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

months leading to the

cessation of the deportations in August 1944 more than 6,000 people were

deported. 179 By then a total of almost 76,000 Jews had been deported from France, a further 4,000 had died in camps or been murdered in the country. This meant

that, as a whole, a quarter of the Jews living in France had become victims of the

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Holocaust. Among the deportees were around 24,000 French nationals, including

8,000 children of foreign parents who were born in France, and 8,000 naturalized

Jews. 180 Around two-thirds of the deportees were deported from occupied France, and about a third from southern France, unoccupied until 1942. 181

Slovakia

By the time of the temporary cessation of the deportations from Slovakia in

October 1942, around 58,000 people had been deported from the country to

occupied Poland. 182 Around 24,000 Jews had been excluded from the deportions by so-called ‘writs of protection’ issued by the Slovakian authorities. The Germans

repeatedly stressed their demand for the resumption of the deportations, but

could not impose their will on Slovakia.

After a German initiative in early summer 1943—clearly in the context of the

general radicalization after the Warsaw ghetto uprising (the parallel with the

German initiatives in France and Croatia is plain)—in June, the ambassador,

Hans Ludin, had to report to the Foreign Ministry that the ‘implementation of

the evacuation of the Jews from Slovakia’ had ‘presently reached a dead end’. The

Prime Minister, Vojtech Tuka, wanted to continue the ‘resettlement’ and was

requesting ‘the diplomatic support of the Reich’. The Secretary of State,

Weizsäcker, advised him to inform President Tiso that the halt to the deportations

was causing surprise in Germany. 183

At this point there were more than 18,000, possibly up to 25,000 Jews, living in

Slovakia. 184 More than 15,000 of these were claimed to be indispensable by the Slovakian authorities; a few thousand were imprisoned as forced labourers in

concentration camps within Slovakia.

In July 1943, the head of department Inland II of the Foreign Ministry, Horst

Wagner, informed the ambassador, Ludin, on Ribbentrop’s instructions, that

‘there were not at present any plans to approach the Slovakian government

concerning the final stage of the cleaning up of the Slovakian Jewish question’.

However, the Foreign Ministry’s South-Eastern Europe expert, Edmund Veesen-

mayer, would soon informally tell President Tiso, in the course of a visit to

Pressburg, of ‘the continuing interest in the cleaning up of the Jewish question

in Slovakia’. 185

After an initial visit in July, in December 1943 Veesenmeyer began negoti-

ations with Tiso, and won his agreement that the remaining Jews still living in

Slovakia, whose numbers were estimated as between 16,000 and 18,000, were

to be ‘taken to Jewish camps’ by 1 April 1944 at the latest. 186 In fact the Slovaks did not keep their part of the agreement. Efforts by Veesenmeyer, by

now the German ambassador in Hungary, to organize the deportation of the

Slovakian Jews in the wake of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, were

unsuccessful. 187

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

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The refusal of the Slovakian government to comply with German demands

has much to do with the change of political climate that had occurred in

Slovakia since early in 1942, but increasingly since early 1943, with the defeat

at Stalingrad. The deportations had encountered opposition among influential

circles of the Slovakian population, and that attitude of opposition became more

marked after details of the fate of the deportees leaked out and, with the Red

Army’s advance towards the national border, it became increasingly likely that

this blatant crime would be punished. 188

Given the delaying response of the Slovakian government towards its German

ally, the last phase of the persecution of the Jews in the country only started after

the beginning of the popular uprising in Slovakia in August 1944 and the occu-

pation of the country by German troops. Himmler appointed his close confidant

Gottlob Berger, head of the SS Main Office, ‘commander of German troops

in Slovakia’ and Hermann Höfle, who had played a central part in ‘Aktion

Reinhardt’, as HSSPF. He also appointed a commander of the Security Police

(BdS) for the territory, which was not treated as an occupied country, but as an

ally. However, the BdS was also assigned its own Einsatzgruppe, H, assembled

from five Einsatzkommandos. These commandos erected a system of bases around

the country, and began hunting Jews living in Slovakia, most of whom were

imprisoned in the camp at Sered. In the face of opposition from the Slovakian

government, the SS imposed the resumption of the deportations: between

September 1944 and March 1943 eleven transports left Slovakia. Almost 8,000

people were deported to Auschwitz, more than 2,700 to Sachsenhausen, and over

1,600 to Theresienstadt. 189 An unknown number of these deportees lost their lives during the transports, as a result of their conditions of imprisonment and the

death marches implemented after the dissolution of the concentration camps.

Hungary

During 1943 the Nazi regime continued its policy of exerting pressure on the

Hungarian government to persuade it to deport its Jews. In January Luther

attempted to influence the Hungarian ambassador to this end, 190 while in March 1943 the Foreign Ministry asked Bormann191 once again to inform his guest, a Hungarian minister, about German requests: the exclusion of the Jews

from the cultural and economic life of Hungary.

At what became known as the first Kleßheim Conference on 17 and 18 April

1943, Ribbentrop responded to Horthy’s question about ‘what he should do with

the Jews’ (‘he couldn’t kill them, after all’) quite unequivocally that they must

‘either be exterminated or taken to concentration camps’. Hitler interjected that

Jews were ‘to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, which could affect healthy

bodies’. 192 At the end of April, Ribbentrop told the Hungarian ambassador, Döme Sztojay, that Germany planned to deport all Jews from the area under

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German control, and that it expected its allies to participate in these measures. 193

Hitler’s strong personal interest in this matter is also revealed by a passage in

Geobbels’s diaries from early May. According to this, Hitler had told the Reichs-

leiters and Gauleiters that the ‘Jewish question’ was being resolved ‘worst of all by

the Hungarians’; Horthy, who was ‘extraordinarily strongly enmeshed with the

Jews through his family’, would fight tooth and nail against really tackling the

Jewish problem. 194

In his report of 30 April Veesenmayer, who had been sent