The great body of middle class Jews, so characteristic of Western and Central Europe, did not exist in the East; in its stead we find a thin layer of upper-middle-class families who actually belonged to the ruling classes and the degree of whose assimilation - through money, through baptism, through inter-marriage - to Gentile society was infinitely greater than that of most Jews in the West.

Among the first countries in which the executors of the Final Solution were confronted with these conditions was the puppet state of Croatia, in Yugoslavia, whose capital was Zagreb. The Croat government, headed by Dr. Ante Pavelic, very obligingly introduced anti-Jewish legislation three weeks after its establishment, and when asked what was to be done with the few dozen Croat Jews in Germany, it sent word that they 'would appreciate deportation to the East.' The Reich Minister of the Interior demanded that the country be judenrein by February, 1942, and Eichmann sent Hauptsturmfuhrer Franz Abromeit to work with the German police attache in Zagreb. The deportations were carried out by the Croats themselves, notably by members of the strong fascist movement, the Ustashe, and the Croats paid the Nazis thirty marks for each Jew deported. In exchange, they received all the property of the deportees. This was in accordance with the Germans' official 'territorial principle,' applicable to all European countries, whereby the state inherited the property of each murdered Jew who had resided within it boundaries, regardless of his nationality.

...The original deadline of February, 1942, could not be met, because Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory, but after the Badoglio coup Hermann Krumey, another of Eichmann's men, arrived in Zagreb, and by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers.

Only then did the Germans realize that the country was still not judenrein. In the initial anti-Jewish legislation, they had noted a curious paragraph that transformed into 'honorary Aryans' all Jews who made contributions to 'the Croat cause.' The number of these Jews had of course greatly increased during the intervening years. The very rich, in other words, who parted voluntarily with their property were exempted. Even more interesting was the fact that the S.S. Intelligence service had discovered that nearly all members of the ruling clique in Croatia, from the head of government to the leader of the Ustashe, were married to Jewish women. The fifteen hundred survivors among the Jews in this area - five per cent, according to a Yugoslav government report - were clearly all members of this highly assimilated, and extraordinarily rich, Jewish group. And since the percentage of assimilated Jews among the masses in the East has often been estimated at about five per cent, it is tempting to conclude that assimilation in the East, when it was at all possible, offered a much better chance for survival than it did in the rest of Europe.