-Caveat Lector-
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html?1201011
Official Secrets:
What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew
by Richard Breitman
Allen Lane £20 pp325
Norman Stone
In Auschwitz: The Myth of Rescue, the historian William Rubinstein argued
last year against a swelling tide of opinion. What could the Allies in the
second world war have done to save the Jews? Should they have told the Nazis
that they would accept hundreds of thousands in Palestine? Or done a deal,
giving food and transport to the stricken German war machine in return for
Jewish lives? Or bombed Auschwitz, to stop the death-transports and the
gas-chambers?
None of these things, said Rubinstein: the Nazis were determined to wipe out
the Jews, and the Allies could not have done much about this. They did what
they could, and it was much more than had ever been done in the past for a
large, persecuted group. The British were extremely good after 1938 about
accepting refugees. And it was technically very difficult indeed to bomb
Auschwitz. Could they have done more? Richard Breitman does not much care
for Rubinstein's book - not much archival work, he sniffs, although the rest
of us might think that there is not much point in amassing so many PhDs in
historical subjects unless someone, somewhere, takes common-sense stock of
the information.
As to the Allies' handling of persecuted Jews, much depends upon what they
actually knew for a fact, and when. The standard British defence was, first,
that nobody could quite know what was going on, and then that the Holocaust
was incredible as a concept, a matter of hysterical exaggeration. Foreign
Office minutes, sometimes insensitively phrased, recorded this, and the BBC
was told not to lay too much stress on the sufferings of Jews, as distinct
from anyone else in occupied Europe. There were fears that anti-semitism
might be aroused in privation-beset war-time Britain There were also fears
of a huge wave of refugees in Palestine, upsetting the delicate balance
there between Jews and Arabs. So how much did the British know?
Breitman himself is an archive man, and has unearthed an interesting source:
the records of the German police troops on the eastern Front in 1941 and
1942. Under their general, Kurt Daluege, they were engaged in shooting Jews
in large numbers. We have known since the Nuremberg trials that SS troops
were involved in this business, but the role of the ordinary police was not
as well documented, and Daluege himself even managed for years to avoid
arrest and imprisonment because he had turned prosecution evidence. The
Holocaust historian Christopher Browning achieved a remarkable feat in
finding documents about one of these police-battalions which showed how
these fairly ordinary German husbands and fathers became involved in
shooting small children; the decent and thoughtful ones among them were even
invited to drop out if they did not wish to take part.
Now, through Breitman, we see that the British actually knew what these
police battalions were doing, at least until someone in Berlin took the
point that the police, like others, should be encoding their messages more
carefully. Breitman says, probably rightly, that a Churchill speech about
Nazi atrocities in October 1941 revealed that someone from the Bletchley
organisation must have told him what these police-messages were saying.
In other words, the British knew that massacres of Jews were under way in
the East. However, there was not much initial response. In America there was
even less. People doubted the reports, did not know how to cover
anti-semitism in their war-time propaganda, and otherwise doubted the facts.
In spring 1942, it became clear (we know the channels now: they included a
highly respected German industrialist, who passed on warnings through a
Swiss businessman) that the Nazi plan was to eliminate all Jews in occupied
Europe, not just those in the occupied Soviet territories. Breitman makes
rather a song-and-dance about this, and takes John Keegan and others to task
for saying that everyone in Europe knew, in 1942, that Jews were being
deported en masse: is that not just the truth? In hinting, as he seems to be
doing, that the police-decrypts were not properly evaluated because of
anti-semitism, Breitman is rather straining belief. When news of the
Holocaust did break, there was, at first, incredulity (some of it
insensitively expressed by various bureaucrats) but then there were great
public demonstrations and, behind the scenes, efforts to save Jews through
neutral countries or by threats. Could more have been done? Breitman says
probably not, but if the police reports had been properly evaluated, then
the protests could have been started earlier.
Breitman is good at making life difficult for archivists, and eventually
caused great mounds of documentation to be declassified in Washington, which
could be checked against the British equivalents. In 1941, the British had
cracked German codes, and quite an industry developed at Bletchley for the
combing-through of the resulting information - an enormous amount, much of
it small beer, and some of it disinformation. The secret services won a
fabulous reputation because they seemed to know in advance what the Germans
would do next. In his East Prussian headquarters, Hitler gave up eating at
the same table as the generals, because he thought one of them must be
betraying secrets. When the secrets still, apparently, were being leaked,
suspicion fell on his own man-servant, Straub.
For 50 years after the war, British secret-service records were kept closed,
which fuelled speculation about such matters. However, the impact of the
Americans' Freedom of Information Act has been such that there is not much
point in keeping British war-time records sealed, since copies found their
way to Washington, where they could be seen.
Breitman's book is quite useful as far as its references go, but it is
essentially an interesting article, expanded by reference to some recent
controversies. It gives rise to a few thoughts. Not for the first time, the
book makes me wish that the Holocaust historians in Israel would give us an
up-to-date history of the Holocaust, settling some of the vexed questions
that still beset this terrible subject (in my view, it is the lack of such
an authoritative, overall account that enables a few lunatics to gain
publicity by "Holocaust denial").
There was indeed a state that could have done more for the persecuted Jews:
the Soviet Union had a large army only scores of miles away, it controlled
thousands of partisans, and it also commanded the air - mainly because the
Luftwaffe was hugely diverted by Allied bombing of German cities. My
question to Breitman is why concentrate on motes in western eyes, when there
are probably great beams to the East? Breitman could have made a far more
powerful case if he had looked towards Moscow.
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