Blog 23-9, written by Jerry Elman, June 19, 2023
“…a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people;
it is not necessary that people be wicked,
but only that they be spineless.”
James Baldwin
Hitler could not have accomplished the depth and massive nature of the Holocaust without the Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Bystanders who collectively gave him the support and mandate to exterminate the Jews. Very little is written about these three groups from the perspective of enablers.
Hitler and the Nazi regime were the perpetrators directly and indirectly. Germany as a nation was mobilized to both fight the war and kill Jews. Killing Jews had a higher priority than fighting the war.
At the end of WW II many Germans claimed ignorance of the genocide of Jews. Too many historians and writers accept this ignorance as real. Hitler did everything possible to keep Germans out of the roundup and killing of Jews. The only Germans directly engaged were the SS.
However, 900,000 Germans were in the SS, and several million were in the regular armed forces, police and government bureaucracies. There were 500,000 clerical and 900,000 manual workers in the railway network, which was key to transporting Jews to the camps. Letters and photographs sent home by German soldiers at the front frequently documented the atrocities. While most of these people outside the SS were not directly involved in the killing, they knew what was happening through their roles in the war effort.
German officer Helmuth von Moltke wrote to his wife in August 1941 referring to the slaughter of Jews: “What will happen when the nation as a whole realizes this war is lost … with a blood guilt that cannot be atoned for in our lifetime and can never be forgotten.”
Ordinary Germans were beneficiaries of the persecution and murder. In one six-week period, 222,269 sets of men’s suits and underclothes, 192,652 sets of women’s clothing, and 99,922 sets of children’s clothes, all collected from gassed victims at Auschwitz, were distributed among civilians in Germany. Between 15 and 20 billion Reich Marks were deposited in German banks, representing the proceeds of the theft of the savings, property, and possessions of murdered European Jews.
The Nazis were aided in their crimes by collaborators from many of the Axis nations, Germany’s allies, and the puppet states they set up in conquered territory. Each state responded differently to the Nazi extermination program, with significant variations in cooperation and, sometimes, active opposition.
Austrians, including Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann, were prominent in the Nazi leadership and the Einsatzgruppen. (Einsatzgruppen were death squads set up to kill Jews and communist officials. They provided one-third of the personnel of the SS extermination units and commanded four of the six main death camps.
In Romania, General Ion Antonescu led a coalition government of military officers and the fascist Iron Guard. In a gruesome episode during a three-day civil war in 1940, the Iron Guard hanged dozens of murdered Jews on meat hooks in the slaughterhouse of Bucharest. This government was responsible for the deportation of Jews to camps in Transnistria in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, where approximately 270,000 died due to neglect, starvation, and disease.
Romanian troops working with Einsatzgruppen D in southern Russia were considered cruel and barbarous even by the Germans because, among other reasons, they often refused to bury the corpses of Jews they had murdered. They just left their dead bodies to rot.
In Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltic States, traditional Christian antisemitism was exploited by propaganda identifying Jews with Bolshevism and the crimes of Stalin, which had claimed the lives of millions. (In fact, Jews had been among those whom Stalin treated most harshly when he killed millions before WW II). Many Eastern Europeans were receptive to Nazi ideology because of the Russian Empire Jew-hating influence going back to Cathryn the Great. The result was enthusiastic participation in the mass killings by various antisemitic groups.
The Hungarian government, under Admiral Horthy, sent some 20,000 German-Jewish refugees back to Germany in 1941. The government also conscripted Jews for forced labor; at least 27,000 died. However, the Horthy government refused to permit the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Nazi death camps.
In March 1944, Nazi troops occupied Hungary and installed a puppet government that deported almost 440,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz between May and July 1944. Thereafter, the Hungarian fascist and Jew-hating organization, Arrow Cross, was turned loose against the remaining Jewish population, murdering thousands in mass shootings and committing numerous other atrocities.
Slovakia declared itself an independent state in 1939 under the leadership of a Catholic priest, Jozef Tito, who was responsible for the deportation and deaths of approximately 75,000 Jews from Slovakia and the confiscation of their property. Slovakia agreed to make a payment to Germany of 500 Reichsmark for every Jew deported, provided that Germany would make no claim on the Jewish property confiscated.
Croatia, governed by the fascist Ustashi organization under Ante Pavelic, had its own concentration camp system, with the largest camp at Jasenovac, where many thousands of political opponents and ethnic minorities were killed, including Serbs, Jews, and Roma. About 20,000 Jews were either murdered by the Ustashi or deported to Auschwitz, of whom about 5,000 survived. In Serbia, 90 percent of the Jewish population of 17,000 were killed in mobile gas vans or by mass shootings.
In France, there were no fewer than 10 Jew-hating political organizations before the war calling for the destruction of the Jews, and some 77,000 Jews were deported to the extermination camps with the help of the Vichy French authorities. However, most of the French declined to collaborate with the genocide policy, and three-quarters of the French Jews survived, many hidden by Church institutions and Christian families.
Among the Nazis’ most enthusiastic supporters were Palestinian political leader Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and his followers. In 1941 al-Husseini fled Palestine (which was under British Mandate rule) and resided in the German capital, Berlin, as Hitler’s special guest. He was relentless in advocating for the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims for infamous SS “mountain divisions” that tried to destroy Jewish communities throughout the region.
He wrote in his memoirs: “Our fundamental condition for co-operating with Nazi Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.” Al-Husseini also wrote that in July 1943, Himmler informed him that the number of Jews “so far exterminated” in Europe was “about three million”.
Al-Husseini intervened to stop an attempt by Red Cross officials to negotiate the exchange of 4,000 Jewish children from Poland, resulting in the children being sent instead to Auschwitz. He also wrote to the foreign ministers of Romania and Hungary, requesting them to send their Jewish population “to Poland.”
SS-Captain Dieter Wisliceny, one of Adolf Eichmann’s henchmen, testified during his trial in Nuremberg that al-Husseini was “one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan….He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.”
Today, Palestinian nationalists continue to regard al-Husseini as a hero and martyr with a commitment to continue the war against Jews that al-Husseini started. Al Husseini can be considered the catalyst for the ongoing Israel and Palestinian conflict taking advantage of major British blunders. In the 1970s, Yassar Arafat formed the Palestine Liberation Organization and other terrorist groups picking up the mandate to destroy all Jews in Israel from Al Husseini. Arafat even falsely claimed to be a relative of al Husseini to give himself more legitimacy. In a future blog, I will cover the true origins of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Bystanders made up a majority of the population of Europe during WW II. Bystanders gave Hitler and the Nazi regime the ultimate permission to exterminate Jews by saying nothing and doing nothing. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Hilter tested and saw the silence. He knew he had a green light to proceed.
It is challenging to pinpoint who the bystanders were because bystanders, by definition, stood by and did nothing. They acted passive and indifferent. They had no direct role as a perpetrator or collaborator. This makes them innocent of any crime! Many were silent supporters of what the Nazis did. Many were silent opposers of what the Nazis did. Many were silent because they were indifferent and did not care. And many were silent because the fear of getting involved drove them.
Almost nothing is ever documented or written about bystanders. History never talks about them. Historians never write about them. Documenting and writing about people who did nothing and said nothing is boring! Bystanders always cleanly get away with their silence and inaction!
After the war ended, many leaders and people throughout Europe would claim “they were silently opposed to the killing of Jews.” They tried the take the high road of claiming action through a claim of silent thoughts! They only broke their silence and made such a ridiculous claim after the war ended!