How European countries from Norway to France colluded in Holocaust and the mass ... trends now

How European countries from Norway to France colluded in Holocaust and the mass ... trends now
How European countries from Norway to France colluded in Holocaust and the mass ... trends now

How European countries from Norway to France colluded in Holocaust and the mass ... trends now

Given their religious taboos, it was a particularly humiliating fate for Jews — herded into pigsties, of all places.

But much worse was to come for the inmates of this makeshift concentration camp on what had been a state farm. Eleven thousand of them were crammed into a space deemed fit for only 7,000 pigs, then callously abandoned.

After bartering their clothes for food that never arrived, they were left virtually naked, just rags and scraps of newspaper to cover them, as temperatures in the winter of 1941 plunged to minus 40. They starved and froze to death.

Their plight was a matter of amusement for the local government official, who would drop in to inspect 'the Yids', as he called them. He'd divert himself by taking pictures of them 'grazing' on their hands and knees, forced to find whatever sustenance they could from plant roots, twigs, leaves, human excrement and even dead bodies. Rape by their guards was commonplace. So was suicide.

Graffiti: 'Jew (closed)' on a shop window in Oslo, Norway in 1941

Graffiti: 'Jew (closed)' on a shop window in Oslo, Norway in 1941

Victims: A Jewish family in Holland forced from their home, among the 100,000 deported to be killed with the help of the Dutch civil service

Victims: A Jewish family in Holland forced from their home, among the 100,000 deported to be killed with the help of the Dutch civil service

Here was a different type of mass murder from the way the Holocaust is normally reported in conventional histories, which concentrate our minds on the 'industrialised' killing in death camps such as Auschwitz, the so-called 'final solution', with trainloads arriving and being almost instantaneously dispatched to the gas chambers and the crematoria.

But this was only part of the story, argues leading Holocaust specialist Professor Dan Stone, in a new book that turns on their head some of the widely-held notions about that terrible era of genocide 80 years ago.

We certainly tend to get wrong just how widespread the Holocaust was, argues Stone, who is director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The fact that we need to get our heads around — and which many countries still find uncomfortable and refuse to recognise — is that the Holocaust was not solely a German project, but a pan-European crime with tens of thousands of active perpetrators all over the continent.

The horrific killings described above took place beyond the boundaries of the Third Reich and its annexed satellites, in Transnistria, part of the western edge of Ukraine occupied by Romania.

Indeed, it was in remote Transnistria that the single largest massacre of the Holocaust took place — carried out not by Germans, but by Romanian gendarmes, Ukrainian auxiliaries and local militia.

An outbreak of typhus in a camp, spread by lice and fleas, was the excuse to butcher the bulk of the 54,000 inmates. They were forced into two locked stables, which were doused with petrol and set ablaze, while others were led to a ravine in a nearby forest where they were shot. The remaining Jews were made to dig pits to bury the dead, doing so with their bare hands in the bitter cold. Thousands more froze to death.

Stone writes: 'Although the persecution of the Jews that led to the Holocaust was a German project — a point which cannot be overemphasised — it chimed with the programs of many European fascist and authoritarian regimes. Without the willing participation of so many collaborators across Europe, the Germans would have found it much harder to kill so many Jews.'

On the basis of recent research, Stone says, rather than a tale of German occupation, deportation and murder in death camps, the Holocaust should really be seen as a series of interlocking local genocides. The Holocaust was certainly driven, and largely perpetrated by Germans, but actual participation went much further.

Countries such as France, Norway, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania persecuted, expelled and killed Jews. And they did so, not under duress from Berlin, but because to do so fitted with their own long-held anti-Semitic views and nationalist aspiration.

How else, Stone asks, can you explain how the Nazis were able to deport Jews across Europe and beyond, from Norway to Crete, Alderney to the Caucasus, the Baltic states to North Africa?

Collaboration and complicity were everywhere. To make his point, Stone quotes a riddle. 'What do a Swiss banker and a Polish peasant have in common? Answer: a golden tooth extracted from the jaws of a Jewish corpse.'

It is not always recognised that German Jews made up no more than a few per cent of the Holocaust's six million victims. The vast majority were traditional, observant Jews living in small towns — or shtetls — in Eastern Europe. Moreover, most of them were slaughtered face-to-face before the SS-run death camps were even fully conceived, let alone operational.

The arrival of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in German-occupied Poland, June 1944. Between May 2nd and July 9th, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. They are all wearing a star emblem to identify them as Jewish

The arrival of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in German-occupied Poland, June 1944. Between May 2nd and July 9th, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. They are all wearing a star emblem to identify them as Jewish

Jewish woman from Zagreb wearing the newly introduced yellow star and the initial of the Croatian word for 'Jew' in 1941

Jewish woman from Zagreb wearing the newly introduced yellow star and the initial of the Croatian word for 'Jew' in 1941

Millions died not in gas chambers, but gunned down en masse in fields, forests and swamps. Many more were starved and worked to death.

As land in the East fell to the German army advancing into the Soviet Union after June 1941 and areas containing vast numbers of Jews were overrun, special mobile SS killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, followed up, forcing them out of their homes at gunpoint to be massacred in cold blood.

After one such operation — and there were thousands of them — a German soldier described to his wife in a letter home how 'with the first truckload of women and children, my hand shook somewhat as I fired, but one gets used to it. At the tenth truckload, I aimed calmly and shot straight. Infants flew through the air in high arches, and we shot them in mid-air before they fell.'

In another town not far away, another soldier recorded in his diary how he volunteered willingly for the task as a thousand Jews assembled in the town square and were marched to a deep trench full of water in a nearby swamp. 'The first ten had to place themselves next to this trench and undress, then they had to get into the water and the firing squad, that's to say we, were standing over them.

'Ten shots, ten Jews brought down. We kept going until we had finished them all. Only a few managed to keep their composure. Women clung to their men and children to their mothers. It was a spectacle we won't forget quickly.'

A few days later, the same soldier was involved in another execution, 'but here there was no swamp, just some sandy ground. So we 'inserted' the Jews there in the sand'. A horrified local recalled how for days afterwards, blood kept rising to the top of the pit, 'like the ground was breathing . . . it was alive'.

Mass, face-to-face killings like this — such as Babi Yar in Ukraine, where 34,000 were put to death over a 36-hour period — were the norm.

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