Hitler and the Holocaust (29 page)

British responses to the Holocaust were also very much influenced by the Arab-Jewish struggle in Palestine. After 1938, imperial decision makers had become increasingly concerned with their strategic and political position in the Middle East as the world war drew near. Although the British had crushed the Palestinian Arab rebellion by 1939, they resolved to appease Arab aspirations at the expense of the Zionists. Thus, any further Jewish immigration to Palestine was made dependent on Arab acquiescence. To this end, after 1939, a supposedly sympathetic Britain was intensely pressuring European governments during the war to
actively prevent
“illegal” Jewish immigration.
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British naval forces were diverted to the eastern Mediterranean for the express purpose of intercepting ships carrying such immigrants, who if caught, usually faced deportation and exile. This grim and inhumane policy, backed to the hilt by the army, the Colonial Office, and the Foreign Office, continued (undisturbed by knowledge of the Holocaust) until British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948.
Naturally, if Palestine, which had been expressly given to Britain to help build a Jewish National Home, was a priori excluded, then possibilities for rescue were greatly reduced. So draconian was Britain’s policy that by 1945 the miserly quota of seventy-five thousand Jewish immigrants to Palestine throughout the war years had not been achieved.

This obstinacy led to such tragedies as the sinking of the
Struma
refugee ship in February 1942, a disaster that was in large measure the result of British government pressure on Turkey to send the rickety vessel back into the Black Sea, despite all the known risks.
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It produced responses like the British high commissioner’s cable to the Colonial Office in July 1940 about Polish soldiers to be evacuated from southeastern Europe to Palestine, in which he said that “only non-Jews be regarded as acceptable.”
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The plain truth was that
all
branches of the British government were determined to keep the Jews out of their homeland at the very moment that they faced their greatest danger. Almost any argument could be used in this perverse endeavor, including the grossly exaggerated one that some Jewish immigrants might be Nazi agents. And even Jewish and Zionist demonstrations of loyalty to Britain’s war against the Nazis did not cut much ice, especially since government officials felt that they could take such support for granted. As one Foreign Office report in 1941 concluded: “When it comes to the point, the Jews will never hamper us to put the Germans on the throne.”
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The contrast with the days of the Balfour Declaration and the First World War, when Great Britain had actively wooed world Jewry (convinced that its friendship was of vital importance to the Allied war effort), could not have been greater.

The scale of the repudiation is the more remarkable since Great Britain was governed during the Second World War by the most powerful prime minister in living memory, Winston Churchill, an ardent pro-Zionist. When in opposition, Churchill had been a fierce critic of the British retreat from its “solemn engagements” given in the Balfour Declaration.
But Churchill’s views had no support from his colleagues in February 1940. A year later, he dismissed General A. P. Wavell’s objections to arming Palestinian Jews as typical of the strong pro-Arab sentiments of most British Army officers, who had deliberately exaggerated fears of negative repercussions in the Arab world. Churchill felt that “the Arabs, under the impression of recent [British] victories, would not make any trouble now.”
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But in order to avoid an unnecessary confrontation on what to him was a secondary matter, he delayed the project for six months. On 5 July 1942, he intervened in support of Weizmann’s request to renew it, writing to the colonial secretary that to indulge the “bias in favour of the Arabs against the Jews” was wrong; indeed, he wanted to make “an example of some of these anti-Semite officers and others in high places” by recall or dismissal.
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There were other factors, too, which influenced Churchill. He was convinced that given the growing strength of feeling in the United States for a Jewish army, delay in this matter could damage the British image in America. Moreover, in 1942, when the Yishuv was in direct danger from a German invasion of Palestine by Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Churchill thought that “we should certainly give them a chance to defend themselves.”
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But the opposition in Whitehall remained determined and insistent, while the War Office continued to be obstructive. Only Churchill’s energetic intervention finally overcame these objections. On 26 July 1944, he wrote to Secretary of War Grigg (who had been firmly opposed): “I like the idea of the Jews trying to get at the murderers of their fellow-countrymen in Central Europe, and I think it would give a great deal of satisfaction in the United States.”
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In a message to Roosevelt on 23 August 1944, to bring him on board, he added that “surely they of all other races have the right to strike at the Germans as a recognisable body.”
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Churchill told the American president (who was basically favorable to the idea) that he had no objection at all to the Jewish brigade flying their own flag, the Star of David, despite
“the usual silly objections” that would be raised. “I cannot see why this should not be done. Indeed I think that the flying of this flag at the head of a combat unit would be a message to go all over the world.”
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Such sentiments were consistent with Churchill’s longstanding personal support for the creation of a Jewish state, which he repeated to Chaim Weizmann in November 1944. But the army proposal was the only clear instance of Churchill doing anything specific to help the Jews during the Holocaust. This is sobering in light of his enormous contribution to saving Western civilization from Nazi barbarism, and it demonstrates how low the fate of the Jews was on his list of priorities.

Churchill did, however, respond positively to Weizmann’s appeal to bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau after Eden had informed him of the matter, replying on 7 July 1944: “Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.”
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Unfortunately, Air Ministry officials felt “that this idea would cost British lives and aircraft to no purpose.”
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As Bernard Wasserstein notes, “this was a striking testimony to the ability of the British civil service to overcome ministerial decisions.”
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All too often, ministerial officials in Whitehall had their way in decisions affecting the Jews, when intervention on a higher level might have made a difference. But Churchill, at least, did have the historical imagination to comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy: on 11 July 1944, he wrote to Eden about the Holocaust: “There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe.”
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Yet Churchill’s statements on the subject were surprisingly rare, considering that he had access to earlier and better information on the massacres of Jews than did any other major Allied leader. The crucial British success in breaking German codes meant that he received regular decryptions of German radio messages, along with intelligence interpretations, soon
after becoming prime minister in May 1940. By the summer of 1941, the British knew through their own cryptanalysts of massacres carried out against Jews in Russia by the German Order Police and Waffen-SS. In a speech of 24 August 1941, Churchill actually made an intensely emotional allusion to the “mass murder” and “frightful cruelties” of the Germans, which reflected the information in the reports he had received.
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However, his emphasis was on the strength of Russian patriotic resistance to the German invaders, not the Jews, whom he never mentioned at all. This pattern continued, despite his access to police decodings. As Richard Breitman has noted, Churchill very seldom went much beyond the limits of the British government consensus about the fate of the Jews in public broadcasts or speeches. An exceptional case was the sympathetic message he sent in November 1941 to the
Jewish Chronicle
, remarking that the Jews had borne “the brunt of the Nazis’ first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity.”
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They were now suffering beyond endurance, Churchill acknowledged, but their spirit was not broken nor their will to resist. Unfortunately, this statement had a rather limited audience and was only a pale echo of what Churchill already knew about the Nazi killings. Moreover, it was a rare instance of his addressing Jews at all. Churchill was not, for example, interested in meeting with Anglo-Jewish deputations. In this respect, he was even less accessible than Roosevelt.

A good example of this detachment was his lack of any personal response to the desperate appeal written on 16 January 1943 by Lady Reading about “the horrible plight of the Jews.” She had implored Churchill to help break asunder “the iron fetters of red tape.”
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How, she asked, could British MPs “stand to show sympathy to the Jewish dead” in the House of Commons while “her officials are condemning these same Jews to die?” “You cannot know of such things. I do not believe you would tolerate them. There are still some 40,000
certificates for Palestine even under the White Paper regulations. Mr Churchill, will you not say they are to be used now, for any who will escape, man, woman or child. Is it possible, is it really possible, to refuse sanctuary in the Holy Land?”
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The cruel answer is that it was all too possible. Churchill knew and did little about it, leaving the Foreign Office to send a characteristically noncommittal reply, invoking the usual transport difficulties and the military complications involved in any rescue effort. The consensus in both London and Washington was adamant that any attempted rescue of Jews could only complicate or obstruct the war effort.

There is no evidence that Churchill thought otherwise. Moreover, his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who “preferred Arabs to Jews” and was an unshakable anti-Zionist, remained unsympathetic to rescue. His position (shared by the Foreign Office) was best summed up in his cool reply to American pressure in March 1943 to help those Jews who were “threatened with extermination” to get out of southeastern Europe. “If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.”
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Eden’s bland response was not the result of ignorance. But as facts accumulated about what was happening to the Jews, there was also widespread disbelief and a desire on the part of British officials (like many of their counterparts elsewhere) to treat the news of mass murder as the unreliable product of an overheated imagination. A characteristic exemplar of this proclivity was the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, who agreed with other officials that the evidence about gas chambers was not to be trusted, adding in July 1943: “The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up.”
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This dismissive and callous attitude is
the more remarkable since a reasonably detailed picture of the death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and its gassing installations, was available to the British government by December 1942 at the latest, if not well before then.

Particularly revealing in this respect was the suspicious reception accorded the eyewitness account of an intrepid Polish underground courier, Jan Karski, who arrived in London in November 1942. Karski, a promising young career diplomat, had soon after the outbreak of war become the liaison between the Polish government-in-exile, based in London, and the resistance organizations in his conquered homeland. In the summer of 1942, this practicing Catholic and ardent Polish patriot had embarked on a highly dangerous mission: with Jewish guides, he had toured the Warsaw ghetto and seen the results of the deportations at first hand. He had visited Izbica Lubelska in eastern Poland and circulated in the vicinity of the Belzec death camp. Karski also accurately identified Treblinka and Sobibór as places of mass execution for Jews. He reported to the British and Americans that of the prewar Polish Jewry of nearly 3.5 million people, “only a small number remain.” It was not a question of oppression, Karski emphasized, but “of their complete extermination by all kinds of especially devised and perfected methods of pain and torture.”
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In describing what went on in Belzec, he specifically mentioned murder by poison gas. Karski repeated word for word the message given to him in Warsaw by a spokesman for the Jewish socialist Bund. “They [in the west] don’t believe what they hear. Tell them that
we are all dying.
Let them rescue all those who will still be alive when the Report reaches them. We shall never forgive them for not having supplied us with arms so that we may have died like men, with guns in our hands.”
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Both the anguished Bundist and the Zionist leader who took Karski around the Warsaw ghetto told him that the Jews in Poland were helpless. They could not rely on the Polish
underground or the population at large for any help against the Germans. Only the powerful Allied governments could assist effectively, but they must take a series of unprecedented steps: bombing German cities and making it clear that this was in retaliation for the extermination of Jews; using German POWs and German nationals resident in Allied countries as hostages; appealing to the German people through broadcasts and air-dropped leaflets; and spelling out all available data in their possession about Nazi crimes against the Jews.
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