In Europe (61 page)

Telling in this regard is the story surrounding the few rare aerial photos of Auschwitz. They were taken on 31 May and 25 August, 1944, by a British reconnaissance plane that had been sent to scout out the nearby I. G. Farben complex for the production of synthetic rubber. Quite by accident, the crew left the camera on as they flew above the death camps. At the end of the roll shot on 25 August there are clear images of the platform at Birkenau, where a train had just arrived. A line of prisoners can be seen, on their way to Crematorium II. The negative was discovered by chance only thirty years later. In 1944, no one on the RAF staff noticed it.

In addition, the British and the Americans had agreed not to respond to the ‘blackmail politics’ of Germany and its allies. As early as February 1943, the Rumanian government under Ion Antonescu had offered to allow 70,000 Jews to leave for Palestine. The British rejected the offer. Any horse-trading with human lives would, after all, have run counter to their military strategies. Although they admitted that mass murders were taking place – the British House of Commons had even held a minute's silence for the victims on 17 December, 1942 – the restrictive refugee policy remained firmly in place.

There were instances of courage and resistance everywhere in Europe, even in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In the grounds of Crematorium III, a series of handwritten notes in Yiddish was dug up in summer 1952. Probably left there by a Jewish member of a
Sonderkommando
, they documented a whole series of incidents. In late 1943, for example, almost
200 Polish partisans were taken to the gas chambers, along with a few hundred Dutch Jews. When they were all completely undressed, a young Polish woman held an impassioned speech, closing with the words: ‘We will not die now, the history of our people will make us immortal, our will and our spirit will live on and blossom.’ She also addressed the Jews of the
Sonderkommando
who were standing around: ‘Tell our brothers, our people, that we are going to our death in full awareness and full of pride.’ Then they sang the Polish national anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikva’, and together they sang the ‘Internationale’. ‘While they were still singing, the car from the Red Cross [in which the Zyklon B was transported] arrived and the gas was tossed into the room, and they all gave up the ghost in song and ecstasy, dreaming of brotherhood and a better world.’

A little less than a year later, on 7 October, 1944, a massive uprising took place. A large group of prisoners tried to escape, but despite careful preparations, the plan failed. Four SS guards were killed, 12 were wounded, 455 prisoners were machine-gunned. As late as January 1945, four women were hanged for having smuggled explosives from the Union factory into the camp.

Today a distinction is drawn between active resistance and ‘resistiveness’, that is to say, the widespread resistance to deportation and other forms of Nazi terror within a normal society. Often – as in the cases, for example, of France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy – the measure of resistiveness was at least as essential to the Jews’ chances of survival as outright resistance.

In Germany, courageous cells of communists and Christians continued to work underground, and several pockets of resistance arose within the
Wehrmacht
as well. The scope of this covert resistance should not be underestimated: an indication of it is found in the sheer number of German political prisoners who died in the concentration camps, well over 100,000 in all. The actual number of Germans who sabotaged the regime, in one way or another, must have been many times that.

Yet in Germany there was no massive, grass roots popular resistance. Despite the success of the women's uprising on Berlin's Rosenstrasse, it remained the only demonstration of its kind there. The merciless Gestapo reprisals, especially after 1941, no doubt had something to do with it:
the students of the White Rose were beheaded for passing out a few pamphlets. On the other hand, the Berlin policeman Wilhelm Krützfeld, who courageously defended the Great Berlin Synagogue against the SA during Kristallnacht, was never touched: five years later he retired at his own request, ‘with the Führer's thanks for service rendered’. Striking, too, was the attitude towards dissidents within Reserve Police Battalion 101. Approximately twenty per cent of the battalion refused to take part in the first mass murders in Poland. Those dissidents received, at most, extra sentry duty or unpleasant kitchen-police tasks, but otherwise ran no risk whatsoever. Christopher Browning has emphasised, as have others, that ‘not a single case has been documented of severe punishment for Germans who refused to kill unarmed citizens’. This means that the Germans who did take part in the mass murders must, for the most part, have done so voluntarily. That compliance was probably based in part on peer pressure, partly on typical German discipline, and partly on antiSemitism – although Battalion 101 also showed few scruples, for example, when ordered to destroy villages around Zamość populated only by Poles.

Eric Johnson interviewed forty-five Jewish survivors from Krefeld. When asked whether they had received significant assistance or support from the local population, almost ninety per cent of them said they had not. The lack of systematic resistance is also evident from Victor Klemperer's diary; he did, however, make note of individual signs of sympathy – a handshake in public, for example – when he walked down the street wearing his Star of David. In the factory where he was forced to work from 1943, Klemperer detected not the slightest trace of anti-Semitism among the German workers. According to him, every Jew who survived ‘had an Aryan angel somewhere’.

In other parts of Europe, the resistiveness of civilian society was much more pronounced. Resistance was seen in many circles as something normal, often even as one's civic duty, no matter how great the risks. At Auschwitz, Witold Pilecki, a courageous officer in the Polish underground resistance, succeeded in infiltrating the camp as early as September 1940, and organised resistance cells for a period of two years until his escape in 1943. In Amsterdam, the communist Piet Nak openly declared the February Strike. The bankers Walraven and Gijs van Hall carried out the biggest banking fraud in Dutch history: with the proceeds, their
organisation was able to keep alive for years tens of thousands of resistance people and those in hiding.

In Marseille, the American Varian Fry helped in the escape of hundreds of prominent European intellectuals. The 3,000 inhabitants of the isolated French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (Haute-Loire), led by Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, provided shelter throughout the war years for more than 5,000 Jews. In Vilnius, Anton Schmidt, a sergeant major in the
Wehrmacht
, saved thousands of Jews from the firing squad. At Kaunas, Japanese consul Sempo Sugihara allowed at least 1,600 Jewish refugees to escape by giving them transit visas for Japan. In Krakow, the industrialist Oskar Schindler was able to save most of his Jewish workers. Something similar was achieved at the Skoda plant in the Czech town of Plzeń by Albert Göring, the brother of Hitler's right-hand man.

In October 1943, most of Denmark's Jews were able to escape to Sweden on a few fishing boats, aided by the police, the churches, the Danish coastguard and countless unsung Danes. Almost all 50,000 of Bulgaria's Jews were left in peace until the end of the war, thanks to the outspoken public opinion against deportations expressed in the newspapers, the pulpits and at public meetings, a popular will which the Nazis did not dare to defy. Jews generally received protection in the areas under Italian control as well; the Italian officers considered the anti-Semitic politics of the Germans ‘incompatible with the honour of the Italian Army’.

In Hungary, the Red Cross representative Friedrich Born, along with the diplomats Carl Lutz (of Switzerland) and Raoul Wallenberg (of Sweden), was able to save the lives of many tens of thousands of Jews by means of a highly dangerous ruse involving Swedish passports and British immigration permits for Palestine. Wallenberg came from a rich and famous family of Swedish bankers and industrialists. During his activities in Hungary he was in constant contact with Nazis and Western leaders. For the perpetually paranoid agents of the NKVD, that was enough to label him a spy. Immediately after the Russians occupied the country in January 1945, he and his chauffeur were arrested. Within the Soviet Gulag camp system he was registered as a ‘prisoner of war’; in the years that followed, there were regular rumours of his having been seen here or there by recently released prisoners. Those rumours were never
confirmed. In 1957, the Soviets came up with a document dated 17 July, 1947 in which it was stated that ‘the prisoner Wallenberg, well known to you, died last night in his cell’. It was signed by Smoltsov, former director of the infirmary at Moscow's Lubyanka prison. Wallenberg, it was claimed, had died of ‘coronary failure’. In November 2000, the chairman of a new Russian investigation committee admitted in a footnote to his report that the diplomat had probably been executed in 1947. The motive for his abduction was purely commercial: the Soviet government had hoped in this way to force the Wallenbergs to provide them with some politically sensitive supplies.

Tens of thousands of European families took Jews into hiding, hundreds of thousands of families were involved in channelling rations, countless larger and smaller resistance groups fought for and alongside runaway Jews. The risks were enormous, the sanctions were grave, yet still it went on.

In Belgium, some 35,000 of the country's 60,000 Jews were saved in this fashion: 60 per cent. In France, 270,000 of the 350,000 Jews survived: more than 75 per cent. In Norway, 1,000 of the 1,800 Jews survived: approximately 60 per cent. Of the 7,500 Danish Jews, more than 100 died: 98 per cent were saved. In other parts of the continent, the percentage of survivors was much lower: in the Netherlands, only 40,000 of the country's 140,000 Jews made it through the war: less than 30 per cent. Of the 2.7 million Polish Jews, barely 75,000 survived: 2 per cent. At the same time, for their singular courage in the war, it has been helpers from these latter two countries who have most often received the honorary title of ‘Righteous among Nations’ from the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum: 5,373 and 4,289, respectively.

It would be simple enough to equate such figures, as is sometimes done, with values like ‘courage’ or ‘humanity’, or conversely with the degree of ‘anti-Semitism’ in a given country. Anyone providing shelter for a Jewish family in Germany ran an infinitely greater risk of being informed on than someone in Belgium. In Poland, hiding Jews was a capital offence, in Vichy France the penalty was only a short prison term. There were in Warsaw's ghetto alone more Jews than in all of France. Where were they to go? In oft-praised Denmark, the actions – without wishing to detract from the courage of the Danish resistance – involved
only a very small number of Jews, who could be helped to escape with relative ease. Consider, by comparison, the problems faced by the resistance in the Netherlands, where tens of thousands of families had to be hidden in a densely populated country under strict SS and SD supervision, with no single direct route of escape to non-occupied territories.

Of the 7.5 million Jews in the parts of Europe occupied by Germany, only 20 per cent were still alive in 1945. Only one out of every five Jewish men, women and children survived the Holocaust.

Could the sole driving force behind this petty, middle-class, vindictive anti-Semitism really have been the old Jew-baiting of Paris, Vienna and Berlin, the hatred that encompassed Raphaël Viau and Karl Lueger, as well as Georg Ritter von Schönerer? There are authors who advance this claim with conviction, and who are paid particular heed in Germany. Despite the painful accusation it contains, it is also an attractive idea, because it is simple and comforting. The theory implies, after all, that mass murders of this kind will never repeat themselves once the folly of anti-Semitism has been abandoned. In other words: the Holocaust was a gruesome but one-time-only excess on the part of a generation past. Nothing like that will ever happen to us again.

The background to the Holocaust, however, was more complicated than that. Anti-Semitism played a role, of course, even a major role, but the Holocaust probably had many more causes, most of which had little or nothing to do with a hatred for Jews. The survivors of Krefeld interviewed by Eric Johnson reported almost no anti-Semitic incidents, and in only a quarter of the cases of Jews being reported to the Gestapo did motives such as ‘political belief’ play a role. Jews were informed against much more often because of conflicts between neighbours, love gone sour, or for financial gain.

This last factor in particular, the matter of material interests, should not be underestimated, and the Nazis put it to most effective use. The contents of the 72,000 vacant Jewish homes were distributed around the country and sold at auctions for a pittance. The historian Frank Bajohr, who studied the deportations from Hamburg, speaks of ‘one of the greatest exchanges of property in modern history, a massive robbery in which an increasingly large portion of the German population took part.’

Another important factor was the total absence of a
mentality
of resistance. In Denmark, Bulgaria, Italy and on the Côte d'Azur, the persecution of Jews failed largely because the local authorities and police considered it beneath their moral dignity. Liberal and tolerant Amsterdam, on the other hand, scarcely had an anti-Semitic tradition. Yet all of the German agents and officers charged with deporting that city's 80,000 Jews could easily fit in a single group portrait. The vast majority of Jewish families were deported, almost without a hitch, by citizens of Amsterdam: Dutch policemen, tram drivers and railway engineers. The Dutch identification card was almost impossible to forge: the proud, humdrum work of a perfectionist Dutch civil servant. Amsterdam's registrar's office helped the Germans with such pinpoint accuracy that the resistance finally had to blow it up.

A similar situation applied in Paris and other French cities. In mid-1942, there were no more than 3,000 Gestapo agents in all of France. Approximately three quarters of the Jews arrested were detained by French policemen. Yet most of those policemen and civil servants were not Nazis, and in no way anti-Semitic. It is with good reason that Adam Lebor and Roger Boyes, in their study of the European resistance movements, speak of ‘a massive collapse of moral and civic virtues’.