Peter Kenez - The Coming of The Holocaust - From Antisemitism To Genocide-Cambridge University Press (2013)

The Coming of the Holocaust
From Antisemitism to Genocide
The Coming of the Holocaust aims to help readers understand the

circumstances that made the Holocaust possible. Peter Kenez demon-
strates that the occurrence of the Holocaust was not predetermined as
a result of modern history, but instead was the result of contingencies.
He shows that three preconditions had to exist for the genocide to take
place: modern antisemitism, meaning Jews had to become economically
and culturally successful in the post–French Revolution world to arouse
fear rather than contempt; an extremist group possessing a deeply held,
irrational, and profoundly inhumane worldview had to take control
of the machinery of a powerful modern state; and the context of a
major war with mass killings. The book also discusses the correlations
between social and historical differences in individual countries regard-
ing the “success” of the Germans in their effort to exterminate Jews.
Peter Kenez is Emeritus Professor of History, University of California,

Santa Cruz. He is the author of many books, including Hungary from
the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime
in Hungary, 1944–1948 (Cambridge 2006); A History of the Soviet
Union from the Beginning to the End (2nd edition, Cambridge 2006);
and Red Attack, White Resistance (2005). He is a board member for
the journal Revolutionary Russia.
The Coming of the Holocaust
From Antisemitism to Genocide
PETER KENEZ
University of California, Santa Cruz
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa
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C Peter Kenez 2013
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permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Kenez, Peter, author.
The coming of the Holocaust : from antisemitism to genocide / Peter Kenez,
University of California, Santa Cruz.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-04335-0 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-63684-2 (pbk.)
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) 2. Jews – Persecutions – History.
3. Antisemitism – History. I. Title.
d804.3.k46 2013
940.53 18–dc23 2013015315
isbn 978-1-107-04335-0 Hardback
isbn 978-1-107-63684-2 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
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Contents
Acknowledgments page vii
Introduction 1
part one: the rise of modern antisemitism

1 French Jews 11
2 Jews of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union 30
3 Hungarian Jews 52
part two: the national socialists take control

of the german state machinery
4 National Socialism and the Jews 71
5 Propaganda 88
6 What to Do with the Jews? 103
part three: war

7 Ghettos in Poland, 1939–1941 127
8 The Holocaust in the Soviet Union 151
9 The Romanian Holocaust 176
10 Germany, 1942 196
11 The Holocaust in Western Europe 205
12 The Last Island: Hungary, 1932–1945 235
13 Extermination Camps 261
14 Afterthoughts 289
Bibliography 295
Index 303
v
Acknowledgments
My friends have encouraged me while working on this manuscript, and

I am grateful for their support. The idea of writing this book grew out
of a course that I have been teaching for decades with my friend and col-
league, Murray Baumgarten, who therefore has heard all the arguments
that are presented here. Two of my kind friends, Géza Kállay and Bruce
Thompson, read the entire manuscript and made helpful comments. I
have received encouragement and advice from my friends Forrest Robin-
son, John Gams, Erich Heftmann, and Paul Hollander. I have been most
influenced in my thinking by the writings of my friend, Viktor Karády.
My wife, Penelope, to whom this book is dedicated, read and commented
on the entire manuscript.
vii
Introduction
The Holocaust is a historical event like all others, and yet we tend to
think that it is different from other significant episodes of recent his-
tory. It is different because of the emotional baggage that is inevitably
attached to it. It is different because as we talk about mass murder we
talk about extreme situations and have an opportunity to examine how
human beings have responded to those, and how human organizations
and institutions functioned under extraordinary circumstances. It is also
different because as human beings, we want to believe that there is a dis-
tinction between right and wrong, and it would be hard to find a topic in
which the issue of morality so insistently resurfaces. It is understandable
why the perpetrators of the mass murder of Jews came to stand for ulti-
mate evil. Unlike other genocides, this one was committed in the center
of the civilized world against a defenseless and nonthreatening minority.
No other mass murder was so ideologically driven, so well organized,
and carried out with such mad efficiency.
Human beings can understand one another because we have shared
common experiences, and we relate what we learn from others to our
own past. At the same time we are all individuals and therefore dif-
ferent, with different histories and characters; consequently no under-
standing can be complete. Just as the same way that we understand but
yet never fully comprehend other human beings, so our understanding
of historical events can never be complete. This observation is particu-
larly true concerning an event that is profoundly contrary to our ideas of
decency, humanity, justice, sanity, compassion and enlightenment. Never-
theless, historians ought not to be too pessimistic about the value of their
work. Understanding is always a matter of degrees. It is possible, indeed
1
2 The Coming of the Holocaust
necessary, to attempt to comprehend difficult topics, and none is more

difficult than the Holocaust.
What is the use of writing about the Holocaust? Why add one more
book to a collection that could already fill a good-sized library? We cannot
accept the usual answer: that we must learn from the past if we want
to avoid the mistakes of previous eras. That explanation is insufficient
because we know that two events are never exactly alike. History has
boundless imagination for horrors, and the past will never be repeated
exactly. The lessons of history are never simple ones that can be used
again and again, because circumstances are never the same. People learn
the wrong lessons just as often as the right ones. That is, they try to use
historical analogies in circumstances when they are not really applicable.
There are many examples where people were misled by faulty analogies.
The point of studying this extraordinary series of events is partially
the same as studying any history: although one might not learn concrete
lessons, one may acquire a measure of wisdom. We expand our horizons.
We learn about how particular individuals acted in extreme situations. We
learn how some societies functioned under a certain set of circumstances,
and thereby we gain some perspective. The study of the Holocaust makes
us think about the limits of humanity. It makes us consider the painful
question of how we would have behaved in the place of the victims and
also in the place of the victimizers. A careful examination of circumstances
in which the murders took place should disabuse us of the comforting
belief that we can find easy answers. We cannot learn “lessons,” but we
might, just maybe, acquire a bit of wisdom. It is by no means certain,
but at least it is possible that people who have a wider perspective might
make better decisions in the future.
There is another reason for studying this topic that is more difficult
to articulate because it goes beyond the boundaries of academic inquiry.
We feel that we owe it to the victims to know what they experienced. We
do not have the right to be squeamish, to turn our gaze away from their
suffering. It is not much, but that is all that we can do for the victims: we
remember.
In spite of the voluminous studies on this subject, the nagging question
remains: how could such a horrific series of events take place at the heart
of civilized Europe, in the middle of a civilized century? What was it about
Jews that made it possible for their enemies to project so many fantasies
on them and thereby prepare the public to the extent that many tolerated
while others actually welcomed mass murder? What was going on in the
minds of the killers that enabled them to justify their inhumanity? How
Introduction 3
did they look at themselves? Probably the reason that there are so many
studies of the Holocaust is that we are all groping for an explanation, an
understanding that somehow continues to elude us.
Perhaps the most difficult problem in the history of the Holocaust
is to understand how human beings could come together and decide
to exterminate millions of other human beings – old and young, men
and women, people who had neither harmed them nor threatened them.
Historians have in vain searched for an explicit order from Hitler for
killing all Jews. Not only was there no such order, but in fact no clear and
unambiguous decision was ever made. Of course, Hitler and other Nazi
chiefs wrote such sentences that implied or explicitly stated that it was
necessary to get rid of Jews. But it turned out to be much easier to write
and talk than actually taking steps toward carrying out the outrageous
plan. Instead, mass killings came about as a series of decisions made often
in an ad hoc fashion. Each anti-Jewish measure, starting with the pogrom
that followed the Nazi seizure of power, made it easier to take the next
step. There was no stopping point. In this study I regard my primary task
as not to describe once again the horrors that people suffered, but to trace
the stages that ended in genocide.
The topic of the Holocaust requires special sensitivity. Artists, theolo-
gians, writers, and poets have attempted interpretations, and some have
argued that comprehension is inherently impossible and consequently
advised silence. But the issue of incomprehensibility is perhaps built on
a misunderstanding. Although we do not hope to be able to give a full
account, to provide an explanation of what happened and why, we might
be able to take steps in the direction of understanding.
Because the Holocaust is a historical event, it should not be removed
from the historical context in which it took place: by doing so, we relin-
quish the opportunity of coming close to an understanding of what hap-
pened, how it could have happened, and why it happened. It should be
possible to discuss the Holocaust as we discuss other major events of
the twentieth century, for example, the Russian Revolution. We should
be able to use the same tools in discussing the Holocaust as we use for the
description of other historical events, such as narration and comparisons.
We can critically examine the evidence. We can pose questions concerning
causes and consequences.
The Holocaust is obviously a phenomenon of the modern age. Both
mass propaganda that denigrated Jews and the machinery of the mod-
ern state were two of the key preconditions for its “success.” It is true
that Jews had suffered pogroms in the Middle Ages. For example, in the
Ukraine in the seventeenth century, close to a hundred thousand were

murdered. Jews were expelled again and again from their places of resi-
dence, for example from England in 1290, and were compelled to exist
under a variety of humiliating restrictions. Yet, what Hitler produced was
something fundamentally different. Our survey, therefore, must begin
with the age of the French Revolution, which is by common consent the
beginning of the modern age in Europe.
The first part of this book describes the varieties of Jewish life approx-
imately 150 years before the Holocaust and what exactly was destroyed.
As I already mentioned, my goal is to help readers understand what
happened and why the attempted genocide happened in particular to
Jews. How did Hitler succeed in mobilizing killers and finding willing
collaborators in every country that came under German occupation? To
understand the nature and causes of hostility to Jews (i.e., antisemitism)
is not the same as blaming the victim, yet it is essential to pose the ques-
tion: why Jews, in particular? What exactly was there in the ordinary
understanding of Jewish life that inspired so much hostility; why was it
possible for the antisemites to project so many mad and paranoid fan-
tasies on them? When I discuss the rising wave of antisemitism, I point
out that antisemitism is a very broad concept; within it there existed a
spectrum of prejudice from the merely unattractive social exclusion to
genocidal fantasies and ultimate willingness to carry out these fantasies.
Some antisemites behaved heroically and saved Jews at the moments of
their greatest peril, whereas others, seemingly normal people, who had
exhibited no strong feelings about that minority, became willing partici-
pants in mass murder. Not all antisemites were alike; not all of them were
motivated by the same hatred.
Several preconditions had to exist to make possible the extermination
of the great majority of European Jewry. Antisemitism was a necessary,
but not a sufficient condition. Clearly, even powerful antisemitic prejudice
shared by most members of a given society, even of a modern racial
variety, in itself would not have resulted in mass murder. The second
precondition was Hitler’s and his close followers’ pathological hatred
and fear of Jews and the Nazi movement’s success in taking possession
of the machinery of a modern state. Yet even after the Nazis established
totalitarian control and were able to punish their opponents without
restraint, mass murder could not yet commence. For a long time Hitler’s
followers did not know “how to solve the Jewish question.” Only after
the third and necessary precondition was also present, namely war, could
the killing of Jews take place. This book explores those preconditions:
Introduction 5
the rise of modern antisemitism, the development of Nazi policies and

attempts at mass persuasion, and wartime when mass murder actually
occurred.
Underlying this discussion is my assumption that modern antisemitism
was different from the medieval variety. It is perhaps relevant to recall
that the very word “antisemitism” came into existence only in the 1870s.
The German writer, Wilhelm Marr, argued that Jews were fundamen-
tally different from others and therefore could never be assimilated, but
had to be defeated. If they were not defeated, then, as an alien body,
they would subvert an otherwise healthy Christian society. Acculturation
made them all the more dangerous precisely because they became less
visible.
To describe Jewish life in the post-emancipation period is not an easy
task both because Jewish life greatly differed from country to country
and because it was a time of extremely rapid change; consequently gen-
eralizations are difficult and hazardous.1 In a study such as this it is
impossible to do justice to the variety of Jewish experiences; it must be
limited to a discussion of representative cases. Based on a distinction made
by Ezra Mendelsohn, I describe three types of Jews in this time period:
Western European (successful acculturation, high rate of intermarriage,
making intellectual contributions to the national as opposed to the partic-
ular Jewish culture, living in a Western-type political environment, etc.).
Eastern European (speaking Yiddish, maintaining a separate cultural life,
living in a premodern political environment, etc.), and a special case of
the defunct Habsburg Empire, in particular, Hungary, where Jews lived
in an Eastern type of political culture and yet possessed the characteristics
that we associate with the Western-type Jewry.2 Although in the course
of the nineteenth century the vast majority of Jews were of Eastern type,
nevertheless we must begin our discussion with the Western type for it
was here that the string of changes began that would later spread to the
rest of the European continent.
In the second part of the book I describe Nazi ideology and the devel-
opment of the policies that ultimately led to the almost completely suc-
cessful extermination of Jews. Was there something special in the German
past that predisposed them to become perpetrators? Recently a historian,
1 The word “emancipation” comes from Roman law, originally describing the process of
a child becoming an adult and consequently being freed from the authority of the father.
Later it came to mean becoming a citizen with rights equal to all others.
2 Ezra Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
Daniel Goldhagen, claimed to find what he called “eliminationist

antisemitism” in German culture.3 Were the Germans in fact different
from the other nations of Europe?
Jews were murdered only in countries that came under German or
Romanian occupation. (There were some partial exceptions: Hungarians,
Slovaks, and Bulgarians under German influence gave up some Jews to
be killed from territories that came recently under their control.) Yet, the
examination of German policies in the 1930s demonstrates that, even in
a state governed by people possessed by a murderous ideology, it is not
easy to separate out a segment of the population and simply eliminate it.
Several steps had to be taken, and several prerequisites had to be satisfied
before that point could be reached. The conclusion must be that the
Holocaust was contingent and not predetermined. At several times there
were forks in the road; events did not have to end as tragically as in fact
they did.
In the concluding part, I turn to the process of ghetto formations,
deportations, mass shootings by special detachments, death camps, and
forced marches; that is, extermination. Although I examine the behavior
of the Jewish leadership and discuss the difficult and emotionally charged
question of Jewish resistance, my primary focus is not on the examina-
tion of what Jews did or did not do. I contend that Jews were deprived
of agency and that their behavior was not different from other victims of
Nazi atrocities.4 Jews were no more or less heroic than other groups of
people placed in comparable circumstances. However, for our under-
standing it is necessary to know who Jews were, what their contributions
were to modern economic, social, and intellectual life of Europe. Without
examining Jewish achievements it is difficult to see how the Nazis could
have placed antisemitism at the center of their outrageous worldview. The
“Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is the most vicious forgery, but it was
previous Jewish accomplishments that made them plausible to millions.5
No one ever considered publishing the “Protocols of the Elders of the
Roma.” Anti-Roma prejudice is vile as all prejudices are, however, the
3 Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Knopf, 1996.
4 I cannot agree with the great scholar of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, who argued that
centuries of Jewish past explained the relative lack of Jewish resistance. The evidence is
overwhelming that other victims of the Nazis did not behave differently.
5 The literature on the Protocols is enormous. The best book is still Norman Cohn’s
Warrant for Genocide. New York: Harper, 1967. See also R. Landes and S. Katz (eds.),
The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion. New York; New York University Press, 2011, and W. Eisner, The Plot: The
Story of the Elders of Zion. New York: Norton, 2005.
Introduction 7
notion never arose that the Roma was attempting to control the world.
To put it mildly, the idea was simply not plausible
I will examine to what extent countries differed from one another, and
what the explanation was for the difference. Western European Jewry
suffered relatively small losses compared to Jews in the Eastern part of
the continent, not only in absolute numbers but also in percentages. But
even within the Western type of Jewry we will see considerable differences
from country to country and it will be our task to explain these. The most
difficult task is to understand the mind and behavior of the perpetrators.
We will see that even here we will find variety. People doing evil to their
fellow human beings were capable of making distinctions. Some drew a
line, while others accepted no limits.
The Holocaust is receding into the past; the last survivors are gradu-
ally disappearing. This book is addressed to people who are one or two
generations away from the events described here. By placing events in
their historical context perhaps, we can come closer to an understanding
of what has already come to be seen as a distant story.
part one
THE RISE OF MODERN ANTISEMITISM

1
French Jews
In history there is no such thing as a tabula rasa – every event, every

movement, every ideology has precursors – yet there are also major turn-
ing points. It is a commonplace to assert that the French Revolution was
one of these turning points and that the modern age began with it. In
reality, of course, the changes that made the French Revolution possible,
such as the strengthening of the middle classes in Western Europe, the
weakening of religious authority, and the questioning of religious dogma
by intellectuals – developed over the course of centuries. Philosophers
articulated changes that were already taking place and prepared the soil
for the great Revolution. Enlightenment thinkers argued that the orga-
nization of societies could and should be based on reason, as opposed
to tradition or dogma, and that people should be treated as individuals,
rather than as members of an estate, a group with defined rights and
obligations. The consequences were momentous and never ending. (This
is perhaps what Zhou Enlai had in mind when he said that it was too
early to evaluate the French Revolution.)
The idea that people should be treated as individuals rather than as
members of a social, political, or religious entity was indeed revolution-
ary. It necessitated rethinking the very concept of a nation, which in
the past had been defined as the politically conscious nobility (together
with the Church and some representatives of the Third Estate). The new
understanding of “nation” included everyone who was part of a cultural
community. At least in theory, everyone became an equal citizen. Almost
immediately the question arose whether under these circumstances Jews
belonged to the nation or were a foreign body tolerated within the bor-
ders of a country. After all, Jews spoke a different language from the
11
surrounding population and claimed to have their own separate history.

In some countries, for example, pre-unification Germany, or in Central
Europe, the question was particularly difficult, because the limits of cul-
tural community were ill defined.
On the one hand, new thinking made possible the spread of freedom
and the development of capitalism, which brought with it an enormous
increase in material well-being; on the other hand, it deprived people of
the comfort of belonging to well-defined communities and of possessing
established rights and obligations. In traditional societies, people lived
lives similar to those of their parents, knew what was expected of them,
and knew who they were, and what they could look forward to. The
vast social transformation was bound to be traumatic, and not every-
one benefited from it: As always, there were winners and losers. Lives in
the newly built factories were not necessarily more pleasant than in the
villages that people had left behind. Even those who found themselves
better off as a result of the changes were often more conscious of what
they had lost than appreciative of what they had gained. Capitalism may
have improved material conditions, but it seemed soulless to many. The
questioning of age-old verities was a high price to pay for increased mate-
rial comfort. From this point on, especially but not only in France, people
were divided into two camps: enthusiasts for the changes introduced by
the Revolution and their opponents.
It would be wrong to think that all Jews welcomed the vast changes
occurring around them, but nevertheless they came to be identified with
modernity, liberal politics, and capitalism; people who did not like these
developments blamed Jews – wrongly – for them. In every country those
who posited the picture of an ideal society in the distant past were almost
certain to be hostile to Jews. The identification of Jews with modernity
has been with us ever since.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century Jewish life changed pro-
foundly, and extraordinarily quickly, at first in Western Europe and later
in the rest of the European continent. France was not the first country to
emancipate Jews. The United States never had laws that applied only to
Jews, and in this sense, it was the first country with an emancipated Jewry.
The French Revolution ushered in those changes that resulted in phenom-
enal Jewish success in terms of economic well-being and disproportionate
contributions to cultural life. The French, an ideologically minded people,
were the first to articulate important but at times elusive concepts, such
as emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation, that would remain rel-
evant to Jewish life for a long time to come. It is important to distinguish
French Jews 13
among these concepts. Emancipation means the abolition of laws that

applied exclusively to Jews. In most countries of Europe, emancipation
was a gradual process; it was accomplished throughout Western Europe
by the time of World War I. Acculturation, which during the nineteenth
century was achieved to a much greater extent in Western Europe than
in the East, means that in outward appearance Jews came to be indistin-
guishable from non-Jews. Most Jews made every effort to reduce differ-
ences in appearance between themselves and their compatriots. With the
exception of the Orthodox, Jews gave up their special attire, and even
in religious services they attempted to conform to Christian patterns –
giving up the separation of sexes in the synagogue, introducing sermons
in the vernacular, and the like. Most Jews also came to speak the local
languages and to contribute to local, as opposed to exclusively Jewish,
culture. Assimilation, which rarely happened in the nineteenth century,
means the gradual disappearance of Jewish identity. However, in time,
in the first decades of the twentieth century at least in some Western
European countries secularization, intermarriage, and conversion among
Western European Jews occurred so frequently that many Jews came to
be concerned for the survival of Jewish life.
Although Jewish identity did not disappear as a result of these changes,
what had been a simple matter in the past became far more complex. Pre-
modern Europe was a society of estates and corporations within which
Jews had a place of their own, albeit often an uncomfortable one. At a time
when religion formed a fundamental component of people’s self-identity,
Jews (aside from Muslims before their expulsion from the Iberian Penin-
sula) represented the only non-Christian minority. The Catholic Church
was a major force behind the theologically based antisemitism that can
be traced to the beginning of premodern Europe: The Church condemned
Jews for not accepting Christ as their savior and, more importantly, for
being responsible for the death of the Son of God.
After the French Revolution, however, antisemitism acquired a differ-
ent character: It became milder, but at the same time more threatening.
The new antisemitism incorporated old ideas but was also genuinely
different. Only then did antisemites come to see Jews as dangerously
powerful and as threatening world domination: The modern language of
antisemitism was born. In feudal Europe the ideas inherent in the Pro-
tocols of the Elders of Zion – the assertion that there existed a Jewish
conspiracy that aimed at ruling the world – would have found little sup-
port and would not have served the interests of antisemitic demagogues.
Even as a rhetorical phrase, “Jewish world domination” would have made
little sense in feudal Europe. By contrast, in the modern world Jews were
not so much despised as hated and feared.
It is difficult to give a balanced description of the position of Jews in
medieval society. Jews suffered discrimination, were periodically expelled
from European countries, and on occasion became victims of mass mur-
der. Not a single European country had an unblemished record of tol-
eration. Everywhere and always limitations were imposed on Jews. Yet
Jews were not serfs, and usually they were not the poorest members of
society. They had no direct masters, and to a considerable extent they
were allowed to settle disputes within their own community. They were
also not the only ones to suffer in an intolerant age: Members of Chris-
tian heretical sects fared no better and at times worse. Some individual
Jews, who because of their wealth, international connections, and finan-
cial expertise could provide essential services to the court, came to be
greatly privileged and powerful. These privileged few were sometimes in
a position to intervene on behalf of their fellow Jews. At other times,
however, they suffered expulsion and the other indignities inflicted on
their coreligionists.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, being a Jew was defined by a set
of obligations and privileges. Often Jews were restricted to ghettos1 and
at times were forced to wear special marks on their clothing. They were
excluded from a number of professions, and consequently the social strat-
ification of Jewish society differed profoundly from that of the societies
in which they lived. Under these circumstances Jewish self-identity was
rarely in question, and the problem of identity existed only on the mar-
gins. Were the converts, the “Marranos,”2 who on the Iberian Peninsula
had been forced to accept Christianity, really still Jewish, as their enemies
insisted? Were the Karaites Jewish? The Karaites were a small group of
people whose origin went back to biblical times. They rejected rabbinical
Judaism and marriage with other Jews, lived a lifestyle profoundly differ-
ent from the rest of the Jewry, and formed such a distinct community that
the Nazis during World War II did not categorize them as Jews, therefore
allowing them to live.
In the modern age, as described earlier, the issue of identity became
much more problematic. Once the special laws that applied only to Jews
were abolished and acculturated Jews came to resemble others in society,
1 The term “ghetto” originally referred to a district in Venice, where Jews were compelled
to live.
2 The word “Marrano” is from the Spanish, meaning pig.
French Jews 15
it was easy to “pass.” The question, Who was a Jew?, could no longer
be answered easily. In the opinion of many, especially but not only
antisemites, a Jew who converted still remained a Jew. But then where
did Jewishness reside? Did it reside in the “blood,” as it was thought at
the time, or in the genes, in contemporary usage ? In modern times there
have been more than a half-dozen competing definitions of who is a Jew.
The fact that a Jew remained a Jew in some sense, in spite of conversion,
in the eyes of many Jews and in the eyes of the broader community very
much contributed to racist thinking. Ultimately the Nazis spent a great
deal of effort to come up with a “scientific” definition of race, but of
course no such definition could be devised, and therefore they had to fall
back on religion (i.e., the religion of grandparents).
It is my assumption that the process that led to the Holocaust started
with emancipation, which profoundly changed the position of Jews in
modern societies and at the same time altered the nature and character of
antisemitism. The very characteristics that enabled Jews to succeed and
also achieve a considerable degree of integration into their host societies
were the same ones that led to the development of the new antisemitism.
Ironically, the more that Jews gave up traits that had defined them in
the past and became acculturated, thereby becoming able to succeed in
economic terms, the more that antisemitism increased. A Jew who did
not seem to be obviously a Jew appeared to be a greater danger to the
antisemites. Thus, integration not only did not solve the problems Jews
faced but it also exposed them to new and greater dangers.
To find an explanation for the astonishing Jewish economic and cul-
tural success in the post-emancipation age, it is necessary to examine
the nature of their pre-emancipation life. Four characteristics of Jewish
life before emancipation stand out: (1) the importance of engaging in an
intellectual tasks, such as studying the Torah and Talmud, (2) the conse-
quences of their exclusion from agriculture; (3) the Jews’ concentration
in commercial and financial occupations; and (4) the consequences of
belonging to a persecuted minority, including the need to rely on one
another. These four aspects are discussed in detail next.
The religious commandment of studying the Torah and the desire to
be able to discuss obscure passages in the Talmud resulted in almost
universal literacy among Jews, at least among males, at a time when no
other group could boast anything similar. The respect for learning and
the prestige that went with knowledge and intellectual accomplishments
remained essential parts of Jewish life after emancipation. In no other
religion was the place of worship referred to as “school,” and in no
other religion did a young man demonstrate his maturity by the ability
to interpret a passage from a religious text. An educated Jew, however
poor, possessed social prestige, at least within his own community. A rich
Jew was willing to allow his daughter to marry a poor man if that man
had the reputation of being a scholar. In modern times, literacy and the
ability to deal with symbols and abstract concepts came to be extremely
useful. It turned out to be possible for Jews to transfer their ability to deal
with religious texts to secular interests. What mattered was engagement
with intellectual issues, rather than the particular subject matter. What
better preparation to be a lawyer in a modern state than training in
interpretation of a difficult passage in the Talmud? (Similarly, the British-
educated classes were taught to read Greek and Latin, rather than subjects
that had direct relevance to the tasks they were trained to perform in
administering the empire.) Wherever Jews lived they made up only a small
minority, and there could be no question of offering military resistance
against those who abused them. They did not serve as soldiers and rarely
settled problems by reliance on brute force. Under those circumstances it
is understandable that what was considered admirable among them was
not exceptional muscle power or military valor, but the ability to read,
write, and argue rationally – in general, intellectual attainment.
The commandments that a medieval Jewish man was expected to
observe were very extensive indeed. Daily life was governed by minute
distinctions and commands, which modernity made difficult to fulfill. The
repudiation of some of the restrictive aspects of Jewish religious culture
that was necessitated by the coming of modernity resulted in skepticism of
received authority and therefore radicalism in terms of intellectual life, at
least among some Jewish intellectuals. This phenomenon might partially
explain the contribution of Jewish intellectuals to revolutionary thinking
in European culture.
Second, their exclusion from agriculture pushed Jews into a way of life
that could be thought of as a proto–middle-class existence. Their wealth
was not in real estate; they were not tied to the land. Jews were not part
of the social elite, but neither were they part of the vast, exploited lower
class that made up the bulk of medieval society, despite their abuse by that
society and the prejudice that surrounded them. There were no Jewish
serfs and very few Jewish workers or miners. The obligation to observe
the Sabbath made it difficult for Jews to work for Christian masters, and
therefore many Jews had their own shops or businesses, however small
and impoverished. In terms of purely material circumstances, they were
French Jews 17
usually better off than the majority of the population of the societies in
which they lived.
Periodic expulsions forced Jews to be mobile: Jews were no more
desirous to move than other people, but at times they had to. They were
also mobile because they were not tied to the land. Jewish migrations
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were unparalleled in magni-
tude. When opportunities to move arose, they were able to take advan-
tage of them; a mobile society suited them better than it suited others.
Ironically, the very restrictions that had been imposed on Jews, such as
being excluded from agriculture, artisan guilds, and ownership of land
and mines, became advantages in the new modern societies. Because of
their occupational structure, they were among the first peoples to become
urbanized. When the cities came to be the primary seats of development
of a new capitalist social order, Jews were already there, ready to take
advantage of new opportunities.
Because religious commandments forbade Christians from lending
money at interest to Christians commerce in “filthy lucre” fell to the
“unclean” Jews. Kings and princes, landlords, and even popes called on
Jews for valuable financial services. In times of war, the rulers were always
in need of money, and they could turn only to Jewish financiers. Jews
became the silent partners of kings, as Jewish taxes and taxes collected by
Jews came to be essential components of royal treasuries. Jews also acted
as intermediaries of lords in carrying out services such as collecting rents.
However, rent collectors were bound to be unpopular, and consequently
the peasants hated Jews more than the lords in whose interests they acted.
Because those in power needed these financial services, often they pro-
tected “their” Jews. The interest of the rulers in the “Jewish question”
was largely limited to the amount of money they could squeeze out of
them. The rulers were most often hostile to Jews, but nevertheless were
willing to tolerate the richest among them, because they needed them.
Arguably Jews were instrumental in creating a modern financial admin-
istration for the emerging centralized monarchies. In the new age of capi-
talism their knowledge of financial markets came to be extremely useful.
It was to be expected that Jews would be represented in the modern world
of banking at a time when capitalism took hold in Europe. The associa-
tion of Jews with the central authorities, which started in medieval times,
continued in the nineteenth century. Although Jews were never part of
the upper classes, their interests were often linked, and Jews were most
likely to settle in the capitals.
Fourth, one consequence of persecution was the recognition of belong-

ing to a special group, which led to the development of a strong sense of
Jewish self-consciousness. Jews had to count on one another. Indeed, the
obligation to help fellow Jews is a religious one. For example, in medieval
times Jews were often called on to fulfill the obligation of ransoming their
coreligionists who had been captured and made into slaves. Because Jews
were dispersed and lived in distant regions, this sense of belonging spread
across borders. A Jew living in a German state felt closer to fellow Jews
living in a distant land than to his or her fellow citizens living in the same
town. This sense of belonging, of being able to trust one another and
thereby create international networks, came to be a great advantage in
the development of modern capitalism; it helped establish business rela-
tionships based on mutual trust. In this respect Jews were similar to other
marginal groups, such as the Chinese in East Asia, the Indians in Africa,
or the Old Believers in Russia.
The other side of the coin was how antisemites saw those same Jewish
characteristics. For them, talmudic learning was merely an exercise in
meaningless hair-splitting; Jewish mobility was the same as rootlessness;
involvement in the banking business was just another name for the tradi-
tional Jewish “vice” of usury and an unwillingness to engage in “healthy
and useful labor”; and the desire to help fellow Jews was clannishness. In
particular, the sense of Jewish solidarity – born out of a history of perse-
cutions, but also having religious foundations, such as rules concerning
cleanliness and diet that kept Christians at arms length – was a source
of indictment in the new era: Jews were often accused of clannishness,
of feeling greater loyalty to their coreligionists than to their countrymen.
They were often suspected, sometimes legitimately, of being Jews before
they were Frenchmen or Germans, even though many saw no contradic-
tion between thinking of themselves as Jewish and at the same time as
French or German.
For antisemites at least, there was only one step from this clannishness
to the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. In an intensely
nationalist age Jews were constantly suspected of disloyalty to the nation.
The notion of Jewish conspiracy came to be a central feature of antisemitic
thinking. The fact that Jews appeared to look like other citizens and yet
retained their “Jewish essence” supported the idea that Jews were not
what they pretended to be. They were considered to be an invisible virus,
a secret plague. There was no escape: However patriotic German Jews,
for example, may have thought themselves to be, for the antisemite that
patriotism appeared nothing more than a pretense.
French Jews 19
Let us begin our survey of the development of European Jewish com-

munities after emancipation by using the French case as an example of
Western European Jewry. There are several reasons for focusing on the
French Jewish community. The position of French Jewry in the course of
the nineteenth century was very favorable. Although the Jewish commu-
nities in Great Britain and Holland then enjoyed similarly favorable cir-
cumstances. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Protestant Ams-
terdam had the reputation of being the most tolerant city in Europe.
Nevertheless France is a good place to begin because here emancipa-
tion took place more or less at once, rather than in stages, as in other
Western European countries. More importantly, the French were theoret-
ically minded and therefore articulated the fundamental issues that arose
as a consequence of emancipation more clearly than other Europeans.
Finally, it was the Napoleonic wars that spread the emancipatory ideas
of the French to the rest of Europe.
Ironically, emancipation, which brought such extraordinary benefits
to Jews, was the consequence of the work of Enlightenment thinkers
who themselves were by no means philo-Semitic. On the contrary, the
emblematic figure of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, had a low opinion of
Jews. He disliked their clannishness and their religion (to be sure, he
disliked all religions), regarded them as obscurantists, and considered
them to be enemies of an enlightened society. Many of the leaders of the
French Revolution shared these views. Nevertheless, Jewish emancipation
(i.e., the abolition of laws and restrictions that applied only to them)
followed from the logic of Enlightenment thought.
Nor were all Jews enthusiastic about abolishing those restrictions and
becoming equal citizens. Conservatives correctly saw the dangers inher-
ent in emancipation: It would undermine group solidarity, diminish the
community’s autonomy, lessen the power of Jewish leaders, and weaken
religious commitment. Assimilation was a promise for some, but it was
seen as a danger by others. Therefore, emancipation was not a prod-
uct of reforms coming about as a result of public demands to remedy
well-understood historical wrongs. It is more realistic to think of eman-
cipation as a by-product of historical processes in which Jews were only
marginally involved.
At the end of the eighteenth century, partisans of the French Revolution
thought of themselves as espousing a universal ideology, and they claimed
to advocate universal values. Given these circumstances, it was not sur-
prising that the issue of Jewish emancipation first emerged in France.
In addition, it was far easier to carry out the process of emancipation
in a country that had relatively few Jews. At the time of the French
Revolution about 40,000 to 50,000 Jews lived in France. French Jewry
was made up of two unequal branches. The smaller Sephardic3 commu-
nity – Jews who were the descendants of those expelled from the Iberian
Peninsula – by this time spoke French, lived in the southwest of France,
and were much richer and better integrated into the surrounding society
than the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi from Eastern and Central Europe.
The Sephardic community, comprising no more than about 5,000 people,
owed its privileged status to the fact that its members lived in a cosmopoli-
tan, urban environment that was expanding rapidly, taking advantage of
the flourishing transatlantic trade. The Sephardic Jews looked down on
their coreligionists, the vast majority of whom lived in the province of
Alsace. Because the Sephardic Jews were better integrated into society,
the rights of citizenship were extended to them earlier than to their coreli-
gionists in the East. The local inhabitants regarded the Yiddish-speaking
Jews of Alsace as fundamentally inassimilable, a nation within a nation.
Their continued communal existence, however, was incompatible with
the modern concept of nation.
Although the issue of emancipation had been discussed before the
Revolution and some steps had been taken to ameliorate the condition
of Jews, such as allowing them to settle anywhere in the country and
abolishing the special tax levied on them, it was only after the victory of
the Revolution that the National Assembly emancipated Sephardic Jews
in January 1790. A year and half later it extended the rights of citizenship
to all Jews, to the satisfaction of many and to the concern of some. Indeed,
emancipation did not take place without serious opposition. The delegates
from Alsace were the bitterest opponents of extending civil equality to
Jews, and the emancipation proclamation occasioned pogroms in the
district. In addition, some members of the Catholic hierarchy opposed the
idea of extending equal citizenship rights to Jews. (Yet, the enlightened
and liberal Abbé Henri Gregoire, an early proponent of racial equality,
was among the most articulate advocates of emancipation.)
Although the revolutionaries made Jews “equal citizens,” they were
enemies of all religion, certainly including Judaism. In that way Jews
achieved equality not only in the political but also in the religious sphere:
Their religion was tolerated neither more nor less than Christianity. Dur-
ing the revolutionary era many synagogues were closed down, and Jews
3 The word comes from Hebrew Sepharad, meaning Spain; Ashkenazi is derived from the
medieval Hebrew name of Germany.
French Jews 21
were not allowed to observe the Sabbath and other ritual practices. How-
ever, passing legislation on the national level did not immediately bring
about a change in the Jews’ status. The nobility in Alsace continued for
some time to coerce special taxes from Jews. In addition, although the
National Assembly dissolved all corporate organizations of a religious
nature, Jewish organizations continued to function.
The architects of emancipation expected that the passage of the act
would be quickly followed by acculturation.4 None were interested in
preserving Jewish community and culture. Jews were to deserve their
“good fortune” by behaving properly (i.e., exactly as other French peo-
ple behaved). The “friends of Jews” believed that negative characteris-
tics that they associated with this religious minority – Jewish cohesion,
seeming obscurantism of their religious practices, usury, and the like –
were entirely the consequence of the prejudice and mistreatment directed
against them. Therefore it logically followed that, once restrictions on
Jews were lifted, these unfortunate characteristics would also disappear.
It was at the time of the Revolution that the principle was articulated that
remained part of Napoleonic policies, and indeed the policy of the French
state during the nineteenth century: “To Jews as individuals – everything;
to Jews as a group – nothing.” The expectation of the Napoleonic reform-
ers was that Jews would become French citizens “of the Mosaic faith,”
and ideally many would convert to Christianity. In any case Jews liv-
ing in France were supposed to have a greater degree of affinity to their
countrymen than to their coreligionists beyond the borders.
In 1807 Napoleon convened an assembly of Jewish notables, a so-
called Grand Sanhedrin,5 from all the conquered countries. Its task was
to determine the position of Jews in the French sphere of influence, as
well as to abolish ghettos and other laws restricting Jewish activities. The
Sanhedrin was particularly important in determining the limits of Jewish
religious laws within the French legal system. It elevated Judaism to the
level of state religion and at the same time demanded the affirmation of
Jewish loyalty to the French state.
Napoleon’s policies toward Jews were in line with his centralization
efforts; Jews came under the authority of a state bureaucracy. Judaism
became one of the recognized state religions, and by extension rabbis were
state functionaries and, after 1830, were paid by the state. Napoleon’s
4 Although the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 implied emancipation, the eman-
cipation of Jews was made explicit only in September 1791.
5 Sanhedrin from the Hebrew meaning sitting together (i.e., assembly).
ideology was also based on the desirability of assimilation: The Jewish

social structure, which had been so different from French, had to change,
with Jews becoming soldiers, agriculturists, and the like, rather than
“usurers” as he saw them. They were compelled to assume surnames (as
opposed to being known by first names and patronymic) and to serve in
the Army. The previous practice that had allowed Jews to avoid military
service by paying for a substitute soldier to serve in their place was no
longer tolerated. Napoleon’s expectation was that assimilation would go
so far and that Jews and Christians would intermarry so often that the
“Jewish issue” would simply disappear in the near future.
Napoleon, just like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, was hostile
to Jews as they were, and some of the laws that Napoleon introduced
reflected this hostility. The laws forbidding the settlement of more Jews
in Alsace, restricting money lending, and absolving Alsatian peasants
from repaying loans not only were attempts to gain the good will of the
peasants but also were motivated by his desire to “change” Jews, to make
them choose occupations other than money lending and more like those
of other Frenchmen. He made it clear that his decrees were not aimed
to make France more attractive to Jews outside of the country; he by no
means wanted to attract more of them.6
Whether becoming emancipated was a good bargain for Jews depended
on one’s point of view. However, it is clear that the character of Jewish
life and the dilemmas Jews faced in the course of the nineteenth century
and later – particularly in France but then throughout Western Europe –
grew out of this compromise. The transformation of Jewish life occurred
extraordinarily quickly. Nineteenth-century France, just like the rest of
Western Europe, experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization.
Acculturation of Jews occurred relatively painlessly because economic
opportunities opened up for everyone and particularly for Jews, because
their background prepared them well for modernity. Within a short time
a previously despised minority proved itself capable of achieving great
success in practically every aspect of national life.7
One aspect of the transformation was urbanization. By 1850 a third of
the French Jews lived in Paris; a mere two decades later – that is, after the
6 Napoleon wrote this to his brother Jerome in 1808: “I undertook the mission to correct
Jews, but I did not want to attract any new ones into my states. Far from it, I avoided
anything that might show esteem to the most despicable of men.” The quotation is in an
article by Maurice Samuels, “The emperor and Jews,” Judaism 2005, No. 1–2, p. 43.
7 Hannah Arendt, “From Pariah to Parvenu,” in Ron Feldman (ed.), The Jew as Pariah:
Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. New York: Random House, 1978.
French Jews 23
French-Prussian war – that percentage doubled.8 Whereas Jews in Alsace

spoke mostly Yiddish, those who moved to Paris changed their language
to French, which was a precondition to acculturation. Yet, acculturation,
contrary to the hopes of those who were responsible for emancipation, did
not make the Jewish occupational structure indistinguishable from that
of the French: Jews did not become farmers and relatively few became
manual workers. Because of the small size of French Jewry, Jews could
not be seen as dominating the economy, despite the considerable success
of individual Jews in the banking and industrial sectors. (At the time
of the Franco-Prussian war there were approximately 75,000 Jews of a
population of 39 million; the Jewish birth rate was comparable to the
national average.)
Nevertheless, within a few short decades all obstacles to success were
removed from Jews, and every avenue of advancement, including the
profession of army officer, opened up for them. Jewish economic success
by the end of the century was undeniable. Jewish acculturation made it
possible for Jews to be elected to the National Assembly and even to join
the cabinet. Jews reciprocated this gesture by demonstrating loyalty to
the French state. They gladly identified themselves with French culture.
Because of the success of Jewish acculturation in France, the question
of Jewish identity (i.e., what it means to be Jewish) emerged in this country
most clearly. In theory Jews were simply French who just happened to
attend a different place of worship; Judaism was a religion and nothing
more. Prominent Jewish leaders may have genuinely believed that this
was the case and made every attempt to persuade the French that this
was so. The reality, of course, was more complicated. Jews who had lost
their faith, and therefore by the logic of the situation should have stopped
being Jewish, in fact remained Jewish and were considered as such not
only by themselves but also by other Frenchmen. The Jewish community
was reluctant to take positions on issues unrelated to religion because
doing so would have contradicted the pretense that Judaism was simply
a religion, like all others. Jews, of course, took pleasure in the economic
and cultural achievements of their coreligionists, but at the same time
they considered it prudent not to call attention to their successes.
It is precisely the success of French Jews in finding a place for them-
selves that makes the development of modern antisemitism in France
so instructive and relevant in our search for an understanding of the
Holocaust. Even a country that was liberal and economically dynamic
8 Karády Viktor, A Zsidóság Europában a Modern Korban. Budapest, 2000, p. 146.

(though not as dynamic as England or Germany) and that had such a

small Jewish population, putting the lie to the charge that Jews dom-
inated economic life, still provided a fertile soil for the development of
antisemitic thought. Despite the successful acculturation of the tiny Jewish
model minority, which acted more or less as the emancipators wanted it to
act, and Jews’ self-effacing efforts not to draw attention to their separate-
ness, antisemitic thought and popular prejudice flourished. It is a striking
phenomenon that, given the very small size of French Jewry, antisemites
could believe and make others believe that this minority could be a danger
to French identity.
That antisemitism existed in nineteenth-century France is indisputable;
it is, however, very hard to establish how widespread and how deep it
was. Historians disagree on its extent and how to measure it. However, it
seems that there was considerable hostility to Jews, largely but not exclu-
sively on the right wing of the political spectrum. French antisemitism,
unlike similar prejudice elsewhere in Europe, was combined with hostility
to the existing political system – the republican regime, the descendant
of the great French Revolution.9 Jews came to be symbols of the new
order in the eyes of those who deplored this new secular, capitalist, free-
wheeling world. Many believed that the individualistic capitalist system
had destroyed the unity of the nation. Antisemitism flared up at moments
of economic hardship and at times of national soul searching caused by
military defeat, but it is difficult to say how important antisemitism was
for the average Frenchmen. Likely few paid a great deal of attention to
Jews in their day-to-day existence.
In France, as in Germany, antisemitism acquired a new virulence in
the last decades of the nineteenth century. By that time Jews were eco-
nomically successful and therefore visible enough to be characterized as a
dangerous enemy. It is impossible to establish whether antisemitism was
a more significant political force in France than in Germany at the same
time. However, many observers have made the point that if one had to
predict at the turn of the century which country would carry out the mass
murder of Jews, France would have been a more likely candidate than
Germany. Certainly antisemitism did not pose the same degree of dan-
ger to Jews as in Eastern Europe and there were few pogroms in France
(there were some at the time of the Dreyfus affair) or in any Western
European country. Nevertheless, together with Germany, France was the
9 Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France, Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus. New York:
Knopf, 2010.
French Jews 25
birthplace of modern antisemitic thought. The accusations against Jews in

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the same through-
out Europe: Jews were sly, cowardly, despicable, and inescapably alien;
could have no genuine feeling for the “sacred motherland”; and were
either subversive of the genuine spirit of France or exploitative of the
natives.
Antisemitism in France was not so much a popular sentiment, but as a
way of thinking on the part of disgruntled conservative intellectuals who
despised the heritage of the Great Revolution and associated Jews with the
modern age, which they hated. Several forces came together to create a soil
from which antisemitic sentiments could sprout. One was the intellectual
respectability of “scientific racism.” Most people took for granted that
Jews constituted a separate race and that the races could be rank ordered:
Some races were higher in the scale of evolution than others. Jews also
were likely to think of themselves in this way. Max Weber famously
connected Protestant ethics to the development and triumph of capitalism.
It is fair to say that whatever Weber saw in the Protestant, especially the
Calvinist, religion would apply at least as well if not better to Jews. Jews
also saw in their obvious material success a confirmation of their religious
belief that they were God’s chosen people. Racism cut both ways: Some
thought of Jews as superior, having demonstrated their ability to survive
through the centuries and achieving success after emancipation, but for
others “the Jewish race” represented something hideous. According to
them, Jews lacked genuine creativity and simply lived off the exploitation
of others. What “genuine creativity” meant was never further defined.
Another contributing factor in the new antisemitism was the migration
after the Russian pogroms of 1881 of about 25,000 Yiddish-speaking
Jews to France. (This was a tiny part of Jewish emigration from the
Russian Empire.) This immigration posed a dilemma for the French Jews.
On the one hand, they felt an obligation to help their less fortunate
coreligionists and felt sympathy for their plight, yet they looked down
on them, on the other. They also feared that the newcomers would bring
all Jews into ill repute and would undermine their carefully cultivated
identity as French citizens who simply followed a different religion. They
definitely did not want the French to form their image of the Jew on
the basis of the newcomers, who were easily distinguishable by their
language, clothing, and behavior; however, this problem was alleviated
by the quick acculturation of the newcomers.
In the war against Prussia in 1870–71, which resulted in the establish-
ment of the German Empire and France’s loss of, Jews showed themselves
to be loyal citizens. Indeed, after the defeat many Jews from Alsace-
Lorraine decided to emigrate to France. Nevertheless, the war indirectly
contributed to the increase of antisemitism. It undermined French self-
confidence and nourished an embittered nationalism that on occasion was
turned against Jews. But perhaps most significantly, Frenchmen came to
be ever more divided between those who applauded the emancipatory
ideas introduced by the Great Revolution and those who disliked those
ideas. Because Jews were associated with liberalism and anti-clericalism,
those who bemoaned the loss of power and prestige of the Catholic
Church – still in the minds of many the genuine French religion – were
disturbed to see Jews in positions of power and influence. They asso-
ciated Jews with the liberal republic and resented their involvement in
what they perceived as attacks on the Church in matters of education. In
their minds Jews continued to be foreign at a time when nationalists saw
France humiliated in a war against Germany, and they feared that Jews
represented foreign, in particular German, influence. In an age of rising
nationalist passion at least among a segment of public opinion, Jews were
resented as inescapably alien.
Conservative intellectuals, who deplored what seemed to them the
destruction of the beauties of the old way of life, were almost by necessity
antisemitic. Those who took the part of the Church and traditional village
life were disturbed by what seemed to them the Jewish contribution to the
new civilization. These thinkers pointed out that the number of Jews in
the republican government, in commerce, and in industry was dispropor-
tionate to their small population size. In a period of economic downturn
the fact that a number of Jews were involved in some prominent financial
scandals contributed to the antisemitic wave. It was particularly galling
to many that Jews, who only a couple generations earlier were a poor
and despised minority, now were seemingly in positions of power.10
Conservative thinkers favored instinct over intellect. In their semi-
mystical thinking only a long-term relation to the land and many gener-
ations of participating in struggles of the people could make one into a
genuine patriot. For some of these thinkers an acculturated Jew was an
even greater danger to the health of the nation than the visibly Orthodox,
because the acculturated person could bring an “alien” spirit into French
life unnoticed. This particular idea would become especially important in
the Nazi era.
10 In the phrase of Hannah Arendt, “the pariahs turned into parvenus.” The Origin of
Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 2004.
French Jews 27
Antisemitism was a complex phenomenon that should be regarded not

as a simple prejudice, but as a broad spectrum of views. There was a
substantial difference between negative stereotyping, such as regarding
Jews as money grubbing or condescending, and paranoid fantasies, such
as the assertion that the Jews ruled France.11 Some who believed in neg-
ative stereotypes did not even think of themselves as antisemites. Others
expressed their thoughts with a degree of sophistication. The two most
prominent antisemitic figures, Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, also
made great contributions to the development of modern right-wing, con-
servative ideology. Maurras, the founder of Action Française, was the
seminal figure of French fascism. In the thinking of Maurras and Barrès,
Jews could never be turned into Frenchmen; they could never possess that
instinctive patriotism that is the property of genuine Frenchmen.
In contrast to Maurras and Barrès, Eduoard Drumont was a vulgar
demagogue who united in his writings various aspects of antisemitic
thought. That his book, La France Juive, and his newspaper, La Libre
parole, could become enormously popular demonstrated that by the end
of the century antisemitic thought resonated widely among the French
people.
The first popular outburst of popular antisemitism was caused by the
greatest financial scandal of the nineteenth century – the Panama Canal
affair – that could be regarded as a preview of the Dreyfus case. Hundreds
of thousands of small investors hoped to make a profit by buying shares
in a French company that was to build the canal. The company was on the
verge of bankruptcy when two Jewish financiers bribed members of the
government to postpone the revelations of the problems of the company;
as a result people continued to invest in the company. Ultimately about
three-quarters of a million of small investors lost a great deal of money,
when the company collapsed in 1892.
It was against this background that the Dreyfus affair took place. The
affair is instructive in several ways. Once again, it was not so much that
France was different from the rest of Western Europe, but that, just as at
the time of the French Revolution, it was in France that Western Euro-
pean antisemitism was most clearly articulated. In 1894, a Jewish officer,
Alfred Dreyfus, was arrested and charged for passing secret informa-
tion to Germany. The fact that there were Jewish officers in the French
army in larger proportion than their share of the population was itself
11 The title of Alphonse Toussenel’s book was Les Juifs, rois de l’epoque (Jews, Kings of
Our Age).
noteworthy. The French army was much more hospitable to Jews, than,
for example, the German army. Those who arrested Dreyfus did so not
because he was Jewish, but because they genuinely, if mistakenly, believed
that he was a traitor. The affair in itself was not particularly important:
An army officer was accused of treason on the basis of false evidence,
and after much suffering, years he was exonerated. However, the conse-
quences of the affair, which occupied French public opinion for at least
five years, were momentous. The affair could be regarded, as Hannah
Arendt argued in her book, The Origin of Totalitarianism, as the crystal-
lization of political antisemitism.12 In 1898, when attempts were made to
demonstrate Dreyfus’s innocence, mobs gathered in the streets and angry
voices were heard shouting “Death to the Jews!” Modern France for
the first time experienced mob agitation. It must have been sobering for
Jews to recognize the depth of antisemitic feelings in a large segment of
the population.13 The leadership of the army, supported by a significant
portion of public opinion, was unwilling to accept Dreyfus’s innocence,
because doing so would be perceived as an attack on the integrity of the
army.
The Dreyfus affair did not so much divide French public opinion as
it strengthened an already existing division. The Catholic Church and
the army, which had been lukewarm in their commitment to the repub-
lic, became explicitly hostile. The Catholic Church played a particularly
ugly part in the hostility to Jews. This division in French political life
was to be a prominent and extremely destructive factor in the following
half-century, and it is remarkable that the defining issue in that bitter
struggle was the role of Jews in modern society. Those who considered
themselves the defenders of the achievements of the Revolution sided with
Dreyfus. Those who were concerned that the pillars of old, traditional
France – the Church and the French Army – were under attack joined
the anti-Dreyfusards. To them the guilt or innocence of an individual
mattered less than maintaining the “honor” of the army, the defender of
the nation. Conservative forces were able to exploit antisemitism in their
struggle against the Republic that they saw as the child of the illegitimate
revolution.
The victory of Dreyfus simply increased the bitterness of conservative,
anti-revolutionary France. The socialists, who in the previous decades
12 Arendt, pp. 117–55.

13 Pierre Birnbaum, The Antisemitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898. New York: Hill
and Wang, 2003.
French Jews 29
saw in Jews only exploiters, rallied to his defense because they saw him
as a man whose unjust persecution amounted to an attack on republican
France. For the first time socialists saw Jews as underdogs in French
society. It became clear to Jews that the socialists represented a valuable
ally, and that their place had to be in the liberal-socialist camp.
The Dreyfus affair was a significant event in the history of modern
antisemitism. The exoneration of Dreyfus embittered antisemites, who
saw it as a demonstration of the corrupt power of Jews and the weakness
and unreliability of the democratic state. They never fully accepted their
defeat. Some drew the conclusion that Jews would always remain out-
siders and therefore vulnerable. In this sense it was a contributing factor
to the birth and development of Zionism. Others saw the outcome of the
affair in a more favorable light. After all, Jews were on the victorious side,
justice ultimately prevailed, and Jews found support in a large segment
of French society.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the extent to which French
society was divided and the concomitant antisemitism varied, depending
on circumstances. At the time of World War I, French society was fairly
well united, and although antisemitism did not disappear, it was not a
major force. The sense of national unity at the time of war rebounded
to the advantage of Jews, who were admitted by most people into the
French family. Significantly, Barrès reconsidered his antisemitic attitudes,
and because of Jewish contributions to the French cause he recommended
that from then on Jews should be considered French. Jewish organizations
agitated among Jews in neutral countries for the Allied cause. They were
particularly keen to regain Alsace-Lorraine, a homeland of so many Jews.
As a consequence of the dreadful human losses suffered in the Great
War, France experienced a shortage of workers after the war. The French
were keenly aware that defeated Germany had a larger population base,
and therefore the government was eager to admit foreign workers, among
them Jews. Requirements for nationalization became less stringent in the
1920s. However, during the 1930s, with the Great Depression and of
its high unemployment and bitter social division, France, more than ever
became a divided society. The resurgence of the anti-republican coalition
and the growing strength of the French form of fascism represented a
threat to the Jewry. That threat was realized after the disastrous defeat
of 1940 and the establishment of the Vichy regime. The anti-Dreyfusards
had their moment in history.
2
Jews of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union
The ancestors of the great majority of the victims of the Holocaust lived
in the Russian Empire. In contrast to France with its few tens of thou-
sands of acculturated Jews, 5.2 million Jews lived in the Russian Empire,
according to the census of 1897 (making up approximately 4 percent of
its population and representing more than half of world Jewry), living a
life altogether different from their coreligionists in the West. When peo-
ple thought of a “Jewish problem” in the nineteenth century they had in
mind mostly the difficulties facing Jews of Russia.1
The extent and nature of Russian antisemitism differed from that in
the West. Russia was the home of pogroms, one of the few Russian words
that came into the English language (from the Russian Gromit’, meaning
break or smash). Unlike in the West, Russian antisemitism was not only
a popular sentiment but also government condoned, inspired, and sup-
ported. Russians were preoccupied with the “Jewish question” in the first
decades of the twentieth century, and this preoccupation during the Rev-
olution and the ensuing civil war became a powerful destructive force.2
Russian refugees, escaping the Bolsheviks, then spread their pathological
concern with Jews to the West, in particular to Germany. In this way
Russians had a major influence on Nazi antisemitism.
The genuinely important role that Jews played in the Bolshevik
Party would have great significance for twentieth-century antisemitism.
1 We speak for convenience’s sake of “Russian Jews,” but in fact Jews lived among Poles,
Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Romanians, but not among Russians.
2 For somewhat biased, pro-Russian apologias on Jewish-Russian relations, see A. I.
Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste. Moscow: Russkii put’, 2001–02, 2 vols.
30
Jews of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union 31
Although most communists were not Jewish and most Jews were not
communists, Jews were represented in the early Bolshevik leadership far
out of proportion to their numbers in the population. This fact allowed
anti-Bolsheviks and antisemites to equate Jews and communism, in the
process doing great damage to both. Hitler’s appeal to his countrymen
at a time of economic crisis largely played on the German middle class’s
fear of revolutionary socialism. Although the possibility of a socialist
revolution in Germany in the early 1930s was extremely remote, nev-
ertheless it seemed very real to the German bourgeoisie. That socialism
and communism could be successfully depicted as “Jewish” came to be
a major component of Nazi antisemitic propaganda and was one factor
that enabled them to come to power. The character of Russian prerev-
olutionary Jewish history and Jewish participation in the revolutionary
movement therefore were significant factors influencing what was to hap-
pen in Germany in the 1930s.
Jews in Poland
Before the middle of the eighteenth century Russia had very few Jews, yet
not having Jews did not mean the absence of antisemitism. The Orthodox
Church was hostile to all other religions, and in particular to Judaism.
The antisemitism that existed in the Middle Ages and in the early modern
period was Church inspired and enforced by the government. However,
this was “theoretical antisemitism” because ordinary Russians rarely had
an opportunity to encounter Jews, who were time and again forbidden to
settle in Russia and with few exceptions were not even able to enter the
country as merchants.
Russian Jewry was born in the late medieval state of Lithuania-Poland,
where its characteristic features were set. When Jews became inhabitants
of the Russian Empire with the three partitions of Poland in the second
half of the eighteenth century – of course, independently of their will –
they already possessed the organizational structure, lifestyle, and eco-
nomic activities that we have come to associate with nineteenth-century
Eastern European Jewish life.
There has been much written about modern Polish antisemitism, and
unfortunately many of the charges are fully justified. After World War I,
with the possible exception of Romania, no country was more viciously
antisemitic than newly independent Poland. That is why it is so important
to point out why Poland had so many Jews then (about 10 percent of the
population in the 1920s): precisely because at one point in its history it
was more hospitable to Jews than any other European country. Compared
to Western Europe, medieval Poland exhibited remarkable religious toler-
ation not only of Jews but also of Muslims. Jews came to the kingdom of
medieval Poland because they had been expelled from German states and
the Polish kings accepted them and to a certain extent protected them. As
long as there were only few Jews, they spoke Polish, but with the large
influx from German-speaking countries, they came to speak a different
language: Yiddish. Times change, circumstances change, and prejudices
do not last not forever; there is nothing inherently antisemitic about being
Polish.
At the end of the seventeenth century, 80 percent of world Jewry
lived in the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. In exchange for protection, Jews
provided various services, mostly financial, to the kings, who time and
again confirmed their special privileges and specified their obligations.
The rulers realized that Jews would stimulate the development of urban
life and professions and that, unlike their German subjects, who were the
other city dwellers, they did not present a threat to Polish sovereignty.
Nevertheless, Jews were required to pay special taxes to the royal treasury.
Jews also received concessions from Polish landlords to make and sell
alcoholic beverages.
Polish antisemitism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
stemmed from both economic and religious sources. The nobles, who
had no desire to manage their own estates, often used Jews, who had
been excluded from agriculture, as middlemen to take on these tasks.
As a consequence, the impoverished and oppressed peasants usually had
contact not with the landlords, but with their Jewish agents. The peas-
ants, wrongly, came to see Jews as their exploiters. The merchants also
disliked Jews and regarded them as alien competitors; they made every
effort to limit their activities. The Catholic Church in Poland as else-
where regarded Jews as enemies of Christ and consequently opposed
toleration.
The Polish rulers found it easier to deal with Jewish community lead-
ers, rather than with individuals, and therefore Jews were allowed to
have their own self-governing institution, the kahal. The kahal was a
democratic organization that possessed a remarkable degree of auton-
omy; the elders were elected, and they often exerted greater power and
influence than the rabbis. (The kahal survived the destruction of an inde-
pendent Poland and continued to play an important role in the life of
Jews in Imperial Russia.) In the seventeenth century a Jewish congress
of the four districts of the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, the Va’ad, was
formed. Its original task was tax collection for the state, but its activities
later extended to all areas of common Jewish interest. It continued to
meet until the division of Poland in the late eighteenth century, although
less and less regularly. The Va’ad was the most successful and ambi-
tious Jewish institution of self-government in modern times before the
establishment of the state of Israel.
In the eighteenth century the aristocracy elected the Polish kings, and
each succeeding election resulted in a further weakening of the central
power. The ultimate result was disintegration of the kingdom. This weak-
ening of the power of the king was an unwelcome development from the
point of view of Jews. As large landowners increasingly came to domi-
nate Polish politics, Jews were forced to depend on their goodwill; their
protection was more erratic and less reliable than royal favor. The victory
of the Counter-Reformation made matters worse. The embattled, but then
triumphant Catholic Church took energetic measures against all Protes-
tants and at the same time exhibited increased hostility to Jews. Ritual
murder charges, which had been frequent in many European countries,
were leveled more and more frequently, and some resulted in pogroms.
The worst such pogrom took place in the middle of seventeenth century in
conjunction with the uprising of the Cossacks against Polish rule under
the leadership of Bogdan Khmelnitsky. The Cossacks massacred Jews
with great ferocity, and the peasants joined in, resulting in the largest
number of Jewish victims in European history before the twentieth cen-
tury. We do not know the exact number of victims, but estimates run as
high as 100,000.
Jews in the Russian Empire

After the tripartite division of Poland, Russia assumed control of one of
the areas, inheriting a much larger Jewish population than the other two
states, Austria and Prussia. The partition was a major turning point in
Eastern European Jewish history: From a homogeneous Polish Jewry, it
created three very different Jewish communities. In Prussia and later in
Imperial Germany the opportunities were very different from those in
Tsarist Russia. Austrian ruled Galicia, which included a very poor Jewish
population, but nevertheless the government in Vienna allowed them to
live in a more liberal political system than in Russia.
As described earlier, before the partitions when there were few Jews
living in Russia, Russian rulers’ religiously inspired dislike of Jews was
mostly theoretical, in contrast to the antisemitism of the Polish peasantry.
Russia’s “Jewish problem” was to grow over time. In the first partition
in 1772, Russia took territories that had belonged to the Lithuanian part
of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom, an area that contained only approx-
imately 35,000 Jews. (The numbers are necessarily imprecise because
there were no proper censuses.) A Jewish population of this size did not
cause much of a problem for the government of Empress Catherine the
Great. An enlightened ruler and a convert to Orthodoxy, she issued a
proclamation to all of her new subjects. She promised order and stability,
the preservation of their previous privileges, the ability to observe their
religions and the ability to continue to work in their professions.3 Jews
were even welcomed by the government, which considered their economic
activities as an incipient middle class to be beneficial.
The beginning of the “Jewish problem” in Russia can be dated from
the second and third partitions of Poland (in 1793 and 1795, respectively)
and the acquisition of Bessarabia in 1812, when Russia gained hundreds
of thousands of Jews. When Nicholas I came to the throne in 1825, there
were estimated to be close to a million Jews in the Russian Empire. By
the end of the nineteenth century, that number had increased fivefold.
Although this was a time of demographic growth for the entire Russian
population, the Jewish population grew even faster. The overall demo-
graphic increase was that observed in other societies undergoing similar
patterns of economic development: Death rates declined faster than birth
rates. The faster growth of the Jewish population can be explained by
greater and more rapid improvements in hygiene among Jews, which led
to a greater decline in mortality. In addition, the religious command to
marry and multiply played a role in Jewish population growth; Jewish
boys and girls married at a younger age than others.
Throughout the nineteenth century and until the end of the tsarist
regime, Jews were perceived to be an unassimilated and inassimilable alien
body within the empire. Jews also considered themselves alien; most of
them did not consider Russia as their fatherland. The antisemites looked
down on Jews and considered them cowardly, sly, and clannish; at the
same time Jews looked down on Christians as unclean, unreliable, unedu-
cated, and stupid. Jews contrasted their own communities, in which there
was little drunkenness, wife beating, prostitution, or violent crime and
3 There is some controversy among scholars concerning the meaning of the proclamation
and the intent of Catherine’s early policy toward the Jewish minority. Salo Baron, The
Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets. New York: Macmillan, 1976, pp. 13–16, describes
Catherine’s government as more liberal than does John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews.
Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986, pp. 53–80.
where there was a network of social support for those who needed it, to
the dissolute ways of the Russian villages. The Jewish and the Christian
worlds lived side by side but had little understanding or even interest in
one another. During this period, unlike in Western Europe, there was
very little acculturation. Jews remained separate from the rest of the pop-
ulation not only in religion but also in occupational structure, dress, and
language. Except for commercial exchanges there was very little social
contact between Jews and Christians, and intermarriage was practically
unknown. This separation of the two peoples allowed all sorts of fantas-
tic myths about Jewish religion and life to flourish among the Christian
peasantry.
The economic and social position of Jews in the Russian Empire was
unfavorable when they became inhabitants of the Russian Empire, and in
the course of the nineteenth century it deteriorated. From the outset Jews
were restricted to living in just twenty-five provinces of the Empire (ten
Polish and fifteen Ukrainian), the so-called Pale of Settlement; as a result,
their settlements, the shtetls, became increasingly crowded. Yet, it should
be remembered that, however burdensome the restriction of living within
the Pale was, in the Russian Empire only the nobility was free. Even after
the liberation of the serfs in 1861, the institution of peasant communes
restricted their movement. The original intention of Catherine was to
protect the already existing weak merchant classes from alien – that is,
Jewish – competition. This intent was not necessarily hostile to Jews. In
the calcified Russian social structure, it was a generally accepted principle
that people, everyone but the nobles – serfs as well as merchants – were
tied to their place of residence. However, Catherine’s position on the
Jews hardened, and in 1794 she levied a double tax on Jews that was
clearly intended to harm them and lessen Jewish competition to Christian
Orthodox merchants. (Jews who did not wish to pay the double tax were
encouraged to leave the empire, at the cost of a three-year assessment of
double tax.4 ) The tax was a heavy burden and was placed only on Jews
and not on other non-Christian minorities.
Unlike Western European countries, which had dynamic economies,
the Russian Empire did not offer many opportunities for advancement,
and its first attempts at industrialization did not reduce poverty. Jews
were shopkeepers, artisans, and middlemen of various sorts; only 1 per-
cent were engaged in agriculture. They were important in the liquor trade,
because the making of alcoholic beverages was a government monopoly
4 Klier, pp. 76–7.

that Jews were allowed to rent. Their involvement had the unfortunate
consequence that the government and many prominent intellectuals
blamed them for alcoholism among the peasantry. Only toward the end of
the century did a substantial number of Jews join the proletariat and take
jobs in factories. Yet despite the Jews’ misery and poverty, the Ukrainian
peasantry usually considered Jews to be richer than they were.
Throughout the nineteenth century the attitude of the governments to
Jews was hostile, although some tsars were more antisemitic than others.
Russia was a multinational empire whose nationalities greatly differed
from one another in terms of economic and cultural development.5 They
each presented a different problem for the government, which had no
common policy toward them all; for example, it favored the Protestant
Baltic Germans, feared the nationalist aspirations of the Catholic Poles,
and treated the religion of the large Muslim population with respect.
Muslim Tatars, after conversion, easily assimilated into the upper classes.
By contrast, Jews, who had no territorial aspirations, nevertheless were
treated particularly badly. The rulers considered them a burden,
looked down on them, were suspicious of them, and regarded them as
fundamentally harmful to the well-being of the surrounding Christian
population. The tsars and their ministers shared the antisemitism of the
common folk. Blood libel accusations appeared early in the century and
continued as long as the tsarist regime lasted.
The question for the rulers was how to deal with this minority. They
argued that Jews could not be emancipated (i.e., by abolishing all laws
that applied only to them) because Jews were “backward.” At the same
time they recognized that one cause of this “backwardness” was the
fact that Jews lived a separate existence, which was at least partially
the consequence of not being emancipated. They also believed that inno-
cent Christian people had to be protected from the unscrupulous, sly Jews
who were corrupting and taking advantage of them. One might describe
this attitude as conservative populism, based on the assumption that the
populace was childish, naive, but fundamentally good and therefore on
the side of the government and that they had to be protected from alien,
subversive forces.
The ruling circles vacillated between two contradictory goals. On the
one hand, the rulers wanted to solve the “Jewish question” by assimila-
tion, and on the other, they imposed rules and regulations designed to
keep Jews separate. These contradictory policies were manifested in their
5 In 1897, only 44% of the population was ethnic Russian.

attitude to the kahal (i.e., Jewish self-government). The rulers did not
like the existence of autonomous organizations and were suspicious of
what Jews might be doing on their own, but at the same time the kahal
carried out quasi-governmental functions, such as collecting taxes and
implementing regulations that the government considered necessary but
did not have the machinary to enforce.
These contradictions were also manifested in the policy toward mak-
ing Jews into farmers. The rulers deplored that Jews were engaged in
professions that they considered exploitative and defined as unproduc-
tive work, but at the same time repeatedly expelled Jews from rural areas
to overcrowded towns, which made it impossible for Jews to become
peasants, even in the unlikely case they wanted to; at one point Jews were
even forbidden to own land. The government of Nicholas I considered
sending Jews to Siberia as agriculturalists to contribute to the coloniza-
tion of the land, but later Nicholas himself vetoed the idea, believing that
Jews would have a negative moral effect on the population.6
At times the policy was to force Jewish children to attend Russian
schools, but at other times the government excluded them. The rulers
attempted to enforce the teaching of the Russian language in cheders,7
but the problem was the lack of qualified teachers – Yiddish speakers
who could teach Russian. Jews were also ambivalent about governmen-
tal involvement in education. As time went on, the desire for a secular
education increased, but Jewish leaders rightly feared that the govern-
ment’s intervention in the curricula of Jewish schools was designed to
take people away from the faith of their ancestors. In Russian secular
schools the study of Orthodox religion was compulsory, and therefore
Jews perceived it as a threat to their beliefs. Even at the end of the imperial
period the number of Jewish children in institutions of higher education
within the Pale of Settlement was restricted to 10 percent, and in St.
Petersburg and Moscow it was limited to 3 percent. As a consequence,
Jewish children, in particular boys, received their education in the cheder
and in the yeshiva. At the beginning of the nineteenth century very few
Jews attended Russian schools, but the numbers increased as time went
on. Jewish children in Russian schools were to become the recruiting
ground for the revolutionary movement.
6 Louis Greenberg, Jews in Russia. Vol. 1: The Struggle for Emancipation. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1976, p. 45.
7 The cheders were schools where Jewish boys starting at age 5 learned the Hebrew alphabet
and gained some rudimentary knowledge of the Jewish religion.
The government’s most calamitous policy, a regulation introduced by

Nicholas I in 1827, concerned Jewish military service: It required Jewish
communities to deliver to the army a specified number of boys up to
the age of 12 years. Before this policy was introduced, Jews could fulfill
their military obligation by paying a special tax. The explicit intent of
the new regulation was to force young Jewish boys to abandon their
religion: Although the draft age was 18 and the period of service was
twenty-five years, Jewish boys were taken at age 12 years to “prepare
them for service.” Being taken by this draft was rightly regarded as the
greatest misfortune that could befall on a family, and therefore every
family made every effort to avoid it. The communities were placed under
great pressure to deliver the prescribed number of boys. Often raids,
organized by the kahal, were conducted to take boys even younger than
12 years. Separated from their families and communities, these children
were pressured to convert; sometimes conversions were carried out by
subterfuge or force. Of the approximately 70,000 young people who
were drafted, about half converted.8
The lot of these unfortunate boys was pitiful. Given the life expectancy
at that time, it was unlikely that they would ever see their families
again. In the army they were exposed to mistreatment motivated by the
antisemitism of their fellow soldiers and the officers. This regulation was
rescinded by Nicholas’s successor, Alexander II, in 1856, but when uni-
versal military service was introduced in 1874, Jews were required to
serve like everyone else. The lot of Jewish soldiers continued to be hard
because of the prevailing antisemitism in the army. However, because this
antisemitism was mostly religious, rather than racial as under Nazism,
a converted Jew could aspire to a military career. We know of at least
one Russian general in the second half of the nineteenth century who was
born a Jew.
In the Russian Empire, the two worlds, Jewish and non-Jewish,
remained far removed from one another. Unlike in Western Europe,
where Jews spoke the local languages and made disproportionate con-
tributions to the cultures of the countries in which they lived, Russian
Jewry, speaking Yiddish, created their own separate culture. At the outset,
this culture was overwhelmingly religious, and the modernizing attempts
among Jews that took place in German lands found little echo here.
Secular education spread slowly and encountered considerable resistance
8 Yitzak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2009, p. 5.
among the conservative leaders. Although there was almost universal

male literacy in Yiddish and Hebrew, those leaders regarded secular edu-
cation as heretical and dangerous. (Many women also learned to read
and write, although most likely in Yiddish rather than in Hebrew.) Even
the poorest Jews considered it necessary to have their male children learn
to read so they could fulfill their religious obligation and study the Torah.
As a general rule, education in the cheder ended at age 12, after which
the more ambitious and those who could afford it went to study in a
yeshiva. The study of the Torah and Talmud never ended for a religious
Jew.
In opposition to the intellectual orientation of traditional Judaism,
the Hasidic movement arose in eighteenth-century Poland, and it was
to acquire considerable influence among Russian Jews. It stressed the
emotional rather than the intellectual aspect of religion, and it appealed
especially to the poorest and to the least educated. The Hasids (the word
“Hasid” means pious), unlike traditional Jewish communities, venerated
their leaders, the Tsadiks (the righteous ones), who were charismatic
figures to whom supernatural powers were often attributed. The growth
of Hasidism divided Russian Jewry into two hostile groups. Those who
wanted to modernize Judaism and to learn from Western European Jewry
were in particular hostile to the Hasids and regarded them as the worst
enemies of enlightenment.
The Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) movement occasioned an even
greater rift within the community. The roots of this movement were in
Germany. Its followers wanted to bring to the masses enlightenment, sec-
ular education, and greater integration into the surrounding societies. It
is understandable why this movement was more successful in the West
and that it came to Russia only several decades later, slowly beginning
in the 1840s. The obstacles to integration and the flourishing of secular
knowledge were much greater in Russian than in the West. Many Jewish
leaders approached the Haskalah with suspicion and saw dangers to Jew-
ish identity in the attempt to get closer to the surrounding society. Some of
this movement’s followers (the Maskilim) were suspected of being agents
of the tsar because of their efforts to make education more secular. Ini-
tially traditional Judaism and Hasidism held greater appeal to Russian
Jews than the Haskalah, but as the nineteenth century progressed, more
and more Russian Jews were attracted to secular learning, the study of
Jewish history, and the revival of Hebrew, thereby basing Jewish identity
on a new foundation. Modern Jewish political movements were made
possible by the Maskilim, Jewish intellectuals who realized that they had
to approach the common people through their own language, Yiddish;

this led by the end of the century to a wonderful flourishing of Yiddish
literature.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russian Jewry was fairly
homogeneous, but by its close the situation was very different: The much
larger Jewish community was split by religious, social, and territorial
divisions. In the south, especially in Odessa, a multinational, fast grow-
ing port city where Jews made up almost a third of the inhabitants,
opportunities appeared that did not exist elsewhere. There, life was freer,
and the city developed a vibrant secular culture. In contrast, Vilna, the
capital of Lithuania, became a center of Jewish learning. Even the lan-
guage Jews spoke, Yiddish, acquired different vocabularies depending on
the language of the surrounding population. The degree of government
protection also varied. Although the legal position of Jews did not change
much and antisemitism became an increasingly strong force, some Jews
became successful in the economic and cultural life of the nation.
In the 1890s industrialization progressed impressively, and the trans-
formation produced winners and losers. In the rapidly changing society
many Jews were reduced to destitution. Those who had acted as middle-
men between landlords and peasants lost their positions after the liber-
ation of the serfs, and the state took over the vodka monopoly. For the
majority of Jews industrialization brought few benefits, because joining
the growing proletariat did not mean much of an advance. At the same
time a small number did succeed in taking advantage of newly opened
opportunities in the rapidly industrializing society. Jewish capitalists were
represented way out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
They played significant roles in banking, insurance, the textile industry,
foreign trade, and railroad building, which was the engine of Russian
industrialization. For the same reasons as in Western Europe, Jews also
became prominent in the professions, and some made noteworthy contri-
butions to Russian culture. This was all the more impressive considering
the official limitations that were imposed on them.
Western European Jews were well integrated, rich, and cultured and
looked similar to non-Jews. Russian Jews, by contrast, remained sepa-
rated from the rest of the society, living a life altogether different from
their compatriots, and most were poor; yet both Western European and
Russian Jews aroused antisemitism. However, unlike in Western Europe,
the Russians did not find it necessary to explain why they did not like
Jews: In the nineteenth century there were no Russian “theorists” of
antisemitism. Russia had no equivalents to Maurras, Houston Stewart

Chamberlain, Wilhelm Marr, or Eugen Dühring.9
Russian antisemitism differed from the Western variety because it was
not racist but stemmed from religious and economic motivations. After
all, Russia was a multinational empire that had successfully integrated a
Mongol aristocracy and actually favored the Baltic German nobility. The
peasants believed the accusation of the Church that Jews were responsi-
ble for the death of the redeemer, and they hated Jews because they saw
them as economic exploiters. Because Jews lived a separate existence, it
was easy for the ignorant and superstitious to attribute to them all sorts
of strange customs and unsavory beliefs. Members of the royal court cir-
cles looked down on Jews, regarded them as inferior, and at the same
time held them responsible for both social ills, such as drunkenness of
their fellow citizens, and, increasingly, political subversion. Earlier the
government had imposed restrictions on Jews because it considered them
unenlightened and inassimilable; at the end of the nineteenth century, in
light of Jewish economic and intellectual success, the government found it
necessary to continue those restrictions but for a different reason: because
the Jews were so clever that the simple Russian people could not com-
pete with them. Simply put, Jews were a burden from which they would
have been delighted to be freed. Yet Russia’s reputation for antisemitism
was not only an embarrassment but also a practical problem: Interna-
tional financial institutions, in which Jews possessed considerable power,
on occasion would refuse much needed loans. In addition, the concern
that foreign Jews exhibited for their Russian coreligionists reinforced the
conviction of the antisemites that there was a worldwide anti-Russian
conspiracy.
This conspiracy theory constituted Russia’s “contribution” to
antisemitic “theory,” disseminated in the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion.10 This fraudulent document, which describes a worldwide Jew-
ish conspiracy, purportedly transcribes the minutes at the first Zionist
9 Houston Stewart Chamberlain was English by birth, but spent most of his life in Ger-
many. He wrote about the superiority of the Aryan race and, in particular, the Nordic
Germanic people. It was the task of the superior race to defend Western civilization
from the influence of the inferior Jews. As mentioned earlier, Wilhelm Marr coined
the word “antisemitism.” He saw an eternal conflict between the Germanic and Jewish
races and feared that Jews were winning the struggle. Eugen Dühring denounced Jews
as responsible for capitalism and cosmopolitanism and saw them as an unchanging evil
force.
10 On the Protocols, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide.
Congress in Basel in 1897. It was first published in 1903 in a journal

Znamia, and two years later Sergei Nilus, an Orthodox religious figure
and mystic, who had close relations with the Tsarist court, published a sec-
ond edition. It is disputed whether the Russian political police (Okhrana)
was involved in the creation of this false document, but a government
printing house did publish Nilus’s version.
However, the Russian forgers could not even claim originality. Ele-
ments were plagiarized from a French writer, Maurice Joly, who himself
based his fictional document, “A Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu
and Machiavelli,” partly on a novel by Eugene Sue. Joly’s writing was
then plagiarized by the German antisemite, Hermann Goedsche, in his
novel, where the conspiracy of the rabbis takes place in the Prague Jewish
cemetery.11 Goedsche’s novel was translated into Russian, and it is likely
that the creators of the forgery had read it. However, the Russians had
no need to plagiarize. All “unmasking” of conspiracies have much in
common: They all claim to show that the conspirators have goals and use
methods that would be considered frightening and distasteful by an envis-
aged audience. That these presumed goals make no sense and contradict
one another does not seem to bother the authors. Joly, for example, had
no interest in Jews, but aimed his work against Napoleon III.
The Protocols is a remarkably crude document, in which the Jew-
ish leaders express such viciousness and cynicism and, at the same time,
such simple-mindedness that no reasonable person could believe that
these protocols were actually minutes taken at a meeting. With amazing
frankness the Jewish leaders discuss their goals for world domination
and their underhanded methods for achieving them. Their plans call for
capitalizing on the stupidity of Christians to make them believe in inter-
nationalism and thereby undermine national sovereignty. The plans also
include corrupting people by having them consort with Jewish prosti-
tutes, fomenting wars among Christian states, and using the power of
gold to control instruments of propaganda. Some of the points verge on
idiocy, such as the proposition that Jews should fight to stop the sale of
alcohol because that would make good Christians depressed. The Jewish
leaders are contemptuous of democracy, internationalism, and, above all,
all Christians.
It is ironic that the notion of Jewish world domination originated not
in the West, where some Jews actually possessed some economic power,
11 This complex story was fictionalized in a recent novel by Umberto Eco, The Prague
Cemetery.
but in Russia, a country where the vast majority of Jews were poor
and defenseless. And it is remarkable that this self-evident forgery had a
lasting and powerful impact, extending far beyond Russia and continuing
throughout the twentieth century and even after. The explanation for this
impact is that in a crude form it expressed the fears of antisemites about
Jewish economic, intellectual, and even political power. It resurrected
in modern form the fear of Jewish supernatural qualities, which they
supposedly derived from Satan.
During the course of the nineteenth century Jews increasingly often
became victims of communal violence. Although Russia was not the only
country in which pogroms occurred, Russian Jews suffered more from
these outbursts of violence than people in any other country, and Russia
is accurately regarded as the homeland of pogroms. It is difficult to estab-
lish a common pattern in these events, but we can make some general-
izations. By their very nature pogroms were disorganized, spontaneous
affairs. It was unpredictable when and where they would break out,
although they were most likely to start at times of social upheaval or
at religious holidays, in particular, Easter, the holiday that marked the
crucifixion. Towns were more likely to be the place of violent outbreaks
than the countryside. Pogroms took human lives and almost always were
accompanied by the destruction of property and looting; on occasion
Jewish women were raped.
Ironically, Odessa, a city that provided many opportunities for Jewish
advancement, was also a venue of the most frequent violence directed
against them. Jews and Greeks lived in close proximity to one another
and were engaged in economic competition. The fights, in which Jews
were almost always the losers, usually occurred at Easter. Greeks attacked
Jews then “for not showing proper respect” and the Russian mob joined
in the mayhem.
The Odessa pogroms were local affairs. By contrast, a two-year wave of
pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 covered
a large area. Although among the assassins of the tsar there was only a
single Jew, Gesia Gelfman, antisemites among the common people blamed
Jews for his death. A government committee under N. P. Ignatev, the
minister of the interior, drew up the so-called May laws. According to
Richard Pipes, these laws, which gave the police wide latitude in pursuing
those accused of political crimes, were the foundations of a police state.12
Ignatev’s committee regarded the pogroms as an understandable response
12 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (2nd ed.). New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
of the common people to Jewish exploitation. Instead of emancipation,

the remedy that it offered was further restrictions on Jewish life, removal
of them from the countryside, and limitations on their economic activities.
The new laws, of course, failed to prevent further anti-Jewish violence.
The 1881–83 pogroms were a turning point in Russian Jewish life: Many
Jews drew the conclusion that the Russian Empire could never become
their homeland and the mass migration began. The pogroms also had
international consequences; it was these pogroms that made the Western
European public think of Russia as the home of antisemitism.
The next destructive wave of anti-Jewish violence took place before,
during, and after the 1905 revolution. The bloodiest pogrom up to this
time took place in Kishinev in 1903, a town in Bessarabia, where Jews, just
as in Odessa, made up about a third of the population. Almost fifty Jews
were killed, hundreds were wounded, and there was extensive damage
of property. Once again the charge of ritual murder inspired the crowd
at Easter to kill Jews; once again the authorities failed to take action
to protect the defenseless.13 The inaction persuaded the crowd that the
government and the Tsar in particular were on their side. In 1905–06,
at a time of revolutionary upheaval and spreading anarchy, hundreds
of pogroms took place across the country, and the violence produced
thousands of deaths.
The 1905 revolution frightened Nicholas II and the tsarist court. The
regime was forced to give concessions to the liberals in the hope of
stopping the spread of revolution. But the tsar expressed his real views
through his support of reactionary, demagogic, arguably proto-fascist,
and inevitably antisemitic organizations, such as the League of the Rus-
sian People, which was commonly referred to as the Black Hundreds.
Members of the Black Hundreds were the most vicious pogromists. Its
demagogic agitation and mobilization of the lumpenproletariat showed
that Russia was the birthplace not only of communism but also of fas-
cism. The revolutionary wave increased the antisemitism of the tsarist
court; more than ever the defenders of the old regime blamed Jews for the
troubles. In addition to blaming Jews for the success of the revolution-
ary movement, the court also detected a worldwide Jewish conspiracy
against Russia. It was convenient for the conservatives to assume that it
was not Russians but aliens (i.e., Jews) who wanted to destroy the empire.
The government supported extreme right-wing organizations that spread
13 The charge of ritual murder, or blood libel, arose in the Middle Ages. Jews were accused
of murdering children for the use of their blood for baking matzoh.
antisemitic propaganda, a major contributing cause of the wave of mur-

ders. Pogromist agitators often falsely claimed that the government issued
proclamations allowing a certain number of days of violence against Jews.
It is revealing that the people were willing to believe that the government
approved of “punishing” the Jews.
However, contrary to contemporary assertions, it cannot be estab-
lished that the tsarist regime, for reasons of exploiting public disaffec-
tion, organized or encouraged the pogroms. The government did not
favor spontaneous movements, even those aimed at murdering or rob-
bing Jews. Yet its Jewish policies created an atmosphere in which such
events could easily take place. How long the disorders continued and
how violent they became depended to a considerable extent on the toler-
ance of the local officials. Some representatives of tsarist powers did take
quick and energetic measures against the participants of the pogroms and
stopped the violence.
The revolutionary wave passed and with it the series of bloody
pogroms; however, that did not mean a diminution of antisemitism.
One manifestation of continuing antisemitism was the reemergence of
the horrifying charge of blood libel. In 1911, Mendel Beilis, a Jewish
superintendent in a brick factory, was arrested and accused of murdering
a 12-year-old Russian boy. The case was a scandalously flimsy attempt
to frame an innocent man; it should have been clear at the outset that
the boy was the victim of a criminal gang. Right-wing circles in Kiev
initiated the spurious charge, but it soon gained nationwide significance
because the prosecution received support from the highest circles in the
government, namely from the minister of justice, I. G. Shcheglovitov, and,
presumably, from the tsar himself. Despite such support in 1913, the jury,
made up by peasants, found Beilis innocent. However, at the same time
it also concluded that ritual murders do take place and consequently the
verdict could be seen as a victory for both sides.
What was striking about the government’s naked intervention was
that the minister and the tsar – and not only ignorant peasants – actually
seemed to believe in the existence of ritual murders. Nicholas II held that
a sect of Jews used the blood of Christian children for liturgical purposes.
We have no way of knowing for certain, but it seems that the court circles
were deeply antisemitic, and therefore it would be incorrect to accuse the
tsar and his ministers of staging this affair merely to divert attention from
the genuine problems of the country. Beilis may have been acquitted, but
court circles still believed that ritual murders occurred. Even if in this
instance the boy was not killed by Beilis, other children elsewhere were
easy prey of vicious Jews.14 The affair attracted worldwide attention and
cemented the Russian authorities’ reputation for antisemitism.
Jews during the Communist Revolution and in the Soviet Union

Before 1917 most Jews were poor and were exposed to increasingly
vicious antisemitism supported by the highest authorities; they had lit-
tle desire to acculturate to Russian society and did not consider Russia as
their homeland. They could respond to their unfavorable circumstances
in three ways. The easiest and by far the most frequently chosen option
was emigration. Between 1881 and 1914 about two million Jews left
Russia, most of them going to the United States. They left for a variety
of reasons. Jews emigrated because of economic hardship and in search
of opportunities elsewhere. Men left to avoid the draft. Some decided
to leave after pogroms convinced them that the hopelessly antisemitic
authorities would not defend them. It was easier for Jews than for non-
Jews to leave because their property was not in land. Most emigrants
suffered little or no homesickness in America, and unlike non-Jews, very
few returned to Russia. Yet because birth rates of those Jews remaining
in Russia were so high, despite this large-scale movement out of the Pale
of Settlement, the number of Jews within the Russian Empire did not
decline.
The second response to the difficult conditions in Russia and growing
antisemitism was an assertion of Jewish identity in form of Zionism. In
an embryonic form Russian Zionism preceded the appearance of Herzl’s
book Der Judenstaat, which was published in 1896. Zionism grew out
of an anti-assimilationist conviction: Many Jews came to believe, not
without justification, that Russians would never accept them as equal
members of society and that they could only be free in their own home-
land. Members of the semi-russified intelligentsia thus decided to return
to their Jewish roots but for nationalist, not religious, reasons. Yet set-
tling in their ancient homeland, Palestine, remained a theoretical idea for
some time, and the actual number of settlers remained insignificant. The
Ottoman Sultan opposed settling Jews in Palestine, and circumstances
there did not make settlement easy. Zionism also had opponents within
the Jewish community. The Bund (a Jewish political party, described later)
opposed Zionism as a form of nationalism and a force that would divide
14 Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986, p. 48.
the international solidarity of the working classes. Jews who continued to

believe in the possibility of assimilation disapproved of the Zionist move-
ment because they feared that it would undermine the notion of Jewish
patriotism.
The third possible response was to look for salvation in socialist inter-
nationalism. It was fully understandable that Jews felt little allegiance to
the tsarist regime that had victimized them. According to Marxist the-
ory, once capitalism was overthrown, nationalism, along with national
hostilities and prejudices, would disappear along with all other social ills.
Some Jews, possibly because of their religious heritage, which included
the command to take the side of the unfortunate ones in the society, were
attracted to the utopian and universalist appeal of Marxism. Further, the
revolutionary youth were largely recruited from the educated classes in
which Jews were overrepresented.
Although antisemites for their own reasons exaggerated the role of
Jews in the revolutionary movement, it remains a fact that Jews were
represented disproportionately in every revolutionary party. It is also true
that those Jews who came to play prominent roles in both the Bolshevik
and Menshevik wings of the Social Democratic Party stopped considering
themselves to be Jewish and in some cases went out of their way to hide
their background. Such a strategy, however, made no difference to the
antisemites: From their point of view, a Jew was always a Jew. Jews joined
the revolutionary movement, even though this movement also included
antisemites. Some revolutionaries used antisemitism as a demagogic ploy
to appeal to the peasants, knowing that they regarded Jews as exploiters.
Antisemitism was particularly noticeable in the non-Marxist, populist
wing of socialism, but it also existed among the Marxists.
Initially many Jewish socialists did not see their interests as distinct
from those of their fellow proletarians. They all suffered from low wages,
deplorable working conditions, and extremely long working hours. Nev-
ertheless, the idea that an autonomous Jewish working-class organization
should be formed emerged relatively early. This idea had less to do with
Jewish nationalism and more with the understanding that the workers
could be best reached by the use of their own language, Yiddish. In 1897,
delegates from different parts of the Pale created the General Jewish
Workingmen Party of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, later popularly
known as the Bund. The leaders of the new organization regarded them-
selves as part of the international socialist movement within the empire
and participated in the founding congress of the Russian Social Demo-
cratic Workers Party that took place in 1898 in Minsk. Jewish nationalism
was anathema for the members of the Bund, and they were ready to
fight Jewish capitalists as well as non-Jewish ones. However, their Rus-
sian comrades were unwilling to accept them on their own terms and
were unwilling to concede them organizational autonomy. The Second
Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903 excluded the
Bund.15 The Bund continued to exist illegally, and in Russia it was finally
destroyed after the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded. However, it contin-
ued to play an important part in the newly re-created Poland until World
War II began.
The great conflagration of the years 1914–21 – the devastating world
war, a democratic revolution, and a bitter and long civil war – profoundly
changed the situation of Jews. In modern Russian history, the greater the
social upheaval, the greater is Jewish suffering, and the violence of these
years surpassed all that came before. In fact, the situation of Jews greatly
deteriorated almost immediately after the outbreak of World War I. The
war made human life seem cheap, and both the Germans and the Russians
regarded Jews as potential spies and traitors. The field of battle largely
coincided with the Pale of Settlement, and Jews were forcibly removed
from the region. Pogroms took place with increasing frequency. Although
mass murders of Jews took place only at the time of the civil war, their
mistreatment and killing began with the commencement of hostilities
between the German and the Russian Armies.
Jews almost everywhere celebrated the collapse of the old regime that
had always regarded them as enemies, and indeed, the democratic gov-
ernment that took power in March 1917 emancipated them. As a conse-
quence of the separate Bolshevik-German armistice concluded at Brest-
Litovsk, as well as the Paris peace treaties, the defunct Russian Empire
lost large chunks of territories and with them approximately half of its
Jewry. From this point on the path of Jews in the newly independent
states and those who ultimately became Soviet citizens diverged.
During the civil war from 1917–22, antisemitism came to be a focal
point in the ideology of the Whites, the anti-revolutionary, anti-Bolshevik
forces. It was a potent force, and the successful identification of Bolshe-
viks and Jews in the public mind greatly harmed both. For the generals
who were leaders of the Whites, however, antisemitism was more than a
demagogic ploy. Those who had been fundamentally comfortable within
the old regime were stunned by its sudden collapse, and it was necessary
15 It was this exclusion that enabled Lenin and his followers to claim the majority at the
congress and hence the name “Bolsheviks” (i.e., majoritarians).
to explain primarily to themselves why such an event occurred. Their con-

venient explanation was that people who had been influenced by alien
subversives overthrew the old order. Given the significant, but of course
far from decisive, Jewish role in the revolutionary movement, it was not
a stretch of the imagination to blame everything on Jews.
Under the circumstances it could hardly be considered surprising that a
particular form of beastliness – pogroms – which had had a long history in
the Russian Empire, recurred during the civil war. Indeed, in the Ukraine
in 1919 and in 1920, mass murder of Jews took place on a scale that was
surpassed only by that occurring in World War II. At a time when human
life was cheap, when there was a general feeling that the old order and
with it conventional morality had collapsed, murder was easy. The major-
ity of Jews (1.6 million out of 2.6 million) who remained in the territory
that was to become the Soviet Union lived in the Ukraine. The civil war
in the Ukraine was particularly bitter and every faction – the Ukrainian
nationalists, the anarchists, the anti-Bolshevik Whites, and even the Reds,
the Bolsheviks – committed atrocities against Jews. Although no faction
was innocent, those pogroms carried out by the White armies were the
most lethal, best organized, and most motivated by ideology. Mostly the
Cossacks carried out the murders, but the officers of the ex-tsarist army
and the politicians cooperating with them created the environment in
which mass murder could take place. The Russian Orthodox Church, the
ideological arm of the White moment, also made its contribution through
priests who carried out ferocious antisemitic agitation. Foreign observers
were shocked by the preoccupation of the White leaders with Jews. An
English journalist, John Hodgson, who stayed for some time at the head-
quarters of General Anton Denikin, the leader of the White forces, wrote
as follows:
The officers and the men of the army laid practically all the blame for their
country’s trouble on the Hebrew. Many held that the whole cataclysm had been
engineered by some great and mysterious society of international Jews, who, in
the pay and at the order of Germany, had seized the psychological moment and
snatched the reins of government.16
Typically the violence began with the arrival of the Cossacks, and
usually Ukrainian peasants joined in the looting. Before the revolution
pogroms took place almost exclusively in towns, but now the violence
spread to the entire countryside. The pogromists were especially violent
16 J. E. Hodgson, With Denikin’s Armies. London: Temple Bar, 1932, pp. 54–55.
at a time when their side was losing the civil war; they took revenge for
their defeats on the defenseless. The more they murdered, the bitterer
became their antisemitism because the murderers had to believe that their
“enemies” deserved what they got. The total number of dead was esti-
mated between 100,000 and 200,000. Even if we regard these figures as
too high, it is likely that the dreadful slaughter carried out during the civil
war killed about 10 percent of the Jewry of the Ukraine. This accounting,
of course, does not include those who were raped, maimed, or orphaned
or had their property and livelihoods destroyed.17
In 1922 the Whites were defeated, and ultimately millions of anti-
Bolsheviks were compelled to go into exile. A minority among them found
common cause with the rising extreme rightist movements in Europe, par-
ticularly in Germany; the ideological ties between the extreme antisemites
among the Russian exiles and the Nazis can be demonstrated. Baltic
Germans, who in the past had served the Russian state, and nationalist
Ukrainian exiles took with themselves an embittered antisemitism that
likely contributed to Adolph Hitler’s crazed ideology. The exiles brought
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which acquired much greater influ-
ence than it had possessed before. Some of the leaders of the White
movement, though by far not the majority, cooperated with the German
invaders during World War II.
Once the civil war ended and the revolutionary regime was established,
an extraordinary transformation took place in Jewish life, even though the
new regime was not philo-Semitic. Although there were a large number of
Jews among the leaders, these people did not consider themselves Jewish
and had no sense of solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters;
as convinced atheists, they opposed all religions, certainly among them
Judaism. Many were also well aware that the association of Bolshevism
with Jews in the public mind was harmful for the regime. However,
the lifting of restrictions on Jewish activities and a government that did
not discriminate among citizens on the basis of religion enabled Jews to
take advantage of the opportunities offered. The movement of Jews to
the hitherto forbidden cities, their acculturation into Russian life, their
involvement with Russian culture, and their success in fields of culture and
politics occurred remarkably rapidly. The young chose a different way
of life from their elders. The antireligious policies of the regime greatly
17 On the pogroms during the civil war, see my article in Klier and Lambroza (eds.), Anti-
Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004.
facilitated the process of acculturation. As religious schools, among them

Jewish, were closed, young Jews came to interact with others to a greater
extent than ever before and came to believe that they were no different
from other citizens. Jews, who a generation before spoke a different
language, Yiddish, now became major contributors to Russian culture,
literature, music, and sciences.
It is unlikely that popular antisemitism disappeared overnight,
but what mattered was that such attitudes could no longer be
openly expressed: The young Soviet state punished open expression of
antisemitism. However, most Jews did not understand the depth of hos-
tility still held toward them. Many took the regime’s internationalist
slogans seriously. It is likely that proportionally more Jews were carried
away by the emancipatory ideas of the Revolution than other citizens.
It is true that, during the purges of the 1930s, a larger percentage of
Jews became victims than non-Jews, but that was because the purges hit
those segments of the population in which Jews were most represented.
Although as a result of the purges the role of Jews in the political life of
the nation gradually diminished, they continued to make great contribu-
tions to the scientific and cultural life of the nation. By any standard of
measurement Jews were the most successful minority in the pre–World
War II Soviet Union.18 It was only after the outbreak of World War II
that the first signs of official antisemitism appeared.
What happened to Jews in the Soviet period was similar to what had
happened earlier in Western Europe. The difference was that it took place
in both a telescoped and larger format: The transformation occurred
faster and there was a much larger population that took advantage of the
changes. Just as for Western European Jewry, it was the values that the
Russian Jews brought into the modern age that can explain the success
of the transformation.
18 The success of the Russian Jews in the early Soviet period is brilliantly described in Yuri
Slezkine, The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
3
Hungarian Jews
Hungarian Jewry was unique; its history was full of paradoxes and con-
tradictions. Nowhere else did Jews come closer to dominating the econ-
omy and cultural life of a nation, nowhere else did Jews play a more
crucial role in the leadership of Marxist socialism, and nowhere else was
the gap wider between assimilated and Orthodox Jews. It is precisely this
uniqueness that makes Hungarian Jewry an excellent case study, because,
in a particularly clear form, it shows the different sources of resurgent
twentieth-century antisemitism.
Although some Jews had lived in the territory that came to be the
kingdom of Hungary since Roman times, their number was small. Their
situation before the eighteenth century was not different from that of
Jews in the other European countries: They were periodically expelled
and then allowed to return after paying special taxes to the treasury; at
times they were compelled to wear distinguishing signs and were limited
in their places of residence; and on occasion, the loans they had extended
to Christians were canceled by the royal authorities, undermining their
economic well-being. Hungarian Jews suffered ritual murder accusations
and at times were burnt at the stake. Hungary was neither more nor less
welcoming to Jews than other European countries.
Only after the liberation of the country from Turkish occupation at
the very end of the seventeenth century did a sizable Jewish community
develop. At that time the country was only thinly inhabited as a result
of the devastation caused by 150 years of foreign rule, so both the court
and the nobility gladly welcomed immigrants. Among those immigrants
they also accepted Jews, but with the condition that they pay a special
tax, the so-called toleration tax. Hungarian Jewish community developed
52
Hungarian Jews 53
more slowly than the Polish Jewry and it remained much smaller. Per-
haps because of its smaller size the large-scale pogroms that devastated the
Polish Jewry did not take place in this early period. In addition, although
Jews lived under various restrictions and experienced only grudging tol-
erance, they were by no means as poverty-stricken as the Polish and later
the Russian Jewry. Even in the eighteenth century Hungary offered better
economic opportunities, and from the earliest period soon after libera-
tion from Turkish occupation, some Jews were able to take advantage of
them. Indeed, most Jews came freely from other parts of the Habsburg
Empire (mostly from Moravia and Bohemia) in search of a better life,
rather than because they were expelled from their previous place of res-
idence. As everywhere, they were engaged in commerce, and trade, and
money lending and remained excluded from agriculture.
The first reasonably accurate accounting of the Jewish population
comes from a census from the years 1735–38: Approximately 12,000
Jews lived in those counties that were surveyed. By extrapolation the
number of all Jews in the entire country was around 18,000, which rep-
resented less than 0.5 percent of the overall population.1 At that time
most Jews lived in the Western part of the country. In the second half of
the eighteenth century there was considerable growth, as the Habsburg
Empire benefited from the destruction of the Kingdom of Poland. In the
first partition Austria acquired Galicia, which included a large number of
Jews. In this underdeveloped and poor region, Hasidism had many fol-
lowers, which made Jewish integration far more difficult and slow than
was the case for Jews who had emigrated earlier from Germany, Bohemia,
and Moravia. The Galician Jews remained much more tradition bound
and less willing and able to take advantage of the economic opportunities
offered in a rapidly changing society.
By the end of the eighteenth century the Hungarian Jewish commu-
nity had grown fivefold, their number probably reaching 100,000. Jews
were tolerated because they performed tasks that the Hungarian nobility
considered desirable, yet were themselves unwilling to do; for example,
Jews acted in finance, commerce, and industry. Some privileged Jews per-
formed services to the court and in this capacity acquired considerable
power and influence. Other privileged Jews served aristocrats, who stood
at the top of the Hungarian social pyramid. However much they may
have disliked Jews and their customs and values, rulers and aristocrats
very quickly realized their usefulness.
1 János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon. Budapest: Osiris, 2001, pp. 26–27.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century Jewish life operated accord-
ing to the laws and customs of a feudal society. Even when allowed to
settle in particular towns, Jews did not always possess the rights that
their fellow city dwellers possessed; in fact, some towns excluded Jews
altogether. As in Poland, Russia, and pre–Enlightenment Western Europe,
Jews represented a special caste, living in circumstances different from the
rest of the population. Contacts that went beyond commercial relations
between Jews and non-Jews were limited, if they existed at all. This sep-
arateness also allowed considerable autonomy to the Jewish community.
Although Jews came to be socially and economically stratified, neverthe-
less the community lived according to the ancient laws. They followed
the precepts of Halacha (Jewish religious law), sent their children to the
cheder, and accepted the authority of a religious court to resolve contro-
versial issues among themselves. Even when they were not restricted to
living in a ghetto, as a general rule they lived in certain sections of towns
in close proximity to one another.
The process of emancipation was gradual, taking place in fits and starts
and lasting almost a century (1780–1867). At times, Jews received con-
cessions and on other occasions suffered reverses. At times, they received
greater support from the court, but on other occasions they were sup-
ported by the only political class, the nobility, which dominated local
politics through its control of local government. The monarchy remained
decentralized and consequently dependent on the goodwill of individual
noble assemblies.
The reign of the “Enlightened absolutist,” Emperor Joseph II (1780–
90), proved a crucial turning point. His efforts to bring order and uni-
formity to his complex, multinational empire undermined some of the
fundamental assumptions on which feudal society had been built. In the
course of his brief reign, the legal position of Jewry also changed con-
siderably. Just like the French revolutionary thinkers, Joseph was not
motivated by philo-Semitism: Like them, he assumed that the way to get
rid of Jews was to assimilate them, so he removed some of the limitations
imposed on them. He encouraged the use of the German language as an
instrument of centralization, rather than Yiddish and Hebrew. He made
it possible for Jews to attend schools and universities as a further induce-
ment to assimilation. It was during his reign that Jews were compelled
to assume last names (as opposed to using their first name and father’s
name), and these were German names. As a consequence a century or so
later, when Jews in fact became acculturated, many changed their names
to Hungarian-sounding names, because their German family names had
Hungarian Jews 55
been assumed only recently and therefore had not become essential to
their self-identity.
Joseph II wanted to modernize, rationalize, and centralize the admin-
istration of his empire and for that purpose he sought to impose German
culture on his subjects. The unforeseen effect of his reforms was that the
Hungarian nobles serving in the court came to realize that they were in
fact not German, but Hungarian. Their assertion of Hungarian identity
came to be intertwined with their desire to retain their feudal politi-
cal and social privileges, which they rightly perceived as being curtailed
by Joseph’s modernization efforts. Ironically, Joseph’s effort to impose
Germanic culture was a great boost to the development of Hungarian
nationalism. During this time of change, use of the Hungarian language
came to play a crucial role, and the concept of nation and the use of the
national language became intertwined. Until this time being a member
of the Hungarian nation meant possessing a set of political rights and
privileges, regardless of language, but Joseph’s attempts to Germanize
changed the concept of nation. It acquired the modern meaning: those
belonged to the nation who possessed a common cultural heritage.
In this period of renewal of the Hungarian language, efforts were
made to make it into a language of Hungarian literature and culture as
well.2 As a result at the time of Jewish emancipation, Jews had the choice
to learn Hungarian and identify with the Hungarian nationalist cause
or speak German. It came to be a crucial precondition of integration
into Hungarian society that Hungarian Jews sided with the Hungarian
nationalists and adopted the national language. Of all the minorities that
lived within the kingdom, it was the Jewish minority that was the first,
most successful, and most enthusiastic convert to Hungarian culture, and
language, while accepting the ruling classes’ definition of national interest.
Hungarian Jewry, like Western European Jewries and unlike their Eastern
European coreligionists, quickly identified with the national language and
culture. (However, at the same time a considerable segment of the Jewish
community became multilingual, meaning that, although they regarded
Hungarian as their mother tongue, they also spoke German.)
The enlightened reign of Joseph was followed by a conservative reac-
tion: Jews once again were excluded from some schools, and feudal-
ism remained fundamentally intact until 1848, when the revolutionaries
abolished serfdom. Nevertheless, the first half of the nineteenth century
was a period of great intellectual and political ferment, described in the
2 Up to 1844 the language of the Hungarian Diet was Latin.

historical literature as the “era of reforms” and the Hungarian equivalent

of the age of Enlightenment. In the reform era the “Jewish question” was
frequently on the agenda of the Diet, the Hungarian parliament, and there
liberal voices could frequently be heard. Among the nobles in the Diet
were learned men who knew and admired Western European political
institutions. Perhaps the most outstanding was Baron József Eötvös, who
since the 1840s had consistently advocated full equality for Jews.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the emerging
forces of nationalism increasingly threatened the multinational empire
and within it the Kingdom of Hungary, the nobility found in Jews an ally:
They formed a group that was, in contrast to most of the other minori-
ties, willing to acculturate and regard themselves as Hungarians, thereby
increasing the strength of the ruling nationality. Furthermore, Jews pro-
vided the middlemen that the landowners needed, acting as agents of
the nobility in collecting dues and taxes from the peasants. Hungary
did not yet possess a modern commercial and financial network and so
benefited from Jewish economic activities. The nobility wanted to mod-
ernize and encourage industry and commerce but did not regard such
occupations as appropriate for themselves. This symbiotic relationship
with the nobility was the source of the uniqueness of Hungarian Jewry.
In addition, in the nineteenth century, the landowning class wanted to
think of itself as Western European and therefore as liberal; one way to
register their distinctiveness from other Eastern Europeans was by how
they treated “their” Jews. As a consequence, unlike in Poland, Russia, or
most countries of Europe, including Western Europe, Hungarian Jewry
was welcomed as an ally of the nationalists.
Although we have no data concerning public sentiments, it is likely that
the common people were more antisemitic than either the nobility or the
court. To the extent that an urban middle class existed at all, aside from
Jews, it was made up of Germans and, to a much smaller extent, Serbs.
Understandably these people were most likely to object to emancipation,
because they saw Jews as unwelcome competitors. Time and again cities
requested that limits be imposed on the size of the Jewish population,
and the Diet on occasion acquiesced. Among the churches, the Catholic
Church associated with the royal house was more resistant to the idea
of emancipation than the Protestant churches, which were more closely
allied to the nationalists.
One of the demands of the revolutionaries in 1848 was the establish-
ment of the principle of the equality of citizens before the law, regardless
of religion or class; this demand implied the emancipation of Jews. Jews
Hungarian Jews 57
by and large identified themselves with the revolutionary cause. Of the

Hungarian army of approximately 180,000, there were 20,000 Jewish
soldiers, a figure way out of proportion to their numbers in the popula-
tion. At the same time, as so often is the case during times of great social
upheaval, antisemitic voices were heard, and anti-Jewish demonstrations
took place in which the people demanded the expulsion of Jews from
some cities. Even small-scale pogroms took place in some towns.
In spite of such evidence of popular antisemitism, Jews in large num-
bers joined the revolutionary cause against the Habsburg state. However,
the defeat of the revolutionaries at the end of July 1849 meant a retreat
in the gradual process of emancipation. For example, the intentionally
humiliating special Jewish oath was reinstituted, that was required at
legal proceedings. Jews had to pay a special fine for their support of the
defeated revolution, and the traditional autonomy of the Jewish commu-
nity was temporarily circumscribed.
The establishment of the dual monarchy in 1867 immediately rein-
stated full emancipation and created the legal and economic conditions
that resulted in what came to be seen as the golden age of Hungarian
Jewry. The Diet accepted full emancipation as a matter of course with lit-
tle opposition. Although there were no conditions set, nevertheless it was
expected that Jews in Hungary would become Hungarians and thereby
allies of the nationalist nobility, a nobility that desired to retain its feu-
dal privileges and wealth but at the same time entertained some liberal
sentiments. This moment was the starting point of a remarkable trans-
formation.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the 1860s,
the size of Hungarian Jewry increased another fivefold due to both a high
birth rate and immigration. (From the middle of the century the immi-
gration came almost entirely from the East rather than from the West.3 )
The rate of growth of the Jewish population was higher than that of
the overall population. The main reason for the difference was the fact
that, just as in the Russian Empire, death rates declined faster among
Jews because of better hygiene. At the same time an extraordinary migra-
tion took place within the country itself: Jews moved into the major
cities, particularly to Budapest. Although most of this movement was
made up of Jews born in Hungary, contemporaries misperceived it as a
migration from Galicia, perhaps because many Orthodox Jews settled in
the major cities. The appearance of Orthodox Jews, so different from
3 Gyurgyak, p. 63.
their already acculturated coreligionists, created a new and different

antisemitism. “Galizianer” became a term of expression of dislike of Jews
in general.4
By World War I the Hungarian Jewish community numbered almost a
million, making up 5 percent of the total population. Most of the increase
was the consequence of natural increase rather than immigration. In fact,
in the prewar decades, emigration to the United States balanced out the
immigration from the East. Just before World War I, Budapest, which
was the fastest growing city in Europe at the time, was nearly 25 percent
Jewish. The antisemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, contemptuously
referred to the Hungarian capital as “Judapest.” Within the city Jews
segregated themselves by settling in two neighborhoods: the fifth district
(Lipotváros) and the seventh district (Erzsébetváros).
The original idea of those who had fought for emancipation – that
Jewry would simply melt into the larger population – was not realized:
Even acculturated Jews remained recognizable. They remained distinct
because in semi-feudal Hungarian society there was no class to which Jews
could assimilate. The emerging Jewish middle-class, in contradistinction
to the feudal nobility and a desperately poor, multiethnic peasantry, was
the only group that represented modernity in its various meanings –
educational attainment, family structure, knowledge of foreign languages,
enterprising spirit, and urbanization.
Thus the uniqueness of Hungarian Jewry stemmed from the partic-
ularly backward nature of Hungarian society and economics. Hungary
possessed no native bourgeoisie that could take on the tasks of modern-
ization. However, the country was more economically advanced than the
Russian Empire or the emerging states in the Balkans, and the political
elite very much desired to catch up with the West, which meant they
needed to develop modern industry. The nobility thus created a climate
in which Jews came to prosper; vast economic opportunities opened up
and there were not many competitors.5
Jews responded with enthusiasm to the opportunities offered and ever
more identified themselves as Hungarians, learning the language and par-
ticipating in the cultural life of the nation with extraordinary exuberance.
To a remarkable extent they came to represent the Hungarian middle
4 That is, coming from Galicia, the poorest and most backward part of the Hapsburg
Empire.
5 I have greatly benefited in writing this chapter from reading the works of Viktor Karady,
in particular, A zsidosag Europaban a Modern Korban. Budapest: Uj Mandatum, 2000,
and Zsidosag es Tarsadalmi Egyenlotlensegek. Budapest: Replika, 2000.
Hungarian Jews 59
classes, a class that more than any other represented a Western way of
lifestyle, social mobility, and education. They dominated some profes-
sions and most branches of the economy. Such domination existed only
in Hungary: In the West, Germans, French, and the like were perfectly
capable of performing those modernizing functions in the economy and
society, whereas to the East Jews continued to be excluded and there was
a low level of economic development.
In the nineteenth century three separate cultures existed in Hungary:
the culture of the nobility, the age-old customs of the multiethnic peas-
antry, and that of the Jews. The nobles possessed prestige and monopo-
lized jobs in the administration and government from which Jews were
excluded; however, they failed to take an interest in capital accumulation,
and they lacked a work ethic. The Jewish middle class lived on the basis
of values that we associate with modernity.6 In addition to possessing
positive characteristics in terms of economic modernization, Jews were
excluded for all practical purposes from the possession of agricultural
property: Both contributed to their accumulation of capital in the more
dynamic sectors of the economy (i.e., industry and banking). In addition,
in the emerging capitalist class Jews had far more had contacts with for-
eign circles than had non-Jews, were acquainted with Western European
ways, and therefore were able to benefit from the emerging foreign trade.
In addition to their astoundingly large role in the modernization of
the economy, control of the banking sector, and ownership of the largest
enterprises, Jews played a dominant role in the cultural life of the nation
by supporting artists of various sorts, especially the avant-garde. Rich
Jews supported the establishment of newspapers and journals, but, even
more importantly, made up the audience for concerts, bought paintings,
and subscribed to journals and magazines. Without Jewish support the
cultural revival that took place in Budapest at the turn of the century
could not have happened. Jews also played a role as intermediaries with
Western culture.
Jewish achievements in education were extraordinary. They were
vastly overrepresented in universities: In some faculties they were ten
times as numerous as their proportion in the population as a whole. It
came to be taken for granted that Jewish students were always among the
best in their classes in secondary schools and universities. Family expecta-
tions and their need to succeed in areas that were open to Jews propelled
these successes. One sign of Jewish achievement was that 350 Jewish
6 Karady, a Zsidosag es Tarsadalmi Egyenlotlensegek, pp. 21–22.

families came to be ennobled between 1867 and 1914. Perhaps an even

better sign of Jewish achievement was the increasing frequency with which
Jews were able to marry into some of the most prominent noble fami-
lies, as impoverished noblemen allowed their children to marry rich Jews.
Yet this is not to say that aristocratic disdain for Jews was diminishing,
and the Jewish partner in such marriages was often excluded from some
social functions. The antisemitism of the aristocracy was similar to the
antisemitism of the British upper classes in the same period.
Not only did Jews change Hungarian cultural life but also in the pro-
cess the Jewish community went through major changes. Emancipation
everywhere, including in Hungary, was based on the assumption that it
was a bargain: Jews will be accepted, but the price will be ceasing to be
Jewish in quite the same way (i.e., they would be assimilated). But what
exactly did assimilation mean? In schools supported by Jewish commu-
nities, the language of instruction came to be Hungarian, and sermons in
Reform synagogues were given in Hungarian. Such changes were accept-
able to a sizable part of the Jewish community. But assimilation that
meant ceasing to be Jewish and losing one’s sense of identity proved
to be unacceptable for many Jews and impossible for almost everyone.
Hungary was unusual in the degree of difference between the accultur-
ated Budapest Jewish elite and the Orthodox group, living mostly on the
periphery to the north and east, who had no desire to acculturate and
feared the loss of the purity of their religion. But the issue in Hungary was
not fundamentally different from that in other countries, East and West,
where emancipation took place on the basis of the same assumption that
Jews would be acculturated.
Even if people wanted to stop being Jewish, however, society would not
let them do so. As a consequence, later problems were already inherent in
the terms of emancipation. On the one hand, for a large segment of Hun-
garians, perhaps even a majority of them, the “Jewish question” – namely,
that Jews remained distinct, rich, dominant in the economy and culture,
and a self-conscious and recognizable minority – was unacceptable. On
the other hand, Jews were disappointed that in spite of their passionate
desire to be Hungarians, their contributions to the national culture, and
their enthusiastic embrace of Hungarian literature, they continued to be
regarded as alien and antisemitism continued to flourish. Contrary to the
assumptions of those who had worked for bringing about emancipation,
Jews turned out to be not merely people who accepted the premises of a
particular religion.
Hungarian Jews 61
Hungarian law drew a distinction between “native” and “recognized”

religions (bevett and elismert). Judaism was a “recognized” religion. The
only distinction was that Christians could convert to a “native” religion,
but needed special permission to convert to a “recognized” religion like
Judaism. In view of the fact that Jews did not proselytize, this distinction
had little practical significance.
In the process of the great economic advance of a large segment of
the Jewry, the unity of the group broke down. The so-called Neologs in
the forefront of reform attempted to show that the outward differences
between the Jewish religion and Christianity were small. Neolog reform-
ers changed religious services to be more similar to Christian services by
ending the separation of the sexes and giving sermons in Hungarian. The
Neologs dominated Budapest. These were the ones who changed their
names and regarded themselves enthusiastically as Jewish Hungarians,
not as Hungarian Jews. In their conception, Jews did not represent a
nation, but only a religion, and consequently their assimilation to the
Hungarian nation was natural and ideologically problem free. This point
of view was, of course, the exact opposite of the Zionists. The Zionist
movement, even though many of its early major figures, including
Theodore Herzl and Max Nordau, were Hungarians, had few followers in
Hungary.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews living in the cities,
especially in Budapest, were attracted to the Haskalah, the Jewish ver-
sion of Enlightenment, whereas those in the northeast region came to be
influenced by Hasidism. As mentioned earlier, Hungarian Jewry, perhaps
more than any other in the world, came to be sharply divided between a
highly urbanized, assimilated group who could no longer speak Yiddish,
and another profoundly conservative one. The attempt by the state, in
this instance the liberal minister of culture and education, Jozsef Eötvös,
to call together a congress of Jewish leaders in 1869 led to a formal break.
The Orthodox rabbis left the congress and announced that they did not
recognize its decisions. At this point it was as if two different Jewish reli-
gions were created. The orthodox repudiated all the changes accepted by
the Congress, while affirming their commitment to the Hungarian nation
and assuring the minister of their patriotism. No other country experi-
enced such a sharp break between those who wanted to acculturate and
those who resisted the reforms. The Orthodox regarded the Neologs as
people who more or less ceased to be Jewish, since from their point of
view the Neologs failed to satisfy a considerable part of the definition of
being Jewish. But even Orthodox Jews considered themselves Hungarian

to a far greater extent than Russian Jews identified themselves with the
Russian Empire. To complicate matters further, in between the two sep-
arate segments of Jewry, which diverged from one another increasingly,
a new group was formed. The so-called status quo group accepted some
of the innovations, but rejected others. The relations between the three
groups were not always friendly.
Yet neither assimilation nor the lack of it satisfied the antisemite. The
paradox in the situation of Hungarian Jews was that the late nineteenth
century – a period of extraordinary Jewish achievement in every sphere
of life and great optimism on the part of at least the Neolog Jews – was
also a time when a species of bitter antisemitism appeared. In April 1882
in a little village of Tiszaeszlár a young girl, Eszter Solymosi, disappeared.
On the basis of trumped-up evidence, Jews were charged with murdering
her in order to use her blood for Passover services. The trial lasted for
more than a year, and ultimately the accused were exonerated, further
fanning antisemitism among the peasantry. Violent attacks took place in
the countryside against Jews, and a member of parliament, Gyözö Istoczy,
the leader of an antisemitic party, went so far as to advocate expelling
Jews from the country.
Istoczy’s political antisemitism was not merely a resurgence of old,
religiously inspired prejudice, although of course, the blood libel had a
long history. Late nineteenth-century antisemitism in Hungary, as else-
where in Europe, was a response to Jewish acculturation, rather than to
their separateness. The antisemities, contrary to the liberals, believed that
Jews could never cease to be Jews, even if they came to look like Chris-
tians and even if they converted. Indeed, the invisible Jews became all the
more dangerous by being able to subvert Christian society, by bringing
in an alien spirit. Although the success of Istoczy’s antisemitic party was
short-lived, and on one occasion derisive laughter greeted his anti-Jewish
outburst in the Diet, a few decades later his political heirs would achieve
considerably more dangerous results.
In some ways the Tiszaeszlár blood libel was similar to the Dreyfus
affair: A liberal consensus was suddenly punctuated by an outburst of
antidemocratic, antiliberal passion on the part of the common folk who
gave credence to crazy, conspiratorial theories. Although some politicians
indignantly rejected blood libel accusations, nevertheless the weakness of
support for liberal politics became visible to all.
World War I was disastrous for Hungary. As some Hungarian states-
men foresaw in 1914, the country could gain nothing in this war, but it
Hungarian Jews 63
could lose much. The fighting was particularly bloody in the Carpathian
Mountains, where Hungarian soldiers fought. Millions died or became
prisoners of war. As periods of crisis usually do, the war greatly con-
tributed to the development of a new antisemitism. At the outset Jews
supported the war just as enthusiastically as their fellow countrymen;
nevertheless, they were blamed for not making the same sacrifices as oth-
ers and for war profiteering. Statistically speaking, the accusations were
accurate. The infantry suffered the heaviest losses, and this branch of
service came overwhelmingly from the peasantry. Members of the edu-
cated middle class had more opportunities to avoid frontline service, and
among this class Jews were heavily overrepresented. In addition, because
Jews controlled so much of industry, whenever scandals arose concerning
the delivery of supplies and munitions, Jews were inevitably blamed.
It was with the conclusion of hostilities that antisemitism became an
overwhelmingly important force. As the monarchy disintegrated, a repub-
lic was declared under the leadership of Mihály Károlyi, a liberal aris-
tocrat. However, the new government lasted less than six months: The
Entente imposed such unfair armistice terms that the new government had
to reject them. Károlyi turned to the communists who, hoping for Russian
Bolshevik support, were willing to confront Czechoslovak and Romanian
armies, supported by the Allies. Ironically, the ostensibly international-
ist communists seemed to be in the best position to defend Hungarian
national interests.
For a proper appreciation of the new antisemitism, we must con-
sider yet another paradoxical fact concerning Hungarian Jewry: Although
Jews were comfortably middle-class and bourgeois, at the same time they
played a role in the creation of the socialist and later the communist
movement way out of proportion to their number in the population. In
fact only in Hungary could antisemites with some justification equate
socialism and later communism with Jews. The reasons are not hard
to find. In Hungary, as everywhere, the socialist leadership came from
the educated classes; that is, from groups in Hungary that were largely
Jewish. Some Jews believed that only the victory of socialism could save
them from ever-present antisemitism. In addition, although most Jews
were Hungarian patriots, some felt keenly their lack of acceptance in
the nation and therefore were more committed to internationalism and
less responsive to nationalist appeals. Arguably, perhaps, the Jewish mes-
sianic impulse, the obligation to “save the world,” drew secular Jews
to the Marxist utopian promise. It is debated whether three-quarters or
four-fifths of the “commissars” in the brief-lived communist regime were
Jewish, but there is no question about the overwhelming role of Jews in

the left wing of Marxism in Hungary. (As expected, none of the com-
missars considered themselves Jewish. They were Jewish by birth and
not because of religious commitments.) That Jews as property owners
suffered disproportionately as a result of the policies of the revolution-
aries and that among the victims of Red terror were many Jews made
little difference. The Hungarians equated Jews and Communists, and
this assumption later harmed the interests both of communists and of
Jews.
The destruction of the monarchy and within it the historical Hungar-
ian state meant a great demographic transformation for Hungarian Jewry
as well. The size of the community was reduced by half (to approximately
475,000 in 1920) and because of the low Jewish birth rate (Jewish birth
rate sharply dropped in the beginning of the twentieth century) and high
emigration, its size continued to decrease in the interwar years. In addi-
tion, the character of Hungarian Jewry was transformed by the loss of
Slovakia and Transylvania; the great centers of Orthodox Jewry became
part of Romania. The remaining community – concentrated in Budapest
and in the large towns – came to be dominated by acculturated Jews. This
highly acculturated Jewry considered itself and wanted to be considered
by others as Hungarian.
Hungarian Jewry in the Interwar Years

In 1919, the communist regime went down in defeat under the combined
forces of the Entente-supported armies of the newly created national
states and the Hungarian counterrevolutionaries. Two groups made up
the counterrevolutionary movement that would determine the charac-
ter of Hungarian politics in the interwar years. One was headquartered
in Vienna and led by Admiral Miklos Horthy, an ex aide-de-camp of
Emperor Francis Joseph. The landed aristocracy whose primary concern
was to prevent significant social change (i.e., meaningful land reform)
supported Horthy, who became “governor” of the country. Hungary
remained a kingdom, without a king, because the word “Republic”
sounded too revolutionary to the new rulers. The other group, organized
in Szeged, was made up of younger men who represented the ideology
of the extreme right. These were the people who would soon find their
hero in Mussolini and his black shirts and who some years later came
to be the admirers of Hitler. Both groups were antisemitic and took it
for granted that in the new state Jewish economic and political power
Hungarian Jews 65
and cultural influence would have to be curtailed, although they differed

in their degree of radicalism and willingness to use violent tactics. The
political struggle in the interwar years, therefore, was between a group of
conservatives who still retained a degree of old-fashioned decency, and
people of the extreme right, proto-fascists, who to some extent were will-
ing to oppose entrenched privilege. However, even those who opposed
harsh anti-Jewish regulations took it for granted that the Jews repre-
sented an alien minority against which the Christian majority had to be
protected. There was little room left for liberalism in this new political
landscape.
The defeat in World War I was followed by the extraordinarily unfair
accusation that it was liberals, communists, and, above all, Jews who
were responsible for the Trianon7 peace agreement, in which Hungary
lost 72 percent of its territory and 64 percent of its population. This
accusation was even more demonstrably untrue than the contemporary
German myth about the socialists and democrats causing the defeat of
the heroic German armies. Untrue or not, the accusation was powerful,
and it became a central charge against Jews that has been periodically
revived to this day. To regain the lost territories, to reestablish “historical
Hungary” came to be the dominant preoccupation of the political classes.
In this atmosphere people established secret and not so secret societies
that aimed to overcome what they had perceived as a great humiliation
and historical injustice. Just like in Germany, these groups, which formed
extremely quickly, stood for radical, exclusivist nationalism and, almost
inevitably, extreme antisemitism. The voices that were expressed were no
less radical than Hitler’s views were at the same time, and their slogans
would be repeated again and again in the course of the next twenty years.
The terror that followed the demise of the communist regime had even
more victims than the Red terror. An inevitable feature of this murderous
wave was pogroms aimed against Jews. The justification for the murders
was the conviction that Jews and Bolsheviks were the same and therefore
punishing Jews was as justifiable as killing Bolsheviks.
The conditions on which the good fortune of the pre–World War I
Hungarian Jews was based were now destroyed. The political class no
longer needed allies against the national minorities, because for all prac-
tical purposes those minorities were no longer part of the new state. The
gentry, previously responsible for administering a large empire, in many
7 The Hungarian peace treaty that was part of the Versailles agreements was signed at the
chateau of Trianon in 1920.
cases had to move to a smaller country from districts that had been given
to another country and to look for middle-class jobs that were occupied
chiefly by Jews.
In no country did the outcome of World War I have such disastrous
consequences for Jews as in Hungary. The Russian Revolution eman-
cipated Jews, allowed their extremely quick acculturation, and enabled
them to participate in the building of a revolutionary state. In France the
war brought people together. Even in Germany, although the defeat may
have increased hostility to Jews, the atmosphere of freedom under the
Weimar regime allowed Jews to participate not only in a lively culture
but also in political life. In Poland and Romania, the two most antisemitic
countries in Europe, one cannot discern much change as a result of the
establishment of the national states. Hungary was profoundly different.
The turnaround was swift and complete.
Hungary, which had been the most favorable place for Jews east of
Vienna, came to be the first after the war to introduce anti-Jewish leg-
islation. The numerus clausus law of 1920 restricted the percentage of
Jews in institutes of higher education to their percentage in the popula-
tion (i.e., less than 6 percent). Before the war Jews had made up almost
a third of the student body, so this restriction had drastic consequences.
The writers of this piece of legislation had to struggle with its wording.
“Race” was not yet a legal concept, and making the exclusion on the
basis of religion would have resulted in difficulties, because Calvinists
and Lutherans were also overrepresented in higher education as against
a Catholic majority. The law did not contain the word “Jew.” It simply
spoke of “national groups,” which was understood by everyone to mean
Jewish and only Jewish. One of the troubling aspects of the law was that it
explicitly contradicted the concept of emancipation, which was based on
the principle of equality before the law. The unfortunate consequence of
this act for Hungary was that many talented young people chose to attend
foreign universities and ultimately made their careers abroad rather than
in their homeland. In the interwar period, Hungary exported an entire
intelligentsia.
The law put the Jewish leadership in a quandary. The victorious pow-
ers in the war that had just ended had imposed on the newly established
states, including Hungary, a requirement aimed at protecting national
minorities. Jews could have appealed to the League of Nations, protesting
an obviously discriminatory law, but they decided not to do so. Because
they had struggled for a long time not to be regarded as a national minor-
ity, it seemed counterproductive to them at this point to claim such a
Hungarian Jews 67
status. Furthermore, they had legitimate doubt that the victorious pow-
ers would take up their case with determination. But most importantly,
Hungarian patriots as they were, it was impossible for them to turn for
help to the powers that were regarded as enemies of the nation.
The antisemitism of the interwar period had several sources and cer-
tainly included old-fashioned, Church-inspired, conservative antimodern
sentiments. The insistence of some intellectuals that Hungary be defined
as a Christian nation carried a self-consciously antisemitic message. What
was new was the willingness of the social elite to give in to the pressure
of the modern right-wing political forces, which wanted to squeeze Jews
out of the economic and cultural life of the nation so they could take
their places. At an earlier time Jews were the allies of the nationalists, but
no longer: The nationalists now defined the nation so as to exclude Jews.
Nationalism and liberal toleration came to be in conflict, and among the
Hungarian ruling classes nationalism proved to be the stronger force.
In the 1920s and 1930s intellectuals were preoccupied with the ques-
tion of what it meant be a Hungarian. In their self-definition the juxtapo-
sition with Jews came to be a central topic, and the “Jewish question” was
a key issue in the political and particularly the cultural life of the nation.
The majority of these intellectuals no longer regarded Jews as Jewish
Hungarians, but as indisputably alien, as “we versus them.” According
to this mentality, a Jewish writer may have been writing in Hungarian,
but only his language was Hungarian; that individual was not. The Chris-
tian churches, especially the Catholic Church, contributed to this way of
thinking by linking Hungarianness explicitly to Christianity.8 Populists,
genuinely concerned about the dreadful conditions of the Hungarian peas-
antry, claimed to find particular virtues among the “real” Hungarians,
and these intellectuals were, practically by definition, antisemitic. They
claimed to find virtue among the simple peasantry and regarded the cities
with suspicion, and Jews were, of course, associated with city life. Jews
had nothing to do with the lives of the “real” Hungarians.
As everywhere in Europe, the strength and passion of antisemitism var-
ied according to the depth of the economic and political crises. After the
confused and difficult years of the immediate postwar period a semblance
of order returned. In the mid-1920s the numerus clausus law was allowed
to be ignored. Probably popular antisemitism did not much diminish, but
the government became more tolerant.
8 Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary; Religion, Nationalism and

Antisemitism, 1890–1944. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
The position of Jews in interwar Hungary was complex. Antisemitic

voices, the memory of pogroms, and the introduction of the numerus
clausus (although it was not long enforced), compelled some Jews to study
and ultimately work abroad. Although many Jews felt intimidated and
alienated from the Hungarian environment, Hungary was still a country
where Jewish finance capital and intellectuals played major roles. There
were Jewish representatives in the lower and upper houses of the Diet.
In the upper house sat the leaders of both the Orthodox and the Neolog
Jews.
A degree of normality continued through the years of the Great Depres-
sion. Even when Premier Gyula Gömbös, who represented the radical
right, came into office in 1932 the Jews did not fear that his new gov-
ernment represented serious change. Gömbös understood that he needed
Jewish economic power to bring about a recovery from the Depression,
and he consulted Jewish magnates for advice. The desire to contain Jewish
economic power and cultural influence coincided with a realistic appre-
ciation of his need for the very same Jews. This contradiction produced
contradictory policies. On the one hand the first explicitly extreme right-
wing politician took no concrete steps against the Jews, but on the other,
the appeal of the right-wing parties greatly increased. The crucial factor in
the movement of the political center further to the right was the German
example, as Hitler achieved one victory after another.
part two
THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS TAKE CONTROL OF

THE GERMAN STATE MACHINERY
4
National Socialism and the Jews
In postfeudal Europe, widely held and passionate antisemitism led to

discriminatory legislation, physical attacks on Jews, and, on occasion,
pogroms; however, until World War II, it never led to genocide. In
the twentieth century, although every European state insisted on the
monopoly of coercive power, no government until many years after
the Nazis took power made the physical extermination of Jews a goal.
Although the Holocaust was the work of the Germans, in the middle
of the relatively stable 1920s, there was no more overt antisemitism in
Germany than in most other countries of Europe. A crucial turning point
on the road that led to the Holocaust took place in January 1933 when a
group that would ultimately make killing Jews its central aim succeeded
in capturing the machinery of the German state. The first step on the road
to the Holocaust was Hitler’s assumption of power.
Fascism
The ideology that drove the German National Socialist Party was a variety
of fascism. The nature of fascism therefore has a decisively important role
in our investigation of the history of Holocaust. Unfortunately it is not
easy to find a definition of fascism that is acceptable to most observers.
Unlike Marxism, socialism, and communism, fascism has not produced
an ideological superstructure. This is hardly surprising because fascism
almost by necessity was anti-intellectual. Asking for a fascist ideology was
asking the fascists to be other than who they want to be. Any definition
of fascism is therefore based on imagining an ideal type and describing
it, and because reality is messy, no ideal type could ever satisfy all people
71
concerned. Furthermore, unlike Marxism, which proudly claimed to be

internationalist, the fascists passionately objected to internationalism and
mythologized the national community, the uniqueness of the nation-state.
It is therefore not surprising that the European states that we consider
fascist greatly differed from each other, and consequently generalizations
on the basis of individual examples are hazardous. Indeed, it is very
much open to question whether it is proper to describe, for example, the
authoritarian Spanish state under Francisco Franco or Romania under
Ion Antonescu as “fascist.” As a result, historians have come up with a
variety of definitions of fascism.
Observers in our own time make the task of defining fascism even more
difficult because they use the concept much too broadly. On occasion they
describe a regime as fascist simply to express their extreme distaste for a
movement or for crudely demagogic reasons. Nevertheless, fascism was
certainly a meaningful concept during the interwar years and World War
II, and therefore it should be described within the context in which it held
sway. Spokesmen for some states, such as Italy under Mussolini (who
came up with the name and concept) and Germany under Hitler, proudly
accepted the term.1
Fascism is best understood as the response of politically unsophis-
ticated people to the hardships caused by the enormously significant
changes that occurred in Europe following industrialization. By “politi-
cally unsophisticated,” I mean people living in societies that had not yet
developed institutions appropriate to the greatly changed world. Fascism
appealed to people who rightly or wrongly regarded themselves as victims
of modernity. Yet, however much the fascists objected to almost every
aspect of modernity, fascism was made possible by it, because its suc-
cess required modern means of communication. World War I, which had
taken place just before fascism became a mass movement, was another
precondition. Its mad slaughter convinced many people that there could
be no return to the relatively peaceful, optimistic world of the nineteenth
century, where rationalism and belief in progress were the dominant
worldviews.
Fascism was born out of disappointment, and its primary character-
istic was, as Ernst Nolte noted, the rejection of the emancipatory trends
1 The word derives from the Italian fascio, meaning bundle. The reference is to the Latin
fasces, the bundle of rods around an ax, which was a symbol of authority in Roman
times. Although a single rod can be easily broken, the bundle itself is strong. Strength
therefore lies in national unity.
National Socialism and the Jews 73
introduced by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.2 Fascism

was a bitter rejection of everything that modernity made possible: democ-
racy, liberalism, individualism, and equalitarianism. Many regarded
the age of capital as soulless and perceived the undoubted economic
advances as inadequate compensation for the loss of a sense of commu-
nity (Gemeinschaft). Fascism promised community, yet the community
of the nation was narrowly defined, excluding those who did not share
its history and culture. A sense of community could be achieved only
by excluding others. Fascists extolled the irrational side of human nature
and introduced a cult of youth, energy, and instinct. In their view a nation
demonstrated its strength and vigor by the willingness to go to war and
not shrinking from committing acts of violence. They held to a profoundly
pessimistic worldview, which saw deterioration everywhere and placed
“the golden age” in the remote past. The act of imagining enemies held
the community together. The enemy could be not only external, but also
internal – be it Marxism, parliamentary democracy, modern capitalism,
and, of course, the Jews. In the formulation of Carl Schmitt, which well
described fascist practice, politics was a struggle between them and us.3
There was always a “them.”
In every society, past and present, there have been individuals suscep-
tible to the fascist appeal, but whether a fascist movement could succeed
in capturing a state requires several specific conditions. To take power,
the fascists did not need to possess the support of the majority of the
population. In fact, no fascist party ever came to power as a result of
a democratic election in which it attracted 50 percent of the vote. Fas-
cists, as indeed all totalitarian parties, have always come into power as a
result of a crisis that threatens the integrity of the state. After a totalitar-
ian political order is established, the question of popular support becomes
meaningless because by definition no alternative political programs can be
articulated. Everywhere “people just go along” (i.e., become accomplices)
because that is the path of least resistance and the cost of opposition is
high. The individual has no way of knowing whether the appearance of
unanimous public enthusiasm for the regime is genuine or only a pretense.
2 Three Faces of Fascism; Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism. New
York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, pp. 429–30. Nolte’s definition actually is much
more complex. His first definition is “anti-Marxism.” His second definition is “life and
death struggle of the sovereign, martial, inwardly antagonistic group.” Only in his final,
most profound definition does he mention “struggle against transcendence,” by which he
means the rejection of the emancipatory ideas of the French Revolution.
3 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
It is perhaps too much to expect human beings to face the danger of stand-
ing alone.
It is evident that antisemitism was not a necessary component of fas-
cism, because the first fascist state, Mussolini’s Italy, was not notably
antisemitic until it was compelled to follow the Nazi example and pass
anti-Jewish laws in the 1930s. Probably it never occurred to Mussolini
to depict the small and well-integrated Italian Jewish community as a
threat to the nation or to Italian culture. Nor were all antisemites fascists.
Antisemitism, of course, has a much longer history than fascism, and
there have been a great variety of antisemites. Nevertheless it is evident
that fascism and antisemitism go well together: Those who are susceptible
to the fascist appeal are also likely to hold antisemitic prejudice.
The heart of the matter was that Jews could be successfully (but, of
course, incorrectly) depicted as creators of those aspects of modernity
that so many feared and disliked. For antisemitism to serve the fascists’
purposes, it was important to describe Jews as powerful and frightening
enemies. Simple aristocratic disdain would not do. The manipulation of
fear is a powerful political tool that is used not only by fascists. Admit-
tedly, the fear of Marxist revolution was an even more potent factor for
the Nazis to succeed than antisemitism. Yet, after the fascist regime set
up concentration camps for socialists and communists, they disappeared
from public life, as did their political power. A socialist could cease to be
a socialist, but a Jew, at least in the Nazi view of the world, could never
cease to be Jewish.
Hitler
In the history of the Holocaust the personality and private delusions of
Adolf Hitler played a decisively important role. Probably without his
mad preoccupation with Jews that tragedy would not have happened. It
was Hitler who created National Socialism out of fascism. Communism
existed without Lenin and Stalin, so we have no trouble imagning it with-
out its central figures. By contrast, we cannot imagine Nazism without
Hitler. More than any other person in modern history he made his mark
on a powerful social and political movement.
It is a disturbing thought that millions had to die not for some grand
historical reason but because of the delusions of a single individual. One
can well imagine that an extremist party similar to the Nazis would
have come to power in Germany, given the circumstances in which the
Germans found themselves at the time of the Great Depression. But it
did not follow that the all-powerful leader of that movement had to
be not only an antisemite – that could be taken for granted – but also
had to possess a hatred and preoccupation with Jews that could only be
characterized as pathological.
Hitler’s ideas about Jews deserve attention because they came to be the
dominant ones in Nazi Germany, ceaselessly advertised by a vast propa-
ganda machine, and to be the basis of the Nazi policy toward Jews. It is a
debated issue, but not a particularly important one, how and why Hitler
became an obsessive antisemite. According to the best recent biography
of Hitler, written by Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s obsessive antisemitism crys-
tallized as late as the early 1920s.4 Nor is it necessary to search for the
source of Hitler’s ideas about Jews. A large segment of Europeans took
for granted his racist worldview (i.e., that race was a scientific concept
and that races varied in their worth). Hitler, along with many others,
believed that the Nordic races were superior because they had to struggle
for survival, and this struggle made them strong, as opposed to people
in the South who could avoid labor and therefore became weak. He and
many others took literally the metaphor of the nation as a human body.
The nation needed protection from all sort of harmful influences, partic-
ularly from the Jewish bacteria, and its health could only be improved
by eliminating the “diseased” among the Germans who were spreading
infection. The “doctor” needed to use all available means for this neces-
sary and noble task. But as is often the case with metaphors, thinking that
uses too many of them can easily get murky. At times in Hitler’s thinking
the Jew also possessed a full body, and as we know one cannot change
from one body to another. A Jew must remain a Jew forever.
Hitler’s ideology combined accusations against Jews from all possi-
ble sources with the conspicuous exception of Christian antisemitism. It
is correct to describe Hitler as anti-Christian. (In fact in Mein Kampf
he even blamed the Catholic Center Party for what he called “sham
antisemitism.”) Yet, all of his ideas about Jews were part of the antisemitic
discourse of the time. As mentioned before, after their defeat in the civil
war, Russian émigrés brought to Germany a passionate hatred of Jews,
whom they considered to be a cause of the disintegration of the Russian
Empire. Indeed passages about Jews in Mein Kampf are very similar to
the picture presented in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
What distinguished Hitler was not his ideas concerning Jews but the
passion of his beliefs and his willingness to put antisemitism at the center
4 Ian Kershaw, Hitler. A Biography. New York: Norton, 2008, pp. 37–43.
of his worldview. Most of the other important architects of Nazi Ger-

many, such as Herman Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himm-
ler, were not preoccupied with the “Jewish question” until they became
prominent figures in the Nazi party. In contrast, those who were so preoc-
cupied, such as Julius Streicher, the publisher of pornographic, antisemitic
newspapers and pamphlets, and Alfred Rosenberg, the “ideologist” of the
party, never attained dominant positions and remained marginal figures
in the Nazi hierarchy.5
It is evident that by the time Hitler came to play a political role
antisemitism was a central component of his thinking. On this issue his
commitment never varied. His radicalism was present when he appeared
on the national stage and remained with him until the day of his death.
In fact, as he maintained, the radicalism of his ideas only increased. At
the very end of his life, killing Jews became the single war aim that could
still be realized.
We have ample evidence of Hitler’s worldview.6 He devoted many
pages to this topic in Mein Kampf, and time and again he held forth on the
subject of the Jewish danger; these “conversations” – really monologues –
were later published.7 It is striking how obsessive and contradictory his
thinking was. For him the “Jew” was at the very bottom of the pyramid
of humanity, but at the same time was still all-powerful. The “Jew”
was incapable of creating anything original, yet stood behind modern
science, democratic politics, modern art, and much else. The “Jew” was
a distinct entity that could not change. A Jew could not cease to be a Jew,
presumably because Jewishness was in his essence, and yet at other times
Hitler wrote that the “Jew is within all of us.” He was concerned about
the purity of “breeding” and maintained that the greatness of Germany
depended on maintaining the purity of the Aryan race, but at the same
time believed that Jews became even more evil as a result of inbreeding
(i.e., they remained racially pure). Consistency was not important. It was
sufficient to find an object onto which Hitler’s pathological fears and
hatred could be projected.
5 Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the Jewish Question. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1984, p. 54. Actually, Hitler considered even Streicher as insufficiently
antisemitic because he “idealized the Jew.”
6 The best summary of his worldview can be found in a brief chapter written by Eberhard
Jäckel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972.
7 Hitlers Tischgespräche Im Führerhauptquartier: Mit bisher Unbekannten Selbstzeugnis-
sen. Stuttgart: Seewald 1976.
Hitler’s antisemitism was part of his racist thinking inasmuch as he

envisaged a hierarchy of races in which the Aryans stood at the top
and Jews, the Blacks, and the Roma were at the bottom. In between
these extremes were Southern Europeans and the Slavs. In his worldview,
however, Jews were not so much a group on the bottom of the hierarchy,
as the Roma or people of African background clearly were, but somehow
they stood outside of the hierarchy altogether. Only that understanding
could explain his curious idea that, if Jews won in the great struggle, then
the world would be deprived of humanity altogether; that is, Jews were
not even human. Because the Roma were a small, powerless group, it
would have been impossible to create a worldview focusing on the fear
and hatred of them, but it was possible to depict Jews as mortal and
immensely dangerous enemies. The fierceness of his hatred and his belief
that Jews were all powerful contradicted the notion that Jews were at the
bottom of the hierarchy, deserving only contempt.
In Hitler’s worldview, Jews were enemies not only of the Nazi state
and of Germany but also of humankind. One of his curious charges
against Jews was their internationalism. It followed that Jews were bent
on destroying the natural order, which called for constant struggle of the
strong against the weak as a form of testing of racial worth. By under-
mining the ability of races to fight each other, “Jewish internationalism”
violated the natural order. At the same time he maintained that Jews
were responsible for all wars. The Nazis then were struggling on behalf
of humanity. Under these circumstances there could be no compromise
with the devil: It had to be destroyed.
Hitler’s concern with Jews was not only theoretical. Whenever he suf-
fered a setback, whenever a foreign government acted against his wishes,
he suspected that Jews were the cause. His great disappointment was that
the British government under Churchill never understood that Britain’s
best interest would lie in an alliance with Germany; he blamed that “mis-
understanding” on the influence of Jews. In the United States, Jews had
even more influence. He underestimated the power of the Soviet Union to
resist because in his mind Bolshevism was Jewish, and therefore it would
not be able to create a powerful state.
When the National Socialist Party was formed, his solution to
the “Jewish problem” was to repudiate what he called “emo-
tional antisemitism” in favor of “rational antisemitism”: Emotional
antisemitism merely led to pogroms but did not take care of the problem.
Indeed, pogroms worsened the problem because they created sympathy
for Jews among the uneducated. The task was to get rid of the Jews.
At this point it was not yet clear what he meant by getting rid of Jews,
although the imagery that he used in Mein Kampf – that Jews were ver-
min and bacteria in the healthy body of the nation – did imply physical
extermination. It is understandable, however, that his readers could not
reach that conclusion, because mass murder on such a vast scale was sim-
ply unimaginable. Nor did Hitler then and in the following years attempt
to make clear how such extermination could take place.
Jews and Germans

Except for Holocaust deniers and mitigators, such as David Irving, few
historians question Hitler’s decisive role in the extermination process. It
is far more difficult and complex to determine the responsibility of the
average German. On one side of the debate, Daniel Goldhagen, in his
well-known book Hitler’s Willing Executioners,8 argues that assigning
responsibility is a simple task: Jews were killed because Germans suffered
from what he calls “eliminationist antisemitism.” This antisemitism was
centuries old, originally inspired by the Church but then secularized.
Hitler simply gave the opportunity to the Germans to do to Jews what
they had wanted to do all along. Other historians have more convincingly
pointed out that before 1933 there was nothing special about German
antisemitism; it was not different from the antisemitism of other European
peoples.
No one would deny that antisemitism was a powerful force in pre-
Hitler Germany: The evidence is overwhelming. The question is whether
there was something special in the German past, going back to the time
of Martin Luther, that predisposed the Germans to act the way they
did in the middle of the twentieth century. Was there something in the
German tradition that made Germans into “eliminationist antisemites”9 ?
To approach that question, it is necessary to discuss the position of Jews
and the character and spread of antisemitism before Hitler came to power.
In the nineteenth century, French and German Jewry shared both sim-
ilarities and differences. In both countries Jews were quickly integrated
and economically successful, and they made important contributions to
8 Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Vintage 1997.
9 The expression is in Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
national culture. For example, in Germany in the second half of the

century, Jews who were only 1 percent of the population made up 8 per-
cent of university students. Jews and Christians frequently intermarried,
and Jewish conversion rates were high. Some converted out of conviction,
others because they believed that conversion was a worthwhile price to
pay for integration and social and economic success. In both countries
Jews were urbanized rapidly and were engaged in industry, trade, and the
professions.
Yet German and French Jewry differed in several important respects. In
Germany full emancipation came much later than in France. The German
Empire was founded only in 1870, and before that the situation of Jews
and their progress toward full emancipation differed in the different
German states. In the second half of the nineteenth century, German
economic growth occurred rapidly, and Jews were in a position to benefit
from it. Because the size of the German Jewish community was larger
than that in France, they played a more important role in the economy
than their French coreligionists and therefore were more conspicuous.
For example, almost a quarter of the banks in Berlin in 1870 were Jewish
owned. When the economy suffered a sudden downturn in the 1870s it
was Jews who were blamed and antisemitism became a political plat-
form. Arguably at that historical moment antisemitism was a stronger
force in Germany than in France. Yet there was no single event in Ger-
many comparable to the Dreyfus affair that split the nation into two
hostile factions. The position of Jews in late nineteenth-century Germany
was thus ambiguous: On the one hand, German economic expansion gave
opportunities that did not exist elsewhere, and the excellence of German
higher educational institutions, the best in the world, provided oppor-
tunities for intellectual advancement. On the other hand, discrimination
against Jews was greater in Germany than in other Western European
countries: For example, Jews could not hope to join the civil service or
the highly prestigious officer corps.
The economic importance of Germany and the size and success of its
Jewish community made German Jewry the most important and most
influential in Europe at the time. The internal struggle within German
Jewry, as well as the German Jewish Enlightenment, had a great impact
on Jews elsewhere. Although in Germany Jews as a whole were just as
well integrated as in France, there were also a larger number of Jews who
had taken refuge in the country, escaping persecution in other Eastern
European countries. Recent immigrants made up approximately one-fifth
of German Jewry.10 That, too, made it easier for antisemities to fan anti-
Jewish prejudice.
In Germany, as in other countries in Europe, the fate of Jews came to
be connected to the strength of the liberal parties. Liberal reformers were
the ones who were anxious to emancipate Jews, believing that doing so
would eliminate those Jewish characteristics, such as clannishness, that
they found not to their liking. As a result, the majority of Jews gave their
allegiance to the liberals. In Germany, however, liberalism was weaker
than its French equivalent, the Republican side in the Dreyfus affair, and
in the long run that spelled danger to the Jews.
The intellectual content of the writing of antisemitic thinkers, if it
can be called “intellectual” at all, was very much the same in Germany
and France, as French and German theoreticians freely borrowed from
each other; they spoke the same language. They took for granted the
existence of races and the qualitative differences among them. They were
all extreme and exclusivist nationalists, who believed that an “alien”
could never truly join the national community, because belonging to the
community somehow resided in the blood; the very presence of aliens was
a danger to the health of the nation. They projected the ideal society into
the past, at a time when the “purity” of the nation was not endangered.
In both countries, World War I at first brought Jews and non-Jews
together. In a brief moment of patriotic fervor, hostility against an outside
enemy created the appearance of unity. For the first time Jews in Germany
joined the officer corps, and individual Jews, most prominently Walther
Rathenau, were able to play a major role in the national war effort. The
end of the war, however, had very different consequences for the Jews of
Germany and France. Unlike in France, the years following the end of the
war brought a new wave of antisemitism to Germany. As a counterfactual
proposition, we may posit that had France lost the war it would have been
France to suffer a wave of new antisemitism. In times of national crises,
the search for scapegoats, if not inevitable, is extremely likely.
In post–World War I Germany a number of disunited, extreme right-
wing organizations came into being, all with antisemitic appeals that
they presented with different degrees of radicalism. Ultimately, of course,
Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party managed to absorb these
nationalist antisemitic groups. The main charge of the antisemites at this
time was that Jews exhibited their true nature during the war by shirking
their patriotic duty. They pointed to a leaked, supposedly secret census of
10 Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the Jewish Question, p. 41.

Jewish participation in the war and Jewish war dead as evidence that Jews
did not fulfill their patriotic responsibilities. Although there were serious
reasons to doubt the accuracy of the census, which was put together
precisely to accuse Jews, it is possible that because of their occupational
structure the percentage of Jews who died in the war was lower than that
of non-Jews.
Yet antisemitism was not the exclusive property of insignificant fringe
groups. Other parties, including the Nationalist Party, were also explicitly
antisemitic, deploring the role of “alien” Jews in the political life of the
nation. Antisemitic agitation, as was to be expected, accelerated during
the economically hard years immediately after the war, a time of privation
and inflation. Physical attacks on Jews took place then, and Walther
Rathenau, the foreign minister, was assassinated. In the middle of the
1920s, however, as Germany achieved a degree of stability, the public
expression of antisemitism receded and with it the appeal of Hitler’s
party. The Beer Hall putsch of 1923 was an embarrassing failure.
It is important to understand the role of Jewry in Weimar Germany
and the nature and extent of antisemitism in the postwar decade, which
served as the immediate background of the Nazis’ ascent to power. Unlike
in Hungary, Jews were in no position to control the German economy,
and they dominated no sphere of economic life, with the exception of
the department store chains, of which four-fifths were in Jewish hands.
However, Jews were better off than the population as a whole, were
prominent in the publishing industry, and played very significant roles
in banking. Most Jews lived a middle-class bourgeois existence; those
engaged in trade tended to own small shops. The testimony to Jewish
success was the fact that the average income of Jews was 3.2 times more
than that of non-Jews in the Weimar period.11 However, Jews suffered
from the economic problems of the decade, principally inflation, and
the worldwide economic crisis as much, if not more, than any other
citizen.
As elsewhere in Europe and for similar reasons, Jews played dispro-
portionate roles in the leadership of the socialist and of the communist
movements. Just as in Russia and in Hungary, it was easy for antisemities
to associate revolutionary Marxism with Judaism. At the same time, anti-
semites associated Jews with the Weimar government. Individual Jews,
such as Hugo Preuss, who was regarded as the father of the Weimar
11 Donald Niewyk, Jews in Weimar Germany. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University,
1980, p. 16.
constitution, played significant roles in the design of the political order

and therefore led antisemites to characterize the Weimar system as
“Jewish.” Throughout the 1920s, in contrast to Imperial Germany, Jews
continued to hold significant positions both in the government and also
in the parliament, mostly as socialist representatives. For antisemities,
seeing Jews in positions of authority was especially galling. Many also
perceived the Weimar constitution as something imposed on Germans, as
something alien. During economically hard times, when the Nazis defined
themselves as enemies of that system, they found willing listeners.
In the 1920s Jews were visible in the political life of the nation, but
they were far more noticeable in cultural life. In every segment of Weimar
culture Jews played outstanding roles, which later allowed the Nazis
to describe modernism, for which Berlin was the center, as something
“Jewish.” Ordinary Germans did not find modern art attractive.
The historian faces a paradox: In the 1920s Jews played a more impor-
tant role in politics in Germany than in any other European country
(except for the Soviet Union). Jews in Germany were also far more impor-
tant in the cultural life of the nation than in any other country. It was
much easier for a Jew to achieve the position of professor at a first-rate
university in Germany than in the United States. Yet at the same time
antisemitism was gathering force and winning converts. Some German
institutions were infected by antisemitism and right-wing radical extrem-
ism. Probably the most significant reason for antisemitism among univer-
sity youth was competition for jobs, particularly in law, medicine, and
journalism where Jews were represented out of their proportion to their
number in the population. A numerus clausus, similar to the one enacted
in Hungary, could not be introduced in democratic Germany, but Jews
could be and were excluded from student organizations. After the war,
when the army, the traditional preserve of the aristocracy, was drastically
reduced in size by the provisions of the Versailles treaties, it succeeded
in excluding Jews altogether. Ultimately many if not the majority of Ger-
mans voted for Hitler in spite of his well-known, well-articulated extreme
antisemitism.
We must not evaluate, however, the extent of antisemitism in Germany
of the 1920s on the basis of what was to happen later. Because neither
the genocide nor even Hitler’s coming to power was predetermined, we
must look at the Weimar world as it was – a society in which Jews could
participate in most if not all spheres of life.
In summary, in the Weimar period radical antisemitism was rare, and
Jews were treated more or less fairly by the institutions of the German
state; for example, the courts and the universities.12 The antisemitism
that did exist among the German people as a whole was characterized by
a vague sense of distaste for Jews and an association of Jews with aspects
of modernity that they did not like, whether they blamed Jews for being
exploiters or being subversive. Before the Great Depression antisemitism
determined the politics of very few people.
The Great Depression immediately and predictably changed the situa-
tion. Antisemitism in the modern world has always increased at the time
of crisis, especially economic crisis for which Jews could ostensibly be
blamed, and the Great Depression was a major crisis indeed. This scape-
goating would have taken place even if there had been no Hitler and no
Nazi party, which is, of course, not to say that the antisemitic propaganda
of the Nazis did not matter. To establish the responsibility of the German
people for the atrocities that were to follow, an examination of the years
1930–3 is crucial. It was during that time that the decisions that led to the
Holocaust were made. Although Hitler’s party never achieved a majority
in a fair election, enough people voted for the Nazis to make it possible
for them to come into power legitimately, and legitimacy mattered a great
deal to Hitler.
Once Hitler and the Nazis established a totalitarian state, successful
resistance to the policies of that state was reduced to close to zero. By
totalitarian we mean that alternative political programs could no longer
be articulated. Individuals could and did act heroically, which was not
without moral significance, but they could not change the policies set
by Hitler. It is indisputable that those who voted in the frantic series
of elections during the Great Depression did not consciously vote for
Auschwitz. They could not have known what was to happen, because as
it later became clear, the Nazis themselves did not yet know what was to
happen. It would take a relatively long time before they formulated their
murderous policies.
It is essential to examine who voted for Hitler and why and how
important a role antisemitism played in their decision. That the muted and
latent antisemitism of the 1920s became a murderous and powerful force
in the 1930s was the consequence both of the depth of despair created
by the Depression, for which Jews could act as scapegoats, and by the
propaganda of the Nazi party as it derived from Hitler’s worldview. The
Nazi vote increased from an insignificant 2.6 percent to 18.3 percent from
1928 to 1930. As the economic crisis deepened and Weimar politicians
12 Ibid., pp. 79–81.

could find no solutions, Hitler gained 37.4 percent of the votes in the
1932 presidential elections; this was his largest vote percentage before
taking power. In that election, the Nazi Party became the largest party in
the Parliament, which then became a precondition of taking power. In the
compromised election of March 1933, held just a few months after taking
power, the Nazis gained 43.9 percent of the vote. (The Communist Party
had been declared illegal.) Therefore almost half of the German voting
population found Hitler’s program acceptable.
In the early 1930s Germany faced a social, political, and economic
crisis of extraordinary severity. A source of the political crisis was the
insufficient legitimacy of the Weimar regime, which was born out of the
still recent defeat in World War I, a defeat that many Germans continued
to believe was the consequence of treason. The Weimar constitution was
depicted by its enemies as something that was forced on the country. But
it was the economic depression that caused the social crisis of millions of
unemployed, which hit Germany especially hard. The political system, in
which the Parliament became paralyzed, could not deal with the profound
problems that the German people had to experience. The Nazis’ rise to
power was conceivable only against this dreadful background.
A crucial but difficult question for our purposes is how important a role
antisemitism played in the success of the Nazis. No firm answer is possible,
because people’s motives were complex and remain elusive. We do have,
however, some evidence that antisemitism did facilitate Nazism’s electoral
success. In their struggle for power, Nazi propaganda usually combined
hostility against Jews with some concrete and presumably popular issue.
According to Nazi propaganda, Jews were responsible for the Depression
and its unemployment because of their control of international finance;
Jews were responsible for communism because Marx was Jewish and they
had prominent leadership roles in the communist and socialist parties.
Germany even lost the war because of Jewish treachery. The Weimar
constitution and democracy in general were shams, because they were
the work of Jews. As a consequence, no one was asked specifically to vote
for the Nazi party just because of antisemitism. Of course, those who did
vote for the Nazis were more likely to be antisemites than those who did
not, but the correlation between the depth of antisemitism and the Nazi
vote was far from direct. Presumably many voted for the Nazis because
the party’s radicalism seemed to be a way out of a miserable situation.
They voted for the Nazis because of German patriotism, because of their
promise to alleviate unemployment, and the like. Some may have believed
that the Nazis used antisemitism as a demagogic device and that once in
power they would drop those ideas, which must have seemed absurd to
many. Yet enough was already known about Hitler’s clearly articulated
and frequently expressed views to dissuade decent people from voting for
his party.
Peter Merkl, in his valuable book, Political Violence under the
Swastika, attempts to disentangle Nazi and antisemitic commitments,
demonstrating that although there was a considerable overlap, it was
far from complete.13 Merkl analyzed a sample of 581 autobiographical
statements written by Nazis in the early 1930s. (An American scholar
of sociology had gathered this material in 1934 with the help of Nazi
organizations.) On the basis of this sample, Merkl was able to make
interesting generalizations concerning the character and worldview of
the early members of the Nazi movement. What interests us here is the
degree and nature of their antisemitic commitments. The Nazi Party was
held together by the projection of enemies, among whom Marxists and
Communists ranked highest and were mentioned far more often than
Jews. In Merkl’s analysis only one in seven joined the party primarily
because of antisemitism, although it is fair to assume that early members
of the Nazi Party were more antisemitic than the population as a whole.
On the basis of his sample, Merkl established five categories among
the antisemites. One-third of the respondents did not mention Jews in
their statements at all; this group was presumably the least antisemitic.
The second group included people who made mild antisemitic remarks
and whose prejudice could be described as social conformism. Merkl
described the third group as choleric antisemites, who on the basis of a
reported personal experience suddenly developed a great dislike of Jews.
The fourth group devoted much more attention to the description of a
concrete incident that made them hate Jews. Finally, people who saw
evidence of Jewish conspiracy everywhere made up the last group; their
antisemitism could be clearly classified as paranoid. One-quarter of the
sample fit into this last category. In Merkl’s sample, members of the pre–
World War I generation and Catholics tended to be more antisemitic than
younger Nazis and Protestants.14 It is fair to assume that people became
more antisemitic after they joined the Nazi movement, particularly its
fighting arm, the SA, because they came to share in an ethos in which the
hatred of Jews was central.
13 Peter Merkl, Political Violence under the Swastika. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1975.
14 Ibid., p. 687.
Among the general population women were slightly more antisemitic

than men and urban residents more antisemitic than the rural popula-
tion. This latter observation was to be expected because Jews lived in
cities and provided economic competition in trade and industry. Yet the
Nazi vote in the early 1930s was more likely to come from rural areas
and from small cities; that is, there was little overlap between regions
where antisemitism was particularly strong and Nazi electoral strength.
To put it another way, we may assume that most or at least many voters
chose the Nazis for reasons other than antisemitism. A classic study by
William Sheridan Allen demonstrates that in the small town he studied
exhaustively, Northeim in the region of Hanover-Brunswick, the small
Jewish community was well integrated and the kind of antisemitism that
existed was abstract, manifested primarily by people telling jokes that
reflected badly on Jews.15
As mentioned before, Nazi propaganda in the years of economic crisis
always combined attacks on Jews with some other evil, choosing that evil
based on the audience. When seeking votes from among the unemployed
the Nazis blamed the crisis on Jewish financiers and exploiters, emphasiz-
ing that the rich Jews did not care about their misery. Addressing middle-
class and conservative audiences, people who were very concerned about
the danger of social revolution, Nazi propagandists emphasized Jewish
subversion. They equated Jews and communists and in the process
harmed the interests of both. Everywhere they depicted Jews as enemies
of the German nation, people who did not carry their fair share at the
time of war and ultimately betrayed the nation in 1918, therefore being
responsible for its defeat.
Historians who have examined contemporary newspapers, pamphlets,
and the speeches of Nazi leaders have concluded that during the cam-
paigns for the crucial series of elections between 1930 and 1932 the
Nazis infrequently used antisemitism as an issue; of course, they never
spelled out what they would do to Jews after they gained power. They did
not spell it out both for strategic reasons but also because they themselves
did not yet know how to solve the “Jewish problem.”
The important question is how many votes the Nazis gained directly
because of antisemitism. The consensus among historians is that
antisemitism played a small role. Of course, voters in Germany were
aware of the Nazis’ views and probably voted as often for the Nazis
15 William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German
Town, 1922–1945 (2nd ed.). New York: Franklin Watts, 1984, p. 84.
because they were antisemites as they did despite it. Yet the vast majority
of people voted for them because they wished a thorough change and that
is what the Nazis promised. The great majority of the Germans disliked
Jews, but did not care about them a great deal one way or another. There
were no parties, organizations, or groups that spoke up in defense of Jews
and explicitly condemned Nazi antisemitism.
The unanswered question is whether the Nazi conquest of power in
Germany succeeded because there was something in German culture and
in the German past that predetermined this outcome. Was there a German
Sonderweg, a special German path to modernity? Did Hitler succeed
because among Germans there were more “authoritarian personalities”
than among other nations? It is indisputable that the German past and
German culture could be reconciled with Nazism, but is it necessary to
accept the proposition that the Germans were different? Do we need to
look for an explanation within German culture? One could argue that
an examination of the years immediately preceding the rise of Nazism
is sufficient: The Nazis rose to power because the political system that
we associate with the Weimar constitution possessed less legitimacy than
the constitutions of other Western European countries. The Nazis suc-
ceeded because the memory of defeat and therefore of humiliation was
still fresh. The Nazis succeeded because the Depression hit Germany espe-
cially hard. The need for scapegoats, and the desire for profound change,
was widespread. Yet, we must remember that their success to a consider-
able extent was a consequence of personalities. What happened did not
have to happen.
5
Propaganda
Propaganda is a highly charged and negative concept. Hearing the word,

we think of politicians telling conscious lies in order to win over public
opinion. Of course, we should not take any propaganda statement at face
value; it is clear that time after time propagandists consciously distort
what they know to be true. However, really effective propaganda is based
on genuine beliefs. Because the assertions of Nazi activists were obviously
absurd and contrary to reality, therefore we tend wrongly to assume that
the speakers or writers could not really have believed in what they were
saying or writing. Not only were the assertions clearly untrue but also
from a logical point of view they made no sense because they often
contradicted one another. At the heart of Nazi thinking about Jews was
this fundamental contradiction, which in different forms appeared again
and again: The Jews were boundlessly contemptible and at the same time
all powerful; they were cowardly but always victorious. In the 1930s when
few countries were willing to take in Jewish refugees, the Nazis repeatedly
characterized, with considerable pleasure, this inaction as evidence that
Jews were disliked everywhere, at the same time that they asserted that
those very governments were in the pockets of Jewish conspirators. Jews
were inferior and despised everywhere, and yet at the same time they
controlled everything. In the worldview of the Nazis, antisemitism grew
everywhere, but at the same time so did the power of Jews.
It would be a mistake to regard antisemitic Nazi propaganda as noth-
ing but empty verbiage for the purpose of winning over the population
by demagogy. On the contrary, we must assume that the fundamental
propaganda themes represented the genuine beliefs of the Nazi leaders
and activists. Nazi propaganda is important not only because it prepared
88
Propaganda 89
the soil for mass murder and later justified genocide but also because it
helps us understand the mind of the perpetrators. It is only because the
Nazis really believed in what they were saying that they had the mad
determination that enabled them, after years of preparation, to carry out
their self-appointed task to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child. We
have no better way to understand Nazi thinking than to listen to what
they were saying.
No well-functioning totalitarian state can exist without an elaborate
propaganda machinery. As Lenin pointed out long before he attained
power, propaganda, and organization – that is, what we would call mobi-
lization – are two sides of the same coin. An effective organization is
needed to convey a worldview to the masses through the carrying out
of propaganda activities. The Bolsheviks proudly regarded themselves as
effective propagandists, but only the Nazis thought of creating a special
ministry entrusted with this task: the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment
and Propaganda. It was headed by one of Hitler’s closest and most trusted
collaborators, Joseph Goebbels, who is often regarded as the greatest
master of the propaganda arts. According to Joachim Fest, Goebbels’
intelligence and originality made him stand head and shoulders above the
other mediocre leaders of the Third Reich.1 David Irving titled his book,
Joseph Goebbels: The Mastermind of the Third Reich.2 During his years
in power Goebbels vastly expanded his empire: His ministry spawned
numerous departments that took control of the various instruments of
propagating the Nazi message. It ultimately employed 1,600 people3 and
stood at the center of a vast network of loosely coordinated institu-
tions and newspapers, all engaged among other activities in antisemitic
propaganda.
The fundamental source of the power of propaganda in a totalitarian
state is the ability of the authorities to suppress competing voices. It is
indeed key to totalitarianism that the ruling party successfully protects its
monopoly interpretation of politics, and in a totalitarian state politics is
defined so broadly that it includes almost all aspects of life. Immediately
after taking power the Nazis suppressed the free expression of ideas in
newspapers, books, and films; Jews, communists, socialists, and other
opponents of the regime in the publishing industry soon lost their jobs.
1 Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. New York:
De Capo Press, 1999, p. 84.
2 London: Parforce, 1996.
3 Jeffrey Herf, “The Jewish Enemy,” in Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the
Holocaust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 20.
This negative achievement is far more important to understanding the

success of Nazi propaganda than the cleverness with which the propa-
gandists conveyed their message.4 Repression rather than brainwashing
was the key for Nazi success. The most significant advantage the propa-
gandists had was that in totalitarian Germany no other voices could be
heard: No one could point to the absurdities, contradictions, and vicious-
ness in what the pamphlets, textbooks, newspapers, and films had to say
about Jews. There was also power in repetition. Much of what Nazi pro-
paganda asserted was not so much believed by the population, but simply
taken for granted. The assertions were not open for public discussion.
However, it was not sufficient to repress; it was also necessary to coor-
dinate. In a totalitarian state, coordination is never easy, because there
can be no clearly established chain of command. Issues are decided at the
pleasure of the supreme leader, and in such circumstances turf battles are
inevitable. Goebbels found himself in constant struggle with Otto Dietrich
and Alfred Rosenberg in particular. There were no meaningful ideological
disputes between the contenders; the issues always were decided by who
had more authority. For example, Dietrich, a Nazi, who had joined the
Party in 1929, was the head of the Press Department of the Ministry of
Propaganda and therefore was Goebbels’ subordinate. However, Dietrich
had daily contact with Hitler and thereby managed to gain his support.
It was from Dietrich’s office that German newspapers in the Nazi period
received weekly instructions on how to handle delicate matters. As far as
the daily management of Nazi propaganda was concerned, Dietrich was
just as important as his much smarter and more sophisticated nominal
superior.5
Bolshevik and Nazi propaganda methods exhibited great similari-
ties, not because the Nazis necessarily learned from the Soviets but
because similar mentalities and circumstances resulted in similar solu-
tions. The Nazis, like the Soviets, used newspapers, films, mass rallies,
wall newspapers,6 and posters to spread their message. Wall newspapers,
which played a crucial role in the Soviet propaganda system, were partic-
ularly important for the Nazis. They were seen everywhere – in streets,
in train cars, and in offices. They became part of the landscape and the
average citizen could not avoid them.
4 On the suppression of the press in 1933 see Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels. New York:
Harcourt and Brace, 1990, pp. 174–77.
5 Ibid., pp. 324–25.
6 A wall newspapers were printed pages designed to be exhibited in public places.
Propaganda 91
Although Nazi propaganda was not entirely preoccupied with the

“Jewish question,” antisemitism was central to it. The uses of antisemitic
propaganda and its main themes were similar to antisemitic propaganda
in other countries. It was its ever escalating violence, extremism, and
depth of hatred that set it apart. The Manichean worldview at the heart
of the Nazi Weltanschauung required an enemy; the “other” and Jews
obviously filled that role. From the Nazi view that Jews were respon-
sible for all the misfortunes of Germany, it followed that the image of
the Jew had to be full of contradictions: Jews were sometimes weak and
contemptible and sometimes powerful beyond limits. The Jew was an
all-purpose enemy.
Although antisemitic agitation probably did not contribute much to
the Nazis’ ascent to power, it did play a major role in their remaining in
power and in creating the kind of state Hitler and his followers desired.
In every aspect, the tone of antisemitic propaganda became increasingly
violent and the denunciation of Jews increasingly sharp. Antisemitism
came to be a defining feature of the Nazi regime: To be a good Nazi, you
had to be a passionate antisemite.
The Jew could assume any form – banker, white slave trader, politi-
cian, pornographer, journalist, or scientist – but always remained a Jew.
Journalists were instructed not to write about French, Romanian, or Hun-
garian Jews, but always Jews living in France, Romania, or Hungary. Jews
could not be Frenchmen in the same way they could not be German. Their
national identity was incidental; only their Jewishness mattered. A Jew
could not stop being a Jew even if he or she wanted to: Jewishness was
immutable and also timeless. A Jew in the Old Testament possessed the
same characteristics as one living in the twentieth century. Just as Jacob
cheated Esau and Joseph was an exploiter of the Egyptians, so acted con-
temporary Jews: A parasite could not stop being a parasite, and there
should be no more sympathy for Jews than for lice or for other parasites
that had to be eliminated. The journalists were also instructed not to
write about “antisemitism” because that might insult Arabs, but instead
to write about “justifiable Jew hatred.” (At a time when the establishment
of a Jewish state was being discussed, relations with the Arabs became an
important matter for the German government.) Newspaper editors were
advised as late as 1944 not to talk about Jewish revenge because such ver-
biage would imply that injustices had been committed against Jews, when
in fact the German people had simply acted in justifiable self-defense.
Party members were trained as propagandists by being instructed how
to answer difficult questions, such as the following. Is religion not a
private matter? (Judaism is not a religion, but a race.) Are there no decent
Jews? (Maybe, but in the struggle of the races there can be no room
for pity.) Are Jews not human beings? (The response was a nonsequitur:
Yes, they are, but lice are animals, and we still kill them.) Do Jewish not
businessmen have better prices? (Maybe, but those come at the expense
of honest German workers who are then unable to feed their families.
Also Jewish businessmen have destroyed small German businesses.) How
about converted Jews? (Judaism is not a religion, but Jews are a race, and
whether they convert or not they remain Jewish. Baptism does not make
a difference.7 ) The answers to these and similar questions were supported
by selected quotations from Hitler or other Nazi leaders.
Propaganda provided an explanation to the German people and also
to the Nazis themselves for whatever setbacks they had to suffer. Jews
wanted to eliminate Germany because the Germans alone had recog-
nized the Jewish danger. If the British and the Americans supported
the Soviet war effort, in spite of the obvious differences in their ideolo-
gies, the only explanation that made sense was that Jews dominated all
enemy governments. The difference between “plutocratic” United States
and England and the proletarian Soviet Union was only in appearance,
because both sides fought for Jewish interests and were controlled by
Jews. If the British could not understand their genuine self-interest and
did not ally themselves with a resurgent Germany, that policy had to be
the result of Jewish influence on the British government. As evidence of
Jewish power in the enemy states, Jewish figures, even those who occu-
pied relatively minor roles in their respective governments, were tirelessly
mentioned, often with the addition of Jewish-sounding names, such as
Finkelstein. Maxim Litvinov, for example, who served as Soviet ambas-
sador in Washington but was hardly a major policy maker during the
war, was always referred to as Litvinov Finkelstein. (Actually, his family
name was Wallach, though it is true that he once used Finkelstein as a pen
name.) The Nazis also attributed great power to the Soviet Union’s sin-
gle remaining prominent Jewish leader, Lazar Kaganovich; the German
propaganda machine “promoted” him to be the father-in-law of Stalin.8
This was a remarkable assertion, given that Kaganovich was considerably
younger than Stalin. The Nazis never spoke of “Bolshevism” but always
7 Kurt Hilmar Eitzen, “Zehn Knüppel wider die Judenknechte,” Unser Wille und Weg
(6) 1936, pp. 309–310. Also see http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm#
Antisem.
8 Ibid., p.142 Herf’s source is the “Word of the Week” publication for January 1942.
Propaganda 93
of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” In response, during World War II the first signs

of antisemitism appeared in governmental policies in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet authorities were well aware of the danger of Nazi propaganda
successfully depicting their war effort as a struggle for Jewish interests and
so did everything within their power to counteract the Nazi-propagated
idea of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Yet Soviet propagandists never made it clear
to their own citizens that the Germans had a “special policy” concerning
Jews.
Reading Nazi propaganda, one gets the impression that the Nazis were
not active agents but were simply responding to the provocation of Jewish
anti-German acts. If the Nazi state received unfavorable publicity abroad,
that, of course, had to be the consequence of Jewish machinations. Joseph
Goebbels in a speech in 1933 spoke about the Nazi-organized boycotts of
Jewish businesses on April 1 as a “counter boycott” necessitated by hostile
international press responses to the Nazi revolution.9 In this extraordi-
narily twisted view, Hitler did not want war; it was Jews who forced the
war on Germany.
Nazi propaganda is a clear example of the well-known psychological
phenomenon of projection. In the Nazi view it was Jews who declared
war on Germany and not the other way around. As the Nazis were
pursuing their genocidal policies, they claimed and very likely believed
that Allied aims, devised by Jews, included the elimination of the Ger-
man nation. Nazi propaganda consistently spoke about Jewish hatred
of Germany. “The Jew” hated Germany because Germany was the main
obstacle for Jewish world domination. An unknown author in New Jersey
in 1941 self-published an insignificant pamphlet, under the provocative
title “Germany Must Perish.” It advocated genocide by sterilization of
Germans and also called for the dismemberment of Germany. Good pro-
pagandist as Goebbels was, he immediately appreciated the pamphlet’s
significance for his own purposes and made certain that it was widely
distributed.10 German propagandists changed the name of the author
from Theodor Kaufman to Nathan Kaufman because that sounded more
Jewish and enabled the Nazis to depict their enemies as homicidal mani-
acs. Theodor Kaufman suddenly found himself to be a politician of world-
wide significance.
9 “Rassenfrage und Weltpropaganda,” Reichstagung in Nürnberg 1933. Berlin:

Vaterländischer Verlag C. A. Weller, 1933, pp. 131–42. Reprinted in http://www.calvin.
edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm#Antisem.
10 Herf, pp. 111–14.
The problem with powerful propaganda is that, to be successful, the

propagandists have to believe what they are saying. The assertions of
Nazi propaganda were so absurd, so far removed from reality that most
people find it difficult to accept that the Nazis believed what they were
saying. However, an examination of contemporary documents, internal
correspondence, and diaries makes unquestionably clear the extent of
Nazi paranoia. There was not much difference between public discourse
and privately expressed views. What Goebbels wrote in his diary was
very similar to what appeared in propaganda publications. He became
obsessed with antisemitism as time passed. In his early career he did
not pay much attention to this topic, but in the last year of his life he
came to believe that the war against “international Jewry” was decisively
important. As Goebbels put it, it was international Jewry that cemented
the “unnatural alliance” against Germany. Even after the Nazis had suc-
ceeded in exterminating German Jewry and a large portion of Jews of
Europe in 1944, they still genuinely continued to believe that Jewry rep-
resented a mortal threat to the survival of the German nation. Goebbels,
Streicher, and Rosenberg went to their deaths continuing to believe in the
reality of a Jewish world conspiracy.
The Nazis believed that they had an ability to see beyond appear-
ances and discern a vast Jewish conspiracy against themselves. A frequent
refrain in their propaganda statements was that finally, the mask of Jews
has fallen off, the curtain had risen, and Jews were exhibiting their true
character. But the consequence of such beliefs is that the propagandists
lose touch with reality and usually pay a high price for not seeing the
world as it really is. The Nazi leaders were the first victims of their pro-
paganda. Time and again they allowed themselves to be misled by their
own words. In 1941, Hitler assumed that the Soviet Union must be weak
because it was just a front for Jewish interests. In 1944, he seemed to
think that it was Jews who kept the Allied-Soviet “unnatural coalition”
against Germany together.
The Nazis studied the impact of propaganda posters during the
Weimar era and designed their propaganda efforts on that basis. In the
Weimar posters, the Jew was depicted as fat, ugly, and effeminate, in
contrast to the average German worker, who was strong but shackled,
just like capitalists in Soviet propaganda were depicted as contrasted with
the Soviet proletariat. Clearly the barrage of antisemitic propaganda that
the Nazis introduced immediately after coming to power was effective
because its themes built on already existing prejudice. There was nothing
Propaganda 95
especially new in what they succeeded in conveying. What were new were
the all-encompassing nature of their efforts and its violent tone.
One then wonders, if the German people were already antisemitic,
why there was a need for the enormous propaganda apparatus, the con-
stant repetition of the same themes. But the function of propaganda in
a totalitarian state is not to convince by cogent arguments. It is rather
to create an official language that defines belonging to the nation. This
language takes the place of genuine intellectual exchange and squeezes
out the discussion of real life with its real problems.
One of the first Nazis, Alfred Rosenberg, who joined the Nazi Party
even before Hitler did, was as obsessed with the “Jewish question” as
Hitler was.11 As a Baltic German he acquired his antisemitism in the
Russian Empire and brought it with him to Germany after the Bolshe-
vik victory. For some time he was the editor of Volkische Beobachter,
the Nazi newspaper, and when Hitler was jailed after the 1923 Beer
Hall putsch, he named Rosenberg as the party leader. More than any-
one else in Nazi Germany, Rosenberg was the theorist of the “Jewish
question.” He combined his antisemitism with an attack on fundamental
tenets of Christian religions and spoke of a “positive” as opposed to a
“negative” Christianity. He accused Christianity of being corrupted by
Jewish influences. He wrote of “a religion of the blood” and considered
Jesus Christ an Aryan who struggled against the Jewish race. In his view
Nordic Aryans moved thousands of years ago to the eastern shores of the
Mediterranean and Jesus was a descendant of these folks. Others shared
Rosenberg’s religious speculations. Arthur Dinter, for example, in his
book, Sin against the Blood published in 1918, went further, repudiating
the Old Testament; he later established his own church, presumably free
from Jewish influences.12
Rosenberg, who regarded himself as an intellectual and a theorist,
published his most influential book, The Myth of the 20th Century,
in 1930. The book aimed to be the continuation of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. It was a confused
11 On Rosenberg, see Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and
Nazi Ideology. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.
12 On Dinter, see Richard Steigman–Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christian-
ity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 30–31. In Dinter’s perception the
struggle between Aryan and Jew is the same as the struggle between God and the Devil.
He took from Houston Stewart Chamberlain the notion that Jesus and all the apostles
with the exception of Judas were Aryans.
restatement in a most extreme form of contemporary “racial science”

that argued that everything worthwhile in the world had been created by
the racially superior Nordic races. Modern culture had been corrupted by
Jewish influences, and the most important task of Germans was to strug-
gle against those who were responsible for this corruption. He established
an Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, which aimed to com-
bat Jewish influence in German culture. At the beginning of the war this
Institute collected looted material from Jewish libraries and institutions in
the occupied countries to provide material for a “scientific” study of the
history of Jews. He also published a biweekly journal, the Die Judenfrage
(The Jewish Question13 ).
Although Rosenberg was one of the first “theorists” of the Jewish
question and devoted much time and energy to the discussion of this
issue, he was a less influential propagandist than Goebbels, Streicher, and
some others. He was constantly engaged in turf battles with Goebbels,
who was a considerably more able politician. Most importantly, Rosen-
berg’s theories were too confused and esoteric to provide good propa-
ganda material. After Nazis rise to power Rosenberg’s anti-Catholicism
was an embarrassment for Hitler, which contributed to the “philoso-
pher’s” marginalization.14 He was a second-rate philosopher in a move-
ment that never took philosophy very seriously. He was sentenced to
death at Nuremberg not for his ideas, but for his role as “Reich Minister
for the occupied territories.”
The official Nazi daily, Volkischer Beobachter, published antisemitic
articles, but the most brutal antisemitic vehicle of the party was the
weekly newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Storm Trooper), edited by Julius
Streicher, who was completely preoccupied with the Jewish question.
In many ways he was a typical Nazi.15 He came from a petty bourgeois
family from Bavaria. His father was a schoolteacher. Already in his school
years he was a passionate antisemite, but World War I in which he fought
with distinction was a defining experience for him. Like other antisemites
deeply hurt by the German defeat, he found the culprit in the Jew.16 He
participated in the Beer Hall putsch and spent two months in prison. It
13 Herf, p. 27.
14 Goebbels, a more intelligent but less theoretically minded man, put it rather cruelly:
“Rosenberg almost managed to become a scholar, a journalist and a politicians, but
only almost.” Cecil, p. 5.
15 On Streicher, see Randall Bytwerk, Julius Streicher. New York: Stein and Day, 1983.
16 Die Entfesselung des Hasses: Antijüdische Stereotype in der Karikatuern und Het-
zartikeln des “Stürmers,” Oldenburg University, House Seminar, 2001–02.
Propaganda 97
can be said that he was a professional antisemite. Unlike Goebbels or

even Rosenberg who had other interests and concerns, Streicher limited
his interests to exposing Jewish crime and danger as he saw them. In
addition to editing his weekly paper, he headed a publishing business
that also specialized in antisemitic propaganda. He was a particularly
unsavory character and was involved in financial and sexual scandals;
he was accused of personally benefiting from looted Jewish property and
engaging in adultery. His fellow Nazi leaders disliked him and did not
take him seriously. He was never at the center of power nor influential in
making policy.
Although Nazi propaganda themes were few in number, predictable,
and agreed on by the antisemitic propagandists, the themes were pre-
sented at different levels of sophistication depending on the target audi-
ence. Der Stürmer was published from April 21, 1923, until the end of
the Third Reich, reaching by the end of the 1930s a circulation of almost
a half-million. The weekly, written in a simple language, aimed to appeal
to the less educated, those who were not regular readers of the press.
Streicher often ridiculed the hesitant intellectual and believed that it was
the simple folk who had a natural instinct in appreciating the Jewish dan-
ger. Readers were enticed by lurid stories of Jewish sexual perversions
and misdeeds; for example, tales of ugly Jews seducing innocent German
maidens. Streicher believed that the blood of a “German” woman would
be poisoned as a result of a single act of sexual intercourse with a Jew and
that an Aryan man’s virility would be compromised by sexual relations
with a Jewess.
Der Stürmer was not an official Nazi organ, but it was a private enter-
prise that made its owner and editor rich. Purveying the most primitive,
violent pornographic antisemitism, which even embarrassed some better
educated Nazis, was good business in Germany of the 1930s. Some Nazi
leaders wanted Hitler to close down the journal, but Hitler continued
to protect Streicher to the very end. Streicher once insulted Göring by
questioning his manhood, which the field marshal would not forgive and
hence became his lifelong opponent. As a result of scandals associated
with him, Streicher lost his position as Gauleiter of Franconia in 1940,
but Hitler, who regarded the journal highly, allowed him to continue to
publish his weekly.
On the title page of every issue there appeared the famous quotation
from the nineteenth-century historian, Heinrich von Treitschke: “Jews
are our misfortune.” The newspaper popularized the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, which first appeared in German translation in 1920,
and it described imagined incidents of Jewish ritual murder. The Jew

was depicted always the same way: He had a hooked nose, thick lips,
dark curly hair, drooping eyelids, and shifty eyes; was small; and walked
stooped over.17 Of course, in this instance Streicher simply built on a
long-established image of the Jew. Some cartoons showed Jews in league
with Satan and exceptionally ugly Jews deflowering innocent German
maidens.
As early as July 1936, Streicher wrote in Der Stürmer that the goal of
the Jews was to exterminate the German people.18 His blood thirst did
not diminish; unlike most of the other Nazi leaders he explicitly called for
mass murder. Even after German Jewry had been destroyed, he published
caricatures that depicted the German worker enslaved by Jews, and a
particularly obscene cartoon in May 1944 depicted a Jew grinning as the
world was being destroyed by war.
One of his odder ideas was to publish a medical journal, claiming
that the large proportions of Jews in the medical profession were doing
great damage to the nation. However, the Nazi authorities closed down
the paper in 1935 because it had argued against compulsory vaccination,
which the Nazis advocated but Streicher regarded as a Jewish plot.
Antisemitic propaganda, with its “scientific” discussion of race, per-
meated textbooks from grade school up to the university level because
the Nazis were very interested in educating the new generation in the
proper spirit. One suspects that Nazi propaganda was most effective in
influencing the young generation. Streicher’s publishing house published
a pamphlet for teachers on how to incorporate antisemitic material into
their teaching, Die Judenfrage im Unterricht (The Jewish Question in
Education), written by Fritz Fink.19 Fink explained that the racial ques-
tion, which is nothing but the Jewish question, should not be discussed
in isolation, but should be included in every subject taught in school.
The teacher should not worry that the children would not understand the
topic, because they, more than adults, possess healthy racial instincts and
recognize the Jew as something foreign. The dislike of the Jew is innate
in an uncorrupted German child. Antisemitism can be incorporated into
the natural sciences by showing how every type of animal sticks to its
own kind and does not interbreed. Then the teacher can explain that
once we let our guard down and admit foreigners, they take over and
17 Ibid., p. 16.
18 See http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm#Antisem.
19 Stürmerverlag: Nuremberg, 1937.
Propaganda 99
destroy our society. In this regard the most important educational task
was to warn German girls about the danger of race defilement, equating
it to “bloodless murder.” The pamphlet contained photos of mixed-race
degenerates and pointed out that sex with Jews results not only in the
loss of descendants to the German race but also of the woman herself,
because foreign poison had entered her body.
In 1934 a school textbook, Deutsche National Katechismus,20 was
published in a catechism format. To the question, what are the charac-
teristics of the Nordic race, it gives this answer: courage, bravery, the
desire and ability to create, and loyalty. To these observations this irrel-
evant comment – the Gothic script is particularly lovely and should be
maintained – is added. To the question about what problems Jews are
responsible for, the catechism explains that Jews exploited German farm-
ers and drove them from their land into cities, where they corrupted
them; Jews also corrupted German literature and music. The textbook
also claims that Jews were responsible for the defeat in World War I and
for the revolution of 1918.
Other pamphlets used in grade school and high school explained how
to watch out for the dangerous, crafty Jew who could be recognized by
the size and shape of the nose. A book on race science included drawings
of different types of noses, among them a Jewish nose.21 Even storybooks
for children contained the Janus-like depiction of the Jew: The Jew is at
once boundlessly contemptible and at the same time all powerful. One
storybook for children about Jews was characteristically titled “Toad-
stool,” something ugly and disgusting. The Jew on the frontispiece is
depicted in the form of a toadstool. The little book aims to make chil-
dren wary of the sly and cunning Jews. Each short chapter tells a story
in which the children are warned against various dangers that Jews can
pose in their lives. In one story the Jew cheats the peasant to such an
extent that he loses his land and house. Another story demonstrates that
a converted Jew is still a Jew. As it states, “It is easier to make a German
out of a Negro than a non-Jew out of a Jew.”22 The Jew is the devil.
Writers published college-level books and pamphlets in which they
claimed to demonstrate the excessive Jewish role in the economic and cul-
tural life of the nation. In one pamphlet published for university students
20 Werner May, Deutscher National-Katechismus. Breslau: Verlag von Heinrich Handel,

1934, pp. 22–26.
21 Rassenkunde, p. 270.
22 Der Giftpilz Nurrnberg, p. 22.
titled “The Jewish Question,” the author, Dr. Ernst Dobers, describes the
Jewish danger. He points out that the percentage of Jews in the popula-
tion has not changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century, but
that statistic gives a false picture because many converted, but in their
essence still remained Jewish. A recurring theme of Nazi writings is that a
Jew cannot cease to be a Jew or act like a Jew any more than a rat could
cease to be a rat. In a sense Jews were not responsible for their Jewishness
because there was nothing they could do about it. The extermination
of Jews was a method of social hygiene that was particularly needed in
the cities; Jews had inundated the cities, in particular Berlin, where they
made up 5 percent of the population.23 Worst of all, Jews had come to
dominate some professions. In some high schools in Berlin Jews made up
half of the student body, and in the universities they were represented
ten times more than their share of the population. In three generations
Jews had moved from the ghetto to dominant elites, taking up places
of leadership and bringing with them an un-German spirit. They had
destroyed the independent craftsmen and small businessmen. (In reality,
of course, a large percentage of Jews were small businessmen.) In the
perception of Dobers, Jews had been leading a war against Germany for
generations.24 Germany lost World War I because of Jewish pacifist pro-
paganda. Yet Jews also caused the war, so that they could benefit from it
as war profiteers.
Cinema was a particularly effective method of Nazi propaganda in
which Goebbels took a particular interest. Film has a special power to
convey negative images. Although the vast majority of films made dur-
ing the Third Reich aimed merely to entertain, some of the most famous
movies were powerful propaganda instruments. German studios made a
number of antisemitic films. Ironically, two such films, The Rothchilds
and Jud Süss, were remakes of a British and a Hollywood film, respec-
tively, to which the Nazi directors gave a 180-degree turn. The Rothchilds
purports to show that the family made its money illgitimately and uses the
resources in order to enslave the people of Europe. Jud Süss was based on
a story by the Jewish writer, Lion Feuchtwanger, whose books had been
burned by the Nazis. The original work aimed to combat antisemitism.
The story concerned an advisor to the Duke of Würtemberg who was
23 Ernst Dobers, Die Judenfrage. Stoff und Behandlung in der Schule. Leipzig, 1936,
pp. 35–6.
24 Ibid., p. 44.
Propaganda 101
thought to be Jewish, but was not, and who heroically accepted the death
sentence rather than revealing that he was not Jewish. In the Nazi film,
made in 1940, he is the villain, who as the power behind the throne cor-
rupts and encourages the duke to do all sorts of wicked things, and finally
rapes a Christian woman. He is, of course, in fact a Jew. After the death
of the duke he is sentenced to death by the elders of the town, and the
elders then expel all the Jews, to the great satisfaction of the townfolk.
The most appallingly inhuman film, The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude),
was also made in 1940. (The title was first used for a Yiddish-language
American film made in 1933, which had nothing in common with the Nazi
version. It was also used as the name of a German traveling exhibition in
1937 that aimed to demonstrate the “Jewish danger.”) No propaganda
film surpassed this one in its viciousness. Goebbels himself had such a
large role in making the film that he could fairly be regarded as the
producer. The film is allegedly a documentary, and a narrator provides
explanations. It uses all the major antisemitic propaganda themes. Dirty
and ugly Jews are contrasted with healthy and attractive Germans (for
demonstrating Jewish filth, the film makers showed images of the Lodz
ghetto, as if the Jews chose for themselves this way of life). Jews do not
work, but are engaged in unsavory businesses, about which the narrator
provided completely made-up statistics, such as “Jews are responsible for
98% of prostitution and for 47% of all robberies.” In the most distasteful
scenes of the film Jews are explicitly compared to rats, whose invasion is
compared to the Jewish invasion of Europe. The only way to deal with
rats is to exterminate them. Einstein is presented in the film as a pseudo-
scientist; Peter Lorre, who had played a child murderer in a famous
film, M, is presented as an advocate for the murderer. Strangely, Albert
Einstein was one of the Jewish figures whom the Nazis hated most. But
even in this film in which Jews are depicted as rats – living in filth, their
natural element – at the same time they are powerful and controlling.
In the concluding scenes of the film we see Hitler giving his famous
speech in January 1939, in which he predicts the elimination of European
Jewry. Although the film was not particularly successful in attracting an
audience, the many who did see it were affected by it, and it inspired
some attacks on individual Jews.
How can one evaluate the success of Nazi propaganda? It is always
more difficult to convince people about matters that they know about
and are interested in. For example, in 1944 it was difficult to convince
the Germans about Hitler’s infallibility and the prospect of victory. The
evidence contradicted the propaganda.25 By contrast people can be more

easily influenced regarding issues that do not matter to them very much.
The success of antisemitic propaganda can be explained by the fact that
it was based on already existing stereotypes. Although the “Jewish ques-
tion” was by no means the most important issue for the great majority
of Germans, Nazi propaganda was still a necessary precondition to turn
ordinary Germans into mass killers.
25 Ian Kershaw in his book, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008, makes the same argument.
6
What to Do with the Jews?
Intentionalists and Functionalists

The development of Nazi policies toward Jews in the course of the 1930s
is central to understanding the history of the Holocaust. Not surprisingly
therefore, this period has been much debated by historians. The most
controversial question has been this: Did Hitler and the Nazi leaders
have a plan for mass extermination before they came to power, and if
so, did they in the course of the 1930s lay the groundwork for carry-
ing out such a plan? To find support for an affirmative answer to this
question, historians needed only to turn to Hitler’s statements before and
after coming to power. The clear implication of Hitler’s description of
Jews in Mein Kampf as bacteria is that they had to be exterminated.
After all, you do not negotiate with nor come to terms with bacteria.
Hitler continued to “prophesy” mass extermination, most famously in
his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, when he said, “If the
international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in
plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will
not be the victory of the Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish
race in Europe!”1
In general this approach to history, the so-called intentionalist
approach, accorded well with those who perceived the Nazi state as total-
itarian and thought of totalitarianism as a system that functions from the
top down, where the decisions are made at the center and the institutions
1 The speech is available online at http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/

hitler-19390130.shtml. It was included in the propaganda film, Der ewige Jude. N. H.
Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Vol. I. London, 1942, pp. 737–41.
103
of the regime simply carry out these instructions. In this view, Hitler had
decided to exterminate the Jews, and his underlings simply realized his
long-standing plans. The infamous answer of the war criminals at the
1946 trial in Nuremberg to the charges against them, that “we were just
carrying out orders,” supported this line of reasoning. In the immediate
postwar period, when research was just starting to be undertaken on the
extermination of Jews and the functioning of the Nazi bureaucracy, this
approach was simply taken for granted not only by the general public but
also by those who wrote on these subjects.
Other historians, members of the so-called functionalist school and
mostly Germans, approached the matter differently. In examining the
“Hitler state,” they found that the Führer was a capricious dictator who
at times listened to one set of underlings and at other time favored others.2
In theory his position was unconstrained, and indeed the Nazi state had
no institutions that could have limited the Führer’s authority. However, in
reality decisions were made in an ad hoc fashion; often one hand did not
know what the other was doing. Nazi chiefs competed with one another;
their areas of competence were ill defined. The competition resulted in
increasing radicalization, as the functionaries attempted to outdo one
another in competing for Hitler’s favor. In this competition moderation
would have been a sign of weakness and failure.
The other source for the functionalist interpretation was the seminal
book of Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, published
in 1961.3 Hilberg thoroughly examined the workings of German bureau-
cracy as they were relevant to the murder of Jews. He found that Hitler
and his fellow Nazi leaders established a dominant worldview, but it was
the thousands of individual decisions made to implement that worldview
that ultimately mattered and led to the dreadful result. He emphasized
that every German institution from the Ministry of Finance to the rail-
roads played a role in the murder of Jews. The most concise description
of this way of looking at history is captured in the title of Karl Schle-
unes’ book, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz.4 Schleunes shows how the
ultimate result was far from predetermined and how many contingencies
there were between taking power and setting up extermination camps.
2 Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz, translated by Philip O’Connor. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1991 (in particular pp. 163–88) and Martin Broszat, The
Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third
Reich, translated by John W. Hiden. London: Longman, 1981.
3 Hilberg’s book was first published by Quadrangle Press in 1961.
4 Schleunes, Karl The Twisted Road to Auschwitz; Nazi Policy toward German Jews,
1933–1939. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970.
What to Do with the Jews? 105
The “path” was by no means straight. Historians belonging to this school

have argued that there had never been a master plan.
However, between the extreme intentionalist and functionalist posi-
tions, several intermediate positions are possible. In the vast literature
on the Holocaust, historians and scholars should not be placed in two
different camps, but instead placed on a continuum.5
A totalitarian polity should not be regarded as a well-oiled machine
in which the appropriate authorities make decisions that are then car-
ried out efficiently. On the contrary, all totalitarian states function with
fragmented bureaucracies in which different groups compete with one
another behind the scenes, often pursuing contradictory policies. Because
a totalitarian state does not tolerate openness and criticism, it is bound
to be inconsistent and inefficient. According to the functionalists, looking
for an order by Hitler, a single decision to carry out mass murder, is in
vain. What Hitler wanted was simply understood; it was assumed but
never put into exact words. Throughout the years of Nazi dictatorship
murderous antisemitism came to be incorporated into the Nazi way of
thinking. There was no need for any special decision. Contrary to writers
such as David Irving, this is by no means to absolve Hitler of respon-
sibility for the mass murder.6 If Hitler had not had his mad hatred of
Jews, the Holocaust would not have happened. It was Hitler who placed
antisemitism at the center of the Nazi worldview, and in the totalitarian
system the desire to murder acquired a dynamic of its own. The Holo-
caust was the consequence of a very large number of decisions made at
different levels of the administration of the German state machinery.
In the years after their conquest of power, the Nazis took a series of
steps, each one necessary for the next step, that ultimately resulted in
mass murder. Although each step was essential to proceed on the road
to Auschwitz, those who were responsible for the decisions themselves
did not know where the road was leading. Therefore it does not follow
that once the first step was taken the next necessarily followed. Each
5 The best known historians in the intentionalist group are Daniel Goldhagen and Lucy
Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1975. Aside from Schleunes, the most important historian among the function-
alists was Hilberg, who went to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate the involvement of
every institution of the German state and to describe how and when individual decisions
were made. Hilberg demonstrated how each step the Nazis took was a precondition for
the next. However, it was not his intention to argue that a step taken necessarily led to
the next.
6 David Irving, Hitler’s War. New York: Viking, 1977. Irving argues that Hitler not only
gave no order for mass extermination but also was not fully aware what was going on.
He puts much of the blame on Goebbels.
step conceivably could have been the last one. As Raul Hilberg argued,
the first step was to define who Jews were. No mass extermination could
have been possible without a precise definition of its target. Hitler’s vague
talk about “the Jewish spirit,” his notion that the Jew is within all of us,
would not alone have provided a solid basis for taking actions against
specific individuals.
The task of definition was not easy. In a country such as Germany
where Jews had been acculturated and were interwoven with the rest of
society, there was no clear answer to the question of who a Jew was. The
Nazis attempted to define racial characteristics of Jews and included in
their textbooks for children descriptions of Jewish characteristics, but of
course this was foolishness. As much as they objected to Jews for “racial”
as opposed to religious reasons, there was nothing else to do, but to fall
back on religion to arrive at a definition satisfactory for themselves.
The second step was the expropriation of Jewish property. The con-
fiscation of Jewish property was supposed to benefit not individuals, but
only the German state. In fact, the despoilment of Jews, a relatively rich
minority, gave opportunities for private gain. It also further limited the
Jews’ sphere of action and led directly to the next and crucial stage. Those
Jews who lost their wealth also lost their jobs and often their livelihood
too, so they came to depend on one another. As they were forced out of
their professions and to leave their homes, forbidden to intermarry, and
excluded from schools, they came to be removed from German society.
When the time came for deportation and extermination, Germans were
not losing their Jewish friends and acquaintances; they had already lost
them earlier. Average Germans did not then have to suffer the inconve-
nience of having their Jewish shopkeeper, Jewish doctor, or Jewish lawyer
disappear from their lives, because that had already happened and it had
happened gradually. Ultimately, the isolation of Jews enabled many Ger-
mans to say after the Holocaust ended that they did not know anything.7
The Terror Begins

Hitler succeeded in taking power in January 1933 because his opponents
underestimated him and because the German people overwhelmingly
7 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Franklin Watts, 1973,
p. 31. The following chapters benefited greatly from the research of the earliest and
arguably the greatest scholar of the subject, Raul Hilberg. We have been greatly influenced
by his ideas and way of thinking.
desired change; that is, they wanted to overcome the political stasis of the
Depression years and find a way out of their economic misery. The new
government almost immediately introduced such far-reaching changes
that they could fairly be described as a revolution, although it is unlikely
that the Germans immediately appreciated the enormity of the transfor-
mation. On assuming power the Nazis were ready to act: Within weeks
they destroyed the parliamentary system and repressed their political
opponents, introducing terror in the process. Within a month of coming
to power, they suspended the civil liberties guarantied by the Weimar
constitution. The “Enabling Law” of March 24, 1933, in effect abolished
the Parliament; from this time on the Reichstag was called together only
when Hitler decided to do so to pass laws, but always without serious
debate.
Hitler and his followers were not interested in changing the relation-
ships among the classes in spite of the word “socialism” in the name of
their party. In fact, autonomous working-class organizations were among
the first to be suppressed. The new government was interested instead in
solving the most painful problems of the nation: a stagnating economy
and unemployment. Therefore the Nazi leaders had to make sure not to
introduce policies that would lessen the chances of economic recovery.
Previous demagogic promises of egalitarianism and anticapitalism had to
be abandoned. Fortunately for the Nazis, the severity of the economic
crisis had started to lessen even before they came to power, which helped
them deliver on their campaign promises.
The most important driver for reviving the economy was rebuilding the
military; it was obvious from the outset that Hitler intended to rebuild the
nation’s military power, thereby regaining the glory of Imperial Germany.
The Nazis played on nationalist sentiments. Many were pleased to see
the Nazis march, seeing it as a reassertion of German strength and a
defiance of the hostile outside world. In addition, newly instituted large-
scale public projects, such as the building of roads for military purposes,
reduced the problem of unemployment.
At first the Nazis largely aimed the terror against their political oppo-
nents, the Marxists – that is, socialists and communists – or, as the
Nazis then referred to them, the November criminals.8 When the first
concentration camp was set up outside of Munich in Dachau, its inmates
were political opponents. But terror is rarely discriminating, and victims
came from all levels of society.
8 This name referred to November 1918, when the imperial regime collapsed.
In Mein Kampf Hitler had argued against organizing pogroms for

those could not “solve the Jewish problem” and only created sympathy
for Jews. Nevertheless, on April 1, 1933, the Nazis did what Hitler had
written that they should not do: They organized the largest pogrom that
had taken place in German history up to this time. As part of this terror,
the Nazis called for a boycott of Jewish shops, businesses, lawyers, and
other professionals as a response to the supposed “atrocity propaganda”
spread by Jews abroad against the young German regime. Indeed, the
foreign reaction to the Nazi takeover was as unfavorable as could have
been predicted, but it is unlikely that the major reason for the negative
reaction was Nazi antisemitism. The attacks on Jews and Jewish property
were part of a general introduction of terror and were largely uncoordi-
nated. Indeed, isolated attacks by Nazi storm troopers had taken place
even before the party gained power. Hitler’s assumption of power sim-
ply removed the obstacles to mistreating Jews, allowing the Nazis to
give physical expression to their accumulated hatred. The storm troopers
attacked shops owned by Jews, bombed synagogues, and took individ-
ual actions against prominent Jews, such as dragging Jewish lawyers out
of courtrooms and beating them.9 From the Nazi point of view, it was
beneficial to give the storm troopers something to do. Attacking Jews
was a bonding experience for them; it prepared them for further tasks.
The beatings and lootings had another aim: to humiliate the victims. The
Germans gradually got used to the mistreatment of Jews as it became
more and more usual and therefore unworthy of notice.
However, the acts of terror against Jews presented the Nazi leadership
with a dilemma. Although there was nothing more important than to help
the economic recovery, beating and humiliating Jews interfered with this
goal. Because different segments of a modern economy are intertwined, it
was impossible to move against Jewish-owned department store chains,
for example, without harming banks that had advanced credit to them
or endangering the jobs of Christian workers at these chains. It would
have pleased German small shopkeepers, who perhaps were the most
antisemitic part of the population, if those chains were closed down,
but such an act would have obviously harmed the economic recovery.
In addition, acts of terror also might have negatively affected German
economic relations with the Western world. They were concerned that
their actions would lead to a boycott of German goods. Indeed, prices on
the stock exchange dropped. To the extent that there was any negative
9 Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2004, pp. 432–33.
reaction in Western public opinion or in newspapers, the Nazis entirely

attributed it to Jewish influence.
Yet, as a radical party the Nazis could not afford to say no to their
own followers, who in beating and humiliating Jews were doing what
they had been encouraged to do. The Nazis did not want to appear as
insufficiently radical to their own followers, to whom not taking any
actions against Jews would have seemed to be a betrayal. In addition, the
Nazis wanted to involve the German people in their antisemitic acts. It
is always important for a totalitarian power to involve every member of
the nation in its misdeeds; it is essential to make citizens accomplices. At
this early stage, the Nazis were not very successful in that aim, but they
would be in the future to a much greater extent.
The solution to the Nazi’s dilemma was controlled violence. The suc-
cess or failure of this pogrom cannot be determined easily. On one hand,
the Nazis did declare “success,” saying that Jews learned their lesson and
stopped atrocity propaganda abroad. On the other hand, the history of
terror was still too young, and German citizens were not yet terrorized
sufficiently to prevent at least a small minority from showing open sym-
pathy to those who had been abused. On the basis of anecdotal evidence
it seems that, although most Germans remained indifferent, at this point
some did express sympathy for the victims. It is interesting to contrast
German responses to the violence in 1933 and in 1938. Five years after
the Nazis came to power, Jews received far less support from their fellow
human beings.
Breaking windows, looting shops, and humiliating and abusing people
were no answers to the central problem as the Nazis saw it: How to get rid
of the Jews? The boycott lasted only for a single day to the disappointment
of Nazi activists. It is difficult to know how the Nazis in the first several
years of their regime conceived of “the solution to the Jewish problem.”
At that point all they had the power to do was to make the lives of Jews
as miserable as possible. Perhaps their expectation was that Jews would
find living in modern Germany so intolerable that they would want to
leave.
Who Is a Jew?
That the Nazis would take measures that would destroy the Weimar sys-
tem should not have surprised anyone. Nor could their economic mea-
sures be regarded as unexpected. It was different concerning their mea-
sures against Jews. From 1933 to 1945, the Nazi determination to harass
and hurt Jews grew stronger, ultimately becoming a determination to kill

them. It was an accelerating spiral to the very end fueled perhaps by this
psychological mechanism: Those who abused and mistreated Jews had
to believe that their victims deserved their fate because they were guilty.
Consequently, the more the perpetrators harmed their victims, the more
they hated them and the more they wanted to damage and ultimately kill
them.
Although when the Nazis came to power, their hatred of Jews was
explicit, it was not a sufficient basis of consistent policies toward them.
Indeed, in the first years of the regime there were no consistent anti-Jewish
policies. The SA, convinced by Nazi propaganda, took measures against
individual Jews of which Hitler, who had to be concerned about foreign
and domestic public opinion, could not but disapprove. On occasion, for
example in Breslau in March 1933, the police were called in to restrain SA
radicals who attacked individual Jews and Jewish department stores.10
To find concrete proposals for anti-Jewish actions, it is necessary to look
to the 1920 party platform written by Hitler. It asserted that only people
with German blood could be members of the community; therefore, it
made it explicit that no Jew, regardless of current religious affiliation,
could be considered German. Being thus deprived of their citizenship,
Jews could live in Germany only under rules governing foreign residents.
At the time of the Second World War this platform would be the basis
for the law mandating the deportation of Jews: All foreigners, not only
Jews, who came to Germany after 1914, were to be expelled.11 On the
basis of the party program alone, no one could have imagined what was
going to happen twelve years later. No one could imagine it and no
one did.
Between 1933 and 1935 a series of rules and regulations was intro-
duced, aimed at least partially against Jews, to restrict their lives and
activities. To determine who would be affected by these laws, it became
necessary to define who a Jew was. For the purposes of these early acts,
anyone who had at least one “non-Aryan” grandparent (i.e., a Jew) was
considered to be Jewish. Very quickly these laws had the effect of remov-
ing Jews from the schools and certain professions. The oddly named
regulation, “restoration of the professional civil service,” excluded Jews
(and other opponents of the regime) from government service. Other acts
limited Jewish enrollment in certain schools and excluded Jewish doctors
10 Schleunes, pp. 71–72.

11 Hilberg, p. 18.
from the National Health Service.12 However, in addition to restricting

the Jews’ economic power, the Nazis were particularly concerned about
“Jewish influence” in German culture. Therefore these early regulations
were also aimed at dismissing Jewish editors, journalists, and filmmakers
from their places of employment.
The blow to German intellectual life came quickly. Jewish musicians
were unable to perform; writers could not publish. Within a few months
Jewish scholars, including some prominent ones, were removed from Ger-
man university faculties. The Nazis organized book burnings of Jewish
authors in the very first months of the new regime. The consequence was
an emigration of an entire intellectual cohort. Famous writers, scientists,
and artists found it relatively easy to leave their country of birth and find
reception abroad. Those less well known, of course, had a much more
difficult time. “German” culture was the first sphere of life to be made
judenrein (i.e., free from Jews).
However, anti-Jewish violence by Nazi youth came in waves. After
the initial violence in April 1933, a degree of normality returned that
seemed to justify the convictions of those who had believed that the
revolutionary party had to moderate its behavior if it intended to stay in
government. Even in this brief period, however, acts of mob terror against
Jews continued. The situation varied from district to district. In Franco-
nia, for example, a province headed by Julius Streicher, acts of violence
occurred frequently, and officially inspired boycotts of Jewish businesses
continued. As mentioned earlier, the Nazi leadership had an ambivalent
attitude toward these mob actions. Although the leaders regarded them
as manifestations of the proper ideological antisemitic commitment, mob
rule was unacceptable in a properly ordered society. It also made a bad
impression on at least part of the population. Many Germans may have
approved of restrictions imposed on Jews, but not street violence against
them: That was not the German way.
By 1935, segments of the Nazi Party were disappointed that two years
of these restrictive regulations had accomplished too little. It is difficult
to establish to what extent the desire to resume the offensive against
Jews emanated from below – from Nazi activists who disapproved of the
resumption of normal life that seemed to them as a betrayal of ideology –
or whether the decision to further diminish the sphere of Jewish activities
was made by the leadership, who had to take seriously the radicalism
of the so-called old fighters (Alte Kämpfer). Most likely the distinction
12 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936, Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, pp. 471–75.
between pressure from below and manipulation from above is an artificial

one. In fact, it was in the genius of the Hitler state to abolish that distinc-
tion. The final result, the Nuremberg laws, was a compromise between
bureaucrats of the Ministry of the Interior and the radicals within the
Nazi movement.13 All of the major features of the Nuremberg laws had
been both considered by Hitler earlier and demanded by the radical wing
of the Nazi Party.
These Nuremberg laws, a major step leading to the Holocaust, were a
body of legislation that came into being in an ad hoc fashion and were
the result of a series of compromises.14 These matters were considered so
important that the Reichstag was called into session, where the laws were
presented to it, and they ultimately appeared above Hitler’s signature.
The first two articles of the laws, promulgated on September 15, 1935,
titled “Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,”
dealt with the issue of sexual relations between Jews and kindred blood.
(What exactly kindred blood meant was not further defined. It presum-
ably referred to “Germanic” peoples such as the Dutch and the Danes.).
By outlawing marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans,
these laws preserved “the purity of the race” and prevented “race defile-
ment.” Although they declared that such marriages taking place outside
of Germany were void, they did not dissolve such unions retroactively.
The churches, in particular the Catholic Church, passionately opposed
the violation of the sacrament of marriage. These laws also forbade the
employment of “German” females under the age of 45 in Jewish house-
holds. The least burdensome paragraph of these laws forbade Jews to
display German flags and national colors.15 Jews also could not vote or
hold public office because they were not considered to be citizens.
But who was a Jew? That was still unclear, so in November 1935 addi-
tional regulations had to be issued. The Nazis believed that Jewishness
had nothing to do with religion; Jews represented a race. But in working
out their definition they had no choice, not surprisingly, but to fall back
on religion: A person with four Jewish grandparents, as registered by
the excellent Imperial German bureaucracy, was of course a Jew. Three
Jewish grandparents also made one into a Jew. However, with only two
Jewish grandparents, difficulties emerged, never to be resolved by the
Nazis. As long as the individual with two Jewish grandparents did not
13 Mommsen, pp. 228–32.

14 Schleunes, pp. 92–132.
15 Ibid.
practice Judaism or was not married to a Jew, he or she was called a

Mischling; an individual with two Jewish grandparents who did practice
Judaism and was married to a Jew was treated as a Jew. A Jew with
one Jewish grandparent who did not practice Judaism was a Mischling of
the second class. Because the law forbade marriage and sexual intercourse
between Jews and non-Jews, the expectation was that within a few gener-
ations the Mischlinge would disappear: Some of them would be absorbed
into the Jewish community and others would become Germans.
In effect the Nuremberg laws created a new breed, and how to deal
with them, how to exterminate the Jew but save the “German blood,” was
something that the Nazis could never resolve to their own satisfaction.
From this point on what to do with the Mischlinge became a constant
problem; within the Nazi worldview, which valued “German” blood and
expressed fear and loathing for the “other,” the problem was unmanage-
able. Mischlinge could be the objects of discrimination – they could not
join the Nazi Party or serve as officers – but they could not be completely
removed from German society. Because Mischlinge were not targeted for
extermination, the elimination process of Jews could not be complete.
The racial laws also created a need for people to prove that they were
not Jewish (i.e., that they had no Jewish parents or grandparents). As a
result, an entire new profession came into being: researchers of family
background.
A second law deprived Jews of their citizenship. Citizenship implied
the right to vote, but because voting in Nazi German was meaningless,
this restriction had little practical significance.16 Still it was this law that
transformed Jews from citizens into subjects.
Anti-Jewish steps were introduced not only by the central authorities
but also by provinces and cities. Most were aimed to humiliate, such
as forbidding Jews to use the local swimming pool and excluding Jews
from athletic competitions. Others were aimed at undermining Jewish
economic strength, such as withdrawing licenses to trade or excluding
Jewish doctors from National Health Service compensation. The new
government took particularly energetic steps against Eastern Jews, mostly
those who had come from Poland. Their further immigration was banned
and their naturalization was revoked. It was particularly easy to take
steps against these people because they were usually recognizable, less
well integrated into German life, and were the objects of widespread
prejudice.
16 Hilberg, pp. 61–77.

The pattern that was to follow all through the decade was thus estab-
lished. The regime took ever more energetic measures against Jews, aimed
to impoverish and humiliate them, cut them off from German society, and
make their lives as miserable as possible – thereby persuading them to
leave the country of their birth. No major social institutions, including the
army, the churches, or the universities, spoke up against antisemitic mea-
sures. Although many Germans exhibited kindness to Jewish individuals,
no person in public life dared to speak up against antisemitism.
Emigration
In the 1930s, there was still a disconnect between the public statements of
the Nazis concerning Jews and their actions. Nazi propaganda depicted
Jews as mortal enemies of the Germans with whom there could be no
compromise. Because Jews could not change their nature, the only solu-
tion remained was to get rid of them. But how? To this question the
Nazis could not find an answer for many years. The measures that they
introduced hurt, humiliated, and impoverished the minority that they
hated and feared, but did not make Jews disappear. Not yet willing to
take the step of extermination, the Nazi government encouraged Jewish
emigration.
In retrospect this question is frequently asked: Why did Jews not leave
their native land and thereby avoid their destruction? Of course, at that
time no one knew what the future would hold. People usually make
assumptions about the future on the basis of their past experiences. The
majority of Jews continued to believe that it would be possible to find
some kind of modus vivendi with the Nazis. They continued to believe
that after a period of radicalism a certain type of normality would return.
This expectation was supported by the fact that after the initial outrages
of the early months of Nazi rule a period of relative calm did return. Nazi
ideology and policies just seemed too absurd to last.
Circumstances were bad enough to encourage some people to leave
their homeland. Yet emigration was exceptionally difficult at that partic-
ular time and for that particular minority. The 1930s were a decade of
worldwide economic crisis, a time when all the major European coun-
tries suffered from high unemployment. The German Jewish minority
possessed exactly those skills that in the current situation proved inap-
propriate. Jews were highly urbanized, well educated, and concentrated
in the professions such as law, medicine, and small business – occupa-
tions that were not needed in countries that might have allowed them to
enter.17 Because of the relatively low Jewish birth rate of the recent past,
the average Jew was older than the average German, and for older people
to make a radical break with the past was especially difficult. Although the
Nazis wanted Jews to leave, they were concerned that a mass migration of
relatively well-to-do people would have a harmful impact on the German
economy, which was just recovering from the depression. Consequently
the Nazi state made it very difficult for Jews to take their property with
them.
It is unfair to blame those countries that did not want to take in
the Jewish immigrants. After all, those who made the decisions to keep
immigrants out had no way of knowing that they would be the cause of the
deaths of the unfortunate applicants. Furthermore, German Jews needed
financial help to resettle, but because it was not yet clear that German Jews
were more in need of help than Jews from other countries, international
Jewish agencies did not give them priority. In the mid-1930s the situation
of the Polish Jews also had greatly deteriorated. Jewish agencies, no more
aware of the danger than anyone else, were willing to help only those
who chose to go to Palestine rather than to any other country of possible
refuge. Because they were highly acculturated, German Jews were less
likely to choose Palestine as a place of refuge than Polish Jews. They
wanted to go no further than other Western European countries. Only
those fortunate ones who managed to leave continental Europe survived.
At the initiative of the Americans, a conference took place in July 1938
in the French resort town of Evian to discuss the question of refugees.
Thirty-three countries were represented, and the participants all expressed
sympathy for the plight of the German and Austrian Jews. However,
ultimately the conference was a failure because none of the countries
offered a place of refuge to a substantial number of Jews. Indeed, the
Evian conference was a propaganda success for the Nazis because it
demonstrated that the democratic world was unwilling to help people
who were in obvious distress. It also showed as clearly as could be that
Jews did not control governments in democratic countries and that they
had few friends.
In March 1938, Hitler occupied Austria, and thereby approximately
200,000 more Jews came under Nazi rule. At the outset of World War II
in September 1939, therefore there were more Jews in the extended Reich
17 See, for example, the contemplations of the extremely intelligent Victor Klemperer as
presented in his dairies. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1945.
New York: Random House, 1998.
than there were when Hitler came into power. The plan of getting rid
of Jews by mistreating them so badly that they would want to leave the
country obviously had not succeeded. Of approximately 525,000 Jews in
Germany when Hitler took power, only 37,000 left in 1933 and in the
following years the number of emigrants actually declined: 23,000 left in
1934, 21,000 in 1935, 25,000 in 1936, and 23,000 in 1937.18 Altogether
about 150,00 Jews left Germany in the 1930s. Nothing shows better how
difficult emigrant life must have been and how little people could foresee
the future than about 10,000 Jews returned to their native land in 1934.
By default, all through the 1930s emigration remained the Nazis’ chief
method of solving their problem of getting rid of the Jews. It was self-
evident that the Nazi goal of removing Jews from Germany and the
goal of the Zionists to gather Jews in Palestine coincided. Up to 1933,
Zionism was not a strong movement in Germany, attracting no more than
20,000 Jews who themselves demonstrated little desire to emigrate to
Palestine.19 Understandably, life in Palestine in the 1920s was not such as
to attract German Jews; they regarded it as a strange and unsophisticated
place. Undoubtedly many of them who later ended up there would have
preferred to find refuge somewhere in Western Europe or in the new
world.
The Zionist appeal changed considerably with Hitler’s coming to
power. In 1933, the Zionist Agency and the German government came to
a financial agreement to enable Jews to leave for Palestine without unduly
affecting German economic interests: the so-called transfer (Ha’avara in
Hebrew) agreement.20 This extremely complicated arrangement allowed
Jews to sell their property and deposit their money in German banks,
which then spent the funds on German goods that were shipped to Pales-
tine. It thus allowed not only Jews but also German goods to be exported
to Palestine, and it provided some aid to the German economy at a time
when it was just recovering from the Depression. Ironically, when many
Jewish organizations for understandable reasons were calling for a boy-
cott of German goods, Germany became the largest exporter of goods to
Palestine.
In retrospect the Nazi-Zionist cooperation appears unsavory and
strange, but Jews were in no position to bargain, and the agreement
18 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and Jews, Vol. 1. New York: Harper Collins, 1997,
p. 62.
19 Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt, Holocaust; A History. New York: Norton,
p. 112.
20 Ibid., p. 113.
did save lives. But aside from the desire to save Jews, the Zionists had
some understanding of the Nazi emphasis on national and racial unity.
The Nazis, on their part, had to make a strategic decision. From their
point of view, would it be better for there to be a place outside Ger-
many where Jews would be concentrated or, on the contrary, for Jews to
be dispersed? Dispersing them might increase their influence everywhere,
but concentrating them also had its dangers. Up to the outbreak of war
the Nazis tried to encourage Jews to move to Palestine. Obviously, this
was not from a love of Zionism. From their point of view a Jew was
a Jew and therefore an enemy, and Zionism was a part of the Jewish
world conspiracy. However, the Zionists could be used for the purpose
of removing the undesired minority from the Reich. In addition, Nazis
despised and feared all Jews, but the worst kind of Jews were the assim-
ilated ones, because they could mask their “essence” and thereby cause
great harm to “Germanness.” The Zionists and the Nazis stood together
against assimilation.
The Nazi state helped the Zionists set up facilities and teach courses
so Jews could learn technical trades and agriculture, which they would
need to start a new life in Palestine. The Germans even gave visitor
visas to Zionist officials from Palestine.21 By contrast, in 1935 the SS
leader, Reinhard Heydrich, prohibited speeches by Jewish leaders who
advocated that Jews should remain in Germany.22 On occasion the Nazis
would free a prisoner from a concentration camp with an understanding
that he would leave for Palestine within two weeks.23 Zionist groups
were allowed a degree of organizational freedom that was denied to
other Jewish organizations. The Germans knew that international Jewish
organizations used their resources to help Poles in moving to Palestine
over Germans, because the German Jews’ occupational structure seemed
less relevant for the economic conditions in their new place of residence.
In the 1930s altogether about 40,000–60,000 German Jews found refuge
in Palestine; many of these left later either for overseas or for Western
European countries.
This cooperation between the Zionists and Nazis ended when, as a
result of fighting in Palestine, the British government created a royal
21 Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1985, p. 194.
22 Ibid., p. 55.
23 That is what happened to the father of the prominent sociologist, Reinhard Bendix,
Ludwig Bendix. Bendix was allowed to leave Dachau in 1937 for Palestine. Reinhard
Bendix, Embattled Reason, Vol. 2. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987, p. 15.
commission to examine the problem of a Jewish homeland; in 1937 it

recommended partition of the land. Although the British government
rejected its commission’s recommendation, the very idea of an indepen-
dent Jewish state was enough for the Nazis to lose their enthusiasm for
persuading Jews to go to Palestine; however, even after 1937 until the
outbreak of the war, the Germans continued to support emigration there,
legally or illegally.
Up to this point the Nazis had rejected Arab appeals to find a common
ground against Jews. In any case, Nazi racist views did not fit well with
the national liberationist, anti-imperialist ideology of the Arabs. This
would change in 1937 when the alliance with England that Hitler had
desired seemed increasingly unlikely and the possibility of a Jewish state
appeared on the horizon. Now the Nazis could ally themselves with
Arabs, who regarded as their highest priority the prevention of further
immigration into Palestine. However, for the next few years the extent of
German support for the Arab cause depended on Hitler’s perception of
the possibility of British-German cooperation, and full-fledged support
for the Arabs began only with the outbreak of war.
Initially this support posed a difficult problem for Nazi propagandists:
In their racist worldview, the Arabs were Semites and therefore infe-
rior. They managed to reframe the issue, arguing that the Nazis really
had no problem with Semites; they had problems only with Jews. Arab
nationalists and bitterly anti-Jewish leaders found it easy to collaborate
with Hitler’s Germany. The prominent Muslim leader, the Grand Mufti
of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin. He
became a useful agent of the Nazis, encouraging his followers to rise
against the “Anglo-Jewish imperialists” using language just as bloodcur-
dling as that of the Nazis. “Kill Jews, wherever you find them” was his
refrain.24 Although the Nazis and some Muslim leaders easily found a
common language, Arab hatred for Jews and Nazi ideology were very
different. These two anti-Jewish forces had little in common beyond a
fear and hatred of Jews.
During the 1930s the Nazis, as well as also other antisemites – for
example, the Poles – considered various other schemes for getting rid
of the Jews. The most serious and well-known plan was to send the
Jews to Madagascar. The idea of expelling Jews from Europe was not
new. It was the German antisemitic intellectual, Paul de Lagarde, who
suggested it first at the end of the nineteenth century, and this idea was
24 Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009.
revived by others with similar ideological commitments after World War

I. It was only the Nazis, however, who took steps to realize this plan.
After the defeat of France in 1940, the victorious Germans considered
including among the terms of the armistice the ceding of Madagascar to
Germany for the purpose of settling Jews there. The island already had
four million inhabitants, and the Nazis considered adding six and a half
million Jews from Europe, including Jews from Palestine in accordance
with current policies attempting to gain the favor of Arabs.25 Because the
island possessed few natural resources that the Nazis needed, it seemed a
convenient place to deposit Jews. The purpose of settling Jews in Africa
was not to create a Jewish state, but rather a reservation where Jews would
be supervised by European powers. The Nazis were also well aware that
sending millions of German Jews to a tropical island was probably a
death sentence to the majority of the exiles. This was to be murder by
indirect means.
The Madagascar plan continued to be seriously considered for some
time.26 Ultimately, of course, nothing came of it because after the defeat
of France the Germans did not possess the naval resources to defeat
the British Navy, which would have been required to execute the plan.
In retrospect it is hard to know just how seriously they pursued this
enormous project. They took the plan seriously enough for Eichmann
and his staff to make a study of life in the tropics and to inoculate
themselves against malaria, presumably because they were ready to travel
to Madagascar and inspect the situation.27 Nevertheless the existence of
such a plan is revealing, because it shows that the Nazis, even as late
as 1940 after they had already caused the deaths of tens of thousands
of Jews in Poland, still hesitated to take the ultimate decision of mass
murder. Even for the Nazis that decision did not come easily.
The Anschluss
In March 1938, the German army crossed the Austrian border, and
the next day Austria ceased to exist as an independent country: It was
25 Götz Aly, Final Solution. New York: Arnold, 1999, p. 92.

26 On the Madagascar plan, see Eric Thomas Jennings, “Writing Madagascar back into
the Madagascar plan.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 21. No. 2 pp. 187–
217. Jennings explains that, in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, serious scholars argued that the original inhabitants of the island were
Jews.
27 Mark Roseman, The Wansee Conference and the Final Solution. New York: Picador,
2002, p. 31.
incorporated into the German Reich to the great and visible satisfaction
of the majority of the new citizens. In one day almost 200,000 Jews came
under the rule of the Nazis.
It is perhaps no accident that so many of the major figures who were
responsible for the mass murder of Jews, starting with Hitler himself,
had imbibed their antisemitism in Austria. Anti-Jewish agitation was a
powerful tool in the hands of right-wing parties in pre-Nazi Austria and
laid the groundwork for the horrors that were immediately imposed on
the Jewish community after the Anschluss. The antisemitic legislation
that had been introduced in Germany over the course of the previous
five years immediately applied to the newly incorporated Austria; Jews
were removed from the economy quickly. It took five years to prepare
the Germans to participate in or at least look on with indifference the
persecution of their fellow citizens. By contrast, in Austria the series of
moves against Jews were immediate, seemingly spontaneous, and some-
how more personal. The Austrian antisemites seemed to take pleasure in
the suffering and humiliation of Jews. Vienna in March and April saw
scenes that Berlin had not yet seen; the attacks on individual Jews were
far more violent than what the German Jews had suffered five years ear-
lier. The disorganized violence could be compared only to what was to
happen a few years later in Eastern Europe after war had already started.
In fact, the Nazis were taken aback by the disorganized nature of the
attacks and had to take steps to restrain their followers.28
The violence in Austria against Jews in the middle of 1938 convinced
the Nazis that they could channel popular hatred of Jews to serve their
purposes; it can be regarded as a preparation for Kristallnacht, which
occurred in November (see the next section). The extraordinary violence
with which the Austrians treated their Jewish fellow citizens provided the
impetus for many to leave the country: Half of Austrian Jewry left at the
last moment when emigration was still possible and thereby saved their
lives. By contrast, only about a quarter of German Jews had sought to
leave their country in the course of the 1930s.
Yet, however great a force antisemitism was among the Austrians, as
long as they did not come under a Nazi administration, they did not
murder Jews. For the Holocaust to happen, thus bitter antisemitism was
not enough. A powerful state machinery that colluded with the vicious
antisemites was also needed.29
28 Friedländer, p. 242.
29 On the consequences of the incorporation of Austria, see Friedländer, pp. 241–68.
The Great Pogrom

On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jew, walked
into the German Embassy in Paris and asked to speak to an official. When
he met Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary, he shot him three times.30 Gryn-
szpan acted out of desperation: He was a descendant of a Polish Jewish
family that had lived in Hannover, Germany, since before World War
I. As a boy, he attempted to go to Palestine, but was rejected for being
too young. He entered France illegally via Belgium in 1936, where he
lived in limbo. He did not receive a resident permit in France, lost the
right to reenter Germany, and was deprived of his Polish citizenship.
The final trigger for his desperate and self-destructive act was a post-
card he received from his sister, in which she described the lot of the
family. Germany had decided to exile the Polish Jews, but the Polish
government was not allowing them to enter the country. Approximately
15,000 people became pawns in the hands of two brutally antisemitic
governments.
The consequences of this assassination were momentous. The very next
day the Berlin government announced new antisemitic measures. Jewish
cultural activities were suspended, and Jews were forbidden to attend
theatrical performances and visit cinemas. Jewish children still attending
non-Jewish schools were expelled, and Jewish newspapers were closed
down. Jewish bank accounts were frozen.
The riots began on the night of the November 9. As it happened vom
Rath died earlier that day, which was the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s
Beer Hall putsch. To what extent this pogrom was organized from above
and, indeed, had been planned ahead of time and to what extent it was the
consequence of undisciplined acts of Nazi youth is impossible to deter-
mine. The participants in the disorder were largely, but not exclusively
members of the Hitler Youth and the SA.31 It is clear, however, that the
events of November 9 and 10 fit into the pattern of increasing acts of vio-
lence against individual Jews and Jewish institutions. Between 200 and
300 synagogues were burned; 25,000 Jews were arrested and sent to con-
centration camps in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen; thousands
of Jewish businesses and apartments were destroyed; and ninety-one per-
sons lost their lives. The disturbances came to be called Kristallnacht,
the night of the broken glass, because of the hundreds of broken shop
30 Gerald Schwab, The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan.
New York: Praeger, 1990.
31 Sturm Abteilungen were Hitler’s private army, organized in 1921.
and apartment windows shattered by vandals. It is revealing of the Nazi

mentality that in the aftermath the courts held people responsible for rap-
ing Jewish women and punished them, but murderers were not punished.
The authorities directed insurance companies to compensate the state for
the losses, but not the Jews who actually suffered. Not only were Jews not
compensated for those losses but also the Jewish community was ordered
to pay the state a fine of one billion marks.
The Nazi leadership, Hitler in particular, made every effort to make it
appear that the violence was not directed from above, but was an expres-
sion of the accumulated and justifiable hatred of Jews by the German
people. It is likely that the Nazi leadership had been waiting for just such
an occasion. One gets the impression that Nazi leaders were frustrated
that in spite of all their anti-Jewish laws and regulations, in spite of all
the verbal attacks and bloody propaganda, the “solution of the Jewish
question” was not getting any nearer. The great pogrom gave an oppor-
tunity to the activists to do something and thereby demonstrate that the
spirit of the Nazi revolution was still alive.
On receiving the news of the assassination of vom Rath, Goebbels took
charge and on the basis of his diaries, he was the chief organizer behind
the scenes. Fearing that some groups within the National Socialists were
becoming restless, Goebbels took on the task of organizing a systematic
attack on Jews that would appear spontaneous. He did so using the party
machinery. It is questionable whether the Nazis considered Kristallnacht
to be an effective means of reaching the solution to the Jewish problem.
The Nazis were well aware that the foreign reaction would be hostile
and would have a negative economic impact. They were most worried by
the U.S. reaction, because an American boycott of German goods could
have significant consequences.32 The German ambassador reported from
Washington that even those segments of public opinion that usually took
no notice of Germany’s mistreatment of its Jews now expressed dismay.
Orders for German goods from England, France, Canada, and, most
importantly, from the United States were canceled. Furthermore within
Germany the great destruction of property harmed not only Jews but also
non-Jews.
On the basis of internal Nazi correspondence and reports of foreign-
ers in Germany even the reaction of the German public to Kristallnacht
32 Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher. Band 3: 1935–38. Piper, 1992 München Zürich,

pp. 1281–87. Goebbels received foreign journalists and “explained” the entire matter to
them, in his opinion making a great impression.
was unfavorable.33 From the point of view of the average German, pass-
ing laws that discriminated against Jews was acceptable. Germans did
not mind that Jews were dispossessed and their property confiscated.
However, it was altogether different to witness street violence and the
seemingly uncontrolled behavior of hoodlums. The Nazi leadership did
care about foreign responses, but it cared even more about the reactions
of their own people. Any evidence that individuals were sympathetic to
the plight of the persecuted minority had to be suppressed. Kristallnacht
provided the Nazis with a negative example: It was not the way to get rid
of Jews.
An interesting postscript to the history of Kristallnacht is the fate
of Herschel Grynszpan. The French kept him in prison for some time
because they were aware of the political sensitivity of the case in the
diplomatic circumstances of late 1938. The French government did not
want to increase tensions with Germany at this point. In the confusion
following the German invasion of France, Grynszpan managed to escape,
but for some reason he turned himself in to the Vichy police, which then
quickly gave him over to the Nazis. In 1941 Goebbels planned a great
show trial of the assassin, planning to argue that Grynszpan was part of
a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and that therefore Jews were responsible
for the outbreak of the war. The trial never took place. The Nazis feared
that in an open trial Grynszpan would claim that he acted out of personal
rather than political motives because he had been involved in a homosex-
ual affair with vom Rath. The idea came from Grynszpan’s French lawyer
at the time when he was imprisoned in Paris. It is almost certain that the
young man had no previous acquaintance with the German diplomat,
who according to rumors may indeed have been a homosexual. Grynsz-
pan probably died in a German concentration camp, though rumors long
circulated that he survived the war and continued to live in Paris under
an assumed name.
33 Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the Jewish Question. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984, and Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the
Third Reich: Bavaria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
part three
WAR
7
Ghettos in Poland, 1939–1941
The Nazis took the first step that led to mass murder on January 30, 1933,
the day they seized power and established a totalitarian regime in Ger-
many. Only a regime that tolerated no dissent was capable of carrying out
the horrendous action of genocide. Although the Nazis obviously did not
foresee the future, nevertheless in the 1930s they succeeded inadvertently
in establishing some, but not all the preconditions for their later “accom-
plishments.” Yet, although the Nazis’ Jewish policy became increasingly
brutal throughout the decade, the number of murdered Jews remained
relatively small, perhaps in the hundreds.
The Nazis took the second major step toward the Holocaust on
September 1, 1939, when they attacked Poland, thereby beginning World
War II. Antisemitism played little role in Hitler’s decision to attack
Poland; nevertheless, in retrospect it is evident that killing millions of
Jews could happen only within the inferno of a war. It is with the con-
quest of Poland, when the Germans set up ghettos that were from the
outset instruments of murder, that the Holocaust began.
World War II can be broken down into two distinct periods: 1939–
41 and 1941–45. In the first period, Nazi policies led to hundreds of
thousands of Jewish dead. With the invasion of the Soviet Union on June
22, 1941, the nature of the war changed, growing in number of com-
batants and in unbounded brutality. In the second period, the Germans
directly undertook the tasks of killing millions.
There were two fundamental components of Nazi ideology – a desire
for war and the belief in the superiority of the “Aryan” race – and these
two components were intimately connected. Racial superiority was exhib-
ited by fighting: How well a “race” performed in struggle was a measure
127
of its standing within a hierarchy. The Nazis did not introduce racial
thinking, but built on a primitive social Darwinism that had been fash-
ionable for many decades before 1933. Many Germans took for granted
that races existed and that there was a racial hierarchy. Followers of
Hitler pushed these ideas to their extreme by their insistence that nothing
but race mattered and that, in the struggle of the races, there could be no
compromises. The victor owed nothing to the defeated, and racial self-
ishness was a natural law of society. The Germans constituted a superior
race and therefore were entitled to rule. Those who did not kill were
weak and therefore deserved to be killed. The new barbarians explicitly
repudiated the idea of universal human values, and they believed that to
kill the racially inferior was as natural as it was for the lion to eat the
lamb. In fact, the murderer performed a useful service by killing members
of the lower races.
Nazi Germany began waging the racist war before it ever invaded a
foreign country. The already superior Germans were made even more
superior by the use of eugenics, that is, eliminating those within their
own society whom they considered inferior.1 Nazi doctor decided who
should be killed and the process of “improving the race” commenced
immediately at the outbreak of the war.
Although nationalism and racialism were connected, the two were not
the same. The Nazis were not extreme nationalists; they were extreme
racists. They were not thinking of making Germany great; they were aim-
ing for the victory of the “German race.” A great and powerful Germany
would be the ultimate proof and demonstration of German racial supe-
riority. The explicit goal was the advancement of the cause of Germans
wherever they lived: in Romania, Hungary, Russia, etc. In the slogan “Ein
Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer” the emphasis was on Volk. What happened
to Jews in the fateful years of 1939–45 must be understood within the
framework of the struggle of the races. The murder of Jews was the most
extreme manifestation of racial policies.
The Germans’ racial ideology made fine distinctions between groups of
people and treated them accordingly. Even among Germans there were
people of higher or lesser racial worth. The infirm and the mentally
defective needed to be eliminated. Slavs were inferior, but within that
“racial group” some Slavs were treated better than others. Czechs received
greater respect and better treatment than Poles or Russians. Most signifi-
cantly, the victorious armies made crucial distinctions between peoples in
1 On the subject, see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State:
Germany, 1933–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Ghettos in Poland, 1939–1941 129
Eastern and Western Europe. What could be done in the East could not
necessarily be copied in Western Europe; Western European sensibilities
had to be taken into account. No death camps could be set up anywhere
in the West, including Germany, nor could people be taken to the edge
of towns there and then massacred and buried in mass graves. In spite of
the fact that the Nazis made no theoretical distinctions among Jews, they
were all sentenced to death, a Jew had a better chance of survival in a
Western European country than anywhere in the East.
The Nazis treated the Eastern European type of Jew – Polish, Belorus-
sian, and Ukrainian – mercilessly and in a most barbaric fashion. In the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many Jews immigrated to Ger-
many from the Russian Empire, and many Germans formed their image of
the Jew on the basis of these Yiddish-speaking and poor immigrants. Con-
sequently the very negative image of the Polish Jew was already prominent
before the invasion of Poland. For example, there were recorded instances
when German soldiers found it more difficult to mistreat German than
Polish Jews, even those living in a Polish ghetto. In Poland the experimen-
tation could begin on the subject of how to solve the “Jewish question.”2
The Destruction of the Polish State

Take away the ideas of racial hierarchy and the necessity of struggle, and
nothing remains of the Nazi worldview. It was an empty vision. That this
war was to be like no other war was clear from the beginning. The war
did not gradually become brutal; from its outset the Nazi leaders desired
and foresaw the brutality with which they dealt with the defeated. In
fact, they made a fetish of brutality: People could demonstrate the depth
of their commitment to Nazi ideology by mistreating those considered
inferior. Excess zeal was rarely punished, but not wanting to dirty one’s
hands aroused suspicions. Although brutality was there at the outset, it
could always be increased; there were to be no limits.
It is striking that the Germans embarked on a war of breath-taking
ambition yet at the same time had no clearly defined war aims or even
precise ideas what to do with the conquered territories beyond the vague
plans of settling ethnic Germans there. The signing of the German-Soviet
nonaggression treaty on August 23, 1939, sealed the fate of the Polish
2 There is the strange case of Wilhelm Kube, a major Nazi figure and governor of Belorussia,
who had no trouble murdering Eastern Euorpean Jews, including children, but drew the
line at killing Germans. In particular, he objected to killing former German servicemen.
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire; How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin,
2008, p. 372.
state: It was once again to disappear.3 As envisaged by the Molotov-

Ribbentrop pact, the Red Army entered eastern Poland on September 17.
The two conquering armies peacefully met one another, and the country
was divided once again. The eastern part was annexed to the Belorussian
and Ukrainian Soviet republics, and the western part was divided into
two: the region that the Germans called Wartheland, with its capital in
Poznan, was annexed to the Reich and chosen to be the region for German
settlement, and the General Government became a protectorate without
a shred of autonomy, governed by the Nazi chief, Hans Frank, stationed
in Cracow. In Poland, and in other regions that the Germans conquered
from the Soviet Union, unlike in Western Europe, the Nazis made no
attempt to set up puppet governments; Poles were not even considered
worthy enough to be made into accomplices.
At the end of September Foreign Minister Ribbentrop flew to Moscow
to negotiate some revisions of the original pact. Under the new agree-
ment Lithuania fell into the Soviet sphere of interest, but the district of
Lublin was incorporated into the General Government. The occupation
of the Lublin district had a considerable relevance to Nazi plans for the
treatment of Jews. During the first years of the war the Nazis had envis-
aged this easternmost territory of German-occupied Poland, farthest from
Germany, as a possible dumping ground for Jews.
When Poland was divided up, those Jews who had the ability to relo-
cate did not know which evil to choose. Approximately 300,000 Jews
managed to find temporary safety in Soviet territory, though some did
move in the other direction. In fact such border crossings were about the
only source of friction that disturbed the meeting of the two conquering
armies; neither of them wanted Jewish refugees. The Soviet authorities
were not happy about the arrival of the Jewish refugees and on occasion
sent them back by force.4 Most of the Jews in the Soviet sphere had
“bourgeois” occupations, such as shopkeepers, and now their livelihood
was threatened. The new authorities deported thousands into Central
Asia. Although this was far from the intention of the Soviet authorities,
ironically, such deportations saved many lives.
Although German policy toward Jews was different from their policy
toward the Poles, both were genocidal. Both foresaw the elimination
3 Philip Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution; The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic
Poles, 1939–1941. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007, p. 40.
4 SSSR – Germani͡ ia . . . : Dokumenty i materialy o sovetsko-germaniskikh otnosheni͡ iakh
by ͡ IUriı̆ Felʹshtinskiı̆; Telex, 1983. Vol. 2, p. 178.
of tens of thousands of individuals the Nazis considered leaders, while

millions were given a different destiny: enslavement. The Poles were to
be reduced to slave laborers. In Himmler’s view Poles had no need to be
educated: All they had to learn was to serve their German masters. In
the first months of occupation more Christian Poles were murdered than
Jews. The Nazis decided to eliminate the Polish intellectual and political
elite even before they made the decision to kill all Jews. They killed
many more members of the elite, such as professors, priests, lawyers, and
doctors, than the Soviets killed at Katyn.5
With the German occupation of Poland there began a vast movement
of human beings, mostly against their will; it continued until after the
end of the war. Such demographic changes, carried out by force, were
unparalleled. The creation of the Wartheland in western Poland was also
a novelty. Ethnic Germans made up less than 8 percent of its population of
approximately five million, so Nazi plans called for deporting millions of
Poles and urban Jews to make room for the German colonizers. The Nazis’
plan to move Poles from areas of smaller population density to more
crowded regions was a far more organized effort of clearing territories
than the immigrants to the Americas had ever attempted.
The Jews were to be treated differently: The decision to settle them
farther east in the General Government, the so-called Nisko or Lublin
project, was made within months of the attack on Poland. That region was
the obvious place to exile Jews from the territories newly incorporated
into the Reich and to concentrate them in urban ghettos. The problem
was that the Nazi-appointed chief, Hans Frank, who liked to think of
himself as “king of Poland” and set himself up in splendor in the old
royal castle in Cracow, resisted the idea that Jews would be dumped in
his territory.6
The very ambitious plans for this massive deportation project were
partly realized. Adolf Eichmann, who had been responsible for Jewish
emigration in the 1930s, was promoted to be head of the section of the
RSHA that dealt with Jewish affairs.7 In the district of Nisko, a small
Polish town surrounded by swamps, and in the area of Lublin, a vast
5 In the Katyn forest in April 1940, the NKVD (Soviet political police) murdered approx-
imately 20,000 Polish officers. Interestingly the Katyn murders made a much greater
impression on Polish consciousness than the much larger number of Nazi murders car-
ried out according to a genocidal plan.
6 On Hans Frank, see Martyn Housden, Lebensraum and the Holocaust. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
7 RSHA: Reich Security Main Office.
settlement would be created to which hundreds of thousands of Jews

and Gypsies from Germany, Bohemia, and also the Wartheland would be
sent. Indeed close to a hundred thousand people were deported there and
abandoned to their fate: 30% of the deportees died within a few months.8
In the spring of 1940 the project was abandoned. The Nazis were still
experimenting with how to deal with the Jews. The occupation of Poland
gave them opportunities, but they were not yet certain how to use them.
Although the Lublin project was abandoned, the Nazis continued with
their great scheme of demographic change. The unincorporated areas
were to be the place of exile of various undesirable elements from every
part of the now greatly enlarged Germany. Among the undesirable, the
most undesirable were the Jews. For the first time, Nazis had the oppor-
tunity to realize what they had been working for from the beginning of
their rule: making Germany free from Jews. Jews and many Poles were
moved from the Wartheland to the General Government, and Jews were
also moved within the General Government because Hans Frank wanted
to make his capital, Cracow, free from Jews.
Although the German ethnic minority in Poland welcomed the con-
querors with enthusiasm, Germans living in other countries of Eastern
Europe were not necessarily desirous to populate regions that were alien
to them. By and large it was the poorer ethnic Germans who were more
likely to throw in their lot with the followers of Hitler. They had less to
lose and left little behind. The Nazis would have preferred more prosper-
ous, better educated settlers, who were better representatives of the “supe-
rior” race. Approximately a third of a million Germans were settled in the
conquered lands. In conditions of war the German colonization of these
vast eastern spaces did not advance very far; the removal of Poles and
resettling of Germans formed an unrealistic project. It is difficult to decide
what is more striking: the inhumanity of the Nazi behavior or the madness
and lunacy of the ideology that formed the basis of their enterprise.
The process of resettlement for Jews, as well as for Poles but to a
lesser extent, was deliberately murderous. From the very outset the Nazis
used resettlement as an instrument of murder, though later “resettle-
ment” became a synonym for murder. Tens of thousands of Poles were
deported from the Wartheland in the middle of the winter of 1939–40 and
deposited in the General Government, without food or shelter; many froze
and starved to death. In their treatment of Jews in Germany itself, the
8 Peter Longerich, The Nazi Persecution and Murder of Jews. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010, p. 157.
Nazis had to be concerned about certain sensibilities. For example, a Jew

who could not be removed from German society because he was married
to a Christian survived. The Nazis did not have to take account of Polish
feelings and their responses to antisemitic measures.
The brutality that the Germans exhibited in the occupied country was
on a different scale than in Germany itself. In the early part of the war,
the violence committed by SS men and German soldiers disturbed the
army command, not because of its concern for Jews, but because such
acts would undermine military discipline. The army command purposely
kept aloof from Jewish affairs. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet
Union the behavior of the army’s leadership had changed.9
The German war on Poland produced several historical firsts. The SS
organized Einsatzgruppen, special detachments whose task was to deal
with nonmilitary resistance.10 In no previous wars had the hostile armies
created special units for the purpose of spreading terror and repression
among the civilian population. Yet such groups existed only in the Eastern
front; Western European peoples were treated differently. In the initial
stages of the war, about 50,000 ethnic Poles were killed in addition
to 7,000 Jews. Although the detachments operated independently from
the Army High Command, some coordination with the army command
was essential on the frontlines. The army command was only gradually
drawn into the process of extermination. Their increasing willingness to
participate was an indication of an ever-descending spiral of murderous
passion.
The fate of Jews and the conduct of the war were closely interrelated.
Mass murder would not have been possible without the war in the back-
ground, and the bigger and bloodier the fighting, the more Jews were
killed. The turning points in Nazi extermination policy can be connected
to the turning points in the war. It took time for the full brutality of
the war to be realized. In fact, the German invasion of France and the
first few months afterward have been described as the “phony war.”
The evidence is overwhelming that even as late as May 1940 the Nazis
had not yet charted the dreadful future, even though they had already
started killing Jews systematically. However, they had not yet aban-
doned the Madagascar plan. Hitler himself repeatedly talked about how,
9 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (3rd ed.), Vol. 1. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2003.
10 Edward B. Westerman, Hitler’s Police Battalions; Enforcing Racial War in the East.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005, pp. 140–45.
at the end of the of the victorious war, a vast German-controlled con-

centration camp would be set up there for Jews. All Jews of Europe
would then be deported to that tropical island where they would live
under Nazi supervision. The alternative “solution” – murdering mil-
lions – was difficult to conceive even for the Nazis. That decision matured
slowly.
After the defeat of France in 1940 the German armies occupied a large
part of France. As expected, the Germans annexed Alsace and Lorraine,
territories they had lost after World War I. One of the first acts of the
newly established authorities was to expel the relatively large Jewish
minority in Alsace-Lorraine into Vichy France. Two years later the very
same Germans went to great lengths to find the same people in order to
deport them into death camps. Had they foreseen the future in 1940 they
could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble.
Ghettos
From the time of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the aim of
German policy was no longer to persuade or compel Jews to emigrate.
That stage was over: There was to be no possibility of escape.11 The Nazis
singled out Polish Jews for particularly brutal treatment. Some members
of the SS and even individual German soldiers randomly beat up and
humiliated Jews they encountered. The Nazis confiscated Jewish wealth,
forbade Jewish doctors and dentists to treat non-Jews, deprived Jews of
government benefits, imposed a curfew on them, forbade them to change
their place of residence or travel on railroads without special permission,
and compelled them to wear armbands for easy identification. It was in
Poland that the process of marking people, which would later be extended
to German controlled-Europe, was first introduced. Marking people came
to be an important precondition of murder.
It is not surprising that it was in Poland, a region that contained
approximately two million Jews, where the Nazis experimented with and
ultimately developed their methods of destruction. In first phase of the
war from 1939–41 the primary German method of killing Jews was by
moving them into ghettos, a process that began almost immediately. The
German occupying authorities ordered all Jewish communities with fewer
than 500 people to be dissolved and the people moved into cities where
they could be controlled and exploited. This step was envisaged as a
11 Emigration in a small scale was still possible from Germany itself.

preliminary move to prepare for the physical removal of all Jews from
areas that were to be incorporated into the Reich. The Nazis justified their
action to others, and also to themselves, by announcing that Jews were
the organizers and motivating force behind the resistance, and therefore it
was a military necessity to remove them from the surrounding population.
This notion was so far removed from reality that it is hard to accept that
Nazi policy makers genuinely believed it, but perhaps we should not
underestimate the impact of the propaganda on the propagandist.
The Germans envisaged the ghettos as temporary institutions, and
indeed they were in two distinct senses. On the one hand the Nazis
regarded them as places to keep Jews before implementation of the ”final
solution,” even at a time when they did not have precise ideas about what
that “solution” would be. Ghettos served also as a transition between pre-
Nazi rule and the extermination camps.12 To some extent Jewish life in the
ghettos preserved at least a semblance of normality. Some characteristics
of pre-Nazi Jewish life, in a distorted form to be sure, survived.
The ghettos were not expected to last long: After a short and victo-
rious war, Jews would be relocated either to Madagascar or to some
unspecified location in the “East,” where they would be kept until the
final solution would be implemented. In fact a substantial number of
victims of the Holocaust died in the ghettos, where overcrowding, starva-
tion, and disease killed hundreds of thousands. This result was foreseen
and welcomed by the Nazis. Heinrich Himmler, for example, made his
expectation explicit that concentrating a large number of people in small
places, with little food and in circumstances where hygiene could not eas-
ily be maintained, would result in mass epidemics, killing a large number
of Jews. He regarded ghettos as an instrument of killing.13
Nazi propaganda used images from the ghettos to demonstrate Jewish
inferiority. Goebbels’ propaganda organization were able to depict Jews
as non-human, as if Jews chose the condition in which they were coerced
to live! The ghettos therefore served an additional purpose: They prepared
the removal of Jews from parts of occupied territory, they were instru-
ments of murder, and they served Nazi propaganda: Jews were reduced
to living like subhumans, and therefore the Nazis could portray them as
subhumans.
12 Gustavo Carni makes this argument in his book, Hitler’s Ghettos; Voices from a Belea-
guered Society, 1939–1944. London: Arnold, 2002, p. 3.
13 Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New
York: Knopf, 1991.
The ghettos had historical precedents of which the Nazis were well
aware. They existed in medieval Europe, but in the course of the nine-
teenth century disappeared everywhere. The medieval ghetto was a pro-
foundly different institution from the ones that the Germans created. The
earlier ghettos existed in a society based on estates, where the rights of
people belonging to different estates were circumscribed and freedom of
movement was not taken for granted for individuals belonging to the
lower classes. In the medieval era Jews lived a separate existence and
performed specific roles in society. In any case, the old ghettos were not
hermetically sealed. In the Russian Empire the great majority of Jews
lived in sthetls, but even though they had some similarity to the ghettos
in that they concentrated Jews in certain areas, they were profoundly
different from what the Germans constructed after 1939. The German
model was more closely related to concentration camps, which had been
important instruments of political control in the 1930s. In the German-
constructed ghettos, inhabitants became prisoners and were treated as
such. Among other functions the process of ghettoization broke up the
unity of the Polish Jewry by separating Jewish communities from one
another. Communication between ghettos was minimal, and information
from the outside world came infrequently and unreliably.
At the outset the Nazis gave little attention how the ghettos would be
organized; they were makeshift creations. Ultimately about 400 ghettos
were created in Poland. Beyond a rather vague set of principles issued
from the highest authorities, local officials had considerable freedom in
carrying out their assigned tasks, and therefore much depended on the
character of the local Nazi commander and on the Jewish leadership.
It was characteristic of the ad hoc character of German policy making
that, at least at the outset, there was considerable variety in the nature
of the ghettos. Some were small, but others, such as Warsaw and Lodz,
included hundreds of thousands of people. A wooden fence surrounded
the Lodz ghetto, but Warsaw was separated from the rest of the city
by a wall. Some of the ghettos were sealed, but others were relatively
open (i.e., residents could temporarily leave with permission). In some
ghettos, economic enterprises successfully supported the German war
effort, whereas others were economic failures from the German point of
view. In some of the ghettos people were reduced to starvation, whereas
others were better provisioned. Some of the ghettos existed for a short
time, and others lasted for several years.
In spite of these differences, there were some features common to all
ghettos. Everywhere the least desirable, poorest sections of towns were
selected for this purpose. The task of moving people had to be carried out
quickly to assure that there would be a great deal of personal property
left behind that the Nazis could use for their own purposes. Everywhere
this relocation, not only of Jews but also of Poles, created hardship for
the ghetto inhabitants. Because ghettos were located in the poor and
industrial section of cities, many middle-class workers could no longer
travel to their place of employment. Breaking up the economic unity of a
town further contributed to the misery of the inhabitants.
The fundamental dilemma of the Nazi leadership in their Jewish poli-
cies in general and regarding ghettoization in particular was whether it
was more important and urgent to kill Jews or to exploit Jewish labor for
the war effort. The two goals were not mutually exclusive – Jews could
be worked to death – but each Nazi leader made a different compro-
mise between the two demands.14 How to balance the two goals varied
according to the conviction of the German officer entrusted with the task
of setting up and overseeing the ghetto. To keep Jews able to work, they
had to be fed, however poorly. First in Lodz and then in Warsaw, the
Nazis set up a Transferstelle (transfer station) that was responsible for
the transfer of people and goods in and out of the ghetto. The Germans
decided that Jews would have to pay for the food they would receive,
because they took it for granted that they had accumulated wealth.
The use of Jewish slave labor should be placed within the context
of Nazi labor policy. As a result of the rapid build-up of the enormous
German military force, the Nazis very soon suffered from a labor short-
age. As the war went on the situation deteriorated, and the authorities
dealt with the problem in various ways. They enticed and then coerced
workers from the occupied territories, with Soviet and Polish workers
often taking the place of Jews who had been deported from Germany.
Under the circumstances it is quite understandable that the Nazis wanted
to use Jews for labor as long as they could, before being killed.
The first step in the formation of ghettos for the Nazis was to compel
Jews to form a leadership council (Judenrat) through which the Germans
could deal with the rest of the Jewish population. In the 1930s the Nazis
had learned the value of communicating with Jews via the Jewish leader-
ship. The members of the council were held responsible for carrying out
German orders. Initially their tasks were limited to conveying German
14 Christopher Browning, Origins of the Final Solution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, 2004. Browning calls the creation of such conditions in the ghettos, in which the
majority were soon expected to die, an “attritionist” strategy.
orders and providing lists of Jews to the Nazis. Among various issues of
the Holocaust none has caused greater controversy than the behavior of
the Jewish leadership. Collaboration between some Jewish leaders and the
Nazis already existed in the 1930s. As described earlier, the interests of
the Zionist leaders who wanted Jews to go to Palestine and the Nazis who
wanted Jews out of Germany coincided. There was certainly nothing rep-
rehensible about the Zionists taking advantage of opportunities offered
to them; by doing so they did not cause damage to their fellow Jews.
Even in the period of 1939–41, Jews probably benefited from having
their own leadership, and thereby a bit of autonomy. Only as time went
on did cooperation gradually became collaboration and Jewish leaders
were presented with impossible dilemmas.
How to supply the ghetto with food to ensure the survival of its resi-
dents? Very soon it became evident that the Nazi assumption that Jews
possessed considerable wealth and that imposing starvation on them
would compel them to give up their valuables and money was false.
By the summer of 1940 Jews were reduced to starvation and the wealth
did not materialize.15 At the outset, the Nazis were forced to supply Jews
with food, however inadequately, but ultimately the food supply was
paid for out of compensation for their labor. The Lodz ghetto became
self-supporting. As a functioning economic enterprise, ghetto labor came
to be incorporated into the Nazi war machinery. However, keeping Jews
alive, even if for the purpose of making necessary economic contributions,
disturbed some of the ideologically committed Nazis who saw no greater
task and purpose than eliminating Jews.
The first major ghetto to be constructed, contrary to the original plans –
which envisaged the removal of Jews as soon as possible from regions to
be incorporated – was in the Wartheland in Lodz, a town that the Ger-
mans renamed Litzmannstadt.16 The Nazis aimed to make Litzmannstadt
into a new and model German city and therefore invested heavily in its
reconstruction, making the contrast between the Jewish ghetto and the
15 Ibid., p. 118.
16 The literature on the Lodz ghetto is enormous. The most important primary source is
Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1987. This is an extraordinary and unique document in its
detailed information about daily life. Food was always on everybody’s mind. Another
primary source is Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, Łódź Ghetto: A Community History
Told in Diaries, Journals, and Documents. New York: Viking, 1989. A secondary source
is Michal Ungar, The Last Ghetto: Life in the Łódź Ghetto 1940–1944. Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, 1995.
new German section all the greater. This ghetto has special significance
not only because of its size and how long it existed but also because
it served as a model for many others to come. Lodz was the largest
town in the incorporated territories, and it contained approximately a
quarter-million Jews, making up a third of the population of the city.17
After Warsaw, Lodz had the second largest population of Jews in Poland.
By the time the ghetto was set up the number of Jews living in the city
decreased because some had managed to escape to Soviet-controlled terri-
tories and others moved to other parts of Poland to find refuge. According
to official records in June 1940 there were only 160,000 inhabitants in
the ghetto.18
Although some smaller ghettos already existed, it was the creation of
the Lodz ghetto that set the course for later developments. Given the
size of the Jewish population the creation of this ghetto was a major
undertaking. The Nazis hoped to accomplish the task of clearing the
northern part of the city of Poles and moving Jews there in one day, but
the process took several months, beginning on February 8, 1940. When
the work was completed in May, the ghetto was sealed. Jews were allowed
to take with them only as much of their property as they could carry; after
all, one purpose of the ghettoization was to confiscate Jewish property.
As mentioned, the Lodz ghetto was unusual because of its duration of
existence and size. The final liquidation of the ghetto took place only in the
summer of 1944, not long before the Red Army liberated the city. Since
Lodz was the largest city in the Wartheland, the Nazis made special efforts
to Germanize it by bringing in settlers and using even greater terror than
elsewhere to control and suppress the Polish population. These actions
outside the ghetto affected ghetto life because Jews within it were even
more cut off from the outside world than in other cities.19
But perhaps what distinguished the Lodz ghetto most of all from other
ghettos was the personality of its leader, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.
He was a man with modest education, a moderately successful insurance
agent, and a Zionist. His major prewar accomplishment was organizing
and maintaining an orphanage between the two world wars. Because he
had played a role in Jewish organizations the Nazis chose him as the leader
of the Judenrat, the “Eldest of Jews.” Unlike some other Jewish leaders,
Rumkowski approached his task with great enthusiasm; he definitely put
17 Dobroszycki, p. xxx.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., pp. xxvi–xxvii.
his stamp on the Lodz ghetto. He achieved a degree of autonomy and

organized a complex administration, which included a postal service,
and banking, police, welfare, and education services. He hoped to create
a semblance of normality in a very abnormal environment. At the time
when Rumkowski assumed his job he had no reason to know or think that
the ultimate German goal would be mass murder; he was collaborating
with a very cruel but not yet genocidal regime. However, Nazi policy
“evolved,” and because Rumkowski’s policies did not change, for all
practical purposes he became an accomplice in the Jews’ destruction.
That Rumkowski was a megalomaniac and in an unseemly fashion
enjoyed his authority is indisputable.20 He ran the government of the
ghetto in a dictatorial fashion, tolerated no questioning of his decisions,
had postage stamps printed with his own image, and appeared in the
streets of the city in a horse-drawn carriage. The inhabitants facetiously
called the money issued in the city for local transactions “Rumkie” or
“Chaimki.” Like a ship captain, he felt entitled to perform marriage
ceremonies. His arrogant behavior made him cordially disliked. He was
obsequious to his German masters and condescending to the people he
regarded as being entrusted to his care.21 Probably he was not a nice
person and in normal life would not have achieved a great deal, but
circumstances favored someone with his personality.
However, unlike many other Jewish leaders, he had a strategy of
increasing chances for Jewish survival. It is true that ultimately he did
not succeed, but the fact that the ghetto lasted as long as it did was par-
tially due to his efforts. His strategy was based on the understanding that
the Nazis needed Jewish labor; he aimed to make “his” ghetto valuable
by producing for the Nazi war machine.22 The ghetto received raw mate-
rials from the Germans and produced what it was ordered to produce:
textiles – Lodz was famous for its textile industry. Jewish slave laborers
produced uniforms for the Wehrmacht and also worked in armaments
factories. In 1943, 90 percent of working-aged ghetto residents worked
for German masters. In exchange, the workers received food. The Nazis
were determined to supply only the bare minimum necessary for survival.
20 A survivor, Lucille Eichengreen, accused him of sexually molesting children. Eichengreen,

Rumkowski and the Orphans of Lodz. San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1999.
21 To see how fellow Jews viewed Rumkowski, read the remarkable diary of a young boy
who died in the ghetto. Alan Adelson (ed.), The Diary of David Sierakowiak. New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. In particular, see p. 102.
22 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation.
New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Workers, especially those who performed heavy labor, received more

food, but to prevent them from sharing the food with their families they
were fed in common kitchens at their places of work.
Yet, even the workers starved; in fact, starvation was a German method
of killing. As Lucjan Dobroszycki wrote in his introduction to the Chron-
icle of the Lodz Ghetto, just as many people died of starvation in Lodz
as in Warsaw, but in Lodz the dead were buried more quickly.
Rumkowski is a figure of great importance in the history of the Holo-
caust. More than anyone else, he represented what Primo Levi famously
called the “grey zone” – that between the totalitarian regime’s murder-
ers and the victims – in which some of the victims were transformed
into collaborators. He cannot be criticised for forcing Jews to work for
Germans or reserving food supplies for workers because he believed that
supplying Jewish labor was key to the survival of the ghetto. It is perhaps
not fair to blame Rumkowski for not saving any more Jews than other
Jewish leaders, despite all the compromises he made.23 Circumstances
were obviously beyond his control, and given what was knowable at the
time he did as well as could be expected.
But Rumkowski can be criticized for the corruption that manifested
itself in the ways in which he came to imitate his German masters. He
harshly punished resistance and those whom he considered to be shirking
work. The Jewish police working for him carried out executions. He will-
ingly participated in the selection of people for deportations, knowing
that he was sending them to their deaths. In this process he became a col-
laborator. Rumkowski in an exaggerated form represented the dilemmas
and moral compromises that the Jewish leadership had to make.
Although the Lodz ghetto with its longevity, special institutions, and
rich culture was the most important ghetto, it is the Warsaw ghetto, which
was the largest, that is most famous because of the ghetto uprising in April
1943. The capital of Poland before the war, Warwaw had the largest
Jewish population of any European city, a third of a million people, which
constituted one-third of the inhabitants of the city. After the ghetto was
established more Jews were moved in, and at its largest, it held almost
450,000 people. To lessen the disruption to normal routes of transport,
after some reluctance, two ghettos were built, connected only by a foot-
bridge. Setting up this ghetto was very difficult; hundreds of thousands
of people had to be moved, including more than 100,000 non-Jewish
23 The dilemma of Rumkowski and other Jewish leaders is discussed in the famous passages
of Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Poles. The very task of removing Jews from normal economic life must
have caused enormous disruption. However much the Germans despised
Poles and wanted to reduce them to slavery, they were still responsible
for creating a semblance of normal life in occupied territories.
The construction of the Warsaw ghetto took several months and was
completed in October 1940. The ghetto became enormously overcrowded
as a third of the city’s population was concentrated in less than 3 per-
cent of its area. One of the problems that the Nazis had to face was the
likelihood of epidemics caused by the overcrowding, starvation, and the
impossibility of maintaining normal hygiene. The Nazis did not mind
that Jews were dying from illnesses, but even sealing off the ghetto could
not prevent the spread of diseases to the rest of the population and even
to the German army. Ironically, one of the rationales the Nazis gave
for setting up ghettos was that Jews, like rats, spread diseases and sep-
arating them from the rest of the population was a matter of hygiene.
Probably the Nazis really believed in this nonsense, yet the conditions in
the ghettos almost guaranteed the appearance of some type of infectious
disease.
The mayor of Warsaw appointed Adam Czerniakow as head of
the Jewish community in October 1939. The Germans confirmed this
appointment and entrusted him with the formation of the Judenrat. Czer-
niakow, an assimilated Jew and engineer who spoke Polish better than
Yiddish, had been active in Jewish community affairs; he had also served
on the Warsaw Municipal Council and had even been elected to the
Polish Senate. As a leader of the ghetto, he did everything within his
limited power to minimize Jewish suffering and to preserve as much
autonomy as possible. Unlike his fellow leader in Lodz, he maintained
as much dignity as he could and did not abuse his powers. Nevertheless,
as an assimilated Jew, he surrounded himself with people from a simi-
lar background when he created the leadership of the ghetto, and some
members of the Jewish community resented him.
Ultimately, the local Jewish government grew to about 6,000 people
and was organized into departments of police, health, education, housing,
sanitation, and culture. The police alone at its height employed 2,000
people. Finances were a constant problem. Although Polish Jewry was
by no means wealthy, nevertheless, the Germans could have supported
the ghetto from the substantial confiscated Jewish wealth and businesses,
which the Germans were unwilling to do. Jewish firms did export products
to German and Polish enterprises, but most of the funds needed for the
welfare of the community, came from taxing the ghetto residents. The
bulk of the revenue came from indirect taxes, such as taxing ration cards.
Because this indirect taxation placed a heavier burden on the poor than
on the relatively well-off, some people in the ghetto blamed Czerniakow
and his administration for favoring the rich. Czerniakow, after all, did not
even speak well the language of the common folk. It was after the return of
a semblance of normality, made possible by Czerniakow’s administrative
abilities that class antagonisms in the Warsaw ghetto resurfaced.
The Warsaw economy, unlike Lodz, operated on the private enter-
prise model. Smuggling and black markets were necessary for survival,
and smuggling food into the city was far more widespread than in Lodz.
These black market activities inevitably resulted in some people having
more money and resources than others. Perhaps not surprisingly, wealth
produced some modest but conspicuous consumption. Under the circum-
stances the relative well-being of some provided a sharp contrast with
the starving masses. Restaurants in the ghetto catered to the well-to-do
at a time when people were collapsing in the street because of hunger.
It was possible to buy one’s exemption from compulsory labor. The
German army, one of the major employers, paid pitifully small wages.
The extreme poverty contributed to corruption. Those who worked for
the administration had opportunities to feed their families better and
many took advantage of them. Members of the Judenrat were in a better
position to survive at least a little longer, and their privileged position
understandably provoked hostilities. The Jewish leadership, after all, was
not chosen by a free election; it was the Germans who appointed them.
Except for the food that was smuggled into the ghetto, the Germans
were in control of food deliveries. Occasionally and unpredictably food
delivery stopped altogether. To the extent the ghettos became instruments
of killing, the primary means was starvation. The Germans intended to
take as much resources out of Poland as they could. Not much remained
for the Polish population and even less for Jews.
On the one hand Jews were removed from the economic life of the
nation, but on the other hand the Germans were determined to take
advantage of Jewish labor. Jewish males between the ages of 12 and 60
were required to work. In fact Jews from the very beginning of Nazi
occupation performed forced labor. At first the Nazis rounded up Jews
on an ad hoc basis. Later they found it more advantageous to negotiate
with Jewish councils in the ghettos for the delivery or workers. The
Jewish leadership favored this approach because it gave them a degree of
autonomy.24 As a result, the major ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw became

economically self-sufficient.
Life in the Ghettos

It is a universal human desire to maintain a semblance of normality even
under the most difficult circumstances. In concrete terms that meant that
in the ghettos Jews attempted to re-create some kind of a cultural, reli-
gious, and social life that reminded them of earlier, happier times. The
inmates set up makeshift schools.25 They continued to observe religious
practices even in situations that made the performance of some practices
extremely difficult. For example, they could not resist German orders to
work on the Sabbath. In the larger ghettos at least there was consider-
able cultural activity. Musical and theatrical events were organized and
libraries were open. Some argued against these activities, maintaining that
“it is forbidden to sing in cemeteries”26 and dancing was indecent; how-
ever, most believed that taking people’s attention away from the dreadful
present served a humanitarian purpose. Scientific research concerning the
effect of starvation (discussed in the next section) was conducted and
could also be regarded as a cultural activity. In some ghettos the leader-
ship in particular patronized cultural activities.
Ghetto life was fluid and unpredictable; one never knew what tomor-
row would bring. On a continuing basis, a large number of people died or
were deported to death camps, and new arrivals would take their place.
For emotional and social support people organized themselves according
to their religious and political commitments.
Widespread poverty and starvation did not result in an undifferentiated
society, because there was an enormous difference between having little
to eat and having nothing at all. The hierarchy in Lodz was headed by
Rumkowski and members of the Jewish council, followed by members of
the police and heads of departments and institutions; next were the skilled
workers, followed by people who were able to work. At the bottom of the
scale were those who could not work any longer. The rations that people
received depended on their standing within this hierarchy; those who were
unable to work were the first to be sentenced to death by being deported.
The fact that members of the Jewish police received preferential treatment
24 Ibid., pp. 138–51.

25 Adelson, pp. 84–85.
26 Carni, p. 152.
created indignation and hostility. In Warsaw social differentiation was

greater than in Lodz. There owners of enterprises and members of the
Jewish police were able to frequent restaurants where they could find
food for which they did not need their ration cards.
The dividing line between the poor and the rich remained significant,
but the differences between the Polish Jews, most of whom had lived in
the city where the ghetto was created, and the German and Austrian Jews
who were dumped on them were even greater. Jews from Austria and
from the Reich itself were deported primarily to the Lodz ghetto, where
about 20,000 German Jews resettled. On occasion German commanders
killed Polish Jews to make room for the new arrivals. Western European
and Eastern Jews had been separated from one another by decades if
not centuries of prejudice. German Jews rarely knew any Yiddish and, of
course, did not know Polish. In these unusual circumstances, not surpris-
ingly, it was the native Jews who could deal better with the hardships.
A large proportion of the Western Jews were intellectuals. The lot of the
intellectuals, for whom the Nazis felt a particular hostility and who were
unused to physical labor, was particularly difficult. Ghetto society was
far from harmonious. As Primo Levi pointed out, shared suffering does
not bring people together.
The resettlement in the ghetto of foreign Jews contributed to a major
source of misery: overcrowding. The site of the ghetto chosen by the Ger-
mans was always in the least desirable part of town that almost never
contained any green space. Access to running water was not always avail-
able and electricity was limited. Extremely insufficient living space was
allotted, meaning that several families usually lived in one apartment
and, on occasion two families had to share the same room. Conges-
tion increased more as ghettos were consolidated and more Jews from
German-occupied Europe were resettled. To assign as little living space
to Jews as possible had practical motivations: It would free up space in
the Wartheland for German settlement and apartments, as Jewish-owned
houses were vacated. But it is also evident that the selection of the least
attractive places and the extraordinary overcrowding served purposes
beyond economic ones: The Nazis meant to humiliate Jews and make
them suffer every indignity they could devise.
Until the death camps were established, starvation or illness resulting
from undernourishment was the chief cause of deaths among Jews of
Poland. This method was easier on the perpetrators than actually shooting
people, but of course obtaining food became a primary and constant
concern for those locked up in the ghettos. German authorities mostly
accepted the fact that if they wanted Jewish workers these people had to
be fed, however poorly. However, they had little interest in feeding the
families of workers.
As mentioned earlier, smuggling was inevitable. Possibilities for smug-
gling varied because some ghettos were more isolated than others; smug-
gling was somewhat more possible in Warsaw than in Lodz. In addition,
the work details in some ghettos took place within the ghetto itself, but
in other ghettos the workers were taken outside of the ghetto confines,
where they could find food more easily. The German authorities had an
ambivalent attitude toward smuggling. On the one hand it was a forbid-
den activity and on occasion was punished by death. But on the other
hand, smuggling was beneficial in that it kept workers alive and required
the Germans to invest even less in the upkeep of the ghetto. The attitude
of the Jewish police to smuggling was also ambivalent. Smuggling was
an activity in which children were particularly adept. Some smugglers
became celebrated heroes.
But smuggling could improve the hunger situation only slightly. The
Poles themselves did not have much to eat and were often not will-
ing to barter their limited food. As time went on and Jewish resources
were exhausted, the opportunities to exchange valuables for food became
increasingly rare. There was practically no possibility of growing any-
thing edible within the confines of the ghetto; neither land nor seeds were
available.
We have a good picture of the food situation in the Lodz from reading
the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, which reports the available food supply
on nearly a daily basis.27 Starvation was a constant fact of life. Whatever
food arrived came irregularly, and of course, it was of the worst quality.
Much depended on the local German authorities. Some of the German
officers were more desirous of keeping Jews alive, whether for the pur-
poses of their labor or because they found it too difficult to accept the
method of killing by starvation. The Jewish Council distributed available
food on the basis of ration cards, reserving some supplies for Jewish hol-
idays. To deal with the meagerness of the food supply, the Lodz ghetto
and then other ghettos established community soup kitchens where for a
relatively modest price the poorest Jews could receive some nourishment.
Even at the time doctors were aware that the ghettos provided material for
a scientific study of the amount of calories necessary for human survival,
27 See Dobroszycki and also the diaries of David Sierakowiak.

and they recorded their observations. As time went on the number of

deaths attributed to starvation and related diseases continued to increase.
The Question of Resistance

Some historians define resistance so broadly as to include the mainte-
nance of underground schools and the publication of newspapers and
pamphlets in ghettos – indeed, making any attempt to maintain a decent
life under extraordinary circumstances. They argue that Jews resisted
Nazis by not accepting victimhood and not behaving as their tormentors
expected them to behave. Some even maintain that committing suicide
rather than allowing the Nazis to commit murder should be regarded as
resistance.28 There is no question that individuals behaved courageously
and nobly when it was extraordinarily difficult to do so. However, it
is a mistake to extend the concept of resistance so broadly as to make
it almost meaningless. Using the word this way underlines the fact that
there was very little real resistance, because there could not have been.
A totalitarian regime, by definition, is capable of preventing the for-
mation of successful opposition. The Stalinist regime murdered millions,
and yet we know of no attempt to successfully organize against it. There
may have been many Germans who despised everything the Nazis stood
for; however, only a handful of noble and courageous individuals at great
risk to themselves did so much as to express a dissident opinion. A fully
functioning totalitarian regime is capable of murdering millions without
the victims having an ability to defend themselves.
Jewish behavior at the time of the Holocaust must be looked at in this
context. If we define resistance narrowly, as we should, and understand
by it actions that actually interfered with the murderous Nazi machine
and slowed down its activities, then it becomes clear that Jews were not
in a position to do much harm to the Nazis. We must remember that,
although the Nazis had a particular fear and hatred of Jews, the Jews
were by no means their only victims. It is evident that the other victims –
Soviet prisoners of war, the Roma, or homosexuals – were no more able
to defend themselves than the Jews were. However ineffective Jewish
resistance was in resisting the Nazis, it is appropriate for us to remember
the few successful attempts when they were able to kill at least a few of
their murderers.
28 An excellent survey of this conception of resistance is in Michael Marrus, “Jewish

resistance to the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary History, 1995, pp. 83–110.
What opportunities did the Jews have to strike back at their tormen-
tors? There were three main venues for resistance: Jewish participation
in partisan units, revolts in ghettos, and attempts of sabotage in death
camps.29 It is unclear, however, to what extent Jewish participation in
the partisan movement should be considered Jewish resistance. After all,
few if any of the partisan activities were aimed or could have aimed at
saving Jewish lives. Jews had good reasons to fight the Nazis, and at least
in Western Europe the partisans accepted them. There was no difference
between Jews and non-Jews in their willingness to fight and the courage
that was necessary to do so. Only opportunities and circumstances var-
ied. The problem was that by the time Germany was losing the war and
consequently the partisan movement had gained strength, most of the
Jews had already been killed.
In the territory of the ex-Soviet Union, which had the largest Jewish
population of any area, the situation was more complicated. The partisan
movement was important, but only became a serious threat to the German
occupiers when victory was within reach and therefore people were will-
ing to risk their lives. By this time most of the Jews were already dead.
Forests in the Soviet Union (and in Yugoslavia) were suitable territories
for the development of partisan activities. However, those few Jews who
were still alive in 1943 and in 1944 and who at great risks to themselves
and their families managed to escape from the ghettos faced special dif-
ficulties. Most significantly, unlike in Western Europe, Jews could not
count on a friendly reception, neither from the local population nor from
the partisan units themselves. Essential requirements of successful parti-
san struggle included a good knowledge of the terrain and a supportive
native population. Jews, by and large city dwellers, possessed neither of
these qualities. It is difficult to determine the number of Jewish partisans,
but the best estimate is that in the Eastern front about 20,000 Jews fought
at one time or another.
It was only in 1943 that the Polish government in London encouraged
the formation of partisan units. Yet the Poles were often suspicious of
Jews and assumed that they were socialists who looked favorably on the
Soviet Union. The Jews were better received by communist-led groups. In
Poland Jewish partisans often established their own units. By contrast the
Soviet leadership did not wish the creation of independent Jewish groups,
although a few such groups existed.
29 Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990. Israel Gutman wrote the chapter on resistance (pp. 457–98).
Ghetto uprisings are clearly examples of Jewish resistance. Unlike in

concentration camps or extermination camps, in ghettos there was at
least a semblance of autonomy, and people often survived long enough to
make planning for resistance operations possible. The uprisings usually
took place only at the last moments before the complete destruction of
the ghetto and the deportation of its residents to sites of extermination.
The ghetto uprisings took place only after the Nazi attack on the Soviet
Union, when the inmates had already received information about the
new Nazi policy of extermination. Taking action was almost always the
result of desperation. As the fighters saw it, their choices were being killed
without resistance or to go down fighting and attempt to kill at least few
of their tormentors. Very rarely was there any hope of retreat or escape.
The most famous and significant of the uprisings took place in Warsaw.
The preparations for action began in the fall of 1942, after the majority of
the residents, in particular the old and the sick, had already been deported
to death camps. The population of the ghetto had been reduced from
approximately 300,00 to about 60,000. The remaining residents, almost
all young, were engaged in labor for the German war effort. Naturally,
these men and women were the most likely to be able and willing to fight.
The preparation for the action took months; the organizers were waiting
for a favorable moment. The first task was to get rid of collaborators, and
therefore the first victims of the planned anti-German action were fellow
Jews. The combat organization supplanted the Judenrat, as the Jewish
leaders in Warsaw not only did not organize the rising, as elsewhere, but
also came to be seen as obstacles.
A problem that the resisters faced was the difficulty of acquiring
weapons. The Polish underground was willing to give some weapons,
but they themselves did not have enough arms, and they feared that the
fighting might spread beyond the ghetto at a time they did not consider
right for a general uprising.30 The rebels had only revolvers, some hand
grenades, and a few rifles and submachine guns. The leader of the rebels
was a 24-year-old young man, Mordechai Anielewicz.
The uprising took place on April 19, 1943, when the Nazis attempted
to deport all the remaining inhabitants into extermination camps. The
resisters were prepared, though the day of the Nazi action could not have
been known. The Jews had prepared for the siege by building bunkers,
and they also set themselves up in attics. There were fewer than a thou-
sand fighters, but thousand others participated by helping build hiding
30 Ibid., p. 480.
places. The SS troops entered in military formation, protected by tanks.

The Jews fired and the Germans were compelled to retreat. The fight-
ing continued for several weeks, until the Germans burned down the
ghetto. There has rarely been a battle in which the forces were so uneven
and yet it lasted for almost a month. In the struggle the Nazis lost six-
teen soldiers.31 The Warsaw uprising was the first such action anywhere
in Nazi-occupied Europe, and consequently its significance was much
greater than the relatively few Nazi casualties.
In other large ghettos, such as Vilna, Kovno, and Bialystok, the Jewish
underground successfully organized some escapes that allowed people to
join the partisans in nearby forests. In addition, in Vilna and Bialystok
some fighting also took place.
31 Hilberg, p. 538.
8
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
When the German army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, its
generals expected to fight a Blitzkrieg – a war of quick movement, over-
whelming force, and short duration – in which they could take advantage
of their superior leadership and well-trained and disciplined soldiers.
Given the limitations of German human and material resources, it was
the only kind of war that had any hope of success. It was also to be like
no other war: Hitler did not issue an ultimatum, and he did not envisage
a possible peace treaty with Stalin. This war was to be a war of annihila-
tion. It was to be the kind of war that the Nazis had prepared for from
the moment of their conquest of power. Anything that happened before
the invasion of the Soviet Union was merely preparation. Already in June
1941 the outlines of future German behavior were present, and so were
therefore the sources of their ultimate failure and defeat.
In view of what happened later, it is remarkable to read the writings of
Nazi leaders written soon after the invasion began. Experienced military
officers expected the collapse of the Red Army in two weeks, and Nazi
leaders were already making plans to level Moscow and Leningrad and
incorporate into the Reich enormous territories in which Slavic slaves
would work to create a paradise for “Germanic peoples.” Generals seri-
ously thought they would be able to use their divisions that in June were
engaged in the East against British possessions around the world by the
autumn.1 They had little respect for the Red Army and were so convinced
of their quick success that they saw little need to gain the support of the
population. Past easy victories misled them. The expectation of a quick
1 Aly, pp. 190, 199.
151
victory was one more demonstration of the inability of the Nazis to look
at the world as it really was. Germany was ultimately defeated because
its leaders lived in a world that they only imagined. Except for its moral
depravity, the most striking feature of Nazism was its utter irrationality.
Nazism was also a racist ideology based on the irrational notion of
different value of the races. Based on this ideology, the Germans explic-
itly rejected the idea of winning over national minorities by offering them
independence or even autonomy. Alfred Rosenberg, to whom Hitler mis-
takenly entrusted propaganda in the occupied territories and who lacked
Joseph Goebbels’ sophistication, considered all ex-Soviet citizens as
“subhuman” and wanted to treat them as such.2
The Holocaust must be looked at within the larger context of German
goals, attitude, and behavior. There was madness in the Nazi desire to kill
all Jews, but that madness existed within a worldview that encouraged the
representatives of the “master race” to kill millions to assure Lebensraum
(living room) for Germans and thereby show German superiority in a vic-
torious war. German behavior toward the defeated was exemplified by
their treatment of prisoners of war: In the first year of the struggle the
Nazis purposely starved to death two million ex-Soviet soldiers. During
the course of the war more than 50 percent of Soviet prisoners of war
died in German captivity, as compared to 1 percent of American POWs.3
It is true that the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Geneva Proto-
cols, and therefore the Nazis argued that Soviet prisoners of war did not
deserve protection, but given their ideology and their previous behavior in
Poland, it is hard to believe that the Nazis were concerned with diplomatic
niceties.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had enabled the Soviet Union to incor-
porate the Baltic states and the eastern half of Poland (i.e., Western
Belarus and Western Ukraine). Probably Soviet strategists envisaged this
region as a buffer zone against German aggression, but their vision was
faulty. The bitterness of the local population against the Soviet occupiers
was so great that Poles, Ukrainians, and citizens of the Baltic states gladly
joined the invaders and helped the Germans advance extremely quickly.
It was the Jews’ misfortune that this particular region had the highest
2 David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. London: Focal Point Publica-
tions, 1999, pp. 654–55.
3 Reinhard Otto, “The Fate of Soviet Soldiers in German Captivity,” in The Holocaust in
the Soviet Union. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Museum, 2005, p. 129.
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union 153
concentration of Jews anywhere in the world; approximately four mil-

lion Jews lived in the territories that the Wehrmacht came to occupy.
Pogroms
Although the Germans found sympathizers everywhere they went, nev-
ertheless they had to provide the initiative for and organization of the
mass killings of Jews. Before they invaded, there were few spontaneous
murders of Jews. Even as late as 1939–41, probably the majority of the
non-Jewish Poles paid little attention to what was happening to their fel-
low citizens. Some may have approved of the removal of Jews from their
midst, but most were preoccupied with their own very serious problems.
However, after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the sit-
uation changed.4 as a new element of horror appeared in the tragedy of
Eastern European Jewry. In areas that had been ruled by Soviet authori-
ties only since 1939, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians,
and Byelorussians turned against their fellow Jewish citizens, whom they
blamed for their suffering under the Soviets, and carried out spontaneous
pogroms. Soviet occupation had indeed been brutal: Hundreds of thou-
sands had been deported and thousands were killed. German soldiers
now gleefully dug up the recent graves of victims of Soviet terror.
During the past two years of Soviet occupation, nationalists from the
Baltic states and the Ukraine had found refuge in Germany, and they now
returned with the conquering armies. They helped the German advance
and perhaps, wanting to demonstrate their Nazi commitment, were the
first to attack Jews. They may have hoped that, by demonstrating their
intellectual comradeship, the Nazis then would leave them with a cer-
tain degree of autonomy. Soon the collaborators were reduced to being
accomplices, to being auxiliaries whose main task was to butcher Jews.
The pogroms took place amid general violence. In the newly occupied
and bitterly anticommunist region not only Jews but also non-Jewish
communists were murdered. There was something particularly ironic
about Ukrainian collaboration. Ukrainians joined the Nazis because of
their hatred of the Soviet Union and their hope in the establishment of
4 The greatest scholar of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, had a different opinion. He thought
that even at this time all the pogroms were inspired by the Germans and none were truly
spontaneous. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (3rd ed.), Vol. 1. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 320–21. The majority of scholars dealing with
this topic agree with Hilberg.
an independent state. They seemed to have not realized that the Germans
had other plans: the colonialization of their land.
A new element was added to the age-old antisemitism that had fueled
previous pogroms: People who in 1939 had come under the hated Soviet
occupation-associated Jews with communists. It is true that, because
the earlier Polish and Lithuanian state had been explicitly antisemitic,
the majority of Jews looked on the Soviet occupiers with less hostil-
ity than their non-Jewish compatriots. For understandable reasons Jews
were somewhat more likely to collaborate with the new authorities than
other Poles or Ukrainians and were more likely to be employed by the
Soviet authorities.5 Those who knew what was happening in Germany
had every reason to fear German occupation, and therefore many looked
at the invading Soviet army as liberators, as an army that would protect
them from the worst. There are recorded instances when Jews greeted the
Red Army with flowers. However, the antisemites’ assertion that the new
Soviet authorities favored Jews was incorrect. In fact, the leaders of the
regime saw Jews as antisocial and anti-Soviet. Many Jews had relatives in
the West, and the Soviet authorities regarded these connections with con-
siderable suspicion. They closed down synagogues and made observing
religious commandments difficult, if not impossible.6 Some Jews escaped
to German-occupied territories – and ultimately to their deaths. As much
as it was possible the Soviet leadership attempted to put non-Jews in
positions of power because they understood the danger of being identi-
fied with Jews. In October 1939 in the local elections in Western Ukraine
and Western Belarus, only 92 of the 2,416 deputies were Jewish, much
less than their proportion in the general population.7
This period of less than two years of Soviet rule would have far-
reaching and tragic consequences. Poles and Ukrainians were not used
to seeing Jews in a position of authority and now seeing them as agents
of a hostile regime very much fueled the passion of their already existing
antisemitism. In 1941 the German invasion provided the opportunity to
take revenge on their imagined tormentors, and the revenge was bloody.
5 Ironically, the very same Jan Gross who wrote the very influential book on the massacres
at Jedwabne had demonstrated in his previous book that Jews did not do well under
Soviet occupation. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western
Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
6 Yosef Litvak, “The Plight of Refugees from German Occupied Territories,” in Keith
Sword (ed.), The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–1941. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991, pp. 65–67.
7 Gereben Agnes, Antiszemitizmus a Szovjetunioban. Budapest: Polgart, 2000, p. 148.
The brutality of the killings was even greater than that perpetrated by
the Germans. The population observed the murders and beatings, and
photographic evidence demonstrates that the onlookers took great plea-
sure in what they saw. The violence was even greater in the countryside
than in the cities. In the rural regions the murderers and the victims knew
one another, which seemingly increased the brutality. For the mob it
was not enough to murder, but it was also essential to humiliate: Jews
were made to dance in front of crazed crowds before being beaten to
death; the beards of Orthodox Jews were cut and on occasion set on fire.
Poles and Lithuanians even accused Jews of shooting at German troops
as they entered a town. The accusation was absurd on the face of it.
Under Soviet occupation Jews, and others, were in no position to have
firearms.
These pogroms can be seen as a revival of the mass violence aimed
against Jews after World War I, which occurred in these same areas.
During the earlier era of civil war, Cossacks, anti-Bolshevik armies, and
Ukrainian and Polish nationalists carried out those attacks and the pop-
ulation participated in the looting. However, in 1941 the attacks were
even more brutal, and the populace took a much more active role. Nazi
propagandists attempted to distance themselves from the massacres not
because they disapproved of them, of course, but because it was in their
interest to demonstrate how Jews were hated and how easily a pogrom
against them might ensue. It was an important psychological benefit for
the Germans to show that others did not disapprove of their actions, but
on the contrary, performed the very same acts that they were doing.
In this instance we should accept the Nazi propagandists’ assertion:
The pogroms were usually spontaneous. Although Reinhardt Heydrich
issued an order suggesting that the pogroms be secretly encouraged,8 and
on occasion the Nazis made an attempt to persuade the local popula-
tion to murder Jews, most likely the pogroms would have taken place
without such encouragement. However, German reports from the front-
line often contradicted one another. In his report, Brigadier General Dr.
Franz Walther Stahlecker, commander of an Einsatzgruppe, complained
that he had found it difficult to persuade the local antisemites to start a
pogrom. Yet in view of the large number of outbreaks that took place
in the recently conquered territories, it is difficult to take his complaint
at face value. The character of the occupying authority was, of course,
8 Martin Broszat et al. (eds.), The Anatomy of the SS State. New York: Walker and Co.,
1968, p. 64.
decisively important. In regions occupied by the Hungarian army, no

pogroms took place because officers would not allow them.9
In terms of the number of victims, these pogroms were not very impor-
tant; the few thousands of victims cannot be compared to the millions
murdered by the Nazis. Yet, they were significant events, demonstrat-
ing once again that Jews in Eastern Europe not only had few friends
but also that a large part of the local population entertained a murder-
ous hatred for the Jewish citizens in their midst. By attacking Jews, the
local population wanted to demonstrate that they were really like the
Nazis and therefore deserved better treatment. Ethnic Germans were par-
ticularly prominent among the murderers. Arguably, their bitter native
antisemitism was even greater than that of the invading soldiers.
At times the Germans were taken aback by the brutality of the attacks
and how much the onlookers seemingly enjoyed the spectacle. A soldier,
who took pictures, wrote about an incident he witnessed in Kaunas,
Lithuania:
A young man – he must have been a Lithuanian – with rolled up sleeves was
armed with an iron crowbar. He dragged out one man at a time from the group
and struck him with the crowbar with one or more blows on the back of his head.
Within three-quarters of an hour he had beaten to death the entire group of forty-
five to fifty people in this way. I took a series of photographs of the victims. After
the entire group had been beaten to death, the young man put the crowbar to one
side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and
played the Lithuanian national anthem. . . . The behavior of the civilians present
was unbelievable. After each man had been killed they began to clap and when
the national anthem started up they joined in singing and clapping.10
An excellent source of information about these pogroms is the on-the-

scene reports of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen. German soldiers, who
witnessed the events, with their great desire to photograph atrocities, also
provided a record of horrifying scenes.11
As the Nazi-Soviet war began, the Lithuanians organized anti-Soviet
partisan groups, and the Red Army, fully occupied by fighting the German
invaders, suffered losses to the partisans. Because these partisans equated
Jews and communists, when the opportunity arose – that is, when the
9 Andrzej Zbikowski, “Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Occupied Poland,” in Lucjan Dobroszycki

and Jeffrey Gurok (eds.), The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1993,
p. 178.
10 Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Reiss (eds.), Good Old Days: The Holocaust as
Seen by Perpetrators and Bystanders. New York: Ree Press, 1991, p. 31.
11 Ibid.
Germans occupied the region – they carried out bloody pogroms. On

the night of June 25–26, the partisans in Kaunas killed approximately
1,500 Jews and on the following night another 2,300 Jews. The head of
Einsatzguppe A, Walther Stahlecker, wrote in his report:
Considering that the population of the Baltic countries had suffered very heavily
under the government of Bolshevism and Jewry while they were incorporated in
the USSR, it was to be expected that after the liberation from that foreign gov-
ernment, they would render harmless most of the enemies left behind after the
retreat of the Red Army. It was the duty of the Security Police to set in motion
these self-cleansing movements and to direct them into the correct channels in
order to accomplish the purpose of the cleansing operations as quickly as pos-
sible. It was no less important in view of the future to establish the unshakable
and provable fact that the liberated population themselves took the most severe
measures against the Bolshevist and Jewish enemy quite on their own, so that
the direction by German authorities could not be found out. In Lithuania this
was achieved for the first time by partisan activities in Kowno. To our surprise it
was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews. Klimatis,
the leader of the partisan unit, mentioned above, who was used for this purpose
primarily, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by
a small advanced detachment acting in Kowno, and in such a way that no Ger-
man order or German instigation was noticed from the outside. During the first
pogrom on the night of 25–26 the Lithuanian partisans did away with more than
1,500 Jews, set fire to several Synagogues or destroyed them by other means and
burned down a Jewish dwelling district consisting of about 60 houses. During the
following nights about 2,300 Jews were made harmless in a similar way.
The Wehrmacht units showed full understanding of the action. As a result the
cleaning operations went on very smoothly. From the outset it was clear that the
possibility of carrying out pogroms only presented itself during the first days of
the occupation . . . ”12
Indeed, once the occupation authorities established a semblance of

order, there was no more room for spontaneous acts. It is remarkable how
short was this phase of local, spontaneous killings of Jews: There were no
instances of pogroms in German-occupied Poland before the attack on
the Soviet Union, and there were none after the passage of a few weeks. As
the population learned more about the plans of the occupiers, it became
increasingly evident that the Nazis did not think much better of Poles and
Ukrainians than they did of Jews. They had reason to fear that their own
turn would come soon. This new understanding of the nature of German
policies dampened their enthusiasm for killing Jews. It is worth noting
that such atrocities were much less likely to take place in regions that
12 Ibid., p. 27.
had been part of the Soviet Union before 1939. In Brest-Litovsk, Belarus,
and Zhytomyr the Nazis made an attempt to induce the population to
carry out a pogrom, but were unsuccessful.13 Perhaps in territories that
had been under Soviet rule for decades the population was more likely to
understand that Jews in fact were not in a position of control.
However, as already mentioned, in areas that were under Soviet rule
for only a short time, such as Lithuania, Western Belarus, Galicia, Eastern
Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine, bloody pogroms took place in those
few weeks after the German invasion. In addition to strains of ancient
antisemitism the main motivating force was hatred of the Soviet occu-
pation. The local population and the Germans in this respect spoke the
same language in claiming that Jews and Bolsheviks were indistinguish-
able. They did not need the Germans to convince them that Bolshevism
was fundamentally Jewish. The stronger the nationalistic sentiments of
the local people, the stronger their antisemitism.
One particularly bloody pogrom in the large Ukrainian city of Lvov
claimed 1,500 victims,14 but what happened in the small Polish town of
Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, came to be emblematic of the pogroms that
took place in the weeks following the German attack on the Soviet Union.
Although several other pogroms took place about the same time, we know
a great deal more about Jedwabne because of the powerful book written
by Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community
in Jedwabne, Poland, published in 2001.15 The story is simple and the
sequence of events is incontrovertible. In this small town a group of
Polish men rounded up all the Jews, abused them, humiliated them, and
beat them. Afterward almost the entire Jewish population of the town
was forced to enter a barn, which was then burnt, killing everyone. The
number of victims varies from the improbably low figure of 300 to 1,600.
The SS troops looked on the massacre favorably. It made their task easier,
and this proof of Polish antisemitism also encouraged them, showing that
their actions past and future had popular support. Clearly, they were in a
13 Saul Friedländer, Germany and Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of Extermination. New
York: Harper Collins, 2007, p. 224; and Shalom Cholawsky, Jews of Belorussia during
World War II. Amsterdam: Harwood, 1998. Cholawsky reported that the non-Jewish
population entertained a hostile indifference to Jews but did not engage in pogroms.
14 Yitzak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2009, p. 91.
15 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
position to prevent the horror that was taking place in front of their eyes
and yet chose not to do so. At the same time it is clear that they did not
organize the massacre; they did not force the Poles to do the dirty work
for them. There could be no question about the enthusiasm for killing
exhibited by the majority of the townspeople. Nor can we attribute the
Poles’ behavior to the impact of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, because
the Germans had entered the area only weeks earlier. The Polish villagers’
behavior was the consequence of long-standing antisemitism combined
with their loathing for the recently overthrown communist regime. Even
though the vast majority of Jews sympathized with the Bolsheviks no
more than did the Poles, they came to stand for Soviet Bolsheviks, who
were unavailable for punishment. Jews were defenceless surrogates and
easily accessible objects of hatred.
The difference between these pogroms and Nazi genocide was that the
Germans, inspired by Hitler, possessed an organization and machinery
that made mass murder possible; Eastern Europeans, left to themselves,
could carry out only disorganized actions. Hitler in his Mein Kampf had
already contemptuously noted this fact.
Einsatzgruppen: Special Assignment Units

The primary instruments of murder on Soviet territory were the Einsatz-
gruppen, key parts of the extensive Nazi terror system.
Immediately after coming to power, Hitler’s followers built an elabo-
rate police organization, as appropriate for a totalitarian state.16 How-
ever, during the 1930s the organizational chart was complex and confus-
ing, and the lines of authority between the police and the many repressive
organizations were not clearly drawn. After coming to power in 1933,
the Nazis immediately took control over the regular police forces of the
state governments (Lände). However, they did not dissolve their own
paramilitary force, the SS (Schutzstaffel). The Gestapo (Geheime Stat-
spolizei, Secret State Police) came under the overall authority of the SS.17
For administrative purposes the uniformed police (i.e., the regular police)
remained separate from the SS, although Karl Daluege, a party member of
16 By totalitarian I mean a political system that successfully prevents the articulation of

political programs different from its own.
17 Edward Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 9.
long standing who was the head of the regular police, reported to
Heinrich Himmler.18 In the poorly organized Nazi hierarchy it was
Hermann Göring who, as the organizer of the wartime economy, was
responsible for Jewish matters. He was the one who in July 1941 ordered
Reinhard Heydrich to convene the Wannsee conference.
But it was Heinrich Himmler who would have the decisive role in
bringing about mass murder. Himmler, an early party member, started his
rise in the hierarchy in 1929 when he became the leader of the SS, which
was then a small bodyguard unit protecting Hitler. Ultimately all police
forces came under his authority, making him the second most powerful
leader in the Third Reich. A turning point in his rise to prominence came
in 1939 when Hitler entrusted him to combat subversion in the occupied
country of Poland. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, his authority
was extended to all occupied territories.
At the outbreak of the war, the security and police agencies were
consolidated in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) under the lead-
ership of Reinhard Heydrich.19 An early Nazi, he was a reasonably well-
educated man with a degree of charisma, who together with his boss,
Himmler, became the major architect of the Holocaust. Although they
disliked one another, the two successfully worked together for their cause:
the extermination of the European Jewry. Heydrich and his superior from
the very outset were engaged in police (i.e., terror) operations. It was in
his “honor” that the killing operations in the Soviet Union were named
Operation Reinhard.
The regular police received the same indoctrination as the men of the
SS, and their members also became involved in the process of extermi-
nation, contributing manpower to the Einsatzgruppen.20 As far as inhu-
manity toward victims was concerned, there was little or no difference
between those who belonged to Nazi organizations and those who wore
the uniform of the regular police. Both did what was expected of them.
Whether they had been members of the Nazi party of long standing or
had taken no part in politics made little difference to their actions.
The Einsatzgruppen were not originally organized for the explicit pur-
pose of killing Jews. It was a task, however, that they soon assumed, and
18 On Himmler see Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final
Solution. New York: Knopf, 1991.
19 Christopher Browning, The Origin of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish
Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004,
p. 225.
20 Ibid., p. 12.
their members became ultimately responsible for mass murder. Examin-

ing how they were organized and who participated in them is therefore
essential for our understanding of the mechanics of the Holocaust. A
small number of people became executioners of hundreds of thousands
human beings. Even more than the concentration camp guards in the
death camps, members of the Einsatzgruppen had direct responsibility
for killing. They were not simply supervising the operation of gas cham-
bers; they pulled the triggers and beat Jews.
Although the members of these detachments became mass murderers
only after the invasion of the Soviet Union, their previous assignments had
prepared them for that violent role. Their first task after the destruction of
Czechoslovakia was to take control of the institutions of the overthrown
government, capture documents, and provide intelligence. They assumed
much more sinister responsibilities after the invasion of Poland. Their
nominal task was to establish security in the occupied territories by elim-
inating potential enemies, and because the Nazi definition of “potential
enemy” was very broad, members of the Einsatzgruppen became agents
of terror.
Before the invasion of the Soviet Union extensive discussions took place
among the Nazi leaders concerning the responsibilities of these security
and police groups, and in particular, the relationship between the Army
High Command and Heydrich’s organization. The small group of men
who were to participate under Heydrich’s supervision in the Einsatzgrup-
pen received instructions even before they knew which country they were
going to attack. Secrecy was essential, and therefore they learned only in
the last days that their area of work would be in the Soviet Union. The
instructions that these men received demonstrated that even before the
invasion the Nazis knew well what kind of war they would be fighting.
They were prepared; it was not unforeseen circumstances that made them
into what they became.
Although the outlines of the relationship between the army and the
Einsatzgruppen had been decided at headquarters, the actual day-to-day
cooperation was worked out only in practice. The members of the Einsatz-
gruppen needed to be trained to carry out their tasks after the invasion;
just as importantly, an agreement needed to be reached between Hey-
drich and the Army High Command. Because the Einsatzgruppen would
be operating in frontline conditions, there needed to be close coordina-
tion with the Wehrmacht. Initially the army leadership was reluctant to
be drawn into activities that were clearly against their traditions and of
course violated international laws of war. But the generals’ scruples were
soon overcome, and the relationship between the army and Einsatzgrup-
pen became close.
As the war expanded into the Soviet Union, the army was increasingly
drawn into the work of these special detachments.21 The special units
depended on the regular army for their supplies, logistics, and communi-
cations, although they retained their independence. The army increasingly
came to play a supporting role by helping to round up Jews. The leaders
of the Einsatzgruppen were surprised by the helpfulness of the officers of
the regular army and that the cooperation went further than envisaged
by the pre-invasion agreements.22 In this respect there was a great differ-
ence between the behavior of the German army in Eastern Europe and
in Western Europe. In Western Europe the generals, of course, did not
come to the defense of Jews, but they chose not to play a prominent role
in the extermination process. In the East, however, the soldiers came to
be imbued with Nazi thinking concerning the inferiority of races. In their
eyes Eastern European Jews belonged to a lower order, and therefore
they willingly became participants in mass killings. In terms of inhuman-
ity there was very little difference between Generals of the Wehrmacht
and SS officers.
Because the Einsatzgruppen could do their work everywhere undis-
turbed, only a small number of individuals were needed to kill so many
Jews. The German invading forces were accompanied by four special
detachments – A, B, C, and D – each assigned to different segments of
the front. A operated in the Baltic republics and in parts of Belarus; B in
the rest of Belarus; C in the Ukraine; and D in parts of the Ukraine, Cau-
casus, and Bessarabia. A was the largest detachment with approximately
1,000 men, whereas D had only 500 members but still covered an enor-
mous territory. Perhaps at any given time no more than 3,000 men served
in these units. Each of the units was further divided into smaller groups
of Einsatzkommando, and then these were subdivided into Sonderkom-
mando; thus, their members spread out across the enormously long front.
The men had served in the SS, Gestapo, the criminal police, the regular
police, and the Waffen SS, but we have no evidence that they harbored a
more passionate form of antisemitism than the rest of the German popu-
lation. They were simply given different jobs to accomplish: Their main
task was to murder. They were organized to achieve maximum mobility
and flexibility. For example, after the occupation of a major city, they
21 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

22 Hilberg, Vol. 1, pp. 305–08.
would be combined into larger units, and when they operated in the
countryside they were broken down into smaller entities.
It is worth emphasizing that Heydrich consciously chose educated
men to be the leaders of the detachments. Three of the four comman-
ders held doctoral degrees. Many of the lower-level officers also had law
degrees, and some even had training in theology. They represented the
German intellectual elite. These officers had joined the Nazi party early
and reached middle-level leadership positions.
The occupied territories were divided for administrative purposes. The
Baltic states were incorporated into “Reichskommisariat Ostland” and
the Western Ukraine was renamed “Reichskommisariat Ukraine,” and
both areas were placed under civilian administrations. The rest of the
occupied territories came under military administration divided according
to the three main army groups: North, Center, and South. From the point
of view of killing Jews, being under civilian or military administration
made very little difference.
The Germans found it necessary to cede administration to the local
population at least on the local level because they did not have the man-
power to do the job themselves. Most of those who assumed roles in the
local administration were older, respectable citizens who had received
their education in tsarist Russia. The Germans also created local police
forces, which was an ideological concession on their part given their
views of the local population, but they had no choice. They preferred
using native Germans, but they were not available in sufficient numbers
so they used individuals of every nationality living in those areas.
As time went on the Germans delegated the task of killing more and
more to Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, and Latvians. These col-
laborators made a great contribution to the machinery of killing because
they were in the best position to identify Jews. It is difficult to make gen-
eralizations about the different nationalities’ willingness to collaborate,
but as mentioned earlier, the native population was more willing to col-
laborate in areas that only came under Soviet authority in 1939. Recruits
from the native population received ideological training where the focal
point was to point out that Bolshevism was part of the Jewish global
conspiracy.
Auxiliaries recruited from the local population provided significant
help to the Einsatzgruppen in carrying out their mission by identify-
ing Jews. The first helpmates came from the anti-Soviet partisan move-
ments formed by the natives of the recently sovietized Baltic states. The
Germans reorganized them and incorporated them into their units. The
most enthusiastic collaborators were the ethnic Germans, who were

numerous in the Ukraine. Perhaps they felt that the best way to demon-
strate their newly discovered sense of national identity was to participate
in the antisemitic undertakings of their German brothers. They played
important roles as intermediaries with the local population, receiving
privileges in return, and came to identify with the occupiers. In Lithuania
they contributed to the murderous efficiency of the Nazis: Only about 10
percent of the 250,000 Jews survived the war.23 It is worth noting that,
although the Germans used Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Lat-
vians as auxiliaries, they made no attempt to use Poles. Undoubtedly
some Poles would have been happy to participate in the task of killing
Jews, but the Germans did not even consider them worthy to use as
helpers.
The occupiers frequently assigned the most unpleasant tasks to the
auxiliaries, for example, the shooting of children. On occasion the Ger-
mans were disturbed to find that their allies were interested not only in
killing Jews but also in looting their goods. The Germans wanted a com-
plete monopoly on abandoned Jewish property. In the first stage of killing
the Einsatzgruppen and the local population worked together. The col-
laborators would go from house to house to find their Jewish neighbors
and acquaintances, drag them out of their houses, and then the Germans
or auxiliary groups would shoot them.
The Victims
Approximately 2 million Jews lived in territories that came under Soviet
rule as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. These Jews were
much less acculturated than those who had lived in the Soviet Union
since the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Under Soviet rule the Jewish
population had experienced a great transformation, but the Polish and
the Baltic Jews were not part of this revolutionary change and were much
more likely to retain their pre-emancipation customs and professions.
The fact that they lived in small towns and other urban areas, rather
separate from the general population, made it easy for the Germans to
identify them. During the Soviet-German quasi-alliance from 1939 to
1941, the Soviet authorites did not publicize the Nazi treatment of Jews in
23 Jürgen Matthäus, “Key Aspects of German Anti-Jewish Policy,” in Lithuania and Jews:
The Holocaust Chapter. Washington, DC: Holocaust Museum, 2004, p. 17.
occupied Poland, and therefore the people had not been warned of the
danger to their lives posed by the Germans.24
In June 1941 the initial Soviet military response to the German invasion
was to attempt to stop the Germans as close to the border as possible, and
therefore the authorities made no effort to evacuate civilians. Stalin and
his associates feared that an evacuation might cause panic. After the first
few weeks the policy changed, and the government decided to evacuate
factories and valuable workers. Among these were a large number of
Jews. By this time the murderous intentions of the Nazis were all too
obvious, and hundreds of thousands of Jews managed to save themselves
by escaping to the East. Nevertheless, just at the time when Nazi policies
reached the stage of a willingness to murder all Jews, they encountered a
Jewry that was concentrated, easy to distiniguish, and wholly defenseless.
Although the mass killings began immediately, the German adminis-
tration, learning from experience, also extended to the newly occupied
territories the policy measures that it had used elsewhere; that is, surviv-
ing Jews were compelled to wear yellow stars and form Jewish councils.
As elsewhere, the task of the Jewish council was to relay orders to the
community and collect money and valuables for the Germans. In Soviet
territories where Jewish organizations had not existed and therefore there
was no preexisting leadership, the Nazis on occasion picked people up on
the streets and appointed them to be members of the council.25 Jews were
forbidden to leave their area of residence and had to register for forced
labor. The process of ghettoization also started immediately. Later the
yellow star and the concentration in ghettos made the task of the killers
easier. In many smaller communities, however, the killing was so quick
and thorough that there was no need for ghettos and councils.
As in Poland, the need for Jewish labor and the desire to kill the
Jews pulled the Nazis in different directions and they had to make com-
promises: Time and again they had to choose between killing Jews or
using their manpower. The selection of those who were allowed to stay
alive and work began immediately after the invasion. In the Kaunas
ghetto, for example, which was established in July and August 1941 and
contained approximately 30,000 Jews, the first selection took place just
24 An excellent source for how the Soviet authority treated the subject of mass extermi-
nation of Jews is Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the
Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
25 Ibid., pp. 118–19.
a few months later. In October 1941 the Nazis selected 10,000 people
to be being taken out of town and shot. Decisions of life and death were
made as casually as they would later at Auschwitz.26
One of the largest ghettos was in the Belorussian capital of Minsk,
which at the outset contained more than 90,000 Jews. The victims were
brought here from the small surrounding communities and also from
Germany. The Nazis immediately selected 2,000 “intellectuals” to be
killed. Jews provided slave labor, and periodically groups of workers were
taken to their place of execution. By the time the ghetto was liberated in
the fall of 1943 only a handful of Jews remained alive in Minsk, hiding in
the city. However, thousands managed to escape and joined the partisan
movement.27 According to Barbara Epstein, Jews in the eastern part of
Belarus found a greater degree of acceptance than in other occupied
territories.
The other important ghetto in ex-Soviet territory was in the capital of
Lithuania, Vilna. This city had an important place in Jewish history as a
center of learning. At its largest the ghetto had about 40,000 inhabitants;
this number was reduced to zero by the end of German occupation. The
Germans carried out “actions” – taking Jews out of the city to the nearby
forest of Ponary, where Lithuanian helpmates and Germans massacred
them.28 The remnants of Vilna Jewry were taken to one of the killing
camps, mostly in Sobibor. People were made to believe that they would
be taken to work and often volunteered to join those groups when in
fact they were sent to extermination camps. Because these ghettos were
established after mass extermination was in full force, ghetto societies
here, unlike in Poland, did not have the time to develop.
“Ordinary Men”
When was the decision made to kill all Jews? This question is one of the
most debated issues in the historiography of the Holocaust. Historians
have chosen different dates and connected them with different events. In
1933 Hitler and his followers aimed to get the Jews out of Germany, an
undertaking in which they were not very successful. After the outbreak
of the war they became more ambitious: They aimed to make the entirety
26 Matthäus, pp. 23–24.

27 Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Interna-
tionalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
28 Friedländer, pp. 325–26. Ponary became a site of killings, where mostly Jews but also
non-Jews were murdered.
of Europe free of Jews. That goal remained constant and did not vary;
only the means and the methods changed according to circumstances. In
the course of the war the goal of “getting rid of Jews” transmogrified
into killing them. Eight years of propaganda and persecution prepared
the ground for that shift. What would have appeared unthinkable some
years earlier became a natural next step.
June 1941 was a major turning point, marking the beginning of the
indiscriminate slaughter of human beings. The Einsatzgruppen crossed
the border into the Soviet Union with explicit instructions to kill commu-
nist functionaries, people’s commissars, and Jewish communists.29 The
Nazis managed to convince themselves that Bolsheviks and Jews were the
same and that Bolshevism was simply the organizational form of the Jew-
ish attempt to control the world. It followed that the partisan movement
was also the work of Jews, and therefore killing Jews was a necessary
step to bring order in the occupied areas. This conviction was a protec-
tion device: After all, the Nazis could tell themselves that they were not
killing innocent people, but were simply acting within the spirit of the
law of war. For example, Himmler in the fall of 1942 reported to Hitler
that 387,370 gang members (i.e., partisans) were killed and added that
among them there were 363,211 Jews.30 It is difficult for us to accept, and
yet it is likely true that Himmler genuinely believed what he was writing.
In reality, at that time the partisan movement was weak, and when there
were partisan groups, Jews played a very modest role in them: They were
either already dead or the local partisans were not willing to have them
in their group.
That at this point there still was no centrally designed policy to
kill all Jews is demonstrated by the fact that the commanders of the
Einsatzgruppen could still interpret their instructions slightly differently;
each detachment started to murder all Jews at a slightly different date.31
Although mass murder began within a short time after June 22, the Nazi
leadership had not yet crossed the last line.32 When Himmler visited
29 Peter Longerich, Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010, p. 190. The order came from Heydrich.
30 Westermann, p. 17. Westermann took the information from Klaus Michael Mallmann,
“Vom Fussvolk der Endlösung; Ordnungspolizei, Ostkrieg und Judenmord Telaviver,”
Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 26, p. 365.
31 Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration.
New York: Henry Holt, 2002, pp. 38–47.
32 Arno Mayer argues, in my opinion not convincingly, that the Nazi decision to commit
genocide was a result of a war that they were losing. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?
New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Minsk on August 14–15 he had a discussion with Nazi leaders, and it

was at that time that the officers came to understand what was expected
of them: to kill all Jews.33 The top leadership – Hitler, Himmler, and
Göring – had established a set of principles, and people in the field were
able to put them into action using their own initiative. The commanders
well understood that no one would ever be punished for carrying out their
instructions with excessive zeal. There was therefore no need for a single
order from Hitler; the local leaders knew what was expected of them
and acted accordingly. An interesting but perhaps irresolvable question
is whether the Nazi bloodlust increased with battlefield successes that
promised that the new era had already arrived or rather with the series of
military defeats, as Arno Mayer argued in his book, Why Did the Heavens
Not Darken? The Nazi bloodlust is better looked at as a descending spi-
ral, where one set of cruelties committed against a group of human beings
made it easier to take the next step, ultimately resulting in industrialized
killing.
Within a few weeks of the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen began to kill
every Jew they could capture – young and old, women and babies.34 The
difference between shooting defenseless and innocent men and shoot-
ing women was not very great. Nevertheless, the Germans still needed
to justify their actions at least to themselves. Because they were fight-
ing “partisans,” whom they considered the same as Jews, why was it
also necessary to kill women and children? Very soon, they concluded
that allowing women, children, and the old to survive would necessitate
the provision of food for them, however minimal.35 And if they let the
children survive to adulthood, they would want to take revenge. One of
the “ordinary men” rationalized to himself the murder of children by
claiming that, because their parents were already dead, killing them was
a mercy killing.36 Within a few months it became clear that the Soviet
regime would not immediately collapse and the war would be longer
than anticipated; therefore, it would be difficult to supply not only the
German army but also the civilian population with food. The idea that
Jews would be transported to some unspecified area further east had to
33 Arad, pp. 129–30.

34 Ordinary Men is the title of Christopher Browning’s very important book on the person-
nel of the Einsatzgruppen: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland. New York: Penguin, 2005.
35 Helmut Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS State. New York: Walker, 1965, p. 63.
36 Browning, p. 73.
be gradually abandoned. Indeed, the primary purpose of the invasion was

to strip away as much food and other resources from the occupied areas
as possible and use them for German needs. Given the Nazi mentality, it
was easier to kill people than to feed them.
The front moved very quickly and with it the small killing groups,
which meant that the killers had to operate under frontline conditions.
On occasion the Einsatzgruppen found themselves under enemy fire. As
mentioned earlier, this was the first time that the Wehrmacht became
directly involved with the killing operations. The soldiers accepted the
Nazi premise that Jews and Bolsheviks were the same and that Jews were
responsible for partisan warfare. However, what made this proposition
all the more absurd was that at the beginning of the occupation, there was
practically no partisan movement. In fact, the local population was deeply
hostile to the Red Army. By the time the partisan movement became a
serious threat to the Germans, very few Jews were left alive.
Yitzhak Arad in his book distinguished three waves of killing. During
the first months after the invasion, the German army progressed quickly,
and the Einsatzgruppen operated often in frontline conditions; therefore
the killings were inevitably somewhat haphazard. It also took time to
reach the decision that all Jews were to be killed. The killers operated
in small groups and inefficiently: Although they destroyed some Jewish
communities were destroyed, they left others more or less untouched. The
Nazis were just learning their job. The region that had been under Soviet
rule until recently had the largest Jewish population and it was here where
the Germans made the fastest progress in killing Jews. Once they reached
territories that had been Soviet before the outbreak of World War II, the
Jewish population was less numerous and Jews had better opportunities
to escape.
By this time the Jews in the Soviet Union had some knowledge about
what Germans were doing in the territories they had occupied and so
they took every opportunity to escape further east. The number of vic-
tims therefore varied from month to month. When the German advance
was stopped or slowed, the Einsatzgruppen could return and return and
finish their job. They raided several Jewish communities more than once.
The Einsatzgruppen regularly sent reports to Berlin about the number
of people they managed to kill. One of the absurd elements of German
behavior was to take Jewish hostages and to execute them if the local pop-
ulation engaged in acts of resistance, such as working with the partisans
or sabotage. Such a policy went contrary to the conviction of the Germans
that people everywhere hated Jews because, if that was the case, no hos-
tile activity on the part of the population would be deterred by holding
Jewish hostages. It was just one more excuse for killing Jews.
The Einsatzgruppen also operated in areas where German allies, the
Hungarians and Romanians, and not the German army, were the occu-
piers. The Romanians not only were willing collaborators but also per-
formed the killing themselves with such enthusiasm and brutality that
even the German were taken aback. As mentioned earlier, Hungarian
officers were much less willing to collaborate.37
After routinizing their operations, the Einsatzgruppen managed to kill
approximately 100,000 people per month. The procedure was to gather
Jews, sometimes by ruse, and to force them to march outside of the town
or village. Usually the men were taken first and marched through a police
cordon to already prepared graves. However, at times Jews were forced
to dig the graves in which they would be buried. They were ordered to
undress, and later their clothes were sorted and sent to Germany. Then
the victims were shot and fell into their graves. Some commanders chose
to use concentrated fire from a certain distance to make the task psy-
chologically less burdensome, but others simply shot people individually
in the neck. On occasion people who were still alive were buried with
the dead. In another favored method – the so-called sardine method – a
group of Jews were forced to lie down in a ditch, shot, and then the next
group was ordered to lie on top of them to be murdered. This method
of killing was “invented” by a leader of an Einsatzkommando, Friedrich
Jeckeln, a subordinate of Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppe A.38 In all these
actions, the victims always vastly outnumbered the killers, and yet there
are no recorded incidents in which any of the executioners were killed.
Although the killings took place outside of the city limits, no systematic
efforts were made to conceal them: German soldiers and the inhabitants
of the region were well aware of what was going on and on occasion
there were spectators. One would assume that the public’s response to
the atrocities varied: Some may have welcomed the ultimate removal of
Jews, whereas others were likely shocked by the behavior of the occupying
troops and may have realized that if the Germans were capable of the
mass murder of Jews they might also be capable of killing Slavs to realize
their racial utopia.
37 Hilberg, Vol. 1, pp. 311–14.

38 Gertrud Shneider, “The Two Ghettos in Riga,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union,
p. 183.
The size of the Sonderkommandos varied according to the size of the

town’s Jewish population. Often there were no more than four soldiers in
each one. Jews were often caught unawares and had no means to resist. In
addition, the more enterprising and stronger Jews had already fled, leaving
the elderly and the less well connected, which facilitated the Germans’
ability to kill so many in such a short time. At times the Germans used
ruses, attracting people by offering them “registration work” and then
killing them.39
The massacre outside of Kiev at Babi Yar was a typical incidence of
Einsatskommando violence. In September 1941 NKVD (the Soviet secret
police) agents managed to blow up some buildings that Germans had
occupied. The German response was savage. The Nazis posted notices
requiring Jews to appear for “resettlement.” They were taken out of the
city where between 33,000 to 34,000 were massacred. The action was
carried out by a small Einsatskommando belonging to Einsatgruppe C,
with the support of an Ukrainian auxiliary unit. The shootings lasted for
two days, and the murderers were relieved every few hours. This was the
largest massacre that the Germans carried out to this point.40
At the end of 1941 the pace of killing slowed because of the German
need for Jewish workers. However, by that time almost a half-million
Jews had been murdered. Ultimately the Germans killed more women
than men because many men served in the Red Army and were not
available as victims. It is estimated that during the first half-year of the
Soviet-German war the Nazis killed more Jews than Soviet soldiers in
combat.41 As the German armies moved east, they encountered ever fewer
Jews. This was partially because Jews were most heavily concentrated in
the western regions of the Soviet Union, and perhaps more importantly
because Jews had opportunities to escape east ahead of the Germans.
In the second stage of killing, after the winter of 1941–42, the Ein-
satzgruppen retraced their steps and found Jews whom they had initially
39 Hilberg, Vol. 1, p. 326.

40 Because of the magnitude of the bloodletting and because it came to be the clearest
example of German methods and viciousness, Babi Yar came to play a major role in
Holocaust remembrances. Evgenii Yevtushenko wrote a famous poem on this topic and
Anatolii Kuznetsov published a documentary novel in 1966. It is, of course, also widely
discussed in the historical literature. See, for example, Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands:
Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010, pp. 202–04.
41 General G. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century.
London: Greenhill, 1997, p. 96. It is also quoted in a review article, “Holocaust and the
knowledge of murder,” by Peter Fritsche in The Journal of Modern History, September
2008, p. 598.
overlooked. That stage lasted until the first German defeats, starting with
the battle of Stalingrad and continuing until the liberation of all Soviet
territories. With these defeats the desire to kill seemed to become even
stronger.
The reactions of the German troops themselves to the killing of Jews
must have varied. The reoccurring justification for their actions that they
heard from their leaders was that Jews were extremely dangerous, they
were behind every act of resistance, and it was necessary to take “harsh
measures” to preserve the security of the rear. The fact that this justifica-
tion was absurd on the face of it did not mean that people did not believe
it. The soldiers needed a justification and they received it. It is remarkable
how frequently the Nazis made up completely imaginary Jewish attacks
on German troops to justify mass killings; if there was one group in
the occupied territories that presented no danger to the German army,
that group was Jews. Yet it was not sufficient justification to claim that
German killed Jews because they were inferior.
Many decades later it is very difficult for us to understand how the
killers viewed their actions. How could normal human beings justify their
murder of innocent people, including children? We can only speculate:
Diaries are not available, and later confessions, even if sincere, are not
helpful. Presumably the majority regarded what they were doing as a
job and did what they were asked to do. They were satisfied that the
responsibility did not rest on their shoulders. It is beyond dispute that the
murderers were average Germans who found themselves in circumstances
in which they were expected to carry out hideous tasks. They must have
been glad that at wartime they were assigned to duties that were not
dangerous, as opposed to serving on the frontline. They could have asked
for transfers, but few did. It was easier to kill than to show themselves
weak and squeamish in front of their comrades. Yet some must have
been taken aback by the suffering of human beings for which they were
responsible.
In the process of killing Jews, many of them came to hate their victims.
Most likely the killings came first and murderous antisemitism followed,
as they had to believe that Jews deserved what they got: If Jews were as
vicious as they were made to believe, then they deserved every punish-
ment. Some people who may have started out as average human beings
in the process of killings became sadists. However, sadists were in a small
minority. For them, it was not enough to kill; to amuse themselves and
relieve their boredom, they had to humiliate their victims and make them
suffer.
We know that the authorities were concerned about the psychological

consequences of the killings on the perpetrators. The Nazis, who had a
tendency to feel sorry for themselves, tended to exaggerate the impact of
killings on the killers. One of the reasons for the introduction of the gas
chambers was to make the job of killers easier. The officers generously
supplied their soldiers with alcohol, and that probably made a difference.
On occasion the soldiers were drunk when they carried out their work.
The Nazi leadership did not look on with favor the exhibition of extreme
sadism: The killers were not supposed to enjoy their work. Himmler
clearly articulated the views of the top leadership in a famous speech
in Poznan on October 4, 1943, and it is worth quoting his remarks at
length:
I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now
very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss
this publicly. . . . Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident
fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked about it. Every one
of us was horrified, and yet every one clearly understood that we would do it
next time, when the order is given and when it becomes necessary.
I am now referring to the evacuation of Jews, to the extermination of the
Jewish People. This is something that is easily said: “The Jewish People will
be exterminated”, says every Party member, “this is very obvious, it is in our
program – elimination of Jews, extermination, a small matter.” And then they
turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew.
They say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But
none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when
100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000.
To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person –
with exceptions due to human weaknesses – has made us tough, and is a glorious
chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult
it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble
rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the
hardships of the war.42
Finding justification for the killings was both essential and easily
achieved. It was also so powerful that, when it was all over, when the
killers were held responsible for their actions in the postwar trials and then
later as many of them were reintegrated into peaceful life, they continued
to be convinced that they had done nothing wrong.43 We can take it for
granted that extremely few people were bothered by their conscience.
42 The speech survives in a gramophone recording in the National Archives and is now
available on the Internet.
43 Browning, pp. 143–58.
The killers had to believe in the righteousness of their cause in order

to retain their psychological equilibrium.
In 1941 and 1942, the years when the largest number of Jews were
murdered, the Nazis made no great effort to hide their activities. The
situation changed as the fortunes of the war changed. As the Red Army
began to reconquer territories held by the Nazis, the German leadership
became aware that the discovery of mass graves would be a blow to
their propaganda efforts. Probably they remembered how their discovery
of the Katyn graves had unleashed a very negative international reac-
tion. Although their efforts to erase the evidence already started in the
autumn of 1942, the real turning point was their defeat in the battle at
Kursk in July and August 1943; that is when people in the SS leadership
started to consider that the great war would be lost. From this point on,
while they continued to kill Jews, they made great efforts to cover their
tracks.
Paul Blobel, the leader of a Sonderkommando within Einsatzgruppe C
and the one responsible for the Babi Yar massacre, was given the task of
erasing the evidence. The undertaking came to be referred to as Aktion
1005. Earlier Jews had been forced to burn the corpses, and after their
work was completed they themselves were killed44 : It was important that
none should escape and later give testimony. Blobel’s innovation was to
exhume the bodies from mass graves, layer them with firewood, douse
everything with gasoline, and finally set the entire pile on fire. The Jewish
workers also had in their service a bone-crushing machine. The residue
then was reburied, the ground flattened, and the area replanted. Given the
number of victims and the numerous sites of the executions, covering up
the evidence turned out to be very difficult. As the Soviet Army advanced
the soldiers found ample evidence of Nazi mass murder.
We do not know the exact number of Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities
in the Soviet Union. Neither the Germans nor the Soviets ever attempted
to come up with precise numbers. Even all the places of executions sites
have not been established, and it seems they will never be. Calculations are
based on census figures before and after the war, although not all Jews
were registered as Jewish. It is, however, unquestionably true that the
overwhelming percentage of the victims were Polish and Soviet citizens.
The number of victims who had lived in Soviet territory (including regions
incorporated between 1939 and 1941) is estimated to be as high as two
44 Arad, p. 348.
and a half million.45 Soviet Jews suffered the greatest losses, and it was
in Soviet territory that their chances of survival were the lowest. It was
there that Jews found the least help from their neighbors, and it was there
that they found it most difficult to participate in resistance movements.
Less than 5 percent of Jews survived years of German occupation.
45 I base this on the calculations of Arad, p. 525.

9
The Romanian Holocaust
In every country the Germans found people who were willing to deliver
Jews to them, knowing fully well the consequences of their actions. Yet,
except for Romania, no country murdered its Jews unless it came under
direct German occupation. Bulgaria, for example, was a German ally but
was not occupied, and its Jewry survived.1
Aside from Germany no nation took such an active role in the murder
of its Jews as Romania. The story of the Romanian Holocaust therefore
should be understood not simply as a part of the Nazi attempt to exter-
minate the Jewry, but as a parallel event: The Romanian government
carried out mass murder on its own. Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Poles
might have been just as antisemitic as Romanians, and indeed their citi-
zens did murder Jews in a particularly brutal fashion when they had the
opportunity to do so, but these countries had no sovereign governments
that could take an active role in mass murder. Therefore the number of
their victims was much smaller than that in Romania. Of course, with-
out German inspiration and the Nazi example, the Romanian massacres
would not have happened. Nevertheless, although other German satel-
lite governments contributed to the Holocaust by delivering Jews to the
German killing machine, it was only Romanians who, on their own and
following orders from the highest authorities in their government, did the
killing themselves. (Paradoxically, of all countries of Eastern Europe with
the exception of Bulgaria it was in Romania that the largest percentage
of Jews survived.)
1 Not including the recently occupied Macedonia and Thrace. Because the government did
not consider these Jews to be Bulgarians, they gave them up to the Germans.
176
The Romanian Holocaust 177
Jews of Romania
Independent Romania came into existence in the second half of the
nineteenth century with the unification of its two provinces, Moldavia
and Wallachia, and the gradual lifting of Ottoman and Russian control.
Romania was a peasant country with a weak landowning aristocracy
and practically no native bourgeoisie. Jews, who had been present since
time immemorial, played the same economic roles there as they played
elsewhere in pre-industrial Europe: They acted as petty traders, money
lenders, innkeepers, and intermediaries between frequently absent land-
lords and the extremely poor peasantry. (Romania, for example, had the
highest infant mortality rate in interwar Europe.) Jews, poor as they were,
nevertheless played a considerable role in the economic life of the nation.
The Jewish communities in the two provinces differed greatly. In Wal-
lachia, especially in Bucharest, there existed a comparatively well-off and
well-integrated, small Sephardic community. In contrast, the Ashkenazi
Yiddish-speaking Jews of Moldavia were less well integrated and much
more numerous and poorer than their coreligionists in Wallachia. Many
of the Moldavian Jews had emigrated relatively recently from even poorer
Galicia and Bessarabia, and from the point of view of Romanian nation-
alists they were doubly alien. However, in Romania, as in other European
countries, the nationalists consistently exaggerated the number of new
settlers, frequently characterising the migration as a “Jewish invasion.”
In the old kingdom, before unification, Jews were not emancipated
(i.e., they were not citizens). The Congress of Berlin in 1878 made the
recognition of Romanian independence conditional on granting equal
political rights to all citizens. Nationalists regarded such intervention as
interference in their domestic affairs and blamed Jews for their humil-
iation. Arguably such outside pressure worsened the position of Jews
and only increased antisemitism. The nationalists resisted the Congress’s
order, and the government policy was that Jews could be admitted into
citizenship only on an individual basis. The Romanian government made
conditions for nationalization so difficult that only a few hundred Jews
had qualified to become citizens before World War I.
As a result of the Versailles Treaty, Romania in 1918 acquired so
much territory – Transylvania, Banat, and Bukovina from the defunct
Austro-Hungarian Empire; Dobruja from Bulgaria; and Bessarabia from
Russia – that it could be regarded as a new entity. In the interwar period
Romania became the home of the third largest Jewry in Europe, after
the Soviet Union and Poland, as the number of Jews more than tripled
(from 240,000 in 1912 to 757,000 in 1930). However, Jews received the

rights of citizenship only because of the pressure exercised by the Western
powers, and the Romanian state made no effort to assimilate its newly
acquired and large Jewry.
With all its new lands, Romania came to have the most heterogeneous
Jewish population anywhere in the world: It is more accurate to speak of
the “Jews of Romania” rather than Romanian Jews.2 During the interwar
years, Romanian Jewry remained fragmented. There was no central lead-
ership, and the different communities had little contact with one another.
The gap between the poor, Yiddish-speaking Jewry in Bessarabia and the
highly acculturated, Hungarian-speaking Jewry in Transylvania and in
Banat remained wide.
The newly acquired large Jewish population in Transylvania identified
with Hungary; Jews from Bessarabia, though they had little reason to love
the defunct Russian Empire, were nevertheless drawn to Russian culture;
and Jews from Bukovina were deeply influenced by German culture. Jews
showed little desire to acquire Romanian identity. They regarded Roma-
nians as a peasant people, who had little to offer that they would find
attractive. According to the census of 1930, only a tiny minority claimed
Romanian as opposed to Jewish nationality.3 This was exactly the oppo-
site in Hungary where most Jews insisted that they were Hungarians.
As a consequence Romanian nationalists, unlike in nineteenth-century
Hungary, perceived Jews not as possible allies, but as enemies, a poten-
tial fifth column. They feared for the integrity and security of the state.
The more committed one was to nationalism, the more antisemitic
one was likely to be, and so the strength of nationalist commitment
came to be correlated with antisemitism. Highly regarded Romanian
intellectuals, such as the historians and statesmen Nicholas Jorga and
Alexander Cuza, spoke the language of violent antisemitism. In no other
country were the outstanding intellectuals so identified with extreme
antisemitism. For example, Hungary had a significant liberal tradition,
some nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals looked favorably on Jews,
and even in Poland there was a political current, associated with Joseph
Pilsudski, which considered it possible to integrate Jews. In fact, the great-
est Polish poet, Adam Miczkiewicz, was a philosemite. In Romania, by
contrast, Jews had no friends or allies.
2 Raphael Vago, p. 29. in Randolph Braham (ed.), The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 35.
3 Raphael Vago makes this point in “Romanian Jewry during the Interwar Period,” p. 35.
It was the misfortune of the Romanian Jews that they were from the
outset regarded not only as aliens but also as dangerous aliens who would
side with those who would break the Romanian state apart. Indeed, when
the opportunity came, the Hungarian-speaking Jewry in Transylvania
welcomed the return of Northern Transylvania to Hungary in 1940, even
though the reactionary Horthy regime was by no means a friend of the
Jews. Similarly, Jews in Bessarabia were less dismayed by the province
being reincorporated into the Soviet Union than the other inhabitants of
the region.
In the interwar years there was a confluence of sources of anti-
semitism.4 Nationalists also intensely resented that the Jewish minor-
ity, at least in Transylvania, was highly urbanized, possessed much more
education, and was much richer than the surrounding Romanian popu-
lation. The Hungarian nobility was glad to leave the task of industrial-
ization to Jews, but the small Romanian commercial class regarded Jews
as unwelcome competitors. Jews were excluded from agriculture, as else-
where, but individual Jews frequently acted as agents of landlords and
consequently the peasants wrongly saw them as their exploiters. Roma-
nian industrialization was not far enough advanced to offer the economic
opportunities found in other Eastern European countries did, and tak-
ing advantage of economic opportunities was everywhere a step toward
acculturation.
During World War II the heterogeneous nature of Romanian Jewry
would have far-reaching consequences. Although antisemites regarded all
Jews as alien by definition, within that category, they made distinctions:
Some aliens were more alien than others. We may make the generalization
that during the Holocaust every country was willing to give up its “for-
eign” Jews. Even the Germans killed foreign Jews before killing their own.
There are recorded instances when Germans found it more difficult to kill
German Jews than Eastern European Jews. In the Romanian Holocaust
the distinction between “foreign” and native Jews would have decisive
consequences. The Romanians first killed Jews who had come under their
4 Stephen Fischer-Galati argues against Hannah Arendt’s view that Romania was the most
antisemitic country in Eastern Europe. “The Legacy of Antisemitism,” in Randolph
Braham (ed.), The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994. pp. 1–29. Admittedly it is difficult to establish the depth and breadth of
antisemitism, but there can be no question that the Romanians murdered more Jews than
any other nation with the obvious exception of Germany. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1977, p. 190. Most
historians would take Hannah Arendt’s side in this disagreement.
authority recently; by the time they had turned to their native Jews, the
Germans were losing the war and cooperation with them seemed less and
less attractive: The native Jews were thus spared.
In the interwar period, as one would have expected, Romanian foreign
policy makers sided with those powers that wanted to defend the existing
territorial arrangements. The Versailles Treaty had satisfied the most
ambitious nationalist goals by bringing all Romanian speakers into one
country. From the surrounding countries Romania had acquired valuable
territories, but those lands also came with various ethnic and national
groups and consequently irredentism was a genuine threat. Indeed, the
central aim of Hungarian foreign policy was to recover Transylvania, and
the only territorial loss that the Soviet Union had refused to recognize was
Bessarabia.
Initially Romanian foreign policy was based on its alliance with France.
However, as the Western powers seemed incapable of defending their own
interests, Romanian policy became increasingly oriented toward Ger-
many. Reasons of geography, economics, and ideology brought Romania
into the German sphere. Small Eastern European countries had no choice
but to come to terms with rising German power.
In its political development Romania was similar to the rest of Eastern
Europe. Initially governments that claimed to be democratic gave place
to autocratic governments everywhere (Czechoslovakia being the major
exception). Romanian politics and the role of antisemitism within it were
fundamentally similar to those of the neighboring countries. Extreme
right-wing forces became increasingly strong. There were attacks on indi-
vidual Jews, including murder, and the courts refused to punish the guilty
ones. Aggressive voices were heard calling for the exclusion of Jews from
the army and the professions, as well as limiting their role in the econ-
omy. The Nazi example enthused many Romanian right-wing politicians.
Romanian antisemities, like their ideological comrades in Germany and
Poland in the late 1930s, spoke of forcibly settling Jews in Magadascar.
The nationalists believed that the greatest danger to Romania came from
the Soviet Union; Romanian antisemites as elsewhere associated Jews
with communism and therefore regarded them as their most dangerous
enemies. As elsewhere university students were particularly antisemitic,
wanting to restrict Jewish students’ access to universities by introducing
a numerus clausus.
The 1930s was the decade of fascism. In Romania, as in Hungary, there
was a political struggle between the series of short-lived governments
and extreme right-wing parties, which took a more violent antisemitic
stance. The governments were gradually pushed to the right to main-

tain their power and accepted more and more of the program of the
extremists. Romania came to have the strongest fascist party in Eastern
Europe. In fact it was the only fascist party capable of coming to power
without external help even if for only a short time. The fascist party of
Corneliu Codreanu operated under several names, such as the “League
of Archangel Michael” and “Everything for the Fatherland,” but the
best known was the “Iron Guard.” The Guardists did not like the word
“party” because that indicated to them a willingness to accept the rules of
the existing political order. They preferred the appellation “movement.”
Although the group rejected the parliamentary order, it participated in
elections and gained increasing strength, attracting ever more members
throughout the decade.
Fascist parties everywhere shared many traits and ideological concerns.
The emphasis on “purification,” racism, and placing the golden age in
the past; the open espousal of terror; the repudiation of modernity; the
distaste for parliamentary democracy and liberalism; and the myth of the
charismatic leader characterized every fascist party. The Romanian ver-
sion included all of the above elements, but also had its own peculiarities.
Its ideology was confused even in comparison with that of other fascist
parties.
The defining characteristic of the Romanian version of fascism was its
religiosity and mysticism. Orthodox Christianity heavily influenced the
Romanian version of fascism, and the Orthodox Church took a partic-
ularly vicious antisemitic stance. The Romanian form of fascism, unlike
the Nazi variety, regularly invoked Christian images.5 The Iron Guard
aimed to achieve spiritual salvation for the nation, a nation that it defined
biologically. The great enemy, not surprisingly, was the Jew, a mythical
figure standing in direct opposition to everything in which a genuine
fascist believed.6 The Jews stood between God and Romania. Codreanu
even developed a fanciful theology that maintained that contemporary
Jewry had nothing to do with the biblical nation into which Jesus was
born. He claimed to have been visited by the archangel Michael, and he
predicted the immediate second coming of Christ. The Iron Guard found
the essence of Romanianism in the peasant way of life and regarded the
5 Jean Ancel, “The Christian regimes of Romania and Jews, 1940–1942,” Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, Spring 1993, pp. 14–29.
6 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1995.
goal of the movement to be defense of the peasantry from aliens and from
modernity in general. The Guardists, to demonstrate their commitment
to the land, wore a small sack of Romanian soil around their neck.7
In spite of its pro-peasant ideology, however, the movement attracted
a large share of the intelligentsia, who could not find employment in
1930s Romania.8 Unemployed university graduates demanded radical
change, and that could be expected only from the right of the political
spectrum. The Iron Guard’s political strategy was based on terror aimed
at Jews, politicians, and policemen. Codreanu’s legionaries assassinated
politicians and carried out violent acts against Jews – burning synagogues
and calling for the physical extermination of Jews. It was, except for the
Nazis, the most violent fascist movement.9
Although Condreanu’s antisemitism found fertile ground in interwar
Romania, his extremism and attacks on politicians were bound to create
conflict with the ever-changing governments. Codreanu was repeatedly
arrested and his movement outlawed, but the Iron Guard continued to
exert influence. Time was on its side.
The political system was dysfunctional; the series of governments, con-
trolled by the traditional political parties, were corrupt and clearly inca-
pable of solving the problems of the nation. Just as in Hungary attacks
on the corrupt and reactionary governments came from the right rather
than the left, which was discredited because of the great fear of Soviet
communism. King Carol II had considerable power and was not hesi-
tant in using it. Although the right considered him to be oriented to the
West, King Carol II was influenced by fascist movements in other Euro-
pean countries. Mussolini particularly impressed him; just like the Italian
leader, he wanted to be a Duce.
Politics in the years before World War II was turbulent everywhere in
Eastern Europe and in Romania particularly so. Conflict was inevitable
between the terrorist group led by Codreanu and royal ambitions. The
governments that the king installed fought against the Iron Guard partly
7 J. R. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1994,

pp. 113–15.
8 Eugen Weber, “The Men of the Archangel,” Journal of Contemporary History, 1966,
Vol. 1, pp. 101–26. Weber points out that the Iron Guard attracted above all the unem-
ployed youth.
9 On Romanian fascism see Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others:
A History of Fascism in Hungary and Rumania. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press,
1970.
by incorporating its program, such as taking measures against Jews, and

partly by repression. In 1937 Carol appointed the openly pro-Nazi Octa-
vian Goga as premier, who introduced anti-Jewish legislation resulting in
the loss of citizenship for about 225,000 people.10 Next year the coun-
try abandoned the pretense of democracy. After considerable political
turmoil, Carol dismissed the government, named himself dictator, and
had the Iron Guard outlawed and Codreanu arrested. The charismatic
leader and several of his followers were killed “while they were trying to
escape.” (Actually, they were garroted before they were shot.)
This act, however, was by no means the end of the Romanian fascist
party. Although the king was suspected of being pro-Jewish because his
mistress Elena Lupescu had Jewish relatives on her father’s side, the two
years of royal dictatorship did not improve the position of Jews. On the
contrary, additional anti-Jewish measures were introduced that aimed at
the further exclusion of Jews from the economic life of the nation. The
legislation made distinctions among Jews: The small number of Jews who
had had citizenship in before unification were favored, and those Jews
who had lived in territories acquired in 1918 were placed in the most
disadvantaged position. As in other right-wing or fascist countries, the
laws defined Jews according to race rather than religion (i.e., an earlier
conversion did not change their status).
King Carol’s dictatorship ended as a consequence of the great changes
that were happening in the early years of World War II. In spite of the
country’s pro-German orientation, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact enabled
the Soviet Union to reclaim Bessarabia and occupy Northern Bukovina.
Even more traumatic for the Romanians, Germans rewarded Hungary
with Northern Transylvania, and the Bulgarians reclaimed Southern
Dobruja. As a result of such defeats Carol was forced to abdicate in
favor of his 18-year-old son Michael and appoint his political opponent,
General Ion Antonescu, a man who had been close to the Iron Guard,
as premier. Indeed, Antonescu quickly allied himself with the Iron Guard
then led by Horia Sima, who was appointed deputy premier.
The truncation of Romania greatly increased violent antisemitism.
Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina reacted to the political changes much
as they did in Eastern Poland and in the Baltic states at the same time:
They were unquestionably less hostile to the new masters than were
10 Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania,
1940–1944. London: Palgrave, 2006, p. 34.
their non-Jewish neighbors, and some actually welcomed the new regime.
Yet the Soviet authorities by no means rewarded Jews for this welcome:
Proportionately as many Jews were exiled to Siberia as non-Jews. In
Bessarabia the Soviets installed a new leadership that included 505 Roma-
nians and 69 Jews, implying that Jews were represented in the leadership
below their proportions of the inhabitants of the region.11
The fascists were looking for scapegoats for their national humilia-
tion and found them in the Jews. The loss of Bukovina and Bessarabia
immediately resulted in pogroms that were similar in brutality to the
1941 pogroms conducted farther to the north. Thousands of Jews were
tortured, hundreds were murdered, and women were raped; their houses
were looted. The differences between these pogroms and what happened
in Poland and in the Baltic states were that there were no Germans present
(therefore we do not have the same photographic evidence), and most
importantly, soldiers, led by their officers, participated in the brutality.
Most of the murders took place in Moldavia.
One of the first and most atrocious pogroms took place in the
north Moldavian town of Dorohoi on July 1, 1940. Nothing illustrated
more accurately the mindless brutality and inhumanity of Romanian
antisemitism than this episode. It took place before the Iron Guard and
Antonescu came to power. A Christian and a Jewish soldier had both died
as a consequence of an armed encounter with Soviet soldiers at the time
of the Romanian withdrawal from Bukovina.12 The Jewish soldier was
to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. The mourners, marking the death
of someone who had died in the service of his country, were set upon by
other soldiers and in the course of the ensuing pogrom 100 to 150 Jews
were killed.13 This pogrom and others in the summer of 1940 support the
argument that the pogroms that took place the following year in German-
occupied Eastern Europe were also spontaneous and that Germans were
not always needed to massacre Jews.
The period in which the Iron Guard shared power was a time of
unchecked, disorganized terror – of brutal murder, looting, expropria-
tions, and pogroms claiming thousands of victims. The Iron Guard also
took revenge on its political opponents. Ironically, one of the victims of
11 Ibid., p. 17.
12 At this time the army still had Jewish soldiers.
13 Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under
the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 41–42.
the terror was Nicholas Jorga, who was a forefather of Romanian fascism
but who disagreed with some of the Guard’s actions. However, the lead-
ers of the Jewish community could still turn for protection to Antonescu,
who was concerned about the consequences of disorder and the harm
that the killing of Jews caused to the economy. At this point no plan yet
existed for the total elimination of Romanian Jewry, although the govern-
ment continued to introduce ever more stringent antisemitic laws aimed
at squeezing Jews out of the economy and of the professions. However,
these laws had a detrimental impact on the economy, and the country did
not have the skilled manpower to take over the jobs that Jews were no
longer allowed to hold. The government was therefore repeatedly forced
to make compromises.
Although it was the result of German policy that led to the dismem-
berment of the state and a loss of one third of its territory, nevertheless it
became clear to the Romanians that their only ally was Nazi Germany.
Indeed, until August 1944 Romania remained a most useful and faithful
ally.
The country was descending into murderous anarchy, and for the
Jews it was as if Kristallnacht had existed for many months. The Iron
Guard also murdered politicians and intellectuals. One of the causes of
the discord between the Iron Guard and Antonescu’s supporters was the
unchecked terror for which the Iron Guard was responsible. This discord
culminated in an attempt by the Iron Guard to overthrow Antonescu on
January 22–24, 1941, accompanied by a three-day murderous rampage
targeting Jews and political enemies. Antonescu successfully resisted the
attempt aimed against him and responded by putting down his enemies
with utmost brutality. The Germans sympathized with the Romanian
fascists, but nothing was more important than the security of the Ploesti
oilfields, which they felt would be best enhanced by having a stable gov-
ernment in Bucharest that could act as a reliable ally. The Nazis never
cared much for the ideological purity of their allies: They cared more
about loyalty, reliability, and stability.
Antonescu had met with Hitler in November 1940 and once again on
January 14, 1941, shortly before the attempted coup. The Romanian chief
must have made a very favorable impression on Hitler, who regarded the
general as his most reliable and capable ally in Eastern Europe. Antonescu
understood that the Nazis would have no objections to his destroying the
Iron Guard. He also learned to his great pleasure that in the near future
the Germans would attack the Soviet Union and that Romania would be
expected to participate in that war, which would enable it to regain some

of the lost territories.14
Romania at War
By the time of the outbreak of the real war on June 22, 1941, the Romani-
ans had killed more Jews than any other nation with the obvious exception
of Nazi Germany. However, the Romanian Holocaust had just begun.
Between his victory over the Iron Guard in January 1941 and August
23, 1944, when he was overthrown, the dominant figure of the regime
was Ion Antonescu, who was given unlimited power by then-King
Michael. The young king, unlike his father, was content to be a fig-
urehead. Antonescu named himself Conducator (i.e., Führer) and estab-
lished an avowedly dictatorial system. Historians have debated whether
Antonescu’s regime could also be described as fascist, but the answer to
this question is not important. The regime was murderous and openly
anti-democratic, but it was not totalitarian in that voices contrary to that
of the ruler could be heard. Even when the regime was at its strongest,
at the time of military victories, some individuals spoke up against the
extraordinary atrocities carried out by their countrymen.
Antonescu was supported by his distant relative, Michael Antonescu,
who was foreign minister and second in command. The Conducator was
a racist who had a vision of a Romania freed of “aliens.” His vision
(paradoxically accomplished decades after his death under very different
circumstances) was of a “racially” pure Romania. As with the Nazis,
antisemitism was a central component of his ideology. The Romanian
leader would have liked to get rid of all foreigners, but it was only Jews
(and Gypsies) whom he was willing to murder. Jews were special.15
Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, he wanted to make
his country free of Jews without exactly specifying how. He implied the
goal of extermination, but never used that word. He and his comrades
14 Jean Ancel, “The German-Romanian relationship and the Final Solution,” Holocaust
and Genocide Studies, Fall 2005, Vol. 19, Number 2, pp. 257–58. According to Ancel,
Hitler told Antonescu of his desire to get rid of all the Jews in Europe. However, it
is unlikely that Hitler told him anything that he had not said before concerning Jews.
Undoubtedly what Hitler said only implied mass murder.
15 In addition to killing Jews, the leaders in Bucharest were also planning to get rid of
the Roma; however, anti-Roma prejudice was not at the center of their worldview.
Approximately 20,000 Roma were deported beyond the Dniester River, more or less as
an afterthought. In the course of the war, approximately 11,000 died.
managed to project everything they hated onto Jews. Just like other mur-
derous antisemites, they made no distinctions between Jews and Bolshe-
viks. At least during the early stages of the war, killing Jews had almost
the same importance as fighting the Red Army. Of course, killing Jews
was much easier than facing Soviet soldiers who had guns in their hands.
Antonescu’s vision of a unified, homogeneous nation at the time was not
unique. His desire to get rid of all “aliens” was no more unrealistic than
the Nazi plan of emptying much of Poland of Poles. His characteriza-
tion of “Jewish Bolsheviks” as the greatest enemy of the nation was not
different from the fervently held ideas of the Nazis.
Yet Romania was not Germany. Instead of the highly acculturated
German Jews, the country had mostly an Eastern type of Jewry. This
heterogeneous group, however, included not only very poor people but
also professionals without whose expertise the backward country could
not function. Paradoxically, while Romanians were killing hundreds of
thousands of Jews, in other parts of the country individual Jews continued
to play significant roles in the nation’s economy and in the professions.
The leaders in Bucharest were aware of the economic consequences of
expelling the Jews. For example, they provided the province of Bukovina
with extra funds to compensate it for the loss of Jewish expertise and
manpower. Before the evacuation from Bukovina began, the government
decided to allow about 20,000 privileged Jews to remain there because
of their usefulness to the province. The local authorities were instructed
to draw up lists of those who would be exempted from evacuation. (The
Romanians chose to use the word “evacuation” rather than deportation.)
These lists included war veterans, people important in the economic life
of the nation, and some groups of professionals and intellectuals. They
also provided opportunities for corruption: Jews were able to buy their
freedom and ultimately save their own lives.16 The murderous nature of
the regime was somewhat alleviated by corruption. Such opportunities
rarely existed in Nazi Germany.
Once the war started the killings took place mostly in the newly occu-
pied provinces. One of the most brutal and largest massacre occurred
in the Moldavian city of Jassy during the anarchic days soon after the
war began. The city’s population of approximately 100,000 inhabitants
included 50,000 Jews.17 It had the longest and strongest tradition of
antisemitism of any Romanian city. Romanian and German troops were
16 Deletant, p. 157.
17 Ioanid, p. 63.
gathered there to prepare for the invasion when the killings began. The
pretext for the officially inspired pogrom was that Jews were helping
Soviet parachutists and giving signals to Russian airplanes; they were
also accused of shooting soldiers. Unlike in Lithuania and in Ukraine,
soliders and the uniformed police were instigators of the pogroms. Both
the Germans and the Romanians claimed authority, and both engaged in
killing Jews. Although the exact number of victims could not be estab-
lished, estimates vary between 8,000 and 14,000.
Even worse than the random, chaotic killings, the pogrom was fol-
lowed by an order from Ion Antonescu himself to evacuate the remaining
Jews from the city. He justified his order as arising out of military neces-
sity: People sympathizing with the enemy could not be allowed to stay
behind the frontline. Jews were ordered to be deported to camps in the
southern part of the country. Thousand of Jews were squeezed into rail
cars meant to carry freight. The victims spent several days in windowless
enclosures without food and water in the July heat: Less than half of
the people arrived alive to their destination. German trains carrying their
victims to death camps never came close to having such a high death
rate.18 Because the trains moved back and forth seemingly aimlessly, and
the victims enclosed in the airless rail cars received no water, one sus-
pects that the Romanian authorities were deliberately killing people in
this most inhumane manner. These “death trains” were one of the most
attrocious parts of the killing machinery of the Holocuast.
The decision to remove Jews from regions to be incorporated was made
on the highest level (i.e., by Antonescu) before the hostilities began.19 The
public’s reaction to liberation from Soviet occupation in Bessarabia and
Bukovina was more or less the same as it was at the same time in the
Baltic countries, in Eastern Poland, and in Western Ukraine.20 Although
pogroms had occurred in this region for centuries, there was some-
thing new in the murderous, unrestrained violence. Between 45,000 and
60,000 Jews were killed in the first wave of terror in these provinces, and
about 150,000 survivors were deported to a district east of the Dniester
river, an area that came under Romanian occupation.
The Romanians, perhaps following the German example, organized
special death squads from volunteers and from people who were
18 Deletant, pp. 136–37.

19 Ibid., p. 755.
20 Vladimir Solonari, “Patterns of violence: The local population and the mass murder of
Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941,” Kritika: Explorations
in Russian and Eurasian History, Fall 2007, Vol. 8, Number 4, pp. 749–87.
appointed by the army command. However, these squads lacked German

discipline and organization, even though they collaborated with the reg-
ular army, and the local population. Although the directions from above
to “cleanse the territory” were clear enough, much still depended on how
the individual commander carried out that order. In Romanian-controlled
territories, as opposed to those that came under German occupation, the
death squads’ actions varied considerably.
The population well understood that the military authorities not only
allowed but actually encouraged pogroms. The attacks on Jews carried
out by the local population were extraordinarily brutal. They aimed at
deliberate humiliation and included rape and, above all, plunder. Yet in
terms of ethnic cleansing, these pogroms were not very efficient in that
not every Jew was killed.
Killings often took place before the arrival of the occupying armies. In
Bukovina the pogroms were more violent, more aimed at killing rather
than plunder than in Bessarabia. Adherents to the Ukrainian nationalist
movement were partially responsible for the violence. From the Roma-
nian point of view Ukrainian nationalism was dangerous, and the gov-
ernment attempted to suppress it. However, Romanian policy toward the
Ukrainians went contrary to German interests, and on occasion the Ger-
mans found it necessary to protect their Ukrainian collaborators. That
the Ukrainian nationalists regarded Jews as their greatest enemy and con-
sidered their most important task not merely to rob and abuse Jews but to
kill them, demonstrates the utter irrationality of the antisemitism of the
age. In Bessarabia most of the killing was carried out by the Romanian
occupying forces with the participation of the local inhabitants.
Characteristically, officials who were arrested on charges of collabo-
ration with the Soviet region were treated better than the Jews. Although
these officials were beaten and put on trial, they were almost never killed.
The gendarmarie often protected these officials from the rage of the local
inhabitants. The Romanians killed people whom they considered alien,
rather than their own: Romanians who had sinned could be saved and
their behavior understood and forgiven, but aliens could not. Their very
essence could not be changed. Unconsciously, perhaps, the authorities
wanted to convey the message that it was aliens who mistreated Roma-
nians, but that Romanians could not hurt their countrymen.21
As the combined German and Romanian forces advanced in Bessara-
bia, members of the German Einzatsgruppe D and the Romanian army
21 Ibid., p. 279.
participated in massacreing Jews. Members of Einsatzgruppe D were ini-

tially shocked by the primitive brutality and cold inhumanity of the Roma-
nian killings; they were contemptuous of Romanian disorganization and
inefficiency. The Romanians, who wanted to remove alien elements from
Bukovina and Bessarabia, did not limit themselves to killing Jews, but
also killed Ukrainian intellectuals.22 The initial plans were actually more
ambitious and included eliminating all Slavs and Roma; however, the
Romanians considered their first task to kill Jews.
As the combined German and Romanian forces advanced farther east-
ward, the territory between the Dnester and the Bug Rivers came under
Romanian occupation. The Romanians created an administrative entity
and called it Transnistria. Antonescu was reluctant to decide the ultimate
fate of the province. On the one hand, as a fervent nationalist he was
attracted to the idea of acquiring as much real estate as possible; on the
other, unlike Hitler, he was thinking about a peace conference at the
end of the war and his primary goal was regaining Northern Transylva-
nia and reestablishing Romania’s 1940 borders. Transylvania was much
more important to him than a province on the north shore of the Black
Sea that contained few Romanians. He feared that the incorporation of
territory for which the country had no claim on the basis of ethnography
might compromise Romania’s position.
However, Transnistria did come under Romanian occupation until
early 1944, when the Red Army was able to regain this region. In
administering this territory the Romanians came to rule over another
300,000 Jews (in a total population of 2.5 million). Romanian occupa-
tion was not as devastating to the local population as it was in the rest of
the Ukraine where the Germans were masters. Romanians were corrupt
and disorganized but lacked the mad German desire to eradicate a race
of people that they considered inferior.
During the summer of 1941 some of the most horrendous events in
the Holocaust occurred on the border between Transnistria and German-
held Ukraine. The Romanians wanted to solve their Jewish problem by
simply herding Jews – men and women, young and old – and whatever
they could carry across the Bug River. The attempt caused conflict with
the Germans. The extermination camps had not yet been set up, and the
German command found the presence of so many Jews near the frontline,
without food and shelter, to be an unacceptable burden; they chased Jews
back across the river. Thousands of exhausted and starving people died

in the process. The Romanians then constructed bridges over the river
so the Jews could recross it, and after Jews were on the other side they
demolished these bridges to prevent Jews from returning.
The matter was then discussed on the highest level between the Ger-
mans and the Romanians without a resolution. The Foreign Ministry in
Berlin instructed the generals to accept the refugees, but they refused to
do so. The Germans used subterfuge and forced them during the night
to recross the river yet again to its eastern side. They shot the Jews who
moved too slowly.
The scenes of horror that took place in Transnistria were unparalleled
in German-occupied Soviet territory. However, most of the deaths of
the quarter-million Jews in Transnistria were not the consequence of a
well-planned program; for example, as conducted by Germans in the
rest of the occupied Soviet Union. Forced marches, inhumane treatment,
lack of food, and disease were the causes of most deaths. However, the
Romanians shared the German vision for the fate of the Jews: When
possible Jews would be deported to somewhere in Siberia. For the time
being, they were to be kept in concentration camps.
The occupation of Odessa in October 1941 started with a massacre of
Jews. The capture of the city was proving to be more difficult than antici-
pated, and the Romanians blamed the Jews for the resistance. A mine left
behind by the retreating Red Army blew up the Romanian headquarters,
killing several officers, including a general. The Romanian response was
to murder close to 20,000 Jews in retaliation. Jews were hanged in quickly
constructed gallows in the streets of the city. This event was similar to
what happened in Kiev and Babi Yar just a month before. Once again this
absurd situation prevailed: The punishment for the death of Romanian
soldiers was killing a large number of Jews, whom the Ukranians hated.
It was unclear how such an act was supposed to impress the Ukrainians
and persuade them not to resist. It was just another occasion for murder-
ing Jews. The surviving Jews were sent to concentration camps where the
great majority died.
Because the Romanians could not push Jews into German-controlled
territory, they decided to set up their own concentration camps and
ghettos. The differences between a concentration camp and ghetto were
small. Local Jews and Jews deported from Romanian provinces were
held together in these camps. Living conditions in the ghettos were worse
than those created by the Germans, as demonstrated by the difference in
the monthly mortality rates. In Romanian ghettos the mortality rate was
double that of the German ghettos.
The Romanians moved Jews from ghettos to concentration camps and

from one concentration camp to another, housing them on occasion in pig
styles. Under the circumstances, understandably, typhus spread quickly
among the inmates, particularly during the winter of 1941–42. Both the
Romanians and Germans grew concerned that the disease would spread
not only to the rest of the population but would also infect their soldiers.
The way they eliminated this problem was through mass killing. The old
and the infirm were hearded into barns, which were set on fire and the
people were burned to death inside.23
The deportation of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina was completed
by the middle of 1942. However, in Transylvania, the Banat and the
Regat – with the exception of the northernmost district of Moldavia, the
area around Dorohoi – most Jews remained in place. This was despite
German pressure on the Romanians to deport the remaining Jews to
Polish camps, where they would be treated exactly as those who came
from the other countries of Europe. Plans were, indeed, drawn up for
their deportation. Remarkably and unexpectedly the enthusiasm of the
Romanian leadership for the extermination of Jews waned, and as a
consequence, half of Romanian Jewry survived.
The most intriguing question of the Romanian Holocaust is why these
plans were not acted on. Antonescu’s partisans argue that the Romanians
never planned to kill native Jews, but all available evidence contradicts
this claim. Antonescu made it clear repeatedly that he was determined to
get rid of all Jews by whatever means. Why did he not do so? The change
of plans occurred at a time when the Germans were still advancing on
Stalingrad. Perhaps Antonescu, who was a military man, understood
that once the Blitzkrieg did not succeed, his fearsome ally’s chances of
winning were fatally diminished, and therefore he had to think of a post-
war period that would not be dominated by Nazi Germany. He was not
contemptuous of Western public opinion, and he, as all antisemites, over-
estimated Jewish influence over Western policies. In any case, he found
it more difficult to cause the death of relatively well-integrated Jews –
those who had not lived under Soviet power and therefore could not have
been influenced by the spirit of Bolshevism as Jews from Bessarabia and
Bukovina supposedly were. Furthermore, internal protests against anti-
Jewish actions were gaining influence. Intellectuals and politicians who
had played a role in prewar governments protested not so much against
23 Ibid., pp. 166–84.

the goal of removing Jews from Romania but the way the task was being
accomplished. Hearing voices that disagreed with his policies may have
undermined Antonescu’s confidence in his policies. Or, as other have
argued, as Romanian-German relations cooled he came to resent what
he regarded as German interference in internal Romanian affairs. Why
should he give up his Jews when the Hungarians were resisting German
pressure to do so? His most important foreign policy goal was to regain
the entirety of Transylvania after the war, and his actions, when com-
pared to the behavior of the Hungarians, could well have jeopardized his
cause.
Thus, as the prospects of a German victory receded, Antonescu’s atti-
tude to the “Jewish question” changed. It is not that he ceased to be an
antisemite or no longer wished to free his country of Jews. But he came
to recognize that in the changed circumstances the interests of the nation
demanded a changed behavior. The consequences were far reaching: Not
only did deportations cease and thereby the Jewry of Southern Transyl-
vania, the Regat, and the Banat survived, but some of those few who
had been deported to Transnistria were able to return to their previous
places of residence. His favored solution to the Jewish question was to
facilitate their emigration to Palestine or, indeed, wherever they could go.
He demanded, however, that Jews who wanted to leave had to pay for
that privilege. For the Romanians, such a solution provided a twofold
benefit: getting rid of Jews and at the same time getting money from
them. The Germans vociferously objected to this solution: They did not
want to alienate their Arab friends by allowing more Jews to settle in
Palestine. Nevertheless some Jews were able to leave, even though it was
very difficult during wartime to find available ships. Yet for those who
remained, Romania did not suddenly become a friendly place for Jews.
All the economic and social restrictions remained in force. Furthermore,
Jews had to be aware that the danger of being deported had not altogether
disappeared. The misery and the expropriations continued.
In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and began to orga-
nize, with the aid of their Hungarian helpers, transports to Auschwitz.
Approximately 1,500 Jews from Hungarian-held Transylvania succeeded
in crossing the Romanian borders and the Romanian authorities allowed
them transit on their way to Palestine. Romania thus participated in an
effort to save Jewish lives.
The story of the Romanian Holocaust provides us with the opportu-
nity to compare German and Romanian behavior. To engage in mass
murder three components were necessary: a leader determined to carry

out this undertaking, willing executioners who did the actual killing,
and a population who at least tolerated what was being done in their
name.
As far as morality was concerned it is difficult to find much difference
between Hitler and Antonescu. Both were responsible for mass murder,
carried out with extraordinary brutality in the name of a repulsive ideol-
ogy. But two differences are worth mentioning. First, Antonescu, unlike
Hitler, did not lose touch with reality; he did not live in a world of his own
delusions. His goal was to get rid of Jews, and to accomplish that task he
was willing to have them murdered. However, if there was another way
to achieve that goal, such as allowing them to leave the country, he had
no particular objection. He stopped murdering Jews when he understood
that such action was contrary to the national interest. He saw that the
war was about to be lost and he wanted to preserve Romania’s future as
much as was possible. Second, the two men operated in different political
environments. There was no one to contradict Hitler; Nazi Germany rep-
resented a totalitarian order. By contrast, there were Romanian religious,
political, and intellectual figures who openly deplored what was being
done by their countrymen and they remained unpunished.
For the Germans the murder of Jews was a specialized occupation. The
members of the Einsatzgruppen did the shooting, and the army assigned
people to guard ghettos and camps. It was a job to be done. For some
this task was difficult; for others it was easy. The Romanian murderers
also shot many Jews, but many more died as a result of exposure to the
weather, lack of food, and diseases caused by unsanitary conditions. The
atrocities were not the work of a limited group of people, as the majority
of Jews died as a consequence of being brutally mistreated by their fellow
human beings. Before their deaths the victims of the Romanians suffered
even more than the victims of the Germans. There were recorded incidents
when Jews were attacked and abusers pulled their gold teeth with pliers
while they were still alive: The Germans at least would have killed their
victims first. Raping and looting were more widespread in Romanian-
occupied territories, and Romanian officers were less likely to discipline
their soldiers than in the German army.
Perhaps the most important difference was that Romanians caused the
death of hundreds of thousands of human beings in an environment that
looked on favorably on their work. Romanians were killing Romanians.
On occasion the killers even knew their victims. The Germans in their
own country, in bad faith to be sure, could pretend not to know what
was happening to Jews. The Romanians did not have this option. An
International Commission, established by the president of Romania in
2003 and headed by Elie Wiesel, issued a report, estimating the number
of Romanian victims during the Holocaust to be between 280,000 and
380,000.24
24 The report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, November

11, 2004, is available online.
10
Germany, 1942
Wannsee Conference
One of the remarkable but paradoxical aspects of the Holocaust is that
it was carried out with great efficiency, involving every part of the Ger-
man state machinery, and yet it was unplanned. The participants did not
follow a blueprint. No single order existed that unambiguously called
for the murder of millions. Instead ever more brutal small steps led to
the horrendous result. The significance of the Wannsee Conference, held
on January 20, 1942, is that it was an occasion when representatives of
the institutions of the Nazi state gathered to discuss issues arising from
the process of extermination, a process that was already under way. The
minutes of the meeting are interesting for what they reveal about the Nazi
mentality.
The initiative for the meeting came from Hermann Göring.1 In July
1941 he asked Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, to call together
representatives of institutions that in one way or another were involved in
the task of getting rid of Jews for the purpose of coordinating their activ-
ities. These instructions from Göring are the closest we have to an order
from the highest level of administration that relates to the extermination
of the Jews. Six months would elapse before Heydrich would implement
Göring’s instructions. It is unclear whether the delay was due to the lack
of urgency at a time when extermination was already proceeding or the
1 According to Roseman, the initiative actually came from Heydrich. He produced a draft
in March 1941 and submitted it to Göring for his signature. Heydrich at this point
evidently wanted to deport Jews to Siberia. Roseman, p. 53.
196
Germany, 1942 197
fact that policies concerning how to get rid of millions of Jews were still
in the process of formation.2
Yet, the conference did not decide the fate of Jews, and so Wannsee
was not a turning point in the history of the Holocaust. Large-scale killing
had already commenced, the first extermination camp at Chelmno was
already operational, and Jewish emigration had been forbidden as of
October 1941, implying that the Nazis’ real goal was to murder them. As
mentioned earlier, the discussions are interesting because they were the
only time when highly placed Nazi officials gathered to debate what they
euphemistically called the “Final Solution,” a phrase that had already
entered the vocabulary of the period.3 There were no antisemitic slurs,
no conversations about how reprehensible Jews were. Evidently in that
company there was no need for antisemitic propaganda. The tone was
matter of fact and the language highly legalistic; the bureaucrats got
together to resolve logistical problems arising from the murder of millions.
It was perfectly clear to all the participants that the Jews of Europe
would be exterminated, and the minutes leave no doubt of the purpose
of the Nazi plans. Yet the word “killing” was never spoken. This is what
Heydrich had to say:
In the course of the final solution and under appropriate leadership, Jews should
be put to work in the East. In large, single-sex labor columns, Jews fit to work will
work their way eastward constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will
be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless
consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with accord-
ingly (wird entsprehend behandelt werden müssen) because otherwise, by natural
selection they would form a germ cell of a new Jewish revival.4
One wonders why it was necessary to use such euphemisms. After all,
members of this group, highly placed officials in the hierarchy, did not
need to be protected from the knowledge of what was in fact happening.
It is striking that it seemed easier to kill than to say explicitly what they
were doing.
The decision had already been made to remove Jews from Europe, but
the Madagascar plan had to be abandoned. Therefore Jews were to be
deported to the unspecified East – from where they would never return.
2 Among the fifteen people who came to the guesthouse of the Security Police at Wannsee
there were representatives of the occupied territories in the East, the Ministry of Justice,
the Interior Ministry, and the Foreign Office.
3 Thirty copies were made and were marked top secret; one copy survives. The protocols
are reproduced in Mark Roseman’s book, pp. 157–72.
4 Roseman, pp. 164–65. I slightly changed Roseman’s translation.
The meeting document first gives a description of what had already been
achieved. Estonia had the distinction of being the first country to become
free of Jews.
Then the participants discussed the order of deportations and the
expected logistical difficulties in each country. Their numbers were rather
imprecise. According to their calculations there were still 11 million Jews
in Europe. (This was undoubtedly an overestimate. The number was
closer to 9 million.) The participants in the meeting assumed that Jews
would have to disappear from all countries, whether allied, conquered,
neutral, or enemy. They foresaw the eventual deportation of Jews even
from England, even though the defeat of England was far from assured.
Neutral countries, such as Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, and Spain,
were also included in the list. Presumably to carry out the last stage of
the large-scale venture, it would be necessary to await the victorious con-
clusion of the war when a triumphant Germany would be able to exert
its will on every country in Europe.
There were decisions to be made. The order of deportations from
Western Europe had to be determined, and perhaps more importantly,
the leaders had to figure out how to carry out the deportations from
the Reich in such a way as to preserve the fiction that Jews were simply
being sent to the mythical East, where they would be performing useful
labor for the war effort. As much as possible, opportunities for good
Germans to protect Jews and appeal for their lives were to be avoided.
The question remained: How could the bureaucrats explain why old peo-
ple, war veterans who had achieved military distinction, and some other
prominent Jews would be sent to perform hard labor when they were
obviously not capable of doing so? The solution was to send such Jews
to Theresienstadt, an already existing camp that would be transformed
into a model camp to be shown off to outside observers. This camp was
explicitly created to deceive, giving the impression that old people would
be sent there to die a natural death. In the following year two films were
made to show the happy lives of the inmates, and in 1944 the Danish
Red Cross was allowed to pay a visit. Ultimately about 140,000 people
went through this camp, including 4,000 German Jews. The camp also
served as a way station for Czech Jews before deportation. Only about
18,000 survived, with the rest being sent on to extermination camps. By
all accounts, the German people were willing to accept the explanation
that was offered, however transparent a lie it was.
It is interesting to examine what difficulties Heydrich foresaw in dif-
ferent countries and what other problems he expected to emerge from
this giant undertaking. The deportations were to proceed from west to
Germany, 1942 199
east, beginning in Germany itself: Germany was to be the first West-

ern European country to enjoy life without Jews. Heydrich foresaw
that the Scandinavian countries might not cooperate with the planned
deportations. However, only a very small number of Jews lived there,
and therefore deportations could be postponed. France seemed likely
to cooperate, because the Nazis were well aware of the strength of the
antisemitic sentiments in that country. Interestingly, in spite of the well-
known antisemitism of the Hungarian government and people, the Nazis
foresaw difficulties in deporting Jews from that country. In Romania the
problem was corruption, which enabled Jews to buy papers exempting
them from deportation.
As reflected in the minutes, the bureaucrats devoted far more attention
to the problems that the deportations might cause in Germany itself
than in the other countries. The Nazis were not much worried about
public opinion in Western Europe, to say nothing about the conquered
East. In fact, representatives from the occupied territories in the East
clamored for the “evacuation” to start there. However, the Nazi leaders
were very much concerned about domestic opinion in the midst of the
war. The deportation and the ultimate fate of hundreds of thousands of
Jews from Germany, Austria, and Bohemia could not have been a secret
given the millions of German soldiers who served in the East and the
mad passion of many of them to take photographs of the atrocities they
had witnessed. They evidently wanted these souvenirs from their service.
However, there was a difference between passive knowledge and open
discussion of the fate of Jews. This “great accomplishment” was never
to be openly discussed. To avoid making it clear to the Germans what
was actually happening, certain concessions had to be made, and certain
problems had to be considered.
Nazi policies pursued in the 1930s had resulted in the separation of
Jews from German society. When the deportations started, the average
German might not have noticed that his or her Jewish doctor, lawyer, co-
worker had disappeared because by then there were no Jewish doctors,
lawyers, or the like. Jews could be removed in such a way as to make no
impression on the average German. However, difficulties were posed by
the Jews married to Germans. The Nazis would have liked to annul all
such marriages, but given the opposition of the churches, especially the
Catholic Church that regarded marriage as a sacrament, such annulments
were impossible.5 By definition, a Jew married to a German had German
5 The best and most thorough discussion of the Wannsee Conference is in Hilberg, Vol. 2,
pp. 434–44.
relatives and consequently could not be summarily excluded from Ger-

man society. His or her disappearance would be noted; death certificates
would have had to be prepared to enable the spouse to resume a normal
life, and consequently difficult questions would have to be answered con-
cerning the person who was no more. The conference came to no decision
in this matter, but ultimately the bureaucracy concluded that, for the sake
of killing a few thousand Jews, it was not worthwhile to endanger the
confidentially of the entire operation and face indignant German women
demonstrating in the streets for the rescue of their husbands. Indeed, such
a demonstration did take place. The Nazi authorities were preoccupied
with the question of what kind of restrictions should be imposed on Jews
who lived with Christians.
The issue of the Mischlinge (i.e., half- or quarter-Jews) was even more
complicated. On the one hand, allowing their survival was contrary to
Nazi thinking; it enabled the survival of the “Jewish spirit” and thereby
made the “final solution” less final. On the other hand, just as in the case
of Jews married to Germans, these people could not be easily removed
from the surrounding environment. In addition, they possessed “German
blood.” Goebbels was concerned about the many petitions made to pro-
tect Jews and half-Jews, but believed that in the interest of finalizing the
solution of the Jewish question, the Mischlinge would have to be deported
as well.6 The participants in the conference, especially Heydrich, wanted
to extend the circles of people to be deported as broadly as possible. They
carried out pseudo-scientific discussions of the issue: Should the “half-
breeds” be allowed to marry only Germans so that the “Jewish traits”
would ultimately disappear? Or should they be allowed to only marry
other “half-breeds”? When the offspring looked Jewish, should they be
“treated accordingly”? It was left unanswered who exactly would make
the decision that the person looked like a Jew. (A striking feature of Nazi
thinking concerning Jews was its pseudo-scientific character. Goebbels,
an intelligent man, at one point expressed concern that, if the Jews were
sent to Siberia, they would become even stronger because of the cold
climate. He recommended sending them instead to Central Africa, where
the climate presumably would weaken Jews. One can only wonder what
nonsense people are capable of believing.7 )
6 David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. London: Focal Point, 1997,
p. 692. Irving was quoting from Goebbels’ diaries.
7 Friedländer quoting from Goebbels’ diaries. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the
Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of Extermination. New York: Harper Collins, 2007,
p. 349.
Germany, 1942 201
The question of what to do with the “half-breeds” remained a constant

concern for the Nazi leadership, and they returned to it again and again.
The removal of Jews had to be complete: As long as some people with
Jewish traits were still in Europe, the danger remained of Jewish revival.
After all, Jews had existed for millennia. To deal with this issue a second
so-called Final Solution conference was called together in March 1942
in Berlin. This time Eichmann chaired the meeting that was devoted
exclusively to the problem of mixed marriages and the Mischlinge. Yet
another conference assembled in October for discussing this complicated
issue, but the Nazis could still not find a satisfactory solution.
The idea of sterilization was frequently discussed in different contexts.
On occasion it was suggested that two or three million Jewish males
be sterilized, and then as long as they were alive they could be used
as laborers. At other times sterilization was envisaged as a solution to
the problem of the Mischlinge. Some suggested that a person should be
offered the alternative of sterilization or deportation. It was naturally
assumed that everyone offered such a choice would opt for being allowed
to live. On other occasions the Nazis considered that the sterilization
could take place surreptitiously. Scientists in fact performed experiments
on inmates in Auschwitz, attempting to induce sterilization with X-rays
and with drugs.
As in other aspects of the Holocaust, the first victims were not Jews,
but Germans who were not considered worthy of life. Newly enacted
laws after the Nazi takeover in 1933 compelled doctors to report patients
who were in their opinion mentally or physically handicapped. However,
mass sterilization could not be performed easily or cheaply, and ulti-
mately nothing came of these schemes. Even German science and tech-
nology could not devise ways to realize those plans, and during wartime,
Germany could not afford the expense, nor did it have the number of
hospital rooms that these plans required.
Deportations
The seizure and deportation of Jews from Germany were in some ways
more difficult and in other ways easier to accomplish than from the
other occupied countries. On the one hand, the Nazis had to pay more
attention to public perceptions and therefore were compelled to offer
concessions (such as allowing Jews married to Christians to live) or
at least postpone some deportations. On the other hand, Germans had
kept meticulous records, and by this time, given the previous anti-Jewish
legislation, it was perfectly clear who and where the German Jews were.
The available manpower was in place, and there were no agencies with
which it was necessary to negotiate, which would have slowed down the
process.
From the beginning of Nazi rule more and more painful restrictions
had been imposed on Jews. Nevertheless, the outbreak of the war in
1939 was still a turning point for the approximately quarter-million Jews
still living in greater Germany.8 A curfew was introduced, and with a
shortage of food and the beginning of food rationing, Jews received ever
smaller and more restricted food allowances. Jews were compelled to
move into overcrowded “Jewish houses.” Forcing Jews to give up their
apartments had a twofold advantage: It alleviated the housing short-
age and further contributed to the Jews’ isolation, thereby making later
deportations easier.
Many of the new rules were imposed simply to make the lives of the
Jews more difficult. They were excluded from some stores and allowed to
do their shopping only during limited hours. They were required to give
up their radios, telephones, sewing machines, and typewriters. Some rules
seemed fueled by vindictiveness. For example, Jews were not allowed
to keep pets; but neither were they allowed to give their dog and cats
to acquaintances: They had to have them killed. After the outbreak of
the war working-aged Jews were drafted into a compulsory labor force.
Although as late as the fall of 1941 (i.e., even after the invasion of the
Soviet Union), Jews were still allowed to emigrate, such emigration was
increasingly difficult. Several hundred Jews did manage to leave in 1941,
most of them to Portugal. Emigration was forbidden only in October
1941.
No ghettos were established anywhere in Germany. Carving out a
part of a city for Jews would have caused inconvenience for Germans.
Later, when Allied bombing became a serious threat, the Nazis genuinely
believed that the Allies would bomb only those parts of the city where
Jews did not live. The compulsory wearing of the Jewish star in Germany
was introduced only in September 1941, two years after it was made
compulsory for Polish Jews. Goebbels was horrified that some Berliners
showed visible sympathy for Jews, for example, by giving up their seats
to them in streetcars.9 This exhibition of sympathy may have contributed
to Goebbels’ desire to get rid of Jews from Berlin by deporting them as
8 Ibid., p. 48.
9 Irving, p. 663.
Germany, 1942 203
soon as possible. Goebbels would have liked to deport them earlier, but
lack of transport forced the Nazis to postpone the deportations.
It is impossible to generalize about the attitude of the Germans to
the suffering of their fellow human beings. According to contemporary
reports, as the war progressed the attitude of the average German became
increasingly hostile to Jews. This may have been the result of Nazi propa-
ganda and of the fact that the lives of the Germans had become more and
more difficult. When there was a shortage of food, many would not have
minded if Jews did not get any. We may conclude that Germans did not
particularly care about the fate of Jews, even though individual Germans
on occasion demonstrated their sympathy for their Jewish acquaintances.
The best description of German opinion and the ever-increasing indigni-
ties imposed on Jews can be seen in the remarkable diary kept by Vic-
tor Klemperer.10 He was an intellectual who was married to a Christian
woman and was therefore allowed to survive. In his diary he meticulously
described their everyday existence.
Antisemitic propaganda in the second half of 1941 became ever more
vicious as the treatment of Jews worsened. There seemed to be a cor-
relation: The more Jews were mistreated, the bloodier the propaganda
became. For all practical purposes no one spoke up in defense of Jews,
and only about five thousand Jews survived the Nazi era through the help
of their German acquaintances. To be sure, hiding Jews in a German city
was a difficult and dangerous undertaking.
Deportations began in October 1941, but because the extermination
camps were not yet operational, the transports took Jews to various
ghettos in the occupied territories. Their property was automatically con-
fiscated as they were deported, because it was taken for granted that there
would be no return. Most Jews were sent to the ghettos of Minsk, Riga,
and Lodz, where they formed small German communities. On occasion
the Nazis shot them on arrival. There is evidence that shooting German
Jews was sometimes hard on the SS personnel, and that may have con-
tributed to the realization by the Nazi leadership that it was easier to gas
people than to shoot them.
The deportations took place in waves, with Jews in the second wave
in the spring of 1942 going to Lublin. The deportations continued until
the summer of 1943 by which time only few Jews remained. A small
number of remaining Jews were engaged in labor that was considered
10 Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941. New York:
Random House, 1998.
essential for war production; some of the Jewish leaders were also allowed
to live a little longer. However, soon thereafter almost all of them were
deported. To make up for the loss of Jewish labor, forced laborers were
brought in from other countries, including Poland.
Ultimately the Nazis decided that it was more important to make
Germany free of Jews than take advantage of Jewish labor. The Nazis
had finally accomplished the goal they had since they came to power:
Germany for all purposes became free of Jews. It is ironic, however, that
although the Holocaust was the work of Germans, German Jews, because
of the possibility of emigration up to 1941, had a somewhat better chance
of survival than Jews did in most other countries.11
11 Calculating the percentage of survivors is complicated by the fact that the borders often
changed. On the basis of 1933 figures, German Jews had a good chance of survival,
because for many years they were allowed to emigrate. But even if we consider the
Jewish population of 1939, German Jews still had about a 50% chance of survival.
11
The Holocaust in Western Europe
How were the Nazis able to carry out their plans for mass murder? What
obstacles did they face? What restrained them? It is evident that from
the outbreak of the war the Nazis were determined to remove Jews from
Europe, although at that point they did not know how to achieve this
goal. It was only after the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 that
it became clear to them that it was possible to exterminate millions of
people, primarily Jews. Nevertheless in some countries they were able
to carry out more completely their campaign of murder than in others.
What explained the differences in the efficiency of killing?
The fundamental difference was between East and West. The two
parts of the European continent experienced different Holocausts – but
not from the point of view of the Jewish victims, who were deported
to ghettos or to extermination camps from all areas of Europe. In fact,
Western European Jews were just as likely to die as their Eastern European
coreligionists. However, the East witnessed horrors that the Nazis were
not capable of performing in Western European countries. It would have
been unthinkable in, say, Amsterdam to gather Jews, take them outside
of the city, shoot them, and bury them in mass graves. There were no
mass extermination camps or ghettos in Western Europe.
Simply put, the Nazis behaved differently in East and West. No doubt
the Germans were encouraged to carry out their assigned murderous
tasks by visible signs of antisemitism among Eastern Europeans. The
civilian population participated in the massacres in the region between
the Soviet Union and Germany, and it was a rare occasion when Jews
received assistance in their desparate need. The Germans could operate
with the conviction that the surrounding population supported what they
205
were doing. Under those circumstances it was easier to deal with their
conscience. Timothy Snyder has described the region between the Rus-
sian parts of the Soviet Union and Germany as Bloodlands. It was an
area where life was cheap, where thousands upon thousands had already
perished, where the horror of the Holocaust was only one among many
horrors. In addition, the Nazis had contempt not only for Polish Jews but
also for all Poles.
Arguably, the Holocaust is an Eastern European story, although the
picture is somewhat distorted because the literature on Western Europe
is much richer. There were more survivors in Western Europe to report
on their experiences, and in the postwar democratic West it was far
easier to study the problems of the Holocaust than in the communist
East. Undoubtedly much more has been written about the few thousand
Danish Jews than the hundreds of thousands of victims of Romanian
murderers or the 60,000 Jews murdered by the Croatian Ustasha.
Although the Nazis aimed to eliminate the entirety of European Jewry,
the vast majority of the victims came from the East. Western European
Jews were better integrated and acculturated and therefore did not stand
out as much as in a country such as Poland or Romania. There were also
many fewer Western than Eastern European Jews. All of Scandinavia had
fewer Jews than a single shtetl in Poland; Warsaw alone had more Jews
than France. Because of past history, culture, and economic conditions the
relations between Christians and Jews were profoundly different in East
and West: There was a degree of cooperation in the West that did not exist
in the East. Jews in Western Europe had less difficulty in being accepted
in the resistance movements and were much more likely to receive aid
from their countrymen than in the East.
To what extent was there a correlation between preexisting
antisemitism in a given society and the Nazi’s ability to exterminate Jews?
In every country the Germans occupied they found willing collaborators.
Even Denmark, perhaps the least antisemitic country in Europe, had
a Nazi Party, which was established before Hitler came to power and
which welcomed the German invaders. An antisemitic newspaper was
published in Copenhagen, and vandals there attempted to burn down a
synagogue. However, the Danish Nazi Party was small and insignificant
and remained so even during the occupation. More importantly, Danish
courts punished the arsonists.
Although in Eastern Europe it is clear that existing antisemitism made
the jobs of the Nazis easier, in Western Europe it is much more difficult
The Holocaust in Western Europe 207
to establish a similar correlation between Nazi killing efficiency and the

attitude of the population. Although France may have had a stronger
tradition of antisemitism than Holland, the percentage of victims in
Holland was considerably greater. In fact, France had the highest per-
centage of survivors in the major Western European countries with the
exception of Denmark and Italy, which came under German occupation
much later. In Western European countries occupied by Germany, the
tradition of antisemitism did not vary a great deal, yet the percentage
of victims certainly did. It might help us understand the mechanisms
of the Holocaust by making comparisions among Western European
countries.
Denmark and Norway

Even in the Western European context the events in Denmark in October
1943 stand out. Every history of the Holocaust singles out the saving of
the Danish Jews as a shining and all too rare example of human decency
in the dark years of World War II.
From the outset the position of Denmark in Nazi-occupied Europe was
exceptional. After the Germans occupied Denmark without resistance
in April 1940, they allowed the king to remain on the throne and the
parliament and other governmental institutions to function. The German
plenipotianary, Cecil von Renthe-Fink, was not a major figure in the
Nazi hierarchy; he was not even a military man, but a diplomat who had
served in Denmark since 1936 and had joined the Nazi Party only in
1939. As long as he remaned in office (until 1942) he followed a policy
of conciliation. Undoubtedly his knowledge of Denmark and his respect
and affection for the Danes influenced his behavior. But the crucial factor
in the development of Danish-German relation was that his superiors, at
least for some time, allowed him to pursue his conciliatory policy. The
policy of minimum Nazi interference with Danish domestic affairs on the
one hand and Danish compliance on the other worked for some time, as
Denmark came to be a ”model protectorate.” In the first two years of the
war Danish resistance was minimal.
One can only speculate why the Germans treated Denmark so differ-
ently from other countries. Perhaps they were so interested in importing
Danish agricultural products that they decided not to interfere with the
conduct of Danish domestic affairs. Maybe they trusted the Danes to
remain compliant and therefore did not want to invest scarce manpower
in policing them. The Germans had a high regard for the Danes, a Nordic
people, and that may have played a role as well. However, the Dutch and
the Norwegians were also Aryan, Germanic people and did not enjoy
comparable freedoms.
The quid quo pro of Nazi non-interference and Danish compliance
could not last for several reasons. By the middle of 1942 German vic-
tory in the war could no longer be taken for granted. As a consequence
a Danish resistance movement became emboldened and carried out acts
of sabotage. The Nazis then came to regard an unreliable Denmark as
a security threat. Further, as Jews disappeared from one country after
another, the situation of the Danish Jewry seemed increasingly anoma-
lous. The Nazis became more anxious to solve the “Jewish problem” and
so put pressure on the Danes to deport the Danish Jews, even though
the German functionaries with contacts in Copenhagen understood that
such pressure on the Danes would end the status quo. A silly affair further
contributed to the deterioration of relations. Hitler was dissatisfied with
a one-sentence response of the Danish king, Christian X, to his birthday
greeting. He understood that the king had only contempt for him and
perceived this perfunctory response both as a personal insult and as the
Nazi propaganda always maintained: “Germany was Hitler and Hitler
was Germany,” and therefore, at least in his view, an insult to National
Socialist Germany.
The consequences of the lost battle of Stalingrad were well understood
in Copenhagen: now it became clear that Germany was unlikely to win the
war, Danish resistance became ever stronger: By the middle of 1943 the
country had become more than a nuisance to the Nazis, and the Nazis
could no longer afford to give a free hand to the Danes. The Germans
were concerned for the security of their routes of communication to
Norway, and the Norwegian coast had great strategic significance. They
demanded that the Danish government deal energetically with the parti-
san movement, which the Danish authorities were unable and unwilling
to do. The compromise built on no resistance movement and retention
of a degree of autonomy broke down. The Nazis could not afford any
longer to give a free hand to the Danes, who were ever more troublesome.
Hitler expelled the Danish ambassador and withdrew his representative in
Copenhagen, replacing him with a Nazi of considerable standing, Werner
Best, who had at one point acted as Heydrich’s deputy. Hitler also recalled
the military commander and replaced him with General Hermann von
Hanneken. Von Hanneken declared a state of emergency and dismissed
the government and all other functioning Danish institutions.1 Civil ser-
vants, however, continued to carry out their tasks. Best became the dic-
tator of Denmark.
Denmark had a small Jewry of between 7,000 and 8,000 people. These
few Jews were by no means conspicuous; they were well integrated into
Danish society, and they certainly did not dominate cultural and economic
life. As the Danes insisted, Denmark did not have a Jewish problem, but
obviously their survival was still dependent on Danish-German relations.
As long as Denmark had remained a model protectorate, Jews, except for
some minor restrictions, could continue to live their normal lives. Once
the autonomy of Denmark was suspended and the German introduced
martial law, the lives of Danish Jews were in danger.
The story of the rescue of the Danish Jews has been frequently told.
The episode is unique in the history of the Holocaust, and it deserves all
the attention that scholars have paid to it. The authorities in Berlin in the
middle of September 1943 decided to take advantage of the suspension of
the elected Danish government and make Denmark free of Jews.2 Order
police (i.e., regular, uniformed German police) and boats were sent to
Denmark to carry out the operation and deport the Jews. The Germans
had been in possession for some time of a list of addresses of Danish Jews,
and it seemed that the fate of the Danish Jews would be no different from
that of Jews elsewhere in Europe. But events turned out differently from
what the Nazi leadership in Berlin had hoped and expected. First, the
head of the Danish civilian administration, who had remained in office,
told both the representatives of the Jewish community and of the German
command that the Danes not only would not cooperate but also would
strongly object to the deportation of Jews. Just as significantly, the head
of the German military command, General von Hanneken, refused to
provide manpower for the envisaged action. Werner Best, the highest
ranking officer, could use only the order police force, sent from Berlin,
which numbered fewer than 200 men. A representative of the German
command notified the Jewish leadership and the Danes of the planned
action on October 1 and 2, 1943.
The Nazi attempt failed for two reasons: the unwillingness of the Danes
to cooperate and, the perhaps more important, the less than energetic
1 Niels Aage Skov, Letter to My Descendants. Odensee: Odensee University Press, 1997,
pp. 195–97.
performance of the German leadership in Copenhagen. When asked by

Best to order Jews to appear at headquarters for “work,” General von
Hanneken refused to provide manpower for the envisaged action. He did
not want to compromise the German Army by having it participate in
what seemed to him a dirty business. This meant that the relatively small
police force available for Best had to go to the apartments of Jews and
collect them one by one. However, the most remarkable person in the Ger-
man administration was Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, who was responsi-
ble for maritime matters.3 He was a Nazi who had joined the party before
Hitler came to power. Before he was transferred to Copenhagen, he had
been a subordinate of Rosenberg where he became a confidant of Werner
Best. When he learned from Best about the planned deportation, he imme-
diately returned to Berlin, attempting to persuade the leadership there to
drop their plans. When this attempt failed, he informed the leaders of the
Danish Jewish community about the danger. But he did even more. He
traveled to Stockholm to discuss with Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson
how Sweden would receive the fleeing Danish Jews.
When the Jews were gathered together in synagogue to celebrate Rosh
Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the rabbi advised the congregation not
to return to their apartments. The news quickly spread within the com-
munity, and the great majority of Jews found refuge among Christian
citizens. The German policemen, in possession of the list of Jews, went
from apartment to apartment looking for them, but were told to arrest
people only if they opened the door. The German commanders wanted
to avoid conflict with the Danish police. They succeeded in arresting only
477 people, who were then taken not to one of the extermination camps,
but to the model camp of Theresienstadt. Of these all but fifty-three sur-
vived. The Danish Red Cross managed to send supplies to Theresienstadt,
which contributed to the remarkably low death rate.
In the course of October 1943, the rest of the Danish Jews were taken
by boats to safety in Sweden. The rescue was carried out by ordinary
citizens using small craft, fishing boats, and whatever was available. Jews
who could pay for the gasoline did pay, but those who could not were
subsidized by the Danes.4 The German commander responsible for the
harbor, on the advice of his friend Duckwitz, reported to the Nazis that
3 The most detailed description of the Danish story in English is by Emmy E. Werner, A
Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews during World War II. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 2002.
4 Hilberg, Vol. 2, pp. 296–97.
there were no speed boats to use in pursuit, because all of them were
under repair. The rescue of the Jews succeeded almost without incident.
Only one person was killed by a German bullet. There is also anec-
dotal evidence that those who were forced to flee and left their apart-
ments behind suffered no property losses.5 When they returned from
Sweden, a year and a half later, not only did they found their apartments
untouched, but in some cases the neighbors, who had expected that the
Jews would return, had also continued to water their plants and feed their
pets.
There can be no doubt that the Danes in 1943 exhibited a degree of
decency and humanity that could serve as an example for all of us. Yet, to
understand why Danish Jewry survived while others perished, we must
look for an explanation not in what the Danes did or did not do, but
in the behavior of the German leadership in Copenhagen. The Germans
who were in a position of authority sabotaged the policy laid down in
Berlin.
The outstanding figure was Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, who risked
his standing in the Nazi hierarchy and his personal safety by committing
treason in going to Stockholm, thereby undermining clearly defined Nazi
policy. Other Nazi officers had pangs of conscience and carried out their
duties in a less than enthusiastic fashion, but we know no one who was
willing to go as far as Duckwitz did in 1943. There was nothing in his
background that could have predicted how he would act, although he
had spent much time in Denmark, knew the language, and had Danish
friends. The fact that he joined the party before it came to power must
indicate that he found Nazi ideology appealing and was not merely a
careerist.
But Duckwitz alone could not have saved the Danish Jews. It was also
necessary that the military commander, General von Hanneken, refused
to cooperate. The Germans, of course, could have stopped the rescue
operation if the naval command had wanted to do so. It is also difficult
to imagine that Werner Best, the plenipotientiary, was not aware of what
was going on around him. He was clearly not carrying out his duties with
the enthusiasm expected from a high-ranking Nazi figure. He pretended
otherwise, but in reality he continued the policy of his predecessor, Cecil
von Renthe-Fink. He came to be infected by the decency of people around
him.
5 Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969,
p. 372.
How are we to explain the behavior of the Germans in Denmark, so

different from anything we know not only in Eastern Europe, but even in
Western Europe? To some extent it must have been an accident of person-
alities that came together in Copenhagen, these were presumably people
who considered it wrong to kill innocent people, and they affected each
another. Obviously this rescue could not have happened in, say, Lithua-
nia, where the German command came to believe that the population was
on their side and saw nothing wrong in what they were doing. In Denmark
the situation was very different. Both Duckwitz and Best understood that
the deportation of Jews would further alienate the Danes, making occu-
pation more difficult and costly. Danish public opinion mattered a great
deal.6
Of all countries that the Germans occupied, Norway had the small-
est Jewry: between 1,600 and 1,700 Jews. In the scale of mass murder
in which millions lost their lives the few hundred Norwegian Jews who
became victims would hardly deserve our attention. However, what hap-
pened in Norway is worth discussing because it reveals why the process
of extermination was more complete in one country than in another.
Norway was invaded on April 9, 1940, on the same day as Denmark.
The Germans encountered slightly greater resistance here than in the other
Scandinavian country. The king and the legitimate government escaped
to England and continued to function there. Thus Norway was not to be
a “model protectorate.”
Yet Norway, just like Denmark, had no “Jewish problem,” and it
would be difficult to prove that antisemitism in Norway was more
widespread than in Denmark. It is true that the Norwegian Constitu-
tion of 1814 did not allow Jews to enter the country, but that had little
relevance in the middle of the twentieth century. No one could seriously
argue that the few Norwegian Jews dominated the economic, political, or
cultural life of the nation. The Norwegians, like the Danes, were Protes-
tants, and indeed of all the Norwegian institutions it was the Protestant
Church that took the most courageous stance in opposing Nazism and
the persecution of Jews.7
National Socialism had as little appeal in Norway as in Denmark.
However, unlike in Denmark, the Nazis possessed a leader of consid-
erable charisma, Vidkun Quisling, who would play a major role in the
extermination of Jews. An able man, he was a mathematician, soldier,
6 Werner, pp. 32–33.

7 Ibid., p. 6.
diplomat, and statesman who at one point had served in a democratic

government as minister of war. In 1933, a few months after Hitler coming
to power, Quisling formed the National Union, a Nazi party, copying the
ideology and paraphernalia of the Germans. He believed that Jews repre-
sented a deadly danger to the nation and to the world, and antisemitism
became a major component of his ideology. Quisling, like many of the
other leaders attracted to extreme right-wing movements, was interested
in mysticism and attempted to reconcile his nationalist ideology with
Christianity. However, the movement had little popular appeal and won
over only a few thousand followers. At the time of the German inva-
sion in 1940 Quisling’s party had only about 2,000 members, and even
after the Germans installed a Nazi government it never had more than
45,000 followers.8 However, it is worth mentioning that the greatest
Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun, who was greatly admired in his coun-
try and abroad, allied himself to the Nazi cause. His pro-German articles
during wartime might have influenced public opinion.9
In April 1940 Quisling committed treason: In the expectation of
acquiring power he cooperated with the invaders and helped legitimize
the regime that they set up. The Germans ultimately did appoint him as
head of the government, although the real power was in the hands of
Josef Terboven, the Reichskommisar. Terboven, an early and an espe-
cially brutal Nazi, established a harshly repressive regime. Although
Terboven and Quisling had the same goal – to transform Norway into a
National Socialist society on the German model – the two men did not
work together well. Terboven had the stronger hand, and it was he who
was the real ruler of the country. As in many other instances, competition
among Nazi organizations did not benefit Jews, but on the contrary. The
German occupying force and the Quisling movement competed in the
destruction of the small community.
Harsh restrictions on Jews were introduced from the very outset of
German occupation. Following the German example, Jews married to
non-Jews and those with foreign passports were exempted from the
restrictions. The preparations for the deportations commenced in Octo-
ber 1942: The first wave took place in November 1942 and the second
wave in February 1943. As in other countries under German occupation,
8 I base the discussion of the Norwegian Holocaust mainly on the chapter by Samuel
Abrahamsen, “The Holocaust in Norway,” in Randolph Braham (ed.), Contemporary
Views on the Holocaust. Boston: Kluwer Nijhoff, 1983, pp. 109–42.
9 Hamsun admired the Nazis so much that he sent his Nobel Prize medal to Goebbels as a
present and was able to meet Hitler.
the task of collecting Jews and keeping them in detention camps before
their removal from the country to extermination centers was done by the
Norwegians themselves. Quisling’s men enthusiastically and efficiently
participated in the process. The Germans who had expected resistance
in Scandianavian countries were happily surprised by the attitude of
the Norwegian authorities.10 Only the leaders of the Lutheran Church
protested the treatment of Jews and they remained unpunished. At first
the men were arrested, followed by the women, children, and those over
65. The final destination was Auschwitz. Of the Western European coun-
tries Norway had one of the highest percentage of Jewish deaths. Accord-
ing to estimates 762 people died, making up about a little less than half
of the Jewish population of the country.
The rescue of Danish Jewry is all the more striking when compared to
what happened in neighboring Norway. Danish and Norwegian societies
were not very different, and therefore popular antisemitism could not
have been the source of the difference.
Why was the fate of the Norwegian and Danish Jews so different?
First and perhaps paradoxically, because during the first two years of
occupation there was less resistance in Denmark than in Norway, it was
in the interest of the Nazis not to disturb the status quo in Denmark by
insisting on “the solution of the Jewish question.” Consequently the Nazi
occupation authority exercised far greater control in Oslo than it did in
Copenhagen. Second, in Quisling, the Nazis found a useful collaborator;
he had no Danish equivalent. But most importantly, the difference was
caused by an accident of personalities. The Danish Jews were fortunate in
that the most important German representatives in Copenhagen possessed
a shred of humanity; they lacked the necessary determination to have
Jews deported and killed. We are left with the unhappy conclusion that
the behavior of a few individuals decided the life or death of thousands
of human beings.
Holland and Belgium

In the large secondary literature on the Dutch Holocaust the recurring
question has been why Dutch Jewry suffered the highest death rate of all
Western European Jews. What makes this question particularly intriguing
is that, paradoxically, Holland can be described as the least, antisemitic
10 Abrahamsen, p. 132.
country (together with Denmark) in Western Europe.11 One way to

approach this question is to compare Holland with Belgium, a neighbor-
ing country. The two countries were very similar in historical background
and economic and cultural development.
At the time of the German invasion, Holland had approximately
140,000 people who under the Nazi definition were considered to be
Jewish and therefore subject to acts of discrimination and, ultimately,
of deportation. This number made up only 1.5 percent of the popula-
tion. Given the liberal character of the Dutch state in the early modern
and modern period, even before emancipation in the Napoleonic age,
the restrictions imposed on Jews were less onerous than elsewhere. Jews
were not particularly rich, but they were increasingly secular and highly
urbanized: More than half of Dutch Jewry lived in Amsterdam. No other
Jewish community in Europe was better integrated, and none had deeper
roots. The ancestors of Jews that the Nazis found in Holland had lived
in the country for several generations. There were many fewer refugees
there in the interwar period than in Belgium or France.12
Of course, antisemitism existed in early twentieth-century Holland,
as it did everywhere else, but it was a less potent force than in France.
Remarkably, until the mid-1930s the Dutch fascist party – though its ide-
ology featured leader worship, anticommunism, and the myth of national
unity and greatness – was not explicitly antisemitic. It even had Jewish
members. That party had more in common with the Italian version of
fascism than with the German variety. It only became antisemitic in the
mid-1930s, as Nazism came to be an increasingly powerful force. Under
German occupation it was the only legal party in the country, growing
considerably in size to about 100,000 members by 1944. Although this
party never assumed power, it provided significant help to the Nazis in
carrying out the deportations.
It is remarkable that the neighboring countries of Holland and Bel-
gium, which shared so much, had such profoundly different Jewish com-
munities. Jews in Holland had a long history and were well integrated
into society, in contrast to Jews in Belgium. Belgium had approximately
70,000 Jews, but 85 percent of those had migrated into the country
11 Of the approximately 140,000 Jews in Holland, only 27% survived, as compared to

Belgium, where 60% of its 70,000 Jews survived. These numbers are only estimates.
12 Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of Jews in the Netherlands,
1940–1945. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 37–41.
only after World War I.13 Most of the migrants in the 1920s came from
the defunct Russian Empire, but in the 1930s many were refugees from
Germany. Jews, here as elsewhere, were highly urban, concentrated in
Brussels and Antwerp. The great majority of Jews did not possess Belgian
citizenship, but their rootlessness turned out to be an advantage at the
time of crisis. After the German invasion on May 10, 1940, thousands
escaped to France. At that time the Germans had no objection to Jews
leaving the country; for the time being their main desire was simply to
get rid of them.
On May 10, 1940, the Wehrmacht attacked Belgium and Holland.
The occupation of the Benelux countries was part of the military strategy
aimed at the defeat of France. The Dutch army was capable of holding
back the invasion only for five days. However, based on the experience
of World War I in which Holland was able to stay out of the conflict,
the Dutch did not expect the violation of their neutrality. Consequently
people did not take advantage of the opportunity to escape to England.
In the chaos of the invasion it was difficult to get to the boats that were
still available. In any case, many hoped that the Allies would be able to
recapture Holland and did not foresee a deadly occupation regime that
would last for five years. One of the reasons for the high casualty rate
among Dutch Jews was that few of them escaped when it was possible.
Soon the opportunity disappeared.
The Dutch royal family and the government, however, managed to
escape to England. In this respect Holland was similar to Norway and
different from Denmark, Belgium, and France. At this stage the Germans
would have been willing to have a legitimate government in place that was
capable of collaborating, but the steadfastness of Queen Wilhelmina pre-
vented such an agreement. The German authorities from the outset then
assumed direct control. Such a situation had far-reaching consequences
for the Jewish population.
One must reach the unhappy conclusion that, wherever in Western
Europe the Germans had more trouble and therefore had to take mat-
ters into their own hands, the extermination of the Jew community was
more complete. When governments collaborated, that meant that they
succeeded in maintaining a least a degree of autonomy and therefore
were able to create a situation that was less deadly to Jews. However
13 Rudi van Doorslaer, “Jewish Immigration and Communism in Belgium, 1925–1939,”

in Dan Mikhman (ed.), Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians and Germans.
Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998, p. 63.
morally reprehensible collaboration may have been, the ultimate result

was saving Jewish lives. Even semi-autonomous governments were in a
position to negotiate, to slow down the process of deportations, and to
make decisions concerning which Jews should be sent to death camps.
Holland was unique in Western Europe in that the German occupa-
tion authorities were in complete control from the very outset. Unlike in
Norway, the Nazis did not make the local fascist leader the head of a
puppet government. The Dutch bureaucracy continued to function, but
there was not even a pretense of autonomy. The country was unfortunate
because the Nazi sent Arthur Seyss-Inquart to Amsterdam to serve as
the Reich commissioner, the highest civilian authority in the conquered
country. He was prepared for his position. As an Austrian, he played a
significant role in the incorporation of his homeland into the Reich and
after the outbreak of the war acted as a deputy to Governor General
Hans Frank in Poland. His brief experience in Poland and his involve-
ment in the “solution of the Jewish question” there may have influenced
his behavior in Holland. He was an ideologically committed Nazi, with a
long history of antisemitism, and he became an enthusiastic architect of
the Holocaust in Holland. He surrounded himself with people of similar
background and ideological commitments, who had come from Austria
and brought with them the Austrian brand of antisemitism. Three of the
four general commissioners, responsible for supervising different parts
of the administration, were Austrians: Hans Rauter, representing the SS,
as well as Friederich Wimmer and Hans Fischbock, two aides of Seyss-
Inquart.14 There was a unity of purpose among these people that was the
mirror image of the Nazi functionaries in Copenhagen, who refused to
perform their anti-Jewish activities with much enthusiasm. This unity of
views removed any doubts that what they were doing was worthwhile
and necessary; it greatly influenced their behavior as they encouraged one
another. However, as elsewhere, there were turf wars among the Nazi
functionaries: Seyss-Inquart resented the power of the SS representative
who had direct access to Himmler. As mentioned before, such disagree-
ments and jealousies did not benefit the Jews. The Nazi bureaucrats vied
to outdo one another in the performance of their duties.
Once Holland was pacified, the Wehrmacht handed over power to
civilian administrators. Perhaps the Nazis introduced a civilian admin-
istration because they regarded the Dutch, like the Norwegians, as a
14 J. C. Blom, “The persecution of Jews in the Netherlands: A comparative Western Euro-

pean perspective,” European History Quarterly, 1989, p. 338.
Germanic folk and therefore deserving the benefits of everything that

National Socialism could offer. However, the fact that Holland came
under a civilian administration had unfortunate consequences for the
Jews, because it allowed the SS (i.e., radical Nazis) to play a stronger role
than the generals of the Wehrmacht.
Holland had a special place in Nazi plans for the future, probably
it was to be incorporated into the Reich after the Nazi victory. All the
policies affecting the German Jews were to be applied to the Dutch Jews,
however, the application of these were not introduced immediately. After
the invasion the Germans above all wanted stability and did not want
to do anything that would undermine it. As an Aryan, Germanic people,
the Dutch were to be won over to the cause of National Socialism by
persuasion. The occupation authorities therefore invested a great deal of
energy in propaganda efforts and provided financial support to journalists
who presented the “correct” point of view.
Belgium was invaded on the same day as Holland. The war in Belgium
lasted for eighteen days before its army capitulated. The Nazis were inter-
ested in Belgium as a part of their struggle against the Allies: They wanted
increased security, and they wanted to use the available resources of the
country for military purposes. At the outset the Nazis avoided raising
the race question, believing that doing so would produce hostility and
resistance at the time when their primary goal was stability in occupied
Western Europe.
Although King Leopold III remained in Belgium, the cabinet escaped
to England and declared itself to be the legitimate government. As a
consequence of his collaboration the king quickly lost popularity. Most
importantly, the country remained under a military, rather than a civil-
ian, administration. Like elsewhere, the Belgian bureaucracy remained in
place, and the Germans administered the country with the help of the
native officeholders. The Germans found plenty of collaborators. The
perennial problem of Belgium – its division between the Flemish North
and the Walloon South – made the task of the Germans easier, as pro-
German forces from each side competed for the favor of the occupiers.
Each part of the country produced its own version of Nazism. The Wal-
loon right-wing Rexist Party, led by Leon Degrelle, was deeply influenced
by Roman Catholicism, and so the Nazis preferred the Flemish equiva-
lent – VNV, the Flemish National League – headed by Staf De Clercq.
However, members of both parties collaborated wholeheartedly.
The military governor in Belgium from the time of the beginning of
the occupation to his arrest in 1944 for his involvement in resistance
activities was Alexander von Falkenhausen. He was a descendant of an

aristocratic family who likely had contempt for the plebeian Nazis. The
main outlines of Jewish policies were, of course, made in Berlin, but the
local authorities by necessity had considerable latitude in carrying out
orders. Von Falkenhausen, like the other senior generals of the Wehrma-
cht, had little love for Jews. When he turned against Hitler in 1944, it was
not because of his dismay at the murder of millions of Jews. Nevertheless
because of his contempt for Nazis he carried out the anti-Jewish policies
ordered from above with less enthusiasm than Seyss-Inquart.
The restrictions on Jews in Belgium and Holland were imposed gradu-
ally, and during the first months of Nazi occupation, it was not yet clear
how determined the German authorities were to exterminate European
Jewry. The ever-increasing restrictions fundamentally repeated the Ger-
man experience, although the process had to be telescoped: Holland and
Belgium had to catch up with Germany, which was already much further
along on the road to extermination. The first regulations excluded Jews,
together with other anti-Nazi figures, from the bureaucracy. To carry out
such a policy, it was necessary to identify Jews, and such identification
was a necessary precondition for other anti-Jewish moves, just as much
as it was elsewhere.
Further restrictions quickly followed. Within a few months of the
occupation, all civil servants – and that included all teachers – were
required to sign an attestation that they were Aryans. The definition of
a “Jew” closely followed the Nuremberg principles. Although most civil
servants complied, many courageously refused to do so and accepted the
consequences.15 Although the steps the Nazis took concerning Jews were
prerequisites of extermination that is not to say that at this point the
Nazis themselves knew where their policies were leading. In the late 1940
it was not clear anywhere that ultimately the Nazis would attempt the
physical extermination of the entire European Jewry.
Jews were gradually excluded from society, which made their ultimate
removal from the country much easier. They lost their jobs and businesses,
were excluded from schools, and were forbidden to employ Christian
domestic help. The Germans confiscated Jewish wealth. Although neither
in Holland nor in Belgium were Jews particularly wealthy, nevertheless
the German loot was not insignificant. The impoverishment contributed
to the Jews’ powerlessness at the moment of their greatest need. As in the
other occupied countries Jews were made to create their own leadership
15 Moore, pp. 54–58.

whose main task was to transmit German orders. As elsewhere, the role
of the leadership later came to be heavily criticized as making the task of
the killers easier.
The year 1941 was decisive on the road to extermination. In early
1941 Jews were required to register, which later proved to be an impor-
tant step toward their deportation. At this point, of course, no one could
have understood the consequences of registering. Regarding this process,
the difference between the two countries was substantial. The Dutch
bureaucracy, although not driven by passionate antisemitism, was highly
efficient, and this efficiency had deadly consequences. In addition, in Hol-
land unlike in Belgium, Jews universally complied with the regulation. As
good citizens, they believed it was their duty to obey the authorities. In
any case, they knew that the state kept reliable records of their religious
identity. In Belgium the situation was different. Belgian documents for
constitutional reasons did not include information about religion. Jews,
the vast majority of whom were foreigners, were less likely to obey author-
ity and register voluntarily than their Dutch coreligionists. This resistance
later saved many lives.
In February 1941 the German arrested hundreds of Jews as “hostages”
in Amsterdam. The Dutch reaction was extraordinary: The trade unions,
under communist influence, called for a general strike in Amsterdam.
This was the only strike that took place anywhere in Europe in response
to Nazi antisemitic actions. The strikers were also expressing their bit-
terness against German occupation policies. German propagandists used
the strike to their own ends, claiming that its organizers were all Jewish
and therefore it was necessary to take energetic steps against them.16 The
German response was quick and brutal: The organizers were arrested and
executed, and the Jewish hostages sent to German concentration camps.
In Belgium there were no such protest actions. As elsewhere the Ger-
mans used the native bureaucracy in the administration of the country.
Here, unlike in Holland, the military leadership wanted to retain the
cooperation of this bureaucracy by making distinctions in their treat-
ment of Jews that it believed would increase collaboration. The Germans
realized that the Belgians would be more willing to give up their foreign
citizens than the native ones. Unlike in Holland, where citizenship made
no difference, in Belgium the foreign Jews, who made up the great major-
ity, were more likely to be deported. The intercession of Queen Elisabeth
16 David Irving, Goebbels; Mastermind of the Third Reich. London: Parforce, 1996,
p. 657.
and Cardinal Van Roey on behalf of the Jews of Belgian nationality also
may have made a difference.
The great turning point leading to mass extermination was the Nazi
attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Nazis soon thereafter
came to understand that it was psychologically and technically possible
to kill millions of human beings. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the
deportation of Jews from Western Europe was discussed at the Wannsee
Conference in January 1942. The participants did not foresee any par-
ticular difficulties with deportations from Holland, Belgium, and France
and planned similar processes in each place. In each country Jews prior to
deportation were to assemble in transit camps: Westerbork in Holland,
Drancy in France, and Malines in Belgium.
The deportations, which began in the summer of 1942, were a complex
undertaking. The availability of trains and the ability of extermination
camps to receive inmates were limited, and therefore precise, coordinated
plans had to be drawn up in Berlin. The original plans for the transport
from Holland envisaged 15,000 people, but the number was quickly
increased to 40,000. The reason for the change was that occupied France,
which had a larger quota (40,000), was unable to gather the number of
people expected within the short time allotted. To make up the difference,
the Dutch were required to deliver more people to their deaths, 1,000
people daily. The deportation of Dutch Jewry was to be accomplished
within eight months.17
In Holland the deportations were carried out by a contingent of Ger-
man order police, but they were greatly outnumbered by the Dutch police,
which were brought under German supervision. Here we see that the
Dutch Jews paid a price for the efficiency of the bureaucracy: Its stel-
lar recordkeeping and ability to collect the required number of Jews in
short order enabled it to carry out the German orders.18 The task of the
local German authorities was to provide enough people to meet the quota
for the twice-weekly transports. Jews were gathered in a camp ahead of
time and from there were taken to the train station. The pretense was
that people were being called up to work in Germany; therefore, the first
victims were women and men in the age group of 16–40 years, later
extended to 50. In fact, the trains took their victims to Auschwitz, and
17 Pim Griffion and Ron Zeller, “Anti Jewish policy and organization of the deporta-
tions in France and the Netherlands, 1940–1944: A comparative study.” Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, Winter 2006, p. 450.
18 Moore, p. 91.
when Auschwitz could not accommodate more victims, Jews were sent
to the even more lethal camp of Sobibor. One of the reasons for the
disproportionate Dutch death toll was that, unlike in Auschwitz, only a
handful of people survived in Sobibor. Soon the pretense was dropped,
and Jews of all ages were required to appear, unless they had received spe-
cial exemption by being married to a non-Jew, working in an important
post for the war effort, or, what was most resented by other Jews, work-
ing for the Jewish leadership in Amsterdam. Jews were ordered to appear
at the central gathering point, but when not enough people appeared to
fill a transport, the Germans and the Dutch police carried out raids. As
time went by fewer and fewer people appeared voluntarily, and therefore
the raids became more frequent and were carried out with ever more
brutality.
The quotas for deportations came from Berlin; the efficiency with
which Jews were collected, however, was due to the devotion of the
German leadership in Amsterdam. To meet the quotas the Germans and
their Dutch helpers collected as many Jews as they could and held them
in temporary camps in dreadful conditions to be ready when the trains
arrived. Hospitals, orphanages, and old age homes were targeted. The
great majority of Jews had been killed by the end of 1943.
In Belgium the process of deportations did not go as smoothly as it did
in Holland. The military leadership jealously guarded its authority over
the SS. This did not mean that they tried to save Jews from deportations,
but they attempted to prevent what they considered to be excesses that
might have created conflict with the population. The deportations from
Belgium began on August 4, 1942. Antwerp was a city with a Flemish
majority as opposed to Brussels, which had a mixed population but was
dominated by Walloons. The police in Antwerp provided greater help in
rounding up Jews for deportations. Most but not all transports went to
Auschwitz, where some Jews who were capable of working survived for
some time. Other transports went to Polish ghettos, primarily to Lodz.
The German authorities, so as not to arouse Belgian public opinion
too much, started the deportations with Jews who had no citizenship.
The native Jews for some time continued to believe that they would be
spared, although by the end of 1942, 15,000 Jews had been deported. The
deportations continued almost to the very end of the German occupation,
but as time went on the Nazis found less and less cooperation from Belgian
civilians and the task of rounding up Jews came to be more and more
difficult. According to estimates, approximately 25,000 Jews who had
lived in Belgium at the outbreak of the war were murdered.
How are we to explain the disproportionately great losses of the Dutch

Jewry? The most important factor was the nature of the occupation
authority. Nazi plans for the future were never precise, but it is probable
that in the case of victory the Germans would have incorporated Holland
into the Reich. This plan might explain why Holland had a civilian rather
than a military occupation, as in the rest of Western Europe. Devoted
Nazis, who competed with one another in delivering Jews to their deaths,
ruled the country. There were more SS troops than in France, and they
did not have to deal with troublesome native administrators. Second, the
very efficiency of the Dutch bureaucracy had unfortunate consequences.
It was usually easy to find where Jews were and to pick them up without
much trouble. As everywhere, the Germans could not have done the work
by themselves. The vast majority of Jews were captured by Dutch troops
who collaborated because of habit, because of conviction, or because of
the expectation of private gain. Jews themselves may have contributed
to their own destruction by having great confidence that, as citizens in a
civilized country, they would be defended. It was a special feature of the
Dutch Holocaust that, unlike anywhere else, foreign Jews had a slightly
greater chance of survival than native Jews.19 Perhaps that happened
because the former were more aware of the danger and therefore took
preventive actions that occasionally saved them.20
France and Italy

The inability of the Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, and Belgians to resist
the might of the German army surprised no one; the defeat of France,
however, was a different matter. Military strategists believed as late as
1939 that France had the strongest army in Europe. The quick collapse
not only of the French army but also of the entire political system was
both unexpected and tragic, and not only for France but also for the
entire European continent.
The collaborationist regime came to office legitimately: President
Albert Lebrun appointed Marshal Philip Pétain to conclude an end to
the hostilities with victorious Germany. The National Assembly on June
10, 1940, made him chief of state and gave him extraordinary powers
necessitated by the emergency. The armistice that ended the hostilities,
19 Peter Tammes, “Jewish immigrants in the Netherlands during Nazi occupation,” Journal
of Interdisciplinary History 2007, Vol. 37. No. 4, pp. 543–62.
20 In drawing these conclusions I was greatly influenced by J. C. Blom’s article.
signed at Compiegne on June 22, divided France in a complex territorial

arrangement. Alsace Lorraine was reincorporated into the Reich; north-
ern and western France came under military occupation; districts along
the Italian border were occupied by Italian troops; and the residue, a
“free zone” or Free France, was administered from the little town of
Vichy where Pétain’s government took up its headquarters. The laws and
regulations of the Vichy government were valid in regions occupied by
the German army; thereby Jews came under the authority of two dif-
ferent sets of repressive regulations. In November 1942, to forestall an
invasion from North Africa, the German army occupied the entire coun-
try; however, the Vichy government remained in place and continued to
collaborate with the occupation forces. Unquestionably, the Vichy gov-
ernment provided great help to the occupiers in a variety of ways, among
them the deportations of a significant part of Jews who were in French
territory at the outbreak of the war. Pétain and his government expected
that a victorious Germany would soon sign a peace treaty with France
and that the division of the country would only be temporary. However,
as time went by and no peace treaty was signed, the politicians in Vichy
were increasingly concerned that the division of the country would have
long-term consequences.
Aside from an enlarged Germany, in 1940 France had the largest
Jewish population in Western Europe, numbering approximately 330,000
people. Many of these Jews had moved to France in the 1920s, attracted
by economic opportunities, or in the 1930s to escape from repressive
countries, most significantly Germany. The steps leading to the destruc-
tion of French Jewry began immediately after the invasion. The machinery
of destruction was the most complex in Western Europe.
The first and most important division was between the German occu-
piers and the collaborators. The German and the French officials shared
some common goals, but they also had diverging interests. The Nazis
and the collaborators shared the desire to remove Jews from the life of
the French nation, but in implementing that goal, the collaborators were
more discriminating and were willing to give more exemptions. Unlike the
Nazis, the collaborators drew a sharp distinction between native French
Jews and those who came to the country recently. Few of them were
so determined antisemites as to want to send to their deaths their com-
patriots whose ancestors had lived in the country for centuries. For the
collaborators the most important task was to preserve as much autonomy
as was possible and to protect French interests by preventing the removal
of Jewish wealth to Germany. When Jewish enterprises were “aryanized,”
the French wanted to be the beneficiaries. The Germans were well aware
that they needed French cooperation not only in the task of destroying
Jews but also in the larger goal of providing a bureaucratic structure,
because they lacked the manpower needed to administer as large a coun-
try as France. The relationship between the French and the Germans was
characterized by constant negotiations.
As elsewhere, the German occupation authority was divided into fief-
doms. At the outset the most powerful organization in Paris was the
Reichswehr, headed by General Otto von Stülpnagel from October 1940
until February 1942, when his cousin, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, took
his place. The generals had to share authority with the representatives of
the SS and the diplomatic service, which was directed by Otto Abetz,
the de facto ambassador.21 All German officials in France participated in
anti-Jewish actions; however, the representatives of the competing orga-
nizations had different priorities. As time went on, the influence of the SS
increased and with that the harshness of the anti-Jewish actions.
The generals were no friends of the Jews; in fact, Carl-Heinrich von
Stülpnagel was directly responsible for massacres of Jews in the Ukraine.
However, from the point of view of the army, maintaining stability was an
important goal, and therefore alienating French opinion was to be avoided
as much as possible. The first Stülpnagel resigned rather than carry out
savage reprisals that he considered contrary to his honor as a German
officer. The second Stülpnagel was sentenced to death in 1944 for his
involvement in the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler. In contrast, the SS and
Abetz were driven to a greater extent by Nazi ideology: They considered
“the solution of the Jewish question” to be urgent and important.
The Vichy regime was also divided. There were no friends of Jews
in the government, but there was a difference between the behavior of
confirmed antisemites and that of the opportunists, who were willing to
do what the Germans wanted in the hope of protecting French interests.
During the first year of the occupation, whatever the Vichy authorities
did to Jews was done on their own accord. Of course, the French held the
Germans as examples to follow, and they realized that taking anti-Jewish
measures would please the occupiers. It is striking how quickly the men
of Vichy turned to undoing the achievement of the French Revolution:
emancipation.
21 Because no peace treaty was signed, France and Germany had no regular diplomatic
relations, and therefore Otto Abetz could not be named ambassador. He represented the
Foreign Ministry and was personally close to Ribbentrop.
In 1940 the Germans expelled thousands of Jews from Alsace and

deposited them without food or shelter in the unoccupied territory. Jews
who had already escaped to the south from the occupied regions were
not allowed to return. At this point the Germans were happy to get rid
of them, although soon they would do everything within their power to
find and kill them. In the territory under their direct control they took
more and more harsh measures against Jews, registering them, depriv-
ing them of their property, and excluding them from professions. They
were very much interested in the aryanization of Jewish property, using
the French industrial base for their own purposes. They acted quickly:
On September 27 an ordinance was passed defining a Jew as a person
with two Jewish grandparents. A few days later Jews were compelled to
register.22 They filled out extensive forms that later made it easier for
their persecutors to locate them. They also had to mark their stores as
“Jewish businesses.” This was the first step toward the aryanization of
Jewish businesses. Gradually Jews were excluded from more and more
economic activities. In August 1940 the government repealed the law
forbidding the publication of articles that advocated hatred against a reli-
gious or national minority. Antisemites were now free to express their
hate.23
The French and the Germans took parallel steps toward destruction,
even though at the time neither group could have known the ultimate
results. At the outset the French did not need much encouragement.
Their actions were the products of native French antisemitism, rather than
something imposed on them by the Germans. Those right-wing French-
men who were in control of the government acted on their long-held
beliefs: Jews could never be integrated and they represented a significant
danger to their idea of France. A series of decrees aimed to revoke all
naturalizations that took place after 1927.24 The next steps concerned
definition of who was a Jew and aryanization. The two measures were
connected because Jewish wealth needed to be identified and then cata-
loged. The most important of the new antisemitic legislation was passed
on October 3: It removed Jews from the upper echelons of the civil
22 Renee Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II. Waltham, MA: Brandeis
University Press, 1994, p. 31.
23 Michael Robert Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and Jews. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, p. 3.
24 Martin Jungius and Wolfgang Seibel, “The citizen as perpetrator: Kurt Blanke and
aryanization in France, 1940–1944,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Winter 2008,
p. 445.
service, restricted their numbers in the professions, and excluded them

from any positions where they would be able to influence public opinion.
At the same time the government passed an ordinance to set up special
camps to intern stateless Jews. Although it was not clear at the time,
it would be these Jews who were the first ones sent to extermination
camps.25
In the summer of 1940 the “Jewish question” in Western Europe was
not at the top on the German agenda. The next military task was to sub-
due England, and for that purpose it was essential to be able to exploit
French resources and assure that resistance there would not become both-
ersome. As far as the Nazi leadership was concerned, the long-term task
of getting rid of all Jews in Europe could be postponed. For the time being,
the German army leaders were the most powerful faction in Paris. The
generals believed that taking harsh measures against Jews might further
alienate French opinion and were pleasantly surprised that they encoun-
tered little resistance. The French willingness to cooperate was the greatest
when the Germans seemed to be winning the war and the politicians in
Vichy were hoping to assure for their country a favorable place in the
new Europe.
In March 1941 the Vichy government created a General Commissariat
for Jewish affairs, headed by the notorious antisemite, Xavier Vallat. He
was the right person for the job. He had placed antisemitism at the center
of his worldview from the beginning of his career. Like other conser-
vative thinkers, he assumed that Jews could never be assimilated, were
parasitical, and therefore were deadly dangerous to his idea of France.
Like others, he believed that at the end of the war they would have to be
removed to some unspecified place.
The internment of Jews who did not have citizenship began in the
spring of 1941. The task was carried out by the French police and
took place without incidents or protests. By the summer of 1942 about
20,000 Jews had been interned. The largest of these camps was at Drancy,
at the outskirts of Paris, which was established in August 1941. Later it
became a transition point on the way to the camps; almost all Jews who
were sent east went through Drancy.26 At first the French police guarded
the camp, but in the middle of 1943 the Germans took direct control,
25 Richard Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France. New York: New York
26 Michael Curtis, Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime.
New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003, p. 164.
under the leadership of the notorious Austrian Nazi and the right-hand
man of Adolf Eichmann, Alois Brunner.
A goal of Vichy government policy was to maintain the unity of the
state (i.e., to extend its authority in administrative matters to the occupied
zone). Achieving that goal required dealing with the Jewish issue.27 The
Germans, in the person of the quasi-ambassador to France, Otto Abetz,
welcomed the French initiative and its promised French help. The registra-
tion requirements with all their harmful long-term effects were extended
to the Southern zone, although the Vichy collaborators on occasion were
able to gain concessions. Vallat, for example, successfully argued that vet-
erans should be excluded from anti-Jewish legislation because the “sen-
timental French” would respond negatively. Although some passionate
antisemites would have liked to get rid of all Jews, many of them in posi-
tions of power, such as Pierre Laval and Admiral Darlan, made it clear
that they did not want to go any further than helping in the removal
of the foreign Jews. When the Germans introduced the requirement that
Jews wear a yellow star, eliminating any distinction between foreign Jews
and native Jews, the public response was clearly hostile. Vichy’s policy
of deporting foreign Jews and protecting native Jews corresponded with
the majority opinion. The yellow star requirement was never introduced
in the unoccupied zone.
The spring and summer of 1942 was the crucial turning point in the
French Holocaust. As decided at the Wannsee Conference in January
1942, the turn of the Western European Jews for extermination had
come.28 Because France had by far the largest Jewish population, its
preliminary quota for deportation was the largest: 100,000 people. At
the same time personnel changes had taken place, in which extremists
replaced more moderate politicians. Darquier de Pellepoix took Xavier
Vallat’s place as Commissioner of Jewish Affairs. He was a man who
already in 1937 had talked about expelling Jews from France or mas-
sacring them. In the new circumstances Vallat was considered to be too
moderate. More significantly, the Germans took away the supervision of
police operations in France from the military and gave it to the SS. Carl
Albrecht Oberg, who had experience in Poland, took over the top posi-
tion: As the one responsible for both the Gestapo and the SS, he became
primarily responsible for the deportations.
27 Paxton and Marrus, p. 84.

28 Michèle Cointet-Labrousse and Michèle Cointet, Vichy et le fascisme: les hommes, les
structures et les pouvoirs. Paris, 1986, p. 203.
The Germans wanted to deport all Jews without reference to citizen-

ship. However, the compromise that was eventually agreed on was that,
in exchange for the French police doing most of the work of arresting
Jews and delivering them to Drancy, the deportations would be limited
to Jews without citizenship. In the middle of 1942 the Germans had only
approximately 2,500–3,000 men available for that purpose in France.29
Holland had almost twice as many.
In July 1942 the Vichy government agreed to the deportation of for-
eign Jews from both zones. The ground had been prepared: Foreign Jews
had already been registered and most were already in camps or labor bat-
talions. In the course of these deportations the people of Paris witnessed
perhaps some of the worst atrocities in Western Europe carried out by
a native police. The police rounded up men, women, the elderly, and
children and kept them without food in appalling conditions for days in
the Velodrome d’Hiver, awaiting transport to their deaths. A particularly
unseemly aspect of the deportation was that the French themselves asked
for the removal of orphans; they did not want to be burdened with the
responsibility of taking care of children.
Once the deportations began, some French people who had previously
supported the Vichy regime did speak out, and public opinion shifted.
There was significant protest from some members of the Catholic hierar-
chy. The behavior and attitudes of the police also varied: Some carried
out their responsibilities with more zeal than others. Some police offi-
cers warned their prospective victims, giving them a chance to escape.
By the middle of 1943 the Germans came to regard the French police
as unreliable.30 From the very beginning, the quota had to be reduced:
Trains were often not available, and when they were the police and the
Germans could not find enough victims to fill them. At the end of 1942,
the most murderous year, “only” 42,000 Jews from France were sent to
extermination camps. As the German desire to deport Jews increased,
their ability to do so had diminished.
With the beginning of deportations public opinion shifted. The Ger-
mans who knew neither the language nor the country had a difficult
time without French help. After the occupation of the entire country in
November 1942 their resources were spread even more thinly. Probably
more important than moral indignation was the French recognition after
Stalingrad that Germany was unlikely to win the war. The Nazis never
29 Paxton and Marrus, p. 241.

30 Ibid., p. 260.
lost their desire to kill Jews, and they continued to arrest and send victims
to extermination camps until the very end of the occupation, but their
ability to do so decreased more and more.
Approximately 330,000 Jews lived in France at the time of the German
invasion, and estimates of the number killed vary between 75,000 and
80,00. About 3,000 died in French camps and 76,000 were deported, of
whom only 2,500 survived.31 Paradoxically, with the exceptions of Italy
and Denmark, French Jewry in terms of percentages suffered the small-
est losses, yet in the scholarly literature French collaborators have been
condemned most strongly. The cause for the condemnation and for the
relatively high survival rate, ironically, is the same: French collaboration.
The Vichy regime was not simply imposed by the Germans; the inhu-
mane policies of that regime were not simply forced on the French by
outsiders. The trauma of the French defeat gave an opportunity for the
anti-Dreyfus coalition to come to power. They acted on the basis of long-
held beliefs and convictions and therefore deserve condemnation. At the
same time, the fact that France had a collaborationist regime later saved
human beings. The major difference between Holland and France was
that the “solution of the Jewish question” in Holland was entirely in the
hands of the Nazis and there was nothing to restrain them. In France the
Germans constantly had to negotiate with the French and accept com-
promises. Maybe the Germans, because they considered the Dutch to be
a Germanic people, therefore were willing to make greater investments
to free that country from Jews, but lacked the willingness or the ability
to make a comparable investment in making France also judenrein.
In June 1940, Italy, wanting also to participate in a war of conquest,
came to occupy a small sliver of land in southeast France. In the fol-
lowing years thousands of French Jews escaped from their native land to
that territory occupied by the enemy. The Italians also protected Jews in
Croatia and Greece. Other allies of Hitler’s Germany were also unwilling
to sacrifice their Jews, but only Italy became a protector of foreign Jews.
In pre-unification Italy Jews suffered discrimination, but were well
prepared for the coming of the modern age. Jews with great enthusiasm
sided with the nationalists, who achieved the unification of the coun-
try against the papacy and against the Hapsburgs. Because Jews enjoyed
almost universal literacy compared to the largely uneducated rest of the
population, they soon came to play a role way out of proportion to their
31 I took these numbers from Michael Robert Marrus, “Coming to terms with Vichy,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Spring 1995, p. 24.
numbers not only in the cultural life but also in the political life of the
young nation. The cause of Jewish emancipation and nation formation
came to be intertwined. Opportunities not only for acculturation but
also for advancement in every sphere opened up. In terms of reaching
top positions in the civil service, diplomacy, and even the military, early
twentieth-century Italian Jewry was unparalleled in Europe.32 Italy’s rel-
atively small Jewry, approximately 50,000 at the time of Mussolini’s
coming to power, was the most acculturated in all of Western Europe.
Italian Jews experienced the highest rates of intermarriage anywhere in
Europe. Italy had no Jewish problem.
We have come to associate fascism and antisemitism, and indeed, the
two concepts go well together. However, one does not automatically
imply the other. The original home of fascism, Mussolini’s Italy, was
not noticeably antisemitic. Although Jews were everywhere associated
with liberal parties, no one considered it strange or unusual that during
Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922 some Jews joined the fascist move-
ment. Jews were prominent both in the fascist and also in the antifascist
movements. Fascism from its inception was racist, but not antisemitic,
and when for the first time in the 1930s antisemitic voices could be
heard within the fascist movement, German Jews could still find refuge in
Mussolini’s Italy.
The situation drastically changed in 1938 with the adoption of
antisemitic laws. No evidence suggests that the Germans pressured the
Italians to introduce this legislation. One can only speculate about the
causes of Mussolini’s change of attitude. Surely the German example and
the necessities of coordinating policies with the Nazis must have been
factors.33 However, as Franklin Adler argues, domestic and international
considerations played a greater role. Mussolini came to blame interna-
tional Jewry for his domestic and international troubles. Jews came to
stand for the “bourgeois spirit” at a time when the fascist movement
attempted to describe itself as “proletarian.” For the first time Mussolini
defined Jews as enemies of fascist Italy.
Yet Italian Jewish life in the period between 1938 and 1943 could
be described as persecution without antisemitism. It was a period full of
paradoxes and ambiguities. On the one hand, the anti-Jewish legislation
32 Alexander Stille, “The double bind of Italian Jews,” in Joshua Zimmerman (ed.), Jews in
Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule 1922–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005, p. 25.
33 Franklin Hugh Adler, “Jew as bourgeois, Jew as enemy, Jew as victim of Fascism,”
Modern Judaism, October, 2008, pp. 306–26.
was explicitly racist, and it aimed at the exclusion of Jews from most
of the institutions of the Italian state and society. These laws were more
restrictive than contemporary legislation in Hungary – where children
were not excluded from schools and Jews were excluded from the eco-
nomic life of the nation less thoroughly – even though Hungary had a
long history of vicious antisemitism. Within a short time of the introduc-
tion of these laws in Italy, thousands of Jews lost their livelihood and
Jewish children were excluded from the school system. (However, unlike
in Germany, they were able to establish schools of their own.34 ) Some
Jews without citizenship were interned.
Although the anti-Jewish policy occasioned no measurable increase in
antisemitism, at the same time no one spoke up for their now persecuted
compatriots. Just as in Germany some years earlier, the laws resulted
in the departure of prominent Jewish intellectuals, mostly to the United
States, causing considerable harm to Italian cultural life. Italians behaved
as people elsewhere: they took advantage of these opportunities, taking
Jewish jobs and their property. When Italy entered the war in 1940, the
laws became even stricter.
At the same time because this policy was driven not by a passionate
antisemitism but by self-interest and, as the fascists saw it, national inter-
ests, it was much easier to find exemptions from the force of the law;
at times there was a seeming lack of seriousness in its enforcement. In a
famous example, a chief antisemitic theorist, Roberto Farinacci, employed
a Jewish secretary.35 Most significantly, Italian fascists were not ready to
participate in mass murder. The Nazis found it increasingly disturbing
that at a time in 1942 when Europe was being emptied of Jews, not only
were Italian Jews protected from deportations but even foreign Jews who
moved to Italian-occupied territories were not being deported.
The turning point in the history of the Italian Holocaust, which
occurred in the summer of 1943, was the result of the overthrow of Mus-
solini and the conclusion of a separate peace treaty with the Allies, which
divided the country in two. With the German occupation of northern
Italy, Italy was transformed from an ally to a country partially occupied
by the Nazis. Unfortunately most of Jews lived in central and northern
Italy in the area that came under German occupation. The Nazis behaved
34 Iael Nidam Orvieto, “The Impact of Anti-Jewish Legislation on Everyday Life and
the Response of Italian Jews, 1938–1943,” in Joshua Zimmerman (ed.), Jews in Italy
under Fascist and Nazi Rule 1922–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005,
pp. 161–63.
in Italy as they did elsewhere. Because it was already late 1943, when
most Jews from Europe had already been deported and dead, they felt
the pressure of time; the deportations began immediately without the
preparatory measures that took place in other occupied countries. The
reconstructed Mussolini regime, which was set up at Salo on Lago di
Garda, was altogether different from the one that had been overthrown
a little earlier. In reality, the Germans were in complete control, even
though they needed and received local help. In this respect Italy was no
different from the other occupied countries. However, perhaps because
of the weak tradition of antisemitism and the fact that by this time it
was clear that Germany would lose the war, the Nazis received less
cooperation from the local population than they did elsewhere. In no
occupied country (with the exception of Denmark) did Jews receive as
much help as in occupied Italy and were protected as much by their neigh-
bors. Especially in the countryside, people took pity on those who were
persecuted.
The largest operation took place in Rome in October 1943, which still
had approximately 10,000 Jews. As in other Western European countries
in 1942 and 1943 the trains went to the extermination camps, primarily
to Auschwitz. The Germans acting on their own saw no need to pay
attention to Italian sensibilities. The anti-Jewish action was led by the
experienced Theodor Dannecker, a close associate of Adolph Eichmann,
who had gained experience in Bulgaria and France and would go on to
Hungary when he was needed.36 He had spent his SS career attempting
to solve the “Jewish problem.” Unlike in France, where he constantly
had to negotiate with the Vichy authorities, in Italy he was free to act
independently.
In December 1943 the Salo regime declared all Jews, whether citizens
or aliens, subject to arrest. From this point on, Mussolini’s police made
most of the arrests of Jews; the Germans did not have the manpower to
go to Italian towns and villages. From the Italian fascist point of view the
arrests of Jews by Germans was disturbing not so much because they were
aimed at their fellow citizens, but because they were a demonstration of
the complete loss of sovereignty. After the Italian police collected Jews,
the Germans took over and deported them. According to the research
of Liliana Piccicotto, the total number of victims was 8,529, of whom
36 Liliana Piciotto, “The Shoah in Italy: Its history and characteristics,” in Joshua Zimmer-
man (ed.), Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule 1922–1945. New York: Cambridge
6,806 died in concentration camps, 322 died in Italy while detained, and
another 950 could not be accounted for.37
Conclusion
This survey of the Holocaust in six Western European countries allows
us to make some generalizations. The depth of antisemitism of the vari-
ous peoples did not correlate well with the number of Jews killed by the
Nazis. It is fair to assume that some degree of antisemitism existed every-
where in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Each country had a fascist party.
However, it was France where in the 1930s the most vocal antisemitic
voices could be heard. In no other Western European country was there
an equivalent of a Pellepoix, who explicitly talked about the massacre
of Jews; in France the conservative, antisemitic regime of Marshal Pétain
enjoyed considerable popularity. And yet, not counting Denmark, which
was a special case, or Italy, which the Nazis occupied only partially and
for a relatively short time, it was in France where a Jew had the best
chance of survival.
What mattered most was the nature of the occupying power. With the
exception of Denmark, the Nazi officials in Western Europe enthusiasti-
cally carried out policies that were set in Berlin. Everywhere (once again
with the exception of Denmark) the Nazis needed and received local help
without which they could not have possibly carried out their work. What
distinguished France was that its conservative regime possessed a mea-
sure of autonomy, and the Nazis constantly had to negotiate for help and
were forced to give concessions. We may establish it as a rule that the
more authority of a native government had, the better were the chances
of Jewish survival.
37 Ibid., p. 219.
12
The Last Island

Hungary, 1932–1945
The position of Hungarian Jewry has always been exceptional (see Chap-
ter 3), with Jews playing a very important role in every aspect of national
life.1 Their importance to the nation was a double-edged sword: In the
twentieth century, it created bitter antisemitism, but yet Jews could not
be removed easily from the Hungarian economy – as they could in the
countries of Western Europe – without doing grave damage to the coun-
try.
In the spring of 1944 it was evident that the Nazis were determined to
murder all the Jews of Europe, and indeed, they had already done much
to achieve that aim: The two bloodiest years of the year were 1942 and
1943. One of the reasons they “succeeded” in killing so many Jews was
that they had developed a uniform modus operandi that they followed in
country after country. However, each country had its own Holocaust, and
because of varying circumstances the end results were not the same. In the
Eastern European countries, which had large Jewish populations, such as
Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia, had
different political and social systems and different Jewries and therefore
the character of antisemitism in these countries also varied. Hungary
differed from both Eastern European and Western European countries in
that, before World War I, Hungarians defined the nation in such a way
as to include Jews, and its Jews were valued as allies of the nationalists.
Ironically and sadly, although one of the reasons why Jews in Slovakia
1 By far the most detailed and solid study of the Hungarian Holocaust is by Randolph
Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. 2 vols. Enlarged edition.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
235
and Romania were hated was that they were considered to be Hungarians
(and indeed they considered themselves as such), just on the other side
of the border, their Hungarian compatriots, after the conclusion of the
Great War, refused to accept them as fellow countrymen any longer.2
As did other countries that were allies of Nazi Germany but were
not occupied by it, such as Bulgaria, the Hungarian government refused
to deport and thereby assume responsibility for the murder of its Jews,
despite Hungary’s bitter antisemitism. However, on March 19, 1944, the
situation changed when Germany occupied Hungary. What the Nazis
accomplished in several years in other countries had to be done in Hun-
gary in a very short time, in circumstances when it should have been
obvious to everyone that the Nazis faced imminent defeat. The peculiar-
ity of the Hungarian Holocaust was that it took place when Germany
had already lost the war. The process of extermination had to be tele-
scoped. According to the census of 1941, 725,007 Jews lived in the greatly
enlarged Hungarian territory. An additional 100,000 people or so were
considered Jewish according to the racial laws. Until 1944, more Jews
lived under Hungarian rule than there were Jews in Western Europe at
the outbreak of the war.3 By the time the Germans occupied Hungary, the
total number had already been reduced to 762,000, one-third of whom
lived in Budapest, the capital.
Antisemitic Legislation
Fueled by the economic crisis of the 1930s, the extreme right-wing element
of the nationalist movement that was known to be bitterly antisemitic
came to power. Gyula Gömbös, who had been the leader of the Szeged
group of more extreme counterrevolutionaries, became prime minister
on October 1, 1932. He was the first leader of a government to visit the
newly appointed Führer. However, contrary to many people’s expecta-
tions, events did not take a dramatic turn during his premiership. In spite
of strong popular and intellectual antisemitism in Hungary at the time,
the economic position of Jews did not deteriorate. Until the late 1930s
the regime did not make a concentrated effort to destroy Jewish economic
power and influence. It remains unclear whether Gömbös moderated his
2 Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during
World War II. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
3 Randolph Braham, “Mentöakciok Magyarországon: mitoszok és valoság,” in Randolph
Braham (ed.), Tanulmányok a Holokausztrol, Vol. 5. Budapest: Balassi, p. 134.
The Last Island 237
ferocious antisemitism because of the influence of Horthy and the con-

servative figures that surrounded him, or because he understood that he
needed the support of the Jewish financial elite.
Gömbös regarded himself more as a follower of Mussolini than of
Hitler. Unlike Mussolini, however, Gömbös’ past was such that there
could be no question about the strength of his antisemitism. Only tactical
considerations held him back from taking radical steps himself. However,
during his tenure radical voices could be heard more and more often, and
he appointed people who within a few years did take anti-Jewish action.
Gömbös prepared the soil. He would have liked to be the dictator of a
fascist state, but circumstances were not yet ready.
That Hungary would gravitate to the German sphere of influence was
inevitable. Its leaders’ primary goal was to undo the wrongs committed at
Versailles: They were driven by a desire to regain some of Hungary’s lost
territories. The most powerful and determined power fighting the status
quo was Hitler’s Germany, and it was from that emerging power that
the Hungarians could have expected effective help. In addition, the Ger-
man economy recovered faster than those of the other Western powers,
and consequently Germany became an importer of Hungarian products,
predominantly agricultural goods. The German alliance boded ill for the
Jewish minority.
Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös died in 1936, and he was followed in
office by a series of prime ministers – Kálmán Darányi, Béla Imrédy, Pál
Teleki, Lászlo Bárdossy, and Miklos Kállay – serving for relatively short
periods and in quick succession. These men differed from each other
in intelligence and willingness to serve their German masters. Teleki, for
example, foresaw that the Germans were likely to lose the coming war and
did everything in his power to distance Hungary from Hitler’s aggressive
ventures. In addition, as an aristocrat he could not but look on the Nazis
with disdain. However, as far as antisemitism was concerned, with the
partial exemption of Kállay, they were very similar to one another. They
took it for granted that Jews represented an alien minority and that the
Hungarian people needed to be protected from them. Most importantly,
in their struggle to hold onto power, they were willing to concede the
demands of the extreme right at the expense of the Jews, perhaps believing
that by passing laws that limited Jewish power and influence they were
saving Jews from something worse.
In the course of the 1930s in imitation of what was happening in Ger-
many and Italy, politicians of varying abilities and intellects appeared
with the intention of playing the role of the Hungarian Führer. However,
copying an ideology that was based on the assumption of the superiority

of the German “race” made little sense in Hungary. The future leader of
the Hungarian fascists, Ferenc Szálasi, who developed his ideology at this
time, was neither a great thinker nor indeed an educated man; neverthe-
less, his ideology was original enough to attract a following.4 Szálasi’s
achievement was to develop a fascist ideology suitable for the Hungarian
political and social environment. He called his political ideology “Hun-
garism,” based on the idea that it was crucial for the future of Europe
and of humankind to re-create the great Hungarian Empire, which would
occupy the entire Carpathian basin. It would be a multinational state, but
the superiority of Hungarians and of the Hungarian language and culture
would be taken for granted. Hungary would be the dominant power in
Eastern Europe and thereby assure peace in the region. How and why
the national minorities would accept the leading role of the Hungarians
Szálasi did not attempt to explain. He simply assumed that Hungarians
who were obviously superior were meant to be leaders. As fascists did
elsewhere at the time, he created an imagined and glorious past for his
nation. He combined his particular brand of nationalism with all other
features of contemporary fascism: antiliberalism, the supremacy of the
leader, corporatism, worship of youth and peasant life, and inevitably,
antisemitism.
Unlike Hitler and Mussolini but similar to other contemporary fascists,
Szálasi regarded himself as a good Christian. Indeed, he believed in his
own divine mission. He and his right-wing followers were deeply attached
to Christianity. In fact, one of the extreme right-wing movements was the
Christian National Socialist Party, headed by Károly Marothy Meizler.5
Meizler made passionate arguments for the exclusion of the Jewish “race”
from the life of the nation and later joined Szálasi’s Arrow-Cross party.
Szálasi placed antisemitism in the center of his worldview: Jews stood
behind all negative features of modern life, and hence there could be
no compromise with them. However, in a tweak of Nazi doctrine, he
did not consider Jews to be inferior. In the Nazi conception of the Jew
4 János Gyurgyák, A Zsidokérdés Magyarországon. Budapest: Osiris, 2001, pp. 451–56. As

did many other fascist leaders elsewhere in Europe, Szálasi came from an ethnically mixed
family. Among his ancestors were Armenians, Germans, Slovaks, and Hungarians.
5 His name was Meizler, and like so many right-wing politicians he changed his name to
make it sound Hungarian; his new name was “Marothy.” In the Diet he gave an extremely
antisemitic speech. However, in exile in Buenos Aires in 1958 he published Az Ismeretlen
Mindszenty, in which he approvingly described the cardinal as a savior of Jews and as
one who resisted the Arrow Cross.
The Last Island 239
there was always a fundamental contradiction: Jews were enormously

powerful and at the same time the lowest of the low, putting their mark on
everything they touched and yet incapable of producing genuine culture.
In Szálasi’s ideology there was no such duality. He was so impressed by
Jewish achievements, which in Hungary were visible for all to see, that
he believed that Jews were already ruling the world.6 To save Hungary,
he needed to remove Jews from its territory. At this point he was not
advocating the physical elimination of all Jews, just as Hitler in the mid-
1930s was satisfied with expelling Jews. Szálasi saw no need to revise
his views even after the defeat of Germany and to his death remained
convinced that his ideology would ultimately prevail. He continued to
believe that he had a divine mission to re-create historic Hungary. The
views that he continued to proclaim in 1945 about Hungary’s leading
role in the new Europe were so inappropriate and so far removed from
reality that people came to doubt his sanity. At his war crimes trial the
question arose whether he should be declared insane.7
Unlike Codreanu and the Romanian fascists who opposed a weak
government, the Horthy regime was much better able to defend itself
against the danger from the extreme right. There was very little chance
that a Szálasi or a figure like him could come to power without foreign
help. Szálasi came to lead a terrorist regime only in October 1944 when
the Germans decided to remove Horthy from power, consequently Szálasi
could not be considered responsible for the anti-Jewish legislation in the
years before the war.
In the 1930s the many antisemitic, extremely radical, and racist parties
and groups contributed to the atmosphere in which anti-Jewish legisla-
tion was introduced. The international environment also had an impor-
tant influence on the government. At the time antisemitism was becoming
increasingly radical in Romania and in Poland, and the Hungarian anti-
semites did not want to fall behind; they were self-consciously competing
with neighboring countries. And of course there was the influence of Nazi
Germany.
The politicians who were in power until German occupation in March
1944 represented aristocratic, clerical, and conservative Hungary, and
they well understood the threat to their power posed by the extreme and
6 Lászlo Karsai, “The Last Phase of the Hungarian Holocaust: The Szálasi Regime and
Jews,” in Randolph Braham with Scott Miller, The Nazis’ Last Victims. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, p. 103.
7 Zinner Tibor and Rona Peter, Szálasiek Bilincsben. Vol. 2. Budapest: Lapkiado, 1986,
pp. 223–24.
socially radical right. They decided to combat the danger by arresting its
most prominent and demagogic leader, Szálasi, and some of his followers,
and they outlawed his movement, the Arrow Cross Party. At the same
time the government adopted a central feature of that party’s program:
antisemitism. Perhaps predictably, concessions to the extreme antisemites
did not reduce their fervor: Nothing was far reaching enough in their view.
To give concessions at the expense of the Jews was easy. However,
Hungary in the late 1930s was still not a totalitarian state. It was still
possible to speak up against this particular form of imitation of the Nazi
policies, and to their great credit, many prominent intellectuals chose to
do so. Above all, Jews could not completely be removed from the eco-
nomic life of the nation. It was, however, possible to inflict suffering on
them and to declare them to be second-class citizens by explicitly abrogat-
ing the terms of Jewish emancipation that took place in the second half of
the nineteenth century. By taking energetic antisemitic actions, the gov-
ernment attempted to ensure a favorable place in a German-dominated
Europe.
Between 1938 and 1941 the parliament passed three sets of anti-Jewish
laws. The parliamentary discussions provide us with revealing material,
showing the particular Hungarian variety of antisemitism.8 They are
also the only detailed parliamentary discussions in Europe of anti-Jewish
actions. Because by design all interwar Hungarian governments had an
assured majority in the parliament, the outcome of the votes was a fore-
gone conclusion. Furthermore, it is probable that any genuinely demo-
cratic elected assembly would have approved the laws, because the major-
ity of the Hungarian people shared the assumptions on which these laws
were based. Nevertheless, the debates were genuine, and the antisemite
majorities were compelled to articulate their arguments. The votes were
far from unanimous. Remarkably, in the discussions concerning taking
steps against the livelihood of Jews, Jewish representatives in the par-
liament were still able to participate. However, the 1938 law demoted
the Jewish religion from “recognized” to “tolerated” religion, and con-
sequently the representatives of the Orthodox and Neolog communities
were removed from the Upper House.
Those who spoke in support of the restrictive laws argued that Jews
represented an alien body because Judaism was not a religion but a race
and race could not be assimilated. They argued that the removal of Jews
8 The speeches of right-wing speakers in these discussions can be found in a neo-Nazi

Hungarian website: http://kuruc.info/r/1/13274/2011.
The Last Island 241
from the economic and cultural life of the nation would give opportunities
to “real” Hungarians. In these speeches one senses a grudging admiration
for Jewish achievements and a need to protect the disadvantaged Hun-
garians. The difference between this variety of antisemitism and that of
Julius Streicher was considerable.
The first anti-Jewish law, passed in 1938, limited the participation of
Jews in certain professions to 20 percent. Instead of defining who was
to be considered Jewish, the law precisely specified who would not come
under the limitations of the new law: Those who had been converted
before 1919 and those who had been wounded in World War I and their
widows and children were exempt. Because the legislation did not define
who was a Jew, that task of definition fell to the government, which
issued regulations to implement the law. The vagueness of definition
enabled some local leaders in the provinces to take more harsh measures
than was envisaged by the legislators. Although the law was self-evidently
racist, it still gave leeway for interpretation: Government officials had to
decide if a person was Jewish based on whether he or she had belonged to
the Jewish religion in the present or in the past. In comparison with the
antisemitic laws of other fascist countries, the first antisemitic law could
be regarded as moderate. Indeed, the most extreme antisemites voted
against the law because they did not consider it radical enough. They
would have liked the complete exclusion of Jews from many professions.
They correctly pointed out that the law barely affected Jewish magnates,
and they demanded the complete confiscation of their wealth.
This first antisemitic law was the beginning of a process that, arguably,
led to Hungarian Jewry’s destruction.9 For the first time in the twentieth
century a Hungarian government explicitly repudiated the fundamental
principle that regarded every citizen as equal. Once that principle was
repudiated, it became easier to take further steps. Indeed, the next step
quickly followed. In 1939 the government, headed by Béla Imrédy,10
submitted to the parliament the second anti-Jewish law. It limited Jewish
participation in the economy to 5 percent. What exactly that limitation
meant and how it was to be enforced was not defined. The new laws
9 The American response to the draft of the 1938 legislation is interesting. Ambassador
Pelényi reported from Washington that he had had a conversation with Sumner Welles
on April 15, 1938: “Welles completely agreed with me that Jews should be satisfied that
their lot would not get worse than what is indicated in this draft.” Political History
Archive 941 f 1 oe p. 6.
10 Ironically Imrédy soon lost his position when his political enemies found documents
showing he had a Jewish grandparent who had converted at the age of 7.
also excluded Jews from government jobs, the teaching profession, and a
number of other occupations. In arguing for the proposed set of laws, the
representatives of the government explicitly mentioned foreign consider-
ations. Hungary did not want to lag behind other countries and above
all did not want to be a place of refuge for Jews from Transylvania and
Slovakia.
Yet, even as late as 1939, anti-Jewish legislation continued to be pas-
sionately debated in the Hungarian parliament. As one of the participants
in the debates said, up to that point only totalitarian states were capa-
ble of instituting antisemitic legislation, but Hungary was different. In
contrast, extreme right-wing deputies deplored the fact that the severity
of the Hungarian laws lagged behind of the German and the Italian ver-
sions. Furthermore they insisted that the “Jewish question” be treated as
a racial rather than as a religious issue.
This second anti-Jewish law was explicitly racist because it defined
Jews as a race. Under this law, Jews who converted after 1919 – that is,
after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic – were still considered
to be Jewish. This law made no distinctions between those who converted
and those who did not. After all, if Jews represent a race, then it does not
matter in which church they pray. The second Jewish law was followed
by the imposition of additional restrictions on Jews. The third antisemitic
law forbade mixed marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-
Jews. The Hungarian “race” had to be protected.
The leading figures of the churches in the Upper House had no com-
punction against voting for the law. However, Cardinal Serédi passion-
ately objected to the racial aspect of the law, namely that those who
had converted would still be considered Jewish. This provision violated
the Catholic doctrine that Jews could find salvation by converting and
by accepting Christ as their savior. Serédi considered unacceptable that
nuns and priests with Jewish ancestry would still be considered Jewish.
Serédi also objected to and voted against the third antisemitic law, which
outlawed intermarriage. He regarded it as state intervention in clerical
matters. The churches thus were antisemitic but not racist.11
The years before the outbreak of World War II were dark ones
for the Jewish population. Hungary came to be increasingly bound to
Germany, and the German-Hungarian alliance brought fruit. With the
destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Hungary acquired the south-
ern part of Slovakia that had a Hungarian-speaking majority, as well
11 Gurgyak, pp. 148–49.

The Last Island 243
as Carpatho-Ruthenia; it regained Northern Transylvania in 1940. The

remaking of the map of Europe had far-reaching consequences for the
demography of Jews in Hungary, Hungarian Jewry almost doubled in
size, and because the regained territory included centers of Orthodox
Jewry, its religious makeup changed. Jews in these territories, especially
in Carpatho-Ukraine, were much less acculturated than those in Trianon
Hungary, giving the antisemites a new argument: Not only were “assim-
ilated” Jews a danger to the nation because they took middle-class jobs
away from real Hungarians but also the newly incorporated Jews were
altogether different and could not be assimilated. From the point of view
of the antisemite there was no contradiction: A Jew was a Jew whether he
or she spoke Yiddish or perfect Hungarian, or was dressed in traditional
garb or looked like everyone else in the streets of Budapest. This was so,
even though many antisemites themselves were descendants of German
or Slovak families and had to change their names to sound Hungarian. In
their opinion everyone could become a good Hungarian, except the Jew.
There was a Jewish essence and it could not be changed.
Before the war started, Horthy’s circle held an ambivalent attitude to
the Nazi state. On the one hand it was only with German help that the
passionately desired revisions of borders to the benefit of Hungary could
take place. The governing circles, which held onto hopes of regaining
Transylvania in its entity, well understood that such revisions could take
place only with German intervention. On the other hand, the Hungarian
aristocracy admired Britain and had contempt for the plebeian Nazis.
In addition, for understandable reasons the politicians feared that a too
close identification with Nazi Germany might mean the loss of their inde-
pendence. Therefore, while enjoying the benefits of the German alliance
the Hungarian government also attempted to distance itself from its pow-
erful and fearsome ally, hoping it could maintain an armed neutrality in
the coming armed conflict.
As logical as this strategy was, it was difficult to carry it out in prac-
tice. When each succeeding government came into office, it feared the
consequences of a close alliance with the Nazis and the ever-increasing
power of the extreme right in domestic affairs, but it often found itself
tied even closer to German policy. Prime ministers coming into office
were increasingly pulled into becoming accomplices of the Nazis.
Hungarian foreign policy and domestic policy were closely connected.
Governments that pursued a policy of close relations with Germany
passed more and more restrictions on Jews. Yet even the moderate prime
ministers pursued antisemitic policies. They all agreed that after the end
of the war it was necessary to get rid of Jews; they all tolerated vicious
antisemitic propaganda; and they all enforced laws that aimed at dam-
aging Jewish interests and humiliated Jews. On occasion members of
right-wing groups attacked individual Jews, although such attacks were
rare, unlike in Poland.
However, Jews played so significant a role in the economy and the
need for Jewish professionals was so great that it was necessary for the
government to allow quite flagrant violations of the laws. Quite fre-
quently Jewish firms simply hired Christians to be figureheads while Jews
continued to run the business. When firms were compelled to fire Jewish
employees, often these same employees continued to work in an unofficial
capacity.
Most importantly, the fact remains that at a time when Europe was
being emptied of Jews, until 1944 close to 800,000 Jews survived under
Hungarian rule. In fact, to the great dismay of the radical antisemites,
after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, thousands of
Polish Jews managed to find refuge in Hungary. A government controlled
by old-fashioned conservatives was willing to go only so far in pursuing a
murderous, genocidal policy. The participants in the Wannsee Conference
in January 1942 – even at the time when the Hungarian premier was the
pro-German Bárdossy – foresaw serious problems in persuading the Hun-
garian government to mark Jews, confiscate their wealth, and ultimately
hand them over to the German authorities for “resettlement.” The Ger-
mans insisted that the Hungarian authorities no longer extend diplomatic
protection to Hungarian Jews living in German-controlled territories, but
the Hungarian government consistently rejected that demand. In conver-
sations between German and Hungarian diplomats the Jewish question
came up time and again. It must have been frustrating for the Nazis to see
that in the middle of Europe, where approximately a tenth of the prewar
Jewish population lived, Jews remained untouched.
There was one massacre, however, for which the pre-occupation
government was indirectly responsible. Hungarian troops occupied
Carpatho-Ukraine in March 1939. Because Hungary was expected to
retain the newly occupied territories after the war, it immediately intro-
duced all the antisemitic laws then in effect in Hungary to the approxi-
mately 80,000 Jews in that region. Many of those Jews had moved there
from Poland and Soviet Ukraine because the more liberal government
in Prague had created better conditions for the Jews. As a consequence,
when Hungary incorporated this region there were many Jews who had
never lived in pre-1918 Hungary and were not Hungarian citizens. As
The Last Island 245
mentioned earlier, after the Reich’s destruction of Poland and incorpora-

tion of Austria thousands of Jews sought refuge in Hungary. In antisemitic
circles there were repeated calls for preventing Jewish emigration from the
East and for expelling Jews who were not Hungarian citizens. There was
a long-standing prejudice against Jews from the East, who were much
less acculturated; even assimilated Hungarian Jews to a certain extent
shared these prejudices against the “Galicianer.” The problem was that
no one knew where to send them. With the outbreak of the war against
the Soviet Union, the opportunity opened for their deportation.
After the attack on the Soviet Union, the Hungarian government, over
the protests of the minister of the interior, Ferenc Keresztes Fischer,
decided to expel Jews without citizenship. These Jews were rounded up
rather randomly, but most of the victims came from the recently incorpo-
rated Carpatho-Ukraine, where entire communities were deported. The
deportations took place in July 1941 and the murders in August. It is
unlikely that the Hungarian authorities understood that they were send-
ing people to their deaths. After all, the work of the Einsatzgruppen was
just beginning. The SS, assisted by Ukrainian auxiliaries at Kamenets
Podolsk, massacred approximately 15,000 Jews from Hungary. These
victims were part of a larger massacre carried out by the Germans of
the Jewish population in the surrounding area. After the government in
Budapest received information about the massacres, it stopped further
deportations.
The Hungarian army was responsible for yet another massacre, but this
one was only tangentially related to antisemitism. In April 1941 Hungary
occupied the Bácska region of Yugoslavia without encountering much
resistance. However, after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union par-
tisan warfare developed, to which the Hungarians responded brutally.
In January 1942 at Novy Sad, the army killed thousands of civilians;
in particular, the perpetrators looked for Jews to murder because the
Hungarian officers had accepted the ridiculous Nazi idea that equated
Jews and partisans. Several hundred Jews became victims. It is, however,
noteworthy that the affair produced indignation in Hungary. The govern-
ment pursued an investigation and attempted to punish the officers who
were responsible. However, with German help, these officers managed to
escape.
Throughout Europe the antisemitic laws had a varying impact on Jews
serving in the military. In Germany after the passage of the Nuremberg
laws of 1935, Jews were excluded from military service. In antisemitic
Poland, however, Jews continued to serve in the army and, together with
their Christian comrades, faced the invaders in September 1939. As it

became clear that war was likely and that Hungary would inevitably
be part of it, there were discussions about the necessary expansion of
the armed forces. The parliamentary discussion of the anti-Jewish laws
included a debate about how Jewish men should serve their country, after
they were excluded by law from the regular army. That Jews would be
altogether freed from service was immediately dismissed. Some, perhaps
in jest, expressed fear that such a solution would lead to mass conversion
to Judaism in order to avoid the draft. In any case, that Jews would
be exempt when Christians might have to fight for the fatherland was
unacceptable.12
The army leadership discussed various possibilities of military service.
The option, ultimately accepted, was to form separate Jewish units serving
under Christian officers. The idea of giving Jews arms was discussed but
rejected. The obligation of the recruit was to serve for three months at a
time and then to be recalled later. Exclusion of Jews from regular service
in the army implied that officers had to prove that they had no Jewish
ancestry. As in other areas, Hungary came up with a unique way to handle
its Jewish problem. On July 1, 1939, the government established “workers
battalions” – units for those who either refused to serve or were not found
suitable for service for ideological reasons. Because hard labor was used
as a punishment, originally the workers’ battalions also included non-
Jews who were politically suspect. This meant that in some battalions
Jews served together with political opponents of the government. The
ironic consequence was that, after the government arrested members of
Szálasi’s quasi-Nazi party, Jews and bitter antisemites on occasion were
forced to serve together. The men received a pitifully small wage and
performed physical labor such as construction or agricultural work.
Up to the outbreak of the war Jews may have been humiliated, but
conditions were not dreadful in the labor battalions. However, after the
invasion of the Soviet Union tens of thousands of members of these labor
battalions were sent to the front where they were engaged in dangerous
occupations such as clearing minefields. The German soldiers battling
in the Soviet Union found themselves fighting together with Hungarian
comrades and the accompanying Jewish laborers; many Jews may have
witnessed the massacres carried out by the Einsatzgruppen. Under Ger-
man pressure Jews could no longer wear Hungarian uniforms and instead
12 The most thorough discussion of the Jewish work battalions is in Braham, The Politics
of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Vol. 1, pp. 294–380.
The Last Island 247
had to wear yellow armbands. At the insistence of the churches, converted

Jews received a privilege: To distinguish themselves from “real Jews” they
were allowed to wear white armbands.
The workers performed their duties – clearing minefields, repairing
roads, and unloading munitions – under extraordinarily harsh conditions.
They were inadequately fed and clothed in the harsh Russian winter of
1942. The army high command was dominated by people of Schwab
(i.e., German background) and was more antisemitic than the rest of the
government or the people as a whole. The suffering of Jews depended
on how they were treated by the commanding officers, and therefore
their chances of survival greatly varied according to the decency of the
Hungarian officer commanding the battalion. Those who were fortunate
to serve under a decent officer had a better chance of survival.
The Second Hungarian Army that fought in the Eastern Front suffered
dreadful defeats at Stalingrad and later at Voronezh in January 1943, and
as a fighting unit it was destroyed. Half of its 200,000 soldiers died on
the battlefield and only about 60,000 returned home. The mortality rate
of the 35,000–40,000 Jews who served in the forced labor battalions was
even higher: 80 percent died on the battlefield or in Russian prisoner-of-
war camps.
In addition, those Jews serving in labor battalions in the copper mines
of Bor in Serbia suffered great losses.13 In 1943 the Germans had a des-
perate need for copper. They had access to the copper mines in Bor,
but no available labor, so they requested that the Hungarian govern-
ment dispatch their Jewish labor battalions to the mines. Approximately
10,000 Jews worked in the mines in the second half of 1943 and the first
half of 1944 under dreadful conditions. They labored under the super-
vision of Hungarian soldiers who demonstrated great brutality. Their
chances of survival were no better than of those who had been sent to the
Eastern Front.
German Occupation
The Kállay government’s (in office from March 1942) commitment to
the Nazis had always been less than enthusiastic. By the end of 1943 the
leaders around Horthy recognized that the Germans were likely to lose
the war, and therefore it would be in the best interest of the country to
13 Tamas Kovacs, “Magyar munkaszolgálatosok Borban,” in Vitári Zsolt (ed.), Kutatási

füzetek 11. Pécs, 2005, 97–122.
negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies. At this point they still hoped
that the British and the Americans would land on the Balkans, and there-
fore the unpleasant prospect of a Soviet occupation could be avoided. In
view of geographic and strategic considerations this was an unrealistic
expectation. The Germans quickly learned of the secret negotiations; for
them the loss of Hungary was a serious threat. They needed Hungarian
agricultural and industrial resources and, even more importantly, were
concerned about the safety of their lines of communications. It was the
cruelest of ironies: As a result of the Hungarian government’s attempt to
distance itself from the Nazis, about a half-million Hungarian Jews lost
their lives.
Although Horthy refused Hitler’s demand to issue an invitation to
the German troops to occupy his country, he nevertheless decided to
remain in office after the invasion. On March 19, 1944, German troops
occupied the country without resistance. The occupation limited Hun-
gary’s sovereignty but did not eliminate it. Horthy complied with Ger-
man pressure and appointed Döme Sztójay as premier. Sztójay had been
ambassador to Berlin and possessed the confidence of the Nazis. (Prime
Minister Kállay found refuge in the Turkish embassy.) The chief Ger-
man representative in Budapest, Edmund Veesenmayer, participated in
the formation of a government. He understood that it was in the interest
of Germany to maintain control over Hungary with as little investment
of manpower as possible, and that goal could only be achieved by tak-
ing advantage of Hungarian cooperation and exploiting the remaining
authority of Horthy.14 Therefore he did not insist on or even desire
the appointment of a purely Nazi government (i.e., Arrow Cross Party)
headed by Ferenc Szálasi.
Veesenmayer’s policy bore fruit: At least during the first months of the
occupation, the Germans found dependable allies. The transformation of
Hungarian politics started immediately. The Germans came well prepared
with a list of people they planned to arrest. They and their Hungarian
helpmates arrested those politicians whom they perceived as disloyal. At
the same time they outlawed opposition political parties and trade unions
and closed down newspapers. Among the arrested was Keresztes Fischer,
the former minister of the interior who was taken to the Mauthausen
14 Veesenmayer explained his policy in the course of his interrogation: Hungary should
retain the form if not the reality of sovereignty. N. F. Dreisziger, “Edmund Veesenmayer
on Horthy and Hungary: An American intelligence report,” Hungarian Studies Review,
Spring 1996 p. 11. During the interrogation, Veesenmayer continued to talk about
sending Jews to work in Germany rather than to their death in Auschwitz.
The Last Island 249
concentration camp. In the first two weeks of occupation more non-Jews

were arrested than Jews. The Nazi attempt to transform the politics of
the country was quickly accomplished and impressively complete. The
Germans were pleasantly surprised that in Hungary they encountered no
resistance.15 They were now able to mobilize the Hungarian economy for
their own purposes.
Veesenmayer’s power, however, was limited by the fact that he had
no authority over Otto Winkelmann, the representative of Himmler and
the Nazi responsible for the SS troops in Hungary.16 A small contingent
of approximately 150–200 people, headed by Adolph Eichmann, was
already dealing directly with the deportation of Jews. Although Eichmann
was ostensibly under the authority of Winkelmann, in reality he was
able to pursue his policies independently. He came to Hungary fully
prepared to pursue his aims: This was the first occasion that he was
actually on the scene where the deportations were taking place, rather
than simply organizing activities from his office in Berlin. He came to
Budapest on March 21, though his staff had arrived two days earlier.17
There are several reasons for the extraordinary efficiency with which
Eichmann and his contingent sent so many people to their death in such
a short time. First, the organizers had a great deal of experience and
skillfully used what they had learned. Second in Hungary, even more
than in any other occupied country, the Germans found eager helpmates.
The new Hungarian government immediately expressed its willingness to
cooperate in the deportations. From the point of view of Hungarian Jewry
a government headed by Szálasi could not have been worse than the one
then in power. Those who took power were no less determined to make
Hungary free of Jews than a purely Nazi government would have been.
Although the primary goal of the German occupation was not the
extermination of Hungarian Jewry, once the opportunity arose the Ger-
mans were anxious to take advantage of it. In addition to the rapidity of
the deportations, the Hungarian Holocaust had other features that dis-
tinguished it from what happened in other countries of Eastern Europe.
Hungarians did not commit the popularly inspired atrocities that occurred
15 Szita Szabolcs, “A Gestapo Magyarorszagon a nemet megszalas utan,” Multunk 2001,

p. 79.
16 Veesenmayer after the war was sentenced to prison for twenty years, although he only
served six years of the sentence and was freed by the American High Commissioner in
Germany, John McCloy. In contrast, Winkelmann, who was directly responsible for the
deportation of Jews, was freed.
17 Braham, Vol. 1, p. 417.
frequently in eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and the Ukraine.
One reason for the lack of such atrocities was that no part of Hungary had
been liberated from Soviet rule, and therefore Jews could not be accused
of collaborating with the enemy. In addition, the antagonism between
Jews and non-Jews was not as bitter as it was in other Eastern European
countries. But the most important reason for the lack of popularly com-
mitted atrocities is that the Hungarian authorities were doing everything
that even the bitterest antisemites could desire.
After the occupation, mass murder could be carried out in an orga-
nized fashion. The German role in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry is
best understood as giving an opportunity to some determined antisemites
to carry out a policy that they had long desired and planned. Minister
of the Interior Andor Jaross appointed two secretaries of state, Lászlo
Endre and Lászlo Baky, who were the chief organizers of the Hungar-
ian Holocaust.18 They got their positions presumably because they had
already acquired a reputation of being the most bloodthirsty haters of
Jews. They were known as “Jewish experts” and were prepared to carry
out a task that they had long contemplated. Endre, on his appointment,
presented his superior, Minister of the Interior Jaross, with a file of pro-
posed laws and restrictions to be imposed on Jews.19
Eichmann’s staff and the Hungarians worked together as a single unit.
The Gestapo and the Hungarian leaders responsible for the extermination
of Jews set up operation near each other in the Buda hills. In Western
European countries the Germans gave instruction to their native col-
laborators. In Hungary the situation was different in that Hungarian
administrators and Nazi leaders worked out the main outlines of the
extermination process together. After all, Hungary was not a defeated
country, but an ally. For example, the important meeting to discuss the
establishment of ghettos and the order of deportations included Eich-
mann, representatives of the German Army, and the Gestapo, and it took
place in the offices of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior.20
18 Baky had started his career as a member of the Szeged counterrevolutionary movement
and then worked for the gendarmerie, an organization that, in contrast to the regular
police, had a reputation for supporting reactionary causes and antisemitism. Baky was
elected to Parliament as a deputy of a fascist party. Endre, in his capacity as a deputy
leader of one of the counties, distinguished himself by taking steps that went further
than required by the antisemitic legislation. Both Baky and Endre had attacked the pre-
German occupation governments for not being antisemitic enough. Now their time had
come.
19 Braham, Vol. 1, p. 424.
20 Ibid., p. 572.
The Last Island 251
The eleven-month German occupation of Hungary can be divided into

several periods. The first lasted until the end of April when the deporta-
tions began. The Hungarian authorities immediately conceded power to
the Germans over Jews and so notified the Jewish leadership. In the first
two weeks, the new authorities arrested 3,076 Jews. Some were promi-
nent persons, but others were picked up at random. These arrests took
place at the direct order of Himmler, who on the very day of the inva-
sion inquired by telephone how many Jews had been arrested so far. The
Gestapo leaders responded by instructing the Hungarians to carry out
arrests.21 For example, Hungarian Nazis would get on a streetcar at the
boundaries of Budapest and demand that Jews disembark; they were then
sent to a concentration camp at Kistarcsa.22
The process of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry began with the
issuance of draconian regulations by the occupation government. Similar
regulations had been introduced in Germany over the course of a decade,
but in Hungary this process took only a couple of weeks. Implementing
their strategy that had worked so well in other Eastern European coun-
tries, the Germans insisted during the first few days of occupation on the
creation of a Jewish council and then issued their regulations through
that body. Jews were completely excluded from the professions, had to
wear yellow stars as of April 5, 1944, and had to provide accounts of
their properties that were then frozen. The intent of the regulations was
to take over Jewish property, businesses, and wealth in any form.
That the Nazis used their well-tried methods of threats and lies was
hardly surprising. What is remarkable, however, is that, even at this
late date, the methods worked: The Jewish leadership believed in the
Nazi promises. During the first meeting with the newly formed Jewish
council, the Nazis did everything within their power to assure Jews that
there would be no deportations and they instructed the Jewish leaders to
reassure their fellow Jews. The Jewish leadership and, indeed, Allied and
neutral governments, as well as Jewish agencies around the world, had
already received the most detailed description of what was happening
in Auschwitz from two people who had escaped from the death camp.
The so-called Auschwitz protocols composed by Rudolf Vrba and Josef
Lanik were available to the Jewish leaders in Budapest by the time the
deportations began. It would be wrong, however, to condemn them; they
21 Szita Szabolcs, p. 59.

22 Peter Kenez, Varieties of Fear: Growing Up Jewish under Nazism and Communism.
Washington, DC: American University Press, 1996, pp. 19–20.
had no means to resist. It is difficult to imagine how they could have

acted otherwise. Under the circumstances, perhaps self-deception was
an understandable response. In spite of all the available evidence they
continued to believe that what happened in the rest of Europe could
not happen in Hungary. They knew that the end of the war was near;
they thought that all that was necessary was to survive for a few more
months. The fact that Horthy and some of his ministers remained in their
positions must have acted as a sign that their fate would be different than
their Polish, Slovaks, and other coreligionists.
The regulations issued during the first few weeks laid the necessary
groundwork for the deportations. On April 5, Minister of the Interior
Jaross ordered the local authorities, with the aid of Jewish organizations,
to put together a list of Jews in the country.23 The most important pre-
requisite for the deportations was the establishment of ghettos. That they
were set up near railroad lines indicated that the organizers knew their
real purpose from the outset: to make it easier to deport the Jews. The
ghettos were not the same institutions that existed in Poland. They existed
only for a short time, and so no ghetto life similar to that found in the
large Polish ghettos could develop there. They are better understood as
transfer stations. As everywhere else, the Germans and Hungarians were
anxious to take possession of Jewish wealth. In Hungary, unlike in most
other countries of Eastern Europe or indeed, even in Western Europe,
there was much wealth to be gained.
The second period of the occupation lasted from the end of April to
July 7, when Horthy stopped the deportations. The discussions concern-
ing the deportation of Jews always spoke not of extermination camps but
of sending Jewish workers for forced labor to benefit the war effort. The
organizers of the deportations made the transparently phony argument
that families should accompany the workers “because then they would
work better.” Horthy accepted the Nazi demand to send 100,000 Jewish
workers to Germany within a short time. The men responsible for the
deportations – Baky, Endre, and Jaross – made it explicit that they were
not concerned where Jews were being sent as long as they disappeared
from Hungary. Almost to the end the architects of the Holocaust main-
tained the fiction that Jews were being sent to Germany for labor. Even
in the cabinet discussions as late as June, the ministers and secretaries
of state continued to talk about sending Jews to Germany to work. This
23 Report on the Work of the Committee Investigating the Fate of the so-called Jaross Lists
Drawn up in 1944, in Hungary.
The Last Island 253
use of euphemism served the same purpose of emotional self-protection

as the unwillingness of the Nazi leaders at Wannsee to state clearly that
Jews were about to be sent to their deaths.
The first transport left Kistarcsa for Auschwitz on April 29, and it con-
sisted only of able-bodied men, which gave the impression to the Jewish
community that, indeed, the Germans were interested in taking advantage
of Jewish labor. In reality the majority of these Jews were gassed immedi-
ately on arrival.24 The plan of deporting Jews starting from the East and
moving to the West came from the highest level – an order from Himmler
to Eichmann, as Eichmann testified at his war crime trial in Jerusalem
in 1961. The reason for this decision was obvious: The Red Army was
approaching the Hungarian borders, and there was reason to hurry. The
German argument for the deportation, in reality a ruse, was the need to
remove Jews from areas close to the front (i.e., from Carpatho-Ukraine
and Northern Transylvania). The Jewish communities from these regions,
the center of Orthodoxy, were the most thoroughly eliminated; the politi-
cians in Budapest felt the least sympathy for them. Once again, Jews living
elsewhere accepted the justification for the deportations of their coreli-
gionists and continued to hope that they were safe. These deportations
were carried out with extraordinary brutality. On one occasion the Ger-
mans filmed the behavior of the Hungarian gendarmerie and exhibited
the film in Switzerland as propaganda material demonstrating how much
more humane they were than the Hungarians.
After several thousand Jews were deported from Kistarcsa, the mass
deportations took place between May 14 and July 9 The great majority
of those deported went to Auschwitz and were gassed on arrival. By the
time the deportations were suspended, 434,351 Jews had been deported
on 147 trains.25
While the deportations were taking place in the rest of the country, the
Jewish community of Budapest was moved into approximately 2,600 so-
called Jewish houses. A ghetto was not set up in Budapest, but instead
Jews were scattered throughout the city in order to protect it: The author-
ities assumed that the Allies would not bomb Jews. This was similar to
a calculation that the Germans had made several years earlier, but it
24 Braham, Vol. 1, p. 665.

25 Judit Molnar, “Gendarmes, policemen, functionaries and Jews: New Findings on
the behavior of the Hungarian Authorities during the Holocaust.” http://www.
jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hungholo.html.
She bases her information on the report of the lieutenant colonel of the gendarmes,
Laszlo Ferenczy, who was liaison officer to the Gestapo. Dated July 9.
is remarkable that the German leadership held this most naive misun-
derstanding of Allied behavior at this late date. The relocation of the
Budapest Jews was envisaged as a step toward their deportation. Under-
standably, the relocation of so many people in a short time created con-
siderable difficulties not only for Jews but also for Christians. At first Jews
were given only three days within which to move, but the deadline was
ultimately extended to eight days.26 Ultimately thousands of Christians
remained in houses designed as Jewish and marked with yellow stars;
however, no Jew was allowed to live in a home not designated for Jews.
In addition, Jews could only leave their houses for a limited period of
time each day.
Another unique feature of the Hungarian Holocaust is that because
it took place at a time when German defeat was all but certain, it was
possible to negotiate for Jewish lives with Germans, who for opportunis-
tic reasons were willing to allow the survival of some Jews. Some of
these negotiations bordered on the farcical. Joel Brand, a Zionist leader,
had discussions with Eichmann and was allowed to go to Istanbul in the
middle of May, just after the mass deportations began. The purpose of
his mission was to persuade the Allies to provide 10,000 trucks, which
would be used only in the Eastern Front to fight the Soviets, in exchange
for the lives of 100,000 Jews. The idea originated at the highest level
of the Nazi hierarchy. If the Nazis really believed that such an arrange-
ment was possible, then they betrayed enormous naiveté, because any
negotiations with the Germans, which the Soviets were bound to find
out about, would have caused great harm to the Allied war effort. Even
giving the appearance of considering the proposal and thereby perhaps
slowing down the deportations was out of the question for the Allies. On
his arrival in Turkey Brand was quickly arrested and that was the end
of the matter. The Nazis had nothing to lose and much to gain if these
negotiations could have brought about the much-desired conflict between
the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. The Nazis genuinely believed
that the alliance between the two major capitalist powers and the Bol-
shevik Soviet Union could not last. Furthermore, the possibility of rescue
probably allayed the fear of some Jewish leaders in Hungary, even though
the negotiations took place after the deportations had already begun.
Another negotiation on a much more modest scale did bring some
concrete results. Rudolf Kasztner, another Zionist leader, negotiated with
Eichmann in June to exchange Jewish lives for money. Eichmann allowed
26 Braham, Vol. 1, p. 853.

The Last Island 255
at first 600 and later another 1,084 Jews to leave Hungary for a neutral
country in exchange for payment of a considerable sum. The members of
the group who escaped were prominent and privileged Jews and included,
not surprisingly, many relatives and friends of Kasztner. He came to be
one of the most controversial figures in the history of the Holocaust,
with his detractors accusing him of collaboration. He knew of the exis-
tence of the extermination camps, but did not warn his fellow Jews. It
is, however, doubtful whether he was the only source of this informa-
tion, and more significantly, even if Jews knew more about what was
waiting for them they might not have been able to act any differently.
A more serious charge against him that when he was allowed to go to
Kolozsvár (Cluj in Romanian) in early May he did not advise his fellow
Jews to escape into Romanian territory. The border was only a few miles
away. However, many Jews did manage to escape to Romania, although
it is unclear what were their sources of information about what was
happening.27
At the end of June 1944 the largest single Jewish community left in
Nazi-dominated Europe was in Budapest. At that time Horthy began to
waver in his willingness to accept further deportations. Several factors
played a role: Neutral countries were protesting the deportations, the
Pope called on him to stop them, the U.S. government promised holding
people responsible for their actions after the end of the war, and his close
collaborators, such as István Bethlen, advised him to end them, point-
ing out that Romanians and Slovaks had already stopped deportations.
The fact that the remaining Jews, who lived in Budapest, were the most
assimilated segment for whom Horthy had less antipathy also played a
role in his change of heart. But perhaps the most significant reason was
that it was increasingly evident that the Germans would lose the war –
Allied troops had already landed in Normandy – and that their strength
in enforcing their will was ebbing.28 The last straw was an ill-conceived
coup attempt by the extreme right-wing government, which up to this
point had complete authority to carry out its policies. The coup against
Horthy was to be carried out by the gendarmerie, which at the same time
would also organize the deportation of Jews from the capital. In response,
Horthy insisted on the removal from office of Endre and of Baky, who was
compromised by his involvement in the attempted coup. (Nevertheless
27 In 1957 he was assassinated in Tel Aviv. The assassin accused him of collaboration.
28 Indeed, the British followed what was happening to Jews in Hungary. The New States-
man on July 22 reported that the deportations were stopped.
both Endre and Baky continued to be involved in anti-Jewish actions until

the very end.) The Sztójay government remained in office until August
29 when Horthy named General Géza Lakatos as premier. Yet the threat
to Jews of the capital did not completely disappear: The Germans and
their Hungarian comrades brought up the matter of deportations time
and again and even managed to deport some Jews contrary to Horthy’s
order.
By the time Horthy succeeded in stopping the deportations, more than
half of Hungarian Jews had been removed from the country. A contro-
versial question is Horthy’s responsibility in the Hungarian Holocaust.
He clearly gave a free hand to the government in handling the “Jewish
question.”29 Yet he managed to evade responsibility for those actions:
Because his ministers and secretaries of state issued only regulations,
rather than laws, as regent, Horthy did not have to sign them. Yet Horthy
collaborated just at a time when Antonescu of Romania had stopped
doing so, though it was easier for Antonescu to take that step because
there were no German troops occupying his country. Whether Horthy
could have stopped the deportations at the outset is not clear; after all,
two months after they began, he did manage to call a halt to them. But
could he have done that earlier? As mentioned earlier, his power was con-
tinually threatened by the extreme right wing, and he gained strength only
as the German military position deteriorated. Whether he understood it
or not, it was so useful for the Nazis to have him stay in his office that
probably he could have resisted the deportations. However, he chose not
to challenge the occupiers before July.
In the summer of 1944 the German position grew weaker every day.
Romania’s changing sides on August 23 was a major blow. Under the cir-
cumstances, however important the Nazis considered the extermination
of Jews, for the time being they chose not to pressure the Hungarians
and even acquiesced to the naming of the Lakatos government, although
they knew well that Lakatos would persue a policy different from that
of Sztojay. The Nazis were, of course, well aware of Horthy’s desire to
extricate Hungary from the war and were preparing to move when it was
necessary, but they stopped insisting on further deportations.
Just as the information concerning Hungary’s secret negotiations with
the Allies impelled the Germans to occupy the country, renewed efforts
by the Horthy government to contact the Soviets pushed the Germans
29 Judit Molnar, “Gendarmes, policemen, functionaries and Jews. New Findings on the
behavior of the Hungarian Authorities during the Holocaust.”
The Last Island 257
into further action. A major turning point in Hungarian history occurred

on October 15, 1944,30 when Horthy attempted a coup against his brutal
ally. The coup was ill prepared and incompetently carried out, and his
attempts to conclude a separate peace with the advancing Red Army
failed. The Nazis still had plenty of supporters and were ready to take
action. The next day they arrested Horthy; he was spirited out of the
country, but not before he named Szálasi as head of the government and
thereby gave legitimacy to a government that was made up of incompetent
murderers. Even at a time when the defeat of Germany should have been
clear to everyone the Nazis still managed to find collaborators. The fact
that the Hungarians continued to serve the Germans to the bitter end
did considerable damage to Hungary’s diplomatic standing at the end of
the war.
The rise to power of Szálasi ended the role of the Hungarian ruling
class that had managed to maintain power until that time. A brief reign
of boundless anarchy and terror began. People of dubious characters and
limited intelligence who had little understanding of the reality that they
were facing were now in power. The government lost control over the
country; its policies constantly changed. Szálasi allowed the Germans
to take further measures toward their goal of extermination, although
organized deportations were no longer possible. The antisemitic fury of
the extreme right was now directed against the 150,000 surviving Jews
in Budapest living in the marked Jewish houses; some of these Jews had
received special privileges for their distinguished military service. Groups
of thugs belonging to the Arrow Cross movement carried out uncontrolled
looting and murder. On occasion the thugs came into conflict with the
regular police, who attempted to restrain them. For many of these murders
the government could not be held directly responsible. For the first time
Jewish men in some labor service units were also slaughtered. At the time
approximately 150,000 Jews were serving in labor battalions.31
The Szálasi government set up categories of Jews. The privileged ones
were settled in early November in a so-called international ghetto in
an area of the city where a large number of well-to-do Jews had lived
before the war. For some time the Jews in the international ghetto were
protected from deportation but not from random attacks. The anarchic
30 Indeed, C. A. Macartney chose to title his great book on the modern history of Hungary,
October Fifteenth, because he thought that this day should be regarded as the end of
conservative Hungary.
31 Braham, Vol. 2, p. 952. Braham included all people who worked in various labor service
groups.
situation gave opportunities to people to live out their sadistic fantasies.

People were murdered at random, whether or not they possessed protec-
tive papers or not, whether they lived in Jewish houses, or were patients
in Jewish hospitals or orphanages. A notorious method of murder was
taking people to the bank of the Danube, tying them together and shoot-
ing only one of them in the neck and watching them all fall into the water
and drown. A Catholic monk, Pater András Kun was particularly noto-
rious. He and his gang roamed the city looking for Jews and breaking
into houses; wearing a Arrow Cross armband and brandishing a pistol,
he urged his followers to shoot in the name of Christ. He was responsible
for the murder of hundreds. The murders continued to the very last days
of the Nazi regime.
After some persuasion, the Nyilas government was willing to send
some thousands of Jews to Germany, ostensibly to work. These men and
women for some time were kept in brickyards in Hungary, and then
Hungarian guards marched them toward the Austrian border on foot.
Circumstances on the march were so dire that it could be regarded as pre-
mediated killing. The prisoners froze and starved to death, and those who
could not continue to march were shot. In fact, an SS officer was shocked
by the brutality of the Hungarians’ treatment of the marchers.32 At the
German border, at Hegyeshalom, the prisoners were handed over to the
Germans. This march of Hungarian Jews to the west could be regarded as
a trial run for similar actions in the next few months, amid ever-increasing
chaos. Jewish men between 16 and 60 and women between 16 and 40
were ordered to appear for work, which meant digging trenches against
the advancing Soviet army, which was already at the outskirts of the
capital.
Against all evidence the members of the government continued to
believe in German victory and hoped to win diplomatic recognition from
neutral states. As a consequence foreign intervention on behalf of Jews
had a greater importance in this era of unparalleled anarchy than in
any other country during the Holocaust. The governments of Turkey,
Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, the Papal state, and, above all Sweden, made
efforts to save Jews. It is not that the governments of these countries
had just learned about the atrocities; that evidence had already been
available for a long time. The difference was that because Germany was
obviously losing the war it cost little to these states to make gestures
that could be conceived as contrary to German policies. The neutral
32 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 968.

The Last Island 259
states and the Papacy issued a joint declaration in November asking the
Hungarian government to stop the deportations.33 International protests
were not without consequence. A few days after Szálasi assumed power
Jews from the central districts of Budapest were herded into the city’s two
major synagogues, presumably to be deported. However, as a result of
international protests they were let to go after several days of being kept
in captivity.34
However, the most significant help the neutral states provided were
protective passes, the so-called Schutzpasses. Approximately 15,000 Jews
were privileged to receive them. The Swiss and the Swedes were the most
generous, but Spain and Portugal also issued a few. The passes were
official-looking documents that stated that the person in possession, as
indicated by an attached photo, was under the protection of one of the
neutral states and was expected to emigrate there. In reality, no person
ever expected to use the document for emigration, and none ever did. It
was a pretense. The neutral states started to distribute them in the summer
of 1944, but they became important only after the establishment of the
Szálasi government. Szálasi’s people decided to accept them in the hope
that the neutral governments would then recognize their government.
It was under these circumstances that a few courageous and deter-
mined foreign diplomats were able to provide help for the still surviv-
ing Jews. Some of the foreign diplomats in the anarchic situation did
more than their governments authorized them to do. The Papal Nuncio,
Angelo Rotta, knowingly accepted false baptismal certificates; Karl Lutz
issued many more Schutzpasses than his government authorized. The best
known and greatest hero of the rescue efforts was Raoul Wallenberg. He
was a Swedish diplomat who came to Budapest for the explicit purpose
of saving Jews. He had studied in the United States, had contacts with
U.S. governmental circles, and had visited Palestine.35 He negotiated with
Nazis, bribed some, and threatened others with prosecution at the end
of the war. Although there can be no doubt of his courage and his devo-
tion to the cause of saving human lives, it is impossible to estimate how
many people he saved. Once the Szálasi government understood that no
diplomatic recognition was forthcoming, it stopped paying attention to
the protective documents: Some of the Jews who had been previously
33 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 971.

34 Kenez, pp. 29–31.
35 These contacts with the Americans would ultimately be the cause of his death. The
Soviets assumed that he was an American spy and arrested him; he disappeared in the
Gulag, where he almost certainly died in 1947.
protected were sent on death marches, others were taken to the banks of
the Danube, and yet others were locked up in the Budapest ghetto.
In the second half of November the Szálasi government decided to
create a ghetto in Budapest. Jews once again were forced to move. For
some families this was the third or fourth time of moving within the last
half a year. The crowding of the ghetto was even greater than that of the
Polish ghettos. By this time it was the only ghetto that existed anywhere.
On occasion Nyilas groups entered the ghetto and simply massacred
people.
By the time the ghetto was established in November, Soviet troops were
surrounding the Hungarian capital. By the second week of January it was
clear that the German and Hungarian forces would not be able to prevent
the Red Army from occupying Pest. Some of the Nyilas leaders contem-
plated bombing the ghetto or sending in a detachment of 500 strong to
massacre all the residents. It was the German general, Schmidthuber who
prevented this action.36 The Red Army liberated the ghetto on January
17–18.
Yet the liberation of the ghetto was not the end of the destruc-
tion of Hungarian Jewry. People still died in Austrian and German
camps and on death marches. According to the best estimates, of
825,000 Hungarian Jews (including about a hundred thousand converts)
about 570,000 died.37
36 Braham, pp. 1006–07.

37 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1298.
13
Extermination Camps
The institution unique to the Holocaust was the extermination camp:

It had not existed before and has never been re-created. Approximately
half of the Jewish victims of the Nazis died in extermination camps, and
the camps, especially Auschwitz, have come to define the Holocaust in
the public mind. It was the mechanization and industrialization of killing
that characterized this genocide, and these features received their fullest
expression in the camps, where the Germans demonstrated most com-
pletely their organizational skills and their thoroughness. The extermina-
tion camps were unquestionably a product of modernity – the killing not
only was done by modern methods using scientific advances, but even
more importantly it relied on the bureaucratic method of organization
that had not been possible before the twentieth century.
As Raul Hilberg argued more than fifty years ago, the two components
of mass killing – concentration camps and the use of gas for extermi-
nation – had already existed: The Nazi innovation was to bring these
elements together.1 Understanding that mass killing could only occur in
wartime, the Nazis began using carbon monoxide gas in its euthana-
sia program soon after World War II began. Using the euphemism of
euthanasia, the Nazis killed approximately 70,000 mentally or physically
handicapped German children and adults. In the next stage the euthanasia
program was taken to Poland to kill handicapped Poles and Jews.
The euthanasia program was extremely important in the history of
the Holocaust and is correctly regarded as the predecessor of the camps
created for killing Jews. Through this program the Nazis realized that
1 Hilberg, Vol. 3, pp. 921–59.
261
it was possible to murder tens of thousands of people efficiently. They

also reasoned that if the handicapped were not considered worth living,
then Jews could certainly share their fate. A large number of those who
later staffed the extermination camps acquired their expertise either in the
euthanasia program or in the numerous concentration camps that were
established in Germany in the 1930s.
Germans were not the first country to set up concentration camps.
The British used such camps to detain their opponents at the time of the
Boer War in the first years of the twentieth century. Taking a page from
their book, Hitler and his followers, immediately after coming to power,
established concentration camps for the purpose of extralegal methods
of detention. These camps were necessary components of a totalitarian
state, because there were not enough prisons to hold and punish the
Nazis’ numerous political enemies. The camps, which aimed to restrain
not only enemies but also potential enemies, demonstrated that in Hitler’s
state only one worldview could be articulated. Because courts did not
pronounce sentence on the political prisoners, there was no set time when,
if ever, they would be freed.
Although the concentration camps were not set up for the explicit
purpose of killing, and for many years most of the inmates were not Jews,
they also came to be instruments of murder. Shortly after the Nazis took
power the camps incarcerated about 20,000 people. By 1937 the number
decreased by half, but then the size of the inmate population started to
grow again. In 1938 about 50,000 inmates were incarcerated in a small
number of camps. However, the great expansion took place after the out-
break of the war. At first the inmates were political opponents of the
Nazis, but soon the regime ran out of such people, and the inmates were
mostly antisocial elements, gypsies, and Jews. By the middle of 1944 more
than a half-million prisoners were incarcerated in 20 large concentration
camps, as well as 165 satellite camps that were set up to accommodate
the ever larger number of people whom the regime wanted to punish.2
Tens of thousands of Jews died in the major concentrations camps –
Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and
Ravensbruck (which was constructed to accommodate women) – and
their satellite camps. The prototype was Dachau, the first concentra-
tion camp, which was established in 1933 fifteen kilometers outside of
2 Nikolaus Wachsmann, “The Dynamics of Destruction: Development of the Concentra-

tion Camps,” in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.), Concentration Camps in
Nazi Germany: The New Histories. London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 33, 126.
Extermination Camps 263
Munich. These camps, in contrast to extermination camps, also served

as labor camps where the prisoners, Jews and non-Jews, were compelled
to work for the German war industry. In spite of the shortage of rolling
stock in wartime, prisoners were frequently moved – at times being sent
to Auschwitz to be killed, but at other times, particularly close to the end
of the war, being moved from Auschwitz to work in these camps.
Although all the camps were inhumane, Mauthausen stood out for its
brutality. It was established shortly after the incorporation of Austria in
March 1938. Here the prisoners had to haul heavy stones from a quarry
up steep steps – the infamous staircase of death. Many workers fell to
their deaths. It is hard to regard the work demanded of the prisoners as
anything but a conscious and particularly cruel method of murder. People
died of starvation or being overworked or were simply shot – sometimes
for no reason at all. During the last phase of the war when the major
extermination camps were already closed, it was in these concentration
camps that most Jews died.3
Chelmno
The turning point in the Holocaust occurred during the second half of
1941 after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Until that time the Nazi
leadership, including Hitler, were willing to postpone implementing the
“solution to the Jewish question” until after the conclusion of the war.
Because they envisaged a short and victorious campaign, they did not
think that they would had to wait long before getting rid of the Jews.
However, the German Army’s initially rapid advances into Soviet terri-
tory in July and August 1941, plus their victories in the West, increased
Nazi ambitions. Their very optimistic assumptions of a quick defeat of
the Red Army led to a change in the Nazis’ Jewish strategy: The Nazi
leaders decided that there was no longer any reason to postpone depor-
tations. The decision to deport hundreds of thousands of people from
Western Europe was probably made in the middle of September 1941.
However, logistical problems required a slight delay in implementation
of those plans: The requirements of the military at this time still took
precedence, and trains were needed to transport soldiers. Therefore the
planned deportation of German Jews to Poland had to wait until mid-
October. The first trains left Berlin, Vienna, and Prague on October 15,
3 Paradoxically, the more information we have about a camp, the less lethal it was: That is
because there were more survivors to tell about their experiences.
16, and 18, respectively, for the Lodz ghetto; these were followed in
the next weeks by transports from other major German cities carrying
approximately 20,000 Jews.4 The decision to deport Jews from all over
German-controlled Europe directly led to the establishment of the first
extermination camp.
The first extermination camp had two immediate goals: to empty the
Wartheland district of Jews, a region in Poland that was designated for
German settlement, and to make room in the Lodz ghetto for additional
transports of Jews from Europe. The place chosen for this camp was
Chelmno, a village at the center of the Wartheland district and on a
railroad line from Lodz. It was remote enough not to call attention to
what was being done there, but also close enough to Lodz, the second
largest ghetto. There was an abandoned castle in Chelmno that was used
for the camp headquarters and for preparing the victims for killing. There
was a nearby forest where the bodies were buried.5 Some of the Polish
residents of the village were expelled, and ethnic Germans from Volhynia,
a part of Ukraine, were settled in their place.
By this time the Einsatzgruppen have already began their work and
had already accomplished a great deal in the Soviet Union. The use of
gas for killing people was not a crossing yet another moral boundary,
it was simply a change of method, and from the Nazi point of view a
more efficient way of carrying out their assigned task. The Nazis were
experimenting: how to kill as many people as possible and as quickly as
possible. For example, Arthur Nebe, The Commander of Einsatzgruppe
B, tried to gather mentally ill people in a bunker and then dynamite it.
The experiment was not considered successful.6 It was too messy and
required too much cleaning up afterwards. In internal correspondence
the leaders were arguing that use of gas for killing was a more humane
method than letting people starve to death, which from their point of
view was the only alternative. This was a more impersonal method than
actually having to shoot women, children, young and old. It is more likely
that they favored this method of killing because it called for even smaller
4 Peter Witte, “Two decisions concerning ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’: Depor-
tations to Lodz and Mass murder at Chelmno,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Winter
1995, p. 319.
5 Shmuel Krakowski, “Die Geschichte das Vernichtungslager in Chelmno/Kulhof am Ner,”
in Manfred Struck (ed.), Chelmno/Kulmhof der vergessener Ort des Holocaust? Berlin:
Gegen Vergessen, 2001, p. 33.
6 Hilberg, Vol. 1, p. 344. Nebe was an interesting figure. Later he participated in the
attempt on Hitler’s life and for that was hanged.
investment of manpower and saved the feelings of the squeamish among

the murderers. Perhaps no more than 100-150 SS and other police per-
sonnel were needed for the operation of this killing center.
The Nazis were still experimenting with killing methods at Chelmno,
so it can be seen as a transition to the later extermination camps. Here
the Nazis used gas vans, even though the camp had no other function but
killing. The Nazis had not yet turned to the use of permanent installations
for killing.
The killings at Chelmno started on December 8, 1941. The task of set-
ting up the camp fell to Herbert Lange, a highly placed SS officer who had
experience in leading the euthanasia program in the occupied territories.
His task then was to get rid of mental patients in Polish hospitals and
asylums and also to kill people with lung disease. In 1940 his unit moved
from hospital to hospital, picking up patients in vans and then murdering
them in the vans with the use of carbon monoxide. Hitler ostensibly sus-
pended the euthanasia program in Germany because of protests, mostly
from religious figures. Lange and his Nazi superiors already had the
expertise in killing; only the choice of victims changed. The move from
murdering mentally handicapped people to murdering Jews and Roma
was accomplished easily.
The Nazis made some attempts to conduct their work in secret. How-
ever, the villagers quickly learned what was going on in the castle. Then
a worker in a Sonderkommando, whose duty was to bury the dead,
managed to escape and reach the Warsaw ghetto. The news of the first
extermination camp became known first to the Jews of Warsaw and
then to the rest of the world. Remarkably, however, the Lodz ghetto,
from which the majority of the victims came, was so hermetically sealed
that the people who were about to be sent to their deaths knew nothing
about what was waiting for them. Even more than in the other centers
of murder, the victims at Chelmno were completely unprepared for their
fate.7
The modus operandi that was to be used in every other camp was
already established at the first killing installation: The victims were told
that they would be sent to work. On occasion the destination that was
given was Germany, but at other times it was the unspecified “East.” They
were asked to undress, to have their clothes disinfected, and to prepare for
a shower. They were even given soap and towels. Then they were shoved
7 Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1984, pp. xxii.
into a waiting van, the door was tightly closed, and the carbon monoxide
produced by the engine of the van was directed into the enclosed area.
(This process was an innovation of the method used earlier to kill the
handicapped, which used canisters containing carbon monoxide.) Death
occurred between ten and fifteen minutes. Then, gold teeth were removed
from the corpses; their clothes were collected and used for the Winterhilfe
charity program, and sent back to Germany. The vans were driven to a
nearby forest where the members of the Sonderkommando removed the
bodies and buried them in mass graves.
The capacity of this killing center was small compared to the extermi-
nation camps constructed later. The daily quota was 1,000 people. Six
vans operated, killing only fifty people at a time.8 Jews were not the only
victims: About 5,000 Roma were also killed at Chelmno.
In front-line conditions it was possible to assemble people and mas-
sacre them, but by December 1941, the front was hundreds of miles away
at the outskirts of Moscow and Lodz and Chelmno were far behind the
front. It was easier to do the killing on a secluded place, surrounded by
a high fence. The possibility of resistance was even more remote than it
was the case of murders carried out by Einsatsgruppen. Only two people
are known to have managed to escape from Chelmno and survive.
Killing operations stopped at Chelmno in March 1943. The Nazis
made an effort to obliterate the evidence by digging up the graves. They
used Jewish workers to burn the bodies and grind up the bones and
then murdered them after the job was completed. By this time more
efficient extermination camps were already in operation, and the Jewish
population of the Wartheland region, except for those in Lodz, had been
nearly annihilated.
The German command was transferred to other regions. However,
only a year later, in April 1944, when the Red Army’s advance compelled
the Nazis to close down most of the extermination camps and there still
were a large number of Jews in Lodz, Chelmno was reactivated for a
short time. It operated in a reduced fashion, killing about another 7,000
people. By contrast it is estimated that in the earlier period 145,000 were
exterminated.9 The murder operations stopped in mid-July 1944, and
8 Because very few Jews managed to survive, our information comes from the trials of the
perpetrators.
9 Krakowski, p. 234. Krakowski bases his information on German court records and
considers the number to be too low. A Polish source estimated 330,000 victims. Hilberg’s
estimate was more than 150.000. Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 958.
the rest of the victims from Lodz were directed to Auschwitz, where the
chances of survival were greater than at Chelmno.
Operation Reinhard
The first step toward the Nazi colonization of the Wartheland was the
removal of the most undesirable part of the population, the Jews. With the
abandonment of the Madagascar project, the occupiers saw the “solution
of the Jewish question” as sending Jews to the East. Before the invasion
of the Soviet Union, probably what they had in mind was setting up some
sort of reservation in the General Government, the region of Poland
farthest from Germany. However, this plan was never worked out in
detail, and therefore it is difficult to know how seriously the leadership in
Berlin considered it. As mentioned before, it appears that in the early fall
of 1941 the decision was made to kill the Jews of Europe.10 After that
point, sending Jews to the East became a euphemism. A minority were
to be kept alive to perform needed work, but that was to be a temporary
reprieve. Ultimately all Jews of Europe were to “disappear.”
The first step toward solving the Jewish problem was the systematic
extermination of the Polish Jews. From the ghettos Jews were to be trans-
ported to extermination camps. It is difficult to see how Jews and the
Jewish police, who participated in the operation, could have believed
the usual lies that the victims would be taken to a work camp, because
the very young, the elderly, and the sick were deported together with the
able-bodied. However, every effort was to keep the victims in the dark for
as long as possible, because ignorance of their fate made the deportations
easier.
The most difficult task the Nazis faced was not the killing but the
delivery of victims to places where they would be gassed. Initially, the
Nazis felt it necessary to remove Jews from the ghettos to make room
for new arrivals, who only after spending some time in the ghetto would
be sent on to death camps. Later, in Western Europe, they deported
Jews from their places of residence directly to the camps. It seems that
at the outset at least it was easier to kill Polish Jews than their Western
coreligionists. Killing became ever easier as the war progressed.
10 Goebbels in his diary entry for March 27, 1942, described the actions against Jews as
barbaric, but well deserved. He spoke only of Polish Jews. Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher
Band 4: 1940–1942. Munchen: Piper, 1992, p. 1776.
Hermann Höfle, an Austrian Nazi, was entrusted with the organiza-

tion of the deportations. He had been engaged in anti-Jewish activities
since the end of November 1940 when he oversaw Jewish workers who
were building fortifications and anti-tank ditches at the frontiers between
German- and Soviet-occupied Poland. The death camps were organized
with extraordinary efficiency, but the railroad journeys were not. Depor-
tations required the investment of scarce resources of railroad rolling
stock and personnel, and the Nazis used as little of these resources as
possible. They crammed as many human beings as they could into the
railcars; up to 200 people were locked into each car, and they were given
nothing to drink. About half of the passengers died along the way: The
journeys were a method of torture. Although they were usually short –
the Nazis attempted to send their victims from the ghettos to the nearest
extermination camp – on occasion they could still take days because these
trains had low priority in the railroad timetables.
Of the six camps that had gas chambers for killing, three – Belzec,
Sobibor, and Treblinka – had stationary killing facilities and therefore
were capable of killing thousands per day. Unlike Majdanek, and espe-
cially the much larger Auschwitz, these three camps had no other pur-
pose but killing. Because there were no labor camps attached, the victims
delivered to the camps were sentenced to death at the outset, and the
sentence was carried out quickly. In contrast to the concentration camps
and even Auschwitz, these camps had very few survivors, although in
the fall of 1943 there were breakouts from Treblinka and from Sobibor,
and a few inmates managed to escape. One might consider these camps
to be the highest achievements of the Nazi murder machine, the culmi-
nation of a process that started in January 1933. Of the very few non-
Jewish victims, most were Roma. Most of the information we have about
the camps comes not from the victims, but from Nazi documents and
statements of the camp personnel, given at their war crimes trials after
the war.
These three camps were located in the General Government, where its
easternmost section, the Lublin district, had already been envisaged as
a place for the deportation of Jews. The SS commander of the district
was the Austrian Odilo Globocnik, and he had a major role in setting up
and running the camps. Globocnik was an early Nazi who had demon-
strated his devotion to the cause by helping prepare his native country
for the Anschluss. As a reward for his accomplishments he was named
Gauleiter (chief of a regional branch of the Nazi party) of Vienna, after
the successful incorporation of Austria into the Reich. He belonged to the
group of most fanatical antisemites and was a special favorite of Himmler,

operating under his direct authority.11 Construction of the three camps,
which started in the fall of 1941 and was completed in the spring of
1942, came to be named Operation Reinhard in honor of Reinhard
Heydrich, who had been assassinated by the resistance in Prague in May
1942.12
Globocnik supervised the work of the camps from his offices in Lublin.
The personnel were primarily those who had experience in the euthanasia
program, who on being transferred to Globocnik’s authority joined the
ranks of the SS. They were sworn to secrecy and within the SS hierarchy
were highly placed. They were rewarded for their important services,
receiving bonuses and home leaves. Only a few hundred specialists were
needed to run the camps, and at any given time there were only about
50–70 SS officers in charge. Globocnik, like Seyss Inquart in Holland,
surrounded himself with his countrymen, and as a consequence Austrian
Nazis had a disproportionate role in running the most efficient killing
institutions that the world has ever known: Franz Stangl, commander at
Sobibor, and Franz Reichleitner, his successor, were Austrians, as was
Hermann Höfle, the second in command.
The sites selected for the camps were near large concentration of Jews
and railroad lines, but far away from population centers in order to
maintain secrecy. It was also an advantage to be far east within the Gen-
eral Government to maintain the fiction that Jews were being deported
to the “East.” Polish and Jewish workers did the construction, with no
idea, of course, of the purpose of the installations. The layout of the three
camps was similar. Each had barracks for the staff members and “shower
rooms” where the gassing took place. As compared to the concentration
camps located in Germany, the extermination camps were small. There
was no need to find places to house the victims or for work areas, because
they were not labor camps.
The first of these three camps, Belzec, was originally a Jewish work
camp built in 1940. The transformation to extermination camp started in
11 There is some dispute concerning the name. According to some historians, the origi-
nal name was Operation Reinhardt, after Fritz Reinhardt who was in charge of the
confiscated property of deported Jews. The name was changed after the assassination
of Heydrich. Jules Schelvis. Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp. Oxford: Berg,
2007, p. 5. After examining Himmler’s daily calendar, which is in the Moscow archives,
Schelvis shows that the appointment of Globocnik came directly from Himmler; p. 39.
12 The best work on Operation Reinhard is Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The
Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
October 1941 and was completed by Jewish workers in February 1942.

The Jewish prisoners who built the camp were among the first to be
murdered in it.
As in Chelmno, the people in charge were those who had experience
in the euthanasia program. Josef Oberhauser was followed by Christian
Wirth, who even within the Nazi hierarchy had a reputation for extraor-
dinary brutality. Wirth is reputed to have used his whip not only on Jews
but also on Ukrainian volunteers. He had gained experience in Chelmno
where he became convinced of the advantages of using carbon monoxide
generated by engine exhaust, rather than having the gas delivered in can-
isters, which created logistical problems and also made it more difficult
to maintain secrecy.
The innovation at Belzec was that for the first time permanent build-
ings rather than vans were used as the killing sites. The first days in
February 1942 were devoted to experiments: how to carry out the task of
killing as quickly and efficiently as possible. Under Wirth’s leadership the
Nazis studied the work routine just as factory planners studied industrial
functioning. The victims were hurried from the trains to the killing site
so that they had no time to learn their fate. Some of the victims also
participated in the extermination project and were used to remove the
bodies. They were rotated with great frequency, often only working for
a day or two before being killed.
The second camp constructed was at Sobibor, also in the fall of 1941.
Like Belzec it was in an isolated area and had good rail transportation.
It was also camouflaged not merely from the outside world but also so
the arriving Jews would suspect nothing and accept the lie that it was a
transit or work camp. In fact, at the entrance of the camp there was a
sign indicating that it was a resettlement camp (Umsiedlungslager). Based
on the experience at Belzec, this camp was made larger. The construction
was carried out mostly by local people, but also by Jewish workers who
thus contributed to the creation of the machinery that would soon destroy
them. By the time Sobibor began operations in March 1942, the Nazis had
considerable experience in the design and organization of extermination
camps.
The construction of the third camp, Treblinka, began after the other
two camps were already in operation.13 Because the first two camps were
hurriedly constructed, the Nazis were determined to incorporate into the
design of Treblinka all that they had learned from their experience in
13 Ibid., p. 37.
mass killing. As at Sobibor, both Jewish and Polish prisoners provided

the labor. The planners made every effort to make the camp as attractive
as possible under the circumstances, to allay the fears of those who arrived
to be murdered. The killings began in July 1942, even though construction
had not yet been completed.
In spite of their superb organization, the Nazis could not have accom-
plished as much as they did without the aid of the local population.
Everywhere the Germans went they found willing collaborators. In the
course of German occupation in the East perhaps as many as 300,000
people served in auxiliary police units, performing various functions for
the occupiers.14 But those who worked in the Reinhard camps had a
more specialized and important role in the murder of Jews than the aver-
age collaborator. They were essential for the secure functioning of these
killing institutions. They received training in a nearby camp at Trawniki
and were consequently referred to as Trawniki.15
Very soon after the outbreak of the war against the Soviet Union,
the Trawniki camp was constructed close to the ex-Soviet border and
about twenty miles from Lublin as a holding facility for prisoners of war.
Karl Streibel, an SS officer, was appointed commander.16 In September
1941 the camp became a training facility for the auxiliaries. Many of
these men who volunteered to serve the Nazis had been soldiers in the
Soviet Army and offered their services in order to escape the dreadful
and often lethal conditions in the prisoners of war camps. Most were
Ukrainians but also there were Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and
a few ethnic Germans among them.17 Two to three thousand of these
Trawniki served in the three camps during their existence, but at any
given time there were no more than 100 or 150 men serving at each
one.18 They were an essential component of the extermination operation,
14 Jürgen Matthäus, “Controlled escalation: Himmler’s Men in the summer of 1941 and
the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2007,
No. 2, p. 231.
15 Peter Black, “Foot soldiers of the final solution: the Trawniki training camp and Oper-
ation Reinhard,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies Spring 2011, pp. 1–99.
16 The Hamburg court in 1977 freed Streibel. Paradoxically and ironically the defenders
of Ivan Demjanjuk obtained Strieber’s help by denying that the signature on his card
from Trawniki was his signature. Streibel’s lawyers successfully argued that the camp
commander did not know the purpose for which the guards were trained. Towiah
Friedman, SS Strumbannführer Streibel. Institute for Documentation in Israel, 2002.
Not paginated.
17 Ibid.
18 Arad, p. 22.
and it is difficult to see how the Nazis could have managed without them
at a time of great shortage of reliable manpower.
Of course, the Germans wanted to select “reliable” people, though
what reliable meant was not specified. These men who were responsible
for the largest number of Jewish dead, unlike those who had partici-
pated in pogroms in Romania, the Ukraine, and in the Baltic states, were
not particularly inspired by antisemitism. They volunteered to carry out
assigned tasks not because they were necessarily more antisemitic than
the rest of the population, but because volunteering promised liberation
from prisoners of war camps where the mortality rates often reached 50
percent. Given the conditions prevailing in the prisoners of war camps,
then it is not quite correct to say that the men were genuine volunteers.
The Nazis chose men they had reason to believe hated the Soviet
system and by extension Jews. To what extent these men absorbed the
Nazi antisemitic ideology is impossible to say. Those selected were mostly
young men of rural background and little education. But all of them
carried out their duties and with excessive enthusiasm. In the course of
their work they became more and more brutal.
At Trawniki, after the volunteers learned about their duties, they were
offered the choice to carry out their assigned tasks or become once again
prisoners of war. Presumably few chose the latter option. Ethnic Germans
were the most likely to volunteer and were often used for clerical duties
or as interpreters; in this capacity they provided valuable services to the
occupiers. At first the selections took place entirely among ex-prisoners
of war, but later the Germans took civilian volunteers. In the camp the
volunteers received arms and uniforms. They had to sign statements that
they were neither Jewish nor had been members of the Communist Party.
Those who served received various privileges and pay.
It is unclear how well the volunteers really understood their duties
for which they were selected. Some may have assumed that their tasks
would be simply to guard Jews, but on occasion shooting Jews was part
of the practical training. The recruits received military training: how to
conduct roundups, make arrests, and escort prisoners. They also received
ideological training (i.e., indoctrination in Nazi ideology).
The Trawniki men were trained to perform duties in the extermination
camps. They guarded the camps, operated the engines that produced car-
bon monoxide, moved people from the trains to the barracks where they
undressed them, and then commanded them to march to the execution
chamber. These tasks gave them opportunities to enrich themselves at
the expense of their victims. However, their activities were not limited to
duties within the Reinhard camps. They were also used for other tasks
involving the killing of Jews, such as organizing the deportation of Jews
from ghettos, shooting Jews, and guarding labor camps. These volunteers
made it possible for the Germans, who only invested about 200 men in the
operations of the extermination camps, to kill approximately 1.7 million
Jews.
In Treblinka and in Sobibor the inmates managed to stage revolts.
These took place at a time when fewer and fewer transports were arriv-
ing and those Jews who had been allowed to survive as long as there was
work to perform must have realized that their turn to be killed would
soon come. In Treblinka in August 1943 the inmates managed to make a
duplicate key to the gate and steal some weapons from the arsenal. They
attacked the guards and burned down much of the camp; after a fire fight
about 150–200 escaped. Approximately sixty of these escapees survived,
with the rest being hunted down by the SS or killed by the local popula-
tion. A similar action took place in Sobibor in October 1943. The inmates
attacked the guards with axes and clubs and succeeded in taking some
of their weapons. About forty to fifty Jews survived.19 Treblinka stopped
functioning two weeks after its revolt and Sobibor immediately after its
uprising.
The best estimates we have for the number of people murdered at the
three extermination camps are 430,000 at Belzec, 150,000 at Sobibor,
and close to 800,000 at Treblinka.20
Auschwitz
Auschwitz has come to be a symbol for the ultimate evil in the modern
world; its name has became a shorthand reference to the Holocaust.
Indeed, more Jews died at this camp than in any other one. However, the
reason that we know so much more about this installation than about the
Reinhard camps is that many more people survived Auschwitz and were
able to give an account of their experiences. Furthermore, Auschwitz was
the destination for most of the Western European Jews, about whom more
was written than the Polish Jews and Roma killed at Belzec, Sobibor, and
Treblinka. Auschwitz was not only the site where the largest number of
Jews was killed but it was also the longest lasting. The first Jews sent
there from the West were from Slovakia; they arrived in March 1942.
19 Hilberg, Vol. 3, pp. 981–82, and Gutman in Yahil, pp. 483–85.

(The Slovak government in fact paid the Germans to take away their
Jews.) The last large transport came from Hungary in the spring and
summer of 1944. After the other camps were closed down, the Nazis
were still sending victims to Auschwitz.
To fulfill their two contradictory aims of killing all Jews and at the same
time having them perform very much needed labor, the Nazis decided to
force some Jews to work and to kill others. Those Jews supplying labor
would constantly undergo selection, and, ultimately all would be killed,
thereby solving the Jewish problem. As Reinhard Heydrich put it at the
Wannsee Conference, “the most resistant elements would be dealt with
accordingly.” Auschwitz was designed as the concrete manifestation of
that policy, bringing together economic considerations and the desire to
kill in the most explicit way. It had facilities for immediate killing (i.e.,
gas chambers and crematoria), and at the same time it was also a vast
collection of labor camps. The inmates worked in factories producing a
large variety of products for the war efforts. Many, but not all of these,
factories were controlled by the SS, making the SS a major economic
power in the Nazi hierarchy.
Auschwitz had a prehistory before it became the largest killing center
the world had ever seen. It was built near a small Polish town, Oswiecim,
that had a prewar population of about 15,000, more than half of whom
were Jewish. Oswiecim was located in Upper Silesia close to the newly
established boundary of the Wartheland and the General Government
and at the confluence of two rivers; it was only about thirty miles from
Cracow. It was not too far from raw materials, especially coal, which
later had great significance because it attracted some of the largest firms
working for the German war industry. However, it was primarily because
of Oswiecim’s excellent railroad connections that Auschwitz came to be
an extensive work and killing center.
Construction began in May 1940 at a camp outside Oswiecim that had
been used as barracks for the Polish Army.21 As was the case with the
other camps, prisoners, including some Jews, participated in renovating
the barracks to make them suitable for the purposes chosen by the new
rulers. However, the first step was to clear the surrounding area of Polish
and Jewish inhabitants. At this early stage only a barbed-wire fence sep-
arated the camp from the countryside.
21 Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present. New York:
Norton, 1996, p. 174.
The commandant of the new camp was Rudolf Höss, who arrived in
Auschwitz at the end of April 1940. As a young man he had consid-
ered becoming a priest. He was among the first members of the Nazi
party, joining even before the 1923 Munich Beer Hall putsch. In 1924 he
was sentenced to a ten-year prison term (of which he served only four)
for his participation in a politically motivated murder. He joined the SS
immediately after Hitler came to power. He had experience in various
concentration camps in the 1930s, at first in Dachau and later in Sach-
senhausen where he was an adjutant to the camp commander. He was
appointed commander of the fledgling Auschwitz camp on May 1, 1940.
At that time it was not yet decided that this camp would become the
largest killing institution, so Höss could not have known what a signifi-
cant role he was destined to play in the extermination of European Jewry.
He retained his position until November 1943, as a result of a corruption
scandal, he was temporarily removed from his post. In his new posi-
tion, however, he had even wider authority over the entire concentration
camp system.22 In 1944 he returned to Auschwitz and oversaw the great
massacres of Jews that took place during the last stages of the war.
Before it was decided that Auschwitz would be the main extermination
facility, the camp was slated to serve several different functions. Among
others it was to be a detention facility aimed at controlling the local Pol-
ish population. Prisons were already full, and the occupying power was
looking for a site where its perceived enemies could be detained. Second,
Auschwitz was to be a transit camp. Himmler, ultimately responsible
for the concentration camp system, planned to incarcerate Poles there,
who later would be sent to the Reich to perform forced labor. Third,
Upper Silesia, where the camp was located, was a region that the Nazis
designated as an area for future German settlement (claiming an ancient
right for this section of Silesia), and they needed workers to make the
area habitable for the settlers. The camp was to become an agricultural
research station that would enable the anticipated German colonizers
to transform this segment of Silesia into a flourishing German agricul-
tural and industrial area. The work began by draining the surrounding
swamps.
In the first year and a half of its existence, the camp grew rather
slowly. Between April 1940 and January 1942 fewer than 40,000 pris-
oners were incarcerated here, including Polish civilians, Jews, and, after
22 Höss, p. 165.
June 1941, Soviet prisoners of war.23 During this time the camp did not
differ very much from the other camps where prisoners performed com-
pulsory labor for the German war industry. At the order of Oswald Pohl,
the man responsible for the finances, construction, and administration of
the camp system, Auschwitz was to deliver sand and gravel to the Reich.
The Germans, well aware of the shortage of manpower, conceived
of an unusual solution for supervising the prisoners about to arrive in
the newly constructed camp. They imported thirty German criminals
who had been inmates at the Sachsenhausen camp to act as kapos: as
guards supervising the prisoners. Although some were less vicious than
others, most of these men were capable of extraordinary brutality. The
SS officers, who supervised them, encouraged them to do their worst.
Even at this time conditions in this camp were worse than those in the
camps in Germany and the death rate was much higher. It was easier
to be brutal in an occupied country; different rules of behavior applied.
In that eighteen-month period, even before the introduction of the gas
chambers, 50 percent of the prisoners died.24
The first transport of prisoners arrived in June 1940. The infamous
sign proclaiming “Arbeit macht frei” (Labor makes you free) was already
in place. Höss had copied this sign from the Dachau camp where he
had worked before.25 Because it was erected when Auschwitz was still a
labor camp, it was only later that it acquired the meaning of a vicious
joke. At this stage of the camp’s life Polish prisoners were sometimes
released: Auschwitz was not yet a death camp where only death could be
the liberator.
The turning point in the history of the camp and also, as mentioned
earlier, of the history of the Holocaust was the German attack on the
Soviet Union. After the invasion, the camp became a prisoner of war
camp where ex-Soviet soldiers were treated with extraordinary brutality.
They were the first ones to be tattooed, which came to be an Auschwitz
specialty, and they were the first ones to be killed. Because the camp was
too small to perform its new function, Himmler ordered the construction
of another camp, Birkenau, only two miles from Auschwitz. The small
23 Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), The Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 6.
24 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History. New York: Public Affairs, 2005, p. 19.
25 Höss seemed to have genuinely believed that work made the lives of prisoners easier.
In 1923 he was sentenced to ten years for participating in the murder of a traitor to
the Nazi cause and thus had prison experience. Rudolf Höss, The Memoirs of the SS
Commander at Auschwitz. New York: Prometheus Books, 1992, p. 75.
Polish village of Brzezinka was destroyed to make room for the new
construction. Birkenau was designed to be a large holding site for slave
laborers – Soviet prisoners of war – used by large industrial firms.26 The
purpose of the camp, however, soon changed; Birkenau came to be the
component of Auschwitz specializing in mass murder.
The construction of Birkenau began in the fall of 1941, and the first
gas chamber was operational in March 1942, at the same time as gas
chambers began operating in the other major killing centers of Belzec,
Sobibor, and Treblinka. Soviet prisoners of war did much of the con-
struction. From the spring of 1942, Jews replaced Soviet prisoners of
war as the great majority of new arrivals. In Birkenau ultimately five
killing centers were constructed, each containing rooms for undressing,
gassing, and ultimately burning the bodies. A sixth was planned but never
constructed. The killers ran out of time.
I. G. Farben dominated the third major camp, Auschwitz III
(Monowitz-Buna), where synthetic rubber was to be produced. Monowitz
was established in October 1942 and became the third major component
of the Auschwitz complex. What made Auschwitz unique were not the gas
chambers, but the associated work camps in which hundreds of thousands
Jews (and non-Jews) labored before they died or were killed. Around the
Auschwitz-Birkenau complex approximately fifty camps grew up in the
last stages of the war. Prisoners performed a variety of jobs, including
agriculture, mining, and predominantly factory work. In the Auschwitz
subcamps, important German firms such as Krupp and Siemens estab-
lished factories, but I. G. Farben established its presence even before the
attack on the Soviet Union. A captive labor force, the closeness of raw
materials in the form of coal mines, and good railroad connections made
the site attractive. The Buna camp was still under construction in early
1944 and then was repeatedly bombed in the fall of that year; therefore,
it is not clear how much synthetic rubber was ever produced there.
Prisoner labor came to play an increasingly important role in the Ger-
man economy. Private industries paid the state for the prison labor, which
was under the authority of the SS; as a result, the concentration camps
came under the authority of the main SS administrative office.27 Prison
labor was not a very good deal, however, because the labor force was
unskilled and there was enormous turnover due to the extraordinarily
26 Rees, p. 62.
27 Franciszek Piper, “The System of Prisoner Exploitation,” in Gutman and Berenbaum,
p. 37.
high death rates. There was a constant influx of new and inexperienced
workers. The high death rate was not contrary to Nazi plans: Exploiting
prison labor was just another method of killing them.
The fact that Auschwitz was also a work camp meant that new arrivals
had to be selected for work or for immediate extermination. The majority
of Jews were killed on arrival, without even receiving a tattoo: They had
no need for one. About one in five of the new arrivals, approximately
200,000 Jews were selected for work and received tattoos; their death
thereby was postponed. There were special sections for women laborers
and also for gypsies. Between 20,000 and 25,000 gypsies were incarcer-
ated, almost all of whom died of hunger and disease.
Killings began in the fall of 1941, even before construction of the gas
chambers. The first victims were the sick, the handicapped, and Soviet
commissars against whom the Nazis had a special animus. People inca-
pable of work any longer were killed by phenol injections into the heart.
After some experimentation phenol had been selected as the most effi-
cient agent. This method continued to be used on a small scale in camp
hospitals even after the introduction of gas chambers.28
In Auschwitz, once the gas chambers were constructed, Zyklon B (prus-
sic acid) gas was used. The canisters containing the pellets were already
in place, used to kill rats and other vermin.29 The use of Zyklon B was
first tested on Soviet prisoners of war in September 1941. At first the
dosage used was too small, and some victims were still alive two days
later and had to be killed. After establishing the correct dosage, the exper-
iment was considered a success: Killing with Zyklon B was quicker than
with carbon monoxide. However, some fine-tuning was still necessary.
The killers did not realize that the pellets would vaporize only above
27 degrees centigrade, and the cellars where the killings took place were
too cold at first.30 Another problem the murderers faced was that the
pellets deteriorated within several weeks, and consequently new supplies
were continually needed, posing the danger that the murderers would run
out of Zyklon B pellets. This, however, did not happen: Up to the very
end German industry was able to provide the deadly material.
The first killings took place in the cellar of the punishment prison bloc.
In 1942, however, the influx of Jews from the occupied country became so
28 Irena Strelecka, “Hospitals,” Gutman and Berenbaum (eds.), The Anatomy of the
Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 389.
29 Rees, p. 54.
30 Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert Van Pelt, “The Machinery of Mass Murder,” in
Gutman, and Berenbaum, p. 209.
large that this first killing installation proved inadequate. Consequently

two new chambers were erected in Birkenau, one in March and the other
in June, in farmhouses where the windows were filled in and airtight
doors were installed.31 To operate successfully, the chambers had to be
ventilated and not be too far away from the crematoria because it would
have been difficult to transport the corpses for a distance and at the same
time maintain a degree of secrecy.
As always, the Nazis found the disposal of the bodies a far more
difficult task than the process of killing. At first the bodies were buried,
but because insufficient care was taken with the burials, the bodies had
to be dug up and then burned. The crematoria were the obvious solution
to the disposal of the bodies; they could be in continuous operation.
The work of incineration was done by a special Jewish unit in which
approximately 2,000 men participated, of whom hardly any survived.32
In the spring of 1942 typhus and typhus fever appeared in the camp,
brought by the free civilian workers who had not been subjected to the
delousing treatment that the captive workers experienced. To prevent the
disease from spreading to the camp personnel and to the surrounding
population, the camp had to be quarantined. In Auschwitz a new way of
dying was added: epidemics.
It was in the beginning of 1942 that Auschwitz acquired its spe-
cial character that made it different from all other killing centers: Jews
began to arrive in ever-increasing numbers, and some of them were killed
within hours, whereas others were allowed to live at least for some time
and work for the war industry. The camp system also included political
prisoners, Poles, and prisoners of war, but only Jews and gypsies were
selected for immediate gassing. Among the labor force only about half
were Jewish, and mortality among them was greater than that among any
other group.
The preparations for the killing at Auschwitz were the same as else-
where: The victims were asked to undress and were told to take a shower
to prevent an epidemic. The ruse, as always, was successful: People
undressed and even folded their clothes to make their murderers’ jobs
easier. At first the killings took place in the crematorium itself, which
made the disposal of the bodies easier. However, the crematorium was in
the middle of the camp, and consequently the shouts of the dying could be

32 Franciszek Piper, “Gas Chambers and Crematoria,” in Gutman, and Berenbaum,
pp. 157–82.
heard. In 1942 the newly built gas chamber was constructed in a secluded
place where secrecy could be better maintained.
Unlike in the Reinhard camps, which the Germans were able to oper-
ate using only few of their own men, Auschwitz required a far greater
investment of SS personnel. The nature and size of the camp required
supervision that could not be left to auxiliaries. Approximately 6,800 SS
men and 200 women served in the camp during the duration.33 As the
size of the camp grew so did its need for SS personnel. In 1940 only
500 SS men served, but at the time the camp was closed down in January
1945 more than 4,500 members of the SS were employed. The average
number of SS men on staff was approximately 3,000.
As one might expect there was an elaborate organizational chart, and
a strict hierarchy was maintained. People higher on the hierarchy unusu-
ally had experience in other concentration camps; those lower down per-
formed guard duties. Many of these men were older than those assigned
to frontline duties, and as the situation on the front deteriorated for the
Germans, more and more older people, not suitable for frontline service,
were assigned to Auschwitz. By and large the guards came from a low
level of society, and the percentage of the Volkdeutsche among the guards
gradually increased. Many did not know German and were considered
second-class Germans. Thus the Nazi racist ideology was applied to Ger-
mans themselves: Some “Germans” were superior to other Germans. By
the end of the war the Volkdeutsche made up almost half of the personnel
in the camp. The nature of the work inevitably encouraged corruption:
Valuables were taken from those who had just died or were about to die.
The leadership was disturbed by the amount of corruption and found
it necessary to discipline hundreds: After all, it was the state that was
supposed to benefit from the confiscation of Jewish wealth, not private
individuals.
Except for Höss, the most notorious Nazi in Auschwitz was Joseph
Mengele, the doctor and eugenicist who, sitting comfortably at a table,
reviewed the Jews disembarking from the trains and made snap decisions
concerning life and death. He had been wounded at the front and asked
for an assignment at a concentration camp. Interested in genetics and
eugenics throughout his professional life, he took the job at Auschwitz to
satisfy his scientific curiosity. After coming to Auschwitz in May 1943, he
first studied gypsy twins. In 1944 he chose Jewish children as his subjects,
33 Aleksander Lasik, “Sociological Profile of the Auschwitz SS,” in Gutman, and Beren-
baum, p. 274.
experimenting on several hundred boys and girls. Because in 1944 the

majority of the inmates were Hungarians, most of his subject children
came from this pool. He was also interested in dwarfism and questions
of human fertility. Jewish inmate doctors were forced to assist him in
his experiments.34 When the camp was liquidated, he personally shot the
surviving children.
One of the medical “experiments” carried out at Auschwitz was to
immerse men in cold water and see how long it would take for them
to die. The ostensible purpose of the experiment was to see how long
German pilots shot down over the cold North Sea could survive. The
Nazi scientists who conducted these experiments knew that immersing
emaciated men in freezing water could not be compared to healthy pilots
who undoubtedly could have survived longer. One suspects that there
was more than scientific interest at play: The scientists took pleasure in
their unlimited power over their fellow human beings.
However, the image of Mengele that remains with us was not that
of a scientist, however inhuman and morally repugnant his experiments
were, but as the doctor in his white coat, selecting those who were to be
gassed immediately versus those given a reprieve and sent to work. This
selection was an Auschwitz specialty because, except for the much smaller
Madanek camp, Auschwitz was the only camp where extermination and
labor coexisted. Mengele was not the only doctor who performed this
task, but he made the greatest impression, as one who visibly enjoyed
his work. He made these decisions in the most casual fashion. Because
there was a continual influx of prisoners, there was no need for a careful
inspection to determine who was capable of work. The SS personnel saw
no need to economize on labor and were not concerned that some people
capable of work were instead immediately murdered. At the outset men
were separated from women. Children who did not reach a certain height
were sent to the left. Their mothers or, on occasion, their fathers were
sent to the left with them. From the point of view of the SS the commotion
caused by the separation of children from their parents was simply not
worth saving those among their parents who could work: There were
more than enough inmates to take their place at forced labor. Those
chosen for labor had their hair cut and their clothes confiscated; in their
place they received rags that had been taken from the large storehouses.
The inmates were then disinfected.
34 Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Greenwich, CT,

1960.
Conditions in the camp were set up in such a way as to kill. The

prisoners in the barracks were not properly clothed. At the outset the
people received prison uniforms, but later they wore the clothes from
the murdered Jews that were not taken by the German for their own use.
Most received nothing but rags. They had no toilet articles, and thousands
shared latrines. The hygiene in the camps was such that various diseases
and epidemics were inevitable. The amount and quality of the food were
not sufficient for survival. The barracks were so crowded that on occasion
the upper bunks collapsed under the weight of the bodies, crushing people
underneath. The workday was extraordinarily long. Summer and winter
the prisoners had to appear for roll calls. The prisoners suffered constant
humiliation; sadistic guards beat them.
The organization in the camp was complex. Prisoners who worked,
and every prisoner kept alive was compelled to work, were organized
into groups, headed by an SS leader who was assisted by kapos, inmates
chosen by the SS officer. These chosen inmates possessed unlimited power
over their unfortunate fellow prisoners. The block commanders were also
inmates, and they also were privileged. They did not even have to sleep in
the same barracks as others. Their chances of survival were considerably
better than that of their fellow victims. However, when their superiors
were no longer satisfied with their behavior, they were demoted and on
occasion killed by their fellow inmates.
The population of the camp was heterogeneous. In addition to Jews,
there were political prisoners, Roma, homosexuals, common criminals,
and conscientious objectors. Each group wore a different colored mark.
The prisoners came from different countries and spoke a large variety of
languages. The camp command purposely chose leaders with a different
nationality from the people who came under their authority. In this way
the Nazis lessened the danger of cooperation among the captives. There
was also a strict hierarchy among the camp population. As one would
expect on the basis of Nazi ideology, Western Europeans stood higher in
the hierarchy than Eastern Europeans; Jews were at the very bottom and
were treated accordingly. Germans who were in the camp for whatever
reason were privileged over others. Common criminals also were most
likely to receive coveted appointments.
In September 1943 a special camp was established in Birkenau. It
housed five thousand Czech Jews who were brought from Teresienstadt
(Terezin in Czech). Contrary to normal Auschwitz procedures, families
were not separated, and, most importantly, the Jews were not subjected to
selections for immediate killings. Conditions in the camp were, of course,
deplorable, so much so that within six months a fifth of the inmates

died. However, here the Jews were allowed a remarkable opportunity
to organize their own lives. In the middle of the largest death camp for
some time cultural activities of various sorts existed. In December 1943
and in May 1944 another two groups arrived also from Teresienstadt,
comprising another 12.500 people, and these groups included not only
Czech but also German, Austrian and Dutch Jews. After the passage of
six months members of the first transport were, all sent to gas chambers.
Evidently there was a decision to keep people alive for six months. In
July 1944 the special camp was closed down. On this instance, however,
selections did take place and those capable of working were sent to other
camps.
The purpose of the maintaining the family camp was transparently
obvious. The inmates were instructed to send postcards to their relatives
who were still incarcerated in Teresienstadt. Since the Nazis allowed the
Red Cross to visit that camp, the postcards were aimed at misleading
that international agency. They aimed to show that sending Jews to the
east was not a euphemism, but in fact people were alive and leading
normal lives. The story of the family camp is important for us because it
contributes to our understanding of Nazi mentality. At least to a certain
extent the Nazis were concerned about world opinion and made some
not very successful efforts to keep the extraordinarily ambitious effort to
kill millions in secret.35
The Nazis were concerned about the possibility of mass escapes and
feared that an Allied bombing raid might create an opportunity for a mass
breakout. To prevent that possibility, they constructed internal walls that
separated segments of the camps. Guards, barbed-wire fences, and dogs
acted as additional security. Frequent roll calls, often lasting for hours,
made certain that everyone was accounted for. In fact, no breakout ever
materialized.
The German defeat at Stalingrad was a major turning point in the
history of the Holocaust. When constructed at a time of Nazi victories,
Auschwitz was envisaged as an instrument of colonization. The inmates
would ready the soil for the settlers. Stalingrad compelled the Nazis to
postpone their fantastic plans for bringing German settlers to this part of
Silesia. By the beginning of 1943 the main task of this particular camp
35 Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death; Reflection on Memory and
Imagination. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 105–116. Kulka was one
of the inmates in this camp.
was to kill Jews. If the war could not be won, at least Jews could still be
eliminated. The function of Auschwitz had to change.
The camp complex came to be the primary killing site only at the
end of 1943. In 1942 camps that were built entirely for the purpose
of killing, such as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, killed more people
than did Auschwitz; in that year approximately 200,000 people died at
Auschwitz. Even in 1943 this camp ranked third in the number killed
behind Treblinka and Belzec. Auschwitz achieved the height of its mur-
derous capacity in the late spring and summer of 1944, after the other
extermination camps had already been closed down. However, at that
time the labor shortage was most acute, and the need for slave labor was
the greatest. That is why 10–20 percent of the new arrivals, mostly from
Hungary and from the Lodz ghetto, were sent to the West to labor camps
there.36 At the end of the summer of 1944, German-occupied Europe had
about run out of Jews, and the Nazi project was mostly accomplished.
In November 1944 the gas chambers in Auschwitz stopped operat-
ing, and the Soviet Army liberated the camp on January 24, 1945. The
Nazis managed to destroy the crematoria before they evacuated the camp,
marching most of the surviving inmates to various labor camps in Austria
and Germany. Only a few thousand Jews were left behind to be liberated
by the Soviet Army.
Because the Nazis only kept records of those who were chosen to work,
not of the total number of arrivals, the exact number of deaths has always
been in dispute. However, the consensus among historians is that about
1,100,000 Jews died at Auschwitz.
Majdanek
Of the six extermination camps that operated in the territory of Poland,
Majdanek was the smallest. The camp was similar to Auschwitz in that
gas chambers and forced labor coexisted within it. It was built on the
outskirts of Lublin, near the headquarters of the SS leader who was
responsible for the exterminations camps, Odilo Globocnik. It was the
only such facility to be built near a major city, and therefore, unlike other
camps, it could not be successfully camouflaged.
The decision to build a forced labor camp was made at the outbreak
of the war with the Soviet Union. First Jewish workers and then Soviet
prisoners of war were used for slave labor. Because at first there were no
36 Dwork and Van Pelt, pp. 338–42.

barracks, the prisoners had to sleep in the open air, and the mortality rate
among them was extraordinarily high. Originally the Nazis planned a
much larger camp, but as a result of the unavailability of building materi-
als, the camp was never able to accommodate more than 50,000 prisoners
at any one time. Majdanek operated from October 1941 to July 1944,
when the Red Army liberated it. It was the first extermination camp to be
liberated and the only one that the Nazis did not succeed in destroying.
In addition to Jews, Poles, political prisoners from various countries
of Europe, and Soviet prisoners of war worked at Majdanek for the war
industry. Initially those prisoners who did not work were shot or died of
malnutrition and disease. Only in 1943 were gas chambers introduced,
and as in Auschwitz Zyklon B was used for killing. The death rate for
all prisoners was very high, although the gas chambers were used only
for Jews. The most reliable estimate of Jewish victims – about 50,000 –
comes from Raul Hilberg.37
Death Marches
At the beginning of 1945 there could be no doubt that the Germans had
lost the war and that their mad and utopian undertaking of remaking the
world according to their ideology had failed. Even within that ideology,
which aimed to improve the world by massacring every Jew, killing no
longer made no sense. And yet the murders continued to the very end,
to the very last days of Hitler’s regime. As long as the extermination
camps operated, the murders took place in a more or less organized fash-
ion: the gas chambers worked efficiently. After they were shut down that
situation changed. After Himmler ordered the dismantling of the crema-
toria at Auschwitz, the last functioning extermination camp, on October
25, 1944,38 what followed was a chaotic period of murder that even
increased the suffering for the survivors. The orderly chain of command
broke down; the directions that came from above were confused. In the
last stages of the war the Germans themselves lived in a state of anarchy.
Armies were retreating and civilians were fleeing the approaching Red
Army. The Nazis had reason to fear retribution. The death marches took
place under these circumstances.
In January 1945 there were still approximately three-quarters of a
million prisoners in the vast concentration camp system that the Nazis

38 Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1046.
had created and operated.39 As early as 1942, people in command had

attempted to eradicate evidence of their actions by digging up graves
and burning corpses. As mentioned before, Paul Blobel, an ex-chief of a
Sonderkommando, was in charge of a unit that had the task of digging up
bodies and burning them. In 1945 the Nazis faced contradictory goals. On
the one hand, they wanted to erase the evidence and to prevent prisoners
from falling into the hands of their enemies. They were concerned that
during the last stages of the fighting the prisoners would rebel and thereby
help the liberating armies; therefore, they desired to kill as many of them
as possible. Himmler issued an ambiguous order in the summer of 1944
in which he instructed the camp commanders not to allow any prisoner to
fall into the hands of the enemy. On the other hand, in the last stages of the
war the shortage of labor became ever more pressing, and therefore the
Nazis wanted to use prisoner labor as much as they could. Furthermore,
Himmler, who was never much of a realist, had the idea that Jews could
be used as hostages, as bargaining chips with the Allies. Even at this late
stage some of the Nazi leaders failed to understand how limited a role
saving Jews played in the war strategy of the Allies.
Because of these conflicting aims and the impending collapse of the
entire bureaucratic system, the people responsible for running the still
functioning camps received confusing instructions. The camp comman-
ders did not prepare for evacuation of the camps, because such plans
would have implied defeatism. The chaos that followed was partially a
consequence of this lack of preparation. The evacuations often took place
at the last possible moment.
In January 1945 the only extermination camp (as opposed to labor
camps) still in existence was the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Based
on an order from Himmler, the SS leadership decided to march those
capable of walking west and to leave the sick behind. When the Soviet
Army liberated the camp in January 1945 they found 7,000 emaciated
and sick prisoners. It is not clear whether Himmler expected that the SS
would interpret his order to leave behind the sick as meaning killing them.
If the Nazis hoped to erase evidence of their crimes it was surprising that
they allowed witnesses to be left behind.
During the last stage of the Holocaust the survivors marched westward
from every camp that was close to being liberated by the Soviet army. A
39 This estimate is based on data supplied by Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 1. He is the foremost scholar on the
topic. See also Yehuda Bauer, “The Death marches, January–May, 1945,” Modern
Judaism, 1983, Vol. 3, pp. 1–21.
vast movement of human beings thus began moving from camps in the
east to those in the west. Because the inmates of the concentration camps,
unlike those of the extermination camps, were not exclusively Jewish, the
participants in these death marches were a mixed group. However, even
though all the prisoners were treated brutally, Jews were singled out by
being treated even more harshly and given smaller food rations; in any
case because of their previous treatment they were more likely to be in
physically worse condition than the others. In some ways this was the
most horrendous period in the Nazi murder spree. The suffering of the
victims was excruciating. They had been weakened by months if not years
of mistreatment; they were inadequately clothed for the exceptionally
cold winter and were barely fed enough for survival. People dropped
dead because of exhaustion. Those who were too weak to continue to
walk were shot.
It is difficult to generalize about these marches, because each one was
different. The Nazi murder machine broke down and with it the unifor-
mity of methods of killing. In some cases the marches were short, but in
others they went for hundreds of miles. In some instances the prisoners
traveled by trains or by trucks, but most often they had to walk.40 The
guards who had been trained to be brutal became even more so. Toward
the last stages of the war, older soldiers, less useful in the front, were
selected for guard duty. Most were not members of the SS and did not
have much experience in the camps, but instead were old Wehrmacht sol-
diers, some of them ethnic Germans, or were auxiliaries from among the
favored nationalities: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, or Latvians. They feared
for their own lives, but they still had power over the prisoners. They took
revenge for their own misery on the defenseless. Order broke down and it
seemed easier to kill the prisoners rather than attempting to control them
and take care of them. In the previous years they had killed in the name
of a crazy ideology. Now they killed because that was the easiest thing
to do. As killing agents of the enemy, they came to believe that killing
people was perfectly acceptable behavior.
In some ways the death marches do not easily fit into the story of
the Holocaust. The victims were not exclusively Jewish.41 In addition,
although the concentration camps and especially the extermination camps
were fairly well insulated from the general population, this was no longer
40 Blatman, p. 11.
41 Blatman argues this point in his chapter, “The Death Marches and the Final Phase of
the Nazi Genocide,” in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.), Concentration
Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 169–73.
true. The marches took place amidst the Polish, Ukrainian, and German
populations. Presumably the impression of the suffering victims made
on the civilians must have varied. There is very little evidence that the
prisoners received help from ordinary Germans; there are many more
reports concerning attacks by the Hitlerjugend and the Volksstrum.42
Years of Nazi indoctrination were not without effect. The Germans who
now themselves suffered demonstrated little pity or sympathy for those
who had suffered much more. It was comforting to believe that Jews
deserved their fate.
It is estimated that one-third of the prisoners died or were killed in the
course of these marches. The mortality rate among the Jewish prisoners
was higher.
42 Hitlerjugend: Nazi youth organization. Volksstrum: A national militia organized at the

very end of the war that included males under the age of 60 years.
14
Afterthoughts
In searching for an understanding of the Holocaust, we must begin by

looking at the nature and consequences of antisemitism. This particular
prejudice has an extremely long history. It is multifaceted: Not all anti-
semites think the same way and have the same concerns, and their beliefs
do not have the same consequences. The genteel antisemitism of a British
lord, who saw Jews as parvenus and associated them with traits for which
he had only contempt, was profoundly different from that of the poor
Ukrainian peasant who wrongly thought of the Jew as his exploiter. A
French writer who depicted Jews in an unfavorable light did not neces-
sarily have much in common with a Nazi storm trooper. Pious Christians
who resented Jews because they considered them responsible for the death
of their savior had different concerns than did the small business owners
who saw Jews as unfair competitors. With the coming of the modern age,
which is coterminous with the French Revolution, the position of Jews
profoundly changed, and with it the nature of antisemitism. In the new
world Jews came to be not only despised but above all feared.
The antisemitism that drove the Nazis had little to do with genteel
contempt or church-inspired antisemitism. Instead the Nazis placed at
the center of their ideology an overwhelming fear of Jewish world dom-
ination. Hitler and his followers managed to connect everything that
they disliked and feared in the modern world to Jews. Their worldview
demanded an enemy, and no group could have played that role as well as
Jews. It is a sad irony that the age of extraordinary Jewish accomplish-
ments in the fields of arts, science, commerce, and finances in the Western
world coincided with the Holocaust. Jewish achievements and the great
tragedy of the Holocaust are two sides of the same coin.
289
To understand the Holocaust, we must pose this question: What

enabled Jews in the course of the nineteenth century to become extraor-
dinarily successful? The explanation is that they brought from their pre-
emancipation past values, traits, and customs that came to be important
and highly valued in the modern age. One of the important themes of
nineteenth-century European history is the great transformation of Jewry
and the ability of Jews to take advantage of newly offered opportuni-
ties. Yet the extraordinarily quick acculturation of Jews made them all
the more frightening to the antisemite. For all practical purposes Jews
became invisible and therefore all the more dangerous. The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion was an extraordinarily clumsily forged document.
Nevertheless, in examining the history of the Holocaust we must attempt
to understand how people could take it seriously. The notion of Jewish
world conspiracy survives even today in certain circles. It was Jewish suc-
cess that enabled the antisemites to connect all those different aspects of
modernity that they did not like to Jews.
It is only the fear of Jewish power that can explain the vehemence of
the Nazi desire to kill them. The fact that such fear was utterly baseless,
and that the Nazi leaders were disconnected from reality to such an extent
that we would rightly consider them lunatic, does not necessarily mean
that they did not believe everything that they said about Jews. The Nazis
killed people because they despised them, but they killed Jews above all
because they feared them. The followers of Hitler were neither the first nor
the only people to become victims of crazy conspiracy theories; however,
they were unique in pushing these theories to their furthest extreme and
in being willing to act on their beliefs. In 1944, at a time when hardly any
Jews were left in German-controlled Europe, they continued to believe
that Jews were their most dangerous enemies.
The Holocaust is fundamentally a German story. It mattered a great
deal who Jews were, but not what the Jews did in response. There is
little need to explain Jewish behavior at the time of their greatest tragedy.
There is no reason to search for explanations of Jewish behavior in their
millennia of experience. Jews did not successfully resist not because long
experience taught them passivity, but because there was no possibility of
resistance. The evidence is overwhelming that no group of human beings
could have behaved differently in their place. Some individuals behaved
better than others, some attempted to save their lives by cooperating, but
once again, Jews were only human beings, and one can take such differ-
ences for granted. The best comparison group is Soviet prisoners of war.
Although the Germans had no plan to kill each and every one of them,
Afterthoughts 291
and the Nazis built no elaborate ideology in which they were depicted as
the greatest enemies of humankind, nevertheless half of those prisoners
were killed by starvation and by every kind of mistreatment. These men
were young and possessed military experience, and yet we know of no
incident when they attempted to take revenge on their tormentors and
rebel. On the contrary, many volunteered to help the murderers.
The Holocaust, of course, is also a Jewish story, but in a very different
sense. That overwhelming tragedy profoundly changed the composition,
character, and mentality of Jews everywhere in the world. However, those
changes, important as they are, do not belong in this narrative.
But the Holocaust is primarily a German story because of this funda-
mental question: How could human beings in the middle of the twentieth
century lose their fundamental morality and become capable of commit-
ting unspeakable crimes in the name of an ideology that can only be
described as lunatic? Obviously antisemitism among the Germans had
to exist before the process began. However, it is clear that the Germans
in the years before Hitler came to power were no more antisemitic than
people in many other countries of Europe. Antisemitism was a necessary,
but not a sufficient condition for the Holocaust. What drove the Germans
was not an excess of antisemitism. In the course of Nazi rule the German
people did become more and more antisemitic, but first came the mis-
treatment of Jews. Average Germans had to believe that Jews got what
they deserved; otherwise, the Germans would have been bothered by their
consciences. After benefiting from the confiscation of Jewish wealth, the
Germans grew more and more ready to listen to Nazi propagandists.
What we see is a descending spiral: More mistreatment created more
antisemitism, and more antisemitism made Germans behave more and
more barbarously. Even the leading Nazis – the organizers and the lead-
ers on a path that led to extermination – became ever more passionate
antisemites. First they killed and then they found intellectual and spiri-
tual justifications for their actions. It was easier to kill than to decide to
kill. The killing started before there was a final decision to murder all
Jews.
In addition to antisemitism, for the Holocaust to take place it was
necessary for the Nazi leadership to establish a totalitarian state. One can
imagine pogroms happening spontaneously, but mass murder requires
sophisticated, complex organization and coordination, which are only
possible with the authority of the state. In a society where voices could
be heard opposing the notion that Jews were dangerous enemies and
subhuman beings, mass murder could not take place.
In a political order that never hesitated to punish its opponents, average

people found it easiest to go along, even if they were not antisemites. They
continued to perform their duties, and because almost every part of the
German state became involved in the destruction process, hundreds of
thousands if not millions became willing accomplices. A few people, no
doubt, preserved their humanity and could not but be horrified by what
was being done in their names, wondering why others did not see things
the same way as they did. They must have felt alone in their opposition
and considered that there was nothing they could do. Even sharing their
thoughts with others would exact a high price, and for what? They could
not really help those who were persecuted.
In spite of the propaganda, probably for the great majority of the
Germans the “Jewish question” did not matter much. For all practical
purposes no one spoke up for Jews, and even those who came to oppose
the Nazi regime opposed it for reasons other than its Jewish policy. It is
unlikely that those who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944 turned
against their leader because of his policies concerning Jews. In fact, one
of the conspirators was Arthur Nebe, one of the most brutal leaders of
an Einsatzgruppe.
Recently a much debated topic among the scholars of the Holocaust is
when the Nazis made their decision to kill all the Jews that they possibly
could. Historians have attempted to establish the exact date, and it is
perhaps not surprising that disagreements continue. Was it in the summer
of 1941? Or perhaps in the fall of the same year? Or was the decision made
only at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942? The question does not
have a simple answer. Arguably from the moment the Nazis attained
power, the followers of Hitler would have liked to make Germany free of
Jews. They did everything within their power to make the lives of Jews so
miserable that they would leave on their own accord. For understandable
reasons they did not succeed. The process of Jewish persecution is best
understood as a descending spiral, in which each step made the next step
possible. This is not to say, however, that these steps necessarily had to
follow one another: It would have been possible to stop at any given
point.
No matter how vicious the Nazi regime was, it is difficult to imagine
that in the modern world it could have carried out mass murder in peace-
time. The Nazis were preoccupied with what to do with the German Jews
in the 1930s and yet could not come up with a solution. The Holocaust
began with the German attack on Poland in September 1939. Not coin-
cidentally, it was only at that point that the Nazi leaders managed to
Afterthoughts 293
embark on their long desired project of “improving the race” by murder-

ing the handicapped. When young soldiers die in battles, “why should we
spare the lives of those not worthy of living?” was their reasoning. War
gave license for killing. There is a correlation between the progress of the
war and the murderous actions against Jews.
The Nazi leaders understood that forcing Jews into ghettos would lead
to the deaths of thousands. The decision not to feed people in ghettos
was consciously aimed at killing them. However, the organized mass
shootings and the creation of the extermination camps coincided with a
vast enlargement of the war that occurred when the German attacked the
Soviet Union. Once again the Nazis crossed a moral boundary, no longer
merely placing people in positions where they were likely to die, but
actually murdering them. When hundreds of thousands of people were
dying as a result of military action, it was much easier to kill civilians.
Those civilians were all potential partisans, the Germans must have told
themselves. But even more important, by this time Nazi ideology had
repudiated the notion that all human beings are essentially alike and that
there is such a thing as shared humanity. When the end was near and the
Nazis lost any hopes for victory it was still important to exterminate as
many Jews as they possibly could.
In 1942 the map of continental Europe included German-occupied
countries, German allies, and a few neutral countries. As the Nazis suc-
ceeded more on the battlefield, their desire to kill Jews also became more
ambitious. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 the discussions
concerned Jews in all of Europe, even including Jews of Britain, a country
that was far from being defeated. It was not enough to save Germany
from Jews. Humankind had to be liberated.
In every country that the Germans occupied, they found willing accom-
plices. Even Denmark had a fascist party. The Nazis could not have
succeeded with their project without such help. Indirectly, hundreds of
thousands of people were needed to operate the state machinery, produce
Zyklon B gas canisters, run the railroads, and the like. However, the
striking aspect of the Holocaust was how few Germans actually had to
do the killing.
Looking at the differences concerning the “success” of the extermi-
nation efforts in different countries, we might draw some conclusions.
No country that retained its sovereign government, with the exception of
Romania, was willing to have its own native Jews killed. Yet the correla-
tion with preexisting antisemitism is tenuous. It is true that in the eastern
part of the European continent antisemitism was a much stronger force
and Jews in these countries suffered the most. Even when significant par-
tisan movements existed in Eastern Europe, Jews could only rarely join
them or count on help from their fellow citizens. But perhaps even more
important, the Germans behaved worse in Eastern Europe than in the
West. The mass atrocities that regularly took place in Poland, the Baltic
states, and in the Soviet Union had few parallels in the West. That so
few Eastern European Jews survived was the consequence of German
behavior.
The correlation with native antisemitism also breaks down when we
attempt to account for differences in survival rates in Western European
countries. Scholars have speculated why the proportion of victims in
Holland was so much greater than in Belgium or France and why Danish
Jewry survived while the minuscule Norwegian Jewish community did
not. The explanation must be that Joseph Terboven in Oslo had different
priorities than the Nazi leadership in Copenhagen. No one would argue
that the Dutch were more antisemitic than the French. We must con-
clude that ultimately the nature of the German occupying force mattered
more than anything else. In countries where the military was in control,
Jews had a better chance of survival. Of course, that does not mean
that military officers were favorably inclined toward their fellow human
beings. However, unlike Nazi party functionaries, officers, no matter how
antisemitic they were, did not consider it their primary purpose to exter-
minate Jews.
One ought not draw facile conclusions about the nature of humanity on
the basis of the dreadful history of this particular genocide. Nevertheless
it appears that the extent to which the behavior of different groups of
human beings differed from one another was not so much the consequence
of higher moral standards of one as against the other, but differences in
circumstances and in background. One should not assign worse grades
to the Poles than the Danes. Circumstances in the two countries were so
different as to invalidate such comparisons. In any case, the task of the
historian is not to give out grades. The task of the historian is to make an
attempt to understand.
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Index
Abbé Henri Gregoire, 20 blood libel, 45, 62

Abetz, Otto, 225, 228 Bogdan Khmelmitsky, 33
acculturation, 12 boycott of Jewish shops, 108
Action Française, 27, 73 Brand, Joel, 254
Alexander II, 38, 43 Brunner, Alois, 228
Allen, W. S., 86 Buchenwald, 121, 262
Alsace, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 134, 224, Bulgaria, 176, 177, 233, 236
226 Bund, 46, 47
Amin al-Husseini, 118
Anielewicz, Mordechai, 149 Catherine, 34
Anschluss, 119 Catholic Church, 13, 26, 28, 32, 33, 56,
Anton Denikin, 49 67, 112, 199
Antonescu, Ion, 72, 185, 186, 188, 192, Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 95
194 Charles Maurras, 27
Arrow Cross Party, 240 cheder, 37, 39, 54
Ashkenazi, 20, 177 Chelmno, 197, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268,
assimilation, 12, 22, 36, 47, 54, 60, 61, 62, 270
117 Christian X, 208
Auschwitz, 83, 104, 105, 166, 193, 201, Codreanu, Corneliu, 181, 182, 183, 239
214, 221, 222, 233, 248, 251, 253, Czerniakow, Adam, 142, 143
261, 263, 267, 268, 273, 274, 275,
276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, Dachau, 107, 117, 121, 262, 275, 276
284, 285, 286 Daniel Goldhagen, 6
Darányi, Kálmán, 237
Babi Yar, 171, 174, 191 Darlan, Francois, 228
Baky, 250, 252, 255 De Clercq, Staf, 218
Bárdossy, 237, 244 de Legarde, Paul, 118
Belzec, 269 Degrelle, Leon, 218
Bessarabia, 34, 44, 162, 177, 178, 180, Der Judenstaat, 46
183, 188, 189, 190, 192 Der Stürmer, 96, 97, 98
Best, Werner, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212 Dietrich, Otto, 90
Birkenau, 276, 277, 279, 286 Dinter, Arthur, 95
Black Hundreds, 44 Dobers, Ernst, 100
303
304 Index
Drancy, 221, 227, 229 176, 179, 180, 185, 186, 187, 192,
Dreyfus affair, 24, 27, 62, 79, 80 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201,
Duckwitz, Georg Ferdinand, 210, 211, 212 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 215,
216, 219, 221, 223, 224, 225, 229,
Eastern European Jewry, 5 230, 232, 233, 236, 237, 239, 240,
Eduoard Drumont, 27 242, 243, 245, 248, 249, 251, 252,
Eichmann, Adolf, 119, 132, 179, 201, 233, 257, 258, 262, 265, 267, 269, 276,
249, 250, 253, 254 284, 287, 292, 293
Einsatzgruppen, 133, 155, 156, 159, 160, Globocnik, Odilo, 268, 269
161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, Goebbels, Josef, 76, 89, 94, 96, 122, 200,
170, 171, 194, 245, 246, 264 267
Einstein, Albert, 101 Goldhagen, Daniel, 78
eliminationist antisemitism, 6 Gömbös, Gyula, 68, 236, 237
emancipation, 5, 12, 15, 19, 20, 21, 23, Göring, Herman, 76
25, 44, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 66, 79, Great Britain, 19
164, 215, 226, 231, 240, 290 “Grey Zone,” 141
Enabling law, 107 Grynszpan, Herschel, 121
Endre, 250, 252, 255
Enlightenment, 11, 19, 22, 54, 56, 73 Habsburg Empire, 5
Eötvös, Jozsef, 61 Halacha, 54
Epstein, Barbara, 166 Hamsun, Knut, 213
euthanasia program, 261, 265, 269 Hannah Arendt, 28
Evian conference, 115 Hanneken, von Julius, 208, 209, 210,
Ezra Mendelsohn, 5 211
Hasidic movement, 39
Falkenhausen, Arthus von, 219 Haskalah, 39, 61
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 100 Herzl, Theodore, 61
Fink, Fritz, 98 Heydrich, Reinhard, 117, 155, 160, 161,
Fischbock, Hans, 217 163, 167, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200,
forced labor battalions, 247 208, 269, 274
France, 12, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, Hilberg, Raul, 6, 104, 105, 106, 110, 113,
29, 30, 66, 79, 80, 91, 119, 121, 122, 133, 150, 153, 162, 170, 171, 190,
123, 133, 134, 199, 206, 207, 215, 199, 209, 210, 232, 261, 264, 266,
216, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 273, 279, 285
228, 229, 230, 233, 234, 294 Himmler, Heinrich, 76, 131, 135, 160,
Franco, Francisco, 72 167, 168, 173, 217, 249, 251, 253,
Frank, Hans, 130, 131, 132 269, 271, 275, 276, 285, 286
French Revolution, i, 4, 11, 12, 13, 19, 73, Hitler
226, 289 Hitler order, 3
Höfle, Hermann, 268
Galicia, 33, 53, 57, 58, 158, 177 Holland, 19, 206, 207, 214, 215, 216, 217,
“General Government,” 130, 131, 267 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 229,
German Soviet non-aggression treaty, 129 230, 269, 294
Germany, v, 12, 20, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, Horthy, Miklos, 64, 178, 237, 239, 243,
33, 39, 41, 49, 50, 53, 65, 66, 71, 72, 245, 247, 248, 252, 255, 256, 257
74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, Hungarian Soviet Republic, 242
86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, Hungary, 5
100, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 116,
117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, I. G. Shcheglovitov, 45
128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, I. G. Farben, 277
148, 152, 153, 154, 158, 166, 170, Imrédy, Béla, 237, 241
Index 305
Iron Guard, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, Max Weber, 25

186 Mayer, Arno, 168
Irving, David, 89 Mein Kampf, 75, 76
Istoczy, Gyözö, 62 Mendel Beilis, 45
Mengele, Josef, 280
Jaross, Andor, 250, 252 Merkl, Peter, 85
Jedwabne, 158 Michael (king), 128, 147, 167, 181, 183,
Jorga, Nicholas, 178, 185 186, 226, 227, 230, 276
Joseph II, 54, 55 Minsk, 47, 166, 168, 203
Judenrat, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 149 Mischlinge, 113, 200, 201
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Chaim
Kaganovich, Lazar, 92 Mordechai, 139
kahal, 32, 37 Mussolini, Benito, 64, 72, 74, 182, 231,
Kállay, 237, 247, 248 232, 233, 237, 238
Karaites, 14
Károlyi, Mihály, 63 N. P. Ignatev, 43
Kasztner, Rudolf, 254, 255 Nebe, Arthur, 264, 292
Katyn, 131, 174 Nicholas I, 34, 37, 38
Kaufman, Teodor, 93 Nicholas II, 44, 45
Kaunas, 157, 159, 165 Nordau, Max, 61
Keresztes Fischer, Ferenc, 245, 248 “numerus clausus” law, 66
Kershaw, Ian, 75 Nuremberg laws, 112
Klemperer, Victor, 203
Kowno, 157 Oberg, Carl Albert, 228
Kristallnacht, 120, 121, 122, 123 Odessa, 40, 43, 44, 191
Kun, András, 258 Old Believers, 18
Operation Reinhard, 160, 267, 269, 271
La France Juive, 27
La Libre parole, 27 Pale of settlement, 35
Lange, Herbert, 265 Panama Canal affair, 27
Lanik, Josef, 251 partisan movement, 148, 166, 167, 169,
Laval, Pierre, 228 208, 294
Lebrun, Albert, 223 Pellepoix, Darquier de, 228, 234
Leopold III, 218 Pétain, Philip, 223, 224, 234
Levy, Primo, 145 Pilsudski, 178
Litvinov, Maxim, 92 pogroms, 3, 20, 24, 25, 30, 33, 43, 44, 45,
Lodz ghetto, 101, 136, 138, 139, 141, 145, 46, 49, 50, 53, 57, 65, 68, 71, 77,
146, 264, 265, 284 112, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158,
Lorraine, 25, 29, 134, 224 159, 184, 188, 189, 272, 291
Lueger, Karl, 58 Preuss, Hugo, 81
Lupescu, Elena, 183 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 6, 13, 41,
Lutz, 259 50, 75, 97
Madagascar, 118, 119, 133, 135, 197, 267 Quisling, Vidkun, 212, 213, 214
Majdanek, 268, 284
Malines, 221 Ravensbruck, 262
Marr, 5 Reichleitner, Franz, 269
Marranos, 14 Renthe-Fink, von Cecil, 207, 211
Maurice Barrès, 27 Ribbentrop, Joachim, 130, 152, 164, 183,
Maurice Joly, 42 225
Mauthausen, 262 Richard Pipes, 43
306 Index
Romania, 31, 64, 66, 72, 91, 128, 176, Tiszaeszlár, 62

177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, Torah, 15, 39
184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 193, 195, Transnistria, 190, 191, 192, 193
199, 206, 235, 239, 242, 250, 256, Trawniki, 271, 272
272, 293 Treblinka, 268, 270
Rosenberg, Alfred, 76, 95, 152
Rotta, Angelo, 259 Ukraine, 4, 49, 50, 152, 153, 154, 158,
Russian empire, 25, 31, 35, 44, 49, 162, 163, 164, 188, 190, 225, 244,
136 245, 246, 250, 253, 264, 272
United States, 12
Sachsenhausen, 121, 262, 275, 276
Sanhedrin, 21 Va’ad, 32
Schleunes, Karl, 104 Vallat, Xavier, 227
Schmitt, Carl, 73 Veesenmayer, Edmund, 248
Schutzpass, 259 Velodrome d’Hiver, 229
Sephardic, 20, 177 Vilna, 40, 150, 166
Serédi Justinian Cardinal, 242 Volkische Beobachter, 95
Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 217, 219 Vrba, Rudolf, 251
Snyder, Timothy, 206
Sobibor, 166, 222, 268, 269, 270, 273, Wallenberg, Raoul, 259
277, 284 Wannsee conference, 160, 196, 199, 221,
Solymosi, Eszter, 62 228, 244, 292, 293
Stahlecker, Walter, 155, 157, 170 Wartheland, 130, 131, 132, 138, 139, 145,
Streicher, Julius, 76, 94, 96, 111, 163 264, 266, 267, 274
Stülpnagel, Carl Heinrich von, 225 Westerbork, 221
Stutthof, 262 Western European type of Jewry, 5
Szálasi, 238, 239, 240, 246, 248, 249, 257, Wiesel, Elie, 195
258, 259, 260 Wimmer, Friedrich, 217
Sztójay, Döme, 248, 256 Wirth, Christian, 270
Talmud, 15, 39 yeshiva, 37, 39

Teleki Pál, 237
Terboven, Josef, 213, 294 Zhou En Lai, 11
Terezinestadt, 210 Zhytomyr, 158
The Eternal Jew, 101 Zionism, 29, 46, 116, 117
Theresienstadt, 198 Zyklon B., 278, 285

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The Coming of the Holocaust

From Antisemitism to Genocide

The Coming of the Holocaust aims to help readers understand the

Peter Kenez is Emeritus Professor of History, University of California,

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

Acknowledgments page vii

part one: the rise of modern antisemitism

part two: the national socialists take control

part three: war

My friends have encouraged me while working on this manuscript, and

necessary, to attempt to comprehend difficult topics, and none is more

Ukraine in the seventeenth century, close to a hundred thousand were

the rise of modern antisemitism, the development of Nazi policies and

Daniel Goldhagen, claimed to find what he called “eliminationist

THE RISE OF MODERN ANTISEMITISM

In history there is no such thing as a tabula rasa – every event, every

surrounding population and claimed to have their own separate history.

among these concepts. Emancipation means the abolition of laws that

Fourth, one consequence of persecution was the recognition of belong-

Let us begin our survey of the development of European Jewish com-

ideology was also based on the desirability of assimilation: The Jewish

French-Prussian war – that percentage doubled.8 Whereas Jews in Alsace

8 Karády Viktor, A Zsidóság Europában a Modern Korban. Budapest, 2000, p. 146.

(though not as dynamic as England or Germany) and that had such a

birthplace of modern antisemitic thought. The accusations against Jews in

Antisemitism was a complex phenomenon that should be regarded not

12 Arendt, pp. 117–55.

Jews of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union

Jews in the Russian Empire

4 Klier, pp. 76–7.

5 In 1897, only 44% of the population was ethnic Russian.

The government’s most calamitous policy, a regulation introduced by

among the conservative leaders. Although there was almost universal

to approach the common people through their own language, Yiddish;

antisemitism. Russia had no equivalents to Maurras, Houston Stewart

Congress in Basel in 1897. It was first published in 1903 in a journal

of the common people to Jewish exploitation. Instead of emancipation,

antisemitic propaganda, a major contributing cause of the wave of mur-

Jews during the Communist Revolution and in the Soviet Union

the international solidarity of the working classes. Jews who continued to

to explain primarily to themselves why such an event occurred. Their con-

facilitated the process of acculturation. As religious schools, among them

1 János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon. Budapest: Osiris, 2001, pp. 26–27.

2 Up to 1844 the language of the Hungarian Diet was Latin.

historical literature as the “era of reforms” and the Hungarian equivalent

by and large identified themselves with the revolutionary cause. Of the

their already acculturated coreligionists, created a new and different

6 Karady, a Zsidosag es Tarsadalmi Egyenlotlensegek, pp. 21–22.

families came to be ennobled between 1867 and 1914. Perhaps an even

Hungarian law drew a distinction between “native” and “recognized”

being Jewish. But even Orthodox Jews considered themselves Hungarian

Jewish, but there is no question about the overwhelming role of Jews in

Hungarian Jewry in the Interwar Years

and cultural influence would have to be curtailed, although they differed

8 Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary; Religion, Nationalism and

The position of Jews in interwar Hungary was complex. Antisemitic

THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS TAKE CONTROL OF

National Socialism and the Jews

In postfeudal Europe, widely held and passionate antisemitism led to

concerned. Furthermore, unlike Marxism, which proudly claimed to be

introduced by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.2 Fascism

of his worldview. Most of the other important architects of Nazi Ger-