Among the first countries in which the executors of the Final Solution were confronted with these conditions was the puppet state of CROATIA, in Yugoslavia, whose capital was Zagreb. The Croat government, headed by Dr. Ante Pavelic, very obligingly introduced anti-Jewish legislation three weeks after its establishment, and when asked what was to be done with the few dozen Croat Jews in Germany, it sent word that they “would appreciate deportation to the East.” The Reich Minister of the Interior demanded that the country be judenrein by February, 1942, and Eichmann sent Hauptsturmführer Franz Abromeit to work with the German police attaché in Zagreb. The deportations were carried out by the Croats themselves, notably by members of the strong Fascist movement, the Ustashe, and the Croats paid the Nazis thirty marks for each Jew deported. In exchange, they received all the property of the deportees. This was in accordance with the Germans' official “territorial principle,” all European countries, whereby the state inherited the property of every murdered Jew who had resided within its boundaries, regardless of his nationality. (The Nazis did not by any means always respect the “territorial principle”; there were many ways to get around it if it seemed worth the trouble. German businessmen could buy directly from the Jews before they were deported, and the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, initially empowered to confiscate all Hebraica and Judaica for German anti-Semitic research centers, soon enlarged its activities to include valuable furnishings and art works.) The original deadline of February, 1942, could not be met, because Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory, but after the Badoglio coup Hermann Krumey, another of Eichmann's men, arrived in Zagreb, and by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers.
Only then did the Germans realize that the country was still not judenrein. In the initial anti-Jewish legislation, they had noted a curious paragraph that transformed into “honorary Aryans” all Jews who made contributions to “the Croat cause.” The number of these Jews had of course greatly increased during the intervening years. The very rich, in other words, who parted voluntarily with their property were exempted. Even more interesting was the fact that the S.S. Intelligence service (under Sturmbannfühhrer Wilhelm Höttl, who was first called as a defense witness in Jerusalem, but whose affidavit was then used by the prosecution) had discovered that nearly all members of the ruling clique in Croatia, from the head of the government to the leader of the Ustashe, were married to Jewish women. The fifteen hundred survivors among the Jews in this area five per cent, according to a Yugoslav government report—were clearly all members of this highly assimilated, and extraordinarily rich, Jewish group. And since the percentage of assimilated Jews among the masses in the East has often been estimated at about five per cent, it is tempting to conclude that assimilation in the East, when it was at all possible, offered a much better chance for survival than it did in the rest of Europe.
Matters were very different in the adjoining territory of SERBIA, where the German occupation army, almost from its first day there, had to contend with a kind of partisan warfare that can be compared only with what went on in Russia behind the front. I mentioned earlier the single incident that connected Eichmann with the liquidation of Jews in Serbia. The judgment admitted that “the ordinary lines of command in dealing with the Jews of Serbia did not become quite clear to us,” and the explanation is that Eichmann's office was not involved at all in that area because no Jews were deported. The “problem” was all taken care of on the spot. On the pretext of executing hostages taken in partisan warfare, the Army killed the male Jewish population by shooting; women and children were handed over to the commander of the Security Police, a certain Dr. Emanuel Schäer, a special protégé of Heydrich, who killed them in gas vans. In August, 1942, Staatsrat Harald Turner, head of the civilian branch of the military government, reported proudly that Serbia was “the only country in which the problems of both Jews and Gypsies were solved,” and returned the gas vans to Berli. An estimated five thousand Jews joined the partisans, and this was the only avenue of escape.
Schäfer had to stand trial in a German criminal court after the war. For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison. The military governor of the region, General Franz Böhme, committed suicide, but Staatsrat Turner was handed over to the Yugoslav government and condemned to death. It is the same story repeated over and over again: those who escaped the Nuremberg Trials and were not extradited to the countries where they had committed their crimes either were never brought to justice, or found in the German courts the greatest possible “understanding.” One is unhappily reminded of the Weimar Republic, whose specialty it was to condone political murder if the killer belonged to one of the violently anti-republican groups of the Right.
BULGARIA had more cause than any other of the Balkan countries to be grateful to Nazi Germany, because of the considerable territorial aggrandizement she received at the expense of Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. And yet Bulgaria was not grateful, neither her government nor her people were soft enough to make a policy of “ruthless toughness” workable. This showed not only on the Jewish question. The Bulgarian monarchy had no reason to be worried about the native Fascist movement, the Ratnizi, because it was numerically small and politically without influence, and the Parliament remained a highly respected body, which worked smoothly with the King. Hence, they dared refuse to declare war on Russia and never even sent a token expeditionary force of “volunteers” to the Eastern front. But most surprising of all, in the belt of mixed populations where anti-Semitism was rampant among all ethnic groups and had become official governmental policy long before Hitler's arrival, the Bulgarians had no “understanding of the Jewish problem” whatever. It is true that the Bulgarian Army had agreed to have all the Jews—they numbered about fifteen thousand—deported from the newly annexed territories, which were under military government and whose population was anti-Semitic; but it is doubtful that they knew what “resettlement in the East” actually signified. Somewhat earlier, in January, 1941, the government had also agreed to introduce some anti-Jewish legislation, but that, from the Nazi viewpoint, was simply ridiculous: some six thousand able-bodied men were mobilized for work; all baptized Jews, regardless of the date of their conversion, were exempted, with the result that an epidemic of conversions broke out; five thousand more Jews—out of a total of approximately fifty thousand—received special privileges; and for Jewish physicians and businessmen a numerus clausus was introduced that was rather high, since it was based on the percentage of Jews in the cities, rather than in the country at large. When these measures had been put into effect, Bulgarian government officials declared publicly that things were now stabilized to everybody's satisfaction. Clearly, the Nazis would not only have to enlighten them about the requirements for a “solution of the Jewish problem,” but also to teach them that legal stability and a totalitarian movement could not be reconciled.