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Jews who had been citizens of these countries, taken together as a group,
survived. The scale of suffering, almost one murder for every two Jews,
exceeds that of any other category of people in the Second World War.
Yet it is sufficiently different from the murder rate in the stateless zone,
something like nineteen murders for every twenty Jews, to warrant serious
attention. The history of each country that retained (some measure of) sovereignty despite German influence was, of course, distinct, but the logics of
survival were everywhere the same: citizenship, bureaucracy, and foreign policy.

Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual

and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen,
and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe
were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places where the state was
destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form
of state protection. This meant that the other major German mass crimes,
the starvation of prisoners of war and the murder of civiliansmostly Belarusians and Poles and Gypsiesalso took place almost entirely within
zones of statelessness. These policies together killed about as many people
as the Holocaust, and they were implemented, and could only be implemented, in the same places. Where the state was not destroyed such extremes were impossible.
In states allied with Germany or states under more traditional occupation regimes, where the major political institutions remained intact,
non-Jews who protected Jews were rarely punished for doing so. Non-Jews
who were citizens of states could not simply be killed if they aided Jews. In
the General Government and in the occupied western Soviet Union, however, the punishment for aiding Jews was death. More Poles were executed
for aiding Jews in individual districts of the General Government than in
entire west European countries. This is not because Poles were particularly inclined to rescue Jews, which they were not. It is because they were,
in fact, sometimes executed for doing so, which rarely happened in western Europe. Indeed, in some places in German-occupied western Europe
it was not even a punishable criminal offense to hide a Jew.
Compare the fates of Victor Klemperer, Anne Frank, and Emanuel

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The Auschwitz Paradox 221

Ringelblum, three famous chroniclers of these years. Klemperer was a

German scholar of Jewish origin who wrote a brilliant analysis of the language of the Third Reich. Frank was a German Jewish girl in hiding in
the Netherlands who kept a diary that later became the most widely read
text about the Holocaust. Ringelblum was a historian of Jewish life in Poland who, within the Warsaw ghetto, organized the assembly of an entire
archive, creating one of the most important collections of sources of the
Holocaust. Collect as much as possible, said Ringelblum to a colleague
in the project known as Oneg Shabbat. They can sort it out after the
war. Klemperer lived and so did the person who cared for him; Frank
died but the people who tried to shelter her survived; Ringelblum was
shot along with several people who had helped him. These fates reflect the
different legal structures of Germany, the occupied Netherlands, and occupied Poland during the war.
Because Klemperer was a German citizen with a n
on-Jewish wife,
he was not subject to the general policy of the deportation and murder
of German Jews. Since his wife did not divorce him, he, like many such
German Jewish men, survived. Anne Frank was also a German Jew, but
in fleeing to the Netherlands she lost even the residual state membership
available to her under the Nuremberg Laws. She and her family were
eventually discovered and deported to Auschwitz. She died after a transfer
to Bergen-Belsen, probably of typhus. The Dutch citizens who had hidden her family survived, since what they did was not subject to criminal
prosecution in the Netherlands. Ringelblums history was different. He
was captured and rescued multiple times, aided by both Polish Jews and
non-Jewish Poles. In the end, he and the Poles with whom he was hiding
were all executed, probably together, in the ashes of the Warsaw ghetto.
Most Poles who tried to aid Jews were not killed, but many of them were;
and it was a risk that they all faced. This was the stateless predicament.
For Jews themselves, the existence of a state meant citizenship, even if
only in an attenuated and humiliating form. Citizenship meant the legal
possibility of emigration. Most German and Austrian Jews exploited this
possibility, although they generally lost their possessions and their connections to their previous lives in doing so. Citizenship for Jews meant the existence of a civil code, even if sometimes a very discriminatory one, which

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