The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (55 page)

impact on the shape of America’s policy toward the Jews in Europe and indeed toward the broader ques- tion of a future home for the Jewish people in Pales- tine.

During the month of July, Harrison toured DP camps in the U.S. occupation zone, was briefed by Army and UNRRA officials, and met with the Central Committee of Liberated Jews and with Rabbi Klausner in Dachau. Harrison was accompanied by a small team of experts that included Dr. Joseph Schwartz, the director of the JDC office in Paris and the leading Jewish relief offi- cial in Europe. Schwartz played a key role in Harrison’s mission because he visited Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia as well as the German DP camps, and wrote a lengthy memo of his own that Harrison drew on for his final report to President Truman. In all the meetings and interviews Harrison held, two themes predominated: first, that if Jews must remain in camps, they wished to be housed in separate, Jewish-only fa- cilities; and second, that the surviving Jews wished overwhelmingly to go to Palestine and desired Ameri- can intervention with the British government to make this possible. Toward the end of July, Harrison cabled a preliminary report to Morgenthau, confirming that the worst reports on the living conditions of Jewish sur- vivors were true. Although his official report did not

reach Washington until late August, General George Marshall, Army chief of staff, and Henry Stimson, sec- retary of war, knew this was a humanitarian crisis as well as a political bombshell, and raised the issue of Jewish DPs with General Eisenhower. Marshall’s Au- gust 3 cable to Eisenhower demanded “immediate im- provement in billeting” and “separate camps for Jews” along the lines of the Feldafing camp. Stimson, on Au- gust 10, also conveyed to Eisenhower his grave concern and his desire “that everything be done to improve the present situation,” and that Harrison’s claims about American Army mishandling of the Jewish DP ques- tion be immediately examined. Eisenhower, who had been dutifully carrying out SHAEF policy of separating Jews by nationality, began to change course, and in re- sponse to Marshall’s and Stimson’s messages agreed to the appointment of a special adviser on Jewish affairs. Eisenhower also consented to the creation of separate Jewish-only camps.
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Even though Eisenhower was already altering SHAEF policy toward Jewish DPs, the Harrison report, when it was finally submitted to Truman on August 24, dealt a shattering blow to the reputation of the occupation army, and clearly wounded Eisenhower personally. It was a powerful and explosive indictment of Allied pol- icy toward the Jewish survivors; and it was released to

the press with a searing cover letter from the president to Eisenhower that pointed to evident mismanagement and delay on the part of SHAEF. Truman lectured the general that the stakes were enormously high, for the Germans must know that Americans abhor the Nazi policies of “hatred and persecution.” The president wrote that “we have no better opportunity to demon- strate this than by the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors.” Truman asked Eisenhow- er “to report to me as soon as possible the steps you have been able to take to clean up the conditions men- tioned in the report.”

The report itself painted a horrific picture, one totally at variance with the broad public view that European Jews, having been liberated by Allied forces, were now safe and secure. On the contrary, wrote Harrison, Jews “have been liberated more in a military sense than actually;…they feel that they, who were in so many ways the first and worst victims of Nazism, are being neglected by their liberators.” Three months after V-E Day, Harrison went on, Jewish DPs “are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences, in camps of several descriptions (built by the Germans for slave-laborers and Jews), including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions, in complete

idleness, with no opportunity, except surreptitiously, to communicate with the outside world.” Death con- tinued to stalk the weakened and ill survivors; for lack of clothing, they were obliged to wear their prison garb; food was scarce and unpalatable; barracks in the camps were unfit for winter use; and in their despair they “frequently ask what ‘liberation’ means.” Neither UNRRA nor the Allied military authorities, Harrison ar- gued, had grappled effectively with the issue, and they had actually impeded the entrance of voluntary orga- nizations such as the JDC into the camps. In a final and deliberately provocative flourish, Harrison wrote that “as matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are fol- lowing or at least condoning Nazi policy.”
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Harrison’s colleague during his mission, Joseph Schwartz of the JDC, prepared a memorandum for Har- rison that was slightly more temperate but equally con- demnatory. Schwartz thought the Army had done a “re- markable job of repatriation,” but had become part of the problem with respect to Jewish DPs. “ The concept of statelessness,” he wrote in his August 19 memo for

Harrison, “is a very difficult one for the army to grasp.” A refugee without a state or a homeland was, in the eyes of the military, a burden, possibly dangerous, and perhaps even a person unworthy of liberty. This helps explains why, in the Third Army area especially, “every camp is still surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards are placed at the entrances.” Predictably, “the internees feel that they are still prisoners three months after their liberation.” This feeling was reinforced by the awful food, the overcrowded conditions, the lack of medical supplies, inadequate toilet and washing facilities, and poor clothing. Schwartz was shocked to find some camp dwellers still in their striped prison uniforms, three months after their liberation. The DPs were idle, as there were no jobs or vocational training, so their morale was very low. And the DPs uniformly expressed the view that the German citizens in villages and towns nearby were being treated better than they by the American Army. Schwartz agreed, claiming that the Army was reluctant to requisition supplies from local Germans. “ Very often the military detachments look upon the civilian German population as ‘their’ people, and upon the DPs as intruders who are a nui- sance.” Naturally, the Jewish DPs were impatient and growing angry. What they wanted above all was to be allowed to get away from this land of sorrows and emi- grate to Palestine.
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Harrison’s report, which drew heavily on Schwartz’s memo, recommended for the short term that state- less DPs be housed in German homes and apartment complexes, even if this required the evacuation of lo- cal German populations; and if this could not be done, at the very least Jews should be allowed to establish and administer Jewish-only camps, in order to provide them with a sense of community and autonomy inside a nation they viewed as both hostile and foreign. The SHAEF authorities were already putting into practice this recommendation; but it was Harrison’s broader recommendation that occasioned much political com- ment, and exacerbated a bitter quarrel between the United States and Britain. “For some of the European Jews,” Harrison concluded, “there is no acceptable or even decent solution for their future other than Pales- tine.” Harrison voiced his support for the request of the Jewish Agency for Palestine that one hundred thou- sand Jewish emigrants from Europe be allowed to go to Palestine immediately. Politics aside, “the civilized world owes it to this handful of survivors to provide them with a home where they can again settle down and begin to live as human beings.”
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General Eisenhower did not dither in responding to the Harrison report, and to an equally dismal portrait of camp life painted by his chief adviser on Jewish af-

fairs, Major Judah Nadich. He wired Truman that he was “very much concerned” by the president’s August 31 letter, and that he was “starting a personal tour of inspection of Jewish Displaced Persons installations.” He reassured the president that “in the US Zone in Ger- many no possible effort is being spared to give these people every consideration toward better living condi- tions, better morale, and a visible goal.”
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On Septem- ber 17, Eisenhower—accompanied by a recalcitrant General Patton—made his first tour of a Jewish DP camp: the generals visited Feldafing to attend the ser- vices for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Three days later, Eisenhower issued an order to all his subordinate commanders that conditions for DPs must be drastically improved, that the goods they required must be requisitioned from the German people, that in offering employment the occupation forces should always favor DPs over Germans, that food must be im- proved and stockpiled for winter, and that all camp po- licing should be done by DPs themselves, without arms. Eisenhower wanted to hear no more about American MPs keeping Jews behind barbed wire, as was common in the Third Army area of Bavaria.
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Finally, in response to Harrison’s report, the administration appointed a special adviser on Jewish affairs, Judge Simon Rifkind of New York, who was to work as a conduit between Eisenhower and the Jewish leaders in the camps.

By early October, Eisenhower felt confident enough to deliver a detailed report to the president on his activi- ties since the Harrison report. “I can assure you,” he wrote, “that the most unsatisfactory conditions report- ed by Mr. Harrison no longer exist.” He laid out what had been accomplished, described improvements in food, clothing, and shelter, and assured the president that the American Army was working to protect and se- cure Jewish survivors. Yet Eisenhower also could not resist challenging Harrison’s report. He believed the report was misleading and unfair, not least because it failed to place the Jewish problem in the broader con- text of the massive war damage Europe had sustained, the acute shortages of housing and supplies, the huge waves of displaced and repatriated peoples, and the sheer logistical challenge of transforming the Army from a combat organization to a humanitarian relief operation. Harrison, Ike suggested, had looked at the Jewish DP problem through a straw, and failed to see the larger picture. Worse, the general felt Harrison had shortchanged the enormous efforts already made on behalf of Jews by the American Army. His report, Eisenhower concluded, “gives little regard to the prob- lems faced, the real success attained in saving the lives of thousands of Jewish and other concentration camp victims and repatriating those who could and wished to be repatriated, and the progress made in two months

to bring these unfortunates who remained under our jurisdiction from the depths of physical degeneration to a condition of health and essential comfort.”
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In Philadelphia, Earl Harrison issued a terse reply to the press: “General Eisenhower refers to improved con- ditions in the camps. What we need is more action in getting the people out of the camps and less talk about improving conditions within the camps.”
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But did the well-meaning Eisenhower really deliver “health and essential comfort” to the Jewish DPs? For all of Eisenhower’s alacrity in responding to directives from Washington, conditions in DP camps did not im- prove quickly, and the interactions between Army offi- cials and Jewish DPs grew worse as the summer passed into fall. Why was this so? The evidence suggests that, rather than create a sense of shared solidarity, the great challenge of restoring and reviving Jewish life in the DP camps served to divide Jews from their protec- tors and liberators.

After an initial outburst of activity upon the publica- tion of Harrison’s report, relief workers and military officials became inured to the complaints of Jewish DPs and grew increasingly to view the Jews as difficult, obstreperous, annoying, and insatiable. Earl Harrison had been right that Army commanders were not par- ticularly eager to carry out Eisenhower’s orders with respect to DPs, as they tended to see DPs as obstacles to their mission of pacifying German civilians. Inside the camps, Army officers and UNRRA officials com- plained bitterly about what they considered the will- ful, stubborn, even hostile attitude on the part of the

Jewish camp residents. Zorach Warhaftig, secretary of the Polish Jewish Restitution Committee and an adviser to the Institute on Jewish Affairs in New York, made a detailed assessment of the camps in October and November, and was stunned by “the tendency to blame camp inmates and make all kinds of insinua- tions against them.” Relief workers, Army officials, and correspondents “all are eager to claim that the Jew- ish camp inmates are broken mentally and morally.” Worse, “the guilt of the Germans has been forgotten” by U.S. Army officials and “the Jewish DPs are looked upon as intruders.”
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Warhaftig suspected anti- Semi- tism and anti-Zionism motivated such calumnies. Yet similar assessments could be found even among the most stalwart allies of the Jewish DPs. “ They have lived and been treated as animals, and much of the animal is in them now,” wrote Oscar Mintzer, a legal adviser working for the JDC, in early November. “Many of them are dirty, even filthy. Their moral standards are shot to hell. They connive, and finagle, and contrive—all the time. They lie and cheat and steal. They had to do this under the Nazis to remain alive, and our crazy red tape and regulations, particularly Army and UNRRA, are making them continue this in order to remain alive.”
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This was a common perception by American officials and soldiers: that the Jews were almost beyond recov- ery, and in any case ungrateful for the efforts made on