On June 30, 1943, considerably later than Hitler had hoped, the Reich—Germany, Austria, and the Protektorat—was declared judenrein. There are no definite figures as to how many Jews were actually deported from this area, but we know that of the two hundred and sixty-five thousand people who, according to German statistics, were either deported or were eligible for deportation by January, 1942, very few escaped; perhaps a few hundred, at the most a few thousand, succeeded in hiding and surviving the war. How easy it was to set the conscience of the Jews’ neighbors at rest is best illustrated by the official explanation of the deportations given in a circular issued by the Party Chancellery in the fall of 1942: “It is the nature of things that these, in some respects, very difficult problems can be solved in the interests of the permanent security of our people only with ruthless toughness” —rücksichtsloser Härte (my italics).
X: Deportations from Western Europe—France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy
“Ruthless toughness,” a quality held in the highest esteem by the rulers of the Third Reich, is frequently characterized in postwar Germany, which has developed a veritable genius for understatement with respect to her Nazi past, as being ungut—lacking goodness—as though nothing had been wrong with those endowed with this quality but a deplorable failure to act according to the exacting standards of Christian charity. In any case, men sent by Eichmann's office to other countries as “advisers on Jewish affairs”—to be attached to the regular diplomatic missions, or to the military staff, or to the local command of the Security Police—were all chosen because they possessed this virtue to the highest degree. In the beginning, during the fall and winter of 1941–42, their main job seems to have been to establish satisfactory relations with the other German officials in the countries concerned, especially with the German embassies in nominally independent countries and with the Reich commissioners in occupied territories; in either case, there was perpetual conflict over jurisdiction in Jewish matters.
In June, 1942, Eichmann recalled his advisers in France, Belgium, and Holland in order to lay plans for deportations from these countries. Himmler had ordered that FRANCE be given top priority in “combing Europe from West to East,” partly because of the inherent importance of the nation par excellence, and partly because the Vichy government had shown a truly amazing “understanding” of the Jewish problem and had introduced, on its own initiative, a great deal of anti-Jewish legislation; it had even established a special Department for Jewish Affairs, headed first by Xavier Vallant and somewhat later by Darquier de Pellepoix, both well-known anti-Semites. As a concession to the French brand of anti-Semitism, which was intimately connected with a strong, generally chauvinistic xenophobia in all strata of the population, the operation was to start with foreign Jews, and since in 1942 more than half of France's foreign Jews were stateless—refugees and émigrés from Russia, Germany, Austria, Poland, Rumania, Hungary—that is, from areas that either were under German domination or had passed anti-Jewish legislation before the outbreak of war—it was decided to begin by deporting an estimated hundred thousand stateless Jews. (The total Jewish population of the country was now well over three hundred thousand; in 1939, before the influx of refugees from Belgium and Holland in the spring of 1940, there had been about two hundred and seventy thousand Jews, of whom at least a hundred and seventy thousand were foreign or foreign-born.) Fifty thousand each were to be evacuated from the Occupied Zone and from Vichy France with all speed. This was a considerable undertaking, which needed not only the agreement of the Vichy government but the active help of the French police, who were to do the work done in Germany by the Order Police. At first, there were no difficulties whatever, since, as Pierre Laval, Premier under Marshal Pétain, pointed out, “these foreign Jews had always been a problem in France,” so that the “French government was glad that a change in the German attitude toward them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.” It must be added that Laval and Pétain thought in terms of these Jews’ being resettled in the East; they did not yet know what “resettlement” meant.
Two incidents, in particular, attracted the attention of the Jerusalem court, both of which occurred in the summer of 1942, a few weeks after the operation had started. The first concerned a train due to leave Bordeaux on July 15, which had to be canceled because only a hundred and fifty stateless Jews could be found in Bordeaux—not enough to fill the train, which Eichmann had obtained with great difficulty. Whether or not Eichmann recognized this as the first indication that things might not be quite as easy as everybody felt entitled to believe, he became very excited, telling his subordinates that this was “a matter of prestige”—not in the eyes of the French but in those of the Ministry of Transport, which might get wrong ideas about the efficiency of his apparatus—and that he would “have to consider whether France should not be dropped altogether as far as evacuation was concerned” if such an incident was repeated. In Jerusalem, this threat was taken very seriously, as proof of Eichmann's power; if he wished, he could “drop France.” Actually, it was one of Eichmann's ridiculous boasts, proof of his “driving power” but hardly “evidence of… his status in the eyes of his subordinates,” except insofar as he had plainly threatened them with losing their very cozy war jobs. But if the Bordeaux incident was a farce, the second was the basis for one of the most horrible of the many hair-raising stories told at Jerusalem. This was the story of four thousand children, separated from their parents who were already on their way to Auschwitz. The children had been left behind at the French collection point, the concentration camp at Drancy, and on July 10 Eichmann's French representative, Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, phoned him to ask what was to be done with them. Eichmann took ten days to decide; then he called Dannecker back to tell him that “as soon as transports could again be dispatched to the General Government area [of Poland], transports of children could roll.” Dr. Servatius pointed out that the whole incident actually demonstrated that the “persons affected were determined neither by the accused nor by any members of his office.” But what, unfortunately, no one mentioned was that Dannecker had informed Eichmann that Laval himself had proposed that children under sixteen be included in the deportations; this meant that the whole gruesome episode was not even the result of “superior orders” but the outcome of an agreement between France and Germany, negotiated at the highest level.