The Allies & The Holocaust: 10 Most Absurd Statements

Kyt · Feb 13, 2008

Writing About The Allies And The Holocaust: The Year's Ten Most Absurd Statements

For many years after World War II, it was widely assumed that the Allies did all that was possible to save Jews from the Holocaust. The process of shattering that myth began in 1968 with the publication of two groundbreaking books: journalist Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, and the first scholarly study of the topic, Prof. David S. Wyman’s Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941. In the four decades since then, numerous important scholarly studies have been published, led by Prof. Wyman’s bestseller The Abandonment of the Jews.

Yet despite these advances in scholarship, as well as a widespread public awareness that the Allies’ response to the Nazi mass murder was grossly inadequate, a number of serious factual errors and distortions of the subject continue to surface each year in various books and articles.

Some of these ill-informed statements are motivated by political partisanship. Some are the result of carelessness or ignorance. They are usually made by individuals who have done little or no original scholarly research in the field. Whatever their source, they undermine the public’s ability to understand what really happened during the Nazi era and the lessons to be learned from those experiences.

To help counteract such misinformation, a panel of prominent scholars assembled by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies has published its first annual list of the “Ten Most Absurd Statements” about how the U.S. and its allies responded to the Nazi genocide. The list was released in conjunction with the recent commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The judges were Prof. Wyman; Prof. Laurel Leff, author of Buried by ‘The Times; Dr. Racelle Weiman of Temple University, director emeritus of Hebrew Union College’s Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education; Prof. Bat-Ami Zucker, author of In Search of Refuge; Dr. Alex Grobman, author of Battling for Souls; Prof. Judith Baumel-Schwartz, author of Unfulfilled Promise; and myself.

Our final selections for the Ten Most Absurd Statements in 2007 About the Allies’ Response to the Holocaust:

1. “Within Germany, bombing the camps or the railroad lines carrying people to the camps would only have killed swiftly men and women who would otherwise have died slowly and miserably.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Journals 1952-2000,” Penguin Press, 2007, p. 675.

Comment: In fact, (1) bombing the camps might or might not have resulted in some Jewish casualties, but not in numbers even remotely close to the number of those being killed by the Nazis; (2) bombing the railroad lines in all likelihood would have resulted in few if any Jewish casualties, since the planes would be targeting the railroad tracks and bridges, not the railroad cars moving along them; and (3) the Jews in Auschwitz were not dying “slowly”; during the period when Allied bombing was feasible, they were being gassed at the rate of as many as 12,000 daily.

2. “The United States accepted about twice as many refugees as the rest of the world combined, 200,000 out of 300,000.” – Robert Rosen, “Saving the Jews,” paperback edition, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007, p. 442.

Comment: In fact, “the rest of the world” took in about 365,000 refugees, meaning that the approximately 200,000 admitted by the United States represented about 35 percent of the total, according to the figures reported in widely accepted history texts concerning refugees from Nazism.

3. “Amid all the pressing concerns of the war on land, at sea and in the air, and the desperate struggle to find the means to challenge the continuing Nazi domination of Europe, Churchill always made time to deal with Jewish issues.” – Martin Gilbert, “Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship,” Henry Holt and Company, 2007, p. 196.

Comment: In fact, Churchill refused to deal personally with news of the Holocaust or appeals for rescue, directing all such inquiries to the Foreign Office, which prepared the replies.

4. “Churchill’s emphatic instruction [in favor of bombing Auschwitz] did not need to be carried out. Three days after he endorsed the bombing of railway lines leading from Hungary to Auschwitz, the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz was halted.” – Martin Gilbert, “Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship,” Henry Holt and Company, 2007, p. 212.

Comment: In fact, Churchill and his aides did not know the deportations had stopped until fully eleven days after he first made that July 7 “instruction” to bomb Auschwitz; it was not until July 18 that the news of the halt to the deportations reached the Foreign Office. Thus, between July 7 and July 18, the Foreign Office and the Air Ministry were passing the proposal back and forth between them, despite their assumption that deportations were continuing; and Churchill did not pursue the matter in any way during that period, even though he had no reason to believe the deportations had stopped.

Even after the Hungarian deportations stopped on July 18, Auschwitz continued to function and approximately 150,000 Jews were murdered there between July 7 and the liberation of the camp six months later. Even though bombing still needed to be carried out during that period, Churchill never revisited the issue.

5. “During WWII as prime minister, Churchill encouraged more Jewish immigration into Palestine ...” – Michael Makovsky, “Winston Churchill Was a Zionist at Heart,” Washington Jewish Week, November 8, 2007.

Comment: In fact, Churchill continued the White Paper policy of severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine throughout World War Two.

6. “[A]fter the war began, virtually nothing could be done to rescue or even assist the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe, who were prisoners of a madman who was bent on killing all of them as his life’s mission and who was dictator of a continent.” – William D. Rubinstein, “Response to the David Wyman Special Issue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 40:3-4, dated Summer-Fall 2004 but published in June 2007.

Comment: In fact, there are numerous examples of Jews being “rescued or assisted after the war began.” About 26,000 European Jewish refugees reached Palestine between 1941 and 1944 in transports organized by Zionist activists. An estimated 27,000 Jewish refugees escaped to Switzerland and were granted haven during the war years, though thousands were turned away. More than 7,000 Danish Jews were smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to safety in Sweden in 1943. Bulgaria’s Orthodox Church, in partnership with its right-wing government, refused Nazi attempts to deport its 60,000 Jewish citizens. Thousands of Jews escaped France in 1942 by fleeing to Spain.

Thousands of Jewish refugees managed to reach Allied-liberated Italy. Pressure by the U.S. government’s War Refugee Board in 1944 played a key role in Rumania’s agreement to move 48,000 Jews of Transnistria out of the path of the retreating German Army and into Rumania’s interior, saving their lives. The WRB also financed a variety of operations to help refugees survive in France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, including bribing German officials, providing supplies and forged documents, and sustaining some 8,000 Jewish orphans hidden in France.

The War Refugee Board mobilized the international diplomatic pressure that stopped the deportation of Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944, and through Raoul Wallenberg saved many thousands from the Nazis in Budapest. As a result, some 120,000 Jews were still alive in Budapest at war’s end.

7. “[E]ven had American Jews acted in complete solidarity, they could not have altered American policies in an era when the nation was consumed by the Great Depression and the Second World War.” – Beth S. Wenger, “The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America,” Doubleday, 2007, p. 217.

Comment: In fact, even though they were divided, Jews did succeed in altering America’s rescue policy. The Bergson Group played a major role in generating the public outcry and Congressional pressure in late 1943 that helped bring about President Roosevelt’s creation of the War Refugee Board. Wenger mentions the creation of the Board (p. 215), but depicts Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. as being single-handedly responsible for its establishment, without any reference to the role of the Bergson Group or Congress.

8. “Nor did notable or important Jewish leaders or organizations in America or Palestine request that American forces bomb Auschwitz at a time when bombing might have accomplished something.” – Robert Rosen, “Saving the Jews,” paperback edition, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007, p. 404.

Comment: In fact, numerous important Jewish leaders or organizations in America and Palestine asked the Allies to bomb Auschwitz in 1944, when it might have saved many lives, including Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress; Maurice Perlzweig, head of the British section of the World Jewish Congress; Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency; Moshe Shertok, head of the Political Division of the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency; Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chairman of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency Executive, in Jerusalem; and the Jewish Agency representatives in Cairo, Budapest, and Geneva.

9. “Nine days after meeting with Wise [i.e., December 17, 1942], Roosevelt induced Churchill and Stalin to join with him in a Declaration on Jewish Massacres ...” – Jean Edward Smith, “FDR,” Random House, 2007, p. 609.

Comment: In fact, the British Foreign Office, not President Roosevelt, proposed the idea of the declaration. Roosevelt administration officials actually watered down the wording of the original British draft.

10. “[W]hile accusations have long been made about [The New York Times’s] failure to publish news about events related to the Holocaust, the record shows that articles about the [American Jewish] Conference appeared at least six times from August 31 to September 3, 1943, twice on the front page.” – Bette Roth Young, “The American Jewish Response to the Holocaust – a Reconsideration,” Midstream, March/April 2007, p. 33.

Comment: In fact, the Times sought to undermine the American Jewish Conference by “balancing” its front-page coverage of the Conference with a half-page story about the alleged increase in Jewish support for the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies: Welcome). His latest book, “Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. and the Struggle for an American Response to the Holocaust,” will be published this summer by Purdue University Press
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Adrian Roberts · Feb 13, 2008

As the writers of this article seem to be suggesting, saving Jews was never the reason for fighting the Germans. The rest of the world had spent the previous two thousand years persecuting them, including in the British Isles on at least some occasions, and they weren't about to change in 1939. Finding out after the war just how bad the Holocaust was has given us a sense of moral self-righteousness ever since.

The reasons we went to war ranged from pure self-interest - or self-preservation to be slightly fairer - to, at best, a desire to protect the Gentile populations of Poland etc from oppression; not all that different from WW1. I'm not saying we shouldn't have gone to war, and I believe that WW2 came closer to being a Just War than almost any other, but the Holocaust is something we only know by hindsight.

Even since the Holocaust I don't see us going to war to prevent genocide in Darfur, or oppression in Burma or Zimbabwe. Now David Milliband has made his bid for statemanship by suggesting we should be aiming to "export democracy", in other words prostitute our Armed Forces on the Bandwagon of Cultural Imperialism which was derailed in Vietnam, let alone Iraq.

The Nazis were, of course, democratically elected.

Kyt · Feb 14, 2008

The movement towards war, I would suggest, was even more Machiavalian than the protection of Poland; rather, it was a fear of the expansion of Russia into Europe which probably encouraged most British politicians to support a treaty with Poland than the fear of Nazi Germany - as evidenced by Britain's rush to support the Finns in 1939/40 rather than actually confront the country they were at war with.

Post-war justifications for the war, especially in the immediate aftermath and the occupation of Poland by the Soviets, needed to be found and the protection of democracy (one of those ironies that shouldn't be lost to us in the current climate), and a fight against despotism seem just as hollow for that period as it does now. I have no issue with Britain the issue that it went to war, in part, to protect its Empire - as long as it finally admits to that fact.

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