave out the communist press, there are striking similarities in the choice of words, preferred topics, thematic chronology and strategies employed in their propaganda.135

Palpable Discretion What is striking about the way in which the vast majority of the underground sheets dealt with – or avoided dealing with – the persecution of the Jews is precisely this almost perfect synchronization, despite the disparity of sources.

192  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski The communist publications were the first to express themselves. From the outset they condemned, in issue after issue, the anti-Semitic measures gradually adopted by the collaborationist Vichy government. The target, the ‘rulers of Vichy’, fitted in well with the party’s overall strategy, even when they were described as ‘Hitler’s fawning toadies’.136 A Comintern directive of January 1941 called for ‘energetically deploying a campaign against anti-Semitism and unmasking the regime and the racist theory of the occupiers’.137 Even before then, on 10 September 1940, the underground L’Humanité explained, in a filler, that ‘anti-Semitism was an invention of the reactionaries intended to keep the workers from uniting against their class enemies, the capitalists’.138 Thus the allusions to, analyses and condemnations of what had become official French anti-Semitism held to the traditional and hallowed idea of an instrumental anti-Semitism, directed exclusively against the poor Jews and sparing the Jewish capitalists, and whose objective was to sow division and discord among the French people. In June 1941, for example, a pamphlet distributed by the Paris sections of the French Communist Party directly addressed the specific effects of the anti-Semitic legislation.139 The measures to expropriate small and medium-sized Jewish busi­ nesses were described as ‘a reactionary and racist scandal’ and fitted into the larger framework of the battle by ‘big business’ against all small merchants and of the bourgeoisie’s tactic of ‘destroying bit by bit everything that interferes with its omnipotence’. It was really the poor Jews who had been robbed in this way, despite a few ‘symbolic examples’ intended to ‘throw sand in the eyes of public opinion’, such as ‘the seizure of the assets of the Rothschild family’.140 Those truly respons­ ible for the misfortunes suffered by the French were not the Jews but ‘the capitalist oligarchies’, ‘capitalism that provokes war and misery’. But there was more in this pamphlet: in addition to the clear condemnation of ‘race hatred’ it contained a direct appeal to the French people, who were encouraged to resist the lure of easy profit.141 This was not the first such pamphlet. Of the fifteen flyers that the party circulated clandestinely in November and December 1940, one denounced the ‘campaign of denigrating the Jews’; the proportion was similar in March 1941.142 Clearly, the party’s propaganda strategy targeted the capital’s Jewish neighbourhoods, where there were tradesmen and small merchants – generally immigrants – who could be won over to the communist cause. Some months later the party issued a flyer denouncing the internment of Jews in the Drancy camp.143 Such references to specific actions that affected the Jews – the theft of their small businesses or internment in Drancy – were rarely found in other under­ground publica­tions; nor did the latter feature direct calls to sectors of the French population that might profit from the plunder, exhorting them not to collaborate. But the party line that class differences were at the core of the Jewish experience of anti-Semitism often concealed a frontal attack on native-born French Jews. Nothing was written about the status to which they too were condemned by the anti-Semitic legislation.

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  193 Even in this very specific form, though, denunciation of the new anti-Semitic practices of the French state disappeared from L’Humanité. In La Vie ouvrière, which had a more precisely defined readership, ‘the clique of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, [and] Freemason capitalists, all of them equally enemies of the workers, the highwaymen of the nation’, was violently attacked, starting in August 1940.144 It took pride in the fact that the party had not waited until 1940 ‘to denounce that exploiter of the people’, Rothschild, and added to the list of ‘suckers of the worker’s blood’ five other leading industrialists who, clearly, did not elicit the same associations as the constantly denounced symbol of Jewish capitalism.145 Here we see how the official propaganda could surreptitiously infiltrate the counter-propaganda intended to oppose it: Jews regularly figured at the head of the roll of infamous capitalists. A different public required a different tone. L’Université libre addressed intel­ lectuals and especially educators. From its first issue, in November 1940, the anti-Semitic laws were clearly designated as what they were: persecution. The spot­ light was focused on the Jewish victims among the teaching corps. ‘This manoeuvre to divide the teaching corps’ was only the prelude to other persecutions that would be directed against ‘other categories of educators’; the ‘unanimous disapproval’ of these ‘anti-French’ measures was underscored.146 The paper returned to these themes several times, especially the last of them. According to the editorial in the issue dated 28 December of that same year, the start of the new term had been delayed ‘to avoid demonstrations of sympathy for the few professors affected on 19 December by the Vichy laws, who are henceforth barred from their own laboratories. Their colleagues, who refused to declare their chairs vacant, have shown them their full solidarity [and] their utter disapproval of the steps that constitute yet another attack on the independence of the university.’147 All of the articles highlighted French society’s immunity to racist theories. As a result of the two Jewish Statutes (3 October 1940 and 2 June 1941), 426 Jews were dismissed from the teaching corps; as of 20 November 1940, all teachers had to indicate on a form whether the Jewish Statute applied to them.148 This meant that school and university circles – to whom L’Université libre was addressed – had direct experience of these dismissals. The essence of the denunciation of antiSemitism and racism by L’Université libre concerned their concrete application to the schools and universities. We may also conjecture that the university milieu, in which the use of ideological language could be expected, was less open to racist propaganda than were working-class circles and thus more likely to accept this type of argument. This hypothesis coincides with the evaluation by the Paris police agents who monitored public opinion and on several occasions noted that intellectual circles were rather hostile to the ‘racial policy’.149 Condemnation of Vichy’s antiSemitic policy may not have occupied centre stage in the propaganda in L’Université libre, but the constant mention in the publications of communist university circles of the persecution of the Jews contrasts markedly with the low profile it was accorded in other journals in those days.

194  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski In fact, the only channel through which the persecution of the Jews was addressed in other papers – when it was – was the denunciation of Nazi propaganda. Pantagruel stands as a representative example. In the first issue, dated October 1940, Pantagruel reminded anti-Semites of ‘that admirable remark by Goethe’, in whose eyes ‘race hatred was one of the vices of the rabble’. But this was only a preamble; the sentences that followed this categorical statement of condemnation took off in a different direction: A victory by Germany would have no anti-Jewish meaning. That country has little love for communists yet can get along quite well with them when its interests require this. It is thanks to Germany that the French communists can lift their heads and again conduct their propaganda; it will be the same with the Jews. If necessary, Germany itself will settle the German Jews in France. On the other hand, a victory by England would have no pro-Jewish meaning, as certain traitorous sheets insinuate.150

This argument, meant to counter one of the favourite themes of official propaganda, was addressed to all the French people, anti-Semitic or not, to enlist their opposition to the policy of collaboration. Hence it was necessary to downplay the authenticity of the Germans’ anti-Semitism. This remained the journal’s angle of attack, as in April 1941: Pantagruel is not an English leaflet. It is published by veteran soldiers who are neither Jews, nor Freemasons, nor politicians … Many fine but timid Frenchmen hesitate to fully sympathize with the English cause because, they say, ‘an English victory would mean the return of the Jews and freemasons’.   First off we answer them as follows: ‘You are free not to love the Jews, but the sentiment that should take precedence over all others is patriotism, and that orders you to think, before anything else, that an English victory would mean the liberation of our Alsace-Lorraine. Accepting its loss as the price of our liberation from the Jews shows that you are blinded by fanaticism.’151

As we see, the idea that French policy was subject to Jewish control or domination by shady Freemasons was not contested. The objective here too was to persuade readers, anti-Semitic or not, anti-Masonic or not, that Pantagruel and Free France were not under the influence of either the Jews or the Freemasons. In October 1941 the paper published a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism, under the title ‘The Horrors of Anti-Semitism’. Once again the target was anti-Semitic propaganda. The anti-Semitic practices highlighted in part of the text were those fathered by the Nazis. The general lineaments of Pantagruel’s denunciation of anti-Semitism could be found in almost all the other papers as well. When Jud Süss was shown in French cinemas in July 1941, Liberté published a long article entitled ‘Why We Do Not Want Jud Süss’. As in the previous example, it was German propaganda that was assailed. What is more, this ideological attack

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  195 was very cautious in its language. Its focus was not criticism of anti-Semitism but condemnation of ‘the appeal to hatred’, which was, in fact, a harbinger of anti-Christianity. Furthermore, the author began by protesting his patriotism and disavowing any desire to defend the Jews. Finally, he alludes to a ‘Jewish problem’ whose existence is conceded, but which should be handled in the French manner, ‘with justice’.152 On the other hand, none of the underground newspapers brought up the laws enacted by Vichy to implement its anti-Semitic policy. Only after the death of the philosopher Henri Bergson could the readers of some of them find an allusion to the Jews’ concrete fate in Vichy France. Several underground sheets – a minority – took up the baton proffered by the official press, which also devoted several articles to the deceased philosopher and addressed the effects of persecution under the shelter of a famous name. Similarly, mention could be made of great artists whose works could no longer be exhibited, reminding collaborationist painters that they were deliberately tiptoeing around the fact that the works of Chagall, Modigliani and Pissarro had been banned.153 Libération (sud) also had recourse to the safety of a famous name in order to mention what was happening to the Jews. In March 1942 it reprinted, without additional comment, Paul Claudel’s letter to the chief rabbi of France, in which the poet proclaimed ‘the disgust, horror and indignation felt by all decent Frenchmen, and especially Catholics, at the injustices, thefts and many varieties of abuse of which their Jewish fellow citizens are currently the victims’.154 But once again, taking the underground press as a whole, no other opening was exploited to bring up the Jews’ fate. This general discretion was deliberate. When Vérités, in a November 1941 article on Nazi propaganda in France, waxed indignant about the occupiers’ banning of some books, it saw no point in mentioning that the works of Jewish authors had been systematically proscribed. The source of the ban was the desire to cover up the Nazis’ ‘hatred of France, hatred of Christianity, [and] desire to dominate the world’, explained the author of the article ‘The War against the Mind’.155 The same ideas recur in articles about the situation in Poland. The fate of Catholics or of Polish intellectuals, harshly repressed by the Nazis, was the focus here. ‘In Poland, 95 per cent of the Catholic priests have been the victims of persecution’, wrote Valmy in the summer of 1941. ‘Some have been martyred, massacred, beaten. Others have been deported, imprisoned or mocked, subjected to public ridicule … This is what awaits us French Catholics’, added the author.156 Poland was ‘precisely in the situation in which France would find itself in the event of an Axis victory’, explained Libération (nord) in April 1942. The next article surveyed several points: the situation of religious believers (in fact only the Catholics); the matter of property, to underscore the fact that the leisure classes had been plundered and Poles could no longer practise the liberal professions; the condition of labourers – now required to work in German factories, with the risk of the separation of families; and the status of the population at large, which was said to be ‘very close to the status of the Jews

196  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski in Germany’.157 Although in exceptional cases there was also some allusion to the persecution of the Jews in Poland, their fate was clearly assimilated to that of the other Poles – as when Les Petites Ailes referred to the creation of ‘ghettos for Jews and ghettos for Poles’.158 Finally, when the persecution of the Jews in general or of some of them was the topic of a short piece, this deviation from the paper’s normal habits was hedged about with precautions. Take, for example, Franc-Tireur, which, in its first issue, took on ‘the Hitlerian fable of an alleged Jewish conspiracy’. But this denunciation of Nazi propaganda led straight into the following lines: The bankers, Jewish or not, must be stripped of their power, which has raised them above the law and subjugated governments to them. The Jew who works, produces and obeys the laws of the country has the same rights of citizenship as the non-Jew. The claptrap about so-called Jewish-Masonic influence has merely served Hitler as a means to create domestic divisions in countries he wanted to weaken before attacking them.159

Tackling the subject from the propaganda angle, the journal found itself on the defensive, in a position that was even more difficult to maintain because public opinion had clearly not yet been persuaded by refutations of such widespread stereotypes. This made it necessary to take on the bankers whenever one seemed to be sticking up for the Jews and led to the restrictive wording that reserved only to ‘the Jew who works, produces and obeys the laws of the country’ the same rights enjoyed by non-Jews – all non-Jews. The image of public opinion held by the editors of the various underground publications certainly provides part of the explanation for their discretion about the anti-Semitic persecutions. The multiplicity of opinions in the fighting press never seriously breached the almost uniform approach in this regard. Until the spring of 1942 the persecution of the Jews was rarely addressed. When it was alluded to, the reference was to the French Jews, and the Germans – the enemies of France and the French people – were generally held to be responsible. The fate of foreign Jews was taboo. Nazi propaganda, with its excesses, offered a more accessible target; but attacking it required an envelope of oratorical precautions to make it clear that one was not under Jewish influence. A denunciation of international finance, an allusion to the excessively generous admission of foreigners by the French authorities in the years before the war, mention of the notorious ‘Jewish problem’ that had to be resolved in a French way, protestations of patriotism, the often repeated affirmation that the fate of the Jews was a harbinger of what the French could expect later – all these immediately followed any reference to the anti-Semitic persecution. Sheltering behind a famous name (Claudel, Bergson, etc.) offered an alternative, but one that was rarely employed. The shadow of the ‘Jewish problem’, solidly entrenched in the public mind, could not be dissipated. The almost total consensus that it existed had woven a veil that

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  197 concealed the effects of practical anti-Semitism in Vichy France. Any reference to the latter was apt to set off an argument. The underground press steered clear of subjects considered to be secondary or derivative, whose very mention might jeopardize national unity – an obsession for the ‘first resistance’, whose priority was ‘restoring that unity’.160 This is why the resistance relegated the anti-Semitic legislation to the sidelines.Were this the only explanation, it would mean that those who produced the various underground newspapers subjected themselves to systematic self-censorship about the persecution of the Jews. This hardly seems plausible. For the members of the resistance, freedom of expression was a fundamental value.161 They would not have willingly chipped away at it by conscious self-censorship on an issue that was felt to be fundamental. Hence their discretion rested on deeper foundations. The havoc wrought by the ‘Jewish problem’ did not spare resistance circles. ‘In some movements, perhaps more difficult to locate precisely, people proclaimed themselves simultaneously against anti-Semitism and against the danger that would be constituted by reverse racism, a Jewish state within the state’, wrote Léo Hamon in an April 1941 report on the situation of the Jews in Paris.162 While anti-Semitic propaganda was in full swing and the Jews were excluded from many sectors of French society by both French and German regulations, he noted that in some resistance circles there was no hesitation about denouncing anti-Semitism and the ‘Jewish problem’ equally. For some of the movements, eschewing all reference to the anti-Semitic persecu­ tion satisfied the need to avoid ruffling public opinion, which was thought to be either anti-Semitic or split on the issue. For other movements, however, the profound conviction that there really was a ‘Jewish problem’ in France and that the Vichy government, perhaps clumsily, probably with some excesses and certainly deriving too much inspiration from German methods, was working to solve it – in short, that it was offering a response that was not quite satisfactory to a question it had reason to ask – paralysed their pens. Naturally enough, it was the movements and leaders that had held out the longest in their reserved support for Pétain that fell into the latter category.163 With the exception of two periodicals that claimed to be the voice of Christian resistance – La France continue in Paris and Les Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien in the south – discretion was the order of the day. This remained the case at least until the summer of 1942, when the imposition of the yellow badge in the occupied zone was soon followed by a dragnet to round up Jews, first in the north and then in the so-called ‘free zone’. This elicited a unanimous protest. The ‘horror’ was described by every pen, and strong language was employed by all in connection with the hunt for Jews in the streets of Paris, the abominable conditions in which they were detained at the Vel d’Hiv and then the round-ups in the southern zone: ‘the howls of despair’ that escaped the ‘Gehenna’ of the Vel d’Hiv,164 the ‘Saint Bartholomew’s Night’ and its ‘heartrending scenes’,165 the ‘ignominy’ of this ‘challenge to the civilized world’ which ‘forced open the most near-sighted eyes’,166 the ‘untrammelled savagery’, ‘the massacre of the innocents’,167

198  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski ‘the vile persecution’ and ‘the great hunt of innocents’, 168 a ‘hateful display of racist hatred’,169 ‘racist savagery not shrinking from any atrocity’,170 ‘the bestiality, cruelty and sadistic madness’ of those responsible for ‘these monstrous crimes’,171 France turned into ‘a land of pogroms’, ‘a back alley’, ‘a torture chamber’,172 France ‘treated like a jungle and its residents like sheep’173 – the poignant descriptions in the periodicals, the special issues and the flyers, as well as over the BBC, justified the use of these extreme expressions. ‘You want to hide yourself and cry in shame’,174 wrote one. ‘We are crushed by a shameful corset’,175 said another. ‘All of France is sullied by this shame’, scolded a communist leaflet.176 In Paris, some people ‘had tears in their eyes and a red face’.177 South of the demarcation line, their colleagues ‘could not speak of it without blushing’.178 ‘When one thinks about the Jews, one feels disgraced.’179 ‘The shame of it!’180 ‘France, the land of shame.’181 ‘France has been disgraced.’182 Such were the first and widespread reactions. Though some kept quiet about it and others did not insist too much, others stated, loudly and clearly, that the ‘French police had performed the Gestapo’s contemptible work’.183 There was a sense of shame at this blemish on the honour of France, accompanied for some by hatred of those responsible for the situation: ‘When you realize the enormity of these crimes, you must hate not only the Nazis and the Gestapo officers, but also every German soldier who agrees to be an instrument of such barbarism, a part of this evil force, of this enemy of reason, light, beauty, goodness and progress’, wrote L’Université libre.184 But – and this cannot be missed – the condemnation was expressed in almost identical terms in all of the underground publications. The Germans, the ‘Boche authorities’ or the Nazis were the instigators of these atrocities. ‘The vile Prussian monsters and their lackeys’ were reviled in a communist pamphlet that circulated in Paris.185 ‘Paris delivered to the SS’ was the headline in Franc-Tireur in August 1942. ‘They’re doing this among us!’ it added.186 ‘Hitler beats, kills and tortures in France’, continued a pamphlet of the same movement, which, for once, denounced the round-up of foreign Jews in the so-called Free Zone.187 Demain protested against the ‘crime of lèse-humanité’, which it described as ‘Hitlerian madness’.188 The Jews were the victims of the occupier, of the enemy that was loathed by all French people. The Nazi barbarism had been unleashed on French soil. When it became increasingly clear that French police officers had carried out all of the atrocities described, they were said to have been acting under duress and compulsion. ‘My God, in the course of my long career I have never had many dealings with Jews and I neither like them nor hate them in particular! But you see what has just been done, these recent days, to these unfortunate people.’189 Le Père Duchesne, like the others, located its revulsion on the human plane. The unfortunates evoked in those articles were first and foremost children, and the chorus of underground voices focused on their fate: ‘We saw something unheard of: two-year-old children snatched away from their mothers. We saw, near the Gare de Lyon, a baby shivering with fever carried off in its blankets to the concentration camp. Luna-Park, Louis-le-Grand, garages all over the

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  199 place were transformed into jails for these dangerous terrorists, Jews aged 2 to 15’, wrote François Berteval (Christian Pineau) in Libération (nord).190 The examples can be multiplied: everywhere Jewish children torn from their mothers’ arms were at the centre of the indignation. The arrest of entire families and their brutal separation constituted the most striking feature of this dreadful summer of persecution. Furthermore, it was a sinister and unexpected innovation, taking by surprise even Jews with advance warning, some of whom had gone into hiding and never imagined that their wives and children would not be spared. The heartrending scenes in the occupied zone and then in the south moved the population; the terrible experiences of young children, innocent victims of this incomprehensible relentlessness, wiped out – or consigned to the shadows – all prejudice, even among those who had been given to it. But this almost exclusive focus was not lacking a manipulative objective. In a report dated 27 July 1942, analysing the instructions sent to Communist Party militants in Paris, the police inspectors wrote that ‘the militants had been told to collect precise information about cases in which children had been separated from their parents and to give them maximum publicity’. The police inspectors concluded from this that ‘it is definitely a question of exploiting the humanitarian sentiments of the population with the goal of creating a true spirit of revolt and hatred against the occupiers’.191 Sensitive to public opinion – in the occupied zone but also south of the line of demarcation – the underground editors sang in unison. The humanitarian chord had been set vibrating and was given prominence in their writings. It made it possible to keep away from the ‘Jewish problem’ – a political issue that was kept under wraps – and forge a consensus. This was made easier by the fact that the humanitarian aspect lay at the centre of the response by leading churchmen. All the underground publications, including those of the communists, devoted considerable space to pastoral letters, and especially those by Mgr. Saliège and Mgr. Théas. Reprinting the words of these eminent prelates to their flocks, the resistance movements huddled under their spiritual authority to denounce the persecution of the Jews. What is more, the moral dimension formed the core of these clerics’ protests against the treatment of the Jews – and nothing else. All the same, one of the pillars of the regime had defected. This was ‘good news’ that had to be circulated widely and explains the almost unanimous decision to reprint their statements. The repercussions of the pastoral letters on public opinion had not passed without notice.192 The temptation to expand their meaning was great. All understood the advantage that could be derived and underscored the fissure that had just opened between the Church of France and the Vichy regime. Another theme kept resurfacing in the work of various authors. This time let us look at Défense de la France, in which Robert Tenaille (André Salmon) traced the link between the foreign Jews of the present and the French people of tomorrow: Those who are still silly enough to rub their hands together and tell themselves, ‘it only involves foreign Jews, not us,’ should make the slight effort to understand that after

200  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski the foreign Jews will come the turn of the French Jews, and after the French Jews that of the French people themselves. We are on this path with the volunteer-labour levy. And as this levy seems to be a total failure, soon we shall see the invitation replaced by compulsion.193

No one was safe. The threat would not stop with the Jews; the Germans were just getting their hand in with them. Several weeks later, in October 1942 when Laval handed over French workers, Libération (sud) could describe ‘the chain’ that led Jews to forced labour after the people of Alsace and Lorraine: The vile enslavement of the Jews, whose vicissitudes have been reported by Libération, has only accelerated the march towards total slavery … The case of the Jews served as ‘joint manoeuvres’ in which French policemen and Gestapo agents worked together. Berlin considers the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from France to be a success that holds out hope for the later shipment of hundreds of thousands of French workers to Germany.194

This was one of the favourite themes of the communist press: All of this, all of this odious display of racist hatred, has no other goal than to provide Hitler with manpower, which he has in increasingly short supply. What is being done against the Jews today will be done against us tomorrow; that is why the French people must prepare to repel any attempt at a round-up, whether in apartments or in factories, by force.

Thus wrote L’Humanité in the summer of 1942.195 So there were ‘the Jews’ and there was ‘us’. There were round-ups in apartment blocks and round-ups in factories. It was all part of the same plan to impress slaves for the occupier. The reactions to the summer 1942 round-ups came close on the heels of the BBC’s reports that 700,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland. But the content of these broadcasts was not reprinted by the underground press in France – not a single newspaper, sheet or pamphlet mentioned them, with the exception of the Yiddish organ of the Bund, Unzer kamf, in July 1942, right before the round-ups. This silence was followed by an equally mute sequel. The July 1942 issue of L’Humanité was the last to refer to the fate of the Jews, who then disappeared completely from its columns, as they did from the entire underground press after the autumn of 1942. It is not that the persecutions had been suspended in France, or the deportations of the Jews to an ‘unknown destination’. Sometimes the BBC broadcast frightful news that had reached London about the fate of Jews from all over Europe in the camps in the east. The underground distribution service in France, part of the Interior Commission of Fighting France run from London by Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, regularly sent out articles documenting these atrocities to the

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  201 various movements. But we look in vain for any piece on the fate of the Jews deported from France or elsewhere in their press. Of course the issue of deportation filled many columns in underground publications – but this was the ‘deportation’ of French men and women for forced labour in Germany. The deportation of Jewish children had given the word a heavy burden. Its terrifying connotation made it possible to encourage the French to revolt against the idea of French labourers going to work in Germany – even when they were strongly encouraged to do so by the French authorities and subsequently when it became mandatory in February 1943. Thus the discretion about anti-Semitic persecution on French soil, followed by the cry of horror that accompanied the mass arrests of Jews, were transformed within a few weeks into total silence, even when an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign was launched and even when it directly targeted the resistance. The Red Poster affair offers a good illustration of this muteness. The poster was pasted up in the wake of the trial of the Manouchian group, members of the communist resistance group MOI, who were particularly active in Paris and had been arrested in November 1943. Their trial began in mid-February 1944 before a German military tribunal.196 All twenty-three defendants were condemned to death; twenty-two of them were shot a few days later.197 The trial received broad coverage in the Vichy press, which underscored – quoting the indictment or verdict – the foreign identity of these ‘terrorists’, Jews or communists in the pay of England and the Soviet Union, who were working ‘for the triumph of international Bolshevism’.198 The infamous Red Poster, which ‘seemed to be a bloody stain’ (to quote Aragon’s poem about it),199 denounced the ‘criminal army’. The poster featured portraits of ten of the defendants in medallions: seven of them were Polish or Hungarian Jews and designated as such, along with the ‘Armenian boss of the gang’, an ‘Italian communist’ and a ‘Red Spaniard’. All of the underground publications reacted to this campaign, which targeted them directly and rested on four arguments: the resistance consisted of bandits or terrorists who were foreigners and/or Jews and in the pay of Moscow. The underground press returned the compliment to Vichy: the Vichy militiamen were the true terrorists. Almost every article proclaimed the unity of the resistance and waxed indignant about the attempt to sow discord by trying to stimulate an anti-communist reaction. A few objected to the xenophobia. But, with the exception of the Lettres Françaises, the organ of the communist writers, none made the least allusion to the anti-Semitic element of this campaign, which was nevertheless its core.200 Throughout the occupation, the resistance spared no effort to prove that its members had not signed up to the goal of defending the cause of the Jews. This was carried so far that the resistance seemed to be quite disinterested in the Jews’ fate. The only dissenting voice heard in the landscape of the underground press was sounded by two Catholic journals, Témoignage Chrétien and La France continue.

202  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski

The Catholic Exception The Paris-based La France continue, which published thirteen issues (10,000 copies each), starting in June 1941,201 stands out from the pack. Founded by Henri Montfort and Suzanne Feingold (Perrin), with the assistance of Paul Petit, the historian Emile Coornaert, and Raymond Burgard, a French teacher at the Lycée Buffon who was one of the cofounders of Valmy (the movement and newspaper),202 it immediately took aim at Vichy, which it described as ‘anti-France’, but also at the ‘nonagenarian Marshal’, whom it accused of having ‘perpetrated an unheardof abuse of confidence’.203 La France continue, which based itself on ‘Christian doctrine’ because it was a distinctly Christian voice that its founders wanted to sound, and which summarized its thought by affirming ‘the primacy of the spiritual’,204 returned in most of its issues to one aspect or another of the persecution of the Jews. In the second issue, the editors highlighted ‘the iniquitous measures … decreed by Vichy against the French Jews’, underlining that ‘the people of France’ would never accommodate themselves to anti-Semitism, ‘despite its new German-style look’.205 Every indictment of the Vichy government mentioned its anti-Semitic policies – including the Jewish census and then the mass arrests in the November 1941 issue.206 It was La France continue that published a detailed article about the arrests of May and August 1941, as well as about the internments in the camps of the Loiret and in Drancy. ‘It is important to underline that these arrests, the internment that followed them, [and] the organization of the camps were exclusively the work of the French authorities, who have cowardly performed the conqueror’s job’, stated the writer. A long description of the conditions in Drancy followed this indictment. Pétain was held to be directly responsible for the anti-Jewish laws, which ‘he modelled on those of the Nazis’.207 It is true that, taken as a whole, these articles paint the native-born Jews as the only victims of a persecution that in fact victimized all Jews; they are the ones whom the newspaper defended explicitly, whether directly or by quoting Péguy. At the same time, however, it did not conceal the fact that the vast majority of the Jews interned in Drancy were not French Jews; nor could one find a single reference to an alleged ‘Jewish problem’. On every topic, La France continue stood out for the clarity of its language, with no sly winks at a population that everyone still thought little inclined to feel pity for the Jews.208 In November 1941 the presses of Villeurbanne printed 5,000 copies of an underground leaflet that was different from anything the underground had produced until then. ‘France, take care not to lose your soul’: that was the title of the first issue of the Cahier du Témoignage Chrétien. 209 The perspective adopted was resolutely spiritual. It proclaimed absolute political neutrality even though the path chosen made its authors into political dissidents. The review format was evidence of a desire to replace recruitment pieces with deep analysis. Nazism was the target pounded by the editors, who rejected any compromise with an ideology that, they

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  203 emphasized, was incompatible with Christianity and who consequently denounced the collaborationist policy of Pétain and his government. Faithful to its desire to unmask ‘the falsehood of collaboration in the new order’, the publication did not overlook any equivocation and forcefully affirmed its message – about Jews, antiSemitism and the persecution of which they were victims. The original hard core of Témoignage Chrétien comprised a group of Jesuit theologians from Lyon and Paris (Father Chaillet, Father de Lubac and Father Fessard), who were joined by a small number of lay intellectuals.210 Pastor Roland de Pury was also part of the team; he played an important role in transmitting reports he received in Switzerland.211 But the initiative for the publication was taken by Chaillet, who set the project in motion, along with Alexandre Marc and Louis Cruvellier.212 The singular nature of this voice, against the background of the generalized discretion, found its full measure in the issue entitled ‘Antisémites’, published in May 1942. It began with an indictment of the silence that enveloped the persecution of the Jews. The anti-Semites interpret the nation’s forced silence as an act of acquiescence: FRENCHMEN AND CHRISTIANS, WE HAVE COME TO SOLEMNLY SHATTER THIS SILENCE.   If prolonged, this silence would burden our conscience and hold up to the eyes of an astonished world all of France, and especially Christian France, as accomplices.   FRANCE SIMPLY DOES NOT INTEND TO BE AN ACCOMPLICE …   Anti-Semitism with its proscriptions is more than shame, it is treason, for which all of France will one day have to demand justice.213

It would be difficult to imagine a more detailed criticism of anti-Semitism, with its ideological roots, specific episodes and moral implications. Hitler’s anti-Semitic racism, backed up for the most part by quotations, was denounced from different perspectives, some of which employed arguments developed in previous issues. But four points were made that make this long study unique. First of all, Hitler’s own speeches were quoted to establish his ‘desire to exterminate the Jewish race in Europe’.214 Next, the centrality of the Hitlerian anti-Semitism to National Socialist doctrine as a whole was underscored. ‘It is its very core, to the point that, according to the Führer himself, anyone who would call himself a National Socialist while rejecting only anti-Semitism would on the contrary be excluding himself from National Socialism.’215 On top of this, there was a detailed account of how the Nazis had put their murderous design into practice in various occupied countries: the deportations in ‘exceptionally draconian conditions’ of the Jews from Germany and Austria to ‘the Lublin reserve’, after a torrent of vexatious measures followed by criminal brutality; the ‘bloody persecutions’ that had ‘decimated’ the Jewish population of Czechoslovakia; the ‘savage persecution’ and ‘deportations’ of the Jews from Yugoslavia; the ‘machine-gun executions’ of the Jews of Romania; the

204  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski situation in the ghettos of Poland, where Jews were condemned to famine and epidemics; in Greece, in Hungary, in Lithuania, in Italy, in the Netherlands and in Belgium – everywhere social exclusion, misery, criminal persecution.216 After Hitler’s murderous purpose had been exposed, documented and proven, the antiSemitic legislation enacted and enforced in France and the situation in the internment camps217 were described and the ‘simultaneously tragic and revolting situations’ they had produced were denounced. Furthermore, whereas the deportation of Jews from France and the extermination of Jews in Poland were totally ignored by the underground press, the very first 1943 issue of Témoignage Chrétien was once again an exception, for it was devoted entirely to Poland. It spoke of ‘the systematic extermination of the Polish people’, ‘the inexorable liquidation of the Catholic Church’ and the concentration camps in which Poles ‘were dying en masse’, ‘especially intellectuals and priests’. The ‘sad reputation’ of the camp in Oświęcim (Auschwitz), where ‘thousands of German criminals and homosexuals and the elite of the Polish nation’ were incarcerated, was mentioned as well. But there was also a passage on the ghettos ‘in which they have concentrated all the Jews of Poland and Germany and to which they are now transporting all of the Jews from all of the occupied countries’. There were descriptions of the ‘mass shootings and poisoning by gas’, concluding with the following lines: ‘In total, more than 700,000 Jews have been brutally murdered on Polish soil and there is no possible doubt concerning Hitler’s plan to totally exterminate the Jews of the European continent.’218 This issue of Témoignage Chrétien, of which 35,000 copies were produced, is especially important, because the only three resistance newspapers – Libération (sud) in July 1943, Défense de la France in September 1943 and Front national in March 1944 – that referred to the fate of the Jews of Poland cited it explicitly.219 They drew on it as a source endowed with unquestioned legitimacy in resistance circles and that none could challenge. Nevertheless, the Jews’ particular fate took up only a few lines in their articles. Front national began by mentioning the murder of 70,000 Jews in Kiev but continued with the extermination of an entire nation: the Poles. None of the three considered that the annihilation of all the Jews of Europe was the most important story. The articles in Libération and Défense de la France climaxed with the decimation of the Polish clergy, and Front national with the Germans’ abject behaviour towards the Poles, Russians and Ukrainians, which the French, too, would not be spared. In the summer of 1943 another underground publication, one intended for internal consumption only, raised the issue of the Jews deported to the east. This was La Vie de la MOI, the house organ of the immigrant communists. In its first issue we find the following lines in the section on ‘the fight against deportation’: A veritable pogrom was organized on 16 July 1942, among the Jews of the occupied zone, in which thousands of men, women, old people and children were brutally dispatched to the east. What happened to these people? Only a small fraction are still alive. Most were

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  205 exterminated in the gas chambers of Poland or in German soap factories, where their bodies provided the fats that the Boches are short of.220

In the next issue the few lines devoted to Poland and the heroic struggle of the Polish people referred to the extermination of the Jews that was taking place on Polish soil: ‘The Nazis want to cover Poland with perpetual shame by turning it into a slaughterhouse for the Jews, because it is in that country that the swarthy barbarians have organized the massacre of two million Jews brought there from all the countries of occupied Europe.’221 It is true that the leading triumvirate of the MOI included Louis GronowskiBrunot and Jacques Kaminski – both of them Polish-born Jews. The former had spent five years working in ‘progressive organizations of Jewish immigrants’, notably as political editor of Naye presse from its founding, before joining the MOI central committee in the autumn of 1938.222 The latter, who was very close to him, replaced him as the political director of the Jewish section.223 This section produced an extensive and variegated network of underground publications, which offered, issue after issue, increasingly detailed reports on the fate of the Jews deported from France and other countries of occupied Europe.

The Solidarity of the French People? The defeat and German occupation had led to the suspension of all Jewish publica­ tions, except for a bulletin that the community was forced to issue by the occupation authorities, Les Informations juives, whose first issue was dated 19 April 1941.224 Thus underground publication was the only possible channel for written material intended specifically for Jews. But only the Jewish communists followed this route systematically. For others it was social action that predominated. Most of the Bund’s few underground publications appeared in the southern zone: occasional pamphlets in Yiddish at first and then, in May 1942 ‘after a long silence’, Unzer kamf, subtitled the ‘Jewish socialist monthly in France’, also in Yiddish.225 Also in the southern zone, a group of dissident Zionists in Toulouse, or rather of one of them, the poet David Knout, put out an underground pamphlet. ‘What should we do?’ this militant Zionist wondered in the wake of the defeat. But this text, which ‘was the beginning of underground publication’226 in the Toulouse region, was meant for internal consumption only. Knout offered his own analysis of the ‘Jewish problem’ and argued for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. He called on the Jews to take their destiny in their hands and set up a clandestine defence organization.227 This was the founding document of a form of Jewish resistance that eventually spawned the Armée juive. This same concern to provide solace to a people overcome by events energized the activists of the Zionist establishment, too; seeking to maintain the Zionist ideal and the hope for the future

206  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski that it embodied, they circulated reports from Palestine in underground bulletins.228 All of these publications were illegal, but the system operated in a closed circuit, with no links to the rest of the underground press or the non-Jewish population. After the defeat of June 1940 most of the immigrant Jews remained in Paris, along with the leaders of the communist organizations, who had gone underground. The repression of the communists, all of whose organizations had been dissolved even before the defeat, became increasingly harsh. Thus social action was also a priority for these communist militants; they chose the name Solidarité for the underground organization they created in Paris, which provided assistance to some 3,500 families until March 1942.229 In the communist tradition, though, no action was conceivable without an explicitly political purpose. The early descent into the underground, as well as the tradition of agit-prop, the presence of the communist leaders in Paris (unlike the leaders of the Zionist organization) and the swift adoption of distinctly political objectives explain the dynamic nature of the underground literature that quickly emerged, initially in the capital. In addition, the Jewish communist organizations had to conform with the party line and strategy: their illegal publications were strongly linked to the rest of the communist press. The earliest issues of the Yiddish Unzer vort (Our word), which took over from the now-banned Naye presse, have disappeared. We have only the French translations by the police of several articles from the issues that appeared between 29 September 1940 (No. 21) and 14 March 1941 (No. 33), as well as Yiddish summaries of some of these issues. At least eighty-nine issues appeared during the occupation.230 As the underground Jewish communist organizations proliferated (creating groups for young people, women, etc.) or formed umbrella organizations (Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’entraide, UJRE [Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Assistance]), the number of publications multiplied, too: each organization had to have its own mouthpiece. The UJRE published Droit et liberté, starting in February 1944, while En avant was the organ of the Jewish Young Communists, starting in December 1942. Jeune Combat, the publication of the Union of Jewish Youth, appeared in June 1943; it set up its own editorial board in December 1943, after relying on that of the Central Committee in the previous months.231 To these titles we can add La Voix de la femme juive, and Unzer vort, Notre voix and Notre parole continued to appear. The Jewish communists had also created another type of organization in the spring of 1940. The Mouvement national contre le racisme (National Movement against Racism, MNCR), though officially non-partisan, was in fact under the absolute control of the Jewish section of the MOI. It started two papers: J’accuse (in the occupied zone) and Fraternité (in the southern zone). Through them the ‘French people’ expressed their solidarity with the persecuted Jews. The August 1944 issue of Fraternité was No. 26. J’accuse published its twenty-second issue the day after liberation. In the meantime, the MNCR had added other publications to the list: Combat médical, for physicians, appeared in March 1943, and the first issue of

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  207 Lumières, targeting intellectuals, was dated January 1944.232 Clarté, the publication of the youth section of the MNCR, was inaugurated around the same time. This extremely diverse group of publications employed the phraseology and key themes of the communist press. But it also reported on, analysed and denounced all facets of the persecution: the anti-Jewish legislation, the manhunts for Jews, the round-ups, the deportations. Reprints of reports on the Jews’ fate broadcast over the BBC or Radio Moscow, the mass murder in the camps of the east, the ‘slaughterhouse of Poland’: it was all there. Sometimes, it is true, the analyses closely followed what appeared in L’Humanité (especially when an attack on Jewish capitalists accompanied an account of the persecution of Jewish workers). There is also no doubt that the typical accents of the underground press as a whole were duplicated, such as the emphasis on the fate of Jewish children during the round-ups of the summer of 1942 and the confounding of the deportation of Jews with the deportation of French labourers. Finally, it is certain that partisan objectives were not absent, as when, for example, one of these publications attacked the Zionists or the bourgeois heads of the community. But what was exceptional about this sector, against the backdrop of the general silence, was the mass of information it communicated about the fate of the Jews – reports that were intended principally for the general population, whose solidarity with the Jews was constantly being praised. According to these publications, the French ‘had not allowed themselves to be deluded by anti-Semitic propaganda … The fraternity of the French and the Jewish people has been reinforced.’ ‘Servings of racism’ were regularly offered to the French people to ‘conceal the persecution of patriots’, but they were not fooled.233 The objective sought by the communist propaganda ‘among the Jewish population’ had not escaped the police inspectors. As a May 1942 report noted, ‘the militants have decided to emphasize that the many Jews who were shot had the sympathy of all the French people, with no distinction of opinion or race, and that the vast majority of the French population was impermeable to the racist propaganda as it developed in totalitarian countries’.234 Throughout the occupation, the Jewish communist press kept sounding this note. The world in general and the French people in particular were in solidarity with the persecuted Jews. Citing the Allied declaration of 17 December 1942, these papers unveiled the Hitlerian plan for genocide. ‘The terrible carnage among the Jews of Poland has provoked indignation throughout the world’; ‘All humanity is arrayed against the assassins’; ‘The entire civilized world has emitted a cry of horror’; ‘The universal conscience is revolted by this barbarism.’235 These are a few of the headlines or lead sentences published in J’accuse between December 1942 and February 1943. The French people’s active solidarity with the persecuted Jews was hammered home on every possible occasion. The indignation of the French people in the summer of 1942 was described in Yiddish in the following terms: ‘For the first time since the occupation, the masses of the country have declared themselves against bestial anti-Semitism. For the first time, the Catholic and Protestant churches

208  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski have openly pronounced themselves against the persecution of the Jews and against the government.’236 This emphasis – ‘for the first time’ – seems to be a sincere expression of the relief felt then and illuminates in retrospect the agonies that must have accompanied the first months of persecution. The MNCR – a movement created and led by Jewish communists – was supposed to embody this movement of French public opinion in the summer of 1942, which in fact legitimized its own existence. Thus, to support the idea of a wave of indignation in France against the horrors it was denouncing, Unzer vort, the Yiddish-language organ of the Jewish communists, referred to actions taken by the MNCR, an organization created by its own sponsors. To corroborate the statement that the Jews and the French were united in a common struggle, it cited, again, the MNCR. These two aspects of the Jewish communists’ propaganda – one addressed to the French people, the other to immigrant Jews – were slightly schizophrenic. The establishment of a periodical, ostensibly by a French organization and devoted specifically to the fight against anti-Semitism, was motivated – at least in part – by the obliviousness of the French underground press to this subject. The percolation of anti-Semitic themes into public opinion made this necessary. At the same time, however, the supposed solidarity between the Jews and the French people was the essential theme of publications addressed to the immigrant Jews – necessary because awareness of their isolation would turn them away from organizations that fought in complete harmony alongside the French organizations or, rather, under their direct authority. This emphasis had a double objective: with regard to the Jews, it sought to enlist them to fight alongside the French and, preferably, in French organizations, rather than to join Zionist organizations that were oriented more towards rescue than towards underground combat. With regard to the French population as a whole, the goal was no different from that of the underground press in general, which, when it emitted its cry of horror, had underscored the fact that the population was resisting the Nazi poison. It was a classic example of autosuggestion. But the Jewish communists were not fooled, as is proven by their appeals to the resistance to make its voice heard. Every possible breach was exploited. The feasibility of creating the MNCR emerged only after the publication of the bishops’ pastoral letters; its objective was to amplify the movement of protest against the persecution of the Jews. All of the appeals released then placed the Catholic intellectuals in the first rank of those addressed. In December 1942, citing the official Allied declaration, J’accuse called on all French people to join their protest to that of the civilized world: French people, we cannot remain passive in the face of these murders that disgrace our country. The National Committee of Fighting France has joined the action of the free governments. For our part we must demonstrate that we are part of the indignant protests of the entire world … Let a unanimous cry rise throughout oppressed and murdered

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  209 France, proclaiming our hatred for the murderers [and] our active sympathy for the victims.237

But no newspaper picked up the report about the plan to exterminate the Jews and the Allied statement condemning it. The press of the Jewish section of the MOI could go no further, not until the appearance of the Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien in January to February 1943, with their mention of the murder of Jews in Poland brought there from all the occupied countries. On 1 March 1943 the MNCR issued a pamphlet addressed to the ‘Christians of France’: Since the occupation of our country, you have witnessed successive waves of persecu­ tion against the Jews … The highest authorities of your churches have courageously protested against these assaults on human dignity and on the most sacred feelings, thereby attracting sarcasm, threats and even blows from the agents of the enemy … But what you have been able to see is nothing compared to what is taking place at the other end of Europe, mainly in Poland, nothing as compared to the monstrous series of crimes committed by the Nazis, which have just been denounced in a statement signed by eleven free governments and by the National Committee of Fighting France.   Poland, the Baltic states, [and] the occupied regions of the Soviet Union have, since the middle of July 1942, been turned into a vast slaughterhouse where blood flows freely. According to necessarily approximate data, at least one million Jews have been massacred there … Despite the criminals’ efforts to keep these horrors secret, the alarm is spreading everywhere and emotions are rising … Everywhere the churches are taking the initiative in the protests against the executioners and in statements of sympathy with the victims …   Christians of France, now you know what fate awaits those you see being sent away in increasing numbers, or those children who are hunted down even in the religious institutions that have given them shelter …   It is no longer enough to help stray families who are fleeing persecution. Now you must raise the loud protest of the Christian conscience against the criminals and their accomplices. You must initiate a formidable campaign that sets public opinion in motion.238

Several months later J’accuse published an open letter to the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFLN, French Committee of National Liberation). Was this initiative linked to the hope raised by the spate of BBC transmissions, all within a period of six weeks, about the fate of the Jews in France? On 13 October 1943 Roger Chevrier described the situation at Drancy over the ether; on 3 November he mentioned the fate of the Jews deported from France in a broadcast about the camp at Auschwitz; on 25 November J’accuse was quoted over the airwaves to document the solidarity of the French people with the victims of persecution. The long open letter reviewed the fate suffered by the Jews of France since the start of the occupation. It described what the MNCR had done to help the victims: ‘Thousands of Jewish children … [have been] snatched from death, hundreds of Jewish families

210  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski … [have been] rescued, thousands of young non-Jews [have provided] effective assistance.’ Then, after evoking the growing terror that was raging in France as a result of the actions of the Gestapo, assisted by Vichy, J’accuse added: The name of our country has already been included, once, in a solemn protest, associated with that of all the democratic powers. Today, it is the real government of France that must once again speak to the world. It must not seem to remain insensitive to the horrors that are taking place in our country. The CFLN must, in the name of France, shout out its indignation at the tortures and massacres and threaten the culprits and their accomplices, whoever they may be, with terrible punishment.   The elites of France have taken a stand and are fighting. The people as a whole have taken a stand and are fighting. The voice of those who are fighting on the oppressed national territory must be echoed by the voice of those who are already Free France, to guide and support them.   And this voice, which would only be expressing our traditions of justice and generosity, must confirm that it is only with honour that France wants to and can live.239

In late 1943 the MNCR also spoke directly to labour leaders, challenging their apathy.240 For months, the MNCR had bowed to the sacrosanct terminology, confounding the deportation of the Jews with the deportation of French workers. Did the militants of the Jewish section of the MOI hope that this appeal might lead to some small dose of reciprocity? Was their aim to rouse La Vie ouvrière to refer to the deportation of the Jews as well? The text of the appeal suggests that this was the case: The MNCR calls on you to protest to your union organization and the authorities against these arbitrary arrests of innocent people, who are doomed to inhuman suffering and a horrible death; to bring these facts to the knowledge of all the labourers in your organization and ask them to express their solidarity with those who are persecuted and to offer asylum to those who are trying to avoid deportation; to offer asylum especially to children who, as is now the case in Paris, are at risk of being deported to Germany to be massacred there; to employ all means to come to the assistance of all victims of racism.

The counter-propaganda efforts remained in Jewish hands, however. Although the communist organizations had taken note of the general silence, they chose to ignore it in their underground publications, to try to breach it whenever possible and then to justify it timidly. ‘The National Resistance must be everywhere’, wrote Résister in May 1944: We should not ask it to fight for us. We relieve it by specializing in that ourselves. It is easier for us Jews to set ourselves against the anti-Semitic oppression than to wait for outside help. Our cohesion must create a homogeneous bloc. We must merit, the day after victory, the right to be reintegrated into French citizenship … To regain our lost place in the homeland we will take part in the battle.241

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  211 In view of the many appeals that the Jewish section of the MOI had addressed to diverse groups, it seems unlikely that its members had truly desired such an absolute division of tasks. There was another appeal as well – to the National Council of the Resistance (CNR), asking it to publish ‘a manifesto devoted specifically to the persecution of the Jews … Let the French people hear the voice of its leaders, calling on them to provide broad assistance and to defend the Jewish victims of Nazi racism’;242 or, again, ‘to issue, now, a public statement condemning racism and AntiSemitism as modes of internal and external oppression [and] as methods for splitting national unity’.243 These repeated appeals to the French people, to the Christians of France, to the labour unions, to the CNR and to the CFLN, calling on them to add a French protest to that of the entire world, to launch a major propaganda campaign, to proclaim their indignation, to bring the reports about the extermination of the Jews to the knowledge of workers, to publish a manifesto devoted specifically to the antiSemitic persecutions, and so on, illustrate the efforts of an organization, directed by the Jewish communists, that never stopped lauding the solidarity of the French people with the victims of the anti-Semitic persecution. But none of these appeals was ever heard.

Conclusion It is no surprise that the Polish and French resistance movements referred to the persecution and then the extermination of the Jews in very different ways. Although there is no doubt that in both countries the clandestine press kept its eye on public opinion, this was less the case in Poland than in France, which had what many considered to be a legitimate government, one that even enjoyed a fair measure of popular support. Consequently, it was in the country with more virulent popular anti-Semitism that, during the initial years of the Nazi occupation, the underground press monitored the anti-Jewish persecution, discussed its progress and in most cases condemned it. In France we find uniformity, even though the underground press was produced by a great diversity of currents, along with a clear desire to steer clear of the ‘Jewish problem’ as much as possible; in Poland, by contrast, we encounter multiple approaches, reflecting ideological and political differences. The far right, which was underground in Poland, held the reigns of power in France. The burden of the pre-war years was nevertheless evident in both countries. The debates carried over from that period required discretion, in one case, and determined the proliferation of varied reactions, in the other. The beginning of the Final Solution produced major changes. But a deep gulf clearly separates the direct confrontation with the mass murder of Jews in Poland and the sight of the round-ups in France in the summer of 1942. Although most writers in both countries expressed their indignation, the denunciation was almost total in France, whereas in Poland it varied as a function of political imperatives.

212  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski In addition, the Polish underground press could not escape paying attention to what was happening to the Jews; they knew what was going on. In France, by contrast, there was wilful ignorance; the resistance hastened to cast the matter aside, not even passing on the reports it had received about the annihilation of Jews in Poland. In both countries we find the idea that the fate of one people (the Jews) was a harbinger of the fate of the other (the Poles, the French), along with a desire to proclaim, loud and long, that the Germans – those barbarians – bore sole responsibility. Similarly, the pre-war era haunted what was written in both countries, albeit in different ways. It is no surprise that an interpretation taken from class theory was pushed by the communists in both countries, even while they sought to give the lie to the accusations of collusion between Jews and communists. Finally, the exceptional Catholic/Christian message was spread in similar terms in France and Poland. In both the alarm bells were rung: the country was at risk of losing its soul if it failed to vigorously denounce the persecution of the Jews. A moral code based on absolute values replaced social prejudice. In both countries the Jewish underground press was produced by militants raised on the same ideological nutrients, but whereas the communists were a distinct minority in Poland, they were almost the only ones writing in France. Furthermore, if the Jewish militants could disagree about the reaction of the resisters in Poland, in France their discourse was totally detached from what was written in the non-Jewish press: they praised the unqualified support the Jews were ostensibly receiving from the French people but had few concrete examples of such support to cite. As a corollary of this situation, the return to the status quo ante after the liberation was considered to be such powerful evidence of the support of the French people for the Jews that it was referred to only in statements that were in strong contrast to the discussions and anxiety found in Jewish publications in Poland. Nevertheless, a feeling of isolation prevailed everywhere. The Zionists in both France and Poland took note of it and withdrew into themselves; the Bundists and communists sometimes undertook to deny it and more often to shatter it. The difference was related to the pessimism that ultimately won out in Poland, whereas optimism never vanished in France. This can be seen as an expression of clear-headedness about the very different characters of the two societies, which the events of the immediate post-war period only reinforced.

Notes 1. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1985), pp.18–19.

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  213   2. Brian Porter, ‘Antisemitism and the Search for a Catholic Identity’, in Robert Blobaum (ed.), Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 103–23.   3. Stanisław Ciesielski, Zbigniew Fras, Krzysztof Kawalac and Teresa Kulak, ‘Naród i narodowość polska lat 1795–1945 w badaniach historycznych’, in Wojciech Wrzesiński (ed.), Polska – Polacy – mniejszości narodowe (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1992), pp. 10, 22.   4. David Engel, ‘The Double Message: General Zionism in Poland Confronts the Nation-State’, Gal-Ed 20 (2006), p. 69 (Hebrew).   5. Olgierd Górka, Naród a państwo jako zagadnienie Polski (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy ‘Biblioteka Polski’, 1937), pp. 66f.   6. Ibid., p. 98.   7. Engel, ‘The Double Message’, p. 70.   8. See ‘Manifest Tymczasowego Rządu Ludowego Republiki Polskiej’, in Haliny Jankowski and Tadeusz Jędruszczak (eds), Powstanie II Rzeczypospolitej: Wybór dokumentów 1866–1925 (Warsaw: Ludowa Sółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1984), p. 431; Engel, ‘The Double Message’, p. 71.   9. Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 4. 10. Manusi Midlarsky, ‘The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic Societies’, International Studies Review 5(4) (2003), pp. 13–15. 11. Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów, pp. 42–6. 12. William W. Hagen, ‘Before the “Final Solution”: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland’, Journal of Modern History 68(2) (1996), pp. 352–60. 13. Andrzej Chojnowski, Koncepcje polityki narodowościowej rządów polskich w latach 1921–1939 (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1979), pp. 135–9; Emanuel Melzer, No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry, 1935–1939 (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), pp. 39–52. 14. Anna Landau-Czajka, W jednym stali domu… Koncepcje rozwiązania kwestii żydowskiej w publicystyce polskiej lat 1933–1939 (Warsaw: Neriton, Instytut Historii PAN, 1998), pp. 259–67. 15. Dariusz Libionka, ‘Alien Hostile, Dangerous: The Image of the Jews and the “Jewish Question” in the Polish-Catholic Press in the 1930s’, Yad Vashem Studies 32 (2004), pp. 227–67. 16. Szymon Rudnicki, ‘Anti-Jewish Legislation in Interwar Poland’, in Blobaum (ed.), Antisemitism and Its Opponents, pp. 148–70. 17. Włodzimierz Mich, Obcy w polskim domu: Nacjonalistyczne koncepcje rozwiązania problemu mniejszości narodowych 1918–1939 (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 1994), pp. 84–9; Jolanta Żyndul, ‘Cele akcji antysemickiej w Polsce w latach 1935–1937’, Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce 1(161) (1992), pp. 53–63.

214  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski 18. Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 117–30; Alina Cała, ‘The Discourse of “Ghettoization”: Non-Jews on Jews in 19th and 20th-Century Poland’, Simon-Dubnow-Institut-Jahrbuch IV (2005), pp. 455–7. 19. On the Jewish political system and how it dealt with existential issues in interwar Poland, see Jerzy Tomaszewski, ‘Niepoległa rzeczpospolita’, in Jerzy Tomaszewski and Józef Adelson (eds), Najnowsze dzieje Żydów w Polsce (Warsaw: Wydawnyctwo Naukowe PWN, 1993), pp. 143–56, 216–41; Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (Berlin: Mouton, 1983), pp. 261–91. 20. Marcus, Social and Political History, pp. 299–311. 21. Nathan Cohen, ‘The Publicistic Writings of Yitzhak Katzenelson during the Nazi Rise to Power’, Gal-Ed, On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry 20 (2006), pp. 101–11 (Hebrew). 22. On the debate about Jewish emigration from Poland in the 1930s, see Emanuel Melzer, ‘Emigration versus Emigrationism: Zionism in Poland and the Territorialist Projects of the Polish Authorities’, in Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 19–31; Daniel Blatman, ‘The Dispute in Poland in 1939 over Jabotinsky’s Evacuation Plan’, in Avi Bareli and Pinhas Ginosar (eds), In the Eye of the Storm: Essays on Ze’ev Jabotinsky (Tel Aviv: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel, 2004), pp. 371–87 (Hebrew). 23. Emanuel Meltzer, No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry 1935–1939 (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), pp. 95–112. 24. See in particular the works by Pierre Birnbaum, especially The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) and Geography of Hope: Exile, the Enlightenment, Disassimilation, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 25. Philippe E. Landau, Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre: Un patriotisme républicain, 1914–1941 (Paris: CNRS, 1999); Un ethnologue dans les tranchées (août 1914–avril 1915): Lettres de Robert Hertz à sa femme Alice, ed. Alexander Riley and Philippe Besnard (Paris: CNRS, 2002). 26. Vicky Caron, ‘The Antisemitic Revival in France in the 30s: The Socio­ economic Dimension Reconsidered’, Journal of Modern History 70(1) (1998), pp. 24–73. 27. Mary Jean Green, ‘Fascists on Film: The Brasillach and Bardèche Histoire du cinéma’, in Richard J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1992), pp. 164–78; Paul Morand, France-la-doulce (Paris: Gallimard, 1934).

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  215 28. See the various works by Zeev Sternhell, especially Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Les Anti-lumières: Du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, 2006). 29. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, Les Annales d’histoire économique et sociale: Correspondance, vol. 3, 1938–1943, ed. Bertrand Müller (Paris: Fayard, 2003), p. 168; Bloch, letter to Lucien Febvre, 19 April 1936, ‘Hommages à Marc Bloch’, Annales d’histoire sociale (Paris, 1945), p. 29. 30. Which are discussed at length by Pierre Gastineaud, ‘Réactions devant Israël’, in Paul Claudel, Les Juifs, ed. Henri Daniel-Rops (Paris: Plon, 1937), pp. 77– 104. 31. Laurent Martin, ‘L’Image du juif et du bourgeois dans la presse de gauche des années trente’, in Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci (ed.), Antisémythes: L’Image des juifs entre culture et politique (1848–1939) (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2005), pp. 177–87. 32. Nancy Green, ‘La Révolution dans l’imaginaire des immigrants juifs’, in Pierre Birnbaum (ed.), Histoire politique des juifs de France (Paris: FNSP, 1990), pp. 153–62. 33. On the Jewish communists in France, see Renée Poznanski, ‘On Jews, Frenchmen, Communists, and the Second World War’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 20 (2004): 168–98. 34. Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), pp. 1–28; Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evaluation of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), pp. 25–35. 35. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, pp. 58–87, 153–85; Czesław Madajczyk, Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce, vol. 2 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970), pp. 235–72. 36. On the evolution of the anti-Jewish Nazi policy in Poland in 1939–41, see Browning, The Origins, pp. 111–51; Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 16–46. 37. Andrzej Żbikowski, ‘Jewish Reaction to the Soviet Arrival in the Kresy in September 1939’, Polin 13 (2000), pp. 62–72; Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 32–5. 38. Bogdan Musial, ‘Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen’: Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 (Berlin and Munich: Propyläen, 2000), pp. 57–78. 39. Andrzej Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego: Żydzi na Kresach PółnocnoWschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej wrzesień 1939–lipiec 1941 (Warsaw: Żydowski

216  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

Instytut Historyczny, 2006), pp. 213–31; Musial, ‘Konterrevolutionäre Elemente’, pp. 172ff. See Jan Tomasz Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement 1939–1944 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 259f. Jean-Pierre Azéma, 1940, l’année terrible (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990), pp. 131 and 137. See also Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), on the mass flight, pp. 174f. ‘Les antidreyfusards au pouvoir’ is the title of the chapter on Vichy in Michel Winock’s Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990); published in English as Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Many examples of this copy-cat behaviour could be given. Here we note only the German ordinance of 26 April 1941, in the occupied zone, which modified the definition of a Jew on the basis of the broader definition adopted by Vichy, and the extension to the south of the authority of the Commissariat général aux questions juives and of the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF). See Michael Robert Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz (Paris: Fayard, 1983–5); Lucien Lazare, Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). This leaves out those who credit the very existence of a French government that supposedly protected Jews of French nationality and served as a buffer between the Jews and the occupier. For my own interpretation, which integrates the time factor, the Germans’ tactical mistakes, the existence (until September 1943) of an Italian zone of occupation and the dynamic of the change in attitude among the French population during the second half of the war, see Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War Two (Brandeis University Press, MA, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001), pp. 488–91. De Ondergrondse Pers 1940–1945 (The Hague, 1954); Catalogue des périodiques clandestins (1939–1945) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1954); Besaettelstides Illegale og Boger 1940–1945 (Copenhagen: De Kongelege Bibliotek, 1954); La Resistenza in Italia 25 luglio 1943–25 aprile 1945 (Milan: Saggio Bibliografico, 1961). Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), Centralny katalog Polskiej prasy konspiracyjnej 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1962), pp. 5–6. Joseph Kermish (ed.), The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw, vol. I, May 1940–January 1941 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979), pp. xxx–xxxi (Hebrew).

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  217 48. Hehalutz ha-lohem: The Organ of the Jewish Pioneer Youth in the Cracow Underground, August–October 1943 (Lohamei Ha-getta’ot and Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 1984 [Hebrew]). 49. Gross, Polish Society, p. 9. 50. Biuletyn Informacyjny 23, 15 January 1940. 51. Ewa Cytowska, Szkice z dziejów prasy pod okupacją niemiecką (Warsaw and Łódź: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1986), p. 8; Stanisława Lewandowska, Polska konspiracyjne informacyjno-polityczna 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1982), pp. 35–6. 52. ‘Tragedia Miast’, WRN (Wolność-Równość-Niepodległość), 20 October 1940. 53. Szaniec 12 (61), 16–31 May 1941. 54. ‘Zawsze ci sami’, Szaniec, 1 August 1940, pp. 29–30. 55. ‘Orientacja polityczne w gorzecie warszawskim’, Fakty na tle idei 2, 21 August 1941. 56. Przez Polska narodową do Polski katolickiej, a nie na odwrot’, Fakty na tle idei 3, 4 September 1941. 57. ‘W Polsce nie będzie anarchij’, Fakty na tle idei 8, 15 November 1941. 58. Nowe Drogi 2 (18), 21 January 1942. 59. Andrzej Friszke, ‘Publicystyka Polski podziemnej wobec zagłady Żydów 1939–1944’, in Wrzesiński ?[del](ed.), Polska–Polacy, p. 198. 60. ‘Dominjun Judea’, Szaniec 28, 17 July 1940. 61. Andrzej Żbikowskiii, ‘Antysemityzm, szmalcownictwo, współpraca z Niemcami a stosunki polsko-żydowskie pod okupacją niemiecką’, in Andrzej Żbikowski (ed.), Polacy i Żydzi pod okupacją Niemiecką 1939–1945: Studia i materiały (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006), p. 492. 62. Some 25,000 copies of Biuletyn Informacyjny were printed in 1942/3. The number increased in 1944 to 43,000 copies. See Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ‘Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord in polnischen Augen: Einstellungen in der polnischen Presse 1942–1946/47’, PhD dissertation, University of Cologne, 2002, p. 107. 63. ‘Żydzi’, Biuletyn Informacyjny, 23 May 1941. 64. Biuletyn Informacyjny, 24 July 1941 65. Rzeczpospolita Polska 1, 15 March 1941. 66. Friszke, ‘Publicystyka Polski podziemnej’, pp. 194–5. 67. Ibid., pp. 198–9; ‘Jak przedstawia się kwestia żydowska’, Barykada Wolności, 9 November 1941. 68. ‘Solidarność ofiar – to także braterstwo broni’, Barykada Wolności 75, 30 Nov.1941; Rzeczpospolita Polska I, 13–14, 2 Oct. 1941; 15 and 16 Oct. 1941; Fakty na tle idei 7 and 15 Oct. 1941; ‘Mordy’, Wolna Polska III, 8 (43), 25 February 1942. 69. ‘Obóz w Bełżcu’, Biuletyn Informacyjny 22 (126), 3 June 1942; 32 (136), 13 August 1942.

218  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski 70. ‘Oświęcim’, Biuletyn Informacyjny 37 (141), 17 September 1942; ‘W Oświęcimiu’, Rzeczpospolita Polska 16 (46), 16 September 1942. 71. ‘Masakry ludność żydowskie nie ustają’, WRN 7 (89), 27 April 1942; ‘Tragedia Żydów’, WRN 8, 11 May 1942; ‘Z Oświęcima’, WRN 23, 4 December 1942. 72. Barykada 3, March 1943; ‘Na progu nowych dni’, 6 July 1943; ‘Treblinka’, Walka 35, 15 September 1943; ‘Na ziem Polskich’, Polak 16, 8 September 1943. 73. Friedrich, ‘Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord’, pp. 304–5. 74. ‘Kanibalizm germańskich kulturtregerów’, Karda P.N. 3, 20 August 1942; ‘Kraj: “Obóz pracy” w Lwowie’ Karda P.N. 9, 10 December 1942; ‘Polska Śordowa: Eksterminacja Żydów’ Karda P.N. 29, 10 December 1943. 75. ‘Zagranica: Nowe łajdactwo Lavals’, Karda P.N. 5, 30 September 1942. 76. ‘Z Oświęcim’, Prawda 7, July 1943. 77. ‘Nasze życie: z obozu śmierci’, Prawda 3, March 1943. 78. ‘Nie damy się zostraszyć’, Biuletyn Informacyjny 3 (137), 20 Aug. 1942. 79. Friszke, ‘Publicystyka Polski podziemnej’, p. 202. 80. ‘Prób wyniszczania Polaków polskiemi rękoma’, Biuletyn Informacyjny 39 (143), 8 October 1942; ‘Oświadczenie’, Rzeczypospolita Polska 18 (48), 14 October 1942; ‘Opór i odpór’, Wiadomości Polski 20, 4 November 1942; Barykada Wolności, 30 November 1941. 81. ‘Na ziem polskich’, Polak 16, 8 September 1943; Żbikowski, ‘Antysemityzm, szmalcownictwo’, p. 495. 82. ‘Likwidacja żydostwa’, Nowa Polska 14, 12 August 1942. 83. ‘Sarca gorące’, Walka 14, 12 January 1943; ‘Niszczenie Narodu w Lubelszczyźnie’ 28, 28 July 1943. On the deportations of Polish citizens from Zamość in 1942–3, see Madajczyk, Politika III Rzeszy, pp. 326–9. 84. ‘Z kraju: Z za kulis pacyfikacji Lubelszczyzny’, Walka Polska 32, 19 August 1943; ‘Wiadomości z kraju’ Walka Polska 42, 27 October 1943. 85. ‘Na dalszy masony terror odpowiemy wlaką przeciw komunikacji wroga’, Nowa Polska 46, 25 January 1943; ‘Z krawych dni Lubelszczyzny’, Polak 17, 22 September 1943. 86. ‘Pierwsze ostrzeżnie’, Wiadomości Polski 19, 21 October 1942; ‘Opór i odpór’ 20, 4 November 1942. 87. ‘Szantanże i ich zwalczanie’, Biuletyn Informacyjny 11 (166), 18 March 1943; WRN 6, 19 March 1943; Reforma, 10 April 1943; Shmuel Krakowski, ‘Holocaust in the Polish Underground Press’, Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984), pp. 255–6; Paweł Szapiro, Wojna żydowsko-niemiecka: Prasa konspiracyjna 1943–1944 o powstaniu w getcie Warszawy (London: Aneks, 1992), p. 25; Żbikowski, ‘Antysemityzm, szmalcownictwo’, pp. 492–4. 88. ‘Spraw bardzo ważna’, Barykada 3, March 1943, in Żbikowski, ‘Antysemityzm, szmalcownictwo’, pp. 495–6. 89. ‘Żydzi w Polsce’, Wielka Polska, 3 November 1943.

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  219   90. ‘Mniejszość żydowska’, Słowa Prawdy, 30 October 1943, in Żbikowski, ‘Antysemityzm, szmalcownictwo’, p. 496.   91. ‘Spraw majątków pożydowskich (Na drodze do Wielkiej Polski [3])’, Wielka Polska 7, 11 May 1944.   92. Friedrich, ‘Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord’, p. 358.   93. ‘O co walczymy?’, Trybuna Wolności 27/28, 1–15 March 1943.   94. Friedrich, ‘Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord’, p. 359.   95. ‘Front wewnętrzny zadecyuje o życiu narodu’, Trybuna Wolności 38, 15 August 1943.   96. ‘Planowe tępienie ludności żydowskie’, Trybuna Wolności 14, 15 August 1942; ‘Z kraju: Walki w Warszawskim getcie’, Gwardzista 12, 5 February 1943.   97. Friedrich, ‘Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord’, p. 364.   98. One of those stories was the unproved heroic event about the resistance of 200 young Jews in Nowogródek during the deportations in spring 1942. See Daniel Blatman, En direct du ghetto: La presse clandestine juive dans la ghetto de Varsovie 1940–1943 (Paris: Cerf, 2005), pp. 502–4.   99. ‘Cały naród do walki!’, Trybuna Wolności 15, 1 September 1942. 100. ‘Samoobrona’, Gwardzista 12, 5 February 1943. 101. ‘Proroctwo się wypelniają’, Prawda 5, May 1942; ‘Pręgierz; Nie wolno przemilczać’ Prawda 7, July 1942; ‘Nasze życie’, Prawda 8, August 1942. 102. ‘Nasze życie’, Prawda 8, August 1942; ‘Nasza życie’, Prawda 9, September 1942. 103. Jan Błoński, ‘Polak-katolik i katolik-Polak’, in Jan Błoński, Biedni Polacy patrząna getto (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1994), p. 51. 104. Mich, Obcy w polskim domu, pp. 66–8. 105. Friszke, ‘Publicystyka Polski podziemnej’, p. 210. 106. Żbikowski, ‘Antysemityzm, szmalcownictwo’, p. 491. 107. Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ‘The Murder of the Jews by the Nazis as Perceived in the Polish Underground Press, 1942–1947’, Yad Vashem Studies 34 (2006), p. 151. 108. Jan Tomasz Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 39–47. 109. Alexander Smolar, ‘Tabu i niewinność’, Aneks 41–42 (1986), p. 99. 110. Friedrich, ‘The Murder of the Jews’. 111. See David Engel, ‘Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944–1946’, Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), pp. 43–85; Gross, Fear, pp. 34–9, 81f.; Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, pp. 214–29. 112. Bafrayung, December 1940; Blatman, En direct du ghetto, p. 275; Tomasz Szarota, U progu zagłada: Zajścia antyżydowskie i pogromy w okupowanej Europie (Warsaw, 2000), pp. 25f. 113. Biuletyn, May 1941.

220  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski 114. Za Naszą i Waszą Wolność, December 1941, Blatman, En direct du ghetto, p. 283. 115. Za Naszą i Waszą Wolność, August 1941. 116. Unzer Hofnung, 1 March 1942, Blatman, En direct du ghetto, pp. 287–92. 117. Za Naszą i Waszą Wolność, December 1941. 118. Jutrznia, 8 March 1942. 119. ‘Hit, hit, hit the Jew!’ – a popular anti-Semitic song from the inter-war period. 120. Yedies, 20 June 1942. 121. Denis Peschanski, ‘Les Avatars du communisme français de 1939 à 1941’, in Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, La France des années noires, vol. 1, De la Défaite à Vichy (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993), p. 418. 122. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), Rés. G. 1470 (393), available as Yad Vashem (YV), microfilm Pfi-91, spool 13. 123. ‘An invisible community of readers’, the term used by Sidney Tarrow in Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 53. Tarrow applies the term to all readers in the age of the mass print media. 124. For the complete set, all of it written by M. Probus Correard, see Henri Michel, ‘Une Feuille clandestine: Arc (octobre 1940–janvier 1941)’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 30 (1958), pp. 23–32. 125. Alya Aglan, La Résistance sacrifiée: Le Mouvement Libération-Nord (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 27f. 126. On Valmy, see especially Claude Bellanger, Presse clandestine, 1940–1944 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), pp. 57f. 127. Olivier Wieviorka, Une Certaine Idée de la Résistance: Défense de la France, 1940–1949 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995). 128. See the analysis proposed by Laurent Douzou and Denis Peschanski, ‘La Résistance française face à l’hypothèque Vichy’, in David Bidussa and Denis Peschanski (eds), La France de Vichy: Archives inédites d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1996), pp. 6f. 129. Harry Roderick Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France: A Study of Ideas and Motivations in the Southern Zone, 1940–1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 31. 130. On Combat and Henri Frenay, see Robert Belot, Henri Frenay: De la résistance à l’Europe (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003). 131. Dominique Veillon, ‘Le Franc-Tireur’, un journal clandestin, un mouvement de résistance (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). 132. Résistance 3, 31 January 1941, quoted by Julien Blanc, ‘Introduction’, in Agnès Humbert, Notre guerre: Souvenirs de résistance (Paris: Tallandier, 2004), p. 40; this forms the ‘Afterword’ in the recent English translation: Agnès Humbert, Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France, trans. Barbara Mellor (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  221 133. Claude Lévy and Dominique Veillon, ‘Aspects généraux de la presse clandestine’, in  La Presse clandestine, 1940–1944 (Conseil général du Vaucluse, 1986), pp. 17–35. 134. Henri Michel, ‘Comment s’est formée la pensée de la résistance’, in Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch (eds), Les Idées sociales et politiques de la Résistance: Documents clandestins, 1940–1944 (Paris: PUF, 1954), pp. 3–37. See also Bellanger, Presse clandestine, pp. 164–5. 135. Olivier Wieviorka noted this too in ‘Between Propaganda and Telling the Truth: The Underground French Press during the Occupation (1940–1944)’, in Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly (eds), France at War in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 111–25. He explains it chiefly by the preference for truth over propaganda. 136. ‘À bas l’antisémitisme’, L’Humanité (zone nord) 114, 25 May 1941, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (175) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 18]. 137. Telegram from Thorez and Marty to Jacques Duclos, in Paris, 27 January 1941, reproduced in Bernhard Bayerlein, Mikhaïl Narinski, Brigitte Studer and Serge Wolikow (eds), Moscou–Paris–Berlin: Télégrammes chiffrés du Komintern (1939–1941) (Paris: Taillandier, 2003), pp. 370–1. 138. ‘À bas l’antisémitisme’, L’Humanité (zone nord) 75, 10 September 1940, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (175) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 18]. 139. Archives of the Préfecture de Police (PP), ‘Situation à Paris’; the pamphlet is reported on 9 June 1941. 140. ‘À bas les mesures racistes prises contre les petits et moyens commerçants juifs’, in Adam Rayski (ed.), La Presse antiraciste sous l’occupation hitlérienne (Paris: UJRE, 1950), pp. 261–8. 141. ‘Aryan small businessmen,’ it ran, ‘do not allow your neighbor to be plundered on the pretext that he is Jewish. It may be your turn tomorrow. Aryan administrators asked to execute an unseemly action, do not lend yourselves to this cruel and dramatic game of the French bourgeoisie and occupation authorities. Refuse to help out in a dishonest action that might rebound against you tomorrow. … Potential buyers looking for a shop, as few as you may be, refuse to get involved when you know that the seller is a Jew being forced to liquidate his stock.’ (‘À bas les mesures racistes prises contre les petits et moyens commerçants juifs’, in Rayski (ed.), Presse antiraciste, pp. 267–8). 142. Fried to Dimitrov, 6 May 1941, in Bayerlein et al., Moscou–Paris–Berlin, pp. 408–9. 143. This ‘Proclamation du Parti Communiste à propos de Drancy’ is summarized and quoted in Unzer vort 36, 6 December 1941; translated by Annette and Aby Wieviorka in Le Monde Juif 125 (January–March 1987), pp. 27–9. 144. La Vie ouvrière 3, 17 August 1940, BNF Rés. G. 1470 [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 14]. 145. La Vie ouvrière 5, 14 September 1940, BNF Rés. G. 1470 [YV, microfilm Pfi91, spool 14].

222  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski 146. L’Université libre 1, November 1940, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (393) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 13]. 147. ‘Éditorial’, L’Université libre 4, 28 December 1940, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (393) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 13]. 148. Archives nationales (AN), Paris, 38 AJ 146, Ministère de l’Intérieur, ‘Fonctionnaires et agents juifs licenciés en application de la loi du 3 octobre 1940 et de la loi du 2 juin 1941’, 23 March 1942. 149. Archives of the PP, BA-1918, miscellaneous reports and correspondence about communist propaganda among the Jews, 6 May 1941 to February 1943; see, for example, the report of 28 January 1942. 150. Pantagruel 1, October 1940, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (273) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 15]. 151. Pantagruel 8, April 1941, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (273) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 15]. 152. Liberté 8, 25 July 1941, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (219) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 11]. See Renée Poznanski, ‘French Public Opinion and the Jews during World War II: The Assumptions of the Clandestine Press’, in Beate Kosmala and Feliks Tych (eds), Facing the Nazi Genocide: Non-Jews and Jews in Europe (Berlin: Metropol, 2004), pp. 117–35. 153. Les Cahiers de Libération, December 1943, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (50) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 6]. 154. Letter dated 24 December 1941 (Christmas Eve), Libération (sud) 8, 1 March 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (211) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 10]. 155. Marc, ‘La Guerre contre l’esprit’, Vérités 17, 15 November 1941, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (404) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 13]. 156. ‘Le Nazisme et les catholiques’, Valmy 8, August 1941, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (400) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 15]. 157. ‘Nouvelles de Pologne’, Libération (nord) 71, 11 April 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (210) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 110]. 158. ‘Pologne’, Les Petites Ailes, 10 June 1941, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (295) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 11]. 159. ‘Rassemblement’, Le Franc-Tireur, December 1941, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (155) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 8]. 160. Jean-François Muracciole, Les Enfants de la défaite: La Résistance, l’éducation et la culture (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1998), p. 102. 161. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France, pp. 71–2. 162. Léo Hamon, ‘Étude sur la situation des juifs en zone occupée’, in Léo Hamon and Renée Poznanski, Avant les premières grandes rafles: Les Juifs à Paris sous l’Occupation (juin 1940–avril 1941) (Paris: CNRS, 1992), p. 91. 163. Here we should mention the article by Maxime Blocq-Mascart, ‘Les Minorités nationales’, Les Cahiers: Études pour une révolution française, OCM 1, June 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (48) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 6], pp. 125–85, as

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  223

164. 165. 166. 167.

168.

169.

170. 171. 172. 173.

174. 175. 176.

177. 178. 179.

well as the debates it sparked in the resistance, as reflected in the underground press. See Renée Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions: La Résistance et le ‘problème juif’ (Paris: Fayard, 2008), pp. 244–8. ‘Vacances à Paris’, Combat, August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (68) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 7]. ‘La Question juive: Les Crimes allemands’, Libération (sud) 16, 1 August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (211) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 10]. François Berteval, ‘Antisémitisme’, Libération (nord) 85, 17 July 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (210) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 10]. ‘Intellectuels français, patriotes français, opposez-vous au meurtre des innocents. Sauvez l’honneur de la France’, a communist leaflet picked up by the Paris police (Archives of the PP, BA-1923). ‘Contre l’immonde persécution’, printed in Franc-Tireur, August 1942, reprinted in Jean-Pierre Lévy, Mémoires d’un Franc-Tireur: Itinéraire d’un résistant (1940–1944), ed. Dominique Veillon (Brussels: Éditions Complexe/ IHTP-CNRS, 1998), p. 157. ‘Les Crimes des racistes’, L’Humanité (special issue of August–September 1942), BNF Rés. G. 1470 (175) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 18], published between 28 August and 4 September 1942; Asher Cohen, ‘La Presse clandestine face à la “question juive”’, Le Monde juif 117 (1985), p. 4. ‘Kultur’, Socialisme et liberté, organ of the CAS, no. 7, 1 August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (354) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 12]. ‘Haine sacrée, haine bénie’, L’Université libre 65, 1 August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (393) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 13]. André Labarthe, 8 August 1942, BBC French transcripts, Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP), microfilm B-76. Jean-Richard Bloch, De la France trahie à la France en armes: Commentaires à Radio-Moscou (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1949), 14 September 1942, pp. 180–3. ‘Philippe-la-vertu’, Le Père Duchesne 3, September 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (294) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 17]. François Berteval, ‘Antisémitisme’, Libération (nord) 85, 17 July 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (210) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 10]. ‘Intellectuels français, patriotes français, opposez-vous au meurtre des innocents. Sauvez l’honneur de la France’, communist leaflet picked up by the Paris police (Archives of the PP, BA-1923). ‘Vacances à Paris’, Combat, August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (68) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 7]. ‘La Chasse à l’homme’, Libération (sud) 18, 15 Sept. 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (211) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 10]. M.G., ‘Maxime Gorki et l’antisémitisme’, Les Lettres françaises 2, October 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (209) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 15].

224  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski 180. ‘Contre l’immonde persécution’, Franc-Tireur, August 1942, reprinted in Lévy, Mémoires d’un Franc-Tireur, p. 157. 181. André Labarthe, 8 August 1942, BBC French transcripts, IHTP, microfilm B-76. 182. ‘La France déshonorée’, Franc-Tireur 11, September 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (155) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 8]. 183. ‘Vacances à Paris’, Combat, August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (68) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 7]. 184. ‘Haine sacrée, haine bénie’, L’Université libre 65, 1 August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (393) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 13]. 185. ‘Un Crime ignoble’, quoted in ‘Rapport du 2 août 1942’, weekly reports on communist plots, Archives of the PP. 186. ‘Paris livré aux SS’, Franc-Tireur 10, August 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (155) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 8]. 187. ‘Contre l’immonde persécution’, in Lévy, Mémoires d’un Franc-Tireur, p. 157. 188. ‘Délire hitlérien’, Demain, Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité 5, [month illegible] 1942, BNF Rés G. 1470 (93) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 15]. 189. ‘Philippe-la-vertu’, Le Père Duchesne 3, September 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (294) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 17]. 190. François Berteval (Christian Pineau), ‘Antisémitisme’, Libération (nord) 85 [sic], 17 July 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (210) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 10]. 191. ‘Rapport du 27 juillet 1942’, weekly reports on communist plots, Archives of the PP. 192. Pierre Limagne, too, mentions them several times, notably on 9 September 1942; Éphémérides de quatre années tragiques, 1940–1944 (LavilledieuArdèche: Éditions de Candide, 1987), p. 767. 193. Robert Tenaille, ‘Les Derniers agissements allemands, Paris le 17 juillet’, Défense de la France 20, 30 July 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (88) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 7]. 194. Libération (sud) 19, 1 October 1942, copy (typescript) in AN, 3 AG 2, 394. 195. ‘Les Crimes des racistes’, L’Humanité (special issue of August–September 1942), BNF Rés. G. 1470 (175) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 18]. 196. On the crushing of the FTP-MOI in Paris and the trial of the twenty-three, see Stéphane Courtois, Denis Peschanski and Adam Rayski, Le Sang de l’étranger: Les Immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 335f. See also the documentary film by Jorge Amat and Denis Peschanski, La Traque de l’affiche rouge (DVD, Compagnie des Phares et Balises, 2006). 197. Olga Bencic was not executed immediately. After being shuttled from prison to prison, she was condemned to death a second time in Stuttgart, where she was beheaded on 10 May 1944.

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  225 198. ‘La Répression du terrorisme et du banditisme: 23 condamnations à mort ont été prononcées par la Cour martiale allemande de Paris’, Le Petit Marseillais, 22 February 1944. 199. Louis Aragon, ‘L’Affiche rouge’, reprinted in Benoît Rayski, L’Affiche rouge: 21 février 1944 (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2004), pp. 21–2. 200. For more details see Poznanski, Propagandes et persécutions, pp. 432-6. 201. ‘À nos lecteurs’, La France continue 11, 31 December 1941, CDJC (Centre de documentation juive contemporaine), 10188. 202. La Presse clandestine, 1940–1944, p. 143; Cécile Vast, ‘Valmy’, in François Marcot, (ed.), Dictionnaire historique de la Résistance (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006), p. 140; Bellanger, Presse clandestine, pp. 69f. See especially Paul Petit, Résistance spirituelle, 1940–1942 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). That volume includes the ‘Lettre ouverte à Son Éminence le Cardinal Baudrillart, recteur de l’Institut catholique de Paris, par un de ses diocésains’, which Petit distributed clandestinely around Christmas 1940. 203. ‘Vichy-État’, La France continue 1, 10 June 1941, CDJC, 10188. 204. ‘Un Peu de doctrine’, La France continue 7, October 1941, CDJC, 10188. 205. ‘Mesures iniques’, La France continue 2, 20 June 1941, CDJC, 10188. 206. ‘Pourquoi nous sommes hostiles au Gouvernement de Vichy’, La France continue 8, 20 November 1941, IHTP, PrC 94. 207. ‘Déclaration des cardinaux et archevêques de la zone occupée’, La France continue 7, 20 October 1941, CDJC, 10188. 208. One of the founders of the paper, Paul Petit, was arrested on 7 February 1942 and condemned to death on 16 October 1943 for ‘acting against Germany by editing a hostile underground newspaper’. He was executed by the Germans in Cologne on 24 August 1944. See Petit, Résistance spirituelle, p. 15. 209. See the pioneering study by Renée Bédarida (with François Bédarida), Témoignage Chrétien, 1941–1944: Les Armes de l’esprit (Paris: Éditions ouvrières, 1977); for details on the printing of the various leaflets, see the table on pp. 288–9. 210. François and Renée Bédarida, ‘Une Voix dans les ténèbres’, in François and Renée Bédarida (eds), La Résistance spirituelle, 1941–1944: Les Cahiers clandestins du Témoignage Chrétien (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), pp. 27–8. 211. Bédarida, Les Armes de l’esprit, p. 293. 212. Renée Bédarida, Pierre Chaillet: Témoin de la résistance spirituelle (Paris: Fayard, 1988), pp. 139f. 213. Pierre Chaillet, ‘Le Sens de notre témoignage’, Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien VI­– VII, Antisémites, in Cahiers et Courriers clandestins du Témoignage Chrétien (facsimile reprint, Paris, 1980), pp. 118–19. The authors of the various articles in this cahier are indicated in Bédarida, Pierre Chaillet, p. 118.

226  •  Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski 214. ‘L’Ordre nouveau antisémite’, Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien VI­–VII, Antisémites, in Cahiers et courriers clandestins du Témoignage Chrétien, pp. 120f. 215. Joseph Hours, ‘L’Antisémitisme et la conscience française’, ibid., p. 133. 216. Pierre Chaillet, ‘L’Antisémitisme hitlérien à l’honneur’, ibid., pp. 125–6. 217. Id., ‘La France au palmarès hitlérien’, ibid., pp. 127–30. 218. Témoignage chrétien, Cahier XIII–XIV: ‘Défi’, January–February 1943, reprinted in Bédarida, La Résistance spirituelle, pp. 211f. 219. ‘L’Ordre nouveau dans le Gouvernement général de Pologne’, Libération  (sud) 30, July 1943, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (211) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 10]; ‘L’Ordre nouveau au Pologne: En Pologne, Les Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien’, Défense de la France 39 (Paris edition), September 1943, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (88) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 7]; ‘Les Crimes des barbares nazis’, Front national, n.s. 3 (March 1944), BNF Rés. G. 1470 (161) [YV, microfilm Pfi-91, spool 9]. 220. La Vie de la MOI 1, July 1943, Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Champigny, David Diamant collection (hereafter MRD-DD). 221. Ibid., no. 2, September 1943, MRD-DD. 222. Louis Gronowski-Brunot, Le Dernier grand soir: Un Juif de Pologne (Paris: Le Seuil, 1980), pp. 72–3, 90. 223. Ibid., p. 90. See also Courtois, Peschanski and Rayski, Le Sang de l’étranger, pp. 87f. 224. On the negotiations that preceded its appearance, see Renée Poznanski, ‘Avant les premières grandes rafles: Les Juifs à Paris sous l’Occupation (juin 1940– avril 1941)’, in Hamon and Poznanski, Avant les premières grandes rafles, pp. 39–51. 225. ‘De l’Avant’, Unzer kamf, May 1942, YIVO Archives, France during WWII, box 1, folder 1, 57–9. 226. Pierre Seghers, ‘L’Édition clandestine’, in La Presse clandestine, 1940–1944, p. 196. 227. David Knout, Contributions à l’histoire de la résistance juive en France, 1940–1944 (Paris: Éditions du Centre, 1947), pp. 142–3. 228. On these issues, see Renée Poznanski, Les Juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Hachette, 1997), pp. 195f. 229. Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 230. Szajko Frydman (Z. Szajkowski), ‘Jewish Underground Labor Newspapers in France, 1940–1944’, somewhere in France, November 1944, two pages, YIVO Tcherikower Archives, folder 1650 (124908-124810). 231. Monthly report (December 1943) of the Yiddish-language section (MOI), Youth, Archives of the MRD, Champigny, fonds DD.

The Underground Press in Poland and France  •  227 232. AN, 3 AG 2, 394. Excerpts were published in Courrier de France 18, 30 March 1944, AN, F1a 5221. 233. Solidarité 4, early May 1942, Dos vort fun vidershtand un zig, pp. 91–3, trans. Annette and Aby Wieviorka, Le Monde Juif 126 (1987), p. 47. 234. Report of 4 May 1942, ‘Situation à Paris’, Archives of the PP. 235. Respectively J’accuse 6 (special issue), 15 December 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (186); 7, 25 December 1942, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (186); 8, January 1943, MRD-DD; special edition of February 1943, BNF Rés. G. 1470 (186); also in Rayski (ed.), Presse antiraciste, pp. 301–6. 236. ‘Premier anniversaire du pogrom contre les Juifs de Paris’, Unzer vort, July 1943; Dos vort fun vidershtand un zig, p. 188, Le Monde Juif 129 (1988), p. 31. 237. J’accuse 7, 25 December 1942, BNF, Rés. G 1470 (186). 238. ‘Chrétiens de France!’, 1 March 1943, Le Mouvement national contre la barbarie raciste, CDJC, XXII-12. 239. J’accuse, special issue of November 1943, BNF. Rés. G. 1470 (186); also in Rayski (ed.), Presse antiraciste, pp. 313–16. 240. Secretariat of the MNCR to union leaders and council members, no date but written after Mussolini’s dismissal from office, CDJC, DD, unclassified press, box 2. 241. Résister 1, May 1944, B. du Rh., CDJC, XXIV-10. 242. ‘Pour un avenir libre et heureux’, UJJ (Union de la jeunesse juive) [YV 09/3– 3]. 243. Reprinted in the first legal issue of Notre voix 76, YIVO, France during WWII, box 2, f. 14 (25).

–6– Cultural Memory and Legal Responses Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania

Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner

Ghosts of the Past in Post-war Europe In his book Postwar, a masterly synthesis of the history of Europe after the Second World War, the American historian Tony Judt points to the importance in contemporary culture of both the Holocaust and the ways in which we commemorate it. He calls to mind the German poet Heinrich Heine, who at the start of nineteenth century concluded that conversion to Christianity provided Jews with the only opportunity to gain access to the community of European citizens. This specific role of baptism in Heine’s day and age has been taken over by extermination after the Nuremberg trials in 1945/6. The extermination, or rather its acknowledgement, has become the admission ticket to the community of civilized European nations. He argues that those who call into doubt or who do not acknowledge the genocide of the Jews during Second World War condemn themselves to the role of international pariahs. ‘Auschwitz’, in other words, has become the benchmark for the identity of post-war Europe. After the crimes committed by the Nazis became known, the Holocaust figured as a point of reference in the assessment of other crimes against humanity. Since the end of the Second World War, all other genocides and largescale violence in history have been measured against the fate of the Jews in the Third Reich. Whether this should be welcomed is another issue, yet it is hard to ignore that the Holocaust has established itself in our public memory. In the words of Tony Judt, the memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become ‘the very definition of’ as well as ‘the guarantee for restored humanity on the European continent’.1 Judt’s argument underscores the sensitivity of the memory of the Holocaust in today’s political culture. It is generally accepted that all those who question this memory in any way undermine the spiritual foundation of our democratic society. If one may regret this development (and it is true that there has been increasing criticism of this turning part of the past into an icon), it is also a fact that denial of the extermination of the Jews continues to trigger fierce reactions. Affirmation or denial of the Holocaust is closely linked to acceptance or rejection of the post-war political order and the rules of international law. It shows that ‘history’ is more than

229

230  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner just dealing with the past. It touches the core of how we position ourselves in our own time. Mostly, our memory is guided by the external world rather than involving a spontaneous process. In recent years it has become fashionable to speak of the politics of memory. Memory is always a mirror of the time in which this memory comes into being. But memory is also tied to a specific location. Increasingly, people have begun to wonder which external factors have contributed to our dealing with the past. This has involved actors that had nothing to do with the profession or field of history itself, such as politicians, courts, media institutions, international organizations and interest groups. History always reveals itself to be a construction of the past. Social scientists speak of and make a distinction between communicative and cultural memory. The first is realized by the interactions about what contemporaries have gone through; the second is shaped by various institutions that determine the content of our official collective memory from the outside.2 As a rule, the denial of the Holocaust evokes fierce reactions. In recent years many countries have felt the need to take legal measures. In Western Europe Holocaust denial has been around for several decades, but only since the late 1980s have political institutions taken action. In the countries of the former Eastern Bloc this same phenomenon came to the surface with the dismantling of communism. In these countries’ public memory of the Holocaust, first the effects of the forty-year rule of a dominant ideology have to be erased. Coming to grips with the Holocaust and the Second World War has to compete here with the traumas of communist rule. Much less than in the West, there is no taboo here on juxtaposing communism and fascism. The Holocaust, then, has taken on emblematic value to a lesser extent in Eastern Europe; it functions less as an exclusive memory and ‘warning for the future’. How a specific country remembers the Holocaust and responds to those who deny it tells us much about that country’s particular historical culture. Holocaust deniers count as the iconoclasts of history writing.3 In this respect, it is relevant to refer to the frequent mix-up between ‘revisionism’ and ‘negationism’. Holocaust deniers often present their theory about the ‘Auschwitz lie’ as part of a broader historical account that aims to revise the conventional view of the history of the Second World War. Thereby they cash in on the positive connotation of the term ‘revisionism’. Revisionism applies to the putting up for discussion and reinterpretation of established scholarly insights. This is a strategy aimed at lending scholarly credibility to deniers and confusing the general public. In the case of the latter they certainly succeed in setting the agenda. Those who lack real expertise view the controversy involving deniers as a scholarly dispute between two ‘equal’ models of interpretation. Holocaust denial commonly pertains to the singular denial of the National Socialist genocide of some six million Jews (negationism). In a broader sense, this singular denial is embedded in a strategy aimed at rewriting the history of the Second World War, in particular the specific responsibility of Nazi Germany (revisionism). Often this leads to a multiple denial of various aspects of the Nazi regime (war crimes, racist geopolitics, euthanasia, etc.). In the latter case, one

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  231 has to distinguish between controversial yet accepted scholarly views that produce new historical insights, on the one hand, and explicit apologies that boil down to a glorification of National Socialism on the other. In both cases, revisionism, in its critical and destructive sense, centres on the question of historical guilt. Revisionism in history writing is always somehow tied to reversing or removing historical responsibility.4 Holocaust denial is an international phenomenon, the content of which is largely fixed; its main ingredients are essentially the same everywhere. Still, specific national traditions play a role in the ways in which governments deal with it. This is why it is elucidating to study Holocaust denial in various national contexts. In our contribution we focus on this phenomenon as it occurs in two very different countries, Belgium and Romania. To render the comparison meaningful, we opted for a parallel description of the development of Holocaust denial in these countries. In each case, the following aspects are addressed: 1. the specific historical frame; 2. legislation and political debates; 3. the application of legislation; 4. the meaning and influence of Holocaust denial on the political culture. A comparative method is only useful inasmuch as systematic juxtaposition reveals specific similarities and differences. It basically involves addressing the same questions in a sustained way in the different cases. This allows one to establish the specificity as well as the general relevance of particular phenomena.

Heirs to a ‘Misguided’ Past in Belgium In Belgium, as in many other European countries, negationism is strictly speaking not a home-grown phenomenon, but has been imported.5 Most negationist publications come from the Anglo-Saxon world, France and to a lesser extent Germany. Literature from these countries is read, translated and distributed in Belgium. In particular with the rise of digital media the flow of such publications has been increasing and has also become much harder to monitor. A fanatical core comprising only a handful of individuals is in charge of an international distribution centre for the dissemination of revisionist and negationist pamphlets. Belgian negationists constitute a very small and marginalized group, whose existence no one really values. Ignored by public opinion, they are politically suspect and put under legal pressure. Every now and then they loudly gain public attention and cause a stir in the media. Despite the fact that negationism in terms of the number of its adherents is a negligible phenomenon, Belgium provided a favourable breeding ground for its development because some aspects of its ideology are connected with broader political and social concerns. In other words, negationism ties in with a political undercurrent that has been present in Belgium since the end of the Second World War and is not altogether insignificant. As such, the country shows a markedly divergent development in its two major regions, the Dutch-speaking area in the north and the French-speaking area in the south.

232  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner Holocaust denial is a hobby-horse of the extreme right.6 Extremism on the right in Belgium has evolved from the legacy of collaboration with the German occupier during the Second World War (1940–4). In Flanders such collaboration emerged from fertile ground because the radical segment of the Flemish Movement (Vlaamse Beweging) had already embraced National Socialism before the German invasion in May 1940. As the 1930s progressed, a pro-German attitude invariably became a pro-Nazi attitude. In Flanders the anti-Belgian movement had ended up in authoritarian waters much earlier. Quite rapidly criticism of the Belgian state, as a ‘prison of many peoples’ in which ‘the rightful interests of the Flemish were bartered’, turned into criticism of the Belgian political system itself, notably its parliamentary democracy. In the French-speaking area, where language-related nationalist agitation played a different role, there was much less of a basis for this ideology. In Wallonia and in French-speaking Brussels, collaboration was inspired purely by a pro-National Socialism attitude because one could not search for a way around it by appealing to regionalist interests. After the Second World War, the former collaborators in both Flanders and Wallonia were tainted by the vile odium of high treason, and they would have to pay dearly for their ‘un-civic’ conduct. In Flanders, the conditions for anti-Belgian sentiment remained largely in place because the demands for more Flemish autonomy remained unchanged.7 Those who cooperated with the German occupier asserted their Flemish-nationalist motives, thus invoking the argument that their collaboration was motivated by idealism. Former collaborators could present themselves – and were often seen – as ‘misled idealists’. After all, in the Cold War era they could be viewed as forerunners in the struggle against the ‘red threat’; their belief in the mission of the German Reich was based on the same motives as were held by those who after 1945 pursued the cause of the West against the threat of communism. In their reasoning, moreover, they could emphasize in particular that their actions were dictated by sincere concerns for the legitimate rights of Flanders. By contrast, extremism on the right in French-speaking Belgium could not advance this argument. In Flanders the far right was firmly embedded in the radical wing of the Flemish Movement, while in French-speaking Belgium it was the avant-garde of Belgian patriotism. The post-war development of the Belgian state, however, has driven both parts of the country further apart. North and south ended up in a two-speed dynamic. Regionalism, and hence the increasing striving for autonomy, became stronger in both parts, while unitary Belgian patriotism gradually became an anachronism. After the Second World War the extreme right in Flanders could build on an unbroken political tradition that served as a breeding ground, while in Wallonia far-right extremists were pushed to the outermost margins of society. Particularly in Wallonia a left-socialist discourse became dominant that presented itself as heir to the war’s resistance movement and that left little room for views associated with the extreme right. In Flanders a dogged political subculture emerged in which nostalgia for the New Order (Nieuwe Orde) could be articulated freely,

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  233 whereas in French-speaking Belgium only outright marginal figures engaged in such exercises. In Flanders the origin of negationism lies in the fact that the extreme right managed to survive the end of the Second World War. In the denial of the Holocaust the spiritual collaboration with the German occupiers lives on. What is more, for the most rabid and nostalgic proponents of the New Order it proved hard to express a public apology for the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. After all, the social taboo on voicing this kind of opinion is too large in a democratic society. The explicit denial of the National Socialist genocide, let alone its glorification, was only for a very small group of diehards. In the years after the Second World War, the Flemish collaborators gradually regained their footing. In most cases the draconian sentences originally imposed were substantially shortened, so that by the late 1950s the phase of punishment was basically over. Also, because the Flemish Movement was generally willing to take so-called ‘black sheep’ – individuals who during the occupation had gone too far in making common cause with the enemy – back into the fold, a flourishing association of former collaborators emerged. In some cases they even found a home in one of the established political parties willing to move on and forget their compatriots’ ‘misguided’ past. Because of the combination of the Cold War and a restored patriotism, the lasting removal of the former collaborators from society’s mainstream was not realized. Initially, these associations were geared towards charitable goals, such as providing material support to families stricken by the post-war purging measures. But soon political and ideological rehabilitation came to be addressed as well, whereby two strategies were followed. The first one was geared to presenting collaboration as a painful yet necessary evil in the Flemish emancipation struggle. The reasoning went that the Belgian government’s anti-Flemish policy had pushed the supporters of the Flemish Movement into the hands of the German occupiers. This was a case of capitalizing on a logic that in the history of the Flemish Movement has been put forward again and again. The thesis of holy innocence, in which the Calimeroeffect of a small nation struggling for survival continues to recur, functions as a leitmotiv in the self-image of Flemish nationalists. Thus for them, too, the trauma of collaboration became bearable. It even provided the Flemish Movement with a certain appeal and respectability elsewhere. On the whole, silence was maintained about the National Socialist ideology and its ultimate consequence, namely the Holocaust. The second strategy consisted of defending National Socialism as a matter of principle. This called for the active or passive denial of the regime’s crimes. However, the two arguments were not always clearly separable from each other; rather, there was a continuum of quite moderate to more extreme positions. The choice to adopt either one of these strategies – taboo or denial – continued to concern far-right circles in the ensuing years and decades. Particularly in the circles of former Flemish Eastern Front fighters this issue played a central role because they had been most directly involved in what had happened to the Jews behind the

234  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner Eastern Front. It was in fact impossible to accuse the Belgian state itself or local populations of direct involvement in the implementation of the genocide. Apart from the round-ups and deportations in Belgium, the Belgian people cannot be regarded as a direct witness of the Judeocide. But the case was slightly different for those who had fought along the Eastern Front. For one thing, they had served as auxiliary troops in a war with a genocidal character, even if they were not necessarily aware of this particular aspect. Already in the 1950s organizations of former Eastern Front fighters were set up; they would clash with each other on the abovementioned point of contention, however. The fairly moderate Association of Flemish Former Eastern Front Fighters (Verbond van Vlaamse Oud-Oostfrontstrijders, VVOS), in its journal Periodiek Contact, adopted the first strategy: taboo. But the much more radical Sint-Maartensfonds, publisher of Berkenkruis, openly embraced an apologetic approach. It first relied on the discourse of the ‘myth of the six million Jews that were murdered’. Its branch in the province of Brabant used even more unambiguous language. The Hertog Jan van Brabant Association became the major disseminator of anti-Semitic and openly negationist articles. In the 1970s the first negationist publications appeared in Flanders, and most of them originated from France – despite all the language chauvinism involved. From then on France, and publicists such as Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson, became the main supplier of negationist publications. Still, the former Eastern Front soldiers from Flanders, regardless of whether they belonged to the moderate or more radical wing, did not really view flat denial of the Holocaust or an open apology for National Socialism as a first priority. They largely sought to legitimize or extenuate their own role during the war. This they did, oddly, by attributing to themselves a new heroic role, which applied to those who on the Eastern Front had come into conflict with the German army leadership of the SS over religious or nationalist motives. Some even embraced a heroic self-image by presenting themselves as victims of a German war machine that had basically ignored their Flemish-nationalist motives. They sought to emphasize the idea that their own nationalist motives had pushed them towards collaboration. Thus the image of Nazism as atheist and anti-Flemish suited them well. In hindsight they certainly sought to gain from positioning themselves as men who had systematically rejected racist and anti-Semitic indoctrination. It is this mindset that found most connection with the radical (non-extremist) wing of the Flemish Movement, which is essentially conservative and Catholic and attempted to divorce its collaboration with National Socialism from associations with genocide. In Belgium, which had a well-integrated autochthonous Jewish community, there was in fact very little room for violent anti-Semitism. In this context it is of relevance that genocidal anti-Semitism hardly played a major role in Belgium. In terms of anti-Semitism, the country has never seen the bloody excesses that occurred in Central and Eastern Europe. The various forms of moderate anti-Semitism – Church-inspired prejudice against the (very small) Jewish

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  235 community, economically motivated hard feelings vis-à-vis the Jewish middle class, concerns about the flow of migrants that had settled in Belgium since the 1930s – were couched in the traditional discourse of the clerical Flemish Movement, without leading to autonomous outbreaks of violence. The persecution of the Jews in Belgium during the German occupation was primarily a German responsibility, whereby the local administration provided practical and logistic support. Even this support seemed rather limited in comparison to that in other countries occupied by Germany. Moreover, specific interest in the ‘Jewish question’, as the German occupier had framed it, was hardly a priority among more radical collaborators. This makes it understandable why all those who wish to spread negationist or antiSemitic views openly in Belgium are automatically forced to operate within tight margins dictated by public consensus or political correctness. In the extremist wing of the Flemish Movement – such as the neo-fascist para­ military storm troop the Flemish Militants Order (Vlaamse Militanten Orde, VMO) – negationist pamphlets were openly disseminated from the 1970s. However, the VMO had already lost contact with the traditional Flemish Movement much earlier, and in 1983 it was banned by the Belgian judiciary as a ‘private militia’. From within these circles, in 1985 a small association called Free Historical Investigation (Vrij Historisch Onderzoek, VHO) was set up in Antwerp. ‘Critical history writing’ – which boiled down to Holocaust denial – became its sole objective. The VHO, consisting of just a few individuals, developed into an aggressive centre that distributed countless writings about the so-called Auschwitzlüge (Auschwitz lie) nationally and internationally. These negationist writings were primarily translations of work by authors from other countries, such as Robert Faurisson, Christopher Howard, Ernst Zündel and Thies Christofferson. Initially, the public interest in VHO activities was lukewarm, while there was no response from the legal world at all, mainly because of the justice system’s inexperience in dealing with this phenomenon. Public outcries were heard in particular when ‘revisionists’, through pamphlets or letters sent to schools and libraries, voiced their views in the Netherlands, where the government and the justice system responded in a much more alert and vigorous fashion to this sort of activity. The radical wing of the Flemish Movement hardly showed any enthusiasm for such peripheral phenomena. Officially it rejected revisionism, but frequently, under the guise of freedom of speech, it came quite close to the Holocaust deniers’ reasoning. This gave rise to a kind of veiled negationism. The negationists’ views were rejected, while the negationists themselves were seen as more or less regular partners in a dispute. After all, they were heralds of ‘freedom of speech’ and in such a climate, some felt, one should offer room to both ‘deniers’ and ‘believers’. The Belgian political and legal world would only abandon its passive attitude and take action when in the 1990s political developments began to take a new turn. If in Flanders negationism, no matter how slight, still managed to retain at least some affiliation with the broader Flemish Movement, in Wallonia negationism

236  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner has always been an altogether more marginal phenomenon, or at most a product imported from France. In Wallonia far-right provocateurs are given hardly any breathing space, unlike in Flanders, with its ‘detour logic’ and its appeal to the ‘idealism’ of Flemish collaborators and Eastern Front soldiers. The inimitable leader of the Walloon collaboration movement Rex, Léon Degrelle, long vied for attention from his Spanish exile, but he was never more than a public oddity. In Belgium negationism developed in the same fashion as right-wing extremism in general: at two speeds. In Flanders it would occasionally rouse public opinion, but also trigger fierce responses, while in French-speaking Belgium it continued to be a negligible phenomenon.8 Bothered by the increasingly moderate direction of the pro-government Flemish Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the Vlaams Blok (VB) was set up in 1979. It would play a modest role in Belgian politics until its first electoral success in 1991. Since then the VB, when seen in an international perspective, has been one of the most stable right-radical political formations in Europe. It emerged out of the radical wing of the Flemish Movement, but its electoral success was mainly based on the ways in which other populist themes were increasingly put on the agenda. The migrant theme played a major role, as well as issues such as security, corruption and conservative family values. Historically, the VB is rooted in the collaborationist tradition within the Flemish Movement, but these origins have gradually become less and less important with the growing distance in time and the change in generations. The apology for National Socialism receded into the background, and in the party’s official discourse it virtually disappeared. The critical press may occasionally have caught individual VB politicians flirting with negationism, but the party as such kept this thorny issue at bay, with the exception of an occasional vague allusion to the assumed right to ‘free speech’ and the expediency of a ‘diversity of views’ regarding the Holocaust. The pressure of what was seen as politically and socially acceptable was too great to risk compromising the party with negationism. One can argue that basically negationism and right radicalism in Belgium had begun a difficult courtship display. If right radicalism served as a breeding ground and infrastructure for negationism, negationists were the kind of self-appointed intellectual desperados with whom few wanted to be identified. Only to the extent to which they presented themselves as ‘outcasts’ who challenged the ‘dictatorship of political correctness’ could they count on lip service from their political mainstay.

The Romanian Holocaust and Its Deniers In contrast to Belgium, Romania is a country where anti-Semitism and discrimina­ tion against Jews have deep roots. Attempts to integrate the Jews, if there were any, were always of short duration. Before the First World War more than 200,000 Jews lived in the so-called Old Kingdom of Romania. Even though they had lived there for

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  237 a long time, most of them remained without citizenship; they were in fact stateless. The first Romanian constitution, that of 1866, whose institutional arrangements were modelled on those of the Belgian constitution, featured the following stipulations: only Christian foreigners were eligible for naturalization and only Romanian citizens were allowed to buy and to own land.9 The arbitrary persecution of political adversaries and of the socially weak was a regular feature of political life in the Old Kingdom. This often had repercussions on international relations. Accordingly, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 the Great Powers demanded citizenship for the Romanian Jews before Romanian independence would be recognized. Although this made naturalization possible, the naturalization process was cumbersome: twothirds of both chambers of parliament had to consent to each naturalization petition. This method resulted in a mere 4,000 naturalizations by 1918. When the Romanian territory was enlarged in the aftermath of the First World War and its population almost doubled, diverse Jewish populations entered the new state. The approximately 400,000 Jews in the former Austro-Hungarian provinces of Transylvania and the Bukovina had enjoyed full citizenship rights since 1867. The quarter of a million Jews of Bessarabia had been granted full citizenship as a result of the February Revolution of 1917. At the Paris Peace Conference it was demanded of Romania that it grant full citizenship to all its Jews, which the Romanian prime minister rejected. Some bargaining and an ultimatum later, the representative of Romania signed the minority protection treaty in December 1919.10 When the naturalization of the Jews foreseen in the treaty was included in 1923 in the Romanian constitution, a large protest movement came into existence. Yet, for another fifteen years the Jews of Romania continued to enjoy equal rights. In the wake of the great depression the influence of anti-Semitic groups grew, and in December 1937 an antiSemitic government came to power. A law on ‘the reconsideration of citizenship’ followed and half of Romania’s Jews became, yet again, stateless.11 This opened the way for a further deprivation of rights and property after Marshall Ion Antonescu came to power in September 1940. Jews were excluded from workers’ associations and an office for ‘Romanianization’ was set up in order to plunder their property. After Romania joined the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the fate of Romanian Jews varied greatly from province to province. Approximately 60,000 Jews were killed by German and Romanian troops, most of them in Bessarabia and the Bukovina but also in the territory of the Old Kingdom (Iaşi, Galaţi). Then in August 1941 Romania was granted the Transnistrian zone of occupation (between the rivers Dniestr and the southern Bug) in southern Ukraine. In 1941/2 all the Jews of Bessarabia and most of the Jewish population of the Bukovina were deported there.12 Most of them had no regular access to food; almost two-thirds of all those deported died of hunger and malnutrition. Estimates regarding the total loss of life in Transnistria range from 280,000 up to 380,000.13 In June 1946 Ion Antonescu and a number of other war criminals were executed. The orders regarding the deportation of the Jews played only a minor role in their

238  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner trial. The charges against them centred on the aggression against the Soviet Union as well as the devastation caused there. They were also used to legitimize the huge sums in reparation payments that Romania was forced to pay to the Soviet Union.14 From March 1945 Romania was governed by a communist-dominated govern­ment, and after this point many politicians from other parties were to suffer persecution; tribunals attributed the responsibility for the devastation caused by the war to them. Thereafter, Romanian participation in the war against the Soviet Union disappeared as a topic from public view; it resurfaced only in the 1980s. If the mass murder of the Jews was mentioned at all, it was usually exclusively attributed to German troops. In northern Transylvania, which was part of Hungary between 1940 and 1944, the role of the Hungarian gendarmerie in organizing the deportation of Jews to German death camps was being discussed in some publications already in the 1980s.15 Immediately after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu in December 1989, a new situation arose. At first the veterans of the war against the Soviet Union demanded the rehabilitation of Marshall Antonescu. They were mainly interested in getting the war years counted towards their retirement benefits. After their retirement claims were settled in 1993, a new group started advocating the rehabilitation of Antonescu. Some of Ceauşescu’s former entourage encouraged the cult around Antonescu as a means of distracting from the calls of civil rights groups for an opening of the Securitate archives. Suddenly Ceauşescu’s former court poet, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, leader of the newly established Greater Romania Party, turned out to be an admirer of Antonescu. But he was not alone in declaring Antonescu to be a great leader of the Romanians. On 1 June 1991, the forty-fifth anniversary of Antonescu’s execution, the Romanian senate observed a minute’s silence; only the senators of the Hungarian minority walked out in protest. Soon, streets were renamed after him, and since 1993 even monuments have been erected in his memory.16 In 1993 a ‘National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism’ was founded and financed by the state; its director hailed from the Greater Romania Party. This party had become a plenum in which former functionaries of the Ceauşescu regime tried to acquire a new status by Hungarian- and Jew-bashing. The director of the institute tried to promote the rehabilitation of Antonescu as well. In spite of the institute’s name, it produced no research on the Holocaust in the first few years. Its activities centred mainly around giving the war against the Soviet Union a positive assessment. Now it was portrayed as a defensive campaign, because at first it was supposedly all about regaining Bessarabia as well as northern Bukovina, which had been transferred to the Soviet Union as a result of an ultimatum in 1940.17 This interpretation had great relevance as, at the same time, some Romanians from these territories, which had re-entered the Soviet Union in 1944, were advocating union with Romania. In the Republic of Moldova, which is largely identical with the former territory of Bessarabia, there was even a violent clash between the Romanians and the Slavic population there, claiming around 800 deaths.18

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  239 Former communist functionaries formed various Romanian governments until 1996 – but under the name of ‘Social Democrats’. They also participated to some extent in the activities to rehabilitate Antonescu. Especially intensive was the governing parties’ support for Antonescu’s rehabilitation in the years 1994 and 1995, when they had to rely on the votes of the Greater Romania Party in order to have a governing majority in parliament. There are very few similarities between the Holocaust deniers in Romania and those in Belgium, even though the attempts to change the perception of the war against the Soviet Union originated with veterans’ associations in both countries. But in Romania, unlike in Belgium, the justification for the war against the Soviet Union through the Antonescu-cult found a broad base of support in parliament itself, among parliamentarians from diverse parties. The propaganda of the right shows one parallel, however: in Romania, as in Belgium, anti-parliamentarian thought is being propagated by these groups. Antonescu is offered as a new national figure of identification. This is done and in fact highlighted by emphasizing his success in the fight against corrupt politicians and against the domination of foreign elements. At a time of conflict over how state capital is to be distributed and with the first foreign companies competing over Romanian state capital, many among the populace who were frightened or felt insecure were easily attracted by such rhetoric. Very much as in Belgium, the far right tries to rally voters with authoritarian pseudo-solutions. But, unlike the Belgian case, in Romania this had a lot to do with distracting from the painful process of coming to terms with the communist past, especially where a judicial process cocncerning crimes committed under this regime might be involved. The 5,800 Jews living in Romania today do not, as such, make easy targets of anti-Semitic propaganda. Thus a new shade of anti-Semitism was invented by the far right. On the one hand, there is the image of the Jews who were collectively responsible for the communist terror and, on the other hand, that of the Jews now conquering Romania economically through a wholesale buying-up of Romanian property.19

Holocaust Denial on Trial in Belgium: Legislation and Political Reactions The law adopted in Belgium to combat Holocaust denial was not a response to a truly urgent or genuine problem, as would have been the case if negationist writings were disseminated on a large scale. Although their dissemination had certainly increased and occasionally took on aggressive forms as well, it never involved a large-scale phenomenon. It was mainly the media interest that fuelled particular political reactions. Home-grown negationism was virtually non-existent; it continued to be largely a product imported from abroad that at most involved a dozen active adherents. The main distribution centre for negationist literature in Belgium was

240  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner in fact never more than a one-person undertaking. Likewise, the Belgian state never embraced a specific ideological view on historical responsibility, unlike, for example, the German Federal Republic. The Belgian government’s response had largely symbolic value and suggested a striving for international respectability. It was first of all meant as a raised fist against the rise of the extreme right in general, a political development other countries had not failed to notice. The political establishment was shocked by the electoral breakthrough of the Vlaams Blok on 24 November 1991, when the party gained more than 10 per cent of the vote in a single blow. Since then the party has grown into a stable, quite comfortable position and attracts some 25 per cent of the vote. In this context, social scientists and critical observers have spoken of a purging ritual, suggesting that the government resorted to measures intended to prove that it was serious about taking action against the danger. Politicians in charge wanted to rid themselves and society, which they claimed to represent, of a particular evil.20 It was, in other words, a manoeuvre directed against the growing success of the Vlaams Blok, without conclusively showing that the party had been really engaged in negationism. Strikingly, if not unexpectedly, it was mainly the left and the French-language parties in the Belgian parliament that pursued legal measures against the propagation of Holocaust denial.21 In French-speaking Belgium the political consensus on this issue was apparently larger than in the Flemish part of the country. In 1992 a first bill was put forward in parliament that was so poorly formulated that it inevitably had to be amended. It aimed to punish those who ‘deny and play down crimes against humanity’. A similar bill was put forward simultaneously in the Belgian Chamber and Senate. It was clearly inspired by a similar French law of 1990. Soon, however, it became obvious that this bill’s formulation would not work because its coverage was too wide and too vague. It was no longer punishable to ‘play down’ and ‘put in doubt’ such crimes, in part because of the unclear meaning of these phrases but also to avoid interference with the right to freedom of speech. The law was limited more specifically to the genocide of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. On 23 March 1995 the law aimed at ‘punishing the denial, minimizing, justifying or approving of the genocide committed by the German National Socialist regime during World War Two’ at last came into force. Initially an attempt was made to get the law passed on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, on 30 January 1995. By linking the law to this day of commemoration its symbolic character was strengthened further. Ultimately, the law, after lengthy preliminary discussions and substantial revisions to the original texts, came into being fairly quickly and was unanimously – i.e. even with the support of the targeted Vlaams Blok – adopted. The law reads as follows: He is sentenced to imprisonment … who denies, grossly minimizes or tries to justify or approve the genocide committed during World War Two by the German National

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  241 Socialist regime under one of the circumstances listed in section 444 of the Penal Code. To apply the previous section, the term genocide must be understood in the sense of section 2 of the International Treaty of 9 December 1948 concerning the prevention and punishing of genocide. In case of recurrence, moreover, the convict can be sentenced to disfranchisement in accordance with section 33 of the Penal Code.

Its proponents clearly believed that the law had a restrictive character. The reference to the Penal Code was meant to ensure that expressions of opinion could only be made punishable if they had a ‘subverting’ character. Moreover, merely negationist views expressed in public spaces – whereby persons who might feel offended were involved – were now subject to criminal law. In its use of the term ‘genocide’ the law also referred to the definition that was adopted by the UN Convention of 1948. This had the benefit that everyone was deemed to know which definition of genocide applied. It also undermined the objection that the legislator would have to put itself in the place of the history writer. Which genocide had to be protected against denial and which not? The law incriminated only that which had served as the basis for convictions that had already been ruled by international courts, in this case Nuremberg. It was not the intention, then, to provide a summing-up of a series of facts that possibly needed to be investigated with the help of historical method; the law referred to legal incriminations or, in other words, to a case that had already been the subject of a legal guilty verdict. Despite praise on the part of the law’s defenders, inevitably there was criticism as well.22 From the start, the formulation of the law itself prompted critical comments. It was pointed out, for instance, that the legislator made no distinction between descriptive speech acts – denying and minimizing – and normative acts (justifying or approving). Because basically the latter never occurred (who approves of genocide or how can genocide be justified by those who argue that it has never taken place?), it soon became clear that the legislator interpreted denial and minimizing as normative acts. The confusing of the normative and descriptive dimensions posed quite a problem in itself. The legislator also referred explicitly to a section of the Penal Code that pertained to the act of insulting persons. The law, then, treated other negationist views as offensive expressions of opinion by definition. This reasoning, too, has been subject to constant criticism. Finally, the legislator used an exclusive definition of genocide by limiting it to the National Socialist genocide of the Jews during the Second World War. The denial of other genocides, then, was not punishable by law. This shows the legislator’s intention was quite clear: the government assumed the right to rely on legal means to safeguard a specific historical truth, in this case the Holocaust. Attacks on this truth needed to be punished. The collective memory of society needed to be protected so as to ‘prevent recurrence of history’. To be sure, this did not apply to history in general but only to a well-described episode of it. The memory of the Holocaust received official political status and legally ensured protection.

242  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner If the politicians were satisfied with the new law, a number of historians, scientists and intellectuals voiced substantial criticisms.23 Historians claimed that they had trouble with a government-sanctioned ‘historical truth’. This tied in with what years afterward has become widely accepted in the ever louder critique of the Holocaust’s sacralization. There is a growing tendency to question the representation of the Holocaust as an absolutely unique and exceptional historical phenomenon. Moreover, negationism cleverly exploited a certain ‘Holocaust fatigue’ among the public at large. This was accompanied by the claim to uniqueness of many Holocaust commemorators – some speak of ‘believers’ – and by the role of this commemoration in the discussion around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Negationism, in other words, uncovers a nerve that reaches much deeper than the historical narrative about x number of victims. It rips open a wound linked to a specific commemoration culture as well as fundamental political-ideological choices. One may justifiably ask, then, whether a law may put a taboo on a much broader public debate in which various legitimate standpoints can be defended. Negationists have shrewdly exploited the semantic confusion between historical revisionism and negationism. The first involves legitimate historical method, the second does not. It becomes hard to ask a judge to rule on where revisionism is justified and where negationism represents a legal offence. In short, legislation has turned that which is part of the core of the historian’s profession into a legal and political affair. By definition historians do not feel at home in the role of hangman. The view that the spread of Holocaust denial can be combated ignores the fact that our conventional knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust is far from indubitable and is always open to discussion and reinterpretation. Negationists, apart from spreading nonsense or absurdities, also point to hiatuses and preconceptions in the evidence about the murder of some six million Jews. In other words, those who are to refute negationism with scholarly arguments have to be well versed in history and history writing about the Holocaust, and they have to be prepared to scrutinize specific exaggerations or untruths in an equally critical fashion. Negationists tend to have a certain expertise when it comes to exploiting these sorts of doubts about the Holocaust story and turning them to their advantage. This calls for expertise from historians, rather than the strong arm of the legislator. Legal experts and moral philosophers pose questions as to the expediency of the restriction of freedom of speech – even regarding utterly unacceptable and non­sensical ideas. The argument most often heard, however, was purely intellectual and belongs in the Voltairean tradition: negationism is an opinion, and opinions should be fought only with other opinions. Inevitably the law concerning negationism, no matter how well intended from the point of view of its proponents, ‘kuriert am Symptom’, i.e. it does not get to the heart of the matter and comes with the danger of mounting censorship of socially unacceptable, hurtful and unpleasant views. In the long term this weakens the democratic right to freedom of speech, which is a necessary condition for a democracy, and, so the reasoning goes, whoever meddles with it automatically puts democracy at risk.24

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  243 Aside from objections of principle, it is possible to raise considerations of a more tactical nature. The main one concerns the expediency aspect. Does the law not give more attention to negationists than they in fact deserve? One can argue that legal persecution causes the media to concentrate on negationists inordinately. This forces them into an underdog position that can only generate more public sympathy for them. Does one-sided attention do sufficient justice to the sensitivities of victims and their surviving relatives of other genocides? By making Holocaust denial punishable by law, victim competition and the weighing of human suffering will rather increase than decline. Is the law a useful weapon in the struggle against the extreme right in the digital era? More importantly, what is the risk that the application of this law will turn into a single-case issue (see below)? Does tabooing the subject hamper the public and scholarly debate rather than enhance it? The law’s main drawback was the assumed intentional character of voicing negationist opinions. Does Holocaust denial, in other words, involve harm-causing (or offensive) intent? These harmful effects can apply to both individual persons (survivors or their relatives) and society at large, in the latter case the values on which democratic society is founded, such as pluralism, tolerance and non-violence. Can one attribute harmful consequences to an opinion based on content-related grounds? Is Holocaust denial necessarily insulting to those who consider themselves Holocaust victims? The Belgian Court of Arbitration established in its decision of 12 July 1996 that the right to freedom of speech is not unlimited where the fundamental values of democratic society are at stake. It assumed a suspicion of bad faith in the distribution of negationist utterances. Those who deny the Holocaust implicitly justify an ideology that is reprehensible and directed against democracy. This is why negationism can be made punishable from a democratic point of view. Essentially the court sought to interpret the legitimacy of the restriction of freedom of speech as far as possible from the perspective of the harm-causing effects of negationist publications. In reality this boiled down to a restrictive interpretation of the law. The letter of the law itself – and its preliminary discussion in parliament – suggested the centrality of the content of a claim. The court interprets the law as if it can only be invoked when such a claim causes harm and, consequently, is clearly meant to insult.25 Thus the highest Belgian court judged the content of a standpoint and its implied intentions to be in fact one and the same, or at least to result from each other. ‘The legislator’, the court argued, ‘did not punish the opinions involved for their content as such, but for their disadvantageous effects on others and on democratic society as such.’ This interpretation comes very close to Tony Judt’s observation. The memory of the Holocaust is directly tied to a specific view of democracy. Protecting this ‘historical truth’ through legal measures is considered an admission ticket to democratic society. It is essentially part of what in Germany is called a ‘streitbare Demokratie’.26 A democratic constitutional state is more than a system that derives power from a mere accidental mathematical majority. It appropriates the right to act by limiting the liberties of those who are deemed to form a threat to democracy. In

244  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner practice it will prove to be hardly relevant whether specific content automatically goes together with evil intent. The law will never be applied where more or less bona fide opinions are involved. Practice suggests that the law will come into operation against Holocaust denial that is part of a broader propagandist argument, of which the far-right character cannot be denied. The lone individual who claims ‘the six million dead Jews’ to be ‘a lie’, or who, based on historical study, arrives at the conclusion that the conventional image of history should be revised, has nothing to fear. The legislation is aimed explicitly against networks that make spreading the Auschwitzlüge their exclusive raison d’être. Politically, of course, the law was a shot in the dark. The Vlaams Blok could not be stigmatized as an extreme-right eccentric because the party itself approved the bill. It was no weapon against the party that increasingly opted for an image of respectability and that could be linked less and less to the war years. (As it happens, in 2004 it was another law that forced the party’s disbandment, after which, under the new name of Vlaams Belang, it continued its activities.) For a long time, the law remained some sort of invisible big stick that was only used, as was also the case in France with the ‘Lex Faurisson’, for dealing with quite specific persons. The law closely kept these individuals under close observation. Only when they wished to enter the danger zone might the law prove its effectiveness.

Cavalier Seul: Siegfried Verbeke and Free Historical Investigation (VHO) In its application the law, which was motivated by lofty views, threatened to degenerate into a legal guerrilla fight against one man: the Antwerp extremist Siegfried Verbeke, who was in charge of the revisionist organization Vrij Historisch Onderzoek (VHO) and had already been active in the far-right wing of the organized Flemish Movement. There were clear ties with the (banned) Flemish Militants Order, the radical action group Voorpost and the Vlaams Blok. Verbeke, who was a member of this party until the adoption of the negationism law in 1995, had built a solid reputation as a propagandist and provider of negationist publications. It was not until 2005, ten years after the introduction of the law, that Verbeke received a definite sentence. On 14 April the Court of Appeal of Antwerp sentenced him to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 2,500 euros for violating the law, while he was also disfranchised for a period of ten years. The Equal Opportunity and Antiracism Centre (Centrum voor Gelijkheid van Kansen en voor Racismebestrijding) and the Belgian Auschwitz Foundation (Auschwitzstichting), the two organizations that took Verbeke to court, received (symbolic) compensation of one euro. On appeal the provisional sentence, which the accused had received a year before, became definite because he had clearly repeated the offence. This sentence ended, at least for the time being, the long career of an indefatigable negationist propagandist. Verbeke

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  245 led the VHO together with his brother Herbert; their organization had disseminated books and pamphlets in Belgium and the Netherlands and also via the internet. The Belgian judge rejected the objections that could be anticipated from the angle of the right to freedom of speech, thus confirming the Court of Arbitration’s interpretation in this matter. The following words were used: The right to freedom of speech, however, is not absolute. Irrespective of the fact that everyone is obliged to respect the constitutionally protected freedom of speech of others, section 19 of the Constitution, in combination with subsection 10.2 of the European Treaty of Human Rights and subsection 19.3 of the International Treaty concerning civil and political rights, implies that freedom of speech can be subjected to specific formalities, conditions, restrictions or sanctions defined by law that in a democratic society are needed to protect the expressly stated objectives mentioned in the treaty provisions above.27

This also meant that the judge was convinced of the inherently insulting character of Holocaust denial. He argued that normative conduct could be inferred from the descriptive use of language and felt ‘that these publications and writings in fact did incite to discrimination, hate, violence or racial segregation vis-à-vis a group, community or its members’.28 In its judgment the court ruled that: the accused abused the fundamental right to freedom of speech to disturb others’ peace of mind and even to upset people by calling into question the suffering that is still a heavy burden to many. They hid behind the argument of wanting to open up the ‘scholarly debate’ involving the Holocaust, but the means employed indicate they are only out to insult victims of war suffering by harassing them with unsolicited and taunting pamphlets. The accused lacked any sense of guilt or insight that their conduct once again traumatized persons who had lost loved ones through the war. On the contrary, the first accused embraced a victim role himself and claims to be ‘persecuted for his beliefs’.

What also played a role in the judge’s consideration was the fact that active mass distribution of writings was involved. Not just individual opinion was at issue, but the spreading of views with political and ideological objectives. Spreading views is allowed, but not if they are subverting and insulting. The conviction by the Antwerp court was not the first time that Verbeke had ended up in court. In the early 1990s he had already been convicted by a Dutch judge for distributing material in which the Holocaust was denied. Verbeke had mailed such material unsolicited to schools, libraries and individuals with Jewishsounding surnames. Various social organizations in the Netherlands, including the Anne Frank Foundation, the CIDI and the Discussion Group of Christians and Jews (Overlegorgaan Christenen en Joden), decided to take steps against him. Because at that time Belgium did not have legislation aimed at stopping such mailings, a case against Verbeke was started in the Netherlands, whereby the judge was asked

246  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner to prohibit the distributing and propagating of Holocaust denial through pamphlets. The judge consented and prohibited further distribution. In 1995 Verbeke was subsequently convicted by a Dutch criminal judge for insult based on subsection 137c of the Penal Code and for distributing discriminatory language based on subsection 137e of the Penal Code. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. It confirmed the judgment that Holocaust denial is in conflict with the prohibitions on discrimination. This course of affairs indicated that the judicial process in the Netherlands operated differently. Because that country had no specific legislation in this area, unlike Germany, France, Austria and subsequently also Belgium, the ban on Holocaust denial was directly derived from the constitutional ban on discrimination. In the Netherlands this prohibition generally has high urgency and is politically much more sensitive, while the free speech principle tends to be brought up less quickly in public debates. Without being able to rely on specific legislation, the Netherlands managed to respond swiftly and alertly to negationism. Meanwhile, in 2005 the German court issued a European arrest warrant against Verbeke. The Belgian court did not comply with this request because the accused had already been convicted in Belgium on exactly the same charges and on other similar charges. In the summer of 2005, however, he was arrested on Dutch soil under the international arrest warrant and extradited to the German judiciary. In Germany he risked a sentence of five to ten years in prison. Despite the many obstacles that were put in his way, Verbeke did not throw in the towel. In late 2004 he astonished the world by his announcement that he was willing to have himself gassed in Auschwitz with Zyklon B; his survival would offer him ultimate proof of the ‘non-existence’ of the gas chambers.29 The arrest of Verbeke caused only a minor commotion in Belgium. There was little understanding. At most one could pity the fate of a man who had devoted his life to his highly debatable ‘ideal’. The fact that he had operated as a loner at the centre of an extensive network that relentlessly distributed revisionist and negationist literature across the country and beyond did not arouse much sympathy. Questions were asked about whether and to what extent officials from Vlaams Belang and other far-right organizations had ties with the convicted and whether they might be prepared to support him. Paradoxically the latter could now be done more openly. The Vlaams Belang was steadily working at its own transformation and increasingly managed to cut its ties with the war past. As the war past became less and less of a visible obstacle, it became arguably more attractive for the party to set itself up as a defender of free speech, even, and especially so, vis-à-vis views denounced as ‘folly’ – much in the same way that at one point the left-wing American intellectual Noam Chomsky defended the notorious French revisionist Robert Faurisson without subscribing to his views but with reference to the unassailability of free speech.30 The discussion has hardly subsided. Many still have reservations about a law that applies to a very limited number of individuals at most. Freedom of speech,

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  247 notably in intellectual circles, continues to be a number one priority. In 2006 the public discussion on this issue took on a new dimension with the worldwide uproar about the Danish cartoons. Radical Islamists and their allies now ask why Holocaust memory deserves legal protection, while some of their religious symbols apparently do not. As a counter-reaction they published cartoons referring to the Holocaust, so as to denounce what they viewed as the hypocritical attitude of the West. Furthermore, the issue of how one should deal with the denial or trivializing of the Holocaust by official institutions or governments in the Middle East, such as the regime in Tehran, has been raised in public. Finally, the question is asked as to whether the law is not in fact a sign of powerlessness and one-sidedness since other genocides – the Turkish genocide on the Armenians, for instance – do not receive similar legal protection.

Holocaust Denial in Romania In Romania, in comparison to Belgium, Holocaust denial has only recently begun to become an issue for the courts. After the regime change of 1989, a flood of anti-Semitic propaganda was published, without much protest. Here just a few examples are to be discussed in detail. Most seminal perhaps are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which had been put in circulation in 1905 by the Russian secret police, a text which is a favourite point of reference for anti-Semites in Europe and the Arabic world. It deals with the manifold ways in which the Jews control the world according to their wishes. In 1924 it had been translated into Romanian by a leader of the Romanian anti-Semitic youth movement. In 1997 it reappeared on bookstore shelves. At that point it was a publishing house in Oradea which assumed responsibility for the publication.31 In 2003 the publishing house of Radu Teodoru’s book Was There Really a Holocaust? made it clear that the author was solely responsible for the contents of the book. Teodoru, the retired commander of the Romanian air force, endeavoured to reinterpret the Romanian Holocaust in such a way that the mass killings appeared as nothing but the excesses of a few radical individuals. He also asserts in his book that ‘the accusal of Holocaust’ is part of a kind of psychological warfare against the Romanian people, the goal of which was to illicitly gain financial compensation from Romania.32 In 2004 a book was printed in Romania called The Process of Israelian Zionism, written by the French revisionist Roger Garaudy, in which he defended the provocative arguments he had published in his 1996 book Founding Myths of Modern Israel. The first book was banned in France in 1998 because the author not only criticized Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians but also, in relation to the Holocaust, questioned the existence of the gas chambers as well as the number of Jewish victims. The fact that instead of the translator’s name one finds merely the cryptic ‘Samizdat’ shows that by now anti-Semitic writing could lead to

248  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner prosecution.33 Thanks to the pressure exercised by Jewish organizations in Romania and abroad, in 2002 a law had been introduced making it possible to take legal action against racist hate speech. However, it was not ratified by the Senate until 2006, and so Holocaust deniers were able to continue publishing until then. Whilst trying to gain NATO and then EU membership, successive Romanian governments had to face complaints from its minority populations. Drafts of a minority protection law presented by the Hungarian and German associations were not seriously debated in parliament, in particular because many parliamentarians understood self-government as a first step towards secession. Still, the government issued decree 137/2000, which prohibited all kinds of discrimination. Because it did not have much effect in practice, however, many Romanian and foreign organizations called for further measures. All this was only made possible by a scandal in June 2001 caused by the former Romanian chief of the general staff, Mihai Chelaru, who, together with the leaders of the Greater Romania Party, took part in the unveiling of an Antonescu bust in front of a Bucharest church. In response to massive criticism, especially from the USA, the Romanian ministry of defence issued a statement condemning general Chelaru’s actions, saying that they were harming Romania’s efforts to join NATO. General Chelaru was forced to resign. Afterwards he joined the leadership of a far-right party.34 Since 1995 certain US senators had protested every time ministers from Antonescu’s government were rehabilitated in Romania. Whilst on a visit to the USA in November 2001, the Romanian prime minister announced a law against the commemoration of war criminals. He initiated the emergency decree no. 31/2002, which made the establishment of fascist, racist or xenophobic organizations, as well as the cult of people who committed acts against the peace and against humanity, punishable by five years in prison. The law is, however, vague; what constituted a punishable deed was hotly debated for four years by Romanian parliamentarians. They were not even able to achieve a consensus about what falls within the term ‘Holocaust’. The representatives of the Greater Romania Party were able to push through the following definition of ‘Holocaust’ in the so-called cultural commission of the Romanian senate: ‘the systematic extermination of European Jews in Nazi camps during World War II’. Because the judicial committee also adopted this definition, the mass murder and the executions of Jews and Roma could still be called into question and their initiator, Antonescu, could still be worshipped as a national hero.35 Corneliu Vadim Tudor, leader of the Greater Romania Party, was able to make political capital out of his role as the chief admirer of Antonescu in the 2000 presidential elections, in which he received 28 per cent of the votes. It was only by a slim margin that Ion Iliescu was able to beat his former ally. His Party for Social Democracy (Partidul Social Democrat) had to differentiate itself strongly from the Greater Romania Party, which with 20 per cent of the votes was now the

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  249 second‑strongest party.36 The so-called Social Democrats followed a strategy for swift integration into NATO and were also willing to put an end to the (embarrassing) Antonescu cult. In 2003 Iliescu appointed a commission of domestic and foreign historians, as well as of representatives of Jewish and Roma organizations from Romania. Within a year this commission collected all the available material on the deportations and the mass murders of the war years. The commission worked under the official patronage of Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel. At the end of 2004 its final report was presented to the Romanian president. This final report not only recounted the extent of the crimes in minute detail, but also attacked those responsible for the hero-worship around Antonescu – the person who, after all, had initiated these crimes. Politicians of the Greater Romania Party were especially criticized. 37 Following heated debates, a majority of parliamentarians agreed to widen the scope of the emergency decree 31/2002. Now decree 107/2006 made it illegal not only to negate the crimes of the German Reich, but also those committed by its allies and collaborators. With Romanian president Băsescu’s signature this became law in April 2006. Little by little street names were stripped of Antonescu’s name again. Antonescuworshippers vehemently criticized this as being the result of foreign intervention. They especially attacked ‘the Jewish lobby’, in which they saw a great danger for Romania.38

The Anti-Semitism of Paul Goma and the Alexianu Case Two examples will serve here to illustrate how the reinterpretation of the war years by Romanian extremists of the far right differs from that of the Holocaust deniers in Belgium. The first concerns the writer Paul Goma, and the second is the so-called Alexianu case. In 1977 Goma was one of the few Romanian dissidents who had declared their solidarity with the Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia. As a result he had to leave Romania. He went to Paris, where he still lives today. Although living abroad, he is able to maintain a very strong presence in the Romanian media thanks to his provocative articles. In most of his writings the time of the Second World War plays only a subordinate role. Not so, however, in his essay ‘The Red Week’. This text, published as a booklet in the Republic of Moldova, can today be found in almost every Romanian bookstore. It deals with the retreat of the Romanian army and administration from Bessarabia after the Soviet ultimatum of June 1940. Relying on reports of the Romanian secret service, Goma claims that ‘the Jews’ in Bessarabia had humiliated and actually killed Romanian soldiers during this retreat. This, he further argues, was the reason why Romanians later retaliated. His ideas in fact represent a clear imitation of the way Antonescu himself tried to legitimize the deportation of all the Jewish population of Bessarabia in 1941, which resulted in the deaths of two-thirds of them.39

250  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner So far, there exists no serious study on the retreat of the Romanian army. Most of the authors dealing with the issue rely on the rather obscure reports of the Romanian secret service of the time. The final report of the Holocaust commission draws attention to the fact that it was not only Jews who humiliated the retreating representatives of state power but also Ukrainians and even ethnic Romanians. One reason for the fabrication of the story about Jewish attacks was the fact that those responsible for an unruly retreat and the abandonment of much war material needed a plausible excuse for this. The very same argumentation was also used as a justification for the first great massacre of Jews by the Romanian army in Galaţi, where probably around 300 were murdered.40 Goma’s theories achieved their highest currency within the Romanian media in 2005 – in the period immediately preceding the publication of the final report of the commission. The newspaper of the Greater Romania Party published Goma’s essay in serialized form. However, it was only when the central newspaper of the Romanian writer’s union published an article by him that the federation of Jewish communities publicly demanded that the wholesale scapegoating of Jews had to stop.41 The leadership of the union apologized and the responsible editor had to resign in September 2005. Many Romanian newspapers reacted by lamenting this attack on ‘free speech’ and supported Goma as well as the editor. Attempts to get Goma convicted for anti-Semitic hate speech were unsuccessful, and he himself in turn sued sixteen people, including Elie Wiesel, for libel. Not only within far-right circles did Goma achieve the status of a symbolic figure. On 30 January 2007 the city council of Timişoara granted him honorary citizenship for his literary achievement as well as his political activism. The president of the federation of Jewish communities protested, because Goma was portraying the Jews as a monolithic group that was, supposedly, acting against the interests of the Romanian nation.42 In December 2006 – immediately before Romania’s accession to the European Union – a Bucharest court of appellation was busy looking into Romania’s war against the Soviet Union and its results. It was dealing with an appeal made by the son of Gheorghe Alexianu, the former governor of the Romanian zone of occupation in Transnistria. The property of Alexianu had been nationalized after he had been convicted as a war criminal in June 1946. His son claimed that the court proceedings had been a farce in the tradition of communist show trials. He alleged that his father had been wrongly convicted. He also advertised his views in a biography of his father, which had the telling title ‘Transnistria, a chapter in the history of Romanian compassion’. The son claimed that his father had only performed administrative duties – although it is known, for example, that he signed death warrants for begging children.43 In its ruling, published in March 2007, the court found in favour of the son on many counts; the attack on the Soviet Union, the court stated, was a legitimate measure of defence, because the Soviet Union had annexed Bessarabia. In the same court ruling Marshall Antonescu was proclaimed ‘not guilty’ of crimes

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  251 against the peace. Immediate protests from the federation of Jewish communities followed.44 After protests were voiced in the Russian Federation and in the Ukraine, the Romanian public prosecutor filed an appeal. On 7 May 2008 the highest appellate court overruled the rehabilitation of Antonescu and his closest collaborators. The far right was outraged; especially on the worldwide web we find much written about the ‘treasonous judges’.45 In contrast with Belgium, the conflict in Romania is not only about reinterpreting the war; at the same time it is interdependent with the process of coming to terms with the communist past. And the latter has begun only very slowly in the broader society as well.

Collective Memory and the ‘Culture of Apology’ The Belgian legislation against negationism was not motivated by the need to counter an imminent domestic threat, but by the political desire to make a symbolic gesture. The struggle for the memory of history coincides with the struggle against the extreme right; it is, more specifically, a central dimension of it. But there is also a wider international context. The state of Israel has certainly played a role in elevating the Judeocide to a central episode in the history of humanity. Without the existence of the Jewish state, which views itself as a safeguard against any possible recurrence of that history, the Holocaust would certainly have not become as solidly anchored in collective memory. Political, economic and military developments in the Middle East have contributed to what people worldwide consider important to commemorate. In this context, it seems irrelevant to develop a conspiracy theory that leads in absurdum. In polemical writings specific machinations by Jewish lobby groups that distorted our image of the past have already been exposed, notably in the United States, and this is subject to debate. Yet it is evident that collective memory does not emerge out of the blue, and nor does it result from a spontaneous process of memory; it is influenced by external factors such as political power and influence. Various initiatives at an international level have caused Holocaust memory to acquire a separate status, even in a small country such as Belgium. Negationism is a radical attack on putting the Holocaust at the heart of a democratic society’s collective memory. The latter should account for errors from the past, and it is precisely this that is challenged by negationism. Belgium has chosen an approach that diverges from the traditions in the AngloSaxon world, but also, for instance, from the Dutch model. Instead, Belgium follows the example of countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Israel, which have explicitly made Holocaust denial punishable. In the Netherlands the punishability of negationism is derived from a constitutionally defined discrimination prohibition. It points to the political prioritizing of making

252  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner Holocaust denial punishable. Legal persecution, then, is performed faster and more efficiently in the Netherlands, even if Holocaust denial continues to be a curious phenomenon there. In the United States the Constitution ensures an almost unlimited right to express opinions. In Great Britain freedom of speech is seen as a residue, an autonomous open space that is not covered by legislation. In practice this means that, as in the United States, one reacts with restraint in the possible punishing of specific opinions. Belgium has followed the example that has gained inroads on the European continent in particular. If one cannot say that in the various countries negationism has evolved differently in terms of content, the legal frameworks differ from one country to the next. The measures adopted in Belgium, then, are inspired by legal-historical traditions rather than a concrete political or social necessity. On an earlier occasion Belgium had already tried to set itself up as a pioneer in protecting universal justice. The so-called Genocide Law of 1993 is a good example. It was a law with far-reaching universal jurisdictional pretensions. Essentially it would have made it possible to have all who were guilty of genocide, as defined in the International Treaties of Geneva of 1949, be convicted by a Belgian court. Accordingly, several state and government leaders from other countries came into view. If the Belgian law was denounced by the International Court in The Hague, it was the law’s political consequences that were to finish it off. In 2003, in the light of possible court cases against the Israeli prime minister Ariël Sharon and against the American president George W. Bush and US general Tommy Franks (on account of the war in Iraq), the law was amended to the extent that it was basically abolished. From then on, cases had to have a direct link to Belgian citizens, implying it was no longer a matter of universal jurisdiction. The international and especially American pressure had become too great for the law to be retained any longer. Still, the legal measures against the spread of negationism fit in a broader bureau­ cratic historical culture. The willingness to take historical responsibility via large public gestures can be viewed as a symptom of a growing ‘culture of apology’. In the past ten years there have been several examples. This culture of apology applied not only to the role of Belgium during the Second World War, but also, for instance, to its role in its former African colony. In the course of the 1990s a Belgian Holocaust museum was realized: the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance opened in Mechelen in 1995. It was built on the symbolic location of the Dossin army base, the site from where the deportations to the extermination camps were organized during the German occupation. The museum is conceived as a memorial devoted to persecution as well as resistance, including the life-saving interventions by those Belgian civilians who provided shelter to Jews who were at risk. This last aspect is a major element in Belgian history writing about the fate of the Jews in Belgium during the German occupation. In this way the memorial contributed to the cherished positive self-image of Belgium as a nation of rescuers of Jews. In 1997, on the initiative of the Belgian government, a research commission was set up to examine the issue of the spoliation and restitution of Jewish goods. This led

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  253 to a series of measures to return stolen Jewish goods or at least pay compensation for them. Agreements were also made with Belgian banks to effect restitution of the assets of Holocaust victims. This was part of an international trend joined by Belgium, willingly or not. The statement made by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt in 2002 in the context of the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Jewish deportations from Belgium to Auschwitz had great symbolic significance. Some 25,000 Jewish civilians (many of foreign nationality) left Belgium for the extermination camps. Most would not survive the war. It was the first time that a leading politician had used the words ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘recognition’ with respect to the persecution of the Jews in Belgium. Verhofstadt was the first Belgian government leader to acknowledge the politics of collaboration practised by Belgian officials in tracing and deporting Jews. This matter also called for an official apology. At the same time, homage was paid to all forms of resistance against Nazi politics, both by civilians and by Belgian officials and institutions. In the wake of this formal statement, a series of research projects was announced that were more closely to analyse the role and attitude of the Belgian public and Belgian officials at all levels of government in the years of war. These should lead to a better understanding of the complexities of the situation in which it was possible for the Holocaust to be carried out in Belgium. Although it is reasonable to suggest that such signs of recognition have come to the surface rather late in Belgium, at the same time they illustrate how chaotically this country deals with its collective past. The apparent lack of a national culture of unity also reveals itself in the country’s fragmented historical awareness.46

Debates about the Holocaust in Romanian Society The debate about the persecution of the Jews and the Roma in the war years has only recently begun in Romania. It is thus difficult to ascertain what a Romanian ‘collective memory’ could mean in this case. During communist times this was a taboo topic and until 2003 it was mainly and almost exclusively the organizations of both groups that were working on this topic. There were some Romanian historians who in their accounts of Jewish and Roma history talked about the war years, but a true kind of Holocaust research began only with the work of the commission instituted by the Romanian president. Immediately after the commission finished its work, there was uncertainty as to whether its work was to have any impact: On the one hand, President Iliescu honoured Elie Wiesel as well as the historian Randolph L. Braham with Romanian state decorations for their work on the commission, but on the other hand, some days later, he also decorated speakers of the Greater Romania Party, who had been attacked in the commission’s report as frequent inciters of anti-Semitic hatred. Wiesel and Braham sent back their decorations in protest.47

254  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner However, the next Romanian president, Traian Băsescu, honoured the spirit of the commission as well as the concrete promises made to it. A National Institute for Holocaust Research was founded in Bucharest, bearing Elie Wiesel’s name. Mihail E. Ionescu, who had acted as an expert on the commission, was appointed as its director general. The institute’s first major publication documented an international conference on the Iaşi pogrom launched by Romanian governmental forces in June 1941, in which 13,000 Jews were murdered.48 Then, on the pogrom’s anniversary in 2007, for the first time ever the Romanian army honoured the victims. The publications of the institute are a forum for important research on various aspects of the subject. One example is an article on the connections between German and Romanian demographers during the Romanian census of April 1941.49 Another example is the work of two authors who examined anti-Semitic propaganda and Holocaust denial in the Romanian media between 2005 and 2006. They discuss Goma extensively as well as the internet publication ‘Altermedia’, which distributes the texts of domestic and foreign Holocaust deniers. They view the internet publications as a greater danger than the newspapers and journals of the multiple far-right organizations. Both researchers confront many of the most common allegations made by anti-Semites in Romania, such as the allegedly high proportion of Jews in the repressive organs of the Romanian communist regime or the so-called ‘stolen revolution of 1989’, which, according to the anti-Semites, was ‘stolen’ by ‘the Jews’.50 Another allegation is the claim that ‘the Jews’ are sponsoring Jewish immigration into Romania so that a second Jewish state can be founded there for a million Jews. Refutations of these wild anti-Semitic allegations by an official Romanian institution are of the highest significance because it seems as if such anti-Semitic publications do after all influence people. Opinion polls showed in 2003 that only 24 per cent of those interviewed believed that the Jews pursued different interests from the rest of the population in Romania, but in 2006 31.6 per cent thought so.51 The previously mentioned internet publication ‘Altermedia’ includes a theory put forward by controversial university professor Ion Coja. He claims that the allegation of a Romanian Holocaust serves only to generate a bad conscience among Romanians so that they will not protest against a new ‘invasion by the Jews’. He criticized the restitution of property and citizenship to the Jews who had migrated from Romania. In the end, he claims, they are aiming to gain control over Romania’s economy and politics ‘again’. Many comments on this conspiracy theory in this internet blog range from the utterly ridiculous to the fantastically incredible.52 Since there are very few Jews in today’s Romania, it is not very probable that the prejudices fanned by such theories will turn into outward aggression on a large scale. Much more in danger of actual violence is the relatively large group of the Roma, of which more than half live in great poverty. The fact that approximately 11,000 Roma died in Transnistria as well is mentioned by the report of the Holocaust commission. However, broader studies of their suffering in the Holocaust have not

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  255 yet been undertaken. Sensitivity towards this group is broadly lacking, including among the leading politicians of the country. After a Roma was murdered in Italy and many Roma were deported from Italy, the then foreign minister of Romania Adrian Cioroianu suggested in November 2007 that ‘Romania should buy a stretch of Egyptian desert in order to set up a punitive camp for all those who committed crimes in Italy’.53 Cioroianu was foreign minister between April 2007 and April 2008. He is a historian who became widely known in Romania when he took part in a televised poll to determine the ‘greatest Romanians’ in 2006. The public selected Antonescu as one of the top ten candidates. Cioroianu spoke on the TV show not only about Antonescu’s merits but also about his war crimes against the Jews and the Roma. In reply, the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism accused him of desecrating Antonescu’s memory. At the end of the debate, Antonescu came in as the sixth most important Romanian of all time.54 It will probably take a couple more years for a ‘collective memory’ of the Romanians to take a similar point of view on the Second World War as well as its consequences and to reach a similar kind of historical sensitivity as has been broadly reached in such countries as Belgium.

Notes 1. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), p. 803. 2. Chris Lorenz, De constructie van het verleden: Een inleiding in de theorie van de geschiedenis (Amsterdam-Meppel: Boom, 1998), p. 291. 3. Georgi Verbeeck (ed.), De verdwenen gaskamers: De ontkenning van de Holocaust (Leuven: Acco, 1997), pp. 7–14. 4. The concept ‘revisionism’ has a longer history than ‘negationism’. The former term emerged in the history of socialist political theory and the history of international relations. It was used for the first time in nineteenth-century German social democracy to indicate that one no longer agreed with the original views of Karl Marx about the inevitable transition from capitalism to a communist, classless society, a process that according to him would occur via a violent takeover of power by the working class. Revisionism sought to revise several major assumptions of Marx and departed from those who followed his line and continued to defend ‘orthodoxy’. ‘Revisionism’ and ‘orthodoxy’ began to denounce each other because essentially they clashed over the proper interpretation of the original and common legacy. In international relations, revisionism pertains to efforts to reverse specific international agreements and border regulations after

256  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner

5.

6.

7.

8.

a conflict. The best-known example involves the striving of successive German governments after the First World War to evade as far as possible the restrictions imposed on the country as part of the Peace of Versailles (1919). Revisionism also applies to the critical questioning of the exclusive attribution of guilt to Germany for the outbreak of the First World War. During the inter-war period several American historians resisted the official version of US participation in the First World War. In this context, revisionism has a general pacifist undertone. Finally, revisionism applies to a leftist trend within Anglo-Saxon political science and history during the 1960s and 1970s. Academics that aligned themselves with the New Left began to question the prevailing paradigm that invariably put the blame for the outbreak of the Cold War on the Soviet Union. In the same vein, they also articulated criticism of the established view of other episodes from national history. Revisionism became a term in both the United States and Europe for indicating a critical reinterpretation of established historical insights. As such, it has always been closely linked to issues of historical guilt and responsibility. It is from this perspective that negationism presents itself as a radical version of revisionism. Bart Brinckman and Bruno De Wever, ‘De stille kracht van een ideologische dwaling: Negationisme in Vlaanderen en Wallonië’, in Georgi Verbeeck (ed.), De verdwenen gaskamers, pp. 81–110. We prefer to distinguish between ‘right extremism’ and ‘right radicalism’, despite the fact that scholars and the general public often use the two concepts interchangeably. Extremism pertains to a small group that does not shy away from using violence. Radicalism rejects the established political order but is not necessarily violent. In many cases it relies on substantial popular support and has a populist image. Hans De Witte and Georgi Verbeeck, ‘Belgium: Diversity in Unity’, in Louk Hagendoorn, György Csepeli, Henk Dekker and Russell Farnen (eds), European Nations and Nationalism. Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Aldershot – Brookfield – Singapore – Sydney: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 107–140. In 2004, after a court sentence, the Vlaams Blok took on a new name: Vlaams Belang. On 9 November of that year, a legal procedure that had lasted three years culminated in a definitive sentence on the basis of the 1980 anti-racism legislation. Because Belgian legislation does not allow for the banning of political parties, three VB-related associations were, on the basis of the anti-racism act, accused of and sentenced for inciting segregation and xenophobia. In a strictly legal sense this sentence had no consequences for the Vlaams Blok as a party, but it decided to change its name anyhow and to drop a number of points from its targeted political programme. The sentence in fact accelerated the process undertaken by the party to replace its far right image with a populist anti-establishment one. Since its emergence, and particularly since its electoral breakthrough in 1991, the party has had to deal with a so-called cordon sanitaire, or the refusal of other

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  257   9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

parties to cooperate with it. In the long term the VB intends to break this strategy by the other parties. Carol Iancu, Evreii din România de la excludere la emancipare 1866–1919 (Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, 1996), p. 72. Mariana Hausleitner, Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina: Die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen Anspruchs Grossrumäniens 1918–1944 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2001), pp. 115–19. Dietmar Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf: Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode. Ethnonationale Staatsbürgerschaftskonzepte 1878–1941 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), p. 458. For English- and German-language articles on the persecution of Jews and Roma in the different regions, see Mariana Hausleitner, Brigitte Mihok and Juliane Wetzel (eds), Rumänien und der Holocaust (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2001). Comisia internaţională pentru studierea Holocaustului în România, Raport final (Iaşi: Editura Polirom, 2005), p. 388; also available at www.yadvashem.org (see under ‘Report Holocaust in Romania’). Armin Heinen, Rumänien, der Holocaust und die Logik der Gewalt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), p. 21. These publications were part of an anti-Hungarian campaign; they were full of distortions. Cf. Randolph L. Braham, Romanian Nationalists and the Holocaust: The Political Exploitation of Unfounded Rescue Accounts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 47–8. On 1 June 1999 the Romanian senators honoured Antonescu again with a minute’s silence. Cf. Sebastian Balta, Rumänien und die Großmächte in der Ära Antonescu 1940–1944 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), p. 15. Mariana Hausleitner, ‘Die verzögerte Aufarbeitung kommunistischer Verbrechen in Rumänien nach 1990’, in Ulf Brunnbauer, Andreas Helmedach and Stefan Troebst (eds), Schnittstellen: Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), p. 522. On the historiographic debates in the Republic of Moldova, see Mariana Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien 1814–1941: Zur Minderheiten­ politik Russlands und Großrumäniens (Munich: IKGS-Verlag, 2005), pp. 10– 12; Stefan Ihrig, Wer sind die Moldauer? Rumänismus versus Moldowanismus in Historiographie und Schulbüchern der Republik Moldova 1991–2006 (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2008). George Voicu, Zeii cei răi: Cultura conspiraţiei în România postcomunistă (Iaşi: Editura Polirom, 2000). Marc Elchardus, Op de ruines van de waarheid (Leuven: Kritak, 1994), p. 89. G.A.I. Schuijt and D. Voorhoof (eds), Vrijheid van meningsuiting, racisme en revisionisme (Ghent: Academia Press, 1995).

258  •  Georgi Verbeeck and Mariana Hausleitner 22. Koen Raes, ‘De wet ter bestrijding van het negationisme: Ethisch-politieke vragen bij het beteugelen van de meningsvrijheid’, in Georgi Verbeeck (ed.), De verdwenen gaskamers, pp. 63–80. 23. Gie Van den Berghe, ‘Een oorlog die, omdat hij nooit gebeuren mocht, blijft duren: Revisionisme en negationisme herzien’, in Georgi Verbeeck (ed.), De verdwenen gaskamers, pp. 15–48. 24. Ludo Abicht, ‘Moet het negationisme bestreden worden? Persoonlijke en filosofische beschouwingen’, in Georgi Verbeeck (ed.), De verdwenen gaskamers, pp. 49–62. 25. Koen Raes, ‘De wet ter bestrijding van het negationisme’, pp. 75–6. 26. Georgi Verbeeck, ‘The Auschwitz Lie in Germany: Political Reactions and Legal Measures’, in Alain Wijffels (ed.), History in Court: Historical Expertise and Methods in a Forensic Context (Leiden: Ius Deco Publications, 2001), pp. 133–60. 27. De Standaard, 15 April 2005. 28. Still it was a thorny task to infer this offensive character directly from a negationist utterance, something that was not lost on the judge. He deemed it necessary in his argumentation to refer to a pamphlet that the accused had helped to disseminate in which the most extreme anti-Semitic propaganda was articulated. It depicted Jews as a people of fanatics who murdered infidels. They were further described as hypocrites, cheaters, a people of thieves and cowardly assassins. The publication’s author, Jean Boyer, does not deny the murder of the Jews, but he justifies it by comparing Judaism with, among other things, a polyp, ‘of which it is not enough to destroy its tentacles as the head has to be destroyed as well’. Because the court, with the support of several historianexperts, has to use multiple publications, it must make a selection. This example illustrates, however, that based on a very limited number of publications to which the label ‘approving of genocide’ applies the entire corpus of negationist literature is disqualified as being essentially marginal. 29. De Standaard, 15 April 2005; De Standaard, 6 August 2005; De Standaard, 13 September 2005; De Standaard, 18 April 2006. 30. De Standaard, 13 September 2006. 31. Protocoalele înţelepţilor Sionului (Oradea: Editura Alma, 1997). 32. Radu Teodoru, A fost sau nu Holocaust? (Bucharest: Editura Lucman, 2003), p. 326. 33. Roger Garaudy, Procesul sionismului israelian (Filipeşti: Samizdat, 2004). 34. Mariana Hausleitner, ‘Minderheitenprobleme aus der Sicht von Historikern – das rumänische Beispiel’, in Wilfried Heller, Jörg Becker, Bernd Belina and Waltraud Lindner (eds), Ethnizität in der Globalisierung (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2007), p. 293.

Holocaust Denial in Belgium and Romania  •  259 35. Michael Shafir, Între negare şi trivializare prin comparaţie: Negarea Holocaustului în ţările postcomuniste din Europa Centrală şi de Est (Iaşi: Editura Polirom, 2002), p. 101. 36. Dorothée de Neve, ‘Wahlen in Rumänien – eine ganz normale Katastrophe?’, Osteuropa 51(3) (2001), pp. 281–98. 37. Comisia, Raport final, p. 355. 38. Continuously updated information on the topic available at: ‘Der Fall Antonescu’, http://www.halbjahresschrift.homepage.t-online.de/Antonescu. htm. 39. Paul Goma, Săptămâna Roşie sau Basarabia şi evreii (Chişinău: Editura Museum, 2003). 40. Comisia, Raport final, pp. 73–85. 41. Alexandra Florian and Cosmina Guşu, Manifestări de antisemitism şi a holocaustului în mass-media din România (Bucharest: Institutul Naţional ‘Elie Wiesel’, 2007), p. 59. 42. www.atheneum.ca/modules/news/article.php?storyid=345. 43. Şerban Alexianu, Gheorghe Alexianu (Bucharest: Editura Vremea, 2007), p. 376. 44. Wolfgang Wittstock, ‘Freispruch für Antonescu, Seelenmesse für Adolf’, Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung, 4 April 2007, available at http:/adz.ro/mb.htm. 45. www.com/01/de/Europa.php?itemid=2245. 46. Georgi Verbeeck, ‘Getouwtrek rond een Vlaams Holocaust-museum’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 120(2) (2007), pp. 233–9. 47. www.halbjahreschrift.homepage.t-online.de/ion.htm. 48. George Voicu (ed.), Pogromul de la Iaşi 28–30 iunie 1941 prologul Holocaustlui din România (Iaşi: Editura Polirom 2006). 49. Viorel Achim, Evreii în cadrul recensământului general al României din 6 aprilie 1941 (Bucharest: Editura Institutlui Naţional pentru studierea Holocaustului, 2008). 50. Florian and Guşu, Manifestări, p. 27. 51. Ibid., p. 23. 52. http://ro.altermedia.info/noua-ordine-mondiala/un-israel-in-romania_3114. html. 53. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 November 2007. 54. Florian and Guşu, Manifestări, p. 34; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_ Cioroianu.

Index Abegg, Elisabeth, 122 Alexander, Lola, 116 Alexianu, Gheorghe, 249, 250 Alperovitz (town cantor), 77 Alsace-Lorraine, 13, 17, 19, 194, 200 Amsterdam, 102, 103, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136 Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth, 123 Antonescu, Ion, 237, 238, 239, 248, 249, 250, 251, 255 Antwerp, 235, 244, 245 Anykščiai, 81, 82, 83, 84 Apeldoorn, 103 Ardèche, 19 Arnhem, 103 Auschwitz, 113, 114, 117, 119, 125, 127, 133, 136, 142, 179, 180, 204, 209, 229, 240, 246, 253 Ausiukaitis, 75 Baar (captain), 75 Baden,105, 122 Baltranas, Balys, 84 Bamberg, Charlotte, 107 Bardèche, Maurice, 234 Bardejov, 17 Barrès, Maurice, 166 Băsescu, Traian, 249, 254 Baum, Herbert, 123 Bełżec, 180 Bentses, Khaimken, 85 Berezowska (mother and daughter), 45, 46 Bergen-Belsen, 99, 127 Bergson, Henri, 195, 196 Berkovič, Elija, 84 Berlin, 7, 98, 99, 101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 145 Berman, Adolf, 138

Berteval, François (Pineau, Christian), 199 Bessarabia, 237, 238, 249, 250 Best, Werner, 16 Białystok, 5, 41, 44, 45, 47, 52, 55, 61, 66, 67 Bibo, Rosel, 121 Bichelonne, Jean, 16 Bičkauskienė, Bronė, 84 Bielsk Podlaski, 67 Biržai, 86 Blanke, Kurt, 26 Bleiman, Zadok, 83 Bloch, Marc, 167 Bloch, Marcel, 19 Błoński, Jan, 185 Blum, Léon, 19, 166 Bogurze 48 Böhme, Hans-Joachim, 75, 76 Bonn, 142 Boom van der, Bart, 127 Bordeaux, 16 Brabant, 234 Brandenburg, 124, 138 Brandom, Randolph L., 253 Bratislava, 17, 20 Braun, Jerzy, 180 Breslau 100 Brodowo, 45 Brunner, Alois, 116, 140 Brussels, 232 Bucharest, 248, 250, 254 Bukovina, 237, 238 Burgard, Raymond, 202 Bush, George W., 252 Carsten, Gerhard, 75, 76, 77 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 238 Čepėnas (local priester), 84 Chagall, Marc, 195 Chaillet (Father), 203

261

262  •  Index Chelaru, Mihai, 248 Chełmno (Kulmhof), 179 Chevrier, Roger, 209 Chomsky, Noam, 246 Choroszcze, 67 Christiansen, Friedrich 131 Christofferson, Thies, 235 Cioroianu, Adrian, 255 Citroën, André, 19 Claudel, Paul, 195, 196 Cochet (general), 191 Coja, Ion, 254 Collm, Ludwig, 116 Cologne, 100, 106 Coornaert, Emile, 202 Cracow, 173, 174, 177 Crémieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis, 200 Croes, Marnix, 102, 129 Cruvellier, Louis, 203 Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis, 19, 26 Daugavpils, 80, 81, 82, 84 Dęblin, 185 Degrelle, Léon, 236 Deutsch de la Merthe (family), 20 Dobberke, Walter, 141 Dołęgowski, Aleksander, 46 Doriot, Jacques, 31 Dorogoj, Dora, 46, 47, 48, 49, 61 Dortmund, 142 Drancy, 192, 202, 209 Drenthe, 113 Dreyfus, Alfred, 165 Durčanský, Ferdinand, 18 Düsseldorf, 106, 122, 142 Dybikowski, Zygmunt, 53 Dziekoński, Henryk, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 69 Ehrlinger, Erich, 76 Eichmann, Adolf, 24, 115 Ekstowicz, Józef, 45, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 58 Elk, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57, 58 Engel, David, 161 Enschede, 103 Essen, 121

Faurisson, Robert, 234, 235, 244, 246 Fein, Helen, 139 Feingold, Suzanne (Perrin), 202 Fessard (Father), 203 Feuerherm, Wanda, 123 Finkelsztejn, Chaja, 42, 44, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65 Finkelsztejn, Chana, 62 Finkelsztejn, Izrael, 46, 61 Finkelsztejn, Menachem, 44, 45, 46, 50, 53, 61, 62 Flanders, 232, 233, 236 Fournier, Pierre-Eugene, 26 Frankfurt on the Main, 99, 106, 107, 117, 125 Franks, Tommy, 252 Freiburg (Breisgau), 122 Frenay, Henri, 191 Friedrich, Klaus-Peter, 184 Friszke, Andrzej, 186 Fünten aus der, Ferdinand, 111, 112 Galaţi, 237, 250 Galicia, 162, 163, 179 Garaudy, Roger, 247 Garber, Misha, 82 Gargždai, 75 Gaulle de, Charles, 30, 172 Gelderland, 132 Geneva, 252 Gepneris, Jurgis, 75, 78 Gewecke, Hans, 78, 86 Gizo, Antoni, 53 Godlewski, Aleksander, 52, 53, 57, 58 Godlewski, Feliks, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60 Godlewski, Stanisław, 53 Goebbels, Joseph 18, 107, 120 Goering, Hermann 18 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 194 Goldstein, Ernst, 118, 119 Goldstein, Evelyn, 118 Goldstein, Herta, 118 Goma, Paul, 249, 250, 254 Goniądz, 55, 67 Górka, Olgierd, 161 Grajewo, 47, 49, 52, 57, 67

Index  •  263 Grajewski, Wiktor, 54 Grebliauskas, Pranas, 86 Griese, Bernard, 77 Grigalavičius, Aleksas, 78 Groningen, 103, 113 Gronowski-Brunot, Louis, 205 Groschütz, 78 Gross, Jan Tomasz, 4, 5, 41, 42, 44, 61, 65, 68 Grybas, Vincas, 76 Grzymkowski, Adam, 46 Gurs, 105, 122 Haarlem, 103 Hall, Walraven van, 126 Hamacher, H.W., 111 Haman, Léon, 196 Hamann, Joachim, 83 Hamburg, 100, 106 Heine, Heinrich, 229 Hermanowski, Władysław, 60 Herzl, Theodor, 74 Hesse, 125 Heydrich, Reinhard, 66, 76, 169 Hilversum, 103 Himmler, Heinrich, 111, 141 Hitler, Adolf, 18, 61, 61, 100, 101, 103, 182, 189, 196, 198, 200, 203, 204 Hlohovec, 28 Holzer, Lotte, 123 Houwink ten Cate, Johannes, 128, 129 Howard, Christopher, 235 Hrubieszów, 189 Hummené, 17 Iaşi, 237, 254 Illiescu, Ion, 248, 249, 253 Ionescu, Michail E., 254 Izbica, 121 Jäger, Karl, 76 Jagodne, 185 Jasionówka, 67 Jedwabne, 4, 5, 6, 41, 42, 53, 55, 65, 67, 68, 69 Jerusalem, 42, 44 Jodėnas, A., 83

Jonava, 82 Judt, Tony, 10, 229, 243 Jurbarkas, 6, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 86, 87 Kaletka, Benediktas, 82 Kaminski, Jacques, 205 Karwowo, 60 Katyń, 180 Katz, Kalman, 83 Katzenelson, Yitzhak, 164 Kaunas, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 107 Kęsik, Eugeniusz, 44 Kiev, 204 Kiliuk, Konstanty, 46, 54 Koneczny, Feliks, 180 Klaipėda, 75, 76, 77 Klapinske, Anna, 83 Kleczkowo, 66 Klimaszewska, Helena, 55, 58 Knies, Hildegard, 118 Knout, David, 205 Knyszyn, 56 Kolno 185 Konopki-Błonie 64 Koot, Hendrik, 112 Kopańczyk, Franciszka, 49 Kosmaczewski, Antoni, 46, 47, 48, 51 Kosmaczewski, Jan, 50, 52 Kosmaczewski, Józef, 46, 48 Kosmaczewski, Leon, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 54, 61 Kosmaczewski, Ludwik, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 60 Kosmaczewski, Teofil, 48 Kossak, Zofia, 180, 181, 185 Kozikowski, Marian, 51 Kozikowski, Wincenty, 59, 60 Kreisau, 122 Kretinga, 76, 86 Kunčinienė, Domicelė, 84 Lages, Willy, 112 Laval, Pierre, 200 Lebot, Florent, 31 Leek, 113

264  •  Index Leeuwarden, 127 Leipzig, 100 Lendo, Józef, 54 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 77 Leonavičius, Antanas, 76 Levickas, Mykolas, 75, 77 Lévy, Pierre, 30 Limburg, 130, 132 Liudiškės, 84 Łódź, 106, 107, 177 Loiret, 202 Łomża, 4, 5, 41, 66, 68 London, 110, 126, 159, 170, 172, 174, 177, 200 Louis-Dreyfus (family), 20 Lubac de (Father), 203 Lublin, 9, 105, 121, 122, 179, 180, 182, 184, 203 Luckner, Gertrud, 122 Ludin, Hans, 20 Lviv, 177 Lyon, 203

Montfort, Henri, 202 Morávek, Augustín, 24 Mordasiewicz, Feliks, 48, 57, 58 Mordasiewicz, Piotr, 59 Morvai, A., 29 Moscow, 201, 207 Mosse, Martha, 108 Mścichy, 46 Munich, 14, 15, 100

Maastricht, 134 Mach, Alexander, 18 Madagascar, 105 Majdanek, 109 Malinauskas, 82 Marc, Alexandre, 203 Marchandeau, 19 Matulevičius, 76 Maurras, Charles, 16 Mauthausen, 110 Max, Emil, 76 Mažeikiai, 86 Mazovia, 41, 42, 65 Mazurek (paramedic), 46 Mechelen, 252 Menthon, François de, 191 Mich, Włodzimierz, 186 Michalovce, 17 Middelburg, 103 Milewski, Jan, 50 Minsk, 97, 109 Mockevičius, Povilas, 77 Modigliani, Amedeo, 195 Molėtai, 81, 83, 84, 85

Oradea, 247 Oslo, 111 Osowiec, 45 Oświęcim (see also Auschwitz), 204 Overijssel, 132

Napartow, Barbara, 48 Natelevič, Yudke, 85 Nemeikšys, 81 Nice, 13 Nisko, 105 Nitra, 17, 28 Noord-Brabant, 132 Noord-Holland, 111 North Rhine-Westphalia, 121, 142 Nová Baňa, 29 Nowo Shventshian, 85 Nuremberg, 10, 21, 25, 100, 114, 229, 241

Pachucki, Antoni, 56 Pagel, Fritz, 116 Palanga, 76, 77 Palauskas, 86 Panevėžys, 73, 86 Paris, 16, 17, 19, 22, 27, 31, 192, 193, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206, 210, 249 Patalauskas, Alfonsas, 81, 83 Paulsson, Gunnar, 99, 138, 139, 143, 144 Paxton, Robert O., 16 Péguy, Charles, 202 Perkal, Mojżesz, 45 Pétain, Philippe, 9, 16, 31, 171, 172, 197, 202, 203 Petit, Paul, 202 Piešťany, 28 Piłsudski, Józef, 162 Pineau, Christian (Berteval, François), 199

Index  •  265 Piotrowski, Wincenty, 47 Pissarro, Camille, 195 Podlasie, 5, 41, 42, 65, 68 Poelchau, Harald, 122, 123 Pomerania, 105 Prague, 106, 111 Prekerowa, Teresa, 139 Prešov, 17 Przestrzelski, Jan, 59 Przestrzelski, Piotr, 51 Przyborowski, Henryk, 54, 56 Przytuły, 53 Puru de, Roland, 203 Radziłów, 5, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 Radzilowski, J., 144 Rajgród, 67 Ramm, Gerd, 118 Ramotowska, Marianna, 54, 58 Ramotowski, Stanisław, 48, 58 Rašė, 83 Raseiniai, 74, 77, 78, 79, 86 Rassinier, Paul, 234 Ravensbrück, 122 Reinhard, Hellmuth, 111 Rejno, Antoni, 47 Renteln von, Adrian, 86 Reynaud, Paul, 16 Riga, 84, 107 Rokiškis, 86 Rothschild (family), 192, 193 Rotterdam, 103, 127, 131, 133 Rowecki, Stefan, 66 Rubinshtein, Khayim-Reuven, 77 Saarpfalz, 105 Saliège (Mgr.), 199 Salzburg, 18 Sapielski, Józef, 59 Scheven, Elisabeth von, 125 Scheven, Walter von, 125 Schneidemühl, 105 Schulze-Bernett, G.W., 111 Segal, Erna, 121, 123 Seyss-Inquardt, Arthur, 103

Sharon, Ariel, 252 Šiauliai, 73, 74, 78, 86 Siberia, 6 Šilinės, 83 Siodłomie, 47 Skrodzki, Zygmunt, 47, 48, 53 Słucz 48, 54 Słupsk, 47 Smalininkai, 75 Smetona, Antanas, 74, 82, 84 Sobibór, 180, 181 Speer, Albert, 101, 107 Stadskanaal, 113 Stahlecker, Franz Walther, 75 Stalin, Joseph, 77 Stalingrad, 123 Stanisławów, 179 Statkiewicz, Henryk, 53, 59, 60 Stawiski, 67, 185 Stettin, 105, 113 Stola, Dariusz, 68 Strauss, Herbert A., 109, 121 Strauss, Marianne, 121 Streižys, 81 Striauka, Povilas, 76 Stryj, 60 Strzelecki, Mieczysław, 57 Strzembosz, Tomasz, 65 Stülpnagel, Otto von, 16 Stuttgart, 106 Suchowola, 67 Suraski, Chemia, 46, 47, 61 Sutkowski, Antoni, 53, 54, 55 Svätý Beňadik, 29 Szczuczyn, 51, 67 Szumów, 185 Szymańska, Sylwia, 61 Tammes, Peter, 102, 129 Tauragė, 86 Tchurz, Kazimierz, 49 Teheran, 247 Tel Aviv 74 Telšiai, 86 Tenaille, Robert (André Salmon), 199 Teodoru, Radu, 247 Théas (Mgr.), 199

266  •  Index The Hague, 98, 103, 115, 127, 131, 134, 136, 252 Theresienstadt, 113, 125, 127, 142 Thijn, Ed van, 130 Tilsit, 75, 76, 77, 80 Timişoară, 250 Tiso, Jozef, 14, 18, 29 Topol’čany, 17, 28 Toulouse, 205 Transnistria, 237, 250, 254 Transylvania, 237, 238 Trnava, 17, 28 Treblinka, 180 Trenčín, 17, 28 Troyes, 30 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim, 238, 248 Tuka, Vojtech, 18, 23 Tuskenis, Antanas, 84 Ukmergė, 82 Upper Silesia, 162 Urbonas, Mykolas, 75, 77 Utena, 6, 73, 74, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 Utrecht, 103, 128, 130, 131, 136, 145 Uzdonas, Jonas, 84 Vales, Abel, 76 Vallat, Xavier, 19, 26 Vel d’Hiv, 197 Verbeke, Herbert, 245 Verbeke, Siegfried, 244, 245, 246 Verdun, 16 Verhofstadt, Guy, 253 Vichy, 9, 13, 16, 19, 22, 26, 27, 30, 31, 171, 172, 181, 190, 192, 193, 195, 196, 199, 201, 202, 210 Vienna, 15, 106, 111, 116, 122, 140

Villeurbanne, 202 Vilnius, 73, 179 Vitkova, Julia, 83 Vlissingen, 103 Voltaire, François, 242 Vught, 112, 115, 129, 133 Walaszczyk, Feliks, 44, 47 Wallonia, 232, 235, 236 Warsaw, 8, 9, 42, 99, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187 Wasersztejn, Berek, 46, 47, 53, 61 Wasersztejn, Lejb, 59, 60 Wasersztejn, Szmul, 61 Wąsocz, 51, 61, 62, 64 Westerbork, 111, 112, 112, 115, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135 Wiechert (SS Second Lieutenant), 76 Wierzbicki, Jan, 47, 49 Wierzbowo, 45, 50, 52 Wiesel, Elie, 249, 250, 253, 254 Winnicki, A., 55 Winschoten, 113 Wisliceny, Dieter, 20, 21, 24, 25 Wiśniewska, Jadwiga, 48 Wolkowysk, 52, 53 Zamość, 182 Zarasai, 86 Zaręby Kościelne, 67 Żbikowski, Andrzej, 61, 186 Zeeland, 111 Zilberis, Srolke, 84 Žilina, 17 Žukas, 82, 86, 87 Zündel, Ernst, 235