Black Earth(104)

The murder of Greek Jews proceeded where the Germans were in control. Italians saw the Ladino-speaking Jews of Greece, descendants of people who had fled centuries before from Spain, as members of their own Latin civilization. Italian officials provided many such people with bogus attestations of Italian nationality. Salonika, the major Jewish city in Greece, was under German occupation from April 1941. Although the Germans found that “for the average Greek there is no Jewish question,” local political and professional elites understood that lawlessness and German priorities could be used to fulfill their own desires. If Jews were no longer citizens of what was no longer really a state, others could make good on prewar claims and satisfy half-hidden desires.

In summer 1942, as the Germans were desperate for labor, local Greek authorities suggested that it might be more politic to use only Jews. This stigmatized one section of the population and confirmed its vulnerability. Later that year in Salonika, the German authorities satisfied a long-standing local postulate by ceding the property of the Jewish cemetery to the city. Such a major property transfer generated a sense of material complicity between Germans and locals as well as a new moral barrier between non-Jewish Greeks and Greek Jews. The destruction of the ancient cemetery and the desecration of hundreds of thousands of remains was painful enough in the present, but also raised a question about the future. If Salonika’s Jews were no longer welcome to die in their home city, where would they die?

In the first weeks of 1943, some of Adolf Eichmann’s closest colleagues arrived in Salonika with the goal of arranging rapid deportations to Auschwitz. They found little public sympathy for their ideology, it seems, but more than sufficient willingness to exploit the separation of Jews from other Greeks. As Salonika Jews were ordered to wear stars and forced into ghettos, others took their movable property and sometimes their houses. The deportations began on March 15, 1943, the Jews exchanging their Greek drachmas for counterfeit Polish currency. Some 43,850 children, women, and men were sent from Salonika to Auschwitz between March and June 1943. The timing was unusual: right after the German defeat at Stalingrad, when German allies were generally trying to switch sides, or change their Jewish policy as a signal to the Allies. But Greece, although regarded by the Germans as an occupied state, was much more like a stateless territory. It had no army in the war that might change sides, and no foreign minister who might send peace signals.

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The French case was very different. The very notion of “collaboration” with Germany, although it has taken on other meanings since, was coined by the French to denote a policy of one sovereign state choosing to cooperate with another. France, in contrast to the Netherlands and to Greece, did retain the basic institutions of sovereignty, and its leaders chose a policy of friendship with the German victors. After Hitler’s armies crushed the French in spring 1940, he expressed the wish that “a French government continue to function on French territory.” Because France, unlike the Netherlands and Greece, was placed under a traditional military occupation, there was no clear opening for the SS and its state destroyers. The new regime, with Philippe Pétain as head of state and with Vichy as the administrative center, was regarded as the legitimate continuator of the prewar republic, both at home and abroad. High officials in all ministries remained in their positions. Indeed, the number of French bureaucrats increased quite impressively during the German occupation, from about 650,000 to about 900,000. The contrast here with Poland is instructive: For every educated Pole who was murdered during the war, an educated Frenchman got a job in the civil service.

France did introduce anti-Jewish legislation on its own initiative. A “Jewish statute” was passed on October 3, 1940, breaking the long French tradition of treating all citizens in metropolitan France as equal members of the state. (Algeria, though at this time part of the French state, was a different story.) In March 1941, a General Commissariat for Jewish Questions was established to coordinate Jewish policy with Germany. The legalized theft of Jewish property began in France that July. In November, the French government created an official Jewish organization that all Jews in France were required to join. The prevailing idea among French authorities was that Jews could eventually be removed to somewhere distant—such as Madagascar. The new laws were implemented by people who had served the prewar republic.

The reasoning behind French Jewish policy was different than that of Nazi Germany and closer to that of, for example, Slovakia or Bulgaria. In Bratislava and Sofia, as in Vichy, a domestic constituency for ethnic cleansing found itself in an unusual situation: Another state, Germany, actually wished to take some (not all) of the people deemed undesirable. In the late 1930s, before the war, the French Republic had already passed a law permitting the creation of “assembly points,” for Jewish and other refugees. The first of these camps had been established in February 1939.