Could the Allies haves saved the victims of the Holocaust?

The informant states that he is unsure of the reliability of his estimation. In addition to this, he conceals his identity and this makes the information contained within the message considerably less believable. In support of this, several governmental departments through which the message was forwarded added footnotes expressing disbelief and reservations regarding the contents of the telegram.

The Allied reluctance to acknowledge the Holocaust could partially be accounted for by the sheer size of the atrocities involved. Genocide on this scale, the mass execution of 6 million people is something that the world had never seen before. It is understandable that initial reports were taken as being war rumour.

On the morning of the 16th of November 1942, a refugee exchange programme saw 114 Palestinian subjects exchanged for a group of German internees. Of these, 69 were Jewish eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. After intense cross-examination, the Allies were forced to concede that these survivors’ accounts were genuine. This revelation caused the British government to offer condemnation of the Nazi atrocities on a formal diplomatic level. The eyewitness accounts also received wide publication in the Palestinian press (though the source of the information was withheld so as not to hinder further prisoner exchange programmes, and the translation was not distributed for the duration of the war, they were distributed in Hebrew).

On The 17th of December 1942, the American President gave assurances when speaking to Congress that the Allied governments would “make every effort to save all those who could be saved.”

Having accepted that Hitler was putting into action a plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, there were many courses of action open to the Allied governments. Indeed, in the summer of 1942 Zionist groups had organised four major rescue attempts. These included moving 270 children from Hungry to Palestine through Switzerland and over 5000 Jews from Poland through the Soviet Union and Tehran.

The governments of Finland, Bulgaria and Italy each rejected several requests to hand over Jews to be “resettled” in Poland, instead leaving them to escape into neighbouring nations. This caused a significant increase in the number of Jewish refugees seeking a safe haven. Far from helping these people, the Commonwealth nations and America made it near impossible to find safety within their shores.

British help to Jewish refugees was often scarce. In 1939 British control of Egypt, Palestine and the Suez Canal was tenuous and dependant on Arab goodwill, therefore it was necessary against the will of Winston Churchill, to limit the number of new Jewish settlers in Palestine to an upper limit of 75,000 at a rate of no more than 10,000 a year. In December 1941 there was an incident when 750 Jewish refugees arrived on the shores of Palestine on board the Struma. Then, despite the ship being declared unseaworthy, (and more than 6000 emergency immigration certificates still left unused) it was towed back out to sea, where one day later it exploded. The public of Britain was outraged and there was much outcry over the incident, many politicians including Lord Cranbourne declared that there would be “no more Strumas”. Yet, in September 1942 a group of Rumanian Jews who escaped by train into Turkey were again turned back to their certain deaths rather than the British authorities accepting them into Palestine.

The inaction against the Holocaust was particularly evident in the United States. Some elements in the immigration departments actually changed laws and policies to make it more difficult for European Jews to find sanctuary as refugees, justifying their action due to security reasons: It was suggested that immigrants with relations living in occupied territory could be put under pressure to sabotage the Allied war effort.

According to acts passed in 1924, the USA was to accept 150,000 immigrants a year, however by 1942 only 23,725 were admitted as immigrants. Of these 4,705 were Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Tens of thousands of visa applicants were turned away.

A large number of the issues and problems with the refugee intake into America can be traced to one man, Breckinridge Long. He was responsible for instigating several policies that made it extremely difficult to obtain American visas.

An example of the actions that he took came when a private Jewish agency wished to give money to the International Red Cross to assist the Jews in German occupied territory. Long took the position that this money would have to go through the Intergovernmental Committee on War Refugees, indefinitely delaying the money reaching the intended recipients. Although the actions of Breckinridge Long himself could be attributed to an individual discrimination against the Jews, Long was just one of many bureaucrats and officials who contributed to keep Jews from receiving support or sanctuary in the United States. The only explanation is a significant Anti-Semitic trend throughout the governmental institutions of America.

The idea of American anti-Semitism is perhaps not overly farfetched: before 1941 the Nazi policy towards Jews was not one of direct extermination, rather they wished to drive the Jewry out of Europe. Hitler also wished to promote anti-Semitism across the world, by flooding the world with Jewish refugees and anti-Jewish propaganda. When the Americans joined the war there was an initial worry from non-Sematic Americans that they were fighting to save the Jews, in fact some time prior to Pearl Harbour, there was a senate investigation into whether the “Jewish dominated” Film industry was producing propaganda films to pressure America into joining the war. Hitler’s propaganda engine seized on this and took every opportunity to try to paint the Allied people as fighting a “Jewish war”.

In April 1943, the Bermuda conference was held to discuss what was to be done about the refugee crisis. The main point on the agenda for discussion was in fact the evacuation of European Jews.  Months later on October the 6th, the committee had still failed to produce a report. Frustrated with the lack of results US Senator Langer stated:

“As yet we have had no report from the Bermuda Refugee Conference… I may voice the bitter suspicion that the absence of a report can indicate only one thing – The lack of action.”

On December the 20th, The Committee on Foreign Relations in the senate provided this summation of events: “We have talked; we have sympathised; we have expressed our horror; the time to act is long past due.”

Despite concern regarding the matter and these powerful condemnations of the Nazi atrocities very little was done, until January 1944 when an agency was set up by the Allies to deal primarily with saving the innocent from Nazi persecution. This organisation was known as the War Refugee Board.

In 1943 American bombers began regular attacks on several factories and chemical plants in the vicinity of Auschwitz, reconnaissance flights before the bombings noted the presence of a ‘concentration or labour camp’ to which thousands of people were observed to arrive weekly. American commanders determined that using the military to disrupt the operation of the camps was “uneconomical use of military resources.”

At the time, the accuracy of Allied bombing was not known to the public. Far from being a precise weapon of war, the Allies forces dropped fewer than 10% of their payload on the intended target. There were no accurate reconnaissance pictures of Auschwitz, If the camp were attacked there would have been thousands of excess casualties. Some of the facilities in the camp were hidden. Destroying the railway lines would not have been tactically successful unless the railways were targeted on a daily basis for the duration of the war, as they could be rebuilt as quickly as they could be destroyed – This was considered a task beyond the Allied air force’s capability.

On The 7th of July 1944, news reached the London populous, of the deaths of nearly 2 million Jews in the death camp at Auschwitz. The British Zionist movement, headed by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, beseeched to Churchill to bomb the railway leading to the camps. Churchill’s response was thus: “Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.” However, despite this the Birkenau crematorium was never attacked from the air.

There was considerable public outcry, press coverage and radio broadcasts. Including a broadcast from London to Hungry, telling that all railway workers who were currently engaged in transporting 400,000 Hungarian Jew’s to Auschwitz, would be regarded as war criminals if they did not immediately desist. Within 48 hours, the Hungarian Government forced the German authorities to end the deportations.

A significant portion of this essay is based on evidence gleaned from Jewish writers, largely those who have written more than once on the subject and some who are actively involved in the American Zionist movement. This would naturally give them a bias towards the side of the refugees and encourage the reader to feel more outraged at the inaction of the Allied governments. One of the texts in which this is most clearly evident is the work of Efraim Zuroff, author of The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust. In addition to this book, he has also written almost a hundred articles on the subject, as well as holding a doctorate in Holocaust Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One must therefore, when reading his book, be aware that the evidence with which you are provided is chosen to lead you to certain conclusions. This is equally present, if more subtle, in the PBS documentary America and the Holocaust, which focuses on Breckenridge Long and his cohorts for their apathy. While there is evidence to support the view that he was responsible for many of the difficulties that Jews had in obtaining American visas, we must be aware that he was not solely responsible for the Allied inaction against the Holocaust. When using biased texts one must try to deal specifically with events and statistics that are found in these texts and avoid the judgements and conclusions that they draw. While many of the sources used have been from biased sources: Jewish authors or sympathisers, a more moderate view was provided by the notable historian Martin Gilbert. Although the very fact that he has authored a book on the subject would suggest that he has a view to present, the Holocaust is what he has dedicated his life to; rather he is the official biographer of Winston Churchill. Gilbert’s work Auschwitz and the Allies attempts to present an objective view on the subject, and although it did contain an inherent bias against the Nazis, it was neutral regarding the Allies and their part in the Holocaust. Notably absent from this essay is the opinion of Holocaust deniers, whilst some historians have published controversial essays and texts which deny that the Holocaust existed on the same magnitude as it is portrayed today. These texts have been avoided because they are generally riddled with Anti-Sematic bias, very few deal specifically with a topic relating to this essay, and they are not generally accepted as legitimate outside of extremist groups.

The Allied decision not to bomb Auschwitz as requested in 1944 suggests a callous indifference or even a complicity in the Nazi crimes committed there. David Wyman in 1978 and later in 1984 has widely condemned the Allies inactivity. Dr. Richard Levy believes that Wyman’s argument is flawed when he discusses the operational problems that would have been involved

The systematic murder of more than five million people is a horror the world will never forget. The Allied governments were aware of the horrors of the concentration camps from 1942. An invasion of Europe did not occur until the late months of 1944.  Bombing the railway routes to the camps or destroying the crematoriums would not have led to an ending of the killings, rather it would have risked the lives of Allied pilots. When the railway systems of Eastern Europe eventually broke down in 1945, intended camp internees were marched to their destination. Shortages of Zyklon B saw camp commanders executing hundreds per day with rifle and machine gun fire. Even without the use of force against the Holocaust, there were plenty of opportunities to save the lives of those who had escaped from German occupied soil. Refugees abounded, without a home or a friendly country to turn to. Many excuses were made for Allied inaction. The Americans justified their inaction by claiming that they must preserve the security of their nations borders, implying that of course that the Jewish refuges would inevitably bring the country to its knees. The British blamed the fact that they had to limit the number of Jews that immigrated to Palestine, a more reasonable excuse perhaps but still fatally flawed, the Jewish refuges were not asking for a new life in Jerusalem, merely for sanctuary from the horrific death that awaited them under the Nazi regime.

Matt Jackson

Endnotes

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