Hitler and the Holocaust (28 page)

Already in the summer of 1944, as hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being deported to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Jewish leaders in Slovakia, especially Rabbi Weissmandel, pleaded that the camp be bombed.
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Some Jewish organizations and the War Refugee Board also called, more circumspectly, for action.
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But by no means
all Jewish leaders were agreed. Some of them, including the Jewish Agency for Palestine, feared the resulting casualties among the inmates of the camps.
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American Jewish leaders seemed far from enthusiastic. The proposal was initially opposed even by Leon Kubowitzki (head of the WJC Rescue Department), who had forwarded a formal request to John J. McCloy, assistant secretary of war. The reply from McCloy misleadingly claimed that a feasibility study had been made and that experts had concluded that “the diversion of considerable air forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere … would be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources.”
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McCloy added that such an effort might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans. These were not trivial arguments, as is sometimes claimed. But it would have made far more sense for McCloy to say that the Germans could always revert to mass shooting if the gas chambers were rendered inoperable. One should not deduce from this negative response (or the similar British refusal) that there was a deliberate cover-up or sheer callousness at play. However, a disinclination to act upon Jewish requests, along with bureaucratic indifference and more than a tinge of anti-Semitism, did indeed exist among high-ranking American and British officials, as well as among Allied military leaders.
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Above all, the “Jewish question” was ultimately marginal to Roosevelt, who certainly had little understanding of its centrality to the Nazis. Once America became involved in the war, it became even less important compared to the supreme goal of an Allied victory. Like Churchill, Roosevelt was far too involved in the larger global military and diplomatic strategy to devote much time after December 1941 to specific issues of Jewish rescue. Nevertheless, he did periodically make himself available to Jewish organizations. When Stephen Wise finally asked him in December 1942 to draw world attention to the Nazi “Final Solution,” he did not refuse. Nor did he try to discourage Wise from pursuing a plan for the
evacuation of Jewish refugees from Romania (which unfortunately led nowhere). More important, from the end of 1943 Roosevelt supported the Treasury and its high officials in taking the initiative on rescue actions.
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The creation of the War Refugee Board, in early 1944, however belated an act, was an important and positive step. For the first time during the war years, the issue of relief for Jews was partially freed from the obstruction of the American State Department and the British Foreign Office. After the German invasion of Hungary, Roosevelt (once again over some internal opposition) warned in a statement of 24 March 1944 that those who took part in deporting the Jews would be punished. The fourth paragraph of his statement referred to the “wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe,” describing it as “one of the blackest crimes of all history.”
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Again, on 26 June 1944 (the day after a rare public plea by Pope Pius XII), President Roosevelt demanded that Horthy halt all deportations from Hungary.

But Roosevelt was not immune to a “liberal” version of anti-Semitism. At Casablanca in January 1943, he had proposed to the French Governor-General of Morocco that “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.”
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This Rooseveltian
numerus clausus
“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 of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc, in Germany were Jews.”
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Equally simplistic notions surfaced in Roosevelt’s meeting with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in February 1945. No doubt influenced by American oil interests, he declared himself very impressed by the Saudi monarch’s (highly partisan) view of the Middle East conflict, which of course totally precluded any possibility of a Jewish
state. Roosevelt added that “the Germans appear to have killed three million Polish Jews, by which count there should be space in Poland for the resettlement of many homeless Jews.” This assumption, shared by British officials, was based on a stunning misconception of the Jewish condition and mind-set in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
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For the Zionist movement, Roosevelt’s sudden death in April 1945 was probably a stroke of luck, since his successor, Harry S. Truman, proved considerably more sympathetic to its aspirations. American Zionists had already drawn their own conclusions from the miserable failure of the Bermuda Conference two years earlier.
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The unseemly farce in the Caribbean seemed like another glaring illustration of the general indifference of the Christian world (including supposedly “friendly” governments like those of Roosevelt and Churchill) to Jewish suffering and demonstrated the futility of relying on humanitarian appeals. Abba Hillel Silver, the firebrand of American Zionism, angrily summed up this sentiment on 2 May 1943, not long after Bermuda: “The enemies of Israel seek us out and single us out but our friends would like to forget our existence as a people.”
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Silver believed that if the Jews had possessed their own Palestinian state in 1933, then German, Austrian, and eastern European Jewry would have found a refuge in large numbers. This was also the argument made by another leading American Zionist, Emanuel Neumann, who added that if American Jews in 1943 did not put an end to the long history of their people’s persecution by supporting a postwar Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, “we shall be contemptible in our own eyes.”
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The Zionist leadership of the Yishuv was fully committed to fighting for the realization of a Jewish National Home and had for the past twenty years urged that everything be subordinated to this priority. The 1933
Ha’avara
agreement to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and part of their property to Palestine offered the Zionists an unexpected opportunity to strengthen their demographic position, even though it
meant undercutting the worldwide Jewish anti-Nazi boycott.
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The Yishuv was still rather small (278,000 Jews) and substantially outnumbered by the Palestinian Arabs. Nevertheless in 1937, the British appeared ready to offer to the Jews a ministate in a partitioned Palestine. But this proposal rapidly vanished from the table as the international situation deteriorated. By May 1939, it was clear that the Balfour Declaration was dead and the Zionist enterprise in serious danger of being derailed by Great Britain at the very moment when a deadly trap was closing in on the Jews of Europe. The foremost leader of Palestinian Jewry, David Ben-Gurion, was fully aware of the defensive and objectively weak position of the Yishuv. However, Zionism and world Jewry had little choice after September 1939 but to support the Allied war effort despite increased British hostility to their national aspirations. At the same time, Ben-Gurion was determined to arouse world public opinion against the White Paper policy and to endorse illegal immigration, without renouncing the de facto pact with Great Britain.
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Despite widespread anger at Britain’s restrictions on
aliya
(immigration) and on military organization by the Yishuv, young Palestinian Jews were encouraged to enlist in the British Army.

The Yishuv and its leadership were nonetheless beset by deep-seated anxieties of impotence, aware of the disparity between the virile self-image of Zionism and its limited capacity to rescue the Jews of Europe. Moreover, by 13 November 1942, the earlier reports of the massacres of European Jewry had been reliably confirmed by the arrival of nearly seventy Palestinian Jews held in Europe since the outbreak of the war.
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They were part of a civilian-exchange agreement with Germans resident in Palestine. The new arrivals came from different parts of Nazi-occupied Europe (including Poland), and their vivid firsthand accounts provided a shocking glimpse into the scale of the genocide. Zionist leaders began to wonder if the complete extermination of European Jewry would not mean the end of the movement, as Chaim
Weizmann had already hinted in June 1942. This “terrifying vision” also haunted Ben-Gurion, though he kept it to himself and tried to play down the magnitude of the tragedy in public.
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Ben-Gurion nonetheless became increasingly active in pressing the Allies to intervene on behalf of European Jews. He proposed that they offer the Nazis an exchange of Germans held in the Western Hemisphere for Jews in Europe; that neutral countries be encouraged to accept Jews with the promise that the Allies would provide food and guarantee their removal after the war. He wanted bombings of German cities carried out openly as reprisals for the massacre of Jews, together with a propaganda campaign using leaflets over German cities to explain the policy. He thought that warnings to Hitler’s allies not to deport or harm their Jews could also be an important deterrent to their further collaboration.
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Above all, he and other Zionist leaders wished for an easing of the British White Paper restrictions, so that Palestine could absorb more of the survivors. Nor were the death camps ignored.

Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok (Sharett) pressed the British foreign secretary for Allied bombing of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Shertok conceded that this might not save too many Jewish lives, but there were still compelling reasons to undertake such an action. In a memorandum of 11 July 1944 that seems to have impressed Eden and Churchill with its cogency, Shertok (a future prime minister of Israel) pointed out that bombing Auschwitz-Birkenau would show “that the Allies waged direct war” on the perpetrators of genocide. It would undermine repeated German assertions “that the Allies are not really so displeased with the work of the Nazis in ridding Europe of the Jews.” It would help dissipate skepticism “in Allied quarters with regard to the report of mass extermination perpetrated by the Nazis.” Furthermore, it would lend weight to the threat of reprisals against the murderers “by showing that the Allies are taking
the extermination of the Jews so seriously as to warrant the allocation of aircraft resources for this particular goal, and thus have a deterrent effect.” Finally, it might create some internal German pressure against continuing the massacres.
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Despite Churchill’s enthusiasm, the British Air Ministry (like its American counterparts) rejected the proposal on technical grounds.
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The British also rejected the “trucks for blood” deal in 1944 that became known as the Joel Brand affair—something to which Ben-Gurion devoted a great deal of time but which was quickly squashed by the Allies as a Gestapo plot.
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Brand, a Hungarian Zionist who had met Eichmann in Budapest, traveled to Turkey on orders to present the Jewish Agency with a German proposition to halt the extermination of Hungarian Jewry in exchange for trucks and other equipment. He was arrested by the British on suspicion of being a Nazi agent and no attempt was made to explore the offer or even to play for time. These and other examples underlined the fact that every rescue and aid proposal emanating from or connected to the Yishuv was dependent on Allied approval—a major restriction on the Zionists. For example, the transfer of Transnistrian Jews out of Romania in late 1942 depended on British agreement, which was not forthcoming. A plan to evacuate Jews from Bulgaria to Turkey came closer to success but ultimately failed because of opposition from the British ambassador in Ankara. Where British immigration permits were granted, as in the case of Romanian Jews arriving in Istanbul in 1944, it was due to the cooperation of the local British consulate and of the American War Refugee Board representative, Ira Hirschmann. But such assistance was given only grudgingly, usually where it suited other British military and intelligence operations.

Thus, the Yishuv found itself trapped between a ruthless German annihilation policy and relative Allied indifference or obstruction. The Zionists did not have a state, an army, a government, extensive funds, or any influential allies. They did not control admission to Palestine or to any other country.
They did not have the ability to declare war on Germany, nor indeed did they possess any independent means of action, except in the most limited sense. An effective response to the Holocaust was therefore almost wholly dependent on the ability of the Yishuv to persuade the British and the Americans to try to stop the slaughter or provide a refuge for Jews. Ben-Gurion and his colleagues constantly had to take into account these very severe constraints. With one eye on the coming confrontation with the Arabs (which they correctly judged to be inevitable), they sought to strengthen the Yishuv and prepare for the future. As a result, rescue was subordinated to long-range political priorities and to a degree of instrumental thinking that in retrospect sometimes seems chilling.
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At a Jewish Agency executive meeting on 6 December 1942, Ben-Gurion evoked, for example, the Jews of Poland as “the sacrifices of a nation without a homeland.” The only proper response to the Holocaust was “redoubled pressure for Jewish independence.”