Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (42 page)

Between July 16 and 31, the period in which the Jews of Rhodes and Kos were taken to Piraeus, the head of the naval transport office on the nearby island of Leros filed a report listing the contents of one shipment. It read: “(1) supplies from the mainland: 1,599 tons, 4 trucks, 14.7 centimeters packages, 2 soldiers; (2) to the mainland: 216 tons, 1,750 Jews.”
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(These figures and the ones that follow show small discrepancies in the number of deportees, which are due to deaths in transit and imprecision in counting.) In his fortnightly review, the head of the central transport office in Piraeus reported the arrival of fourteen motorized boats with the following, extremely light loads: “8 tons currants, 37 tons munitions, 82 tons coal, 37 tons equipment, 14 tons trade supplies, 298 tons empty containers and scrap, 33 soldiers, and 1,733 Jews.” On August 1, “1 female Jew” arrived belatedly on the MS
Pelikan.
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The historian Michael Molho describes the journey from the perspective of the deportees:

On June 24, the detainees are crammed into three transport barges towed by a schooner. After a journey reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, they arrive in Piraeus, where they are handled roughly. Those who in the opinion of the navy watchmen are slow to disembark are brutally mistreated. An elderly woman is beaten so badly with a revolver that her brains splatter the surrounding detainees. Seven deportees have died at sea, twelve more are in the process of dying, and the rest are starved, thirsty, helpless, and exhausted. In Piraeus they are robbed of everything they have on them. Belts and shoe soles are searched, and whatever is concealed there confiscated. The brutish guards go so far as to search the private parts of helpless, horrified women. False teeth, bridges, and crowns are ripped from people’s mouths. The booty is collected in four crates usually used for transporting cans of petroleum. The crates, suddenly converted into treasure chests, are filled to the top with jewelry, bars of gold, gold coins, and valuables of all kinds.

Shortly after their arrival in Piraeus, the deportees boarded trains for Auschwitz. According to research carried out by survivors, a total of 1,673 Jews were deported from Rhodes and 94 from Kos. Twenty-one died in transit, 1,145 perished at Auschwitz, and 437 died in labor camps. Only 151 Jews from Rhodes and 12 from Kos survived.
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In 1947, Rhodes had 60 Jewish inhabitants. Kos had one.
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THE DEPORTATION of the Jews of Rhodes seems at first glance to be a crime motivated solely by an insane ideology of racial genocide. Historical materials suggest, however, that the Wehrmacht organized the deportatin because it fit in with their military aims and provided an immediate benefit. By the time the Jews of Rhodes arrived in Piraeus, the Wehrmacht was no longer able to make purchases in Italian liras, which were still legal tender on the island. The same was true for the drachma in nearby areas. The desperate financial situation explains the voracious appetite for gold, which led Wehrmacht members to rip it out of people’s mouths. Along with exchangeable goods, gold was the only viable means of payment in Greece, as well as on Rhodes. In early July, the commanding admiral of the Aegean had demanded “payment of the balance [of occupation costs] in gold.” Without it, he feared “a catastrophic effect on our defensive strength.”
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In October 1944, the Central Office of the Reich Credit Banks concluded that “the Wehrmacht authorities had great success in the period before their retreat [from Greece] by meeting their obligations with gold.”
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The valuables so viciously stolen by German soldiers on July 31 in Piraeus represented only a small portion of what the Jews of Rhodes had once possessed. The vast majority of their belongings remained on the island. (They were held—or more accurately ignored—by British troops until May 8, 1945.) When the Jews were moved to hastily established ghettos in the city of Rhodes and three villages, Pepo Recanati, a Jewish Greek Security Service collaborator from Salonika, convinced them “to take along a lot of provisions and valuables: jewelry, gold, securities, etc.” The Wehrmacht then confiscated those possessions. As for what they left behind, Molho writes: “Accompanied by informants, the Security Police searched the abandoned houses for hidden treasures. Whatever could be transported—household items, linens, furniture, glass, books—was carefully packed.”
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Immediately after the Jews were gone, Ulrich Kleemann formed a “committee for securing Jewish estates.”
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On July 20, the Jews were taken to the German-Italian military airfield in Rhodes, where a German officer in a white shirt seized their valuables. According to the recollections of one survivor, Violette Fintz, the officer had a translator at his side (probably Recanati) who spoke Ladino. German soldiers filled four sacks with jewelry.
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The deportees were told that the jewelry and other valuables were being confiscated “to pay for the maintenance of the Jewish population.”
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(There was a parallel instance of theft in Jerba, Tunisia, where some 4,500 Jews lived in two ancient ghettos. Pressured by the worsening military situation, the Wehrmacht commandant there demanded fifty kilograms of gold from the city’s head rabbi, threatening to bomb the Jewish quarter if he did not get it. In the end forty-seven kilograms of gold were handed over.)
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The decision to dispossess the Jews of Rhodes was not spontaneous. Military officials responsible for war finances had long talked about it as a possibility. On July 31, 1944, with the looted valuables in the possession of the island’s German occupiers, chief intendant Werner Kersten summarized their discussions. In a secret report on the Wehrmacht’s needs in Greece, he wrote: “The Navy High Command reported in late June 1944 that the delivery of fresh supplies to Crete and the Aegean islands was endangered and called, in the interest of the islands’ defense, for the ruthless impounding of gold and currency as well as basic regulation of the currency.̵
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Although Kersten doesn’t explicitly mention Jews here, the context of his report strongly suggests that he was referring to Jewish assets. The Wehrmacht had already confiscated gold from the Jews of Salonika in 1942-43 to pay its ongoing costs. In the summer of 1944, Wehrmacht officials once again decided to use this proven option.

Faced with accelerating inflation, the Wehrmacht commander for mainland Greece, who was also responsible for Rhodes, suggested using “exchangeable goods from supplies of confiscated property (Jewish assets, etc.)” to supply German troops.
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At the time of his suggestion, the only significant assets left were those of the Jews of Corfu, Ioánnina, Crete, and Rhodes. Kleemann’s secret directive of July 16, cited above, encourages the same conclusion that Jewish assets were sold off to pay the Wehrmacht’s operating costs. The deportation of Rhodes’s Jews, Kleemann told his soldiers, was justified by “the political and economic conditions in the area of command.”
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Responsibility for abandoned real estate was transferred to the island’s Italian administration, clearly with the goal of converting it into paper money for use by Wehrmacht soldiers.
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Transportable property remained in German hands. The funds were urgently needed. According to eyewitness testimony from Erwin Lenz, a German soldier who served in a penal battalion on Rhodes, malnutrition began to spread in the fall of 1944, affecting even “the German troops who had remained on the island.” Lenz happened to see a secret communiqué from the newly appointed island commandant, Major General Eduard Wagner. “In this communiqué,” Lenz testified, “Wagner informed [the unit’s Nazi Party head], among other things, that he had ordered Lieutenant Captain Günther to exchange belongings confiscated and secured from Jews, who had been deported several months previously, for food from local merchants.” The transactions “would have to be carried out very delicately,” however, because Wagner feared encountering difficulties from the International Red Cross, which was sending aid to the island’s residents. “In addition,” Lenz concluded, Wagner ordered “all participants to maintain strict silence about the source of the goods to be exchanged. Nonetheless, other German soldiers told me that transactions of this sort did indeed take place.”
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Reich officials often justified their policies toward the Jews with arguments about economic necessity. For example, one German bureaucrat stationed abroad during the war made the reasonable-sounding—if morally abhorrent—assertion that the sale of Jewish assets was “an effective means of price regulation.”
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But the sale of Jewish household effects and the confiscated wares of Jewish businesses by no means eliminated the shortages in supplies caused by the war and by the larcenous greed of the Germans. It could only reduce those shortages for brief periods of time and in certain regions. This was nothing more than a classic instance of the law of supply and demand. There is no evidence to support the propagandistic claim that ghettoization and deportation of Jews put a stop to “contraband and black market trading.”

The immediate effect of the complete dispossession of a group of victims was an increase in supplies of consumer goods—especially clothing, furniture, kitchen appliances—that were in great demand. The sudden availability of goods—and not the alleged prevention of black market trading—was what stabilized prices. A second market mechanism also played a role. The removal of a significant number of urban inhabitants reduced the number of consumers, which in turn reduced demand at a time when supplies were increasing.

The fact is that Jews were not the ones who engaged in black market transactions. The real culprits, as the war progressed, were German soldiers and those who purchased supplies for the German military and civilian agencies. By creating unbridled demand for goods wherever they set foot, citizens of the Reich destroyed the price equilibrium everywhere in Europe. They also developed an active self-interest in blaming others for what they themselves did.

THE PRECEDING chapters have discussed the actions taken by officers and civil servants in the German military administration. In many places—Belgium, Salonika, Tunisia, and Rhodes—they directly organized raids for the purpose of plunder. In other occupied territories—Serbia, France, and Italy—they put pressure on local authorities to dispossess Jews for the benefit of the Wehrmacht. Statements by General Ulrich Kleemann, by Max Merten, and by army commander in chief Walther von Brauchitsch, who in 1940 attached “the highest priority . . . to accelerating the removal of Jews from the economy,” attest to the Wehrmacht’s role in the anti-Semitic campaigns. Everywhere they went, these men acted in accordance with the motto Gold is the price of survival.

Before the victims of Nazi looting could be deported from the occupied territories, German military officers had to agree on and, in most cases, provide the necessary means of transport. They did this without the slightest objection—and not simply because they hated Jews or were willing to sacrifice the last vestiges of their consciences out of a supposedly innate German need for obedience. The officers helped carry out the deportations because the deportations served their own interest.

Historians continue to debate how much responsibility individual German soldiers must bear for the acts of murder committed during the Holocaust. But an equally compelling concern for scholars should be identifying the structural factors—apart from popular racist ideology—that motivated the Wehrmacht to seek the removal of the Jews from the European continent. It is matter of historical record that policies of “ethnic disentanglement”
(ethnische Entflechtung)
and the looting of food and other necessities accelerated the Final Solution. Ceaseless Nazi propaganda alleging that Jews represented an enemy fifth column promoted passivity among Germans in the face of mass murder. Alongside these three rationales, considered standard in the literature of the Holocaust, the current volume proposes a fourth: field officers’ interest in extracting the largest possible contributions from occupied countries toward the costs of occupation. The motivation was not personal greed but the professional determination of the military leadership to wage war in such a way that financial shortfalls would not affect military strategy and troop morale.

At first glance, the material resrces gained from the “de-Jewification” of Europe appear scant, amounting to no more than 5 percent of the total revenues that flowed into the German war chest between 1939 and 1945. Yet this figure is misleading. The Reich attached great importance to the proceeds from the Aryanization initiatives. In every budgetary debate, whether in a democracy, a corporation, or a dictatorship, one of the most contentious issues is who will bear the greatest burden. Another is how far to stretch finances during times of crisis. German economists insisted that no more than 50 percent of war costs be financed through credit. Every bit of revenue thus counted for double, for both its own value and its value in increasing the self-imposed credit limit. Within this context, even a few percentage points made a big difference. Additional revenue sources eased the ongoing financial crisis and allowed the regime to forgo unpopular measures, such as hikes in beverage taxes or cuts in soldiers’ pay.

A second aspect of the asset-seizure campaign is even more important. The main revenues from liquidated Jewish assets fed the German war machine during the decisive period between the beginning of the summer offensive in 1942 and the battle of Kursk in 1943. The offensive of 1942 was originally planned to proceed through the Caucasus to Iraq and cut England off from the Suez Canal. The 1943 campaign was intended to strike a major blow at the Soviet Union and restore German momentum in what had become a dire situation on the Eastern Front. For this, the Third Reich had to mobilize all its resources. A significant portion of the funds needed to finance these campaigns was raised from Jewish assets in Serbia, Greece, France, Holland, Belgium, Poland, and, of course, Germany itself. Using stolen Jewish wealth, Germany succeeded in covering 70 percent of the occupation costs for Greece for a number of months, and the Nazi leadership employed a similar strategy with its allies Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania between 1941 and 1942. Examined from this perspective, Germany’s Aryanization initiatives can be seen as a crucial part of a much larger mobilization.