Russia's unexpected counteroffensive had dealt Hitler's vision of Lebensraum in the east a shattering blow. But the dream was not yet dead. Indeed, efforts were under way to establish what Hitler called the New Order, not only in the areas of the Soviet Union that had fallen under German control but in the remainder of Nazi-dominated Europe as well. Hitler intended the New Order to apply ultimately to all peoples of Europe, in ways that differed according to his view of the merits of each group as well as circumstances. The degree of accommodation and resistance among the conquered peoples also varied from country to country as did the attitudes and policies of the few remaining neutral European states.
In all occupied countries elements of collaboration as well as resistance coexisted. Generally resistance did not take substantial form until later in the occupation and then usually due to increasing harshness on the part of Nazi authorities. The first response of many people was one of shock, in large part due to the speed of German conquest. Most people tried to adjust to the changed conditions and hoped to avoid getting into trouble. In some countries, numerous people actually admired Nazism. Fear of communism and a desire for order often motivated such persons. Others considered resistance useless and likely to lead to reprisals. As time passed, and it became clear that Germany would probably lose the war, this attitude waned, but most people still decided to sit out the war rather than resort to active resistance. Still others could see definite opportunities for economic gain and better treatment by collaborating. Resistance was, of course, a risky undertaking and often hampered by a lack of resources. In some countries the terrain did not provide sufficient shelter for resistance operations. The Nazis contributed to the growth of resistance movements by such practices as forcing large numbers of men into their slave labor program. Neutral countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland, saw cooperation as the key to remaining free from German occupation as well as economic gain.
THE GREATER GERMAN EMPIRE
The Germans were the chosen people in the New Order. But Germandom, in Hitler's mind, included not only the Germans of the Reich and the ethnic German minorities of Central and Eastern Europe but also the other Germanic peoples - the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the Luxembourgers, the German-speaking Swiss, the Flemish Belgians, and the English. He envisaged most of these peoples as members of a Greater German Empire. The English were the one possible exception to this. Hitler apparently intended to allow them to maintain their independence as an affiliated state, provided that they demonstrated a sufficiently positive attitude.
Hitler's approach to the Germanic peoples of Scandinavia and the Low Countries varied from area to area, but his final intent was to absorb all of them into the Greater Reich. When his troops overran Denmark in April 1940, he allowed the Danish government to continue administering the country, subject to German supervision. The Danes believed that a policy of accommodation to the conquerors was the only sensible approach. After the German invasion of Russia, the government allowed the recruitment of a volunteer Frikorps Danmark to fight against the Soviets, and in November 1941 it bowed to German pressure and adhered to the Anti-Comintern Pact. Werner Best, who became the top German official for Denmark in 1942, believed that a lenient policy would enable Germany to dominate the country peacefully. But his hopes fell afoul of rising anti-German feeling and increased sabotage activity by a resistance movement that had existed since 1940. All of this led to a crackdown in August 1943, complete with the imposition of military rule for the remainder of the war.
Hitler initially planned a similar policy of moderation for Norway, but Norwegian resistance to the German invasion shattered this hope. It was widely believed in Allied countries that wholesale treachery on the part of many Norwegians had paved the way for Germany's victory. The major culprit in this so-called "5th Column" was believed to be Vidkun Quisling, a man whose name became synonymous with traitor. In reality, there was no 5th Column. To be sure, Quisling, the leader of a Nazi-type political party, had visited Berlin in December 1939 and had urged Hitler to take over his native land. But the Fuhrer had not seen fit to take him into his confidence regarding the projected invasion, and Quisling was as surprised as any other Norwegian when the Germans actually struck. He did move quickly to set up a collaborationist government in Oslo, however, which Hitler did recognize. But the regime proved so distasteful to most Norwegians that Hitler soon withdrew his support. Quisling regained Hitler's favor in 1942, however, and returned to his former position. He retained it until the end of the war, even though Hitler found him increasingly tiresome. Quisling visualized Norway as an independent client-state of the Reich. Hitler had no intention of allowing this, and Josef Terboven, the top German official in Norway, dominated the country. As in Denmark, a resistance movement came into existence soon after the German conquest. According to the media in the United States and Britain, it engaged in pitch battles with the Germans on a regular basis. In reality, its contribution was much less spectacular. Nevertheless, it had one major accomplishment to its credit - the raid on the Norsk hydroelectric plant at Vemork in February 1943, which temporarily cut off the supply of heavy water for Germany's nuclear research program. The Norwegians, who carried out this raid, were trained in Britain by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Churchill had ordered the creation of this organization during the grim summer of 1940 with the stated intention of setting "Europe ablaze." Although the blaze was slow in coming and never did fulfill the prime minister's high expectations, this raid was one of the SOE's most successful operations.
Norway's neighbor, Sweden, maintained its freedom from Nazi occupation, but if Hitler had won the war, it seems likely that it, too, would have disappeared into the Nazi empire. In the meantime, the Swedes cooperated with the Germans and profited from a brisk trade, including the iron ore so vital to Germany's war economy. Sweden also departed from its traditional neutrality to allow German troops to use Swedish trains enroute to Norway, at least on a limited basis.
The Fuhrer originally intended to grant preferential treatment to Luxembourg, but Grand Duchess Charlotte and her government fled into exile and refused to cooperate. As a result, the Germans absorbed the country into the Reich administratively and economically.
In the Netherlands, Hitler originally hoped to gain the cooperation of the Dutch by treating them leniently, somewhat on the order of his initial policy in Denmark. But the swift departure of Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch cabinet to Britain during the invasion of 1940 undercut this approach. Instead, Dutch officials continued to handle routine administration but took orders from Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who had been Hitler's instrument in the destruction of Austria's independence. Seyss-Inquart soon encountered a number of rivals for authority, however. These included the SS, the Foreign Ministry, and various economic organizations. Hitler intended eventually to incorporate the Netherlands into the Reich, and as the first step in this direction, German officials attempted to integrate the Dutch economy with Germany's. While considerable progress resulted, the competition between rival Nazi agencies also led to a great deal of inefficiency and confusion.
Not all of the Dutch were hostile toward the Germans, most notably a Dutch Nazi party, which reached a membership of 110,000. But its leader, Anton Mussert opposed absorption of his country into a Greater German Reich. He preferred a league of Germanic peoples that would include an independent Greater Netherlands, enlarged by the annexation of the Flemish-speaking areas of Belgium and northern France. Obviously, this did not meet with Hitler's approval, but the party proved useful to the Germans in rounding up Jews for deportation as well as helping to recruit volunteers for Waffen SS units and Dutch regiments that served on the Eastern Front. The majority of the Dutch became increasingly disenchanted with German rule and economic exploitation, however, and a resistance movement developed. Its scope of action was limited by the flat, open nature of the country's terrain.
Belgium posed a special problem because of its mixed population. Hitler recognized the Flemish-speaking people of northern Belgium as Germanic and, thus, worthy of absorption into his Greater Germany. The French-speaking Walloons, who lived in the southeast, had highly questionable Germanic credentials. Although a substantial number of the Flemish were sympathetic to the Germans, they were badly split into various nationalist parties. Staf de Clerc's Flemish National Union was the strongest of these, but de Clerc cherished a dream similar to that of Mussert in the Netherlands, in this case a Greater Flanders. Again, this obviously was at odds with Hitler's plans. The Germans also did not want to alienate the Walloons by tying themselves too closely to the Flemish, especially in view of the friendly attitude of Leon Degrelle, an extreme Walloon nationalist and an admirer of the Nazis. After the invasion of Russia, Degrelle even organized a Walloon brigade and served with it on the Eastern Front. Unlike Queen Wilhelmina and Grand Duchess Charlotte, King Leopold refused to leave his people and remained in Belgium, referring to himself as a voluntary prisoner. The Belgian cabinet did escape to Britain and established a government in exile. A resistance movement also came into being but confronted many of the same problems as the one in the Netherlands. It is clear that Hitler ultimately planned to annex Belgium after the war.
Switzerland, like Sweden, remained free from occupation throughout the war. Hitler saw the German-speaking Swiss as the black sheep of the Germandom because of their democratic government and what he viewed as their single-minded devotion to business. To him, Switzerland was "a pimple on the face of Europe." Nevertheless, immediately following the armistice with France in 1940, the OKH ordered planning for an invasion of Switzerland. Hitler intended to absorb four-fifths of the country into Germany while allowing Italy to take the Italian-speaking portion in the south. But planning for Operation Sea Lion and later the actual attack on the Soviet Union relegated the Swiss project to the realm of what might have been. Like the Swedes, the Swiss profited from a vigorous trade with Germany throughout the war. They supplied the Reich with munitions and other manufactured goods as well as meat and dairy products. They also cooperated in other ways. In 1942, they closed their borders to Jews at the very time that the Holocaust was starting, in effect condemning those seeking refuge to a death sentence. Swiss banks also became depositories for funds looted from every country that fell under German domination during the war, including huge amounts from victims of the Holocaust. The Swiss refused to cooperate with postwar international efforts to recover these assets until the late 1990s.
THE "JEWISH QUESTION"
If the Germanic groups were the chosen people in the New Order, the Jews were the damned. While the Nazis inflicted barbaric cruelty on other peoples who fell under their yoke and murdered vast numbers of them, none were subjected to the same type of systematic genocide as that which befell the Jews. Although the term is sometimes applied to many of the Slavs, it is the Jews whom we remember as victims of The Holocaust. From the time he came to power, Hitler clearly planned to expel the Jews from Germany and other territories that fell under his control. Whether he intended from the start to exterminate them is less clear.
The early Nazi approach focused on the imposition of numerous restrictions aimed at making life miserable for the Jews and encouraging their emigration from Germany. Some Jews did leave, but the majority stayed. Many simply lacked the financial means to flee. Others disliked the thought of abandoning their homeland and hoped that the persecution might be temporary. The situation deteriorated in 1935 as Nazi thugs attacked Jewish shops and beat up Jews in the streets. This trend culminated later that year in the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and ethnic Germans.
Persecution became more intense in November 1938 when a Jew assassinated an official of the German embassy in Paris. A wave of terror followed in Germany. The Nazis murdered 100 Jews, arrested 30,000 others, and engaged in the wholesale burning of synagogues and the destruction of Jewish shops. They broke so much glass in the process that this pogrom became known as Kristallnacht (Night of Crystal Glass). In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Nazis forced the Jewish community to pay a heavy indemnity, seized Jewish businesses, and required firms to dismiss Jewish employees. All of this led to a great increase in emigration during the remainder of 1938 and into 1939. The Nazis established a special agency to facilitate emigration in early 1939, but an estimated 140,000 Jews still remained in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia when the war erupted. The great majority of the Jews, who died in the Holocaust, however, were residents of countries not subject to German domination before the war.
With the outbreak of hostilities, Jewish emigration became extremely difficult, and the Nazis eventually resorted to deportation. At first they did little to implement this policy, other than to speculate on where to send the Jews. The most bizarre solution involved a plan to take over the island of Madagascar, a French possession off the southeast coast of Africa, and convert it into a permanent Jewish homeland. But the Germans were never able to gain control of Madagascar. Instead, they designated Poland as the dumping ground for Jews, but the process did not begin until the fall of 1941, when the Nazis launched a large-scale deportation program.
THE HOLOCAUST
Hitler and his associates ultimately chose extermination as the "final solution to the Jewish question," a ghastly process that is remembered today as the Holocaust. Traditionally, scholars, while not contending that the German people were blameless, attributed primary responsibility to Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. But studies gradually appeared, which indicated that Nazi anti-Jewish policies were widely accepted at virtually all levels of German society long before the war and the formulation of the final solution. During the 1990s some historians began to focus on the actions of German reserve police battalions, which were recruited from "ordinary" civilians and participated in killing Jews in Eastern Europe. Daniel Jodah Goldhagen charges that the willingness of members of these units to become executioners reflected a centuries-old and uniquely German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism that sought to eliminate Jews from participation in German society. Christopher Browning argues that Goldhagen exaggerates the murderous nature of anti-Semitism among the German population as a whole and ignores many factors that influenced the behavior of police battalions that had little to do with hatred of the Jews. These included fear of punishment for not carrying out orders, peer pressure, and apathy. He contends that these men acted no differently than would those from other countries, if confronted by such an extreme situation. This controversy has sparked an ongoing debate among historians, not only on the issue of the police battalions but also on other questions involved in the Holocaust. It is now also clear that the German army was involved in committing atrocities against Jews and other peoples to a much greater extent than was once believed.
The concept of the final solution to the "Jewish question" appears to have taken shape gradually. The Germans put the preliminaries into effect in 1939, when 2 million Polish Jews came under German domination. The SS, under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of Himmler's security services rounded up Polish Jews and concentrated them in ghettos in large cities. It is not clear whether the original intention was extermination or expulsion. Death camps, as such, did not come into existence until much later. The task of concentration proved a formidable one, however, and the SS eased the problem by shooting many Jews, a practice that continued when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Special Action Group murder squads carried out this policy in the USSR on a much greater scale than in Poland. The most notorious massacre featured the shooting of 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children in a wood called Babyi Yar near Kiev. In all, the SS killed approximately 1.4 million Jews in this manner by the end of 1942.
The Nazis established the first ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz in October 1939. Others soon followed, most notably the Warsaw ghetto, which became the largest. The Germans provided for the formation of a Jewish Council (Judenrat) in each ghetto, composed of influential members of the Jewish community. These councils received the thankless task of administering the ghettos and ultimately filling quotas of Jews to be sent to the death camps. In this grim situation, the actions of the council members varied greatly, running the gamut of human behavior from slavish submission to open rebellion. The ghetto residents performed what amounted to slave labor for their captors. Fuel and food were in short supply, and deaths from malnutrition and epidemics of diseases were common. Mortality was especially high among children and the elderly. A steady influx of Jews deported from other countries led to badly overcrowded conditions and compounded the original problems.
During the spring of 1941, Heydrich and his underlings began to plan for the possibility of the "biological extermination" of the Jews. By the late summer and fall of 1941, it became apparent that this would be the form of the "Final Solution." On August 20, Goebbels wrote, "The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity. They must somehow be exterminated." The next step in the process toward the Final Solution, starting in December 1941, was the establishment of six actual death camps, using gas. Five of these were located in the Government General of Poland - Belzec, Chelmno, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. But the largest was centered at Auschwitz in an area of southwestern Poland that Hitler had incorporated into the Reich. The commandant, Rudolf Hoss, replaced gassing by carbon monoxide with the more deadly Zyklon-B crystals (hydrogen cyanide or prussic acid) at Birkenau (Auschwitz camp II) and could "process" 24,000 human beings in a day. Heydrich assumed responsibility for the extermination program, although Himmler retained overall supervision, and Adolf Eichmann handled the actual task of arresting and transporting Jews to the camps.
Heydrich and Eichmann were among the most sinister members of the Nazi hierarchy. Blond, tall, and well built with strong, indeed cruel features, Heydrich was one of the few party leaders who looked the part of the true Aryan. Ironically, this paragon of the Nordic "Blond Beast" was probably not "racially pure." He allegedly had a Jewish grandmother. This did not prevent him from executing the Final Solution with cold-blooded efficiency. No less an authority than Hitler admiringly referred to him as "the man with the iron heart." It was Heydrich who convened the Wannsee Conference of Nazi officials on January 20, 1942 to coordinate the Final Solution. Eichmann lacked Heydrich's physical attributes but shared his devotion to duty. He rose gradually through the SS ranks and presided over the program that encouraged Jewish emigration and later enforced deportation.
If life was grim in the ghettos, it was far worse in the death camps. It was also often very short. Upon arrival, men and women were separated along with their children, boys going with their fathers, girls with their mothers. Herded into barracks, subsisting on meager rations, and subject to the brutality of sadistic guards, the inmates performed slave labor while awaiting their rendezvous with the gas chambers. Thousands of inmates became human guinea pigs in medical experiments performed by doctors such as Josef Mengele. Experiments included studies of the effects of freezing human beings or subjecting them to intense air pressure as well as sterilization of women. Some prisoners were deliberately infected with diseases such as typhus, while others were exposed to mustard gas and still others became victims of wounds that were allowed to become gangrenous. The Germans selected some Jews to be members of special units (Sonderkommando), which were responsible for herding inmates into the gas chambers and burning their bodies afterward, although SS personnel did the actual killing. Many Sonderkommando were eventually put to death as well.
Jews considered unfit for labor were taken directly to the gas chambers, disguised as bath houses, where they were told to undress prior to taking showers. The unsuspecting victims, including many young children sometimes received towels to allay fears of what might await them. But once in the "showers," Zyklon-B crystals dropped through holes in the ceiling, releasing lethal gas. After a few minutes of increasing panic and agony, the victims died. Once the gas was pumped out of the chambers, the Sonderkommando entered to carry out the grim task of extricating gold rings from fingers and gold fillings from teeth. The bodies were then transported to the crematoriums to be incinerated.
SS leaders referred to the killing of Jews euphemistically as "special treatment." At first they murdered only those who were unfit for work, but in the spring of 1942 they extended the principle to all Jews in Eastern Europe. In March 1943, the Nazis attempted to speed up the deportation of the remaining Jewish population from areas under direct German control as well as satellite states. Civilian authorities and ordinary citizens cooperated eagerly in some countries, while in others they attempted to foil the Nazi policy. Most of the small Jewish population of Denmark and over half of the Norwegian Jews escaped to neutral Sweden. About 50 percent of Belgian Jews, again a small number, and more than two-thirds of the 300,000 French Jews were also able to elude Nazi efforts to capture them, as were most of Italy's 50,000 Jews.
The Jewish populations of other countries were less fortunate. Nazi death camps took the lives of most of the surviving Jews of Poland and the German-occupied areas in the Soviet Union as well as the majority of those from the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Despite the resistance of the Hungarian government, the Germans ultimately secured the deportation of 500,000 Jews after Germany occupied Hungary militarily in 1944. Most of them died at Auschwitz. Although one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe, Rumania also resisted Nazi pressure to deport Jews to death camps. This was due in large part to the fact that both Hungary and Italy had not cooperated in this endeavor, and the regime in Bucharest did not want to appear to be the "weak sister" among the Nazi satellite states. But this did not prevent the Rumanians themselves from carrying out mass murders of 260,000 Jews. In all, perhaps as many as 5.8 million Jews perished during the Holocaust. Their only crime was the fact that they were Jewish.
Although some commentators have expressed bewilderment that the Jews accepted their fate so docilely, resistance to the Nazi murderers was an exceedingly difficult undertaking. But many Jews did resist. The most notable example was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 when a small, poorly armed resistance force lashed out against German efforts to liquidate the ghetto and send the remaining residents to death camps. It held out against much stronger German forces for 42 days. The Germans, commanded by SS officer Jurgen Stroop, used tanks, artillery, dynamite, and flamethrowers against the rebels, who finally retreated into the sewers and made a gallant last stand there. Revolts also took place in other Polish ghettos, and there were even uprisings in Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Sobibor death camps. All of them failed, but they at least allowed those who participated to die with far more dignity than was the case in the gas chambers. Other Jews fought as partisans in Poland and the Soviet Union, and many joined the French resistance forces.
One of the horrible ironies of World War II was the timing of the Final Solution. The Nazis launched their extermination policy at almost the same time that the German army was suffering its first reverse in Russia and accelerated the killing in 1943 when it should have been clear even to Hitler that chances of a German victory were extremely remote. They were determined to finish the task before the war ended.
Many survivors have related accounts of ghastly incidents that took place during the Holocaust, but the following eyewitness description by a Jewish stoker at Auschwitz perhaps best captures the nightmarish horror of the crime against the Jews. It refers to a situation caused by the arrival at Auschwitz of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews in July 1944. Approximately 75 percent of them went to their deaths immediately, creating a serious problem for the camp's crematoriums, which lacked the capacity to process such a glut of bodies. The stokers had to burn many of the victims in open pits, which also created problems:
While in the Crematorium ovens, once the corpses were thoroughly alight, it was possible to maintain a lasting red heat with the help of fans, in the pits the fire would burn only as the air could circulate freely in between the bodies. As the heap of bodies settled, no air was able to get in from outside. This meant that we stokers had to constantly pour oil or wood alcohol on the burning corpses, in addition to human fat, large quantities of which had collected and was boiling in the two collecting pans on either side of the pit. The sizzling fat was scooped out with buckets on a long curved rod and poured all over the pit causing flames to leap up amid much crackling and hissing. Dense smoke and fumes arose incessantly. The air reeked of oil, fat, benzole, and burnt flesh.
Despite Nazi efforts to keep the extermination of Jews secret, as early as 1941 news of the mass murders began to penetrate into Germany as well as Allied and neutral countries. At first, the reports were greeted with disbelief. Even Jews in the United States and Britain were skeptical. By 1942, however, it gradually became clear that the reports were undoubtedly true. The response or lack of response of the Allied Powers to this genocidal policy has become a hotly debated topic among historians. The Soviet Union was not likely to divert its attention from the desperate struggle against the Germans raging on its own soil, even if Stalin had been concerned about the plight of the Jews. There is no evidence that he was. Britain also focused almost completely on the war, and the United States generally deferred to the British on Jewish policy until late in the conflict. Critics of the Western Allies, and they are numerous, contend that Britain and America refused to pursue a number of options that might have saved some of the Jews. They insist that the Allies should have pressed the Germans to release the Jews from captivity. This, to be sure was not done, but since Hitler was determined to exterminate the Jews, it is inconceivable that he would have responded to such entreaties. Even if he had, how would the Jews have been removed, and where would they have gone? It is highly unlikely that the neutral countries of Europe - Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden - would have welcomed a mass influx of Jews. Clearly, the Allies could have made the effort, but in all probability it would have amounted to a public relations ploy.
Critics have focused especially on what they view as the failure of Britain and America to bomb railway lines leading into Auschwitz as well as facilities in the camp itself. There were good reasons, however, why this was never attempted. Auschwitz lay beyond the range of Allied bombers and fighters until late 1943 when British troops captured the Foggia airbase in southern Italy, and the vastly-improved U.S. P-51 "Mustang" fighter became operational for long-range escort duty. Other death camps in Poland were even more remote. In fact, none of the various civilian groups concerned about the fate of the Jews proposed such an attack until May 1944. The U.S. War Department did not receive any proposals for this until June 18, and then only against a secondary line transporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Officials doubted if such a raid could actually put the line out of commission. Moreover, the Nazis completed the shipment of Jews from Hungary on July 9, sealing the fate of the proposal. The question of bombing Auschwitz itself posed a myriad of technical problems such as inadequate intelligence on the layout of the camp and the inaccuracy of so-called precision bombing. There was a very real danger that bombs, which were intended to destroy the gas chambers and crematoriums, would actually fall on barracks, killing rather than saving many of the Jews housed there. Indeed many Jewish groups opposed such raids because of this danger.
Finally, some critics have contended that late in the war Himmler and Eichmann initiated negotiations with Jewish contacts in which they offered to free large numbers of Jews in return for ransom. The most notable example was Eichmann's April 1944 proposal to free a million Jews in return for 10,000 trucks, which were to be used only on the Eastern Front. Some historians have denounced the Western Allies for not pursuing this option, but others consider such a deal unrealistic and shameful. It would have posed still another moral dilemma since it would cost the lives of Soviet soldiers in order to save Jews. Clearly, Stalin, already deeply suspicious of his Western allies, would have greeted news of such an arrangement with outrage, rightfully considering it a flagrant betrayal. Moreover, it is not at all clear that these proposals were really genuine. They would have to be carried out behind Hitler's back since he was obviously opposed to such a policy, and that would have been highly dangerous to the officials involved. Furthermore, if such an agreement actually did come to pass, there was no assurance that the trucks provided by the Germans would be used only on the Eastern Front.
The attitude of Pope Pius XII toward the Holocaust also has sparked controversy. Critics have taken him to task for his "silence" on the plight of the Jews during most of the war. Some have attributed this to an inability to grasp the scope of the disaster befalling the Jews. Others focus on the Pope's overriding concern for the preservation of the Catholic Church and a reluctance to jeopardize its position by antagonizing the Germans and Italian fascists. It was not until late in the conflict that the Pope's policy began to change, most notably in regard to the Church's participation in saving the majority of Italian Jews from falling into the hands of the Nazis. He also intervened in behalf of Hungarian Jews.
The Jews were not the only people to feel the full fury of Hitler's hatred. He condemned the Roma (Gypsies) to the same fate. The Roma apparently originated in India and over the centuries became dispersed throughout the world. They wandered about in small groups and refused to settle in one place. Hitler considered them "trash" fit only for extermination. The death camps claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 out of a total of 700,000 European Roma.
THE NEW ORDER IN SLAVIC COUNTRIES
Hitler also looked upon the Slavs with utter contempt. For them, the New Order ultimately held only the prospect of expulsion from their homelands, enslavement, or death. But during the war, Nazi policy toward the Slavs varied from country to country.
The Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia were the first Slavic people to fall under German domination. Hitler initially followed a moderate policy toward them because he valued their efforts in producing war materiel and because they cooperated with the Germans. The Czechs did so because they hoped to ensure their continued existence. They developed little in the way of a resistance movement, although former president Benes did maintain an exile government in London. In Bohemia and Moravia, the Czechs carried out routine administration, but the real power remained in the hands of the German official who held the title of "Reich protector." Konstantine von Neurath, the former German foreign minister, was the first to hold this position. Himmler's protégé Karl Hermann Frank, a Sudeten German, served as Neurath's deputy but quickly built up his own rival power base.
At first, Hitler opposed any attempt to "Germanize" the Czechs, but Neurath and Frank persuaded him that Czechs who possessed "Germanic" characteristics were deseverving of such an "honor." The majority of the Czechs, who were not eligible for Germanization, would face expulsion to the east when the convenient time came. Although the Germans developed this policy in secret, the Czechs soon became aware of its intent and grew restless. Hitler considered Neurath too weak to control the situation and replaced him with Heydrich in early 1942. Heydrich followed a carrot-and-stick policy that combined specific benefits to workers and peasants with harsh repression of any dissent. The incentives included increased wages for workers and higher crop prices for peasants. His approach proved effective, and the Czechs became increasingly docile. These developments alarmed the Czech government in exile and the British, who engineered a plot to assassinate Heydrich. They expected his death to provoke German vengeance, which would in turn kindle Czech resistance. The plot was successful; Heydrich fell victim to an ambush, and Nazi reaction was at least as brutal as expected. They totally destroyed two villages after shooting all the men and sending the women and children to concentration camps. The name of one of the stricken villages, Lidice, became a symbol for Nazi brutality. Contrary to the hopes of the British and the Czech exile regime, however, the German reprisals so thoroughly frightened the Czechs that resistance did not develop. Bohemia and Moravia remained remarkably quiet until the end of the war.
Slovakia had become an ally of Germany after the destruction of Czechoslovakia and even sent troops to fight in Russia. As a reward, Hitler allowed the Slovaks to keep their own government under Monsignor Josef Tiso, an admirer of Mussolini's Fascist system who had long opposed Slovakia's incorporation in Czechoslovakia. But despite Slovak collaboration, German economic and military influence increased and in 1944 provoked a revolt that the Germans crushed with some difficulty. Hitler now imposed complete German domination, although the puppet Slovak regime continued to function. He apparently planned expulsion to the east or extermination as the eventual fate of the Slovaks.
The Germans treated the Poles much more harshly than either the Czechs or the Slovaks. Poland had resisted, and Hitler was in no mood to be lenient. In an effort to deprive the Poles of a potential ruling class, the SS shot Polish intellectuals and clergy. They also planned to transfer the Poles from the incorporated territories to the Government General and replace them with German settlers. The Nazis actually began this process during the war with the deportation of 300,000 Poles. Former German residents of the Baltic states took their place and were joined later by large numbers of ethnic Germans whom the Nazis shifted from Russia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. A great deal of confusion snarled the process, and both the Poles and many of the ethnic Germans did not relish their arbitrary transfer.
In addition to absorbing Poles who had lost their homes in the incorporated territories, the Government General had to accept large numbers of Jews and Roma. This huge influx of people created staggering administrative problems for Nazi officials and tremendous pressure on the already shattered Polish economy. Although the Nazis shipped many Poles to Germany to serve as laborers, the bulk of the population remained in the Government General and was subjected to savage oppression. The Germans set out to reduce education for Polish children to a bare minimum and placed severe restrictions on cultural activities in an effort to wipe out a sense of being Polish among the population. The Poles responded by conducting secret classes and doing everything possible to keep cultural vitality alive. An underground press urged the Poles to remain united, resist the Germans, and avoid collaboration. Hitler looked upon the Poles as "slaves of the German Reich." Many were literally worked to death or used as guinea pigs in medical experiments conducted in Nazi death camps.
Hitler appointed Hans Frank to head the administration of the Government General. Long an associate of Hitler, Frank quickly alienated both the Poles and his German associates, and various Nazi agencies soon challenged his power. Himmler and the SS dominated racial policy and supported a program of settling German colonists in the more favorable parts of the Government General while moving Poles to less desirable areas. Hitler apparently intended the final solution to the Polish question to include absorption of the entire Government General into the Reich, the resettling of the area with Germans, and the expulsion or extermination of Poles. The harsh nature of the German occupation led to the growth of resistance groups, many of which merged into the Polish Home Army. Soon after the German invasion of Russia, a Communist resistance organization also came into existence and became a rival to the non-Communist Home Army. The Germans reacted to acts of sabotage or the killing of German officials by shooting hostages and even wiping out whole villages.
Yugoslavia, another Slavic country, experienced varying types of treatment at the hands of the Germans. Hitler partitioned the country soon after completion of the German conquest in April 1941. He divided the northwestern area of Slovenia into German and Italian occupation zones and established the puppet states of Croatia and Serbia.
Many Croats had refused to resist the German invasion and thus became the most favored Yugoslav group. Hitler greatly enlarged Croatia by granting the Croats territories inhabited by Serbs including the province of Bosnia, which also contained Croat and Muslim populations. Ante Pavelich, leader of the extremist Croatian nationalist movement Ustase, became head of the new state and followed slavishly pro-German and anti-Serb policies. He set out to expel or exterminate both Serbs and Jews within his territory and presided over such horrendous massacres that even the Germans were appalled. Estimates of the number of Serbs who lost their lives range from 350,000 to 750,000. Despite Pavelich's subservience, Hitler had actually designated Croatia as an Italian satellite and allowed Mussolini's forces to occupy Croatian territory along the Adriatic Sea. Hitler also maintained German troops in the eastern portion of the country, and when Italy abandoned the war in 1943, Wehrmacht units replaced the Italians in the coastal strip.
The Serbs also lost additional territory to Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria, leaving a state smaller than pre-World War I Serbia. Hitler allowed a Serbian government under the leadership of General Milan Nedich, but the country remained subject to overall German military supervision. Nedich, a former Yugoslav minister of war, cooperated with the Germans because he feared the alternative might be the extermination of his people.
Soon after the German conquest, Colonel Draja Mihailovich, a former member of the Yugoslav general staff, organized a resistance movement, the Chetniks (from cheta, the 19th-century Serbia guerilla band that had helped drive out the Turks). The Chetniks were primarily a Serbian patriotic front and failed to transcend the prewar Serb-Croat rivalry, even though it won the support of the British and later the Americans. Indeed, Mihailovich was especially bitter toward the Croats, whom he blamed for the disintegration of Yugoslavia and for the atrocities against Serbs. He visualized a restoration of a Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia after the war. The Partisans, a Communist resistance movement led by Josip Broz (better known as Tito), proved much more important.
Tito, who was born in Croatia, fought in the Austro-Hungarian army early in World War I. But the Russians captured him in 1915, and he remained a prisoner of war until the Russian Revolution. After his release, he remained in Russia, became a Communist, and saw action in the Red Army during the Russian civil war. When Tito returned to his homeland in 1923, he joined the outlawed Communist movement and became general secretary of the party in 1937. Due to the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, he did not take the field against the Germans until after Hitler's invasion of the USSR. Unlike Mihailovich, Tito strove to create a national movement that would embrace all Yugoslav ethnic groups.
The Partisans also posed a much more serious problem for Hitler than the Chetniks. Mihailovich became concerned that by fighting the Germans, he would expose the Serbian people to reprisals. He also feared that if Tito grew too strong, Yugoslavia would become a Communist state after the war. Bedeviled by these two specters, Mihailovich cooperated with the Germans against Tito, but his policy proved disastrous. Not only did it fail to save his compatriots from savage repression, but it also weakened the Chetniks in the eyes of the Western Allies, who shifted their support to Tito during 1943. When the war ended, Tito controlled large areas of Yugoslavia. Mihailovich fell into his hands, was tried for treason, and was executed. Tito became the ruler of a Communist Yugoslavia.
OCCUPATION POLICIES IN THE USSR
Hitler's occupation policies in the Soviet Union were at least as ruthless as those he directed against the Poles and Serbs. He contended that Germany had but one obligation: "to Germanize the country by immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins." His reference to "Redskins" was an allusion to the United States' treatment of the native Americans, a policy he greatly admired. The Nazis pursued this approach not only toward the Russians but also the Belorussians, Ukrainians, and at least some of the inhabitants of the Baltic states. This policy cost Germany the cooperation of these peoples, especially the Ukrainians, many of whom had greeted the Germans as liberators from Soviet tyranny. Hitler ordered the elimination of all potential leaders as well as Jews and Roma, and for good measure he suggested that anyone "who looked in any way suspicious" should be shot.
The SS and the army, too, carried out his wishes with ruthless determination. Even before the invasion, the Nazis sought to demonize the Soviet regime and the various peoples who made up the population. Their propaganda portrayed Germany's aggression as if it were a preventive war designed to defend the German people from an inevitable attack by barbaric "Asiatic" hordes bent on the destruction of European civilization. It is not surprising then that the SS and the army put the principles of the infamous Commissar Order into effect with utmost ferocity. The leadership of the army also indoctrinated its troops with this perverted view of reality. For example, General Hoth informed his soldiers in November 1941 that Germany's mission was "to save European culture from advancing Asiatic barbarism" and added that: "This battle can only end with the destruction of one or the other; a compromise is out of the question."
Much German-occupied territory in the Soviet Union remained under military administration because of its proximity to the front. Civilian authorities controlled only areas far enough to the rear to be considered safe. As in other occupied countries, German administration was a jumble of competing jurisdictions.
Officially, Alfred Rosenberg, the self-styled theoretician of the Nazi party, exercised full authority over the occupied areas. Although Rosenberg was of German descent, he had been born in the Baltic city of Tallinn in Tsarist Estonia and had fled to Germany to escape the revolution. Rosenberg became an associate of Hitler and appears to have influenced his ideas to some extent in the early 1920s. Hitler may have decided to appoint Rosenberg to his post because of his knowledge of the USSR - limited though it was, it was superior to that of most other Nazi leaders. But from the start, Rosenberg was able to exert little real control while various Nazi rivals challenged his authority.
Himmler and the SS especially operated as a law unto themselves and imposed a policy of terror in an attempt to cow the population into submission. Goering also assumed a lofty role that supposedly gave him control over economic exploitation. But others soon intruded and undercut Goering's position. These included Fritz Sauckel, the head of the slave labor program, and Dr. Fritz Todt, the minister of armaments and munitions.
Technically, Sauckel remained under the authority of Goering as director of the Four-Year Plan, but in reality he wielded virtually unlimited power over recruiting laborers. Todt began as another of Goering's nominal subordinates under the Four-Year Plan and had been responsible for construction of the West Wall along Germany's western border. But when he became minister of armaments and munitions in 1940, he was no longer responsible to Goering and eventually began the process of converting Germany's economy to a full wartime basis. When he died in a plane crash in 1942, Albert Speer succeeded him and greatly accelerated the transformation. In the face of all this competition, Goering's actual control over the Russian economy was never extensive.
To increase the confusion still more, the Germans established two special regional administrations. The first of these supervised the Ostland, an area consisting of the Baltic states and western Belorussia; eastern Belorussia remained under military rule. Hitler selected Hinrich Lohse as Reich commissioner of the Ostland. Lohse had been a close associate of Rosenberg who had counted on his loyalty. But Lohse's primary aim was to build up his own power. In pursuit of this goal, he attempted to play off Rosenberg, Himmler, and Goering against one another.
Each of the Baltic states as well as Belorussia received its own subcommissioner who operated under Lohse's supervision. Wilhelm Kube, the subcommissioner of Belorussia, strove to increase his administrative autonomy and quarreled frequently with Lohse. He was fond of fair-haired Belorussian women and developed a virtual harem of "blondies," as he called them. He did not win their love, however, and one of them eventually killed him by means of an antipersonnel mine that she concealed in his bed.
The other special administration, under the direction of Erich Koch, supervised a large part of the Ukraine. The eastern Ukraine remained under military control. Koch has been described as a man of "monumental stupidity and arrogance." He followed relentlessly brutal policies and cooperated enthusiastically with the anti-Jewish campaign and slave labor program.
German occupation policies helped enlarge the Partisan movement in the Soviet Union, but this process took time. In 1941, most of the Partisans were soldiers who had been bypassed by the German advance and had managed to hold out in forests and swamps. It was not until 1942 that their numbers became notable, and a highly organized mass movement did not develop until 1943. This slow growth was due largely to the fact that the Soviet government and army were unable to devote much time to organizing Partisan warfare because of more immediate problems. Nevertheless, even during the 1941 campaign, small partisan hit and run attacks on German troop columns and garrisons created confusion and concern. This was especially the case during the Battle of Moscow when the Soviets sent units or regular troops behind German lines to augment partisan bands, swelling their number to 10,000.
Germany did not hold its Russian conquests long enough for Hitler to put his long-range program into effect, but he clearly intended to dominate everything as far east as the Ural Mountains. He also planned to annex the Baltic states, Belorussia, much of the Ukraine, and the Crimea. German colonists would have become the master race in this vast area, and the Nazi regime would have enslaved the native populations.
HITLER'S POLICY TOWARD ITALY
Nazi policy toward the Latin peoples of Europe was less clear-cut than that pursued in regard to the Jews and the Slavs. Hitler considered them to possess some Aryan blood but, alas, not enough to qualify as Germanic. Although Italy was a Latin country, Hitler had desired an alliance with Rome from an early date. To obtain that goal he refused to pressure Mussolini to cede the former Austrian territory of the South Tyrol, which contained a substantial German minority. Italy had obtained the South Tyrol in the 1919 peace settlement. His bond of friendship with Mussolini also extended to designating most of the Mediterranean as an Italian sphere of exploitation. But the ouster of Mussolini in July 1943, and Italy's surrender to the Allies shortly afterward put an end to Hitler's generosity. Henceforth, he thought in terms of annexing not only the South Tyrol but all Italian territory formerly belonging to Austria-Hungary and, perhaps, everything north of the Po River.
The Germans quickly occupied roughly two-thirds of the country after the Allies landed in the southern part of the peninsula at the same time as Italy's surrender.
Italy also witnessed the rise of a resistance movement. Dissatisfaction mounted with the early Italian military disasters in North Africa and Greece, and after the German invasion of Russia, Italian Communists became active in organizing strikes in northern Italy. A partisan movement came into being during the German occupation. The partisans harassed the Germans in the countryside and became especially active in the fighting in northern Italy during the last weeks of the war.
COLLABORATION AND RESISTANCE IN FRANCE
Hitler's attitude toward the French, another Latin people, was initially far less forbearing. He took immediate steps to absorb Alsace-Lorraine back into Germany and planned to acquire a strip of French territory extending from the mouth of the Somme to the Swiss border. Until November 1942, Germany's relations with the French differed from those with other defeated peoples because the armistice of 1940 had left part of France unoccupied. Technically, the Vichy regime continued to administer the entire country, but in Occupied France primary control lay with the German army. As usual, the SS and various Nazi economic agencies challenged this authority. Again this led to considerable chaos.
During 1940-41, Vichy leaders, such as Petain and his chief minister Pierre Laval, considered a final German victory inevitable and thought that realism required French adjustment to a German-dominated Europe. Laval served four times as premier, but during his last term his attempt to concede Mussolini a virtual free hand in Ethiopia caused such a backlash that he resigned in early 1936. For the next four years, he receded into the political wilderness and grew extremely bitter toward the Third Republic. Petain rescued Laval from near oblivion in June 1940 when he appointed him to be his deputy.
Admiral Francois Darlan succeeded Laval as the key man under Petain during most of 1941 and early 1942. Darlan owed his powerful position to the fact that he was chief of staff of the navy, and the navy had emerged from the conflict almost unscathed. Even after the British attack on Oran and Mers-el-Kebir in the summer of 1940, it remained an important factor in European power politics. Britain's action against the fleet also helped bring Darlan's latent anti-British sentiments to the surface. Darlan followed a strongly collaborationist policy until Germany's fortunes began to fade in Russia. When he shifted to a less pliant approach, the Germans pressured him out of office. Laval returned to power and remained the dominant leader in Vichy until the end of the regime in 1944.
Most of the French people quickly rallied to the Vichy regime, in large part because they identified with Petain, the hero of Verdun and a symbol of victory in World War I. The French also tended to blame the leaders of the Third Republic for the country's military debacle. Political conservatives had feared a Communist revolt in the wake of defeat and welcomed Petain's government as a bulwark against the left.
The leaders in Vichy badly underestimated Hitler's ambitions. They still persisted in the belief that he was primarily interested in regaining the territories lost in World War I and absorbing all Germans into the Reich. They also admired Germany's authoritarian government, which contrasted so vividly with the instability of the Third Republic. To them, collaboration was the key to negotiating a peace settlement that would be beneficial to France. This policy achieved little except for the gradual return of 600,000 of the 1.5 million French prisoners of war who had been interned in Germany.
There was no shortage of other collaborators. Many industrialists and businessmen were eager to obtain German orders for war materiel and other products. Workers wanted to keep their jobs even if this meant providing the recent enemy with goods. The Catholic Church had often been at odds with the Third Republic over its anticlerical legislation and welcomed the new government's pro-Catholic policies, especially in regard to education. On the extreme right of the political spectrum, several small political groups wanted to go beyond Vichy's more traditional authoritarian government to create a system modeled after those of Germany or Italy.
There were limits to Petain's willingness to collaborate, however. He insisted on maintaining French control over both the fleet and the empire and refused to engage in military cooperation with Germany. He and his colleagues were less squeamish when it came to the Jews. In October 1940, the government passed a law excluding Jews from public office and some professions as well as providing for the internment of foreign Jews. Vichy also made no attempt to intervene against German roundups of Jews and by June 1942 even agreed to participate in them. Much of the population did not appear overly outraged by these actions. The majority of Catholic bishops also reacted weakly to the persecution of the Jews. Whatever their personal feelings toward the victims might be, their primary concern was to safeguard the position of the Church.
To be sure, not everyone was in favor of collaboration. Although for some time General de Gaulle won little support in France itself, a resistance movement did develop, but it remained weak for some time. As in many other countries, the Soviet Union's entry into the war galvanized Communists in France to join the resistance. Germany's forced labor program, again with Vichy's acquiescence, proved to be the chief catalyst to the growth of the Resistance.
The Germans sharply increased the number of French people required for labor service in 1943, but many evaded this fate by joining the Resistance. The Resistance took the name Maquis (French for "underbrush") and adhered to de Gaulle's Fighting French movement. Resistance movements contributed to the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944 by snarling German communications with innumerable acts of sabotage. Early that same year, the Maquis created a unified military force, the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Though poorly equipped, the FFI reached a numerical strength equivalent to 15 divisions and succeeded in liberating much of central France after the Allied invasion.
As in other countries, the Germans punished acts of resistance with great ferocity. The most infamous of these took place in the small town of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France in June 1944. It became even more notorious because it was the result of a mistake. A day earlier a Waffen SS officer fell victim to a sniper's bullet in a nearby town with a similar name. Seeking vengeance, an SS detachment swept into Oradour-sur-Glane, shot the men and herded the women and children into a church where they burned to death when the Germans set the building on fire. In all, 642 persons died.
The ultimate success of the Resistance was a triumph for de Gaulle and his once forlorn movement. In the last few months of the European conflict, an actual combat army, the French 1st, took its place in the Allied line. As for de Gaulle, he was destined to be the dominant figure in France in the early postwar period and, after 12 years in the political wilderness, would emerge again as the founder and first president in France's Fifth Republic.
NAZI POLICY TOWARD OTHER EUROPEANS
Spain, still another Latin country, was also in a unique position. Although the Spanish government had professed friendship to Germany, it had skillfully avoided an alliance. Hitler never forgave Franco for his duplicity. Even Franco's decision to dispatch a Spanish military force, the Blue Division, to fight on Germany's side in the Soviet Union did not eliminate his animosity. If Germany had won the war, Hitler probably would have pressed for the ouster of Franco and his replacement by a more pliable Spanish leader.
During the war, Spain, along with neighboring Portugal, declared a policy of neutrality. This did not prevent Spain from supplying Germany with war materiel as well as large amounts of wolfram, a vital ingredient in the production of armor-piercing shells. After the entry of the United States into the war, Franco set out to cultivate good relations with Washington, while maintaining his hostility to the "godless hordes" of the Soviet Union. As the war turned against Hitler, Spain continued to supply Germany, but its trade with the Allies soon eclipsed that with the Axis. Spain and Portugal were also important destinations for downed Allied airmen and agents as well as escaped prisoners and other fugitives on the escape route operated by Resistance workers. In addition, they, like neutral Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, and Turkey, were centers for diplomatic contacts among the warring powers as well as hotbeds of espionage activity.
The Greeks were not related to the Germans, Slavs, or Latins, but they suffered terribly. After the conquest of Greece, Hitler placed the country primarily under Italian and Bulgarian occupation while retaining German control over certain strategically important areas. He also established a puppet Greek government that proved highly unpopular. When Italy left the war in 1943, German forces occupied the Italian-held area of Greece. A Greek resistance movement developed early in the occupation. It consisted of various rival groups, the most important of which was the Communist Greek Liberation Front (EAM) and its Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS). The Germans responded to Greek resistance by shooting large numbers of hostages and annihilating entire villages. But an even greater horror came in the guise of famine due to persistent food shortages. More Greeks succumbed to starvation than to German firing squads.
WAS RESISTANCE WORTH THE PRICE?
Traditionally, those who served as members of resistance movements in Nazi-dominated Europe have been hailed as heroes and those who collaborated with the Germans vilified as traitors. More recently, however, some historians have questioned whether the resistance was really worth the price it cost in the lives of innocent civilians. Acts of resistance often resulted in the Germans shooting large numbers of hostages in reprisal. In some cases, the Germans even resorted to wiping out whole villages and deporting or killing all their inhabitants. Resisters also often resorted to the same type of atrocities that they decried when committed by the Germans. These included torture, mutilation, and murder of prisoners. This was especially true of partisan units in Russia and Yugoslavia.
Although, many collaborators acted out of desire for personal survival or political and economic gain, some did so because of fear that the alternative would bring down German wrath on their innocent neighbors. To be sure, the resistance performed valuable work in providing intelligence to the Allies in regard to German troop dispositions and strength as well as vital acts of sabotage and aiding the escape of both downed Allied airmen and fugitive Jews. But the question remains: Was the killing of one German soldier or even a handful worth the slaughter of 100 or more hostages? And, to be sure, Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane were not the only villages to be wiped out in German reprisals, as the people of Poland and the Soviet Union could attest.
HORROR AS STATE POLICY
Theoretically, at least, the Nazis inflicted their multiple horrors on Europe on behalf of the German people. Their actions were in keeping with Hitler's basic aims - domination of Europe, creation of Lebensraum, and the expulsion or extermination of Jews and other "undesirables" from Nazi-occupied areas. Whether the German people were in favor of such hideous policies was irrelevant to Hitler. He neither confided in them nor sought their opinions. To be sure, the German people thrilled to the Wehrmacht's early victories and certainly were not ignorant of much of what followed in the wake of these conquests. The extent of that knowledge and the degree of complicity of the German people in these policies are a matter of heated debate, as the controversy over "ordinary Germans" in the reserve police battalions who murdered Jews in Eastern Europe clearly indicates. At present, there would appear to be more confusion than clarity on this most troublesome issue. It is clear, however, that as the war continued, more and more Germans came to realize the enormity of these crimes. With this growing awareness, fear of retribution haunted them, strengthening their will to fight on in hope of delaying the day of reckoning. Certainly, when the war ended, few of them were willing to admit that they knew anything about these monstrous atrocities. Even with the passage of decades it remains difficult to comprehend that one of the world's most culturally advanced nations could have perpetrated these horrors as a deliberate policy of state. But it did.