Hitlers Europe 1079

Dutch Jews on their way to the trains for transport from Amsterdam to a concen­

tration camp.

deport Danish Jews, Danes ferried Jews across the straits to nearby neutral
Sweden. There a courageous German cultural attache had helped prepare
the way. Perhaps fearing that mass deportations might spark Danish resis­
tance, in this case the German authorities looked the other way. In Bul­
garia, King Boris and his government, although allied with Nazi Germany,
simply abandoned plans to deport the country’s 50,000 Bulgarian Jews,
(yet Bulgaria willingly handed over to the Nazis and thus to certain death
Greek and Yugoslav Jews). In Hungary, Horthy resisted for three years Ger­
man demands that the Jews of Hungary be sent to death camps. After
German occupation in 1944, he ordered the deportations of Jews that had
begun to be stopped. Yet Hungarian police killed tens of thousands of Jews
in Hungary. In Croatia, where Italy had established an occupation zone,
some Italian army officers protected Jews (and Serbs as well) from Croat­
ian death squads. But when, in August 1942, Germany requested that the
Italians turn the Croatian Jews over to the Nazis, Mussolini wrote “No
objection’’ across the letter. Italian authorities had little interest in round­
ing up Italian Jews. They ignored German directives, or they could be bribed
to look the other way. Some non-Jewish Romans contributed their jewelry
to help raise a ransom demanded by the Germans from Jews under threat
of deportation. Others helped Jews hide. They did so at great risk; German
troops executed entire families of those who hid or even gave food to Jews.
Nazi doctors performed barbaric experiments on prisoners. These
included experiments in the sterilization of Slavic women; measuring the
pain a patient could survive when being operated on without anesthesia;