The 'Holocaust' and the Failure of Allied and
Jewish Responses: The Logic Of Disbelief
K. C. Gleason
Over the past several years, there has emerged with increasing
frequency the charge that because it failed to bomb the Germans'
concentration camps, the United States bears a significant share of the
blame for the Holocaust. There are even those who insist that American
officials were well aware of Hitler's crimes during World War Two, yet
chose purposely not to stop them.1
Documentation made available only during the past decade, however,
amply demonstrates that the volatile accusations of American
indifference -- even collusion -- are unwarranted. That the
Roosevelt administration (and, it is also charged, American Jews) did
not act with dispatch to effect the rescue of European Jewry, shows
essentially that the tales of extermination were not believed.
This study will examine what was known of allegations of a German
policy of mass murder in Europe, and whether the many wartime reports
about such allegations were credible. I contend that the mass murder
reports were, in the main, of such a patternless character that their
key elements are thrown into doubt.
Consequently, with few exceptions the information as received in the
West was dismissed as atrocity propaganda. It was not treated seriously
by the Allied leadership, nor by Allied intelligence; not by the
American public nor the English; not by American Jewry nor even European
Jews. Who could accept the fantastic allegation that Hitler would
exterminate a vital manpower source late in the war, while engaged in
ferocious battles on three fronts and desperate for every available
hand?
Because the Allied response to the sporadic accounts of mass killings
was conditioned mainly on intelligence data, it is appropriate that the
study begin here. Records of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
America's chief wartime intelligence agency, are currently being
declassified and to date show a startling paucity of data on
"exterminations." By themselves the OSS documents challenge the notion
that Allied leaders "knew" what was happening to the Jews under German
occupation. Not only is the information given in them remarkably scant,
it is often mutually contradictory and sometimes bizarre.
One document quotes a "Polish underground source" as saying during
the Spring of 1944 that Auschwitz was metamorphosing from a death camp
into a massive "forced labor camp."2 This was ostensibly taking place
during the alleged time of greatest killing at the Birkenau facility,
when 700,000 Hungarian Jews were presumably being murdered. This report
directly contradicts all that has been claimed about that period since
the end of the war.
Another document, distributed by OSS headquarters in Washington in
March 1944, refers to Belzek, Sobibor and Treblinka as the best-known
death camps. Some 20 others are mentioned as well-yet Auschwitz,
sometimes called "the kingdom of death," is nowhere discussed.3 This
document is significant because, as Walter Laqueur notes in his book
The Terrible Secret,
Auschwitz had been open since 1940. Thus, any report failing to point
to Auschwitz as the Nazis' key extermination plant would be puzzling.
There are, however, many reports which do not connect Auschwitz with
exterminations.
In the same period, June 1944, a captured SS man told his Allied
interrogators that his brother had witnessed an extermination of Jews in
special "gas barracks." After the murders, the OSS report says, he told
his captors that the corpses were "sticking together; it was one block
of dead which could not be separated. Apparently the gas destroyed the
skin and therefore the bodies melted together."4 Few other accounts,
contemporaneous or postwar, have described such queer and doubtful
effects.
Another story, sent in early January 1944 from the American
Consulate-General in Istanbul to the State Department in Washington,
discusses Jewish underground activities at length. But while
prisoner-smuggling techniques and other issues are bandied about,
nothing in this internal memo relates to the Nazis' killing of Jews.5
A high-ranking OSS official, William L. Langer, received a report
apparently composed in August 1943. In it Auschwitz is described in some
detail. Among other claims made for the camp is the immediate gassing
of 98% of all Jewish arrivees, "mostly young and healthy individuals."
These, the report alleges, were "gassed and then burned half-alive."
Women and children were gassed, then "thrown out through an apperture
and cremated on a stake." Langer was asked by a horrified subordinate to
give this information "maximum publicity" in the United States. In the
postwar era, of course, most of the extensive body of Holocaust lore
insists that healthy persons were not killed outright, but worked to
death. Since then, "stakes" have not seriously been associated with
Auschwitz. (For unexplained reasons this document adds that "only a
German could have perpetrated such destruction.")6
Still another late-war dispatch (made also at the supposed time of
greatest killing) rejects news of gas as a murder agent, in favor of
steam. At Treblinka, it says, "men and women were separated and driven
into hermetically-sealed baths, in which instead of water steam was
introduced through the faucets. The victims [at Treblinka] are in
general killed by steam, and not by gas as had been first suspected."7
One of the most nettlesome and persistent tales, accepted by the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, involved the manufacture
of soap from Jewish bodies. While no one was convicted of such
loathesome business by the war crimes courts (nor any reliable evidence
produced for it), the soap story continues to enjoy widespread currency.
This despite occasional debunking by scholars like Walter Laqueur,8 and
the dismissal several years ago by a German court in Flensburg of "soap
recipes" presented by Holocaust survivors. (The former inmates had
claimed that a "soap factory" had existed at the Stutthof concentration
camp in Germany.9)
Certainly one of the most significant events bearing on the question
of the Allies' knowledge of German extermination preparations or
operations occurred in 1979. Owing to research by two CIA
photo-analysts, Dino A. Brugioni and Robert Poirier (who said they were
moved by the original NBC Network telecast of Holocaust), the National
Archives and the CIA released dozens of aerial photographs taken by
Allied warplanes over Auschwitz in the Spring and Fall of 1944.10
The two CIA men, who apparently worked in their spare time, said they
wondered whether any actual "photo-imagery" existed of the camp's
extermination annex, Birkenau. They began an exhaustive search of
government photographic holdings from this period, finally locating many
images of Auschwitz I (the main camp), Auschwitz III (the primary
industrial sector), and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
The unusual photos, made sharper by advanced computer enhancement
techniques, are often cited by critics of the U.S. government as proof
of a callous disregard for the fate of the Jews. Author Konnilyn Feig,
for example, contends that since the photos were available to the
American military, there can be no doubt that this country "knew" about
Hitler's "death camps." Feig says that the American explanation that it
had inadequate information was now proven to be "a clear lie." Here,
finally, were photos bearing "clear... topographical information."11
According to Feig and other contemporary writers, for the American
government to have had this evidence and not concluded what today seems
obvious is somehow incriminating.
These accusations, however, have the classic hallmarks of "20-20
hindsight." At the original press conference announcing the release of
the photos (a conference that Feig appears to have missed), CIA analyst
Brugioni said that when the photos were first viewed they indeed seemed
inconsequential. There was nothing in them to suggest anything besides a
conventional prison camp -- or even army camp -- of the sort which
dotted the Silesian landscape at that time.l2
Brugioni also explained that when he served as a young Army Corps
photo-interpreter in Europe, there were no reports in Yank, Stars and
Stripes, or other publications referring to Polish camps as the locus of
Nazi murder programs.13 Moreover, the two intelligence analysts (along
with Robert Wolfe, curator of the National Archives' Modern Military
Branch) stressed that the current means of minutely examining the photos
were unavailable to the armed forces of 40 years ago.14
The real significance of the CIA/Archives photos lies not in what
they show, however, but in what they fail to show. That is: evidence to
sustain "ground accounts" of mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz in the
Spring of 1944. Whereas the great majority of the extensive descriptions
of Auschwitz speak of between ten and thirty thousand victims gassed
and cremated daily at this time, in none of the hundreds of aerial
photos examined by the CIA officials is found any hint of the smoke and
flame said to blanket the entire Auschwitz region.15
The great and infamous "burning pits" meant to accommodate the
overflow of Hungarian Jews are absent as well. Only one shallow pit --
perhaps 15 by 20 feet -- is visible in any of the photos. And even
with the benefit of computer-enhancement it shows no evidence of the
revolting purpose ascribed to it.
The CIA analysts and the National Archives (which in 1979 supplied
for the photos such labels as "possible cremation pit," "Jews on the way
to gas chambers," "gas chambers," etc.), were unable to reconcile this
anomaly. A footnote accompanying the monograph observes only that the
photos did not conform to "corollary ground accounts" of the purported
events at Birkenau.16 In light of this, declarations by writers such as
Otto Friedrich that the "remarkably clear" photos show "the essential
evidence -- the gas chambers, the crematoria, the prisoners standing
in line"17 are without foundation. They are, in fact, utterly
ridiculous.
The keys to understanding these important photographs, are, rather,
that 1) Auschwitz was not "reliably" reported by Allied authorities as a
death camp until the Fall of 1944, and 2) the photos'
seemingly-authoritative captions were not applied until 34 years after
the war ended.
Robert Wolfe -- under whose aegis the Birkenau pictures were
released by the National Archives -- is concerned lest people today
use them as weapons against various government agencies or officials.
Yes, he says, the U.S. did receive scattered atrocity reports, but "if
you don't know or suspect something like [gassing at Auschwitz], you
wouldn't look for evidence like chimneys." Besides, the custodian of the
Archives' vast Modern Military Branch added, "the truth was
intermingled with all sorts of rumors and stories... The U.S. didn't put
[the information] together correctly."18
Wolfe, who is Jewish, says that investigations of this sort are
difficult for him, but that as a professional archivist he must rely on
"contemporary textual and documentary evidence." In the realm of
extermination data, this evidence is largely absent. According to Wolfe,
the rules governing the acceptance of mass-murder intelligence data
were and are the same as those impinging on other areas.
"You have to evaluate [the information]," he said intently. "How good
is the source? Where does the data come from? How does it fit in with
something else?" He offered as an analogy the Battle of the Bulge in
1944. In that instance Allied commanders possessed information that,
assembled in a cogent way, would have thwarted the unpleasant surprise
of the Germans' sweep through American lines in Belgium.
In marked contrast to critics who insist that the Allies had obtained
good information on exterminations of Jews as early as 1942, Wolfe
would prefer not to characterize inaction as indifference. "The main
questions involve when and to what extent, and which part of the Allies
[knew about the extermination], and what could they do about it. All of
that is pretty hard to boil down."19
Author Edward T. Chase is similarly aware of the need for probity
about the CIA/Archives photos and other evidence. In assessing the role
of former Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy in the American failure
to bomb Auschwitz, Chase said: "You've got to be enormously careful...
before you start throwing bricks around; you have to really look at [the
question of responsibility]. You can't just impose hindsight on events
that took place then."
To Chase, the information of the period -- as well as post-war
"revelations" of Allied culpability for not rescuing European Jews --
"has to be examined with more responsibility."20 Chase's views reflect
the experience gained from his service as a Naval Intelligence officer
during World War Two.
It appears that the treatment of intelligence data received
throughout the war was, in the main, distinguished by such rigorous
evaluation. Even analysts in the British ENIGMA program, which decrypted
nearly all German intelligence ciphers from 1942 on, possessed nothing
of sufficient moment with which to frame a conclusion of a German
extermination policy. Thus, although the Allies had, through the
possession of a captured ENIGMA coding machine, decoded the messages of
the SS, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe and other organizations, a highly
respected authority on the ENIGMA program has little to say on the
subject of extermination. In the nearly 1000 pages of
Bodyguard of Lies, Anthony Cave Brown refers to the Nazi concentration camps primarily as adjuncts of German industry.
In this seminal study, Cave Brown also cites standard intelligence
sources which failed to establish a relationship between deportation and
mass murder. "... [British] MI-6 and [American] OSS," he writes, "had
gained considerable success discovering Hitler's secrets through
conventional... channels -- the reports of spies and informants
throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and in the satellite and neutral
countries; the censorship of foreign mail; the interrogation of POWs."2l
A "massively-detailed" but "little read" study of Britain's wartime
intelligence published in 1981, British Intelligence in the Second World
War, strongly bolsters the notion that the British did not associate
what appeared to be random shootings of Jews with a policy of mass
murder. In fact, from 1942 on there were no references in the SS and
Police decrypts to gassing. Underscoring a seeming disbelief in the
reports, mention of German concentration camps in any connection became
increasingly scant as the war progressed. The British did, however,
"carefully log" the return of prisoners -- presumably from work
details -- to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and seven other camps.22
In both the massive British intelligence study and in SS records at
the National Archives there are, to be sure, field reports alluding to
"executions" of Jewish partisans and civilians in Russia. "Field
reports" of this sort are hardly persuasive evidence of an extermination
program, however. Nor were they taken as such by analysts of the time.
Another recent book on Allied intelligence, Joseph Persico's Piercing
the Reich (dealing specifically with American agent penetration of
Germany), devotes only four pages to what was known of the activities of
camps like Auschwitz. This is curious, inasmuch as the author's preface
states that "the U.S. reaped an abundant harvest of intelligence in the
operations of the wartime OSS."23 And a former OSS operative who served
in Europe made this observation recently: "... the OSS learned in
advance about the development of German jet aircraft, the Nazi effort to
develop a nuclear weapon, secrets of the V-ls and V-2s, and the plot
against Hitler."24 These were some of the most highly secret goings-on
in the entire Third Reich. Had even verbal information about a projected
slaughter of the Jews been gleaned by the OSS, knowledge of this ought
to appear in study after study of wartime European intelligence. It does
not. Rather, it is fairly clear that American agents' reports directly
from Germany itself expressed no knowledge about -- or belief in --
accounts of Jewish exterminations in Europe.
As the previously-cited British study indicates, Allied planners in
the U.S. and England did calculate the size of concentration camp
populations through the years; the linkage between manpower capabilities
and industrial output clearly interested them.
Investigating the manufacture of ersatz fuel at Auschwitz, for
example, was deemed a vital mission by Allied intelligence because the
hydrogenation worlds were a key to Germany's capacity for future
military operations. It is virtually certain that information concerning
Jews at Auschwitz -- who were employed in many of the three dozen
enterprises located there -- was both obtained by American agents
inside Germany and published in manpower or demographic studies.
Had the rumors of extermination, with which the camps were reportedly
rife, been credible, the agents' reports ought to have conveyed shock
and anxiety. This because a sudden diminution of available laborers in
the camp would logically have prompted questions about their
disposition. To date (although there remains much classified data on the
subject) indications are that intelligence analysts viewed the waxing
and waning of inmate populations as no more ominous than intra-camp
transfers, which occurred on a regular basis depending upon which
prisoners had which skills.25 (Auschwitz, for example, had an artillery
fuse plant and cement works; Dachau a clothing factory for the Waffen
SS; Neuengamme a research and development facility for V-2 missiles. All
were staffed largely by Jews.)
Some students of the period, such as American University professor
Allen Kraut, contradict Persico's contention that the OSS was
well-informed on concentration camp matters. To Kraut, the "OSS was just
a bunch of amateurs beginning to learn professional methods." Moreover,
"the plight of the Jews was really a very secondary matter. What the
OSS wanted was military intelligence." Yet the OSS received vast
assemblages of data on the role of concentration camps in the German war
effort; it in effect concluded that the evidence for charging Germany
with an extermination program was insufficient.
Kraut is similarly hard-put to explain the lack of plausable
extermination information on the part of the British, who largely taught
America its intelligence craft. "They weren't looking for [evidence],"
he contends. "They were getting some about the ex- ecutions of Jews;
many times they were ignoring it. And other times they saw it, they read
it, and they didn't believe it. But there's a difference between that
and simply not having any information."28 It might be added that there
is a difference between having an unconsolidated mass of raw
intelligence about the killings of Jewish civilians, and knowing which
reports were more reliable than the discredited "Belgian baby"-type
allegations of the previous war, which members of the British Parliament
later admitted fabricating.
It appears, then, that in the intelligence sphere the accounts of
mass killings lacked credibility. Even if some analysts suspected that
Germans randomly shot Jews, Slavs, Poles and others considered racially
inferior by the Reich government, a quantum leap of faith was required
to accept tales of Europe-wide extermination.
If the reports had at that time been accorded the respect and
credibility they have acquired since the war, some attempt to warn
Europe's Jews would almost certainly have been inaugurated. Yet those
agencies (the OSS, MI-6, and others) privy to the most secret
communications throughout the far-flung Reich failed to attempt even
rudimentary leaflet campaigns for this purpose.27
Even American officials like Roswell McClelland, who found the term
"deportation" pregnant with evil meaning, kept their suspicions mostly
to themselves. "One wonders why... It's something I've never entirely
explained to myself," McClelland says in answer to the question of why
he didn't mobilize others to act on his "gut feelings."28
McClelland was stationed in Switzerland during the war as War Refugee
Board (WRB) representative at the American Consulate in Bern. In
addition to his work on behalf of war refugees, including Jews, he often
communicated, he says, with the Switzerland-based OSS chief, Allen
Dulles. McClelland is widely acclaimed for having transmitted to
Washington from his post in Bern the report of two Slovakian Jewish
escapees from Auschwitz. (This report was later to gain notoriety as the
main evidentiary feature of the "WRB Report.") His remarks to this
writer on his failure to propose the obvious -- a massive warning
campaign for the Jews -- are all the more puzzling for it. They
underscore that fact that although some people in rumor-choked
Switzerland had a "gut" suspicion that extermination was taking place,
their actual behavior did not reflect such concerns. Pressed on his
inaction, McClelland offers little. "You had intimations," he recalled
rather weakly. "But then you were swept on, and there was a lot of
[other] work to do. [The extermination allegations] sort of faded to the
background."29
There was another, earlier, report which sparked a great deal of
controversy, because it appeared more authoritative and complete than
the notably brief and usually unattributed fillers that the New York
Times and other U.S. papers started publishing in mid-l942.30
Like Roswell McClelland, the World Jewish Congress (WJC)
representative in Switzerland, Gerhard Riegner, was apparently a man who
"could not believe, yet did believe" information on exterminations. He
made many protestations to Allied governments on the basis of a report
he allegedly obtained from an anti-Nazi German industrialist in the
Summer of 1942.
In that report, Riegner was quoted recently as saying, were somber
warnings that Hitler had prepared for the total physical annihilation of
European Jews. Authorities in the U.S. and Britain were asked to
believe that the industrialist (who owned factories employing 30,000
workers) had access to the highest counsels of the German government,
and was invited to a secret meeting at which the Nazi extermination plan
was laid out.
In the first of several messages to American and British diplomatic
representatives in Switzerland, Riegner asked that the data be
transmitted to their governments and to key Jewish leaders. As is now
well known, the information was dismissed as fantasy by the foreign
service establishments of both countries. A typical reaction was that
these allegations were merely "the opinion of one Jew in Geneva."31 As
Riegner himself told the
Washington Post: "No one really believed
it. Not even the Jews who knew it [?]... I counted 4 million Jews as
dead." (How they were counted is not indicated.) "My own World Jewish
Congress office in New York -- where I sent all my reports --
published the figure of only 1.5 million."32
While he has reportedly "struggled" long and hard with the reasons
his industrialist's -- and by extension, others' -- reports were
suspect, Riegner concludes that the human mind simply could not accept
claims of such magnitude.
There are, of course, less metaphysical reasons why Riegner's claims
were viewed as little more than rumor. The most obvious is their
unsubstantiated character. As Martin Gilbert made plain in his 1981 book
Auschwitz and the Allies, Washington and London were "disinclined" to
believe Riegner's "fantastic" tales, in part because no others had been
as strikingly grandiose. Although Riegner spoke of interrogating the
mysterious industrialist (it was two full days before he believed the
man's accounts himself), authorities in the West remained dubious. Much
of this attitude appears to have hinged on the phrase "at one blow
exterminated," found in Riegner's first urgent telegram, of 8 August
1942.33 To be sure, some officials, including the American Vice-Consul
in Geneva, Howard Elting, considered the 30-year-old lawyer "a serious
and balanced individual," but inside the State Department skepticism
prevailed.
Against Vice-Consul Elting's view that Riegner would not have asked
to see him had Riegner "lacked confidence in his informant," must be
weighed the questions of Elting's colleagues about the messenger.
Riegner was, in fact, an entirely unknown quantity either in Foggy
Bottom or in Whitehall. When the Riegner correspondence was forwarded
from Switzerland to London, the response of Richard Law, Undersecretary
of State for Foreign Affairs, was to ask: "What do we know of Mr.
Riegner?"34 After pouring over refugee files and consulting with British
Zionists, the answer was: nothing. As Gilbert notes, "the Foreign
Office drew a blank."35
Owing to such official reservations the Riegner report was not made
public. On 17 August the U.S. Minister in Bern, Leland Harrison, was
told by Washington that the report also had not been delivered -- as
requested by Riegner -- to World Jewish Congress President Rabbi
Stephen Wise. The reason, according to U.S. documents quoted extensively
in Gilbert's book, was "the unsubstantiated nature of the information."
The American Consul in Geneva, Paul Squire, bluntly echoed this
language in communicating to Riegner a week later. Until "corroboratory
information" on the extermination of the Jews was received, Squire told a
frustrated Riegner, the State Department was "disinclined to deliver
the message in question in view of the apparently unsubstantiated
character in the information that forms its main theme."
There was another reason for this disinclination. The report repeated
some of the most gruesome atrocity canards of the First World War.36
Some stories retained the discredited charges intact, others dropped
certain elements and replaced them with ones which may have had a
plausible basis. The result was an incomprehensible hash of fact and
fancy.
A typical illustration: Quoting on authority of an "anti-Nazi" German
officer attached to German Army Headquarters, Riegner contended that
Nazi factories were rendering Jewish bodies into fertilizer, glue and
lubricants. This part of his story was similar to other dreadful tales
circulating around Europe at the time -- tales whose authors were, of
course, anonymous. Recalling the propaganda of the previous war, one
British diplomat remarked: "The facts are quite bad enough without the
addition of such an old story as the use of bodies for the manufacture
of soap."37
Just as the contents of intelligence reports on the Jews' misfortunes
were disjointed in extremis, so did poorly-sourced news accounts about
people like Riegner help to undermine public confidence in them. The
content of many stories circulating in Geneva tended, in fact, to make
all "extermination" information suspect in the eyes of Allied
officialdom. In addition to the "soap and glue" tales, there were even
accounts alleging that Hitler sought the elimination of Jews because
European food supplies were dwindling.38
Nor did reports from nations bordering on Germany or Poland give
credence to charges by Riegner and his fellow messengers of the
unthinkable. For example, Eduard Benes, the exiled but well-informed
President of Czechoslovakia, wrote to the World Jewish Congress in late
1942 to say that Riegner's claims were false.39 This statesman hardly
regarded himself as a friend of the Germans; he was, however, convinced
that they had drawn up no plans to murder the Jews.
The Swiss government reacted in a similar vein, declaring (after the
poorly-detailed Allied atrocity declaration of 17 December 1942) that
such claims were "foreign rumor propaganda of the worst type."40 Roswell
McClelland found the Swiss view reflected in an October 1942 interview
with Heinrich Rothmann, head of the Swiss Federal Police. McClelland
says that the extermination charges against Germany were judged patently
untrue.4l This was not the case with various reports of sporadic
killings. brutality, and general abuse of Jews and others by German
occupation forces. Yet, as disturbing as these reports were to many
people, few were prepared to extrapolate the likelihood that the
extermination of a race was in the offing.
American and European Jews, too (for emotional, logical, or other
reasons) largely dismissed as rumor the tales of massive killing. The
connection between the two Jewish communities is important. Contrary to a
popular postwar impression, the flow of information from one to the
other was far from totally circumscribed.
Information on numerous topics flowed freely between Germany and
neighboring Switzerland, transmitted by phone, telegrams postcard,
word-of-mouth and other methods. Remarkably German censors even passed
data of intelligence value from Nazi-occupied areas -- including
messages about Jewish suffering. Historian Walter Laqueur describes, for
example, cards sent from Jews in Europe to relatives in Allied nations.
Had fear of imminent death been endemic or palpable, surely this would
have been communicated. Had the extermination accounts been accepted by
European Jewry in a serious way, concerted efforts to bring them to the
attention of Jews everywhere would have been made.
Rather than merely one or two examples of data transmitted by the
mails containing, for example, "coded" messages about exterminations to
fellow Jews outside Nazi control, one would expect to find hundreds or
thousands in Jewish archives. Laqueur knows of only two extant.42 This
is not to say that other "coded" letters or phone-call transcripts might
not exist. They would certainly be considered of immense value to
historians and thus publicized, if indeed they were preserved and
known.43
The foreign press stationed in Germany also succeeded in passing a
great deal more information in their dispatches to "the outside world"
than is generally believed. Often these accounts were uncensored, though
critical of the Nazi regime. Others from countries occupied by Germany
were similarly uncensored for the most part; reporters from neutral
powers in these nations sent "a steady stream" of material to their home
offices.44 On occasion, the foreign press coverage focused on tales of
Jewish civilian deaths, sometimes even describing them as the product of
extermination. Surely some people believed the tales, Gentiles as well
as Jews; most did not.
On 6 June 1943, the secret Polish radio station SWIT was quoted by
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising of two months before. Jewish survivors of the fighting, said
SWIT, were "deported to an unknown destination." After the war it was
learned that the destination was Auschwitz. By 1943 the camp had
supposedly become a household word throughout occupied Europe, as the
most notorious camp in the Nazi "kingdom of death."45
It is thus surprising that the SWIT report did not mention the
"destination" in any context suggesting a grisly fate for the ghetto
soldiers. Rumors were rife at this time, of course; SWIT broadcasters
were no strangers to them. Yet the failure to mention death camps
implied that captivity was the Warsaw survivors' lot. Moreover, the
World Jewish Congress even omitted mention of the important uprising in
the "Resistance" column of its newsletter, Jewish Comment, for 11 June
l943.46
The fact that this portentous event was overlooked by a major Jewish
organization (although covered in some detail by the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency on successive days thereafter) amply illustrates the crisis of
credibility engendered by mass-murder stories. And it foreshadowed the
bitter infighting and recriminations that attend the current debate on
Jewish behavior during the war.
The Judenraete, or Jewish councils of the occupied towns and cities
of Europe, similarly had no inkling of any German plans for the complete
physical annihilation of their people. These organizations have been
severely lambasted over the years by writers who have found in them
"Nazi collaborationists." While this collaboration may in some instances
have occurred out of fear for individuals' lives, it is only through
the optic of hindsight that the elders of the Judenraete are so
disparaged. Of the views of such writers as the late Hannah Arendt,
National Archives official Robert Wolfe says exasperatedly: "Those poor
[Judenraete] bastards. It wasn't their idea to exterminate their fellow
Jews." He maintains that "hope" led them to believe in resettlement (not
extermination), and that the end of the war would save them "from
whatever the fate was -- resettlement or death; whatever they happened
to know or believe."47
Clearly, what most of the elders and their flocks knew was less
unsettling than the fears they are now criticized for not giving rein
to. The councils' actions seem best reflected in examples like the
following. In early 1943 the elders of Amsterdam were disturbed at the
lack of postcards from two categories of Dutch deportees: the elderly
and mothers with children. But the source of their concern was not the
one that now leaps quickly to mind, i.e., extermination. The Amsterdam
Jewish Council was, rather, angered because the Germans had broken their
promise to keep Jewish families united on their journeys to various
camps.48 There was what has been called "an unbridgeable gulf" between
what was ultimately concluded about the fate of the deported Jews, and
the remarkable dearth of information as to where this killing was taking
place. It bears repeating that the great majority of Jewish officials
did not mentally associate trains with gas chambers.49
One highly-respected elder, Berlin Rabbi Leo Baeck, reportedly
rejected as rumor claims of mass murder eight months into 1943. He had
been told of large-scale gassing at Auschwitz by a fellow inmate at
Theresienstadt camp, and decided against informing the camp elders'
council about it. "... this death was not certain at all," he reasoned.
"... There was selection for slave labor; perhaps not all transports
went to Auschwitz. So I came to the grave decision to tell no one."50
Why Baeck's informant did not then himself communicate this urgent
information to everyone, may never be known.
French Jewry apparently refused to believe in the
deportation-means-death theory until the end of the war. The increasing
reports of the putative fate of Europe's Jews were generally chalked up
to British propaganda; few paid any attention. It was not merely the
blasé rejection of the genocide information as propaganda that led the
French Jews to their conclusions; its disjointed character made
rejection a virtual certainty. And so it went throughout Nazi-occupied
Europe. The French, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Hungarian and other Jews
behaved in a manner that bespoke disbelief in the fantastic gossip of
the time.
The most dramatic evidence -- even proof -- that the claims were
generally dismissed, however, is the simple fact that throughout the war
Jews passively boarded the "resettlement" trains. Certainly there were
cases of panic, and the odd suicide -- but there was little resistance
to speak of. Roswell McClelland recalls having a "gut knowledge" that
the Jews of France -- some of whom he aided after they had fled the
war zone in 194 -- would be murdered. Yet he confined expressions of
his fears to a 10-minute chat with the Vichy President, Pierre Laval.
Laval told the American relief worker that he was a victim of "atrocity
propaganda"; no such killings were taking place.5l Granted that Laval
was not the most authoritative source, his remarks nevertheless could
only have reinforced McClelland's own experience. Resistance by French
Jews? "There wasn't any, besides some infrequent hysteria," he agrees.52
Instead, entire Jewish populations of cities, towns and hamlets
throughout Europe, numbering in the millions, grudgingly accepted the
journey to "labor assignment in the East."
Jewish organizations in America and in other Allied nations betrayed a
similar disinclination to honor the stories emanating from "the old
country." Yes, most people had seen the press reports of the cruelties
being inflicted upon the Jews by the Nazis, and yes, the word from
relatives under occupation confirmed that conditions for the Jews were
harsh. Nonetheless, at no time did American or British Jews mount an
all-out, sustained, unified mobilization for rescue or even protest.53
In view of this lack of visible attempts on the part of Jewish leaders
themselves, it seems tendentious now to heap blame on British or
American statesmen for "complacency."
The concern over exaggerations was by no means limited to suspicious
officials in the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office,
however. Such was the wide and wild variety of extermination stories
from occupied Europe that even the Zionist press often warned against
"padding" them. Thus, while the organ of the World Zionist movement,
Ha'olem, published up to June 1942 no news concerning Nazi massacres, it
did contain a feature by a Polish Jewish leader claiming that the
propaganda uses of Jewish suffering had been discovered and the truth
"actually exaggerated two-fold and more." (This, and the following
citations quoting Jewish newspapers Ha'olem, Davar, and Hatzofe are from
Laqueur,
The Terrible Secret, pp. 184-85.)
Another Hebrew-language newspaper, Davar, cautioned all of its
reporters (and readers) that great care should be taken in evaluating
tales of, for example, soldiers returning from the front. Some people
had accepted claims in the Soviet Army tabloid, Red Star, that most of
those killed by the Germans at Babi Yar (Kiev) were Jews. Laqueur writes
that Davar admonished readers not to accept such reports because the
Soviet paper had not adequately supported its claims.
Even the information from Warsaw Ghetto leader Schmuel Zygelboim
(whose report constituted key evidence of extermination after the war)
was discredited when it appeared. Another Hebrew paper, Hatzofe,
commented about Zygelboim: "The irresponsible informants... absorb every
rumor, they desperately look for every piece of bad news, every
enormous figure and present it in a way that makes the blood curdle in
one's veins." This organ scolded careless correspondents and informants,
comparing their inaccurate stories to those about the Palestine riots
of 1936-39. These, the paper recalled "were spread all over the world
and... were so much exaggerated." (In the earlier case, Zionist press
accounts dealt falsely with the degree of Arab violence towards the
increasing numbers of Jewish refugees in Palestine.)54
Perhaps more than any single document, the detailed physical
description of Auschwitz given in the War Refugee Board [WRB] Report
convinced some that the rumors of extermination were based on fact. The
information, carried by two young Slovakian Jewish escapees from
Auschwitz, was published by the U.S. War Refugee Board in November 1944.
The late date is significant for the purposes of this study. The
Roosevelt administration, reacting to the two Slovakian Jews' report as
it had to earlier data alleging a Nazi extermination campaign, "sat on"
the Auschwitz news for four months before authorizing the WRB to release
it.55
Again the believability issue had surfaced. While more detailed than
previous questionable reports, this one by escapees Alfred Wetzler and
Rudolf Vrba contained similar data. One element, however, distinguished
it: for the first time Auschwitz was mentioned primarily as an
"extermination camp." The introduction of this new term -- new at
least in connection with "genocide" -- probably undergirded the
widespread suspicions among Allied leaders. When the Auschwitz claims
reached Washington via OSS London representative Arthur Goldberg,
officials at the State Department remained unimpressed. Remember, one
said privately: "... stuff like this has been coming out of Bern since
1942... this is a Jew telling about other Jews."56
Although some Jews may have begun to accept the claims by this time
(having read similar material in the past), Jewish organizations in
Hungary apparently steadfastly rejected them. Instead of a dramatic
rescue plan for Jewish camp inmates, a laborious barter arrangement was
established. Gilbert describes in some detail the talks between
SS-Standartenführer Adolf Eichmann and Hungarian Zionist authorities, in
which Eichmann offered Jews their freedom in exchange for food, trucks
and other commodities needed by the struggling German military.57
As impressive a document as the Vrba/Wetzler report is supposed to
have been, the desperate warnings it contained about the endangered
Hungarian Jews were somehow shunted aside in favor of an inherently
time-consuming approach. To this day, Vrba is said to be convinced that
had the facts brought to Bratislava been circulated immediately
throughout Hungary, many of the 450,000 Jews scheduled for deportation
would have resisted, evaded or otherwise obstructed their transfer to
concen- tration camps. As it happened, the two young Jewish messengers
sparked the same lukewarm response as had Gerhard Riegner.
Some people, however, still do not accept the logical notion that
masses of panicked Jews in the middle of a war could have wrought havoc
among the Nazi authorities. Among these are former Supreme Court Justice
Arthur Goldberg, National Archives curator Robert Wolfe, and Holocaust
scholar David Weinberg. The first two argue that any resistance to the
Germans would have been futile, and that the Jews were conscious of
their fate.
Weinberg (a member of an interdisciplinary Holocaust research team)
agrees that awareness of impending doom was widespread among the
deportees, but he describes a kind of "moral resistance." It was "not
necessarily a passive acceptance" that the trains' occupants expressed,
says Weinberg, but "a pattern of resistance that manifested itself in a
commitment to Jewish identity and a will to survive as witnesses to Nazi
brutality." This explanation is untenable, however, if only because of
the em- phatically "survivalist"mentality evolved in the Jews through
centuries of bitter experience. How Weinberg expected the doomed Jews to
have "survived as witnesses" -- if they believed they were to die --
is nowhere explained in his writings about the behavior of Jewish
prisoners.58
One final report on the Jews' response to information about mass
killings deserves examination. It is one which, considering its
background and sponsors, seems surprisingly to have been quoted only
rarely in the post-war period. The Displacement of Population in Europe,
published in late 1943 by the International Labor office in Montreal,
contains heavily annotated data on the far-ranging movements of
civilians during the war. But despite having been prepared and
sanctioned by an impressive coalition of Jewish organizations, the Red
Cross, and others concerned with refugee work, Displacement echoes the
Nazi line on deportation.59 The rule, this 100-page document found, was
that following concentration in ghettos, European Jews (along with other
civilians) were transferred from their homes to make room for
"repatriated. Germans."
"At the same time, however," the report continues, "another factor,
perceptible since the end of 1940 and now assuming growing importance,
is strongly operating in a contradictory direction -- namely, the
needs of the German war economy. As a result, Germany's Jewish policy
may be described as a compromise between the extermination of the Jews
and their utilization in the war economy." It is difficult to understand
whether the term "extermination" in this context refers to physical
murder, or to the elimination of all vestiges of Jewish unity and
cultural heritage.60 But because the report proceeds at length
concerning the manner in which Jews were being forced to labor for
Germany (and only rarely refers to "extermination" in other contexts) it
seems clear that many Jewish organizations accepted the Nazis'
explanation of the word "deportation." In addition to the surprising and
conspicuous absence from the population report of the "extermination
camp" category from its list of labor and other camps, there is the
interesting observation that Jews were "permitted to return home"
following a day's work.61
There is, certainly, a complicated matrix of elements involved in the
attitudes of the Allied governments accused of failure to destroy the
Nazi "extermination" camps. Some relate to concerns that heavy rescue
efforts on behalf of Jews would be construed as preferential treatment
for their Jewish civilians by nations seeking help from the major
powers. A related issue was apparently the belief that responding to the
sporadic pressures from Jewish leaders would make the conflict appear
to be a "Jewish war," causing latent anti-Semitism to rise in the U.S.
and Britain and playing into the hands of Nazi propagandists. Another
element involves the wisdom of diverting military resources for
humanitarian purposes.
But such concerns -- now the subjects of many books and articles
-- are dependent upon, and rightly subordinated to, the question of
what was known factually, and believed, about Nazi atrocities.
Highly-charged debate over questions like the Allied failure to bomb
Auschwitz becomes moot when viewed in light of the absence of evidence
supporting allegations of mass murder.
Whether or not greater rescue efforts by the Allies or Western Jewish
groups could have prevented Jewish deaths is highly speculative. What
is far clearer and, I believe, amply demonstrated by the foregoing, is
that neither the Allied powers nor world Jewry had adequate knowledge
from which convincingly to argue a case that the extermination of the
Jews was occurring.
The "bottom line," perhaps, is this: with the Goldberg Commission (to
investigate Jewish behavior during the war) now -- Summer 1984 --
aswirl in charge and countercharge -- accusations about who helped and
who did not, who had the resources and who did not, who "knew" about
the atrocities and kept silent, and so on ad infinitum -- it is unjust
for the seemingly growing numbers of Jewish leaders now to accuse the
Allied governments of indifference. What appears to be taking place is a
dangerous scapegoating, aided by an entirely misplaced and
inappropriate guilt among those Gentile leaders who associate with this
school of thought. Among these are President Ronald Reagan,
Vice-President George Bush, and other government officials endorsing the
goals of the semi-official "President's Commission on the Holocaust."
Because the fruit of the Commission's work will be the opening of a
"Holocaust Museum" in Washington, in which Allied "indifference" will
reportedly be highlighted, the Mea culpas of present-day administration
figures have the effect of aligning them with only one (albeit the
loudest) faction in a dispute that has yet to be resolved.
It is hoped that this study may help to illuminate those darker corners of the dispute that some have preferred to shun.
Notes
Full References for Sources Cited in the Notes Are Given in the Bibliography
- The Washington Post, May 19, 1983, p. B1. Columnist
Richard Cohen called "a disgrace" the conferring of an honorary degree
by Harvard University upon John McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War under
Franklin Roosevelt). Cohen, like other writers of late, finds fault
with the decision by the Allies not to bomb Auschwitz. McCloy himself
has said that the decision was not his to make. The Washington Times
of April 8, 1983 (p.2-B) quotes the President of the Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors: "Why wasn't the world telling what was
happening to [European Jews]?... These are the questions, not why did we
go like sheep." In Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness,
historian Konnilyn Feig cites the "extensive topographical information"
in the aerial photos of Auschwitz in 1978 as proof that the Allies
"knew" what was occurring there; in an interview with this writer Arthur
Goldberg claimed bluntly that "the Allied governments... did not
exercise... these powers... of deterrence... to the fullest. This is to
their everlasting shame." Yet Goldberg (with the OSS Labor Section in
London during the war, and currently Chairman of the American Jewish
Commission on the Holocaust) concedes that "there was great
difficulty... to accept what was going on." One reason cited: the
Belgian-babies-being-eaten-by-the-Germans falsehoods of the First World
War.
- Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Record Group RG 226,
National Archives and Records Service, Washington D.C. Document Number
81854-C, June 13, 1944.
- Ibid., Doc. 61701, September 27, 1944.
- Ibid., Doc. 80227, June 1, 1944.
- Ibid., Doc. 56166, January 8, 1944.
- Ibid., Doc. 66059, August 12, 1943.
- Ibid., Doc. 67231, April 13, 1944.
- Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's Final Solution,
p. 82. The soap story was very reminiscent of stories which surfaced in
the previous conflict, and was equally suspect in the minds of the
(by-then) somewhat more sophisticated public in America and abroad. In
the "war to end all wars," it was recalled, Germany -- so it had been
said by Allied propagandists -- established "corpse factories" for
rendering civilians into various lubricants, glue, and so forth. The
ever-popular soap allegation was freely repeated at Washington's 1983
gathering of Holocaust survivors from around the world.
- Erich Kern, Meineid Gegen Deutschland, p. 152-63.
- Dino A. Brugioni and Robert Poirier, The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz/Birkenau Extermination Complex.
- Konnilyn G. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness, p. 368.
- See Gilbert, generally, and press conference cited below.
- Press conference, National Archives, Washington, D.C., 23 February 1979.
- Ibid., and author's interview with Robert Wolfe, April 1983, on
the intelligence value of the photos: "That was 1978, and nobody had
ever looked at those things since the war. And when they looked at them
during the war... they had no idea that Birkenau was a murder mill...
How good was the [information on extermination] being evaluated? After
all, it was coming from behind enemy lines."
- Brugioni and Poirier, p. 11
- Ibid., note p. 11.
- Otto Friedrich, "The Kingdom of Auschwitz," The Atlantic, September 1981, p. 54.
- Author's interview with Robert Wolfe.
- Ibid.
- Author's interview with Edward T. Chase, May 1983. Chase said
that four factors "conspired to ruin" the Jews' case for sparking Allied
rescue and bombing efforts: 1) Roosevelt's "lack of imagination"; 2)
"the degree of divisiveness and hostility among the American Jewish
groups themselves... and between upper-class German Jews and the Russian
and lower-class Jews," which was "immense"; 3) the [related] impatience
this squabbling caused among the non-Jews and State Department and
other officials, who "wondered who the hell they were going to deal
with"; and 4) the question of "what's true, what's false about the
extermination stories. "
- Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, p. 5. Cave Brown
also makes an interesting observation on the uses by modern nations in
wartime of what is generally termed "black propaganda." Quoting Sir
Garnet Wolseley, former Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, in his
1869 Soldier's Handbook: "We are brought up to feel it a disgrace
ever to succeed by falsehood... that honesty is the best policy...
These pretty little sentiments do well for a child's copybook, but a man
who acts on them had better be prepared to sheathe his sword forever."
The Allies in both world wars certainly did heed these words on
occasion, fabricating some data about Nazi atrocities to discredit the
Germans and to encourage greater efforts against the "barbaric enemy."
Such propaganda has become a standard fixture of modern warfare, on all
sides.
- "British Intelligence and the Holocaust," Baltimore Jewish Week, April 15, 1983, "News" section, p. 30, quoting F. H. Hinsley, et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War.
- Joseph Persico, Piercing the Reich, p. xi.
- Richard Dunlop, "The Wartime OSS," American Legion, June 1984, p. 15.
- In The Terrible Secret (p. 86), Laqueur claims that
"studies about what, if anything, was produced at Auschwitz ... were
probably undertaken [by Allied intelligences but they have not been
declassified." While it is true that some records remain classified --
involving as they do intelligence sources and methods -- a large body
of material on Auschwitz industries has been, or is in the process of
being, declassified. See, for example, OSS RG 226 at the Modern Military
Branch of the National Archives, and archivist John Taylor. Some 36
sub-camps at Auschwitz produced goods for the German war machine as
diverse as cement and electrical fuses.
- Author's interview with Professor Allen Kraut, May 1983. Kraut is co-author of a work-in-progress entitled American Refugee Policy, 1933-1945.
- Ibid., and Laqueur, p. 85. Laqueur makes the valuable
observation that highly-classified Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SS Security
Service or "SD") codes could be read in London by late 1941, thanks to
British Intelligence's acquisition of a German ENIGMA coding machine.
Although much in the ENIGMA files remains classified, what is presently
known (from Anthony Cave Brown and others) makes patently evident that
even in the covert communications of those German agencies most often
associated with extermination of the Jews, the subject of Jewish
killings rarely arises.
- Author's interview with Roswell McClelland, April 1983.
McClelland acted as the WRP representative in Switzerland from 1942 on.
From 1940 until that time he and his Quaker wife travelled through
unoccupied France aiding war refugees.
- Ibid. Laqueur (p. 99) says that OSS spy-master Allen Dulles was
"profoundly shocked" at the report of the two Auschwitz escapees in
1944, saying: "one has to do something immediately." What Laqueur fails
to explain is why Dulles should have expressed surprise at the
information, considering that he occupied the best listening post in
Europe, had an efficient and elaborate agent network which extended
across Europe, and regularly received vital intelligence from such
high-ranking anti-Nazi German leaders as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (head
of the Abwehr, or military intelligence). Laqueur suspects that such
professionals as Dulles may have inhabited a twilight zone "between
knowing and not knowing" the truth about the Holocaust, or knew "and
kept their knowledge to themselves." Dulles, whether or not his "shock"
was genuine (it may more likely have been affected for the benefit of
the British newsman who brought him the Auschwitz report), confined his
only known reaction to writing a cable to the State Department the next
day.
- A selection of items from The New York Times from 1943
reflects the low order of priority assigned to charges of extermination
by America's "newspaper of record" -- despite the magnitude of the
charges. Note the page numbers: February 14, p. 37: "Mass executions of
Jews in Poland on an accelerated tempo was reported by [European Jewish
leaders]... In one place 6000 Jews are killed daily, according to
reports"; February 16, p. 7: "All the aged and feeble [from
Czestachowa] Poland] were sent to Rawa-Russka, in Galicia, for execution
by the Nazis, sources inside Poland said"; March 10, p. 10: "40
thousand persons listened and watched ... last night to two performances
of 'We Shall Never Die,' a dramatic mass memorial to the two million
Jews killed in Europe... The narrator said, 'There will be no more Jews
left in Europe for representation when peace comes. The four million
left to be killed are being killed, according to plan' " ; April 20, p.
11: "Two million Jews have been wiped out since the Nazis began their
march through Europe in 1939 and five million more are in immediate
danger of execution ... The report said lethal gas and shooting are
among the methods being used to exterminate the Jews."
- Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. The Devil's Chemists, pp. 184, 188.
- "The Nazi Secret No One Believed," The Washington Post, February 5, 1983, pp. C-1, C-4.
- Arthur B. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy,
p. 57. Riegner's telegram read: "Received alarming report stating that,
in Führer's headquarter, a plan has been discussed and is under
consideration, according to which all Jews ... numbering 3 1/2 million
to 4 million should be ... at one blow exterminated ... Action reported
planned for autumn. Methods under discussion include prussic acid."
- The Washington Post, February 5, 1983, p. C-4.
- Gilbert, pp. 57-59.
- Ibid., p. 57, and Morse, p. 4.
- Laqueur, p. 82, quoting Frank Roberts, Central Department official in the British Foreign Ministry.
- Ibid., p. 98. Also expressing an incredulity that seemed
widespread was the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, Hershel Johnson. Johnson
had heard a story from a "German eyewitness" about a document alleging
that of 450,000 Jews in Warsaw only 50,000 remained. Although he sent
the report on to his superiors in Washington in April 1943, he noted
that "so fantastic is the story... that I hesitate to make it the
subject of an official report." Bernard Wasserstein, in Britain and the
Jews of Europe, 1933-1945, pp. 295-96, delves into very similar
attitudes of British government officials toward the reports. He quotes a
member of the Propaganda Directorate who said after the war that
"Exaggeration, excitement, threats and extravagance in all forms were
avoided." Concerning the Foreign Office's consideration of further
declarations against German mass killings of Jews and others, similar to
a previous declaration of December 1942 (in which Jews were not singled
out as victims), Wasserstein explains that "officials agreed that
evidence for the use of gas chambers was untrustworthy and
inconclusive." The Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee,
moreover, commented irritatably: "The Poles, and to a far greater extent
the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us
up."
- Laqueur, pp. 162-64.
- Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust, p. 229.
- Author's interview with Roswell McClelland, April 1983.
- Laqueur, pp. 130-31.
- Gilbert, p. 340. Between May 1942 and June 1944, Gilbert notes,
almost none of the messages reaching the West referred to Auschwitz as
the destination of Jewish deportees or as a killing center. "Nor had
Auschwitz made any impression on those who were building what they
believed to be an increasingly comprehensive picture of the fate of the
Jews." Bauer (note p. 325) and Gilbert (p. 121) both indicate that
Jewish records confirm what is suggested by the postcards cited by
Laqueur. Jewish organizations in Europe were "diligent record-keepers,"
yet despite what Bauer says is a good amount of documentation that
survived the war, there is "an absence of vital [i.e.,
extermination-related] subjects from the records." Gerhard Riegner,
whose report from the anonymous German industrialist made believers of
some (since the man supposedly had access to the killing chemicals),
strangely mentioned only "eastern camps" in his reports. Had his
informant truly been aware of any "secret talks" at Hitler's
headquarters -- or actually attended them, as Riegner claims --
surely Auschwitz would have received high priority. Further straining
the credibility of such stories is the fact, noted by Laqueur, for
example (pp. 22-25), that notwithstanding Auschwitz's top-secret status,
any serious suspicions would have spread quickly. This, he says, is
because "Auschwitz inmates were dispersed all over Silesia, and... met
with thousands of people. Hundreds of civilian employees worked at
Auschwitz, and journalists travelled regularly in the Government-General
(Poland) and were bound to hear." Obviously, what was heard was written
off as propaganda or gross exaggeration.
- Laqueur, p. 215.
- Jewish Week, Washington, D.C., April 7-13, 1983, p. 10.
- Ibid.
- Author's interview with Robert Wolfe, April 1983.
- Gilbert, p. 121.
- If the Jews in close proximity to the Germans failed to
appreciate an ominous "deportation-equals-extermination" formulation,
the Allied leadership thousands of miles away can hardly be faulted for
not seeing the connection.
- Laqueur, p. 148; Bauer, pp. 56, 58. Bolstering Leo Baeck's
essentially "upbeat" view is the fact that there were many deportations
from Theresienstadt; apparently no credible information existed there to
alter the venerated rabbi's position.
- Author's interview with Roswell McClelland, April 1983.
- Ibid.
- Gilbert, p. 5.
- Laqueur, pp. 184-85.
- Allied officials can only have wondered why they did not hear
earlier about the "extermination" activities of Auschwitz. My own
conclusions are manifest.
- DuBois, pp. 184-88.
- Gilbert, pp. 204-05.
- David Weinberg, "The Holocaust in Historical Perspective," in Byron L. Sherwin and Susan G. Ament (eds.), Encountering the Holocaust: An Interdisciplinary Survey,
pp. 61-62. After speaking of the "heroic resistance" in the Treblinka
concentration camp and the Warsaw Ghetto, Weinberg concedes that "the
overwhelming majority of Jews did not actively resist their slaughter."
That is presumably because "it was impossible for a powerless and
unarmed people to mount an effective defense against the most powerful
military and political force in Europe." Aside from the fact that Jews
were not entirely "unarmed" (and, with stolen and airdropped arms,
engaged the Germans in battle much as the Afghan "freedom fighters" do
against the Soviets today), Weinberg's logic is open to question. If the
annihilation of Europe's Jews was the certainty that he sees 40 years
later, uprisings like the one in Warsaw should have attained a far
greater fury and been more numerous than they were. Jews have no lesser
instinctive desire to live than do other peoples. The scale of their
resistance actions against the Germans occurred in direct proportion to
their fears.
- Eugene M. Kulischer, The Displacement of Population in Europe.
A partial list of contributors to the report: The American Joint
Distribution Committee, the American National Red Cross, the American
Jewish Committee Research Institute, the Institute of Jewish Affairs,
the Board of Economic Warfare (Washington, D.C.), the Central and
Eastern European Planning Board (New York), the Office of Population
Research (Princeton University).
- Bernard Wasserstein, "Jewish Silence," Midstream,
August-Sept. 1980, p. 13. Wasserstein quotes Zionist leader Chaim
Weizmann in a May 1940 letter to aide Meyer Weisgal: "European Jewry,
with very few exceptions, has been practically blotted out." The fact
that the term "blotted out" is as strongly connotative of physical
murder as "extermination" illustrates the problems that arise from
rhetorical license and faulty translation. Few, certainly, would argue
that most German Jews before or during the early period of the war --
to say nothing of Jews in Eastern Europe -- were overcome with a
foreboding that tragedy would befall them several years later.
Weizmann's declaration is, therefore, both inflammatory and grossly
misleading. In 1940, the European Jewish community was intact and its
members quite alive.
- Kulischer, pp. 109-110.
Bibliography
Author's Interviews
Edward T. Chase, May 1983.
Arthur Goldberg, June 1983.
Allen Kraut, May 1983.
Roswell McClelland, April 1983.
Robert Wolfe, April 1983.
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American Jewry and the Holocaust. Chicago: Wayne State University Press, 1979.
Brenner, Leni.
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From
The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1984 (Vol. 5, Nos. 2, 3, 4), page 215-239.
K. C. Gleason is the pen name of a Washington, DC, journalist whose
feature reporting has appeared in numerous periodicals in Europe and the
Middle East.
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