Black Earth(102)

None of Germany’s sovereign allies was indifferent to the traditional concern of preserving the state. Most of the sovereign states allied with Germany altered their foreign policy in 1942 or 1943 or 1944, as it became clear that Germany was losing the war. This meant reversing anti-Jewish policies, attempting to switch sides in the war, or both. If leaders slowed or halted their own anti-Jewish policies, it was in the hope that the Allies would notice the signal and would treat them more favorably after the war was over. Sometimes attempts to switch sides succeeded and thereby aided the Jews, as in Romania and Bulgaria. Sometimes they failed, as in Hungary and Italy. But it was this very ability to make foreign policy that distinguished sovereign states from puppet states created during the war and from the stateless zones.

This same capacity for diplomacy distinguished Germany’s allies from Nazi Germany itself. Until 1942, the Jews of Germany were in a position not so different from that of Germany’s allies. From 1942, however, the position of Germany’s Jews worsened radically, whereas that of the Jews of Germany’s allies generally improved (until and unless Germany itself intervened). Unlike the leaders of Germany’s allies, Hitler was indifferent to the fate of his own state, and viewed the extermination of Jews as a good in and of itself. He thought that the world was a planet covered by races rather than a globe covered by states—and acted accordingly. Germany did not have a conventional foreign policy, since its Führer did not believe in sovereignty as such and could imagine state destruction as the proper end of the war just as easily as he could see it as the proper beginning.

When the war turned against Germany, the killing of Jews under German control was not slowed, as with Germany’s allies, but accelerated. Because the German leadership was pursuing what it saw as colonial (anti-Slavic) and decolonial (anti-Jewish) campaigns from the beginning, Hitler and others could shift emphases from one war to another, and from one definition of victory to another. The leaders of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy had to contemplate the actual military conflict as it unfolded on staff maps. Hitler understood the minutiae of war; indeed, he grasped its details far better than any other head of state and better than most of his generals. But the way he synthesized the data was his alone. For him the German defeats revealed the hidden hand of the planetary Jewish enemy, whose destruction was necessary to win the war and redeem mankind. The extermination of the Jews was a victory for the species, regardless of the defeat of the Germans. As Hitler said at the very end, on April 29, 1945, Jews were the “world poisoners of all nations.” He was sure of his legacy: “I have lanced the Jewish boil. Posterity will be eternally grateful to us.”

Hitler was seeking to lift a Jewish curse from the planet. This categorical Nazi approach, once it was realized as policy, made possible ethnic cleansing from other countries, since it created a place, Auschwitz, where European Jews could be sent. The German mass murder of Jews created an unusual opportunity for ethnic cleansers elsewhere in Europe, creating possibilities for removing one (of many) unwanted minorities. Such an interaction was possible only because the makers of the Holocaust were realizing the desire to remove all Jews from the earth.

Hitler was not a German nationalist, sure of German victory, aiming for an enlarged German state. He was a zoological anarchist who believed that there was a true state of nature to be restored. The failed campaign in the East brought useful new knowledge about nature: It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: “If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people.” Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, “the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east.”

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In the European states linked by military occupation to Hitler’s strange sense of destiny, the proportion of Jews who survived varied greatly. The greatest confusion arises over the contrast between European states with significant prewar Jewish populations: the Netherlands, Greece, and France. About three-quarters of French Jews survived, whereas about three-quarters of Dutch Jews and Greek Jews were killed.

Here, as with Estonia and Denmark, intuitions fail to explain this enormous difference. In general, neither the Dutch nor the Greek population was regarded as antisemitic, whereas observers then and historians now chronicle a major current of antisemitism in French popular and political life. In the Netherlands, Jewish refugees were admitted without visas until 1938. In Greece, German-style antisemitism had almost no advocates. Antisemitism was less resonant in interwar Greek politics than just about anywhere in Europe. In the Netherlands, uniquely, there were public manifestations against the introduction of anti-Jewish laws after the German occupation. Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands had almost no public support. And yet a Dutch Jew or a Greek Jew was three times more likely to be murdered than a French Jew.