Could the allies have saved the lives of more Jews during the Holocaust? For at least 20 years, book after book has appeared claiming that the allies could have done far more, and that their failure was the result of indifference and anti-Semitism. In the US, in particular, the government and President Roosevelt have been indicted for their alleged failure during the Holocaust. The best known of many critical works is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews (1984), and perhaps 20 other similar books have appeared in recent years. In Britain, Bernard Wasserstein's scholarly Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-45 (1979) predated a more recent spate of works explicitly hostile to the British government, by historians such as Geoffrey Alderman, Richard Bolchover, David Cesarani and Tony Kushner.
Typical of the now dominant assumption about the Holocaust-encouraged by such scholars-are last month's newspaper reports following the release of classified material showing the British government knew of the mass killing of Jews in the Soviet Union in July or August 1941. At one level the press reports were just plain wrong. There was no "cover-up" to make sure the news did not leak out; the killings were widely reported throughout the media of the western world by September or October 1941. However, the clear suggestion is conveyed by these reports that Churchill, having known of the slaughter, could have done something to stop them, and was culpable for doing nothing. Yet this proposition is absurd: in mid-1941 Britain had been fighting alone for a year and still faced a high risk of being invaded and conquered. It had no troops within 1,500 miles of the Soviet Union and no planes capable of flying beyond Berlin, let alone to the Ukraine or Belarus. What could Churchill and the British have done in 1941 to prevent the mass killings of Jews by the Nazis in Russia? Tragically, the answer is nothing.
Yet the negative view of the attitude and actions of the allies during the Holocaust has long gone almost entirely unchallenged and, as the recent news reports show, has coloured the popular imagination. In my new book, The Myth of Rescue (Routledge), I argue that the rescue of significant numbers of Jews by the democracies was impossible and that those historians who argue otherwise have entirely misconstrued the situation faced by the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe.
two points must be kept in mind in understanding why the rescue of Jews was so difficult. The first is that the Jewish refugees who escaped from Hitler before the outbreak of the war came exclusively from Germany and its satellites. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, there were only about 500,000 Jews in Germany, in addition to another 190,000 in Austria (independent until March 1938), and a further 115,000 in those parts of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia) annexed by Hitler in 1938-39 as a result of the Munich accords. But the Jewish population of continental Europe at this time totalled nearly 10m, of whom around 7m fell into Hitler's hands at the furthest extent of the Nazi conquests in 1942. The great majority of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust did not live in Germany or other territories absorbed by Hitler before the outbreak of the war but in eastern Europe, and particularly in Poland, the Soviet Union and Hungary. These Jews were not under Nazi domination. They were not refugees and did not appear to anyone, least of all themselves, to be living out their last years on the planet.
Until the absorption of Bohemia and Moravia, the rump of Czechoslovakia, by the Nazis in March 1939, the aim of Hitler's policies seemed clearly to be the creation of a unified racially "pure" German state in central Europe. This entailed a revision of the "injustices" of the Treaty of Versailles to make German nationality the basis of Germany's boundaries, in the same way as the principle of nationality-based boundaries had been applied (often very roughly) to other parts of Europe in the post-1918 settlement. There was nothing inherently outrageous in this, whatever one made of Hitler the demagogic dictator: Hitler's aims appeared to be limited, which is one important reason why so many intelligent people supported appeasement during the 1930s.
Until the outbreak of war, Hitler's intention towards the Jews of Germany and other areas of the Reich which fell into his hands was simple: he wished to expel as many as possible. However, even this policy was not fully developed until Kristallnacht in November 1938, and "protected" groups of Jews remained in Germany until then and after. That Hitler wished to conquer all of continental Europe, including eastern Europe with its tens of millions of "helot" Slavs and millions of "sub-human" Jews, would appear to be a flat contradiction of Nazi "racial" policy. Nazi policy towards the Jews of Germany was to expel them (after brutalising them in every possible way), not to kill them. No Jews were killed as a deliberate component of Nazi policy until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
with hitler's rapid conquest of most of continental Europe from 1939 to 1941, the situation of Europe's Jews changed fundamentally. This brings us to the second point which must be understood if the difficulty of rescuing Jews is to be grasped. From late 1940, Jews were specifically forbidden to emigrate from Nazi-occupied territory. Jews were forbidden to emigrate from the Polish general government (the central area of pre-1939 Poland, including Warsaw and Lublin) in a regulation issued in November 1940. Bans by the Nazis on Jewish emigration spread rapidly throughout all parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. By 1942 Jewish emigration from Nazi-occupied territory had become almost impossible. Obviously this ban on Jewish emigration was designed to facilitate genocide, which began in the Soviet Union just after the invasion of Russia by Nazi Germany in June 1941.
From late 1940, therefore, Jews ceased to be refugees. A "refugee," in international law, is a person who is forced to flee his or her homeland because of a well founded fear of persecution. This is clearly an accurate description of the situation of Germany's Jews during the 1930s, when the goal of Nazi Germany was to expel its Jews, but not of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe after 1940-42. Then the Jews ceased to be refugees and became prisoners-prisoners of a psychopath who wanted to kill every Jew in Europe. The barriers to European Jewish emigration were raised by the Nazis themselves, not by the western allies, and made rescue a virtual impossibility. In effect (and with the most limited of deals involving the release of Jews from Nazi hands) only the military liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe could rescue any significant number of Jews.
This basic distinction between refugees and prisoners was not properly understood during the war or, remarkably, by subsequent historians, who frequently argue that the difficulty facing Europe's Jews during the war was that they had no place to flee. Great emphasis has been placed, for example, on the white paper, issued by the British colonial secretary Malcolm MacDonald in 1939, limiting the number of Jews legally able to migrate to Palestine to 75,000 over the next five years. But this limit was meaningless if Jews were forbidden to leave their occupied countries. Fewer Jews arrived in Palestine over the next five years than was permissible under the 1939 white paper, precisely for this reason.
It might also be noted that there is no record, so far as anyone is aware, of a Jew who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe being returned by the western allies to Nazi-occupied Europe. Thousands managed to escape. Some were allowed to migrate to Palestine; others were housed in places such as Mauritius for the duration of the war. (The exception was neutral Switzerland, which turned back thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.)
it is often alleged that the western world erected almost insuperable barriers to German Jewish emigration while "there was still time." This is the opposite of the truth. Some 72 per cent of Germany's Jews, including 83 per cent of German Jewish children, managed to flee before this became impossible, one of the greatest rescues of any beleaguered group in history. There is no evidence that barriers were raised after Kristallnacht when it became evident that Jews had no future in Hitler's Germany. On the contrary, more Jews left Germany in 1939 than in any other year. In the last year before the war, Britain radically liberalised its policies towards Germany's Jewish refugees to allow virtually carte blanche immigration. New areas of refugee settlement, such as Australia and Canada, were now also permitting significant refugee migration for the first time, pushed by international pressure and by a high degree of philo-Semitism and disgust at Nazi brutality among its elites. Most historians have ignored these developments, even though they were strong enough to counteract nativist hostility which had been reinforced by economic depression. Only about 130,000 Jews remained in the 1933 boundaries of Germany when emigration became impossible.
It is important, too, to realise that many German Jews declined to leave their German homeland until the last minute, not because they had no place to flee, but because they believed (as I have heard it put many times in interviews with surviving German Jewish refugees) that Nazi anti-Semitism would "blow over" once the regime became institutionalised. No one foresaw that the regime would become genocidal.
The attitude of the western democracies towards the German Jews at this time should also be contrasted with their attitude towards the hundreds of thousands of other refugees fleeing hostile regimes during the interwar years. Under the Aliens Order Act of 1919, Britain had abolished any legal notion of a "refugee" who could automatically apply for asylum. During this period Britain admitted only a derisory number of White Russians fleeing the Bolshevik regime, Armenians fleeing Turkish genocide, Greeks fleeing Ataturk's nationalist government, Spaniards fleeing the murderous civil war, or any other persecuted group. The only significant exception to this was made after 1936-37, for Germany's Jews, of whom probably 60,000 settled in Britain (there are no precise figures) and at least 100,000 in other parts of the Commonwealth, including Palestine. This generosity arose in part because of elite loathing of Nazi anti-Semitism (a factor which was probably significant, although not central, in Britain's decision to go to war in September 1939). This generosity manifested itself several years before the Nazis turned to genocide, and was founded in widespread detestation of the "maniac" Hitler and the brutality (short of genocide) routinely shown to Germany's Jews after 1933, picked up and publicised in a way without precedent in newspapers and newsreels. This generosity applied to Jews from Germany and the expanded pre-1939 Reich but not, as already explained, to the Jews of Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary et al, who comprised the great bulk of Jews who were murdered. They were not under Nazi rule at this time, and were not "refugees." In addition, the 3m Jews of the Soviet Union-a total which rose to over 5m following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and other parts of eastern Europe in 1940 as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact-could not be "rescued" by any means in the world and were forbidden to leave Stalin's tyrannical and increasingly anti-Semitic empire.
in my book I examine every traceable plan for rescuing Jews proposed by any group or individual in the democracies during the war (something not done in any of the hundreds of books on the Holocaust). Many of these plans, made in obscure Jewish magazines, have not seen the light of day for nearly 55 years. I am convinced that, with few exceptions, they was useless and could not have saved the life of a single Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. Even as the reality of Nazi genocide unfolded, most were based heavily upon wishful thinking as to Nazi intentions towards the Jews and again and again illustrated the confusion between refugees and prisoners.
A typical example of the futility of the plans for rescue offered by Jewish groups and their supporters in the democracies may be seen in the programme offered by the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror, the major British organisation founded specifically to propose schemes to rescue Jews. The committee was founded in March 1943. It had two chief organisers, Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946), Independent MP for the Combined British Universities and a tireless campaigner on behalf of Jewish refugees in the 1930s, and Victor Gollancz (1893-1967), the publisher and leftwing activist. Both Rathbone and Gollancz felt the catastrophe unfolding in Europe to their cores. Gollancz may well have been the first man in England to have truly faced the meaning of the Holocaust. In 1942-43, as news of the Nazi genocide filtered back, he gave talk after talk on the Holocaust to British audiences.
Fearing that his speech might become stale he began arriving at the venue half an hour early to "feel myself... into the situation of people at Dachau or Buchenwald. One night I was being gassed; the next I was helping others dig our own mass grave, then waiting for the splatter of the machine gun."
By June 1943, this practice had led Gollancz to a nervous breakdown, incapacitating him for more than six months. When news of the Holocaust arrived in Britain, Rathbone redoubled her efforts on behalf of the Jews, working without respite, leading delegations, organising letters of protest and button-holing ministers. Contrary to the myth of universal indifference to the fate of European Jews during the war, the committee's office bearers constituted a "Who's Who" of the British establishment. Among its vice-presidents were the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the moderators of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland, and such notables as Sir William Beveridge, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, Lord Sankey the Lord Chancellor, Sir Harold Nicolson, Quintin Hogg (later Lord Hailsham), as well as the leaders of Anglo-Jewry. The committee took evidence, produced 14 booklets and pamphlets on the Holocaust, and presented several detailed plans for rescue. And it is clear that the committee attracted widespread public goodwill. Its pamphlet of early 1944, Continuing Terror, referred to a Gallup poll taken during the spring of 1943, which asked "Do you think that the British government should or should not help any Jews who can get away [from Europe]?" Seventy-eight per cent of respondents answered "yes"; Gollancz's pamphlet on the Holocaust, Let My People Go!, sold 150,000 copies within six months of its publication in January 1943.
The most important rescue proposals from the committee, outlined in Continuing Terror, were as follows:
First, instructions should be given to all allied commanders to do everything possible, without hindering military operations, to rescue Jews and political prisoners.
Second, neutral states should be encouraged to admit more refugees, by gifts, guarantees that refugees will be evacuated after victory, and promises to find homes after the war for a substantial number of refugees.
Third, relaxation of United Kingdom visa rules.
Fourth, workers experienced in dealing with refugees should be sent to assist the British authorities wherever such assistance may be needed.
Fifth, increased transport facilities for evacuating refugees.
Sixth, removal of restrictions on admission of Jewish refugees to Pal-estine.
Seventh, continued pressure on Germany and its satellites (including Vichy) to refrain from cruelties and deportations and to let their victims go; making it clear that those responsible for cruelties will be considered war criminals.
Eighth, frequent appeals, through radio and leaflets, to tell the peoples of enemy and enemy-occupied lands, making known the facts and urging them to resist deportations.
Ninth, recognising the extreme urgency of the problem, the position should be frequently reviewed by the cabinet.
Tenth, adoption of the principle that, whatever other nations may do... the British contribution to the work of rescue should be the speediest and most generous possible without delaying victory.
In the light of what we now know about Hitler's genocide this list appears to be a pathetic confession of helplessness and bankruptcy. Not one of these proposals would have saved the life of a single Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. The central flaw in all of these suggestions is that it was the lack of a safe haven for Europe's Jews that was the factor impeding their rescue. This belief reminds one of the story about the poor Jew in the Polish shtetl in 1880 who suggested that a marriage should be arranged between his daughter and the son of Baron Rothschild. "And already," he proclaimed, "we are 50 per cent in agreement!" There was already 50 per cent agreement about rescuing Europe's Jews; unfor-tunately, however, Adolf Hitler was proving diffi- cult to convince.
one matter the committee did not raise was the bombing of Auschwitz. But this has become an important part of the prosecution case against the allies. Professor David Wyman made the failure to bomb Auschwitz into the centrepiece of The Abandonment of the Jews. But in the past few years the question of whether Auschwitz could have been bombed has been critically examined by a newer school of military historians, especially James Kitchens III (archivist of the US Air Force) and Richard Levy, who have concluded that bombing Auschwitz in a manner which would have destroyed the gas chambers and crematoria without killing its prisoners was virtually impossible. Levy and others have also brought to light the fact that many (probably most) Jewish groups explicitly opposed the bombing of Auschwitz when the question first surfaced in mid-1944, viewing these raids as likely to kill many Jews without stopping the killing process. This was the stance taken by Leon Kubowitzki, head of the rescue department of the World Jewish Congress in New York, and the executive of the Jewish Agency in Palestine (the "government-in-embryo" of the state of Israel), headed by David Ben-Gurion, which explicitly rejected the bombing of Auschwitz at a meeting held on 11th June 1944.
It was logistically impossible for allied planes to reach Auschwitz until late 1943 or early 1944, when Foggia airfield in Italy came into allied hands. The earliest proposal resembling one to "bomb Auschwitz" was apparently made by Michael Weissmandel, a Slovakian rabbi who had escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz; he managed, in May 1944, to send a coded telegram to the US urging the allies to bomb the railway line between Kosice and Preskov in Slovakia, in order to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz in sealed railway carriages. Similar proposals emerged from other sources, all urging the bombing of one or several railway lines, especially between Kosice and Preskov. This was rejected as "impractical" by the US assistant secretary of state for war on 26th June 1944.
In reality, the bombing of the Kosice-Preskov railway line at that date would have been useless. Himmler and Eichmann had divided Hungary into a number of geographical zones, and the Jews deported to Auschwitz had already come and gone along this route. There were no fewer than seven separate railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz (which was selected in part because it was a major railhead), which criss-crossed each other, and bombing this particular one would not have affected the viability of the other routes. In addition, the deportation of perhaps 350,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz took place in a remarkably brief period of time, between 15th May and 8th July 1944. Proposals made in Washington at the end of June 1944 could not have been mounted in time. A proposal to bomb Auschwitz itself (as opposed to railway lines) was not made by the US war refugee board until 8th November 1944, only 20 days before the last gassing took place there.
There were other difficulties with the bombing proposal. A bombing raid on Auschwitz was very different from an allied air raid on a German military-industrial site (or a German city), in that its aim was presumably to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria without killing the prisoners. But the technology did not exist in mid-1944 to carry out any such precise raid on a remote target in southern Poland. Any allied bombing raid on Auschwitz might well (indeed, most likely would) have proved to be an utter fiasco, with Jews and other prisoners killed in significant numbers but the gas chambers left intact. Had such a fiasco occurred, I have no doubt that those historians now loudest in their denunciation of the allies for failing to bomb Auschwitz would have been equally loud in denouncing the allies for having carried out such a foolhardy mission (against the advice, bear in mind, of most Jewish organisations): indeed, given that Jews would have died at the hands of the allies, this would probably have been construed as evidence of allied ill will towards Europe's Jews, even of anti-Semitism.
whenever i have presented my views to an academic or historical audience, I have been asked how such an erroneous and egregious body of historical opinion can possibly have enjoyed virtually unchallenged status for several decades. This is a question which I cannot answer. Many among the US's large and influential Jewish community have felt strong feelings of guilt at surviving in freedom and prosperity while European Jewry perished. Given the strength of America today, and the wide success the "Jewish lobby" has enjoyed in pursuit of its aims, many have drawn the misleading conclusion that the US enjoyed similar power 55 years ago. British proponents of the view that too little was "done," in contrast, have tended to emerge from among a younger school of Anglo-Jewish historians who have criticised the anti-Semitism of the British establishment and the timid leadership of the Anglo-Jewish community, which was too anxious to avoid stimulating anti-Semitism by making particularistic demands in wartime.
Both viewpoints, however, miss the point: once the war began, rescue was impossible because the Nazis made it so. Only by winning the war as quickly as possible, and destroying the Nazi scourge, could the surviving Jews of Europe be liberated. This was well understood at the time but has been camouflaged in recent decades by wishful thinking and, above all, by hindsight.
