Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

Ribbentrop that he send an experienced adviser, Wisliceny

perhaps, to the German embassay in Budapest as a ‘consultant on Jewish ques-

tions’. 336 As a ‘first instalment’ one could deport 100,000 Jews from the annexed Slovakian and Romanian territories, a suggestion already made to Wisliceny by a

Hungarian contact when he was staying in Budapest in October. 337

But this suggestion contradicted the official Hungarian position, which was

hardening at this time. In a note of 2 December 1942, the Hungarian ambassador

in Berlin summed up his government’s attitude to the German proposals of

17 October. 338 According to this, the Hungarian government was only prepared to withdraw its Jews from the German sphere of influence if all foreign Jews also

living there were forced to take the same step. The labelling of Jews living in

Hungary, or indeed their deportation, was for various reasons impossible at the

present time.

372

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Luther’s attempts, beginning in October 1942, to clarify the further stance of the

Italians with regard to the deportation of Croatian Jews from Italy’s occupied

zone, also did not lead to the desired outcome. 339 Although Mussolini had, in August 1942, agreed with the German demand to hand over the Jews living in the

Italian occupied zone, senior Italian officers and officials were determined to

prevent this from happening. 340

While these initiatives were still fully under way, on 22 October Luther pre-

sented Ribbentrop with a lengthy paper containing the suggestion that Italy be

addressed about the ‘Jewish question’ at the level of Foreign Ministers or the

Heads of State. The Italians should be exhorted to agree to the deportation of all

Italian Jews from the whole of the German sphere of influence; to draw up Jewish

legislation on the German model and coordinate their position vis-à-vis other

states with Germany. 341

In fact, however, the Italian occupation authorities would not hand over the

Jews living in their zone; instead, from October 1942 they began interning them,

more than 2,600 people according to official Italian figures. Jews who had or

who could claim Italian citizenship were brought to Italian territory, and the

others were accommodated on the Croatian coast, away from the hands of the

Germans. 342

Ribbentrop’s directive of September 1942, to demand of the Danish government

the deportation of Jews living there, is probably directly traceable to the extraor-

dinary displeasure with which Hitler reacted to developments in that country in

September 1942. For a time, Hitler expressed the view that the particularly

restrained form of German occupation in that country should be radically

changed, and it should henceforth be ruled with an iron fist as a ‘hostile country’.

The first consequence was that SS Gruppenführer Werner Best was appointed

Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark. However, Best also represented a relatively

elastic policy in Denmark, one irreconcilable with the demand for the handover of

the Jews living in the country. 343

It seems possible that the deportation of the Norwegian Jews in the autumn of

1942, which had plainly been prepared in a rush, and the history of which cannot

be reconstructed in detail, formed a kind of second-best solution given that the

deportation of the Danish Jews was undesirable for general political reasons to do

with the occupation of the country. Some 2,000 Jews were living in Norway at the

end of 1942. By that point they had been subjected to the usual measures, such as

removal from public service, confiscation of property, stamping of passports, and

other things besides. From autumn 1942 a statistical office set up by Quisling’s

party began drawing up a list of Norwegian Jews. 344 Thus the technical preconditions for deportation were in place, and in October 1942 the RSHA, clearly on

the spur of the moment (the lack of preparations concerning the preparation of

transport capacity indicates as much) decided to go ahead with it. On 23 October

the Norwegian police received the order to prepare for the detention of all Jews.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

373

On 26 October the arrest of all Jewish men between the ages of 15 and 54 began,

on 25 November that of the women and children. The next day a German

transport ship containing 532 Jews set sail for Stettin (Sczeczin). 345 Further deportations occurred in November 1942, in February 1943 and 1944, bringing

the total numbers of deportees to 770. Ninehundred and thirty Norwegian Jews

had fled to Sweden. 346

chapter 18

THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLICY

OF EXTERMINATION AFTER THE TURNING OF

THE WAR IN 1942–1943: CONTINUATION OF

THE MURDERS AND GEOGRAPHICAL

EXPANSION OF THE DEPORTATIONS

In the second half of the war—apart from the efforts to secure the space controlled

by Germany in a political, military, and police sense, and alongside the complex of

economic and food policy—Judenpolitik was a main axis of Germany’s occupation

and alliance policies. In the view of the National Socialist leadership the more the

war advanced the greater the significance of the systematic murder of the Jews for

the solidarity of the German power bloc. This increasingly important alteration in

the function of Judenpolitik provides a significant explanation for the fact that the

murder of millions in the second half of the war was not only continued, but even

expanded.

Under military pressure, Nazi Germany was less and less in a position to draft

even sketchily the main features of a ‘New Europe’ in accordance with racial

principles. If it had seriously made such an attempt, the issue of the racial

‘inequality’ of the peoples living on the continent, the core element of National

Socialism, would inevitably have been raised, and the numerous unresolved

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

375

questions of borders and minorities would have come onto the agenda. If, on

the one hand, the National Socialists did not want to abandon their claim to open

the door to a completely new kind of order for the European continent, but, on the

other, did not want to abandon the way in which this project was to be realized,

they had no other option but concretely to anticipate their racist utopia in a

negative way. From this point of view the Entjudung of the German sphere of

influence represented the claim to be the start of a comprehensive racist new

order, but was actually—because of the inconsistency and impracticability of a

‘positive’ racial policy—the substitute for the unfeasible ‘new order’ on a racial

basis.

In the second half of the war, the continuation and radicalization of Juden-

politik, the