Eichmann had been especially upset by the arrangements in Holland, because it was clearly Himmler himself who was cutting him down to size, quite apart from the fact that the zeal of the gentlemen in residence created great difficulties for him in the timing of his own transports and generally made a mockery of the importance of the “coordinating center” in Berlin. Thus, right at the beginning, twenty thousand instead of fifteen thousand Jews were deported, and Eichmann's Mr. Zöpf, who was far inferior in rank as well as in position to all others present, was almost forced to speed up deportations in 1943. Conflicts of jurisdiction in these matters were to plague Eichmann at all times, and it was in vain that he explained to anybody who would listen that “it would be contradictory to the order of the Reichsführer S.S. [i.e., Himmler] and illogical if at this stage other authorities again were to handle the Jewish problem.” The last clash in Holland came in 1944, and this time even Kaltenbrunner tried to intervene, for the sake of uniformity. In Holland, Sephardic Jews, of Spanish origin, had been exempted, although Jews of that origin had been sent to Auschwitz from Salonika. The judgment was in error when it ventured that the R.S.H.A. “had the upper hand in this dispute” —for God knows what reasons, some three hundred and seventy Sephardic Jews remained unmolested in Amsterdam.
The reason Himmler preferred to work in Holland through his Higher S.S. and Police Leaders was simple. These men knew their way around the country, and the problem posed by the Dutch population was by no means an easy one. Holland had been the only country in all Europe where students went on strike when Jewish professors were dismissed and where a wave of strikes broke out in response to the first deportation of Jews to German concentration camps—and that deportation, in contrast to those to extermination camps, was merely a punitive measure, taken long before the Final Solution had reached Holland. (The Germans, as de Jong points out, were taught a lesson. From now on, “the persecution was carried out not with the cudgels of the Nazi storm troops…, but by decrees published in Verordeningenblad…, which the Joodsche Weekblad was forced to carry. Police raids in the streets no longer occurred and there were no strikes on the part of the population.) However, the widespread hostility in Holland toward anti-Jewish measures and the relative immunity of the Dutch people to anti-Semitism were held in check by two factors, which eventually proved fatal to the Jews. First, there existed a very strong Nazi movement in Holland, which could be trusted to carry out such police measures as seizing Jews, ferreting out their hiding places, and so on; second, there existed an inordinately strong tendency among the native Jews to draw a line between themselves and the new arrivals, which was probably the result of the very unfriendly attitude of the Dutch government toward refugees from Germany, and probably also because anti-Semitism in Holland, just as in France, focused on foreign Jews. This made it relatively easy for the Nazis to form their Jewish Council, the Joodsche Raad, which remained for a long time under the impression that only German and other foreign Jews would be victims of the deportations, and it also enabled the S.S. to enlist, in addition to Dutch police units, the help of a Jewish police force. The result was a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country; it can be compared only with the extinction, under vastly different and, from the beginning, completely desperate conditions, of Polish Jewry. Although, in contrast with Poland, the attitude of the Dutch people permitted a large number of Jews to go into hiding—twenty to twenty-five thousand, a very high figure for such a small country—yet an unusually large number of Jews living underground, at least half of them, were eventually found, no doubt through the efforts of professional and occasional informers. By July, 1944, a hundred and thirteen thousand Jews had been deported, most of them to Sobibor, a camp in the Lublin area of Poland, by the river Bug, where no selections of able-bodied workers ever took place. Three-fourths of all Jews living in Holland were killed, about two-thirds of these native-born Dutch Jews. The last shipments left in the fall of 1944, when Allied patrols were at the Dutch borders. Of the ten thousand Jews who survived in hiding, about seventy-five per cent were foreigners—a percentage that testifies to the unwillingness of Dutch Jews to face reality.
At the Wannsee Conference, Martin Luther, of the Foreign Office, warned of great difficulties in the Scandinavian countries, notably in Norway and Denmark. (Sweden was never occupied, and Finland, though in the war on the side of the Axis, was the one country the Nazis hardly ever even approached on the Jewish question. This surprising exception of Finland, with some two thousand Jews, may have been due to Hitler's great esteem for the Finns, whom perhaps he did not want to subject to threats and humiliating blackmail.) Luther proposed postponing evacuations from Scandinavia for the time being, and as far as Denmark was concerned, this really went without saying, since the country retained its independent government, and was respected as a neutral state, until the fall of 1943, although it, along with Norway, had been invaded by the German Army in April, 1940. There existed no Fascist or Nazi movement in Denmark worth mentioning, and therefore no collaborators. In NORWAY, however, the Germans had been able to find enthusiastic supporters; indeed, Vidkun Quisling, leader of the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Norwegian party, gave his name to what later became known as a “quisling government.” The bulk hundred Jews were stateless, refugees from Germany; they were seized and interned in a few lightning operations in October and November, 1942. When Eichmann's office ordered their deportation to Auschwitz, some of Quisling's own men resigned their government posts. This may not have come as a surprise to Mr. Luther and the Foreign Office, but what was much more serious, and certainly totally unexpected, was that Sweden immediately offered asylum, and sometimes even Swedish nationality, to all who were persecuted. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Undersecretary of State of the Foreign Office, who received the proposal, refused to discuss it, but the offer helped nevertheless. It is always relatively easy to get out of a country illegally, whereas it is nearly impossible to enter the place of refuge without permission and to dodge the immigration authorities. Hence, about nine hundred people, slightly more than half of the small Norwegian community, could be smuggled into Sweden.
It was in DENMARK, however, that the Germans found out how fully justified the Foreign Office's apprehensions had been. The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe—whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. To be sure, a few other countries in Europe lacked proper “understanding of the Jewish question,” and actually a majority of them were opposed to “radical” and “final” solutions. Like Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Bulgaria proved to be nearly immune to anti-Semitism, but of the three that were in the German sphere of influence, only the Danes dared speak out on the subject to their German masters. Italy and Bulgaria sabotaged German orders and indulged in a complicated game of double-dealing and double-crossing, saving their Jews by a tour de force of sheer ingenuity, but they never contested the policy as such. That was totally different from what the Danes did. When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate resignation. It was decisive in this whole matter that the Germans did not even succeed in introducing the vitally important distinction between native Danes of Jewish origin, of whom there were about sixty-four hundred, and the fourteen hundred German Jewish refugees who had found asylum in the country prior to the war and who now had been declared stateless by the German government. This refusal must have surprised the Germans no end, since it appeared so “illogical” for a government to protect people to whom it had categorically denied naturalization and even permission to work. (Legally, the prewar situation of refugees in Denmark was not unlike that in France, except that the general corruption in the Third Republic's civil services enabled a few of them to obtain naturalization papers, through bribes or “connections,” and most refugees in France could work illegally, without a permit. But Denmark, like Switzerland, was no country pour se débrouiller.) The Danes, however, explained to the German officials that because the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Nazis could not claim them without Danish assent. This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not statelessness per se that saved the Jews but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them. Thus, none of the preparatory moves, so important for the bureaucracy of murder, could be carried out, and operations were postponed until the fall of 1943.