Black Earth(90)

Auschwitz was built in a zone of state destruction, after the invasion of Poland and as part of the attempt to obliterate the Polish political nation. Its original infrastructure was that of a Polish military barracks. As a territory it was conquered by Germany in September 1939 and granted to Germany by the terms of the German-Soviet Treaty on Borders and Friendship. Neither its construction nor its subsequent adaptations would have been thinkable, let alone possible, without the German campaign to eliminate rival polities and without the special talents and unusual goals of the state destroyers of the SS.

Auschwitz was unusual, however, in one important respect. Unlike the death pits in the doubly occupied zone and the occupied Soviet Union, unlike the death facilities at Be??ec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Che?mno, it was the planned murder site for very large numbers of Jews who were still citizens of states that Germany recognized as sovereign. Its intended Jewish victims were generally people who lived beyond the German zone of state destruction and who were therefore much less vulnerable to the imposing power of the SS. Such individuals had to be abandoned by their governments or stripped of their citizenship and physically transported from their country of residence to Auschwitz. There was nothing automatic about this, and indeed it often proved to be difficult.

Hitler’s fantasy of a planet without Jews was always present, and his desire to rid Europe of Jews was known to his subordinates no later than the spring of 1942. As of that moment, the policy of the mass murder of Jews, initiated the previous year in the Soviet Union, was general. Yet whether and to what extent that policy could be realized depended upon where Jews happened to live. Because the successful killing strategies were a result of prior decisions and actions that were specific to a certain part of eastern Europe, they could not be repeated with the same kind of success elsewhere. What happened to states in 1939, 1940, and 1941, in other words, was crucial for what would happen to Jews in 1942, 1943, and 1944. The Germans could not exploit the psychological, material, and political resources created by Soviet occupation in places where there had been no Soviet occupation. The Germans could not reassemble the fragments of destroyed states in places where they or the Soviets had not destroyed the state. The Germans could not apply the politics of relative deprivation in places where the war was not a campaign of racial mastery. In the museum at Auschwitz built in communist Poland after the war, its victims were classified by citizenship. This was designed to obfuscate the basic fact that the great majority of them were Jews, and murdered for no other reason. The emphasis on citizenship also obfuscated a more subtle but central fact: that the Jews who were killed were first separated from their states.

In many of the places from which the Jews were to be sent to Auschwitz, none of these conditions existed, and so Jews survived. Millions of European Jews who were condemned to die at Auschwitz survived because they never boarded a train. Jews under German control who were supposed to be sent to Auschwitz were more likely to survive than Jews under German control who were not supposed to be sent to Auschwitz. That is the Auschwitz paradox, and it can only be resolved by considering how states were and were not destroyed. These are the political particularities that explain the different outcomes within the universal design. Auschwitz demonstrates the universal design to kill Jews. It also demonstrates the general significance of statehood in protecting them.

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A comparison between two countries under German occupation can suggest the significance of the political factor. Estonia and Denmark had a great deal in common when the Second World War began. Each was a small northern European state with a long Baltic coast, and each was home to a very small number of Jews. During the war both were under German occupation, both were subject to the Final Solution, and both were declared judenfrei—free of Jews—by their German occupiers. And yet the history of the Holocaust in each land could hardly have been more different. In Estonia, about 99 percent of the Jews who were present when German forces arrived were killed. In Denmark, about 99 percent of Jews who had Danish citizenship survived. The Jews of Denmark were marked for Auschwitz; the Jews of Estonia met their fate before Auschwitz became a death facility.

In no country under German occupation did a higher percentage of Jews die than in Estonia, and in none did a higher proportion survive than in Denmark. Given the totality of the German policy of killing Jews, this difference calls for an explanation. Surely the population of Estonia was known for its antisemitism? If anything, such a tradition is easier to document in Denmark. Surely the Estonians were governed by antisemites before the war? The double dictatorship of Konstantin P?ts and Johan Laidoner was clearly conservative, but it came to power in a coup against the Far Right in 1934. In fact, Estonian Jews were equal citizens of the republic, which took in some Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany. Denmark, by contrast, turned away Jewish refugees after 1935.