The Stupendous Failure of the Nazi Extermination Program

“The Nazis, for historical reasons, developed an ideology that led them, in 1941, to decide on the annihilation of every Jew, man, woman or child, they could lay their hands on.”

This is a quotation from the “Conclusion” by Yehuda Bauer, summing up the anthology The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London 1994, p. 301). Bauer is supposed to know about these things; he is professor of Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Therefore, let us assume that the Nazis actually decided this complete annihilation – although no documentary proof backing this up has been found so far.

The document that we can base an opinion upon is the so called Wannsee Protocol, which speaks of “evacuation” to the East of all the Jews. Part III of this protocol says:[1]

“Anstelle der Auswanderung ist nunmehr als weitere Lösungsmöglich­keit nach entsprechender vorheriger Genehmigung durch den Führer die Evakuierung der Juden nach dem Osten getreten.”

“Instead of emigration, evacuating the Jews to the East is now another possible solution, subject to prior authorization by the Führer.”

This evacuation (read: deportation) would give “practical experiences […] with regard to the coming final solution of the European Jewish question,” which would include 11 million Jews in all of Europe.

According to the statistics given in the protocol, France would have been the main center of the Jews to be evacuated. (The Jews of Poland, the Baltic States and the Soviet Union were obviously already “in the east,” awaiting the final solution.) A paragraph in the protocol specially mentions France:

“Im besetzten und unbesetzten Frankreich wird die Erfassung der Juden zur ­Evakuierung aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach ohne große Schwierigkeiten vor sich gehen können.”

“In occupied and unoccupied France, the registration of Jews for evacuation will in all likelihood proceed without great difficulty.”

Let us see how this evacuation, supposedly easy to perform, turned out when it came to implementing the plan.

In both parts of France, there were 865,000 Jews according to the list on page 6 of the protocol, thereof 165,000 in the occupied zone. Within less than a year from 20 January 1942, the other zone was occupied as well, thereby further facilitating the evacuation. With a rate of a normal trainload of 1,000 Jews per day, these 865,000 could all have been safely “in the east” before the invasion of 6 June 1944. In reality, however, the evacuation started on 27 March 1942, a whole month after the conference (and more than 20 months after the capture of France). During the first 100 days, the SS managed to deport, not 100,000, but 13,000 Jews. Within the first year of evacuation, a total of 52,000 Jews had been moved east. Thereafter, a three months’ break followed.

The next 14 months, after the break, involved the evacuation of 74,000 more Jews, before it was time for the Germans to evacuate themselves from France, leaving behind 789,000 Jews – as the Wannsee experts would have considered.

We have every reason to suspect that the Wannsee figure of 865,000 Jews in France in January 1942 was greatly exaggerated – some sources give only 310,000. The uncertainty is due to the fact that no one knows how many fugitive Jews there were in the unoccupied zone. But even if this latter figure be the correct one, the Nazis should have been able to get four times as many Jews out of France as they actually extracted – there was plenty of time, and the Wannsee experts anticipated no difficul­ties. Ten trains a month would have sufficed. There were probably more than 250,000 French citizens among the Jews in France, but less than 20,000 (8 percent) of these were among those deported (according to Klarsfeld[2]). If the idea was to make France judenfrei (free of Jews), the deportations were obviously an utter failure. Especially since the German authorities apparently believed that there were about 790,000 Jews left in France, Himmler ought to have dismissed Eichmann already in 1943.

France was not quite exceptional either. A comparison of the deportation figures listed the orthodoxy’s leading study on demographic tendencies in Europe during World War Two, Wolfgang Benz’s Dimension des Völkermords,[3] with the Jewish population figures from the Wannsee Protocol, shows that the rate of deportation was 0 percent for Finland, 8 percent for Denmark, 12 percent for Romania, 15 percent for Italy and 24 percent for Bulgaria. The deportation rate for Hungary was 59 percent (437,000 individuals) according to Dimension (see the table at the end of this article). But as a matter of fact, even the Hungarian Jews were left unmolested for a period of more than two years after the Wannsee Conference. They would hardly have been deported at all during the War, if Hungary had held its position against the Red Army – or against the German Army. It is well known that the deportations of Hungarian and Italian Jews started only after Germany had occu­pied these countries. Finland was never occupied by Germany and, quite so, the Finnish Jews were not molested at all. The conscripts among them had to fight the Red Army like any other conscript in Finland,

According to Dimension, a little more than a million Jews (1,069,000) were deported from western and southern Europe to camps in Poland. Compared with the population figures of the Wannsee Protocol, this would mean a deportation rate of 39 percent altogether (1,069,000 out of 2,725,000). This was the achievement of a state that was able to conquer the Netherlands, Belgium and France in a number of weeks. It was also able to supply the Barbarossa armies, running into millions, seven or eight hundred kilometers from its bases for months on end. To deport people at a rate of one train a week is just a mere trifle in comparison.

These facts conflict heavily with the uncompromising and all-including decision that Yehuda Bauer says was taken already in 1941 (“every Jew, man, woman and child”). Of course, the Nazis could have deported at least 80 percent of all the Jews within their domain in less than a year, if they had decided to do so, They got hold of 80 percent of the Greek Jews and deported them, according to Dimension. So why only 9 percent of the French Jews? And why were the Danish Jews sent to Theresienstadt and not to Auschwitz as most of the others? It looks like the deportation policy had a very low priority on Hitler’s war-time agenda. Just because French Prime Minister Pierre Laval opposed the deportation of French‑born Jews, Himmler and Eichmann yielded and acquiesced in receiving only foreign Jews and French Jews naturalized after 1927 – and probably not all Jews in these categories either. Laval actually saved at least a quarter of a million Jews from deportation, including practically all French‑born Jews. Retaining good terms with the Vichy Government was obviously more important for Hitler than the extermi­nation of 240,000 Jews (or 790,000, as he might have believed).

In the case of Denmark, it is obvious that the German occupation troops and frontier guards did not do what they could to stop the Jews from fleeing to Sweden across the Sound. And when only a few hundred of elderly Jews were left after the general escape, these were all sent to Theresienstadt instead of Auschwitz. This made it possible for the Danish Government to get some insight into the conditions of the deportees. As a matter of fact, non of them was murdered or executed. The treatment of the Danish and the French Jews did certainly not conform at all with the Wannsee Program.

The same holds, more or less, for the Jews in all the countries west and south of Poland, At least one million Jews were left undeported in these countries. The Nazis themselves apparently believed that more than 1,600,000 Jews were living unmolested in the area that they controlled. The Wannsee Protocol notes that, from the Nazi’s Machtübernahme until the end of 1941, of 537,000 Jews had legal emigrated legally from Germany, Austria and Bohemia‑Moravia, which would mean no less than 68 percent of the total Jewish population in that area. This emigration occurred mainly in times of peace and without any forced mass transports in freight trains.

One can hardly avoid the conclusion that the war actually slowed down the German efforts to make Europe judenfrei. In order to attain military goals, such as the control of Crete or the Caucasian oilfields, no costs were regarded too high. Even the well‑being of the soldiers would justify the use of one or two trains a day for bringing home soldiers on leave from Norway and back, Obviously, there was an abundance of transport needs regarded as more urgent than the fulfillment of the Wannsee Program. And what about Hitler’s putative decision to annihilate every Jew, man, woman or child, who his henchmen could lay their hands on? Could it be that the distinguished Professor Bauer is mistaken, after all?

Endnotes