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.
Books
Bauer, Yehuda. American Jewry and the Holocaust. Chicago: Wayne State University Press, 1979.
Brenner, Leni. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983.
Cave Brown, Anthony. Bodyguard of Lies. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
DuBois, Josiah E., Jr. The Devil’s Chemists. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952.
Feig, Konnilyn G. Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1981.
Gilbert, Martin. Auschwitz and the Allies. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1981.
Grunberger, Richard. The Twelve-Year Reich. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971.
Hinsley, F. H.; Thomas, E. E.; Gransom, C. F.; and Knight, R. C. British Intelligence in the Second World War. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1979, Vol. II (1981), Vol. III (1984).
Kern, Erich. Meineid Gegen Deutschland. Preuss-Oldendorf, W. Germany: Verlag K. W. Schutze, 1971.
Kulischer, Eugene M. The Displacement of Population in Europe. Montreal: International Labor Office, 1943.
Laqueur, Walter. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s ‘Final Solution.’ London: Penguin Books, 1980.
Morse, Arthur B. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. New York: Random House, 1968.
Persicos Joseph. Piercing the Reich. New York: Viking, 1979.
Wasserstein, Bernard. Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1979.
Weinberg, David. “The Holocaust in Historical Perspective,” in Byron L. Sherwin and Susan G. Ament (eds.), Encountering the Holocaust: An Interdisciplinary Survey. Chicago and New York: Impact Press, 1979.
Yad Vashem Institute (ed.). Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977.
Other
“British Intelligence and the Holocaust.” Baltimore Jewish Week, April 15, 1983, “News” section, p. 30.
Brugioni, Dino A., and Poirier, Robert. The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz/Birkenau Extermination Complex [monograph]. Washington D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1979.
Cohen, Richard. “John J. McCloy and Harvard.” The Washington Post, May 19, 1983, p. B-1.
Dunlop, Richard. “The Wartime OSS.” American Legion, June 1984, p. 15.
Friedrich, Otto. “The Kingdom of Auschwitz.” The Atlantic, September 1981, pp. 30-60.
Jewish Week, Washington D.C.l, April 7-13, 1983, p. 10.
“The Nazi Secret No One Believed.” The Washington Post, February 5, 1983, pp. C-1, C-4.
The New York Times: February 14, 1943, p. 37; February 16, 1943, p. 7; March 10, 1943, p. 10; April 20, 1943, p. 11.
“Washington Hosts Holocaust Survivors’ Gathering.” The Washington Times, April 8, 1983, p. 2-B.
Wasserstein, Bernard. “Jewish Silence.” Midstream, August-September 1980, p. 13.
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.
Found at https://ihr.org/journal/v05p215_Gleason.html
Ava’s SubstackRead More
R1
T1
