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wishful thinking
It's time to stop blaming the West for not doing more to stop the Holocaust, says a Jewish historian.
Last year, a rash of reports in British newspapers claimed that Winston Churchill's government knew about the mass killings of Jews in the Soviet Union as early as July 1941 and did nothing to stop it. More recently, Switzerland has come under international pressure to reexamine their wartime activities in connection with the Jews. On Tuesday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, the French Catholic church in France apologized for its silence when the Vichy administration deported tens of thousands of French Jews to the Nazi gas chambers. According to a new book, the West has very little for which to apologize. In "The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews From the Nazis" (Routledge), William D. Rubinstein, a professor of history at the University of Wales, demolishes the most cherished articles of faith of what he calls the "Holocaust revisionists": that the Allies could have taken in more Jewish refugees, negotiated with the Nazis to save more Jewish lives and bombed Auschwitz and other death camps. Salon talked with Professor Rubinstein about his findings and the controversy that is already swirling around them. The core of your book is that nothing -- absolutely nothing -- could have been done by the Allies to rescue the Jews of occupied Europe during the War. How did you conclude that? I examined every plan for rescuing Jews devised by people in the democracies that I could find. It's self-evident from reading the plans that nobody had any idea of what to do. Most of the plans concerned opening up the gates of Palestine, an idea made famous by Leon Uris' "Exodus" among other books. It's true that beginning in 1939, the British, who ruled Palestine, restricted Jewish immigration to please the Arabs. But the point is: that wasn't relevant to the basic problem facing the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, which was that they couldn't get out. It wasn't a matter of Jews not being able to get British permission to enter Palestine; it was a matter of Jews not being able to get emigration papers from the Nazis. Which made it hard for Jews to go to any country. Right. The main problem was not that Western countries were closing their doors. The main problem was that the Germans wouldn't let them go. German policy changed totally and completely from expelling all Jews from Germany to imprisoning and killing all the Jews throughout Europe. Nobody, nobody had a way to get around the fact that Adolf Hitler, as his life's mission, wanted to rid Europe of the "biological basis of Jewry," as he put it. So, the whole concept of "Jewish refugees" is wrong? A refugee is a person who has to flee from his or her homeland because of a well-founded fear of persecution. That is an accurate description of the Jews of Germany, especially in the late 1930s, when they were being kicked out of Germany. My argument is that when the war came, this changed. They were no longer refugees. They were now the precise opposite. They were prisoners. They were the prisoners of a psychopath who was the absolute master of Europe from the border of Spain to the gates of Moscow. In other words, you're agreeing with what Western leaders said at the time: that the only way to rescue the Jews was by the Allies' defeating Nazi Germany. Exactly, which is what even the Jewish leaders said at the time. Roosevelt and Churchill said the only way we can liberate the remaining Jews was to conquer Europe mile by mile, which is what they were doing. Let's go through the myths that you challenge in your book. First, the myth of "closed doors." It is widely believed that the Western world, the democracies, closed their doors to Jewish immigration from Germany in the 1930s. Well, first of all, 72 percent of Germany's Jews, including 83 percent of German Jewish children, actually escaped from Germany between 1933 and 1939, most of them in the last year before the war started. Many German Jews were reluctant to leave. They thought the antisemitism would blow over. Second, the closed-door issue only applied to Germany and the territories annexed by Germany in the late 1930s -- Austria and Czechoslovakia. It had nothing to do with Poland, Russia, Romania, Hungary, France and so on, where the bulk of the Jews who were killed actually lived. Before the war began, those countries were not under Nazi occupation and, therefore, their Jews were not refugees. Many people now ask why we didn't save the Jews of Hungary in 1935. That's a non sequitur. In 1935, nobody thought they were in any danger from anything. What about the infamous St. Louis incident, in which several hundred German Jews aboard the SS St. Louis in 1939 were turned away from the United States and were eventually forced to return to Europe? It was a very regrettable incident. At that time, America would not allow in any more German Jews than the quota of 25,000 to 30,000 a year, which was rigorously enforced. The boat also unsuccessfully tried to unload its refugees in several other countries in the Western Hemisphere. But they were not sent back to Nazi Germany, contrary to popular belief. They all received refuge either in England, the Netherlands or France. Some of the countries were later conquered by the Nazis, and some of the St. Louis refugees died. But in 1939, nobody foresaw that. N E X T+P A G E+| The role of American antisemitism |
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BY JONATHAN BRODER | it has been an article of faith, among average Jews and Holocaust scholars alike, that the Allies in World War II could have done more to try and save the Jews of Nazi Europe. David Wyman's "The Abandonment of the Jews" and some 20 other similar books have appeared since the 1960s, accusing the Allies, out of indifference and antisemitism, of shutting their doors to Jewish refugees and deliberately foregoing military strikes that could have saved many Jews languishing in the Nazi death camps.
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