The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (61 page)

lied authorities in charge of this problem are doing their best, and may be sure of the widest gratitude in return,” said the Chronicle editorial page on June 1. But by mid-June, the newspaper began to run sharply worded pieces about the administrative malfeasance in the camps. “Sufferers Still Suffer,” “Jewish Victims of Official Bungling,” “Jewish Survivors’ Hopeless- ness,” blared headlines on June 15. On July 13, an edito- rial titled “ They Are Being Allowed to Die!” excoriated the Allied policy in the DP camps and focused on what was becoming an obvious, and powerful, argument: “is it reasonable to forbid them [the Jewish DPs] access to that soil to which alone they turn their wistful eyes in their distress, their only possible home, their own home, the Jewish National Home?…It is not to be be- lieved that this appeal will be callously rejected.”
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On July 15, the Board of Deputies of British Jews issued an appeal to the great powers, then meeting at Potsdam, to open Palestine to Jewish immigration in order to address the “desperate position” of the stateless Jews. The World Jewish Congress followed suit, and released a report on July 20 decrying the “callous and shameful neglect by Allied Military Control authorities,” and cit- ed the wretched state of Belsen in particular. This led to an investigation by British military authorities with the predictable outcome that the British army absolved itself of the charges.

The calls for linking the DP crisis to the Palestine ques- tion only increased. The World Zionist Conference, meeting in London on August 1, featured Dr. Chaim Weizmann’s plea to the Labour government to open Palestine to Jewish survivors. Is it possible, Weizmann asked, that after the catastrophe of the Nazi genocide, the world would now “read over the gates of Palestine ‘No Jews need apply’?” In late September, the Inter- national League for the Rights of Man added its voice to these calls for emigration of Jews in camps to Pal- estine; the same week, leaders of the American Jewish Committee, which had not been pro-Zionist, met with President Truman and urged him to pressure Britain to open up Palestine as a humanitarian measure to ease the crisis of the camps. The argument for doing so had become irresistible by late September, and was deftly summarized by Lady Reading herself in a letter to the London Times: the Jewish survivors had nourished the hope for twelve years that one day they would make it to Palestine. “ What dreadful lack of imagination con- demns them to exist amid the daily remembrances of past brutalities while holding out no prospect for the future?” She summarized sharply: “ The Nazis broke their bodies. The United Nations are breaking their spirit.”
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It was just at this moment when the Harrison report

was released to the public, triggering President Tru- man’s rebuke of Eisenhower for the condition of the DP camps in the American zone and leading to a sharp shift in American policy. Harrison’s report also gave Truman the moral advantage to press Britain for a simi- lar change of policy on Jewish DPs. Naturally, President Truman was sensitive to the domestic political implica- tions of the Jewish DP crisis, but he was also genuinely aggrieved by the problem and now brought sustained pressure on the British government to ease immigra- tion restrictions for Jews who wished to go to Pales- tine. Truman in fact had already sent his views to Prime Minister Attlee in late August, asking Attlee to consider revising upward the numbers of Jews allowed to emi- grate to Palestine—set at 1,500 per month—as set out in the 1939 White Paper on Palestine that still formed the basis of British policy. Attlee simply refused, reply- ing that 100,000 Jewish immigrants in Palestine would vastly complicate Britain’s position in the Middle East and India by inflaming Muslim opinion. But the public campaign in the press had reached into the U.S. Con- gress, and a debate on October 2 in the Senate revealed an emerging consensus there that Britain’s immigra- tion policy was wrong and must be changed. Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado charged that Britain has “made the Jew a political football,” a comment that no doubt the British government would have had trouble

swallowing. Not to be outdone, Senator James E. Mur- ray of Montana declared British rule in Palestine to be “a black chapter in English history,” and full of “eva- sion and duplicity.” Robert Taft of Ohio, a perennial ri- val of Truman’s, also called for the prompt transfer of 100,000 Jews “who survived the horrible persecution and tortures of the Nazis.”
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Ernest Bevin, the embattled British foreign secretary, proposed to deflect American criticism by creating a joint Anglo-American committee to investigate the en- tire Jewish DP problem as it related to Palestine pol- icy, thereby buying time and engaging the Americans in finding a solution to the problem. The Americans agreed. But Bevin’s announcement of the new com- mittee did nothing to ease the barrage of criticism the government faced. Indeed, Bevin sadly mishandled the announcement, burying it inside a House of Commons statement that also reiterated the policy of the govern- ment to abide by the terms of the 1939 White Paper. Bevin reiterated the government’s “dual obligation” to Jews and Arabs, and in any case declared that immigra- tion by Europe’s Jews to Palestine would not solve the problems that European Jewry now faced. What Jews in Palestine and in Europe had been hoping for—a new departure, and a revision of immigration quotas—had not materialized. Instead, there was to be a committee

to investigate a problem that had been in full-blown crisis for over six months. Bevin, while speaking to re- porters after his Commons speech, said that the great problem with the Balfour Declaration, which in 1917 had promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, was that it had been “unilateral” and had “not taken account of the Arabs.” They had “their fears of Zion- ism” which must be taken into account, Bevin said. He hoped “the Jews in Europe shall not overemphasize their racial position…. If the Jews with all their suf- ferings want to get too much at the head of the queue, you have the danger of another anti- Semitic reaction through it all.”
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The reaction to Bevin’s House of Commons speech among Jews was furious. In Palestine, on November 14, Jews went on a twelve-hour strike; a crowd set fire to British government buildings in Tel Aviv and clashed with military police, resulting in seven deaths and twenty-seven wounded. The British 6th Airborne Divi- sion turned Tel Aviv into “an armed camp.”
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In Lon- don, the Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced Bevin’s speech, as did Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Jewish Agency, who was in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to address the convention of the Zionist Or- ganization of America. Some members of the House of Commons dismissed Bevin’s idea for a committee,

and called the immigration quota of 1,500 Jews per month “a meager contribution towards the desperate need of the people still living in concentration camp conditions in Germany.” Barnett Janner, a member of Bevin’s party, said “the White Paper ought to be swept aside and the gates of Palestine opened at once.”
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The reactions among the DPs in Germany was especially anguished. In the British zone, a number of scuffles with British military police took place, including one incident in Hannover (just a few miles from the Belsen camp). There, four hundred Polish Jews from the DP camp at Vinnhorst staged a protest of British policy, and waved banners reading, in English, “ We want the gates of Palestine opened,” and “ We demand a Jewish country.” A military policeman, one Corporal Cooper, ordered the banners taken down, resulting in a clash and a thrashing of Corporal Cooper by the protestors. Ten arrests were subsequently made. (In December, eight protestors were convicted of promoting an un- authorized gathering and resisting British police forc- es.)
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In the American zone, Jews were equally outraged and announced a twenty-four-hour hunger strike. In Landsberg, Samuel Gringauz, in the Landsberger La- ger- Cajtung, wrote that Bevin’s decision “not to open the gates of Eretz Israel for the survivors is one of the greatest betrayals that a democratic and socialist body has ever committed.” In a scathing editorial, Gringauz

called Bevin’s message “a fivefold betrayal.” It was a be- trayal of the sacrifices made by the thousands of Jews who fought under arms alongside the Allies in the war; a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration; a betrayal of the historical reality of the Nazi war on the Jews; a betrayal of the moral purpose of the war against Nazism and brutality; and a betrayal of the socialist ideals of the Labour Party. The break between Britain and the Jew- ish DPs appeared complete.
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What did Bevin achieve by his delaying tactics and his prevarication? Underground Jewish organizations in Palestine now opened up a sustained campaign of vio- lence against the British presence there that would lead to increased deaths of British soldiers. Bevin’s Anglo- American Committee of Inquiry backfired: once it got under way, its members became increasingly convinced of the need to relent and allow Jewish immigration to Palestine, if only to relieve the horrible conditions they found in DP camps. The committee’s final report, to Bevin’s everlasting fury, called for the immediate immi- gration of 100,000 Jews from DP camps to Palestine.
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Truman left Bevin hanging by indicating that he still supported prompt immigration to Palestine, whatever the committee might conclude. And in a remarkable coincidence, the New York Times ran a critical story on November 20, just a week after Bevin’s speech, that

quoted unnamed UNRRA officials and the leader of the Belsen Jewish committee, Josef Rosensaft, to the effect that conditions in Belsen were “appalling.” There was no heat, inadequate clothing, and shortages of medi- cine; worse, Rosensaft said, the British censored the camp newspaper and prohibited any expressions in fa- vor of emigration to Palestine. The British ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, saw this as a deliberate effort to embarrass the British government, and asked London “for some clear public statement…on what we are attempting to do to improve conditions for Jews in the camps in Europe.”
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Halifax also had secured a copy of an especially damning report sent (via telegram) by Joint chairman Edward Warburg to Truman’s adviser, White House counsel Sam Rosenman. While praising the job done by Judge Rifkind in the U.S. zone, War- burg leveled a serious charge at the British. “Seven months after Liberation, conditions British zone most alarming…. No winter clothes, no desperately needed shoes, no coal or wood, inadequate housing…threat of epidemic alarmingly real. Corrective action still lack- ing. Urge consideration highest levels.” The response of the British army to these allegations—which were real enough—typified the general attitude of the mili- tary authorities to the Jews at the close of 1945. “ This is the last straw,” seethed the British Control Commission in its reply to headquarters. “Jews seem to be using

Belsen as a focal point for world agitation to emigrate to Palestine.” One solution, recommended here, was simply to transport all the Jews out of the Belsen camp and break them up into smaller groups, thus squelch- ing such agitation. “If we move Jews from Belsen they will not be able to use the magic word ‘Belsen’ in con- nection with this propaganda.”
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The Jews had indeed become “a continuous embarrass- ment” for the British: the entire encounter with Jews in liberated Germany cast a harsh light on an ill-con- ceived, illogical, and self-defeating policy of curtailing Jewish emigration while incarcerating Jews in German camps. How far from the heady days of April, when those young, startled Tommies at the gates of Belsen had brought with them liberation and the promise of a new beginning.

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HIS SAD TALE of deteriorating relations between the British and the Jews, starting from a high point in April and running down to the low of Bevin’s November speech, has long obscured one sig- nificant achievement of the British occupation author- ities. Just when the British government was coming in for heavy criticism both from Jews inside DP camps

and from around the world for its policy on Palestine, the British army opened up a two-month-long war crimes trial of the Belsen commander, Josef Kramer, and his subordinates.
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The “Belsen trial,” as it became known—though in fact it included crimes commit- ted at both Auschwitz and Belsen by Kramer and the others—ended in the hanging of Kramer and ten other defendants. It charted important new legal ground, be- ing the first war crimes trial in occupied Germany, and it was carried out with thoroughness and careful at- tention to judicial norms. More than this, the trial was obliged to carry a heavy burden, for it was set up as a kind of noble project, a showcase of the rule of law, the restoration of order, and the fulfillment of the promise of liberation. The trial might offer a counterargument to those Jews clamoring for “special treatment.” Brit- ish law, the trial declared, could serve out justice fairly, with evenhandedness and moderation, and so provide a kind of benchmark for other nations aspiring to civi- lization. As we shall see, in the highly charged atmo- sphere of the time, the trial failed to meet these high expectations. What accounts for the failure?