Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew
By Richard Breitman
Penguin, 2000
325pp., $21 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
It was "the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world", said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the Holocaust. Britain, the USA and other capitalist states often cite their moral disgust at the Nazi program of mass extermination of the Jews as one of the noble reasons why they went to war against Hitler, rather than dwell on their less than noble imperialist interests. The actual, racist behaviour of such "humanitarians" as Churchill towards the millions of Jewish and other victims of Nazism, however, speaks more loudly than their rhetoric.
Richard Breitman's book exposes the abject failure of the political leadership of the Allies to do more than a fraction of what they could have done to save the Jews. The reasons offered for their lack of action are shown to be lame excuses.
The claim, made during the war and repeated by historians such as Martin Gilbert, that the Allies' political leadership did not know that there was a genocidal Holocaust planned or taking place in Europe until very late in the war defies all credibility. Anyone who could read Hitler's Mein Kampf manifesto or listen to Nazi leader's speeches should have had no illusions about what the Nazis wanted to do to the Jews.
Those in the Allied governments who were anti-Semitic, and there were quite a few of them, were wilfully blind to what was intended. The British ambassador to the Third Reich sympathised with Nazi concerns over the "disproportionate" number of Jews in business, the professions and in the education system. Capitalist government leaders such as Australia's Robert Menzies, Britain's Churchill and US President Roosevelt admired Hitler and Mussolini for their tough anti-communist and anti-union policies.
When the mass killings started, Allied governments clung to the claim that they couldn't be certain of what was happening. This was a convenient lie. The code-breakers working for British intelligence had in 1939 cracked the German police radio codes which later revealed large-scale massacres of Polish and Soviet Jews after the German Army invaded eastern Europe.
Allied agents inside German military intelligence were also reporting massacres. The chauffeur of the Gestapo head in Prague, for example, reported thousands of Ukrainian Jews being forced to dig trenches and then being shot and falling into them. British military intelligence concluded that there was "evidence of a policy of savage intimidation if not ultimate extermination" and that the German police "were killing all Jews who fell into their hands". These radio decrypts and intelligence assessments were included in frequent briefings to Churchill.
When the extermination camps in occupied Poland came on stream from 1942, the code-breakers had already, from December 1940, broken the more sophisticated Enigma codes used by the SS who ran the camps. Regular SS messages about hundreds of thousands of "additions" and "subtractions" of prisoners at camps like Auschwitz showed the Holocaust to be in full swing. German railway decrypts also showed large movements of "special cargo" into the camps.
Information from eyewitnesses, refugees, the Polish underground and anti-Nazi German industrialists with mines near Auschwitz corroborated the radio intercepts.
The US State Department initially called the information "a wild rumour inspired by Jewish fears", while the chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee said the information was being used "to stoke us up". In the eyes of these governments, Jews were not the best victims for generating war fever. When knowledge of the Holocaust eventually became undeniable, a variety of excuses were trotted out for the Allies' inaction.
The British and US governments simply did not want Jewish refugees. Whilst public pressure was mounting for the Allies to take in more Jewish refugees, the British home secretary only talked of admitting one to two thousand to be confined on the Isle of Man, because of a lack of accommodation! When Romania, a German "satellite" country, offered to release 70,000 Jews, the British Foreign Office called this "a frightful prospect".
The United States' "tight immigration policy" offered no hope to the potential victims of genocide. In 1939, the St Louis ocean liner, carrying 1128 German-Jewish refugees, was turned back by US immigration officials because the immigration quota for Germany had been met. The mass graves and the gas chambers were not so rejecting.
Public demands to rescue Jews and to stop the Holocaust, fell on the deaf ears of Allied governments. The governments said there were not enough ships to transport Jews from Europe, an excuse which had lost any substance by 1943 when the Allied war outlook had improved considerably. They claimed that the railway lines and bridges leading to the slave labour/extermination camps, and the gas chambers and crematoria in them, could not be bombed because the planes did not have the necessary range, payload or precision.
In fact, the Allies did not even bother to investigate the technical issues. Anyway, distance was no longer a problem once the Allies had bases in Italy from 1943, from where they launched bombing raids against factories and oil refineries as little as 10 kilometres from Auschwitz (bombing raids were also careful to avoid US-owned factories in Germany).
Roosevelt and Churchill opposed large-scale rescue plans, not because of logistical problems, but because they were fearful they would be successful. They fed the public the official line that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war as soon as possible. The costs of this unnecessary and inhumane policy of military victory at all costs were borne by the Jews.
The final sop the Allied governments threw to the public was the promise that the Nazi murderers would be punished after the war. This failed to square the ledger, however, especially as those Nazi war criminals who were deemed to be valuable to the Cold War crusade against socialism were allowed through the immigration net that had so successfully kept their victims out. German capitalists (for example BMW and Volkswagen) who profited from the Jews being worked to death as slaves were spared prosecution.
However, far from the Allied governments' behaviour being "a departure from the values of Western democratic societies", as Breitman argues, their shameful inaction was in keeping with the values of "Western democratic" societies.
The capitalist "champions" of the war for "freedom, democracy and human rights" confronted the Jews with anti-Semitism at official levels and with racist immigration laws. The "anti-fascist" war against the Jews' executioners was a reluctant choice forced on the West only when Nazi Germany overstepped US and British imperialist boundaries.
US trade and investment flourished in Nazi Germany, even during the war years. Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil and IBM were just some companies that took advantage of the war-profiteering opportunities made possible by Nazi terror.
Whilst Breitman pulls the big punches that might have been levelled at the real — capitalist — values of the Western bourgeois democracies during the Holocaust, he clearly shows that the Allied governments knew about the Nazi genocide of the Jews. They chose not to act.
The Allies waged war against their fascist rival, but in keeping with their traditions of the slave trade and massacres of colonial and indigenous peoples, they did not wage war against genocide, racism or the profits-first system.