This book puts the murder of European Jews in much broader contexts than is usual. It describes Germans’ mindsets and interests that influenced the destruction. It considers episodes of mass violence against non-Jewish groups and relates and compares them to the fate of Jews. And it takes the policies of non-German states and the behavior of other societies into account. The book's point of departure is that we should analyze modern mass violence as a multi-causal, participatory process that victimizes multiple groups. This approach is meant to uncover dynamics that are not visible when one examines the fate of one persecuted group alone, or when one only examines the history of the state and of political ideas.

As a result, this study emphasizes, more than others, the impact of popular racism (rather than scientific notions of race), nationalism and economic interests on the persecution of Jews and other groups, particularly interests in gains for the non-Jewish bourgeoisie and the educated middle class. My findings suggest that in many regards the background to persecution by Nazi Germany and other countries did not differ as much as is often portrayed. In each country (other than Germany), individual, group and what were perceived as national interests mattered more than Germany's. These national interests did not go uncontested and were sometimes the subject of public debate, as was the violence. Among Germans, these interests were much less contested since there was less social conflict within Germany than there was elsewhere. Facing persecution from forces beyond merely the state, Jews’ survival strategies were adapted to deal with the situation of being under threat also from large parts of the population.

Logics of persecution: Economy, ideology and multi-causality

The persecution of European Jews was unusual in many ways; for example, it was a transnational and international action. Yet, like other political processes, it is explainable, since it was structured by a variety of actors with identifiable attitudes and interests. The latter were more changeable than the former, although interests too could have a long-term character and impact. Explanations of the extermination of European Jews will probably always remain controversial. This book has offered elements of an explanation by exploring different logics of the persecution of Jews: racist thought, imperialistic chauvinism, counterinsurgency strategies, various economic-material factors and foreign policy goals. Although I have discussed these threads one by one, they were in reality interwoven.

On November 25, 1941, the largest political show of force of Hitler's international coalition took place in Berlin. High representatives of thirteen member states of the Anti-Comintern Pact – Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Manchukuo, Spain, Bulgaria, Nanking China, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Romania and Slovakia – met to demonstrate their participation in the fight against the Communist International and also their mutual political support in general. The last seven signed the revised treaty on that day. The German press called the meeting a “world sensation.” But what a strange coalition it was! Despite their official condemnation of communism, these states varied considerably in their political systems and economies as well as their involvement in World War II. Denmark, an occupied and neutral country according to the Danish Foreign Minister, Erik Scavenius, had outlawed the Communist Party but would not declare war on any state (including the USSR) because the population would not support that. Franco's regime in Spain, which had come to power in what it portrayed as a largely anti-communist civil war, argued that it had to remain neutral in World War II because of the devastation it had already suffered. Finland's Foreign Minister, Rolf Witting, was happy that his country fought against the USSR but did not commit itself to declaring war on Great Britain. By contrast, Bulgaria did so in December 1941 while at the same time refusing to declare war on the Soviet Union, despite its fiercely anti-communist government, because of its historic cultural ties with Russia. Hungary and Romania, which both had troops on the Eastern Front, also had troops amassed along their common border and within weeks would come close to armed hostilities against each other; and Romania's Antonescu conspired against Hungary during the meeting in Berlin. And the Japanese representative, Ambassador General Nagisa Oshima, did not even reveal (either openly or in secret talks) that his country would attack the USA within two weeks, let alone the fact that Japan would not invade the Soviet Union. Of the thirteen member states of the Anti-Comintern Pact in late 1941, only seven entered the war with the USSR.

Nazi ideology is often given a major or overriding importance in explaining the murder of the European Jews. Many scholars see racism and anti-Jewish attitudes at the core of this ideology. Some historians argue that anti-Jewish ideas were necessary or a precondition for extermination but not sufficient to explain it. Some have portrayed hatred of Jews as being at the center of Nazi ideology, in contrast to those who put anti-Judaism in a broader context of racism and social utopias. In fact, “anti-Semitism,” though important, does not explain “eugenics, pro-natalism, killing the disabled, militarism, expansionism, or Nazi racial policies aimed at Gypsies, blacks, Slavs, or the ‘asocial.’ ” This chapter takes a closer look at the sometimes surprising inner workings of Nazi and German racist thought in order to locate anti-Jewish sentiments therein and explain differences between racial theory and political practice.

Racism as a form of ascribing a common ancestry to groups, assuming qualitative differences, and justifying social hierarchies among them on that basis, has been known in many cultures and for thousands of years. European ‘scientific’ racism evolved in the seventeenth century – first as a legitimation of European superiority over non-European peoples, supplemented in the nineteenth century by the idea that large human collectives within Europe differed biologically. In the second half of the 1800s, some degree of racist thought became common among European thinkers. This way of thinking influenced the spread of nationalism in Europe (and beyond), generating something that has been called “ethnopolitics,” and certain aspects of such racism have been portrayed as “rebellion against modernity.” Racial thinking seemed to provide orientation during a time of social upheaval that was being brought about by industrial capitalism and moral crisis.

According to Nazi-German racists, race membership determined everyday and political life. They explained history as a sequence of struggles among races, for example, over land for sustenance. Increasingly, races were assumed to be of different values, as were the people who belonged to them. Racists ascribed certain mentalities, character traits, patterns of behavior and cultural achievements to each race, usually putting their own race first. In Germany, people of the ‘Nordic’ race were supposed to be of the highest quality. One German didactical book hierarchically ordered the races as follows: white people over people of color; among whites, Aryans over Jews; and among Aryans, the “Nordic” races over the eastern ones.

This book offers a particular perspective on the destruction of the European Jews. It places the persecution of Jews in the context of interdependent policies regarding warfare, occupation and policing, social issues, economics, racist thought and popular racism. The study also describes the murder of Jews amidst massive violence against other groups and attempts to make connections among these different sorts of violence. This differs from narratives that examine the persecution and murder of Jews alone with little regard to the fate of other groups, on the basis of a history of ideas with relatively few other forms of contextualization. In addition, this book gives more prominence than many other works to the persecution of Jews by non-Germans and tries to provide a general analysis of this persecution across national boundaries.

This book's perspective is derived from a new approach to understanding mass violence that I have recently suggested. In brief, I find the prevailing explanations too state centered, too focused on the intents and plans of rulers and too concentrated on race and ethnicity as causes, and they are usually concerned with the persecution of one group that is treated in isolation from other victim groups. Historically, by contrast, various population groups in many countries were victims of massive physical violence in which diverse social groups, acting together with state organs, participated for a multitude of reasons. These three aspects – the participatory character of violence, multiple victim groups and multi-causality – were interconnected. Simply put, the occurrence and thrust of mass violence depends on broad and diverse support, but this support is based on a variety of motives and interests that cause violence to spread in different directions and in varying intensities and forms. In emphasizing that mass violence is based on complex participatory processes, I speak of extremely violent societies. These phenomena can be traced through many important historical cases of mass violence such as the Soviet Union from the 1930s through the 1950s, the late Ottoman Empire (including the destruction of the Armenians), Cambodia, Rwanda and North America in the nineteenth century.

The same traits – broad participation, multiple motives and several victim groups – can also be found in the violence of Germans and people from other nations during World War II.

This chapter deals with the interrelated issues of the organizational structures of German mass violence against Jews and others, and of the people who participated in these processes. It contradicts the popular image that Nazism worked on the basis of strict hierarchies, orders and obedience, and that the extermination of Jews was organized smoothly in a factory-like fashion. In reality, the Nazi system was semi-decentralized and permitted a good deal of flexibility, informal coordination and autonomy, but it also generated some friction because it gave individuals and groups room to pursue their own interests.

A semi-decentralized process

Table 6.1 is telling in several ways. It shows that of the five major German extermination camps three different agencies were in charge and three different technologies used. Four of these camps, or rather killing stations, had a regional function and were run by regional agencies. They were primarily used to kill Jews from the areas where they were located. Virtually everyone who arrived there was murdered, unlike at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where staff sorted out considerable numbers of deportees for forced labor. (Regarding the other killing centers, ‘selections’ took place at the location of departure before deportation.) The experimental character of the methods of destruction in the beginning is well known. But although the planning of these five killing stations stretched over a year, new technologies or operational procedures for murder introduced at one site did not lead to a change at the others. All of this shows that the killing process was not fully centralized.

Table 6.1 also indicates that about every second murdered Jew was gassed, if one includes the victims of gas vans at other places than Chełmno and murders in other concentration camps than Auschwitz. About 2 million Jews were shot, primarily in the occupied Soviet territories. The existence of gas chambers and gas vans did not stop the mass shootings, which continued through 1942 and into 1943, claiming far more than half a million victims in 1942 alone. Thus, four major technologies for murder existed in 1942. Much has been made of the smoothly working so-called ‘industrial’ German mass murder that was taking place in extermination camps, but this picture is somewhat misleading given that half of the murdered Jews did not perish in gas chambers, that three of the five major annihilation centers listed above had no crematorium,[…]

Researchers have equipped us with a solid inventory of anti-Jewish legislation in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. However, few analyses across national boundaries exist. This demonstrates, once again, how much the history of the persecution of European Jews consists of separate national histories – which serve, first of all, to create national identities. Accordingly, there is a debate for virtually every country about the degree to which anti-Jewish laws and regulations depended on German rule or political influence, Nazi ideas, or had indigenous origins. Indeed, these discussions dominate the field.

Just a handful of works – a few articles and short book sections – attempt a comprehensive analysis of anti-Jewish legislation outside Germany. Their authors likewise either take German regulations as a yardstick – as, for example, did Raul Hilberg, who emphasized, however, that the intensity and form of persecution by non-German governments differed according to their various and shifting interests – or they assess the extent of German influence as being either small (like Asher Cohen), or large (like Randolph Braham). Donald Bloxham puts the persecution of Jews outside Germany within what he calls an ethno-political context of other violence. All of these authors note that the economic aspects of such legislation were important, but treat them relatively briefly. The entire debate focuses on countries that were either occupied by Germany, depended on it politically, or were otherwise ruled by right-wing authoritarian or fascist regimes: Vichy France and Norway; Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary and Romania; Bulgaria and Italy.

In my view, a comparative analysis should take into account countries that are often left aside in this context, as well as aspects (especially xenophobia) that have not received much attention. This leads to a number of new conclusions. My objective here is, in part, a generalizing and, in part, a variation-finding comparison of government actions, which I shall approach in three different ways: by country, according to historical phases, and, finally, according to various themes that are set out in the content of legislation.

This chapter is restricted to legal regulations of non-German states, broadly understood. German-occupied territories without their own governments are not considered here. I will deal with mere executive measures and orders in later chapters; alongside boycotts, pogroms and other action taken by non-state protagonists. However, I do not aim at purely legal considerations here, and complete coverage of every relevant law is impossible.

During World War II, more than 200 million people in seventeen nations came under German occupation. Germany conquered these countries for a mixture of intertwined political, strategic and economic reasons. Control over them served military functions, but it was also a precondition for exploitation. Because of geographic overextension and the concentration of troops at the fronts, the Germans were usually only able to deploy relatively weak military and police forces to the occupied areas. This resulted in the German view that one needed to rely, first, on indigenous forces and, second, on fear-inducing violence. For this they developed systematic strategies that went far beyond aimless reprisals. Nonetheless, armed resistance movements and guerrilla warfare sprang up in many areas. Across Europe, German repression led to the deaths of about a million people (most of whom were not Jews), often unarmed civilians, primarily in rural areas.

In comparison to work about the impact of repression on the countryside, there has been little systematic research on German methods of terror for suppressing urban resistance. Though it is clear that thousands were detained, deported to German camps and often murdered, numbers specifically for urban victims of terror have not been clearly delineated from other forms of persecution (such as forced labor conscription), and nor are the patterns of urban violence entirely clear.

The fate of Jews was connected in many ways to the persecution of resistance fighters and those suspected of supporting them. Blaming partisan activity on Jews prompted many efforts to kill them, but guerrilla warfare also created spaces where it was possible for Jews to survive. In order to understand these links it is necessary in this chapter to explain, phase by phase, who the partisans were, what their activities consisted of, and which repressive strategies and for which areas Germans developed. These conflicts were not always binary. Other Axis governments killed hundreds of thousands in this context (see Chapter 14). As a result of the German practice of indirect rule, partisan warfare included an element of domestic conflict from the start, and, given deepening social tensions, it often ended in civil war. The end of this chapter discusses the influence of partisan war on the survival chances of Jews. The connection that German politicians and functionaries saw between Jews and insurgency was important, but not their only reason by far for killing Jews.

There was a complex interrelationship between official policies and the activities of non-state actors, whether in Germany or elsewhere. Citizens were affected by government propaganda, but they also, in turn, tried to influence government policies in their own interest. A clear-cut distinction between official and private contributions is not usually possible; state functionaries and citizens cooperated in too many ways. What ordinary people did was influenced not only by the state but also by their social situations, the ideas and actions of enemies and allies from other countries, and deep-rooted attitudes (against Jews and toward diverse related political issues).

A very common question in this context – often the first – is how anti-Semitic the population of a particular country was. There are a number of reasons why this will not be central to this chapter. First, there is no convincing way of measuring anti-Jewish attitudes. With one notable exception (see below), we lack contemporary opinion surveys, let alone a series of them over time. Retrospective polls after World War II about anti-Jewish attitudes before 1945 cannot be trusted as the moral frameworks had changed radically. Second, answers to the question ‘How anti-Semitic was a country?’ are usually speculative, vague and overly sweeping – in part because their bases are national frameworks. Resembling outdated and unscientific inquiries about ‘national character,’ they ignore vast differences among groups (and individuals) within countries. In fact, one important insight is that a great deal of diversity existed. To be sure, it is not enough to state this fact, for ubiquitous contradictions do not account for the very different outcomes in terms of the persecution and survival of Jews. Yet, third, it may be somewhat comforting that popular attitudes toward Jews among the population of a country, though they did matter, were only one factor determining this outcome. Romania is supposed to have been a strongly anti-Semitic country, but survival rates for Jews were higher there than in Croatia, Slovakia and Hungary. Many scholars assess anti-Jewish attitudes in France as being stronger than in Norway, Greece or the Netherlands, and yet the survival rate was much higher in France. This may underline how questionable judgments about a national level of Jew hatred are, but it also indicates that attitudes did not necessarily lead to related action.

Food was a scarce commodity of major political importance during World War II. Unlike in the European Union of today, there were no large European grain surpluses, butter mountains and wine lakes. Instead, Europe – and especially its chief industrial powers, Germany and Great Britain – depended on large overseas imports. However, Germany, her allies, and the countries she occupied, had these deliveries cut off from late 1939 by the British naval blockade. This resembled the situation in World War I, which is why German leaders – and especially Hitler – worried about it. They believed Germany had lost that war because of a breakdown of morale and political willpower in 1918, and that famine (which was supposed to have claimed the lives of 300,000 Germans) had played a crucial role in this collapse, as well as mobilizing proletarians for the 1918–19 revolution. They wished to prevent a repeat of this at all costs. Nazi leaders blamed hunger in Europe from 1939 to 1945 on the Allied blockade, which was allegedly inspired by Jews who were, thus, responsible for the fact that Aryan children starved to death, as Hitler wrote in his testament. Before the war, Hitler had already emphasized that territorial expansion was necessary for German food autarchy. In Mein Kampf he had portrayed starvation as a crucial personal experience and a great threat to the German nation and its culture.

The potential for increasing domestic food production to replace lost imports was low. Food production markedly decreased in most countries, as one would expect, due to a lack of agricultural inputs. The supply of labor fell as the military recruited men from the countryside; less machinery could be used because of the lack of fuel and the military's requisitioning of tractors; horses were also requisitioned; less mineral fertilizer was available since it was produced from phosphate and nitrogen, which were needed for making ammunition; and natural fertilizer was scarce because the lack of imported feed grains and forage meant that the number of livestock had to be reduced as pasture was converted to cropland. The move from animals to grain for human consumption, and from grain to potatoes or sugar beet (which were more calorie-efficient), could only remedy the problem in part.

This chapter focuses on Jewish action and the possibilities of Jewish survival, but also the lack thereof. Concentrating on survival, as such, is unrepresentative because most Jews did not survive. Close to 6 million were murdered; about 1.3 million Jews once living under German rule – or in countries allied with Germany – lived to see the end of the war in 1945 (see Chapter 5). Also, the experiences of the survivors are not always representative of all the persecuted. For instance, living in a camp – so prominent in survivors’ accounts and the imagination of today's public – was far from a universal Jewish experience (unlike other victim groups, like Soviet POWs and Polish and Soviet forced laborers). A majority of Jews were in camps, but I estimate that 2.5 million never so much as spent a single night in a camp. This number includes those Jews, predominantly in the occupied Soviet territories, who Germans and their helpers massacred close to their towns; and those who were deported to extermination camps and murdered within hours of their arrival. Life in confinement of other kinds (in ghettos, Jewish neighbour-hoods, or ‘Jew houses’) was more typical. But as this chapter also deals with many failed attempts to survive, and the reasons for these failures, it does account for Jewish responses in general to German and Axis persecution, which has been covered before.

The perspective of this chapter is narrow in that it does not offer a full account of Jewish life and emotions during the persecution. Like most other parts of this book, it analyzes actions, as a principle, and tries to explain their background, also in terms of ideas and emotions. But, like elsewhere, I do not elaborate much on thoughts, attitudes and emotions that did not lead to action. I think that a total history of that side of life, in all its aspects, remains to be written (as it does for perpetrators too). In particular, we have not fully understood the everyday lives of the persecuted in which, it seems to me, not everything was related to being persecuted. This would have to have been so. Psychologically, their everyday lives can be understood in terms of an instinctive distancing of themselves from the dangers they faced.

As described in Chapter 4, Hitler had decided in principle in December 1941 to kill the Jews in Europe, Göring had given the matter urgency in August 1942, and by June 1942 Himmler had adopted a plan to murder all of the Jews within one year, i.e., by the middle of 1943. But none of this meant that annihilation would run automatically or smoothly. Further mass murders required new impulses and institutional support based on the views and interests of German functionaries. They also needed the consent of foreign governments, bureaucracies and, to a certain extent, populations. Moreover, in the second half of World War II, Germany occupied one friendly country after the other in order to prevent them from switching sides, and this brought new Jewish communities under more direct German control. This expanded and prolonged efforts aimed at the extermination of Jews, with greatly varying outcomes.

By the end of 1942, the great majority of Jews within the German sphere of influence had been murdered. About 4.5 million were dead, about 1.1 million lived in German-occupied countries (primarily Poland and France), and some 1.2 million others lived in countries allied with Germany but not occupied (above all, Hungary and Romania). About 3 million Jews perished from May to December 1942, 2 million in the four horrible months from July to October 1942 alone.

This chapter provides a survey of the major mass murders of the second half of World War II, and is based on the assumption that they did not happen randomly. Rather, the places and times of their occurrence were the result of certain political groups, and their considerations, winning the upper hand over other groups and considerations. The fact that the pace of mass murder clearly slowed after the end of 1942 was also due to a number of political factors. In German-occupied countries without dependent national governments, the German demand for Jewish labor decelerated the destruction. In several countries with a national government, whether under German occupation or not, the readiness of regimes, non-German administrations and local non-state actors to hand over their Jewish compatriots decreased considerably. Such reluctance had already begun to develop between August and November 1942, most notably, and in remarkably parallel fashion, in Romania, Italy, France and Slovakia – but also, to a certain degree, in occupied Poland, though for other reasons.

From the onset of Nazi rule, Jews were the targets of hostile propaganda in the German media, on posters and banners, and in mass gatherings. The central government under Hitler desired this atmosphere. However, there was no single authority in charge of the persecution of Jews. Rather, different state and Nazi Party agencies – central, regional and local – pursued their own anti-Jewish policies. These policies were related to other political areas, for no authority and virtually no single official in the government or Party was responsible for Jews alone. There was no consistent, undisputed, overall strategy. Accordingly, this chapter tries to sketch anti-Jewish policies in Germany, the relevant agents from 1933 through mid 1941 on different levels, legislation and centralized action, popular violence, communal policies and Jewish behavior. The chapter also covers the first years of German anti-Jewish policies in annexed and occupied countries until mid 1941, before the systematic massacres started.

The Nazi Party was handed power on January 30, 1933, at the low point of the Great Depression. Within months, it erected a dictatorship, introduced press censorship, took control of radio broadcasting, outlawed all other political parties and suppressed leftist opposition through mass arrests and detention, partially in improvised camps. In the general elections of March 5, 1933, the Nazis, despite their intimidation, did not win an absolute majority. In the months afterwards, however, they gained the often-enthusiastic sympathy of the vast majority of Germans who often flocked to Nazism of their own accord. This mass support was consolidated by an economic recovery stronger than in many other countries, a recovery that was built in no small degree on dirigiste measures – and especially on a massive rearmament effort – and accompanied by the rhetoric of class compromise that in reality gave entrepreneurs a free hand. By 1938, Germany enjoyed full employment. The social crisis seemed to be overcome. Nazi organizations and their propaganda permeated the everyday, but at the same time the regime integrated most of the traditional elites and the middle classes into its politics. The Party's relationship with parts of the Protestant and Catholic Church remained conflicted, incomes were modest, and there was repeated grumbling over scarce consumer goods and too much empty Nazi propaganda. Currency problems restricted foreign trade. Still, birth rates rebounded – indicating increasing confidence.

This chapter deals with a period of time that included several dramatic turns in German anti-Jewish policies and practices. Extermination was not decided upon all at once. Within one-and-a-half years, from the spring of 1941 to the late summer of 1942, the imaginations about schemes for the territorial concentration of the Jews came to include more and more violence combined with ideas for the selective mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union that was to be occupied. This led to intentions to kill virtually all Soviet Jews; to which were then added plans to murder those Polish Jews who were regarded as unproductive, until, finally, the plan to kill all European Jews by 1943 was developed. Such policies came about through a complex process involving different central and regional authorities and agencies – at different levels of their hierarchies – and were the result of a number of intertwined motives. Practice evolved accordingly, though in regionally uneven ways – from selective mass shootings to almost complete annihilation in the occupied Soviet territories in 1941, though in some regions large numbers of Jews were spared for a year or longer; and from selective deportations from many countries to newly built extermination centers; and then the almost complete wiping out of Jewish communities in 1942. Other policies of mass violence also emerged and evolved during 1941–42, including the starving of Soviet POWs and others, forced labor, and anti-guerrilla warfare, all of which were, in some ways, connected to the fate of Jews. All of these developments were closely connected to the war's having become a relentless life-and-death struggle as a result of Germany's invasion of the USSR in June 1941 – and the subsequent hard-fought battles; of Germany's feverish efforts to support the Eastern Front with a wartime economy hampered by scarcity; and by the start of guerrilla uprisings in several countries. Non-German policies and actions against Jews and others must also be borne in mind.

It is important to examine the many initiatives and twists and turns in German decision-making because such patterns indirectly provide insights into more profound questions about the motives behind, the forces driving, and the political structures responsible for the extermination of Jews.