Black Earth(93)

Denmark’s neighbor Sweden, neutral in the war but complicit in the economic side of Germany’s war effort, had every reason in 1943 to demonstrate a tilt towards the Allies. The Swedish government now proposed to Germany that Sweden take Denmark’s Jews. It repeated the proposal over the radio on an open frequency, so that Danish Jews knew that they would be welcome in Sweden. Danes then arranged for a flotilla to ship their Jewish population to Sweden. The German police knew about this undertaking and did not stop it; the German navy watched the Danish boats float slowly by. The Danish citizens did this work at little risk to themselves, since helping their fellow citizens was not a crime in their own country. The German police raid of October 2 caught only 481 of the 6,000 or so Jews of Danish citizenship. The sovereign Danish government intervened with Berlin on behalf of these citizens. Some of them were released, and the rest were sent to Theresienstadt, a transit camp in what had been Terezín in Czechoslovakia, rather than to Auschwitz. Not a single one of them was gassed. Other Jews from other countries were however sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and murdered to make room for the Danish Jews. German authorities took advantage of the presence of Danish Jews to make a propaganda film about the ostensibly good conditions for Jewish life in their camps.

Jews who were Danish citizens survived, which is not exactly the same thing as Jews in Denmark surviving. Danish authorities did not accept Jewish refugees after 1935, and they deported some of the ones who had arrived earlier back to Germany. The Jews who were denied state protection in Denmark shared the fate of Jews who lacked state protection in Estonia or, for that matter, everywhere else: death.

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Occupied Estonia was part of the zone of statelessness where the entire Holocaust took place. In Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the western Soviet Union, Hitler’s vision of global racial struggle was converted, in conditions of statelessness, to new forms of politics. In each of these places the sequence of events that permitted the emergence of the Final Solution as mass killing was different. Nevertheless, a set of actions and absences can be identified.

The actions were the advance creation of racial or hybrid institutions whose major task was state destruction; the undertaking of aggressive war, permitting these institutions to fulfill their mission beyond their own homeland and in a permissive environment; the fact of state destruction, the removal of political capacity, the murder of leading classes, and the redefinition of such actions as law; the solicitation of collaboration, which was effective when it involved the exploitation of political resources created by an earlier state destroyer, but which always required the exploitation of existing local police forces, cut off from previous authority or eager to prove their loyalty after previous collaboration; the mobilization of psychological resources such as the release from humiliation and the gratification of the desire for revenge; the exploitation of greed, the material resource, enabled by ongoing or prior elimination of property rights; the recruitment of German institutions beyond those originally tasked with killing civilians; the exploitation of fragments of institutions remaining from earlier destructions of states.

After German (or Soviet and German) power destroyed states, the absences were the formal denial of sovereignty and the nullification of any connection by foreign policy to a larger world beyond German power; the lack of an overarching political entity that might protect its citizens, or motivate its citizens to protect it, and thus the disappearance of citizenship as a reciprocal relationship; the experience of the removal of traditional state protections in the form of laws and customs; the resulting spread of the dark market, the economic behaviors that arise in a free market without individual rights in which some people are treated as mere economic units to be consumed or sold; and the legal abyss, where all was permitted, where colonial thinking was natural, because international law in the traditional European sense did not apply.

These lists of actions and absences are both ways of characterizing the same extreme: the stateless zone where a Holocaust could be imagined, begun, and completed. At the other extreme during the Second World War were sovereign states that were untouched by German power. Although these generally pass unmentioned in analyses of the Holocaust, they are worth considering. After all, Hitler’s racial theory was planetary, and his declaration of war against the Jews was global. There is no particular reason to think that antisemitism was more prevalent in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania between the wars than it was in the United States, Great Britain, or Canada.

Most Jews in the world were safe during the Holocaust for the simple reason that German power did not extend to the places they lived and did not threaten the states of which they were citizens. Jews with Polish passports were safe in countries that recognized the prewar Polish state, and killed in countries that did not. American and British Jews were safe, not just in their home countries but everywhere. The Germans did not contemplate murdering Jews who held American and British passports, and, with few exceptions, did not do so. Statehood, like statelessness, followed Jews wherever they went. Soviet Jews were killed, with few exceptions, if they were caught in the lands occupied by the Germans and where Germany fought its war of extermination. In these places the Germans behaved as if the Soviet state had been destroyed and sought to annihilate all of its traces. So long as Jews were in Soviet territory and east of the German occupation, however, they were preserved from the Final Solution—although they were of course subject to Soviet policies. Roughly fifteen percent of the Polish Jews deported by the NKVD in 1940 died in transit or in the Gulag; even so, at the end of the war these deportees were the largest surviving group of Polish Jews.