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What part did civilians
play in the destruction of the European Jews?
In this essay, part of my first year course, I was able to examine the
Holocaust, and the vexed question of the guilt or otherwise of the civilian populations of
occupied Europe.
The distinction between
military and civilian personnel is to a certain extent a semantic one - just because
someone is subject to military discipline does not prevent them from exercising their
moral judgement. Admittedly, it becomes more difficult to follow that
judgement, but the
defence of war criminals that they were simply following orders was frequently inadequate
for the Nuremberg tribunals, and for the German de-Nazification courts that succeeded
them. The actions of Italians in Croatia who intervened, without orders, in the attempted
massacre of Serbs by Croatians demonstrated that soldiers could independently exercise
their moral sense. This question, then, is aimed partly at the distinction between those
whose jobs placed them in direct contact with the Holocaust, and those who contributed to
it other ways, for while the majority of the civilians did not visit the death camps, or
themselves pull the triggers on the guns which slaughtered the Jews (indeed, many of them
were not aware of the existence of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other camps), they may well
have made some contribution to the Holocaust, whether through action or inaction. To
clarify the technical distinction between military and civilian personnel, I will provide
a brief working definition: when we refer to civilians, we are referring to all those
people who are not subject to military discipline in a military or para-military
organisation. In the case of Germany, which will be the main focus of this essay for its
conception and implementation of much of the Holocaust, this excludes the army and the
notorious SS, the police and the Gestapo, but includes a large number of people from a
wide range of social groups. While they may not have participated in the actual killings
to the extent of the dreaded SS Einsatzgruppen, they shoulder between them a significant
portion of the burden for the attempted extermination of an entire race.
When assigning ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust, we must turn to
Hitler and the elite circle of advisors and ministers who surrounded him. They were not
the only anti-Semites present in Germany by any means - latent anti-Semitism was a factor
in much of Germany and the whole of Europe in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
in Germany especially after the First World War - but they were the ones who took the
bigoted but passive anti-Semitism of their countrymen and turned it into a phenomenon that
was to claim the lives of two-thirds of European Jewry. When we examine the role of the
civilian population then, we are not looking to attribute blame for the form that the
‘Final Solution’ took, for this form was the brainchild of Hitler and
Himmler,
along with other, equally ruthless members of the inner circle and the SS. We are looking
to see how far the civilian population facilitated the implementation of the scheme
devised by Hitler - did they enthusiastically support it? Did they know about it? Did they
actively oppose it? Did they work in this area of the government, or derive benefits from
the terrible fate suffered by the Jews? These are the questions we must ask when
considering what part the civilian population played in the destruction of European Jews.
Firstly there were those people in the Civil Service whose talents
as administrators and legislators made them a necessary part of the legal and governmental
process which prepared for the implementation of the Final Solution - these men, spread
throughout the civil service, played their own parts in formulating and implementing the
aspects of Jewish policy for which their particular department was responsible. The
gradual development of the need for civil servants to oversee matters of Jewish policy
meant that there was never a central office established to deal with the matter - we
cannot point a finger at any one department for helping to administer the smooth running
of a systematic extermination, for no one civilian organisation ever did enough by itself
to kill the Jews (a military central authority of sorts was established under the control
of the infamous SS Obersturmbennführer Adolf Eichmann, known as the Race and Resettlement
Office. It had control over much of the administration of the Final Solution. However, it
was still a body that depended upon other organisations for logistical support or other
co-operation, and cannot be said to be an all-encompassing authority). Raul
Hilberg, in
his book Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, identifies 21 civilian
bodies, public, party and private, which participated in the administration of anti-Jewish
measures in the Third Reich, along with the four military organisations that took part.
These civilian bodies include the Reich Chancellery, the Interior Ministry and the Justice
Ministry, various party organisations, the Finance Ministry and the Foreign Office, and a
plethora of private concerns including major businesses (chemical company IG Farben being
the most famous), major banks, and the churches of Germany. This number of organisations
was involved because each had a special role to play. I have provided examples from
Hilberg’s book of three of the above mentioned bodies, and the special tasks that
fell to them:
Interior Ministry:
Definition of the term Jew
Prohibition of mixed marriages
Decrees for compulsory names
Dismissals from the civil service
Deprivation of property
Various firms in retailing, wholesaling, manufacturing:
Acquisition of Jewish firms
Dismissals of Jewish employees
Utilisation of Jewish forced labour in cities, ghettos, construction and camps
Contracting for measures of destruction, such as supply of poison gas
Finance ministry:
Discriminatory taxes
Blocked funds
Confiscation of personal belongings
Special budgetary allocations, such as clearing Warsaw Ghetto ruins
This clearly illustrates the division of labour which took place in
the German administration with regard to the distribution of the plethora of tasks
relating to the four major elements of Reich anti-Semitic policy, which operated sometimes
simultaneously, and were sometimes mutually exclusive: expulsion, emigration,
ghettoization and extermination (which of course was christened the Final Solution, since
it was the last of the four, but also final because after it, no solution would be needed
- the Jews of Europe would have been totally eradicated). It is unlikely that the series
of anti-Semitic measures implemented in Germany would have been half as effective without
the men of the Civil Service and Nazi Party apparatus who applied their specialist skills
to undertaking specific tasks, or formulating legitimate laws to allow others to undertake
their tasks with a veneer of legality. However strong Hitler’s insistences were,
however great his drive and determination to see the resolution of the ‘Jewish
Question’, it needed these men to oversee the logistics of such a complex and
comprehensive operation, and to make it the ‘anti-Semitism of reason’ rather
than the ‘anti-Semitism of emotion’ that only resulted in pogroms like Kristallnacht
(‘Night of Broken Glass’).
As well as those inside the administration who were indispensable to
the implementation of anti-Semitic practices and legislation, there were those outside it
whose efforts and contributions were essential not only to the continuation of German life
as a whole, but to the success of ‘Aryan’ and anti-Semitic policies. Accountants
and bookkeepers helped with the logistics and legal issues of the confiscation and
redistribution of property. Architects, engineers and builders constructed the death camps
and gas chambers, and companies like IG Farben made use of forced Jewish labour in a
number of installations. Men drove the trains that transported the Jews to Poland from all
across Europe, and auctioneers oversaw the cataloguing and sale of confiscated Jewish
belongings. The professions in particular had a major impact upon the program of
anti-Semitism. In its mildest form, their contribution involved the expulsion of Jewish
members of a particular trade or profession (this was particularly notable among the
physicians, a profession that was generally considered to be overmanned anyway). A handful
of doctors was inducted into the SS proper, but many more became involved, willingly or
otherwise, in the process of ‘medicalised’ destruction. Tasks allocated to them
in the anti-Semitic program included: ‘race’ categorisations;
sterilisation;
euthanasia; medical experiments; selections for gassings and shootings; and the medical
issues involved in ghettoization, mainly monitoring, control of outbreaks of disease, and
the use of these reasons as justification for the brutality. Given that we are dealing
with a profession whose Hippocratic Oath should have been far more binding than any idea
of loyalty to Hitler and his regime, we are able to view a group of people who blatantly
sold out age-old principles for the Third Reich. The Nazi regime, adhering as it did to
the concept of ‘rational’ rather than ‘emotional’ anti-Semitism,
needed these men of medicine to furnish a veneer of scientific and medical respectability
to its programme, and many co-operated willingly, viewing the process as a chance to push
back the boundaries of knowledge by experimenting on subjects who their regime considered
to be sub-human. Given the positions of responsibility many of them occupied, one wonders
whether they could not have attempted to influence policy from within, or subtly
obstructed the massive processing of Jews for deportation and extermination, especially
questions over the definition of Jews and Jewishness. Apparently, this was not to be the
case for most, and in keeping with Hitler’s philosophy of ‘Alles oder
Nichts’, all or nothing, for most of them the ignoring of the Hippocratic Oath was
simply the start of a long career in unethical and downright inhumane
behaviour.
Four-hundred thousand people were unwillingly subjected to sterilisation experiments
designed to find a swift, efficient way of sterilising a patient without them knowing.
These criteria must surely have given those doctors involved an awareness of the potential
use of their processes, if they did not know already - it was hoped to make extinct all
the Slavs in German-held areas of Europe through mass sterilisation. Although the
programme encompassed mainly mental patients, and the number of Jews involved was
relatively slight, nothing can better serve to illustrate the lack of scruples of the
doctors who found themselves working directly or indirectly on matters relating to
genocide. More directly pertaining to the ‘Jewish question’ was the euthanasia
program first started on German mental patients. The issue of involuntary euthanasia for
seriously ill mental patients is a thorny ethical matter in itself. That information on
painless killing was later used in the mass murder of the Jews seriously calls into
question the morality of many physicians - the first commander of the Treblinka death
camp, Imfried Eberl, was a euthanasia physician. Doctors were also used at the death camps
to partition prisoners into two groups: those only fit for immediate extermination, and
those who would be fit enough to work as slave labour in the surrounding industrial
complexes, or as carriers of the bodies of other Jews. This ‘decision’ was based
on the doctor’s first glance of the prisoners as they disembarked from their trains,
and had no basis in medicine, just in first impressions. However reluctantly some doctors
may have undertaken tasks such as these, Hilberg sums up their role succinctly when he
writes that ‘in the final analysis, however, they were all there’.
The legal profession was also important to the Nazis. The torments
heaped upon the Jews were not simply undertaken arbitrarily; they were legislated for, in
which case they were not undertaken until the law had been published in a legal gazette
(the lack of a true legislature meant this marked the point at which a proposal became
law, not the assent of the Reichstag as in times past); alternatively, they were passed to
apply retrospectively to particular processes or procedures. The perversion of the
legislative process was important in two respects, although neither of them can be seen as
being as important as the contribution of medical practitioners to the course of the
Holocaust: firstly, it allowed Hitler and his government to claim that they always acted
within the law, and to point this out to a civil service that pre-dated them, ensuring its
co-operation in implementing the new laws; secondly, in the eyes of the rest of the
European community, while Germany may have been enacting harsh legislation, it was at
least keeping within the bounds of that legislation. Nobody could say that the government
was acting outside the law, and the risk of international action, such as economic
sanctions, which could have been fatal to German re-armament, was probably reduced.
Basically, the law and the men who formulated it allowed both German and foreign leaders
to sleep in their beds at night knowing that everything was within the law. This was of
course a fundamentally semantic distinction in a totalitarian regime with no democratic
element to act as legislature, but the psychological effects for the Germans are
illustrated well by a report of a conversation between Goering and Goebbels, as referred
to by Hilberg: they were discussing whether or not ‘Aryans’ should have the
right to automatically eject Jews from seats on crowded trains. Goering was firmly in
favour of this, but Goebbels replied ‘I would not say that. I do not believe this.
There has to be a law’, (quoted in Hilberg, op. cit.).
Having dealt with activity, that is those sections of German society
who were active in their participation in the Holocaust, we must now turn to the more
problematic issue of passivity, that is, those people, German and otherwise, who simply
stood by and made no attempt, open or subversive, to do anything to halt the slaughter.
After we exclude those members of various resistance movements, which were fairly thin on
the ground in Germany (most Jews on the run were hidden by non-Jewish family members, not
underground groups), this leaves us with a large proportion of the population who were
passive bystanders. Certainly, most of these people may well have been too busy
considering themselves victims of the war to consider who were the real victims. The
argument that the observation of secrecy by the SS and the involved government ministries
prevented large scale disclosures of information, and that this ignorance was enhanced by
the machinations of Goebbels propaganda apparatus, carries little weight. When one
considers what was going on in the Reich, and the number of people exposed to some degree
to what was occurring, then it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that many people
knew, at least had some inkling, of some of the things that were occurring in the East.
Firstly, domestic measures including the legal segregations of the Jews, their being
forced out of their occupations and into emigration, etc., were highly visible to the
German public. Confiscated Jewish property was often auctioned, and was bought without
hesitation. This by itself, coupled with propaganda about ‘resettlement in the
East’, might have kept the matter from the public. However, coupled with the
information that was almost certainly disclosed by people ‘in the know’, many
people must have realised what was occurring. In human nature, difficulty in keeping
secrets and the need to talk about experiences and opinions are almost universal. Many
people must have told friends or relatives some of what they knew (although that may not
always have been the whole picture): soldiers on home leave, boastful SS men, officials in
various ministries, business men who had travelled to the occupied East on various
missions; no amount of censorship and propaganda could have prevented some of these people
disclosing what they knew, whether through shame or pride.
The next question is whether the civilian population at large failed
to make any attempt to affect what was going on simply through sheer apathy, through more
developed active anti-Semitism, or through fear of the ramifications of any resistance.
Certainly, we well know the fate of outspoken opponents of the Nazi regime, whether Jewish
or not - many ended up being executed or sent to the concentration camps, or emigrated in
the early stages of Hitler’s rule to avoid persecution. Fear is a factor that no
doubt affected everybody. However, it is not the sole explanation. When considering
whether or not a large part of the German civilian population was anti-Semitic, the
following factors must be taken into account: that Hitler and the Nazis gained as much
power in the Reichstag as they did partly on an anti-Semitic electoral ticket; the
non-existence of any serious attempts to challenge or destabilise the regime on the
grounds of its anti-Semitic policies (the generals’ plot to assassinate Hitler was
conceived more because Germany was beginning to lose the war than on any moral grounds;
preservation of the country was the key factor here); the general level of anti-Semitism
in Europe, which was high in most countries. Indeed, before Hitler came to power it was
considered that Germany was one of the safer and more welcoming countries of Europe in
which a Jew could live.
On the issue of the rise of the Nazi party, several points should be
made. Firstly, anti-Semitism was only one plank of Nazi policy, and it was certainly not
the basis of their electoral victory. It seems more likely that pledges to undo the Treaty
of Versailles and restore the economy were the prime attraction. This was nationalism
rather than anti-Semitism. Secondly, there would have been many who did not believe that
Hitler was serious, that anti-Semitism was only so much electoral rhetoric. Indeed, there
were prominent Jewish politicians and community leaders who co-operated with Hitler in the
implementation of his anti-Semitic policies, believing that enshrining limited
anti-Semitism in law and stabilising it was better than letting it grow unchecked. The
rise of the Nazi party is not indicative of a huge ground-swell of anti-Semitism in
Germany (remember, Hitler never achieved a majority in the Reichstag through democratic
means). More to the point, what anti-Semitism there was would have been far less extreme
than that implemented in the Reich; it was instead the sort of violent, irrational
anti-Semitism that had its outlet in Kristallnacht. It was the anti-Semitism of
emotion, a common but not all-encompassing type of bigotry, and one that transcended all
national boundaries. The chances are that most of the anti-Semites of Germany would have
been just as appalled as liberals, communists or anyone else by the slaughter of Jews from
Germany and its considerable occupied territories. Only a few extremists became involved
in the active planning for the Final Solution to the Jewish question. Ultimately, sheer
apathy becomes a significant factor in the passivity of a large part of the German
civilian population, and it is something that is, and probably always will be, difficult
to explain. There is no doubt, though, that it allowed the Nazi leadership to turn its
attentions towards its rapidly expanding frontiers without worrying that any Germans would
oppose their barbaric policies.
While Germany provided the impetus and the leadership for the
implementation of anti-Semitic measures throughout the Greater German Reich, it could not
have done so without the co-operation, or non-intervention, of individuals and groups in
the occupied territories, and the submission of the governments of satellite states. The
majority of Jews put to death by the Nazis were not German: approximately 160,000 German
Jews lost their lives. In comparison, three million Polish and one million Russian Jews
were executed. In Czechoslovakia the death toll was 277,000, in Holland 106,000, in France
83,000, in Croatia 40,000. Even these totals can seem modest when compared with the
numbers which the Final Solution considered would have had to have been executed in order
to completely purge Europe of the Jews: five million in the USSR, 330,000 in Great
Britain, 58,000 in Italy (of which 8,000 actually lost their lives), 765,000 in France,
and so on. Figures were prepared for every nation in Europe, whether ally of Germany or
enemy, occupied by her or not.
To allow her to execute the numbers that she did, there must have
been in many countries help from the civilian population. This often consisted of active
collaboration with the Nazis. In Holland, whose government in exile was greatly concerned
with stability during the occupation, the civil service did its utmost to ensure that all
possible help was furnished to the Germans in matters of general administration. The SS
and Gestapo were granted unlimited access to personal files that allowed them to single
out and round up Jews, ably assisted by the Dutch police force. The Netherlands were a
nation where the integration of the Jewish population into the economic and social fabric
of the country was quite advanced. Here, latent anti-Semitism was low (the Dutch Nazi
party had a pitifully small number of members even during the occupation), and many
non-Jews assisted persecuted families in escaping across the channel or evading detection
by the authorities. The most famous example of this kind of behaviour is of course the
family of the young Jewish girl Anne Frank, and their concealment in a specially converted
annexe in an office building in Amsterdam.
In occupied territories, one can well understand the fear that the
occupation brought to the inhabitants, and their failure to act can be seen as less
apathetic, the options open to them more limited. However, in some countries, no
encouragement was needed to ignite rabid anti-Semitism and acts of violence that even
Eichmann considered brutal. This was most true of the former Yugoslavia, where in the
newly created state of Croatia anti-Semitism mixed with age-old racial tensions to create
severe atrocities. In this part of the world, the distinction between soldiers and
civilians becomes less important, because the principle military forces were the cetnik
bands, comprising of untrained partisans, Here, the attempted destruction of the Jewish
(and Serbian) population needed very little help from the Germans, and they sometimes had
to attempt to curb the worst excesses of their allies.
In countries that were part of the Axis alliance but which remained
politically and militarily independent - Italy, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria - the
effects of the Holocaust were generally more limited, often due to the efforts of the
civilian government. Sometimes these efforts were made for reasons of economic necessity,
sometimes due to different beliefs over the exact forms anti-Semitic legislation should
take. The governments of Germany’s allies were required to implement anti-Semitic
legislation that mirrored that of Germany, to make the Jews ‘ripe’ for
deportation. In this they mostly complied willingly, and the politicians and civil
servants of these countries bear a unique culpability for the deaths of Jews living in
their respective countries. The governments of Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania only agreed
to the surrender of the non-naturalised Jews living in their countries (known in German as
Ostjuden, these Jews were often fleeing from Russian persecution, and still
retained many customs and habits long abandoned by the naturalised populations), and those
Jews Living in newly conquered territories that they had acquired by the grace of Germany.
They insisted on protecting the majority of the naturalised populations, with the result
that the number of Jews yielded by these states was far less than the projections made in
the Final Solution. This was often because the Jews fulfilled vital roles in economy or
infrastructure, as doctors, tradesmen, etc.. Vichy France was one country where there
seems to have been a genuinely widespread anti-Semitic feeling among the civilian
population, partly as a result of the Dreyfus affair. The government of the Vichy regime
was, like many others, reticent to surrender its native Jews to the Germans, but
co-operated willingly in the deportation of refugees, and, after 1942, in the removal of
some of the native population. Not all members of the administration agreed with the
policy, and the nature of the government was such that open protest was still safe and
possible. Albert Lévy, president of the UGIF (Union Générale des Israelites de France),
sent a telegram to Marshall Petain, head of the government, on September 4 1942,
describing ‘heartrending scenes unworthy of French traditions and susceptible of
blackening French reputation in all neutral and Christian countries’, (quoted in Vichy
France and the Jews, Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton). However, such
protesters were in the minority, and the Prefects of the Departments co-operated fully
with German wishes. The following extract is from a report submitted to the government by
the Prefect of the Meuse:
‘I have the honour to report that two trains carrying
Israelites from the Paris region and heading for Germany passed through the Bar de Luc
railway station on 22 June.
These convoys were made up of men under forty years of age whose
hair had been very closely cropped. Two cars were filled with girls, the eldest of whom
could have been twenty-five years.’
(Quoted in Marrus and Paxton, op. cit.)
The obvious pride in the tone of this report is indicative of the
attitude of French officials, who played their part in the Final Solution. It was
ironically the Italian government who went to greater lengths to prevent the persecution
of the Jews, and it is really the only Axis government whose conduct regarding
anti-Semitic policy is in any way laudable. Despite the passing of the racial laws in
1938, Italy not only managed to keep most of its Jews from the Reich, but protected Jews
in France and Croatia, where it also protected many persecuted Serbs. The numbers saved
may have been relatively small compared to the numbers of European Jews killed, but the
exercise, a connivance between senior civil servants and generals, often without the
knowledge of Mussolini, proves one thing: that there were people who had the courage and
initiative to act against the Nazi plans, and that the course of the Holocaust could be,
in a minor way at least, subverted. In demonstrating this, the guilt of many other members
of the civilian population, at all levels, is exacerbated: resistance was an option
through subversion, yet it was one that hardly anybody chose.
The role of the civilian population in the destruction of the
European Jews is immeasurable. It is just as important in its own way as the part played
the military personnel who fired the bullets, herded the Jews into the gas chambers and
supervised them in forced labour camps. As we have seen, their participation can be
divided into two sorts: firstly, those who actively aided or served the Nazis concerning
the specific objective of the elimination of European Jewry. This aid was invaluable to
the Nazis in technical, logistical and administrative terms - had it not been, for
example, for the civil servants who implemented Nazi directives and physicians who
administered euthanasia, it is likely that the number of Jews murdered would have been
much lower, through inefficiency as much as anything else. Members of foreign governments
who complied with the wishes of the Nazis fall into this first category, as do those
people in newly conquered territories who were so eager to assist the Germans in carrying
out their goals that they ended up killing more than the German Einsatzgruppen or police -
this phenomenon was most notable in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
The second category is broader and harder to define: it is those people who took little
part in the active pursuit of the goal of annihilation, but whose silence and inactivity
allowed the slaughter to take place. In Germany and many of its occupied territories the
moral majority became the amoral majority, unwilling to interfere or even hold a view of
what was happening. Included here are huge numbers of ordinary civilians, people from all
backgrounds spread throughout the whole of continental Europe. It is not easy to condemn
them completely, given the difficult circumstances many endured throughout the war, but
such circumstances do not even come close to being truly extenuating. If the facts speak
for themselves, then the role of the civilian population in the destruction of the
European Jews is enormous, its contribution equally important to the men who devised the
‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ as the role played by the military.
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