In Europe

conversely with the degree of ‘anti-Semitism’ in a given country. Anyone providing shelter for a Jewish family in Germany ran an infinitely greater risk of being informed on than someone in Belgium. In Poland, hiding Jews was a capital offence, in Vichy France the penalty was only a short prison term. There were in Warsaw's ghetto alone more Jews than in all of France. Where were they to go? In oft-praised Denmark, the actions – without wishing to detract from the courage of the Danish resistance – involvedonly a very small number of Jews, who could be helped to escape with relative ease. Consider, by comparison, the problems faced by the resistance in the Netherlands, where tens of thousands of families had to be hidden in a densely populated country under strict SS and SD supervision, with no single direct route of escape to non-occupied territories.
    Of the 7.5 million Jews in the parts of Europe occupied by Germany, only 20 per cent were still alive in 1945. Only one out of every five Jewish men, women and children survived the Holocaust.
    Could the sole driving force behind this petty, middle-class, vindictive anti-Semitism really have been the old Jew-baiting of Paris, Vienna and Berlin, the hatred that encompassed Raphaël Viau and Karl Lueger, as well as Georg Ritter von Schönerer? There are authors who advance this claim with conviction, and who are paid particular heed in Germany. Despite the painful accusation it contains, it is also an attractive idea, because it is simple and comforting. The theory implies, after all, that mass murders of this kind will never repeat themselves once the folly of anti-Semitism has been abandoned. In other words: the Holocaust was a gruesome but one-time-only excess on the part of a generation past. Nothing like that will ever happen to us again.
    The background to the Holocaust, however, was more complicated than that. Anti-Semitism played a role, of course, even a major role, but the Holocaust probably had many more causes, most of which had little or nothing to do with a hatred for Jews. The survivors of Krefeld interviewed by Eric Johnson reported almost no anti-Semitic incidents, and in only a quarter of the cases of Jews being reported to the Gestapo did motives such as ‘political belief’ play a role. Jews were informed against much more often because of conflicts between neighbours, love gone sour, or for financial gain.
    This last factor in particular, the matter of material interests, should not be underestimated, and the Nazis put it to most effective use. The contents of the 72,000 vacant Jewish homes were distributed around the country and sold at auctions for a pittance. The historian Frank Bajohr, who studied the deportations from Hamburg, speaks of ‘one of the greatest exchanges of property in modern history, a massive robbery in which an increasingly large portion of the German population took part.’
    Another important factor was the total absence of a
mentality
of resistance. In Denmark, Bulgaria, Italy and on the Côte d'Azur, the persecution of Jews failed largely because the local authorities and police considered it beneath their moral dignity. Liberal and tolerant Amsterdam, on the other hand, scarcely had an anti-Semitic tradition. Yet all of the German agents and officers charged with deporting that city's 80,000 Jews could easily fit in a single group portrait. The vast majority of Jewish families were deported, almost without a hitch, by citizens of Amsterdam: Dutch policemen, tram drivers and railway engineers. The Dutch identification card was almost impossible to forge: the proud, humdrum work of a perfectionist Dutch civil servant. Amsterdam's registrar's office helped the Germans with such pinpoint accuracy that the resistance finally had to blow it up.
    A similar situation applied in Paris and other French cities. In mid-1942, there were no more than 3,000 Gestapo agents in all of France. Approximately three quarters of the Jews arrested were detained by French policemen. Yet most of those policemen and civil servants were not Nazis, and in no way anti-Semitic. It is with good reason that Adam Lebor and Roger Boyes, in their study of the European resistance movements, speak of ‘a massive collapse of moral and civic virtues’.
    The problem was not only the mass murders themselves, it was also, as Daniel Goldhagen puts it, ‘the ease, the incredible ease with which the razzias could take place, the punctuality of the