The Way the World Works: Essays (28 page)

War is messy, we say. It’s not pretty, but let’s be real—it has to be fought sometimes. Cut to the image of a handsome unshaven G.I., somewhere in Italy or France, with a battered helmet and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. World War
II, the most lethally violent eruption in history, is pacifism’s great smoking counterexample. We “had to” intervene in Korea, Vietnam, and wherever else, because
look at World War II
. In 2007, in an article for
Commentary
called “The Case for Bombing Iran,” Norman Podhoretz drew a parallel between negotiating with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and negotiating with Hitler: we must bomb Iran now, he suggested, because
look at World War II.

True, the Allies killed millions of civilians and absurdly young conscripts, and they desolated much of Europe and Japan—that was genuinely sad. But what about the Holocaust? We had to push back somehow against that horror.

Yes, we did. But the way you push is everything.

—

The Holocaust was, among many other things, the biggest hostage crisis of all time. Hostage-taking was Hitler’s preferred method from the beginning. In 1923, he led a group of ultranationalists into a beer hall in Munich and, waving a gun, held government officials prisoner. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, he imprisoned thousands of Jews, releasing them only after the Jewish community paid a huge ransom. In occupied France, Holland, Norway, and Yugoslavia, Jews were held hostage and often executed in reprisal for local partisan activity.

By 1941, as Congress was debating the Lend-Lease Act, which would provide military aid to Britain and other Allies, the enormity of the risk became clear, if it wasn’t already, to anyone who could read a newspaper. On February 28, 1941, the
New York Times
carried a troubling dispatch from Vienna: “Many Jews here believe that Jews throughout Europe will be
more or less hostages against the United States’ entry into the war. Some fear that even an appreciable amount of help for Britain from the United States may precipitate whatever plan the Reichsfuehrer had in mind when, in recent speeches, he spoke of the elimination of Jews from Europe ‘under certain circumstances.’ ”

In response to this threat, the
American Hebrew,
a venerable weekly, ran a defiant front-page editorial. “Reduced to intelligibility this message, which obviously derives from official sources, warns that unless America backs down, the Jews in Germany will be butchered,” the paper said. So be it. The editorial went on:

We shall continue, nay, we shall increase our efforts to bring about the downfall of the cutthroat regime that is tyrannizing the world, and we are not blind to the price we may have to pay for our determination. But no sacrifice can be too great, no price too dear, if we can help rid the world of the little Austrian messiah and his tribe, and all they stand for.

Other Jews, a minority, disagreed. (“In wars it is the minorities that are generally right,” Ponsonby once said.) In 1941, Rabbi Cronbach, of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, began talking to Rabbi Isidor B. Hoffman, a friendly, bald, hard-to-ruffle student counselor at Columbia University, and Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Omaha, Nebraska, about forming a Jewish Peace Fellowship. The fellowship would help support Jewish conscientious objectors who were then in alternative service camps or prisons, and it would, according to the first issue of its newsletter,
Tidings,
“strengthen the devotion to pacifism of self-respecting, loyal Jews.”

“Crony” Cronbach became the honorary chairman of the Jewish Peace Fellowship. He was a fine-boned man, always in a suit and tie, and he had a horror of vengeance as an instrument of national policy. He’d seen what happened in the Great War. “People of gentleness, refinement, and idealism became, in the war atmosphere, hyenas raging to assault and kill not merely the foreign foe but equally their own dissenting countrymen,” he recalled in his 1937 book
The Quest for Peace.
By supporting the earlier conflict, he suggested, America’s Jews had “only helped prepare the way for the Nazi horror which has engulfed us.”

The American middle class, still dimly recalling the trenches, the mud, the rats, the typhus, and the general obscene futility of World War I, was perhaps slightly closer to Cronbach’s pacifism than to Roosevelt’s interventionism—until December 7, 1941. Once Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row burned and sank, the country cried for the incineration of Tokyo. Abraham Kaufman gave his version of what happened in a letter to a historian in 1974: “Roosevelt,” Kaufman said, “was willing to use the natural Jewish opposition to Hitler to get US public opinion in favor of his war measures (was unsuccessful as far as the country at large)—and finally managed to force us in with the worst kind of skull-duggery of which history is yet to be written. Shalom, Abe.”

With the country demanding vengeance, the false-flag “peace” groups, such as America First, disbanded immediately; the absolute pacifists stuck to their principles. “Our Country Passes from Undeclared to Declared War; We Continue Our Pacifist Stand,” wrote Dorothy Day, in her
Catholic Worker
. She quoted Jesus Christ: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you.” A Catholic newspaper,
in response, charged that Day was sentimental and soft. Day, whose life was spent in poverty, caring for homeless people, wrote back: “Let those who talk of softness, of sentimentality, come to live with us in cold, unheated houses in the slums.” She said: “Let them live with rats, with vermin, bedbugs, roaches, lice. (I could describe the several kinds of body lice.)” She said: “Let their noses be mortified by the smells of sewage, decay, and rotten flesh. Yes, and the smell of the sweat, blood, and tears spoken of so blithely by Mr. Churchill, and so widely and bravely quoted by comfortable people.”

At the War Resisters League headquarters on Stone Street in Manhattan, the executive committee members, including Kaufman, Jessie Hughan, John Haynes Holmes, Sidney E. Goldstein, Isidor Hoffman, Frieda Lazarus, A. J. Muste, and Edward P. Gottlieb (a schoolteacher who had changed his middle name to “Pacifist”), published a post-Pearl Harbor flyer, “Our Position in Wartime.” “We respect the point of view of those of our fellow citizens to whom war presents itself as a patriotic duty,” the flyer said; nonetheless, the league could not abandon its principles. “The methods chosen determine the ends attained,” they wrote. They promised to assist in relief work, to help conscientious objectors, to work for economic justice—and also to call for an early negotiated peace. “The war must end some time and it is proper that we should urge an early rather than a late ending on a basis of benefit and deliverance for all the peoples of the earth.” The flyer got a good response, and won them some new enrollees; only a few angry letters came in, one written on toilet paper. The FBI visited the offices and began making a series of what Kaufman called “exhaustive inquiries.”

Meanwhile, Hitler’s anti-Semitism had reached a final stage of Götterdämerungian psychosis. As boxcars of war-wounded, frostbitten German soldiers returned from the Russian front, and as it became obvious to everyone that the United States was entering the war, Hitler, his arm tremor now evident to his associates, made an unprecedented number of vitriolic threats to European Jewry in close succession—some in speeches, and some in private meetings. (The Jew, Hitler now claimed, was a
Weltbrandstifter,
a world arsonist.) A number of Holocaust historians—among them Saul Friedländer, Peter Longerich, Christian Gerlach, and Roderick Stackelberg—have used this concentration of “exterminatory statements” (the phrase is Friedländer’s) to date, in the absence of any written order, Hitler’s decision to radically accelerate the Final Solution.

The shift, Friedländer writes, came in late 1941, occasioned by the event that transformed a pan-European war into a world war: “the entry of the United States into the conflict.” Roderick Stackelberg summarizes: “Although the ‘Final Solution,’ the decision to kill all the Jews under German control, was planned well in advance, its full implementation may have been delayed until the US entered the war. Now the Jews under German control had lost their potential value as hostages.” On December 12, 1941, Hitler confirmed his intentions in a talk before Goebbels and other party leaders. Goebbels, in his diary, summarized Hitler’s remarks: “The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”

Chelmno, the first killing factory, had already commenced operation on December 8, 1941: Jews from the ghetto in a town called Kolo were suffocated with exhaust gasses in sealed trucks. Beginning in March 1942, the Lublin ghetto
in Poland was liquidated: Jews by the thousands were taken to a second extermination camp, Belzec, and gassed there. More Jews, including orphaned children and old people who had until then been excluded from the camps, were taken from Vienna at the beginning of June. Leonhard Friedrich, a German Quaker arrested in May for helping Jews, later wrote: “In the six months after the United States entered the war, the Gestapo felt under no restraints.”

It was an open secret in the United States. On June 2, 1942, a story ran in many American newspapers about Hitler’s plan. It was written by Joseph Grigg, a United Press journalist who had been interned by the Germans for five months, then freed with other Americans as a result of negotiations. “There apparently was an effort to create a ‘Jew-free’ Reich by April 1, as a birthday gift for Hitler,” Grigg reported, “but due to transportation and other difficulties the schedule could not be maintained.” The massacres in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic states were, Grigg said, “the most terrible racial persecution in modern history.”

Meanwhile, that June, the United States was “fighting Hitler” by doing—what? By battling the Japanese navy, by building big bombers, and by having war parades. On June 13, 1942, with the Allied land assault on Europe still two years away, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia threw an enormous war parade in Manhattan. It went on for a full day. There were tanks, planes, and picturesque international costumes, but there were also floats meant to stir emotions of enmity and fear. A float called “Death Rides” moved slowly by: it was a giant animated skeleton beating two red swastika-bearing drums. There was a huge mustachioed figure in a Prussian helmet and body armor, riding a Disney-style dinosaur that strode heedlessly through corpses—the float
was called “Hitler, the Axis War Monster.” There was a float called “Tokyo: We Are Coming!” in which American airplanes set fire to the city, frightening off a swarm of large yellow rats. The
New York
Herald Tribune
’s reporter wrote that the only thing missing from the parade was subtlety. This is what the United States was doing during the early phase of the Holocaust: beating big red toy death drums on Fifth Avenue.

—

During this same mid-war period, the Royal Air Force’s attacks on German civilian life crossed a new threshold of intensity. The militarily insignificant city of Lübeck, on the Baltic Sea, crowded with wood-timbered architectural treasures, was the target of the first truly successful mass firebombing, on the night of March 28, 1942, which burned much of the old city and destroyed a famous, centuries-old painting cycle called
Totentanz
(“The Dance of Death”). “Blast and bomb, attack and attack until there is nothing left,” said the Sunday
Express
. “Even if ‘Lübecking’ does not crack the morale of Germany, it is certainly going to raise our spirits,” said the
Daily Mail
. “We have no hesitation on any humanitarian grounds in writing over the whole map of Germany, as we have done at Lübeck and Rostock, ‘This was once a city.’ ” Vera Brittain, reading through a pile of these newspaper clippings, exclaimed: “We are Gadarene swine, inhabited by devils of our own making, rushing down a steep place into the sea.”

Operation Millennium was the RAF’s next large-scale fire raid, at the end of May. Nearly a thousand bombers flowed toward the city of Cologne, where they dropped about 1,600 tons of bombs—more firebombs than high explosives—in
half an hour, destroying tens of thousands of houses and apartments and more than twenty churches. The area around the city’s main cathedral was a roasted ruin. “You have no idea of the thrill and encouragement which the Royal Air Force bombing has given to all of us here,” wrote Roosevelt’s personal aide, Harry Hopkins, to Churchill. He added: “I imagine the Germans know all too well what they have to look forward to.”

No doubt the Germans did know—in any case, they promptly blamed the Jews for the bombings. On the radio, Goebbels said that Germans were now fighting for their very skins. Then again came the overt threat: “In this war the Jews are playing their most criminal game and they will have to pay for it with the extermination of their race throughout Europe and, maybe, even beyond.” American newspapers gave wide coverage to Goebbels’s speech.
GOEBBELS SAYS JEWS WILL DIE FOR R.A.F. RAIDS
,
said the
New York
Herald Tribune
.
NAZIS BLAME JEWS FOR BIG BOMBINGS,
said the
New York Times
.
JEWS FACE MASS EXTERMINATION BY ENRAGED NAZIS,
said the headline in the
Altoona Mirror
.
GOEBBELS THREATENS TO WIPE OUT JEWS,
said the
Pittsburgh Press
.

The Jewish press took the threat seriously, too. “The Jews were to be used, Hitler often promised, as hostages to assure the good behavior of the democracies,” said
Opinion: A Jewish Journal of Life and Letters
. “The terrific RAF poundings of Cologne, Essen, Emden, Rostock and other German cities are being answered by the nazis with threats of reprisals—against the Jews.” And Rabbi Louis I. Newman, of Temple Rodeph Sholom, devoted part of his sermon that Saturday to Goebbels’s speech. “The dastardly threat of Goebbels that the Nazis will exterminate the Jews if the
R.A.F. continues its bombardment of German cities should be clear evidence that the Jews of Germany and occupied countries have been and are merely hostages in the hands of brigands and gangsters,” Newman said, as reported in the
New York Times
. “Jews have been martyrs before in the annals of mankind, and if the slaying of Jews is necessary to redeem humanity from the blight of nazism those who are the victims will prove again the stuff of which the prophet and the martyr race is fashioned.”