Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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468 nicholas atkin
rejection of Nazism. This was not so. To become a resister – to become a collabora-
tor – involved an issue of choice, often a brave one, occasionally an arbitrary one. In
his 1974 film Lacombe Lucien – a depiction of an adolescent boy in southern France
– the director Louis Malle portrayed the ambiguities in joining either the resistance
or collaborationist forces. A majority preferred to wait on events, yet occupation
meant that people increasingly had to take sides – a process which, as Rab Bennett
illustrates, involved agonizing dilemmas.
47
It is, though, hazardous to generalize
about the experience of the home fronts. Much depended on where one lived, on
one’s race, on one’s gender, on one’s age, and on the extent of German economic
plunder, In Jìˇri Weil’s semi-autobiographical novel Life with a Star, Czech rail trucks
laden with goods destined for Germany had the word “Stolen” chalked on them.
What might be safely said is that, throughout Europe, life became a matter of making
do, of keeping warm, of searching for food, processes which became incredibly inven-
tive and, just occasionally, fun.
48
It is also significant that social structures, at least
within western Europe, largely withstood this makeshift way of surviving. It can be
further said that nowhere in Europe was there liking for the Germans or the Soviets,
even if this discontent did not always equate with resistance. As the Nazi grip on
power began to loosen, as the round-ups, deportations, and arbitrary shootings
intensified, as the Soviet advances mounted, fear stalked Europe. Small wonder
people looked towards the end of the fighting. It lies beyond this chapter, but the
tragedy was that with liberation often came disappointment, as the hopes nurtured
on the home fronts for a better future were unrealized in the postwar world.
NOTES
1 See Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint,
Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World
War (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1972).
2 Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1977), p.
88.
3 Winston Churchill,
Great War Speeches (London: Corgi, 1965), p. 53.
4 See Gordon Wright,
The Ordeal of Total War (New York: Harper, 1968); Enzo Collotti,
ed., L’occupazione nazista in Europa (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964); Werner Röhr, ed.,
Okkupation und Kollaboration, 1938–1945 (Berlin: Hüthig, 1994). On collaboration, see
David Littlejohn, The Patriotic Traitors (London: Heinemann, 1972); Werner Rings, Life
with the Enemy (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Rab Bennett, Under the Shadow of the
Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Europe
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). On resistance, see M. R. D. Foot, Resistance: European
Resistance to Nazism, 1940–45 (London: Methuen, 1976); Henri Michel, Shadow War:
Resistance in Europe, 1939–1945 (London: Deutsch, 1972); Stephen F. Hawes and Ralph
T. White, eds, Resistance in Europe, 1939–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
5 See the forthcoming volume by Robert Gildea and Olivier Wieviorka. Meanwhile, see
part 9 of Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, eds, Le Régime de Vichy et les Français
(Paris: Fayard, 1992) and chs 29–33 in John Bourne, Peter Liddle, and Ian Whitehead,
eds, The Great World War, 1914–45, vol. 1: Lightning Strikes Twice (London: Harper
Collins, 2000).
6 John Campbell, ed.,
The Experience of World War II (London: Grange, 1989), p. 188.
7 Among studies on individual countries, see Ian Ousby,
Occupation: The Ordeal of France
(London: John Murray, 1997); Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration:
the home fronts 469
The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Hagen
Fleischer, Im Kreuzschatten der Machte. Griechenland, 1941–1944 (Okkupupation,
Resistance, Kollaboration) (Frankfurt: Lang, 1986).
8 See especially Robert Gildea,
Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation,
1940–45 (London: Macmillan, 2002) and Camilla Cederna, Martina Lombardi, and
Marilea Somaré, eds, Milano in guerra (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979).
9 See Michel,
Shadow War, pp. 21–2.
10 Michael Burleigh,
The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan, 2000), p. 408, who is
good on the contours of Hitler’s Europe.
11 See especially Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox,
Refugees in an Age of Genocide:
Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century (London: Cass,
1999).
12 Ian Beckett, “The Resilience of the Old Regime,” in
Total War and Historical Change,
Arthur Marwick, Clive Emsley, and Wendy Simpson, eds (Buckingham: Open University
Press, 2001).
13 Figures are from Calvocoressi and Wint,
Total War, pp. 218–19, and Mark Harrison,
Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938–45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 71. See also John Lukacs, The Last European War, September 1939–December
1941 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 239–40.
14 See Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, “The Experience of Displacement: Refugees and War,” in
Bourne, Liddle, and Whitehead, Great World War, p. 572.
15 See Alan Milward,
War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 1977);
Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International
Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jean Freymond, Le IIIe
Reich et la réorganisation économique de l’Europe (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1974); Brian Bond,
War and Society in Europe, 1870–1970 (London: Fontana, 1984).
16 Quoted in Richard Overy,
The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London:
Allen Lane, 2004), p. 504. See also his War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994).
17 See I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot, eds,
The Oxford Companion to World War II
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 744, 309.
18 Overy,
The Dictators, pp. 504–11.
19 The classic work is Angus Calder,
The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (London: Cape,
1969).
20 See Dörte Winkler,
Frauenarbeit im Dritten Reich (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe,
1977).
21 Corelli Barnett,
The Audit of War (London: Macmillan, 1988). See also Peter Clarke and
Clive Trebilcock, eds, Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic
Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
22 See Michal Grynberg, ed.,
Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw
Ghetto (London: Granta, 2003), pp. 35–6.
23 Richard Vinen,
France 1934–1979 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 64.
24 Henri Van der Zee,
The Hunger Winter: Occupied Holland, 1944–1945 (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1998).
25 See H. Roderick Kedward,
Occupied France (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
26 See Christian Bernadac,
Kommandos de Femmes. Ravensbück (Paris: France-Empire,
1973).
27 See Fabrice Virgili,
La France “virile”: des femmes tondues à la Libération (Paris: Payot,
2001).
28 Robert O. Paxton,
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York:
Knopf, 1972).
470 nicholas atkin
29 See Stanley Hoffmann, “Collaborationism in France,” Journal of Modern History 40/3
(1968): 375–95.
30 Robert O. Paxton,
The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 111.
31 On France, see Philippe Burrin,
Living with Defeat: France under the German Occupation,
1940–1944 (London: Arnold, 1996); on Belgium, see Martin Conway, Collaboration in
Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement (New Haven CT: Yale University Press,
1993); on Norway, see Hans F. Dahl, Quisling: A Study in Treachery (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 336.
32 Burleigh,
Third Reich, p. 410.
33 Mark Wheeler, “Pariahs to Partisans: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia,” in
Resistance
and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939–1948, Tony Judt, ed. (London: Routledge,
1989), p. 125.
34 Gerhard Hirschfeld, “Collaboration in Nazi Occupied France: Some Introductory
Remarks,” in Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation,
G. Hirschfeld and P. Marsh, eds (Oxford: Berg, 1989), p. 1.
35 A starting point is Yisrael Gutman and Cynthia J. Haft, eds,
Patterns of Jewish Leadership
in Nazi Europe, 1933–1945 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979).
36 Julian Jackson,
The Dark Years: France 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), p. 313.
37 Littlejohn,
Patriotic Traitors, pp. 336–7.
38 On Italy, see Mario Isnenghi, ed.,
I luoghi della memoria, 3 vols (Rome: Laterza, 1997–8);
on France, see Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991).
39 Bernhard Kroener, Rolf-Dieter Müller, and Hans Umbreit, eds,
Germany and the Second
World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vol 5, part 1. For the experience of
east Europeans, see Diemut Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich (Baltimore
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
40 M. R. D. Foot, “What Good did Resistance Do?” in Hawes and White,
Resistance in
Europe, p. 215.
41 Wheeler, “Pariahs to Partisans,” pp. 110–56. See also his entry in Dear and Foot,
Oxford
Companion, pp. 1015–16.
42 H. Roderick Kedward,
Resistance in Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978).
43 R. White, “Unity and Diversity of Resistance,” in Hawes and White,
Resistance in Europe,
pp. 8–9.
44 Very judicious is Olivier Rota, “Les ‘Silences’ du Pape Pie XII,”
Revue d’Histoire
Ecclésiastique 99/3–4 (2004): 758–66.
45 Introduction to Judt,
Resistance in Revolution, pp. 4–5.
46 Perry Wilson, “Saints and Heroines: Rewriting the History of Italian Women in the
Resistance,” in Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe, T. Kirk
and A. McElligott, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 180–98.
47 Bennett,
Under the Shadow, pp. 13–14.
48 This is the argument of Dominique Veillon,
Vivre et survivre en France, 1939–47 (Paris:
Payot, 1995).
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Rab Bennett, Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and
Collaboration in Hitler’s Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Good on the ethical ambi-
guities of choices under occupation.
the home fronts 471
Joanna Bourke, The Second World War: A People’s History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003). Illustrates how fighting impacted on civilians.
John Bourne, Peter Liddle, and Ian Whitehead, eds, The Great World War, 1914–45, vol. 1:
Lightning Strikes Twice (London: Harper Collins, 2000). An eclectic array of essays, several
of which touch on the home fronts.
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan, 2000). Excellent section on
the high and low politics of collaboration.
Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World War
(Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1972). Good on context despite its age.
Józef Garlinski, Poland in the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1985). Brings home
the brutal reality of Nazi rule in eastern Europe.
Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–45 (London:
Macmillan, 2002). An exemplary study which relates local conditions to the national
picture.
Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International
Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Examines the home fronts
largely from an economist’s standpoint.
Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German
Occupation, 1940–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1988). Highlights the complexities of the Nazi
presence.
Tony Judt, ed., Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939–1948 (London:
Routledge, 1989). An incisive collection that focuses on the communist contribution to
resistance.
H. Roderick Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Groundbreaking study whose lines of inquiry can be applied to other countries.
Bernard Kroener, Ralf-Dietrich Muller, and Hans Umbreit, eds, Germany and the Second World
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vol. 5, part 1. Examines the nature of German
rule in occupied countries.
Henri Michel, Shadow War: Resistance in Europe, 1939–1945 (London: Deutsch, 1972). Full
of ideas, albeit francocentric.
Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). One of many books on the British home front,
arguing that divisions within society outweighed unity.
Chapter Thirty
The Holocaust
David Engel
What is the Holocaust?
History is not naturally divided into discrete sets of events. On the contrary, historical
episodes are usually identified, named, and classified only after they occur. Moreover,
the specific and generic names attached to past occurrences have great power to shape
what people think about them. The evolution of the term “holocaust” since the
Second World War and the ways in which it has framed discussion about one of that
war’s particularly frightening features are cases in point.
Into the 1950s “holocaust” served mainly as a workaday label for large-scale
destruction and loss of life. In the English-speaking world the word was applied vari-
ously to the suppression of Italian nationalist activity by the Habsburg regime during
the nineteenth century, the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, the devasta-
tion caused by Japanese air raids in China in 1938, the blaze that destroyed the
Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston in 1942, and the sinking of the German battle-
ship Scharnhorst in 1943. Often it was used to signify the carnage of war in general:
among its most frequent referents were the American Civil War, the successive mas-
sacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1894 to 1915 and, after 1945, the
anticipated outcome of nuclear conflict. It was not until the 1960s that the cata-
strophic losses suffered by the Jews of Europe at the hands of the Nazi regime in
Germany or its allies between 1933–45 – especially the death of some 5.8 million
Jewish men, women, and children, who made up about two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish
population in 1939 – took on the status of a holocaust par excellence, to the point
where the phrase “the Holocaust” (capitalized and preceded by the definite article)
came in common parlance to designate that particular catastrophe.
1
In fact, for 15–20 years after the end of World War II English speakers do not
appear to have perceived any need to invent a special label to describe that instance
of destruction, let alone to set it above any of the other events to which the word
“holocaust” had been habitually applied. It hardly seemed that the persecution and
mass death that befell European Jewry under Nazi impact should be regarded as
anything more than a subset of the war’s overall devastation or of the afflictions that
were the lot of a host of casualties of Nazi brutality. Those victims included political
dissenters (socialists, communists, and others with a record of anti-Nazi statements
or activity in any of the countries under German occupation); so-called “asocials”
(mostly vagrants, chronically unemployed persons, and repeat criminal offenders);
male homosexuals from Germany and Austria; Jehovah’s Witnesses (who refused
military service and would not salute Hitler); slave laborers from many subjugated
(mostly east European) populations; and members of groups targeted for wholesale
killing, including the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, and the
mentally and physically disabled. Many of these had been incarcerated in an extensive
network of concentration, labor, prison, and transit camps notorious for their espe-
cially cruel regime and high mortality. When British and American armed forces
entered those camps in April–May 1945 and first gained what would become lasting
impressions of Nazi atrocities, they encountered a population of upwards of 700,000
inmates, of whom probably only about 100,000 were Jews. As a result, they and the
journalists who followed close on their heels (recording the scenes of emaciated
bodies and corpses stacked like cordwood that have served as symbols of twentieth-
century barbarities, including “the Holocaust,” ever since) were hard put to perceive
that Jewish suffering bore any especially horrific features. On the contrary, most
observers initially saw all those incarcerated in what a 1945 film newsreel called the
“Nazi murder mills” simply as victims of a coercive and cruel dictatorship. As one
editor of a major American newspaper explained, the prisoners had been deprived of
their freedom because “they refused to accept the political philosophy of the Nazi
party” or otherwise “refused to conform.”
2
It took more than a decade until even
the most sophisticated commentators understood that the Jews and certain other
categories of victims (most prominently the Sinti and Roma and the disabled) were
victimized without regard for what they believed or how they behaved, or that mil-
lions of Jews from throughout Europe died in far more lethal “murder mills” than
the concentration camps that so shocked their liberators – in killing centers built
especially to suffocate them en masse immediately upon arrival.
Most likely it was Israel’s capture, trial, and execution in 1960–2 of Adolf Eichmann,
a key engineer of the Third Reich’s murderous anti-Jewish campaign, together with
the animated discussion that accompanied and followed it in many countries, that
catalyzed a new conceptualization of the similarities and differences between the
experiences of Jews under Nazi rule and those of other victims of the Reich’s savagery.
The trial, widely covered in the mass media throughout Europe and the Americas,
centered on the testimony of some 100 witnesses who described specific “crimes
against the Jewish people” that prosecutors believed had not been afforded due
attention at the Nuremberg trials 15 years before. The testimony of the witnesses
and the accused together focused an international spotlight upon a Nazi program to
kill each and every Jewish man, woman, and child within the Third Reich’s reach;
the thorough, systematic planning that underlay the program’s conception and execu-
tion; the alarming degree to which the plan had succeeded in most German-occupied
and allied countries; and the virtual impossibility for Jews to escape the death sentence
that had been placed upon them, even through formal renunciation of any Jewish
affiliation or active assistance to the German war effort. The sufferings of forced
laborers, political prisoners, and other groups associated with the Nazi camp system
now appeared mild compared to the horrors Jews had faced, which popular history
the holocaust 473
474 david engel
writer Barbara Tuchman, writing under the trial’s impact, labeled “the peak and
apotheosis of [twentieth-century] violence.”
3
Those horrors had earlier acquired a
collective name in Israel: sho’ah – a biblical word suggesting utter, unprecedented
devastation,
4
uncommon in modern Hebrew and thus appropriate to their excep-
tional magnitude in Jewish history. “The Holocaust” soon became the accepted
English rendering of the Hebrew term, probably because “holocaust” also carried
biblical associations and conveyed a sense of ruin beyond ordinary experience.
Of course, assigning the Jews’ ordeal under the Third Reich its own special name
raises the question of whether that ordeal was really fundamentally different from
that of other victimized groups. After all, the Sinti and Roma also lost approximately
two-thirds of their prewar populations in some parts of Europe, many in the same
special killing centers and by the same methods used to murder Jews. Those methods
were also employed against some 200,000 disabled persons and an equal or greater
number of Soviet war prisoners, with 2.5 million more Soviet POWs dying from
hunger, exposure, and abuse by their captors. Significant groups in other occupied
countries, including a large segment of Poland’s political, religious, and cultural elite,
were marked for death, while much of the remainder of the Polish population was
turned into a reservoir of helots whose individual lives were assigned minimal value.
In all, close to 2 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) perished under German rule.
In 1944 the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin classified all of these murderous actions
together under the rubric of “genocide,” a term he coined to designate “a coordi-
nated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of
the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
5
For
Lemkin, it made little difference whether the perpetrators of genocide sought to kill
every individual member of the targeted group; genocidal policies were ultimately
equally destructive of group life whether or not they displayed this one particular
feature. In the late twentieth century, under the impact of the deadly intercommunal
violence that accompanied the collapse of Yugoslavia, a similar behavior, often called
“ethnic cleansing,” was identified. That term has been employed to designate the
forcible displacement or killing of large numbers of minority group members inhabit-
ing a particular territory in order to create ethnically homogenous areas. Hence many
people since have maintained that the encounter between the Third Reich and the
Jews is most productively understood not as a phenomenon sui generis but as a spe-
cific variant of a more widespread crime committed repeatedly before and since.
Others have taken issue with this approach, arguing that the planned systematic
total murder of European Jewry by the Nazi regime constitutes a historical novum
that “reveals the dark, eccentric essence of Nazism . . . in a way that nothing else
does.”
6
In consequence they have advocated conceptualizing “genocide,” “ethnic
cleansing,” and “the Holocaust” separately. Still others have accepted the distinction
between “genocide,” as defined by Lemkin, and “holocaust,” by which they under-
stand the planned killing of all members of a group; but they dispute the contention
that “the [Jewish] Holocaust” was the first and only example of the latter. Some
argue that the Sinti and Roma were indeed victims of a full-blown holocaust; others
have identified a program to murder all individuals in the targeted group in the
slaughter of Armenians by Turkish troops in 1915 or in the mass killings of certain
native American populations by European settlers between the sixteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. The claims and counterclaims of proponents of the various compet-
the holocaust 475
ing conceptions have generated a rich literature analyzing the similarities and
differences between the killing of Jews by the Third Reich and many other instances
of mass death throughout human history. Nevertheless, popular usage in English and
most European languages persists in equating “the Holocaust” primarily with the
modern Hebrew sho’ah. The essay that follows conforms to popular usage insofar as
it concentrates upon the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews. It takes
no position, however, about whether that encounter ought to be treated as one
instance of a larger phenomenon or as a singularity. Precisely because history is not
divided naturally into discrete sets of events, the identification, categorization, and
naming of historical episodes is necessarily left to observers, who may choose for
themselves whatever names, comparisons, and analytical rubrics best meet their par-
ticular needs.
Idea and Execution
Perhaps the most striking fact about the systematic mass murder of Jews during World
War II is that, in the eyes of the leaders of the Third Reich, its ultimate justification
lay in an idea about Jews that differed in at least two crucial respects from the stock
anti-Jewish images that had permeated western culture since the middle ages. First,
until the late nineteenth century even the most hostile depictions of Jews had located
the source of their supposedly pernicious qualities in the religious system inculcated
in them from childhood. As a result, it was generally accepted that Jews could be
improved and redeemed through religious conversion or (in modern times) funda-
mental reform of their own traditions. Toward the end of the nineteenth century,
however, some writers concluded that Jewish behavior was a function not of belief
and education but of genetics (or, in the language of the time, “race”), which could
never be altered. According to this notion, Jews who became Christians or otherwise
assimilated into their surrounding societies were not to be welcomed but feared: even
though they now appeared to be citizens of their countries like all others, they still
supposedly bore injurious “Jewish” characteristics, making them an especially danger-
ous and invisible source of harm. The Nazi Party founded its approach to dealing
with Jews upon this premise. Second, whereas earlier malevolent representations of
Jews, even “racially” based ones, had been framed in language generally understood
to be metaphorical, Adolf Hitler and some of his closest associates appear to have
taken their own anti-Jewish images literally. In his two books, Mein Kampf (1924–6)
and an unpublished work (1928), Hitler developed a theory of human history from
which he inferred (under the influence of the occult racist circles from which he had
learned during his youth in Vienna) that Jews were not human beings at all but
actually noxious parasites in human bodies who could survive only by robbing other
peoples of their food supply.
7
From this notion it followed that Jews were the inexo-
rable mortal enemies not only of Germany but of all humanity; in principle, as long
as a single Jew remained alive, all peoples faced potential ruin from them.
That Hitler personally held such beliefs does not mean, however, that a German
effort to murder all Jews everywhere was inevitable once the Nazi Party assumed
power in Germany in 1933; it means only that once the Nazi regime decided to
undertake such an effort, that decision could be supported by reference to Hitler’s
worldview. As it happened, such a decision appears to have crystallized only in 1941.
476 david engel
Before that time the regime took a series of steps whose broad aim was to detach
Jews from German society and, once war began, to remove them from conquered
east European regions intended for German settlement. These measures included the
dismissal of Jews from the civil service, free professions, and cultural and educational
institutions; deprivation of Reich citizenship; a ban on marriages or extramarital
sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews; labeling Jews with special markings;
forced transfer of Jewish-owned businesses to non-Jewish owners; and restriction of
Jewish residences to specially designated buildings. Additionally, in 1933 and again
following the 1938 Anschluss with Austria, Jews were subjected to periodic physical
violence, culminating in the so-called Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9–10,
1938, in which 1,400 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were attacked and
91 Jews killed. The German foreign ministry explained in January 1939 that both
legislative and violent actions aimed at “a radical solution to the Jewish question”
through “the emigration of all Jews living in German territory.”
8
Upon taking control
of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938–9, Reich authorities established special offices
in Vienna and Prague to enable the maximum number of Jews to leave those coun-
tries in the shortest possible time. After the outbreak of war, when some 2 million
Polish Jews fell under German rule (the remaining 1.5 million Jews in Poland inhab-
ited territories occupied by the Soviet Union from September 1939 to June–July
1941), anti-Jewish measures were directed at transporting all Jews under the Reich’s
control to a special Jewish “reservation,” planned first for the area around Lublin,
later for the island of Madagascar, and later still for Siberia (in anticipation of the
eventual conquest of the USSR). Beginning in October 1939, Jews in a number of
Polish cities were concentrated in ghettos, from which they were to be removed to
the reservation once it could be established. Not until October 1941 were Jews for-
bidden to leave Reich-controlled territory; evidently only after that time did the
regime become fully committed to a program of continent-wide systematic mass
murder.
Several explanations of why Nazi leaders did not pursue such a program earlier
are possible. It may be that Hitler and his associates failed at first to draw the extreme
operative conclusion that his worldview seemingly required. It may also be that
although Hitler himself aspired to rid the entire world of all Jews eventually, he did
not believe such a goal was feasible in the short term – whether because until 1941
less than half of Europe’s Jews, let alone the world’s, were within Germany’s reach,
or because few others in the Nazi regime shared his aspiration, and he was unable
to impose it by himself. Perhaps, realizing that they could not entirely eliminate the
putative danger to humanity posed by the existence of Jews anywhere in the world,
Nazi leaders concentrated initially on measures that would shield at least the German
people from the Jewish menace. Perhaps the technical means and organizational
infrastructure necessary for systematic mass killing throughout the continent were
not available from the outset. To be sure, some scholars have argued that all anti-
Jewish measures undertaken by the regime from the moment of its accession to power
(including, counterintuitively, encouragement of emigration) are best understood as
integral parts of a diabolical step-by-step plan conceived in advance to culminate in
total murder, but compelling evidence is lacking to sustain their view. Much the same
can be said, however, regarding virtually all other conjectures about long-range Nazi
plans for the Jews between 1933 and 1941. All that is certain is that large-scale
the holocaust 477
murders of Jews began only following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in
1941, that a mass killing program became systematized and extended throughout
Europe only toward the end of that year, and that once the program began to be
carried out, it was legitimized by the representation of Jews as incorrigibly noxious
parasites rooted in Hitler’s writings.
Much scholarly attention has thus been directed toward identifying what catalyzed
the transition to murder. The search has been complicated by the absence of any
written order directing mass killing to begin. Perhaps such an order was prepared
but subsequently destroyed; perhaps it never existed at all. There is even a lack of
unequivocal testimony about whether a specific oral order was ever given. Initially it
was assumed that any order, written or oral, must have come from the highest levels
of the Nazi hierarchy and been passed down the chain of command from Berlin
outward. However, research accumulating since the 1990s has suggested that,
although German troops invading the USSR carried orders to undertake targeted
killings of Soviet Jewish state and Communist Party officials, intellectuals, communal
leaders, and men of military age, it was actually local military personnel and commis-
sioners in Balkan and east European areas conquered by Germany between April and
October 1941 who ordered the first wholesale killing operations on their own initia-
tive, then sought approval up the chain of command for a general policy of indis-
criminate murder of Jews in the territories under their responsibility. Their requests
were justified on the basis of wartime exigencies, as part of a campaign to eliminate
partisan resistance or as a way to make certain that “useless” or “harmful” elements
of the conquered population did not consume scarce food and supplies. Other local
Nazi officials, evidently fearing that their bailiwicks might soon become a dumping
ground for Jews deported from points west, appear to have concluded that the only
truly effective way to prevent an unwanted increase in the Jewish population in their
realms was to kill Jews en masse. These operations, undertaken in summer and early
fall 1941, when thinking in Berlin still focused upon establishing a giant Jewish res-
ervation in Siberia, gradually emerged in the final three months of the year as the
preferred model for disposing of all Jews under Nazi rule once the invasion of the
Soviet Union stalled and it became evident that a Siberian reservation would not be
created as quickly as had been anticipated earlier.
9
Recent studies also strongly suggest that the idea of systematic total killing may
have recommended itself to its German initiators in the field at least partly through
observation of the behavior of local non-Jews toward Jews in the Soviet, Polish, and
Yugoslav territories occupied by Germany in 1941, as well as in Romania and the
territories it reclaimed or conquered from the Soviet Union in the same year. All of
these military actions brought in their immediate wake notable violence by Lithuanians,
Estonians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Croats, and Poles against their
Jewish neighbors in cities and small towns throughout the regions in question. Some
of this violence appears to have been German-instigated or even German-organized,
but much of it was evidently spontaneous, justified by no more than stereotypical
identification of Jews with a hostile foreign power (usually Soviet or, in the case of
Croatia, Serb). More often no overarching justification at all was sought: broadly
aware that the new German occupiers were not likely to provide Jews any serious
protection, murderous local mobs took advantage of the presence of the new regime
to settle personal local grievances or to seize Jewish property. Yet although they lacked