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

new Fascist government in the northern half of the country, the

RSHA was resolved ruthlessly to deport the Jews living in that part of the country,

numbering between around 33,000 and 34,000. 163

In October, Dannecker was sent to Rome as leader of a small Einsatzkom-

mando. 164 Two days after a large-scale raid on 16 October, more than 1,000 Jews were deported from the Italian capital to Auschwitz. Dannecker’s commando

went on to organize further raids in other Italian cities, so that by the end of the

year almost 1,400 people had been deported to Auschwitz in four transports. But

the RSHA reached the view that this approach had not produced ‘any noteworthy

result’, as the great majority of Jews living in Italy had by now gone into hiding. 165

At the beginning of December, representatives of the Foreign Ministry and the

RSHA therefore agreed to involve the Italian authorities in the persecution. 166

To achieve this, they exploited the fact that the government of the ‘Social Italian

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Republic’ had independently ordered the internment of all Jews in late November,

without at first officially informing the Italians about the final goal of the perse-

cution, deportation, and mass murder. The Fascist state was thus to be enmeshed

in a murderous complicity with the ‘Third Reich’.

In accordance with this new persecution strategy Dannecker’s mobile com-

mando was replaced early in 1944 by a special Jewish department attached to the

commander of the Security Police, led by Friedrich Bosshammer, also a colleague

of Eichmann. With the help of the apparatus of the BdS, Bosshammer had the

chance to deploy the Italian police as an auxiliary organization for systematic

persecution. Beginning in January, the office of the BdS demanded that the Italian

police hand over the interned Jews. Bosshammer ignored Italian laws forbidding

the arrest of certain groups (the elderly, those married to non-Jews, etc.). In mid-

March Bosshammer took over the Fossoli camp from the Italian authorities and

made it the central collection camp for the Jews arrested by the Italian police and

the branch commandos of the BdS. In August 1944, given the approaching front,

the central collection camp was transferred to Bolzano.

Overall, throughout 1944 at least fifteen transports carrying more than 3,800

Jews left Italy for Auschwitz, where the great majority were murdered. Meanwhile

over 80 per cent of the Jews living in Italy managed—thanks to the solidarity of the

Italian population—to escape the clutches of their persecutors. 167

Since September 1943, Odilo Globocnik, himself originally from Trieste, and

one of the men chiefly responsible for the extermination of the Polish Jews, had

been appointed HSSPF to the ‘Operation Zone of the Adriatic Coastal Region’,

along with part of the Einsatzkommando Reinhard. This was the area around

Trieste which had been directly incorporated into the territory of the Greater

German Reich. The Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice mill, served as a collection

camp for the Jews arrested in this area. From December 1943 until February 1943,

twenty-two transports carrying more than 1,100 Jews left Trieste for Auschwitz,

the last one reaching Bergen-Belsen. Over 90 per cent of the deportees were

murdered. 168

Former Italian Zones of Occupation in Greece and Croatia

After the Wehrmacht had taken over the Italian zones of occupation in Greece as

well as Albania, Montenegro, and the Dodecanese (the eastern Aegean group of

islands, Italian since 1912), in response to Italy’s departure from the war, a further

(approximately) 16,000 Jews came under German control. 169

After an ‘action’ in March 1944 against the Jews living in the former Italian zone

of occupation on the Greek mainland, on 2 April a transport carrying a total of

5,000 people left Athens for Auschwitz, reaching the camp nine days later after

unimaginable hardships. 170 Between May and August 1944 the members of the Jewish communities on the Greek islands (Corfu, Rhodes, Crete) were arrested by

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

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the Wehrmacht, transported to the mainland, and deported to Auschwitz in two

transports. 171

When the Italian occupation of Croatia ended in September, the majority of the

Jews who had by now been rounded up in an internment camp on the island of

Rab were able to escape to a zone controlled by the People’s Liberation Army;

around 200 Jews were captured by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz in the

second half of March. The same fate awaited several hundred Jews in other parts

of the formerly Italian-occupied zone. 172

Further Radicalization of the Persecution in France

Immediately after the German troops marched into the Italian-occupied zone of

southern France on 8 September, following the ceasefire between Italy and the

Allies, Brunner’s Sonderkommando began to hunt down those Jews who had so far

been left unmolested. 173

Brunner concentrated particularly on Nice, where about 20,000–25,000 Jews,

mostly refugees, were living. Without French support, however, he managed only

to deport 1,800 people to Drancy within three months. 174

The security police had always seen the Italian resistance to the German

persecution of the Jews as a significant hindrance to a radical ‘solution’ of the

Jewish question across the whole of France. From the point of view of the Security

Police, the removal of this factor opened up the possibility of radicalizing the

persecution of the Jews across France on the massive scale sketched out by

Eichmann and Röthke in the summer of 1943,175 and deporting, where possible, all Jews living in France regardless of their nationality.

Since as early as August 1943, the Gestapo had stepped up their arrests of French

Jews across the whole of France for alleged infringements of the French anti-

Jewish laws. 176 After the head of the militia, Darmand, had replaced Bousquet as general secretary of the police, on the orders of the Security Police the French

police increasingly participated in the arrest of French Jews in the provinces. 177

But after the French government had been reshuffled to the right in March

1944,178 there was no further reason for the Germans to take into consideration French objections and reservations about the deportations. For the French government’s support among the population was in any case so weak that the country

could only be kept under control by means of a rule of terror.

On 14 April 1944, Brunner and Knochen ordered all Jews, regardless of their

nationality, to be arrested, with the exception of people living in ‘mixed mar-

riages’. Rewards were offered for denunciations. In the four