THE ANGLO-AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE HOLOCAUST

1933-1939: 60% of Germany’s 500,000 Jews flee their country before the outbreak of the Second World War. 1937-46: The British severely restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine because of unrest among Palestinians.July 1938: At the Evian Conference, delegates from 32 countries refuse to help Jewish refugees. April-October 1940: The German occupiers confine all Polish Jews to ghettos.Summer 1940: German officials propose to deport all European Jews to Madagascar.August 1941: Germans begin the mass shooting of Jews in occupied Soviet territory.January 1942: The Wannsee Conference plots genocide.December 17, 1942: The United Nations denounce Germany’s campaign “to exterminate the Jewish people.”

“Palestine: Promised Land,

Land of Promise”(Zionist

recruitment film, 1935)

THE SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHIC BALANCE IN BRITISH PALESTINE

There were about one million Arabic-speaking Palestinians in 1920. They confronted:

• 150,000 Jewish settlers in 1926

• 172,000 Jewish settlers in 1931

• 384,000 Jewish settlers in 1936

Palestinian militants sought to prevent further immigration through the Hebron massacre of 1929 and the Arab Revolt of 1936/37.

The British crushed the Arab Revolt in 1937 but also restricted Jewish immigration to 15,000 per year.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini

Scottish troops hunt Arab rebels, 1936/37

The Grand Mufti fled to Cairo and then to Berlin, to appeal to

Hitler for support

THE EVIAN REFUGEE CONFERENCE, July 6-15, 1938

At the urging of FDR, delegates from 32 countries and 24 charitable organizations assembled in France to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees.The USA & Britain agreed in advance that the issue of immigration to Palestine would not be raised, and that no country would be asked to alter immigration laws.All countries except the Dominican Republic declared that they were already “saturated” by refugees. Golda Meir told the press afterward, "There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore."[ In 1939 the USA admitted only 27,000 refugees from Germany and Austria.

When Great Britain confirmed its anti-immigration policy in May 1939,

Zionists split between moderates (led by David Ben-Gurion, below) and

“Revisionists” who decided to fight the British (led by Vladimir Jabotinsky)

The odyssey of 937 Jewish refugees on the S.S. St. Louis, May-June 1939

Throughout German-occupied Europe, Jews suffered discrimination in 1940

Entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941, where 500,000 Jews were crammed into a district built for 50,000

THE NAZIS BECAME UTTERLY RUTHLESS AND RACIST AS THEY PLANNED TO INVADE THE

USSR

Hitler told his generals that this campaign would ignore the Geneva Convention and laws of war. The SS was placed in charge of anti-partisan warfare, and the Waffen-SS and SS Einsatzgruppen were beefed up. The “Commissar Order” of May 1941 instructed all army units that captured political officers in the Red Army must be shot. Oral explanations added that all Jews should be regarded as commissars. Soldiers were promised immunity from prosecution for all crimes against civilians. Five million invasion troops were ordered to live off the land and send grain back to Germany. Planners assumed that at least 20 million Russians would starve to death.

Operation Barbarossa

(June-November

1941) captures

two million Red Army

troops

German troops greeted as liberators in the Baltic Republics

The grain harvest, under German guard (summer 1941)

In October 1941 German troops were ordered to gather stockpiles of food for the winter (soldier’s

snapshot)

Soviet POW’s fill in the ravine where the SS shot 33,000 Jews from Kiev at Babi Yar on September

29/30, 1941

Most of the 2 million Red Army soldiers captured in 1941 died

of neglect in the winter of 1941/42

GERMAN OCCUPATION POLICY SPARKED A GENUINE POPULAR

UPRISING

“Our hope is in you, Red Warrior!”

“The Enemy Shall not

Escape the People’s

Revenge!”

FDR and Churchill first meet on the HMS Prince of Wales,

August 14, 1941. They agreed on the “Atlantic Charter,”

promising all peoples the “right of self-determination,” lower trade barriers, and

“freedom from want and fear.”

Cartoon on American

isolationism, published by Dr. Seuss,

October 1941

Events in Europe encouraged Japanese expansion

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941:

360 carrier-based aircraft sank 2 U.S. battleships, damaged the other 6, destroyed 188 aircraft on

the ground, and killed 2,403 Americans.

But the damaged ships could soon be repaired, and the fleet’s two aircraft carriers were out on

patrol

Admiral Yamamoto devised a bold plan to prevent

U.S. interferenc

e in the huge

offensive southward

U.S. PUBLIC OPINION WAS ENRAGED

FDR signs the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, December 8,

1941

Commentary on the killing of U.S. fliers shot down over

Tokyo in April 1942

THE STUNNING WAVE OF JAPANESE VICTORIES IN THE PHILIPPINES, EAST INDIES, MALAYA, &

SINGAPORE

Site of the Wannsee Conference, convened on January 20, 1942, by the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich and SS Colonel Adolf

Eichmann

The Network of Death Camps Created in 1942

Nazi propaganda in 1942 blamed the Jews for the

war

“The Jewish Conspiracy”

“THE JEW:Warmonger

War-Prolonger”

German Jews deported from Würzburg, spring 1942

Everyone knew in 1942 that the Germans were “evacuating” all Jews to “labor camps” in the East

ULTRA INTERCEPT DECODED BY THE BRITISH: SS report from January 1943 on the killing of 1,274,166 people in the four camps of “Operation Reinhard” in

the year 1942

“Persons dealt with”

Lublin Belzec Sobibor Treblinka

Last two weeks

12,761 0 515 10,335

Total for 1942

24,733 434,508 101,370 713,555

Rail Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942

A new shipment of Jews undergoes selection on the Auschwitz train ramp

The weak were disposed of immediately:Hand-carved model of the main gas chamber and

crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Details

United Nations Declaration of December 17, 1942

(compare Richard Breitman, pp. 139-44)

The Allied governments had received “numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities… are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland… the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.

“The above-mentioned governments condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination…. They reaffirm their solemn resolution to insure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end."

Jewish victims of the Third Reich

U.S. planes bomb the Buna synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz, 13 September 1944

THE DEBATE OVER BOMBING AUSCHWITZ

Details of the Auschwitz killing operation finally became known in the West in June 1944.Some Jewish leaders in Britain and the USA implored their governments to bomb Auschwitz, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau took up the cause.Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy refused to consider the idea, insisting that only military assets be targeted. Only in 2002 was it revealed that McCloy had referred the matter to FDR, who replied, “Why, the idea! They’ll only move it down the road a little way.” FDR added that Americans would then be accused of “bombing these innocent people…. We’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business!”

PROPOSALS REJECTED BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

To punish German citizens held in the USA and bomb the civilian population (proposed to FDR by General Sikorski in June 1942; see Breitman, 137).To broadcast propaganda denouncing racism in general and/or anti-Semitism in particular (Breitman, 138-40).To further publicize the mass murder of the Jews after December 1942.To open large refugee camps in 1943 in liberated Morocco or Algeria (see Breitman, pp. 142, 149).To exchange German POWs for Jewish children.To bomb Auschwitz in 1944.

Elie Wiesel in 1943(at age 15),

the year before his deportation to

Auschwitz.He published

Nightin 1958.

Elie Wiesel, freed in Dachau, 16 April 1945 (middle bunk, rear)

Elie Wiesel on the Day of Remembrance in the U.S. Capitol with President Carter & Senator Robert Byrd, 1978