Foreign Office Was Fully Supportive of the Shoah

Nazi leaders deeply, sincerely, passionately (and erroneously) believed that in order to win the existential war with “Judeo-Bolshevist” Soviet Union, they had to kill all Jews not only under German control, but under control of all Nazi allies (Italy, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Finland, Bulgaria and Hungary) and nominally independent Vichy France.

To make it happen, the Nazi government had to negotiate the corresponding agreements with the governments of these countries. Fortunately for the Nazis (and very unfortunately for the Jews), Reich Foreign Office was fully supportive of the Final Solution.

No surprise here – Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop held the (real, not honorary) rank of Obergruppenf;hrer (three-star general) in the SS and often showed up in the SS uniform (it bit him real hard after the war).

Ribbentrop spared no effort in trying to persuade the leaders of Nazi puppet states and other Axis powers to deport Jews to Nazi killing centers. However, in August 1941, when the question of whether to deport foreign Jews living in Germany arose, Ribbentrop initially argued against deportation as a way of maximizing the Foreign Office’s influence.

Later, Ribbentrop had Undersecretary Martin Luther (later an attendee of Wannsee Conference) negotiate agreements with the governments of Romania, Slovakia and Croatia to allow Jews holding citizenship of those states to be deported.

In September 1941, Reich Plenipotentiary for Nazi-occupied Serbia, Felix Benzler, reported to Ribbentrop that the SS had arrested 8,000 Serbian Jews, whom they were planning to execute en masse. He asked for permission to try to stop the massacre. Ribbentrop assigned the question to Luther, who ordered Benzler to co-operate fully in the shooting of Jews.

Even before Wannsee Conference, on December 8, 1941, Luther had his staff compose a memorandum which committed the Foreign Office to working with other countries to introduce antisemitic restrictions modeled on the Nuremberg Laws, and then to transport their Jews to the SS killing centers.

Following the conference, Luther’s department was involved with preparing and securing agreement at the diplomatic level for the deportation of Jews from the countries allied with Germany (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia), as well as from the areas occupied by Germany.