(Author: Alexander J. Groth, Vol. 63, No. 3, Chanukah 2008)
A variation on Holocaust denial is a more subtle attempt to absolve so-called bystanders, especially Allied governments, of complicity in the mass murder of European Jews. A foremost example of those who disguise the Allied role is the eminent British-Jewish historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Sir Winston Churchill and prolific, widely cited, author of historical narratives focused both on the Holocaust and the Second World War. Gilbert’s ‘sanitizing’ method is analyzed and illustrated here in relation to the proposition that Hitler’s Final Solution might have been, and certainly should have been, variously obstructed and impeded by “third parties” – the Allies foremost among these – not only in relation to the events of 1941-1942 and subsequently, but also 1940-1941.
Holocaust denial is simply too obvious a falsehood to command a significant following within the world’s respectably intellectual circles. The denial of Allied passivity and collusion with the perpetrators, however, is quite another matter. There are respectable scholars and historians who distort the reality of the Holocaust because it seems that they cannot face up to the indifference and the complicity of non-Nazis, and especially of Allied governments, in the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe under the auspices of Hitler’s regime.
Gilbert has recounted and reconstructed some of the most horrible scenes and events from the whole European landscape of Jewish martyrdom and Nazi inhumanity. Simultaneously, however, he has promoted two arguments to absolve the Allies of responsibility in the Holocaust, viz. lack of information, and a technical-physical inability to act in any timely or effective fashion. In order to sustain this interpretation, Gilbert has (1) gone to great lengths to disguise, obscure, and distort what was known about the killings and also what was knowable (and what is ‘knowable’ always depends, to some extent at least, on someone’s interest in knowing…); he has also (2) resorted to gross misrepresentation of alleged Allied inability to act in response to that which was either known or knowable; and (3), he has exhibited a consistent unwillingness to make inferences from Allied rhetoric and behavior which suggested that lack of desire, rather than lack of information or capability, was at the root of Allied behavior with respect to the Holocaust.
To put the matter into proper perspective, one needs to take into account Allied recognition of the fact of the Holocaust. This recognition was embodied in the Allied Declaration of 17 December, 1942, issued on behalf of the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the French National Committee. It was made public by British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden in the House of Commons. It asserted that:
…the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettoes established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews. …None of those taken away are ever heard of again. … the number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.
Eden observed that the reports upon which the Allied declaration was based were ‘reliable’, and that they had reached the British government ‘recently’. In the conclusion of the official declaration, Eden said that Allied governments condemned the “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination”. He said nothing about any possible assistance to the victims.
Virtually any Jew who had survived these times, especially in East-Central Europe, is cognizant of the important effect of local antisemitism on the success of Hitler’s Final Solution. To be sure, there were heroic individuals in all European societies who ran all the risks of murderous Nazi reprisals in order to do what they could to help and rescue Jews. There were some “shining stars” like Oskar Schindler and Jan Karski. But, in very great numbers, there was also collaboration between Nazi killers and antisemitic sympathizers, people who identified and turned over Jews to their murderers, people who assisted in the roundups and the killings, and who also, in many cases, simply refused to give Jews any assistance or even sympathy, that is, people who remained wholly indifferent to, and passively accepting of, the Nazi mass killing of the Jews.
For these people, a public word from the very prestigious figure of Winston Churchill, as indeed also from Franklin Roosevelt, would have been significant. It could have made a life-or-death difference for thousands of Jews who were “turned in”, and for thousands who could have been assisted but were not. Nazi liquidation of European Jewry occurred disproportionately – certainly for a majority of the roughly six million – in only six principal extermination camps. These were Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor. All these camps were located on the territory of pre-war Poland. Although the Polish underground movement reported throughout the war on the extermination of the Jews to its political leadership in London, it made no effort to interfere with the killing process in or around these camps. There were no Polish attacks on these Nazi facilities or the railroad tracks leading to them, or on the trains carrying the victims.
Anthony Eden spoke with enormous inaccuracy, to say the least, when he assured the House of Commons following his Declaration:
I may also say that all the information we have from occupied countries is that the peoples there, despite their many sufferings, trials and tribulations, are doing everything in their power to give assistance and charity to their Jewish fellow-subjects.
Some Gilbert Interpretations
Nevertheless, Gilbert, in a work whose very theme might have suggested to him some very critical observations about Allied conduct, managed a blandly exculpatory conclusion. In the Epilogue to his 1981 book about Auschwitz and the Allies, he summarized his view of the Jewish tragedy as follows:
Most of Europe’s Jews had already been murdered several months before the facts of the concentration camp killings were fully [?!] known, and more than a year and a half before Auschwitz itself was identified as a main killing centre.
Throughout 1942, the problem confronting both the Allies, and the Jews in Allied lands, had been lack of information. This arose from the deliberate Nazi policy of deception, whereby the destination of the deportees, and their fate, was cloaked and concealed. But as the details of the killings in Eastern Europe began to filter through to the west early in the summer of 1942, it was clear that the scale of the massacres was substantial and horrific; so much so that by the end of the year they were described in the widely publicized Allied Declaration of 17 December 1942 as ‘bestial crimes’.
During this time, it was difficult for the Allies to do anything other than to issue warnings and declarations. It was the German army which dominated Europe, from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. At the same time, one problem for both Jews and non-Jews outside Nazi-dominated Europe was to take in the enormity of what was happening. For some of those who read the reports, there was also an unwillingness to take them in.
Gilbert’s message here was awkwardly mixed. If the Allies said in December 1942 that they knew what was being done to the Jews, how could one argue that they really did not? Eden did not say that the Jews had been killed; he said they were being killed. Even if the Allies did not know all the details of Nazi policies, and all the specifics of Auschwitz, as opposed to other camps and other killing locations, how much of a handicap to policy was that? Gilbert’s notion that it was “difficult for the Allies to do anything” was virtually sophomoric. Was bombing Germany day and night during 1942 and 1943 ‘difficult’? It was ‘difficult’ but it was being done. Was helping out and supplying French and Yugoslav and Norwegian resistance movements ‘difficult’? That was also being done from British and American resources. Ships sailed and planes flew and soldiers fought.
Interestingly, earlier in the same work, Gilbert had written that ‘many’ British policy makers “opposed the appeals on behalf of [Jewish] refugees [because they] were particularly ‘afraid’ as they expressed it, of the ‘danger’ of ‘flooding’ Palestine, and indeed Britain with Jews. They argued that even the arrival of a few thousand Jewish refugees in Britain would provoke an outburst of antisemitism. These same policy makers were also wary of what they regarded as a parallel ‘danger’ of falling for what one of them [?!] referred to as Jewish ‘sob-stuff’”. And some, he wrote, also spoke of “customary Jewish exaggeration”.
It would hardly be a matter of literary license to label the policy-makers’ attitudes that Gilbert described here as fundamentally antisemitic. But, if this was the case, was it not likely that various other British policies with respect to the Holocaust – not just refugee issues – might have been affected by such attitudes? Was it even possible perhaps that there were some British policy-makers who thought that Hitler’s killing of the Jews – who, if left alive, might some day seek to ‘flood’ Palestine – wasn’t such a bad idea?
After all, it was in 1942 that Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, made this infamous observation in his diaries:
The question of Jewish persecution in Europe is being given top news priority by the English and the Americans … At bottom, however, I believe that both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff.
In his major work, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Collins, 1986, 959 pp.), Gilbert concluded the discussion of the extermination of European Jews in an Epilogue of several pages subtitled, “I will tell the world”. He described the apparently special character of the Holocaust among Hitler’s many crimes: “It was the Jews alone who were marked out to be destroyed in their entirety: every Jewish man, woman and child”. But in this work Gilbert gave virtually no attention to the attitude of the Allied states toward this horrible process from its early days in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 and 1941 to its gas chamber conclusion from 1942 to 1945.
To be sure, Gilbert quoted from the famous letter of Szmuel Zygielbojm, the Warsaw Ghetto representative who committed suicide in London in May 1943 in protest of world and Allied passivity toward the murder of the Jews. But in doing so he, critically, left out Zygielbojm’s line about the Allied governments’ failure to act. He used only the words: “By my death, I wish to express my vigorous protest against the apathy with which the world regards and resigns itself to the slaughter of the Jewish people”.
Gilbert made mention of a Churchill broadcast on 24 August, 1941, coincident with the Nazi attack on Russia, in which he spoke of “merciless butchery” unlike all previous experience, although he noted that “Churchill made no specific reference to Jews”.
He mentioned Churchill’s message on 14 November, 1941, to Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, on its centenary, in which Churchill “gave public recognition to the Jewish suffering”. What Gilbert quoted, however, was exceedingly tame. The Prime Minister wrote: “None has suffered more cruelly than the Jews”.3 In this message, according to Gilbert, Churchill concluded that “[The Jew] has not allowed [this persecution] to break his spirit: he has never lost the will to resist … Assuredly in the day of victory the Jews’ sufferings and his [sic!] part in the struggle will not be forgotten”.
Churchill made a passing reference to Jewish deportations from France in September of 1942 in the House of Commons and concluded that “When the hour of liberation strikes Europe, as strike it will, it will also be the hour of retribution”.
In October 1942, Churchill sent a message addressed to a protest meeting held in London on behalf of Hitler’s Jewish victims. He spoke of “the systematic cruelties [?!] to which the Jewish people – men, women, and children – have been exposed under the Nazi regime [as] amongst the most terrible events of history” .., but again his conclusion was that “when this world struggle ends with the enthronement of human rights, racial persecution will be ended”.
It is quite clear from all the foregoing Churchill quotations – industriously assembled by Gilbert – that (a) they tended to understate the enormity and singularity of the Nazi “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, that (b) they included no reference to any possible interference with the Final Solution while the enormous crime was actually in progress and (c) they did not include any appeals to anyone in or outside Britain for assistance to the victims.
Gilbert’s laudatory treatment reached still greater heights in his 1991 biography of Churchill. His account of the Prime Minister’s career was full of glowing tributes. In fact, he concluded his 1066 page treatise by saying that “as the years pass and the historical record is studied without malice, Churchill’s actions and aims will be seen to have been humane and far-sighted”.1 He also suggested that “perhaps not enough has been made of [Churchill’s] magnanimity”.
Without denying Churchill’s critically important role in Allied victory in World War II, the question nevertheless remains: just how humane and magnanimous was he when it came to dealing with Jews? Churchill’s attitude to the unprecedented plight of the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust was, at best, one of relative indifference, even when by the admission of his own government (if not Gilbert’s) he knew full well what the Nazis were doing to the Jews of Europe.
Looking at specific events, what did Churchill do when he learned about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as all the world did of course, in April 1943? Did he utter a public word? Did he send planes with supplies to Warsaw, or even as a show of solidarity, as he did when the Poles staged their ill-fated Warsaw uprising in August 1944? 3 Did he consult Roosevelt and Stalin on these matters in 1943 as he did in 1944? Did he issue a declaration supporting the Jewish Fighting Organization as his Foreign Secretary did for the Polish Home Army in September 1944 demanding that the Polish freedom fighters be treated by the Nazis as regular combatants with all the implicit threat of Allied reprisals?4 Did he call in the representatives of the Polish Government-in-Exile, headquartered in London, to urge them to give Jews fighting in the streets of Warsaw more help, especially from their fairly significant weapons’ stockpiles (or perhaps through diversionary actions)?5 Did he call a single meeting of his staff or cabinet to consider what, if anything, might have been done to assist the martyrs and heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto?
At the time of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in August-September 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged many messages concerning assistance to the Polish insurgents and contacts with Stalin to facilitate it. The record speaks for itself.6 In the case of the Jewish Warsaw uprising in April-May 1943, they did not exchange a single message. (It is noteworthy, of course, that Jewish resistance in Warsaw actually lasted longer than the resistance of six sovereign states in the 1940-1941 period, i.e., Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Yugoslavia and Greece).
During the Polish rising, Churchill made two speeches in the House of Commons. On 26 September, 1944, he paid tribute to the heroism of the Polish insurgents in Warsaw and specifying various ways in which Britain had been trying to assist them “despite the very great practical difficulties and in the face of heavy losses [of Allied aircraft and crews]”. This was followed by a speech on the House floor, 5 October, after the Polish insurgents in Warsaw had already surrendered. Here, Churchill expressed admiration for the Poles and expressed “sympathy with the Polish nation”. When the Jewish resistance movement fought the Nazis in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, Churchill made no mention of it in any public statement or speech.
Analogously, Roosevelt remained entirely silent when the Jews fought in Warsaw, although he and his administration sent messages to Stalin and exchanged various public statements with the Polish Government-in-Exile during the subsequent Polish rising. It was ironic, however, that five days before Mordechai Anielewicz, leader of the Ghetto resistance, perished in his Warsaw bunker, President Roosevelt did send a public message to Poland, but it recognized and honored a completely unrelated Polish national anniversary.
Naturally, when one considers why it was that the Allies remained entirely passive bystanders while Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto fought and died the question of decision-maker attitudes is obviously important. In the case of Churchill’s partner, Roosevelt, we have timely, relevant testimony from the public record: Roosevelt’s own opinion of Jews expressed to a Vichy official on 17 January, 1943, in Casablanca – almost exactly within three months of the Ghetto uprising. According to the State Department’s official account:
The President stated that he felt the whole Jewish problem should be studied very carefully … the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc.) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population. Such a plan would therefore permit the Jews to engage in the professions, at the same time would not permit them to overcrowd the professions, and would represent an unanswerable argument that they were being given their full rights. … The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty per cent [sic!] of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.
As is evident from the Rosenman collection of presidential pronouncements, Franklin Roosevelt, just like Winston Churchill, did not make a single speech or broadcast touching on the issue of the Nazi extermination of the Jews during the whole course of the Second World War. The closest reference was a statement issued in the Presidents’ name and behalf on 24 March, 1944, shortly after Nazi troops entered the territory of Hungary.
From the perspective of ‘results’, it is clear that under Churchill’s stewardship, and without opposition from Roosevelt, British warships did much to keep the few Jews escaping Hitler’s European inferno from reaching the shores of British-occupied Palestine. Under the Prime Minister’s direction, various partisan organizations throughout Europe, Yugoslav and Polish among them, received all sorts of weapons, equipment and technical and material assistance, but no such things were offered to the Jews. Many Allied planes were lost over Warsaw in 1944 in what was, for the most part, a futile attempt to supply Polish insurgents, but none could be found or flown to help Jews in 1943. An attack on Auschwitz was talked about in official British circles, with apparent support from Churchill, in 1944 but nothing came of it.
How accidental was it, one might reasonably ask, that while literally thousands of trains, carrying their suffocating Jewish cargo, rolled endlessly toward extermination camps in Poland from places that were geographically close to Britain (and also to southern Italy from 1943 onwards), none were ever attacked by Allied aircraft or commando units? There were trains from France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Western Germany, Norway, Hungary, Italy, and also from Yugoslavia and Greece. Was it not the case that the safest job in the German military-security apparatus during World War II was killing Jews at Auschwitz and elsewhere because the Allies never sought to interfere with the killing process? The Nazi crews escorting Jewish death trains during the Holocaust suffered literally no casualties in carrying out their ghastly tasks. Death camp guards and doctors lived exceedingly well.
If there would have been clear symbolism in Allied attacks on German railroads employed in the Nazi Final Solution, the British Government did not appear interested in it. Perhaps the balance of political benefits seemed to be on the side of modest indifference to ‘humanity’ as far as Jews were concerned. In any case, we do know that on 1 August, 1946, Churchill, somehow, managed to say publicly that he “had no idea when the war came to an end, of the horrible massacres [to which Jews were subjected]”.
Gilbert’s few references in his biography to Churchill’s interface with Jews or Jewish concerns during the Second World War are, necessarily it would seem, few. The most extensive discussion occurs in just three very short paragraphs on pages 783-4; these indicate Churchill’s support for an Auschwitz bombing mission in July 1944, support which, somehow, of course, did not sufficiently impress the Royal Air Force to cause it to carry out the mission; and there are some references to British intervention with the Hungarian government concerning Jewish deportations. This intervention Gilbert links to the saving of “more than a hundred thousand Jews”. By the time these events had occurred, over ninety percent of Hitler’s Jewish victims in Europe were already dead, and the issue of Allied victory over the Third Reich was no longer a matter of any serious dispute – at least outside the Führer’s bunker.
The Warsaw Beginnings
For the morally challenged, the question arises as to how one might exonerate British leadership for its silence during the early years of Hitler’s butchery of European Jewry, during 1940 and 1941 when the murders were more gradual but when they were also embarrassingly more in public view. Gilbert suggests an answer to this in his treatment of Nazi policies toward Jews before Barbarossa, i.e., before June 1941 and the introduction of the so-called Einsatzgruppen in the east. The effect of this is to conceptually soften the earlier form of mass murder involved in ‘ghetto-ization’.
The genocidal misery of the Warsaw Ghetto, unlike Auschwitz, was virtually on public display, prominently located as it was in one of the great capitals of Europe, governed by decrees posted on public streets and walls, visible from many intersections outside the Ghetto, connected to the city by a public telephone network and accessible to public streetcars from which non-Jews could see the emaciated corpses of Jews scattered on the sidewalks.
In this instance, Gilbert’s vehicle for a sugarcoated interpretation is an essay on the Final Solution in the 1995 Oxford Companion to World War II. Here we find him saying that after their conquest of Poland the Nazis began to implement a scheme confining Jews in “restricted areas”. He defines the situation of the Jews as follows: “A medieval concept, that of the ghetto, was revived. But whereas in medieval times the ghetto, such as the one in Venice, was a centre of Jewish creativity, under the Nazi scheme it was a place of confinement and poverty”.
He goes on to say that the “food ration imposed upon [Jews] was even smaller than that imposed upon the non-Jewish inhabitants of Poland”.
Clearly this interpretation, in light of the officially promulgated Nazi decrees and actual experience, leaves much to be desired. ‘Poverty’ is something people can live with for centuries. The size of the Jewish food ration being smaller than that of the Poles is the least important aspect of the Nazi ghetto regime. The importance of a 184-calorie per day ration is not that it was smaller than the Polish food ration. Its real importance derives from the fact that human beings cannot survive very long if they are fed a 184 calorie daily diet. And if such a diet is reinforced by deliberate crowding of many people into a very small area (actually hundreds of thousands of people forced into about 2 square miles of urban space), hunger and exposure combine to terminate lives. Deprived of fuel, as well as food, over 90 percent of ghetto households did not have any heating in an area where the mean high temperature in January is 2 degrees below freezing and the mean low is 12 degrees below.
The regime of death from starvation, disease and exposure was made possible by cutting off the Jewish population of the ghetto from virtually all regular and lawful economic intercourse with the external world, from the sort of linkages which precisely characterized medieval and renaissance ghettos of Europe. Jews who entered the Nazi ghetto were stripped of all their real and large-object property beyond whatever they could carry on their persons or drag on a cart. Thus, even for purposes of smuggling and illicit trade, there was an overwhelming dearth of appropriate resources which that sort of activity could be conducted.
Most of the inhabitants of the ghetto had no gainful employment. There was a relatively small class of high-risk smugglers and well-to-do people who could sell their jewelry, gold, foreign currency, furs, or other such assets, in order to meet personal needs. These people were a source of employment – but a constantly declining and doomed source – to thousands of other Jews, on the model of Wladyslaw Szpilman playing piano in a popular ghetto café for the economic elite. There were tailors, barbers, shoemakers, tutors, doctors, nurses and sundry others who could delay starvation by servicing this trade. There were also people working for the Germans, but most of them at extremely low, near-starvation level wages. What extended the existence of some inhabitants of the ghetto – at a terrible price – was smuggling, which the Nazis routinely punished with death, often of very young children who engaged in this desperate trade at an unspeakably desperate time.
While Gilbert does say in another part of his article that the ghetto “was in itself a horrifying solution, the murder of whole communities of people by slow starvation”, he also presents misleading and inaccurate information likely to persuade the reader that things in reality were not quite so bad. He claims that by June 1941 “the death toll … had reached 2000 a month in Warsaw” and concludes that it would take “20 years or more” to achieve total destruction of Polish Jewry. According to Jewish Warsaw expert, Israel Gutman, the average rate of mortality for the period from May 1940 to June 1941, was 4,219 whereas Gilbert’s language suggests that the alleged 2000 in June 1941 was the apogee of the ghetto death rate. Given mortality figures by Danuta Dombrowska in the 1972 Encyclopedia Judaica, the Jewish population of Warsaw – using linear extrapolation – would have been extinguished not in twenty years but in about five.
Unfortunately, any presumed linear extrapolation is absurd in its fundamental assumption. If one locked up a hundred people in a room, depriving them of food and water, and extrapolated the death rate from the results obtainable after the first day – to what might happen in 6 months or a year – one could actually conclude that most people could live without food or water for months, or even indefinitely.
Is it unreasonable to speculate on what Churchill’s Government might have done, or at least said, even in the bleak 1940-1941 period, if Germany had announced publicly that English prisoners of war would henceforth receive 184 calories of food per day?
Thesis Revisited
In his 1995 essay on the Final Solution, Gilbert revisited his basic interpretation of the Holocaust:
Details of the killings of Jews reached the West only in fragments … after the events had taken place. [?!] … the killings, … were taking place … far beyond the range of Allied bombers, … the destination of the deportees was unknown, referred to as “somewhere in the East”. … the Germans, … used every type of deception to hide the true destinations and fate of the deportees. …
Details of killing of Jews at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) did not reach Geneva, London, and New York until the summer of 1944. … Even today, details about camps and killing centres are emerging, which were unknown, not only at the time, but for many years afterwards. …
However Jan Ciechanowski, Polish Ambassador to the United States, wrote shortly after the War with reference to the summer of 1942:
The Polish Government was being fully informed about the murder of the Jews owing to the perfect system of daily [in London] contact which it had successfully set up with the Polish Underground.
From information I was receiving and constantly communicating to the American Government and to the press, and describing in my numerous speeches in many American cities, the monstrous pattern of Hitler’s mass extermination of Polish Jews and of Jews brought to Poland from other countries was becoming clearly evident. The Polish Underground insistently demanded that our government present these facts to our allies and especially to the American Government.
General Sikorski was working on it overtime in London and I was following up his requests to the President, the State Department and the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
Among Gilbert’s more ludicrous myths is the oft-cited claim that Nazi killings took place “far beyond the range of Allied bombers”. Oddly enough, he only needed to read the very informative article by Richard Overy on strategic air offensives published in the same volume in which his own Final Solution article appeared to discover that his claim was demonstrably false. One could even say that Gilbert could have reread his own Auschwitz book, p322 for example, to prove that his allegation was absurd. If the Allies bombed targets in the immediate vicinity of Auschwitz, then obviously they could reach Auschwitz. If they flew from Italy or Britain to Warsaw, then obviously they could have flown the shorter distance to Auschwitz, too. When the Allies liberated Rome on 4 June, 1944, they were only about 600 air miles from Auschwitz. Could anyone seriously claim that this was too far to fly for all the planes in the Allied arsenal? The distance between South-East England and Warsaw is about 900 air miles. Even in early 1943, with some realistic fuel tank modifications, several Allied planes, including the British Lancaster bomber, the American B-17 and Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25, were all capable of reaching the Polish capital. Much could have been done if only the Allied leadership had had a sufficient moral and political interest in the matter.
Gilbert’s latest relevant contribution is a book titled Churchill and the Jews, A Lifelong Friendship, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007 [Reviewed by John Simon in the Rosh hashanah 2008 issue of Jewish Affairs – ed.]. Insofar as this work deals with Churchill’s role vis a vis Jews during the years of the Holocaust, it is nothing short of a monumental intellectual travesty.
Gilbert tells us that the Prime Minister proposed in December 1942 to the Royal Air Force that it might conduct “two or three heavy raids” over Berlin with warnings to the Germans that such raids were “reprisals for the persecution of Poles and Jews”. He notes that the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, told Churchill that any actions “avowedly conducted on account of the Jews would be an asset to enemy propaganda”. Sir Charles was perhaps entitled to an opinion, but Gilbert, amazingly, concludes: “Churchill had no power to overrule his air chief on operational matters but he continued to keep a vigilant eye on Jewish issues.”
How could Portal’s opinion about a subject so clearly political – the question of what would or would not make effective enemy propaganda and how that might count in a decision – be defined as an “operational issue”, and one over which even the Prime Minister had no power to overrule a bureaucratic subordinate? Was antisemitism an ‘operational’ issue?
Gilbert mentions the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but takes no note of Churchill’s failure to address that event.3He does not mention anywhere in this book the name of Szmuel Zygielbojm.
On the subject of refuge, especially in Palestine, Gilbert says:
…the number of [Jewish] refugees able to escape Nazi-dominated Europe was minimal. If more had been able to leave, there were still 33000 unused Palestine Certificates within the 1939 White Paper quota. From 1 April 1939 to 31 March 1943 the total number of Jews reaching Palestine both legally and illegally had been 41,169. This left 33,831 certificates still unused.
All of this might suggest to the unwary reader that the British authorities in Palestine, over which Churchill presided as Prime Minister, welcomed Jews, although, unfortunately, few could make use of the haven that was so generously being offered to them. Nowhere in his book does Gilbert mention the Struma incident, where ultimately hundreds of Jews drowned because British authorities would not allow their ship to reach Palestine. There is no discussion here of British warships firing on Jews attempting to enter mandate territory.
Gilbert seems to have forgotten that Churchill, but for one endnote reference in the last volume, did not even mention the Holocaust in his monumental post-war history. Recently published Cabinet war records testify to virtually total indifference of the British leadership to the plight of the Jews.
Above all, however, Gilbert offers the Prime Minister’s reputation a familiar sanctuary. Whatever it was that the Nazis were doing to Europe’s Jews, it simply was being done too far away for the British to be able to intervene.
The fact, however, was that the physical distance which separated Winston Churchill from helping the Jews – if he had really wanted to help them – was only a few city blocks in London itself. For that was the headquarters of the Polish Government in Exile which Britain hosted from 1940 until 1945. Is there any record of the British Prime Minister approaching that government – whether under the leadership of General Wladyslaw Sikorski or Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk – to offer help, encouragement, and concrete suggestions, let alone pressure, toward rescue operations, aid, or perhaps disruptive attacks on the railroad traffic carrying Jews to their deaths in Poland’s extermination camps?
When in July 1944 the British received reports that Jews from Hungary were being gassed at a “previously unheard … rate of 12,000 a day”, Chaim Weizman and Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency urged the British to bomb the “railway lines from Budapest to Auschwitz”.
According to Gilbert, Churchill wrote to Eden, “Get anything out of the Air Force you can…” In the upshot, however, no such action was taken. Gilbert notes complacently that “Churchill’s emphatic instructions 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, apparently on the initiative of Hungary’s Regent, Admiral Horthy”.
Was this a problem solved or a problem neglected? The gassing of Jews “on arrival” in Auschwitz did not end until November 1944; the last Jewish transport arrived in Auschwitz as late as 5 January, 1945, from Berlin. For all his vivid accounts and prodigious industry, Sir Martin has not been a just custodian of the Holocaust story. The extermination of European Jewry in World War II was ultimately the outcome not only of Nazi policies but of the passivity and complicity of people whom Raul Hilberg called bystanders, the three principal Allied powers foremost among these. This aspect of the Holocaust has been seriously misrepresented by Martin Gilbert.
Alexander J. Groth is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
