Black Earth(101)

In the end, about half of the Hungarian Jewish population survived. Most of those killed had inhabited territories that changed hands during the war. The vast majority perished after the German intervention that compromised Hungarian sovereignty.

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Bulgaria was the German ally least affected by the war. It never lost territory to any of its neighbors. Bulgarians did not experience occupation of any kind until the very end of the war. The Bulgarian army did not join in the invasion of the Soviet Union. It did, however, take part in the German campaigns against Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, gaining some of Thrace from the former and Macedonia from the latter. Bulgaria was also granted southern Dobruja from Romania. Bulgarian authorities deported about thirteen thousand Jews from Macedonia and Thrace, following German wishes, on lands they gained thanks to German help. Most of these children, women, and men were gassed at Treblinka.





The Bulgarian government also drew up plans for the deportation of the Jews who inhabited prewar Bulgarian territory, but these were never implemented. Bulgarian Jews often had friends, colleagues, or employers who could explain their value to Bulgarian society. Letters from non-Jewish Bulgarian citizens about Jewish Bulgarian citizens flooded ministerial offices. In March 1943, after the tide of the war had turned, Bulgarian parliamentarians protested the anticipated deportations. Their resolution failed, but their public airing of the issue made a difference. Leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church intervened on behalf of the Jews generally, and other Bulgarians issued public protests. In the end, the king seems to have changed his mind about the desirability of deporting Bulgarian Jews to their deaths, settling for a removal of Jews from Sofia to the countryside. In 1944, Bulgaria reversed alliances and finished the war on the side of the Allies.

All in all, about three-quarters of Jews on territory controlled by Bulgaria survived. Almost all of those who were killed inhabited territories where regimes had changed during the war.

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Italy was Germany’s ally from the beginning, and its Duce, Benito Mussolini, was one of Hitler’s inspirations. He, rather than Hitler, pioneered the politics of anti-communism, and the deployment of ideological paramilitaries to gain and then transform state power. Mussolini did not, however, see the Soviet Union as part of a planetary Jewish peril to be destroyed, nor did he imagine his Blackshirts as special units with the power to return Europe to some racial Eden by killing Jews. His major colonial aims and thus atrocities were in Africa. Italian troops joined in the invasion of France belatedly and almost irrelevantly, but participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union on a grand scale. Insofar as Italy and its soldiers contributed to the conquest of Soviet territory, they contributed indirectly to the Holocaust. The same, of course, is true of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and all of the other German allies on the eastern front. When Italy bungled its invasion of Greece in 1940, it forced the Germans to intervene. In this way Italian aggression created some of the preconditions to the Holocaust in southeastern Europe.

Although Italy did pass anti-Jewish and other racial legislation, Mussolini showed no interest in deporting Italian Jews to their deaths. Beyond Italy, Italian soldiers sometimes sheltered Jews. In general, Jews who had a choice would flee to zones of Italian occupation. As a matter of prestige and sovereignty, Italy would intern rather than deport Jews who escaped from Croatia. The Holocaust in Italy itself began, and could only begin, after Mussolini’s fall. In Italy, as elsewhere, a failed attempt to change sides was a disaster for Jews. When Italy’s new leaders tried to join the Allies, Germany invaded from the north and undertook the deportation and murder of Italian Jews themselves. In the end, about four-fifths of Italy’s Jews survived; without German intervention, almost all of them would have.

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Jews who were citizens of Germany’s allies lived or died according to certain general rules. Jews who maintained their prewar citizenship usually lived, and those who did not usually died. Jews usually lost citizenship through regime change or occupation rather than by law; slow legal depatriation on the German model was the exception, not the rule. Jews from territories that changed hands were usually murdered. Jews almost never survived if they remained on territories where the Soviet Union had been exercising power when German or Romanian forces arrived. German occupation of states that were trying to switch sides led to the massive killing of Jews, including those who lived in countries where there had been little or nothing of a Final Solution. In all, about seven hundred thousand Jews who were citizens of Germany’s allies were killed. Yet a higher number survived. This is a dramatic contrast to the lands where the state was destroyed, where almost all Jews were killed.