Essays on Hitler's Europe

NOTES

Who Were the National Socialists? 1. On all this, see especially Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question” (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 1984), 119 and 300. All figures regarding German -Jewish survivors are merely rough estimates. On this, see Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (New York: Barnes, 1961), 491–92, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1976), 506. Who Were the Fascists? 1. Hamilton notes, for example, that the vote for Hitler among passengers on five German ocean liners in the July 1932 parliamentary elections was above the national average . But to arrive at this figure he assumes that the ordinary seamen voted for the Social Democrats or Communists. This may be so but then it is hard to understand why the people on the Tacoma and the General Artigas, freighters with only a few passengers, respectively voted 62.3 percent and 57.1 percent for the Nazis. Perpetrators 1. The American historian Bruce F. Pauley reminds us in his important work From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xviii, that the U.S. laws passed in the 1920s to restrict immigration were aimed to a large extent at the Jews from Eastern Europe. These laws and the many American state laws forbidding racial intermarriage were closely watched and applauded by Austrian anti-Semites. Public opinion polls conducted in the United States between 1938 and 1942 revealed that only one-third of the population would have opposed anti-Semitic legislation if the government had proposed it. Between July 1938 and May 1939, the worst period of open anti-Jewish excesses in Nazi Germany, from 66 to 77 percent of the American public was opposed to raising the immigration quota to help Jewish refugees, even children. Pauley quotes, on the same page, from a work, published in 1935, by a great scholar of anti-Semitism, Count Richard Coudenhove-Calergi: N O T E S 195 “[T]he overwhelming majority of non-Jewish Europeans today are more or less antiSemitically disposed.” 2. For National Socialist fanaticism, murderous activities, and postwar self-acquittal of the German regular army from generals down to ordinary soldiers, read Omer Bartov’s devastating but scholarly indictment: Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3. Bruce Pauley writes in From Prejudice to Persecution, 298, that five thousand Jewish “U-boats” or “submarines” survived in Berlin, but only seven hundred in Vienna, a city that, before the war, had housed considerably more Jews. Even if we take into consideration the unreliability of all statistical data on annihilation and survival and the differing conditions in the two cities, we have no reason to doubt that a Jew in hiding was more likely to find assistance among the notoriously cynical Berliners than among the Viennese. In Disguise 1. Other works by Nechama Tec, both highly recommended, are Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) and When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 2. There is nothing surprising about Tec’s—or was it Oswald Rufeisen’s?—mistranslation of Papa Rufeisen’s military rank. Many Jews of Central or East Central European origin cherish the memory of an ancestor who served under Francis Joseph, the greatest friend the Jews ever had. It is only natural that the military rank of such a notable forefather inevitably rises with the passage of time. After all, both captains and buck sergeants wore three stars on the collars of their uniform. Who today can tell from faded old photographs the difference between gold stars and white stars? The Incomprehensible Holocaust 1. Philip Lopate,“Resistance to Holocaust,” Tikkun 4, no. 3 (May/June 1989): 56. 2. See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Theses on Revisionism,” in François Furet, Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1989), 304–19. 3. Translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1988). 4. Nechama Tec estimates, in When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 11, that between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand Jews survived the war in Poland, but it is not clear from her account whether these figures include only...