Just water under the bridge
Posted: November 3rd, 2006, 11:17 am
How did the world respond to the Holocaust?
The world outside Nazi Europe received numerous press reports in the 1930s about the persecution of Jews. By 1942 the governments of the United States and Great Britain had confirmed reports about the Final Solution - Germany's intent to kill all the Jews of Europe. However, influenced by antisemitism and fear of a massive influx of refugees, neither country modified their refugee politics. No specific attempts to stop or slow the genocide were made until mounting pressure eventually forced the United States to undertake limited rescue efforts in 1944. In Europe, rampant antisemitism incited citizens of many German-occupied countries to collaborate with the Nazis in their genocidal policies. There were, however, individuals and groups in every occupied nation who, at great personal risk, helped hide those targeted by the Nazis. One nation, Denmark, saved most of its Jews in a nighttime rescue operation in 1943 in which Jews were ferried in fishing boats to safety in neutral Sweden.
How did the world know?
Jan Karski was a Polish resistance hero and the man who first told the world about the horrors of the Holocaust. After a very dangerous journey he brought his story to the West, briefing political and religious leaders in London and then in July 1943 met personally with President Franklin Roosevelt. However, Karski was unable to convince them to take military action against death camp targets. President Roosevelt in the US, and even prominent American Jewish leaders, all listened politely, but all were disinclined to believe Jan Karski's gruesome narrative of mass murder in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the extermination camps. Their first priority remained the defeat of the Third Reich, rather than the rescue of European Jewry. The slaughter went on.
http://www.auschwitz.dk/bullseye/new_page_1.htm
America and the Holocaust
One distressing discovery was how early the Allies became aware of Nazi plans and actions for mass murder. Numerous historians have demonstrated that the West possessed verifiable contemporaneous accounts of the wanton murder of Jews in the Polish campaign of 1939, their relocation into ghettoes in the following year, and their slaughter in the fields of Russia in 1941. Historians also have confirmed that the Allies had accurate reports of the operations of various extermination camps as early as the autumn of 1942, just months after such operations began in earnest. They point out that in 1943, the Polish underground courier Jan Karski brought his eyewitness accounts of the extermination camp at Belzec and the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto to members of the British government as well as to President Roosevelt and other American officials.
This information was not simply in the hands of government intelligence services. Newspapers and news magazines regularly reported news of massacres, population relocations, and Nazi rhetoric concerning the Jews. As information leaked out of Europe concerning the extermination camps, this too appeared in the American press. Furthermore, in July 1944, newspapers and magazines reported the Russian capture of Majdanek and included pictures of its warehouses filled with clothing, eyeglasses, and human hair. In that same year, Jan Karski recounted his eyewitness accounts and futile visits to London and Washington in The Secret State. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
More important, these same scholars have formulated a dismal picture of Allied failure to use such information. Time after time, they argue, officials in London and Washington had the opportunity to act more aggressively against Nazi genocide and to rescue refugees even while prosecuting the war. Time after time, they refused. In the most sensational example, Wyman contended that by 1944 detailed maps and reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz and Birkenau existed, making strategic bombing possible. When several groups recommended bombing the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the railroad tracks leading to the camp, the U.S. Army Air Force and the British Air Force both refused. They cited the need to concentrate on military targets and the distance of the target from existing air bases. Yet, as Wyman pointed out, the Army Air Force had already carried out a successful bombing raid on the Buna plant that was part of the Auschwitz complex.
The British, in particular, impeded rescue plans because they feared that "to unload an even greater number of Jews on to our hands," as one official put it, would put pressure on England to open Palestine for refugee settlement. At various times during the war, when small numbers of escapees tried to sail out of Europe to Palestine, the Royal Navy badgered them, turned them around, left them adrift, or interned them in squalid camps. Nor did the Western allies channel aid to Jewish partisan movements, this despite ardent pleas for help during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and similar actions.
http://www.utexas.edu/opa/pubs/discover ... caust.html
The world outside Nazi Europe received numerous press reports in the 1930s about the persecution of Jews. By 1942 the governments of the United States and Great Britain had confirmed reports about the Final Solution - Germany's intent to kill all the Jews of Europe. However, influenced by antisemitism and fear of a massive influx of refugees, neither country modified their refugee politics. No specific attempts to stop or slow the genocide were made until mounting pressure eventually forced the United States to undertake limited rescue efforts in 1944. In Europe, rampant antisemitism incited citizens of many German-occupied countries to collaborate with the Nazis in their genocidal policies. There were, however, individuals and groups in every occupied nation who, at great personal risk, helped hide those targeted by the Nazis. One nation, Denmark, saved most of its Jews in a nighttime rescue operation in 1943 in which Jews were ferried in fishing boats to safety in neutral Sweden.
How did the world know?
Jan Karski was a Polish resistance hero and the man who first told the world about the horrors of the Holocaust. After a very dangerous journey he brought his story to the West, briefing political and religious leaders in London and then in July 1943 met personally with President Franklin Roosevelt. However, Karski was unable to convince them to take military action against death camp targets. President Roosevelt in the US, and even prominent American Jewish leaders, all listened politely, but all were disinclined to believe Jan Karski's gruesome narrative of mass murder in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the extermination camps. Their first priority remained the defeat of the Third Reich, rather than the rescue of European Jewry. The slaughter went on.
http://www.auschwitz.dk/bullseye/new_page_1.htm
America and the Holocaust
One distressing discovery was how early the Allies became aware of Nazi plans and actions for mass murder. Numerous historians have demonstrated that the West possessed verifiable contemporaneous accounts of the wanton murder of Jews in the Polish campaign of 1939, their relocation into ghettoes in the following year, and their slaughter in the fields of Russia in 1941. Historians also have confirmed that the Allies had accurate reports of the operations of various extermination camps as early as the autumn of 1942, just months after such operations began in earnest. They point out that in 1943, the Polish underground courier Jan Karski brought his eyewitness accounts of the extermination camp at Belzec and the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto to members of the British government as well as to President Roosevelt and other American officials.
This information was not simply in the hands of government intelligence services. Newspapers and news magazines regularly reported news of massacres, population relocations, and Nazi rhetoric concerning the Jews. As information leaked out of Europe concerning the extermination camps, this too appeared in the American press. Furthermore, in July 1944, newspapers and magazines reported the Russian capture of Majdanek and included pictures of its warehouses filled with clothing, eyeglasses, and human hair. In that same year, Jan Karski recounted his eyewitness accounts and futile visits to London and Washington in The Secret State. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
More important, these same scholars have formulated a dismal picture of Allied failure to use such information. Time after time, they argue, officials in London and Washington had the opportunity to act more aggressively against Nazi genocide and to rescue refugees even while prosecuting the war. Time after time, they refused. In the most sensational example, Wyman contended that by 1944 detailed maps and reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz and Birkenau existed, making strategic bombing possible. When several groups recommended bombing the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the railroad tracks leading to the camp, the U.S. Army Air Force and the British Air Force both refused. They cited the need to concentrate on military targets and the distance of the target from existing air bases. Yet, as Wyman pointed out, the Army Air Force had already carried out a successful bombing raid on the Buna plant that was part of the Auschwitz complex.
The British, in particular, impeded rescue plans because they feared that "to unload an even greater number of Jews on to our hands," as one official put it, would put pressure on England to open Palestine for refugee settlement. At various times during the war, when small numbers of escapees tried to sail out of Europe to Palestine, the Royal Navy badgered them, turned them around, left them adrift, or interned them in squalid camps. Nor did the Western allies channel aid to Jewish partisan movements, this despite ardent pleas for help during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and similar actions.
http://www.utexas.edu/opa/pubs/discover ... caust.html