Black Earth(103)

The Netherlands was, for several reasons, the closest approximation to statelessness in western Europe. The sovereignty of the Netherlands was compromised in several ways that were unusual in this part of the continent. There was no head of state once Queen Wilhelmina left for London in May 1940. The Dutch government followed her into exile. The bureaucracy, in effect decapitated, was left with the instruction to behave in a way that would best serve the Dutch nation. Uniquely in western Europe, the SS sought and attained fundamental control of domestic policy. Arthur Sey?-Inquart, an experienced state destroyer, was made Reichskommissar for the occupied Netherlands. He had served as the chancellor of Austria during the days when that country had ceased to be. He was then deputy to Hans Frank in the General Government, the colony created from Polish lands where, according to the Nazi interpretation, there had never been a Polish state. Such reasoning was never applied to the Netherlands, whose people were seen as racially superior to the Poles, and indeed as part of the same racial group as the Germans. It was nevertheless the state destroyers of the SS who filled the vacuum of the missing Dutch government.

Amsterdam was the only west European city where the Germans considered creating a ghetto. That such a discussion even took place suggests the unusual dominance of the SS. German authorities withdrew the plan after the Amsterdam city council and the Dutch government objected. This reveals the difference between the occupied Netherlands and occupied Poland, where no meaningfully autonomous local or national authorities existed. The Dutch police, like the Polish police, was however directly subordinate to the German occupier. As in Poland, the Dutch police was purged, and its top leadership generally removed. A large number of German policemen, some five thousand, monitored Dutch subordinates. In the Netherlands, as in Poland, fragments of the previous state order—indeed, institutions that had once represented toleration—could be turned to the task of extermination. In Poland, the legal Jewish councils of the 1930s were transformed under the Germans into the Judenr?te. In the Netherlands, all religions had been organized into communities for purposes of legal recognition, and all citizens were registered according to religion. This meant that the Germans could make use of precise preexisting lists of Jewish citizens. Dutch citizens protested, but it made little difference. The Dutch underground resisted, but this, if anything, only brought more harm to Jews. The German and Dutch police attended to districts where they believed the underground functioned and, in the process, found Jews in hiding.

The situation of rescuers and dissidents was quite different in the Netherlands than in Poland. People who hid Jews in the Netherlands, for example, were usually either not punished or punished lightly. People who protested anti-Jewish laws in public, such as Professor Rudolph Cleveringa at Leiden University, were sent to camps but were not killed. His Polish colleagues in Cracow or Lwów, meanwhile, were murdered for doing nothing other than being professors.

The Dutch were treated as citizens of an occupied country, unless they were Jewish. Because the Netherlands lacked basic institutions of sovereignty, and because Dutch institutions were fragmented on the east European model, the outcome for the Jews was similar, although not quite as awful, as in the stateless zones. The first transport of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz was in July 1942. Because there was no sovereign state functioning, there was no foreign policy, and no ability to change course in 1943. The Germans determined what happened to Jews, which meant that the trains from the Netherlands to Auschwitz kept running through 1944.

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Greek sovereignty was also severely compromised, although in a different way. Greece was originally invaded by Italy in late 1940. The Greek army fought the Italians to a standstill, forcing Hitler to rescue Mussolini. The Greek dictator died at what proved to be a critical moment. Germany invaded Greece on April 6, 1941. The king and the government had fled the country by the end of the month. The Germans did not seek to destroy the state in Greece as they had done in Poland, but in these unusual circumstances created an occupation regime in which the Greek puppet government was powerless. Greece lost territory and was occupied by three separate powers: the Germans took the north, allowed the Italians to control the south, and granted part of Macedonia to Bulgaria. No Greek government exercising any real authority was formed during the war. Its head had to submit his nominations for ministerial positions to both the German and the Italian authorities. There was never a Greek foreign minister. The Germans and the Italians did not allow the Greek government to apply for the international recognition of the new regime in its new borders. Greek authorities were unable to control food supplies. Some forty thousand Greeks starved in the first year of the war.