I’ve read only an abridge version of Churchill’s six volume history of the war. There are a few things omitted; for national security reasons he doesn’t mention ULTRA or MAGIC, Colossus and the work of Bletchley Park. But I’ve also heard that in the full six volumes he doesn’t dedicate a single sentence to the Holocaust.
I recall reading a mention of Jews in comparison to the Greeks, Googling reveals a word that could be in reference to the Nazi goal of wiping them out; “Personally I have always been on the side of both,and believed in their invincible power to survive internal strife and the world tides threatening their extinction.”
So two questions; 1 - Is this the only reference in Churchill’s six volumes to the Holocaust? No words at all about the camps, ghettos, rebellions?
2 - Why? Given how much manpower and resources the Nazis dedicated to it it’s rather a large omission on Churchill’s part. Did he just assume it would be common knowledge or something?
I’ve tried Googling the answer but all I could find was Holocaust denier sites who think that it’s somehow proof that the whole thing never happened and looking at those makes me feel like taking a shower.
He talks a little bit about Hitler’s anti-antisemitism in the first volume, and I think includes some correspondence where it’s mentioned that the Jews of one country (maybe Greece) are afraid they’ll be killed if the Germans invade, but that’s pretty much it. I think it’s that, ultimately, it’s not the story that Churchill wants to tell. He wants to tell the story about how the Allies, against all odds, and under his leadership, defeated the evil that was Nazi Germany. He doesn’t want to tell the story about how the Allies, under his leadership, stood by and did nothing while the Jews of Europe were murdered. That’s a much less triumphalist and pro-Churchill story.
Ah yes, I have the single volume here - in Chapter III, Adolf Hitler, he writes “He had mingled in Vienna with extreme German nationalist groups, and he had heard stories of sinister, undermining activities of another race, foes and exploiters of the Nordic world - the Jews. His patriotic anger fused with envy of the rich and successful into one overpowering hate.”
Again though, seems kind of skimpy when one considers this would lead to something unprecedented in human history. Not that I necessarily disagree with you that it wasn’t part of his narrative, but Churchill doesn’t shy away from debate about other actions in the war (and he would have been on the same page as Eisenhower and other Allied leaders who said that the best way to end Nazi horror was to devote all resources into winning the war ASAP and not be distracted with ‘refugee issues’). Plus it would also add to the unpleasantness of their foes i.e. ‘if they had won, they’d have murdered millions more’.
Would it have been part of the popular conciousness by the late '40s/early '50s, when Churchill wrote the books? These days the idea that we fought to stop Nazi murder is a popular one, how much was it synonymous with the war back when the book was written?
Don’t have anything of substance to add, other than I’d love to get an answer to this. I have to agree with the OP. This wasn’t a 10 page paper. This was six volume history. Clearly Churchill wasn’t sparing the ink.
I partly agree with this, but also think it is a bit unfair. Churchill was trying to tell a very pro-British, and to some extent pro-Churchill, story. His overall theme was basically the indomitable will of the Allies in general, and the English in particular. It is much more a story of England than Germany; you really don’t get a good view of a lot of German happenings; it is not restricted to the holocaust.
Part of the unfairness, I think, is to accuse him of doing nothing while the Jews of Europe were murdered.
First, while there were many attrocities before the war (Kristallnacht, etc), I don’t know of anyone who foresaw that this would lead to 6 million Jews being exterminated. The exterminations really didn’t happen until the war was underway. I’m not sure what exactly Churchill was supposed to be doing at this point, as he had his back against the wall for much of it and in 1940 faced the threat of his country being invaded and defeated (at least as far as everyone knew at the time). At the time the extermination camps were being built and the Holocaust as we know it started, the Allies had zero capability of doing anything about it.
Second, the one time in history when the Holocaust could have been prevented was between March 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, and September, 1938, with the Munich agreement. During this time, one of the only people who was actually pushing for aggressive action to contain Hitler was Churchill. I’m certainly not going to pretend that he was doing so out of a desire to protect the Jews of Europe, but it is almost certain that if Churchill’s policies had been followed from the start, the Holocaust would not have happened, at least in the severity in which it played out.
There is probably plenty of blame for many world leaders in the 1930s for allowing the events that led tro the Holocaust, but I would say that Churchill evades most or all of this blame.
Another possibility on why Churchill omitted the crimes of the SS and Wehrmacht; when the Soviets liberated Auschwitz they did not announce it to the world or make any statements recognising Jews as a special target of persecution, they thought it would distract from the suffering of the USSR.
Obviously Churchill wouldn’t care about that (anyone can see he’s not a fan of Stalin in his writings), but was he working on the same kind of logic - that elaborating on specific victims of the Nazis would detract from seeing the war as a disaster for millions elsewhere, as a global tragedy? How likely is this interpretation?
Churchill was a bit of Victorian at heart. Wiping out undesirables was something which was in such a world view, something which occasionally needed to be done. Distasteful, but necessary.
He had no problems causing a famine which killed millions in Bengal at the same time.
Churchill’s six volumes are not a “history of the war”. They are memoirs. They are built around the memos and cables that Churchill wrote and received at the time.
The general background of the war is sketched in synoptically, with just enough information so that the memos and cables make sense. There is only the sketchiest history of the fighting on the Eastern front, or the Sino-Japanese war, because Churchill had to make few decisions on these topics.
The abridged version is a little misleading in this regard, because by running the synopses together (and omitting many of the memos) it reads more like a general history of the war. But, the full six volumes were never intended as such. Again, they are memoirs, not a general history.
So the Holocaust gets short shrift, because Churchill had to make few (if any) decisions relevant to it, and probably received little information about it during the war and wrote even less.
But as you mention there are pages dedicated to things Churchill had no input or control over, from decisions taken in 1919 to the Battles of the Coral Sea to Stalingrad. Perhaps just to give context - but why is their no context given in terms of Nazi crimes?
That was comparatively early on in the shoah, before Aktion Reinhard. After it Churchill had more to say and do on the subject, too much to simply copy and paste but this link gives more details. He even knew about the camps while the war was ongoing, writing in July 1944;
So it just seems odd to me he didn’t dedicate even a paragraph to it, when we know he did receive information about it, spoke about it, wrote about it, telegraphed Eisenhower about it and with Eden even discussed bombing. I wish I could have simply asked him to hear he reason(s) but sadly he died before I was born.
Genocide is a recurring motif in human history. It wasn’t even unprecedented with respect to the Jews, who had been the subject of several attempts to exterminate them. See Book of Esther for one failed attempt. The Nazis brought modern methods, efficiency and thoroughness to the project, but it was not a new thing under the sun.
[QUOTE= He doesn’t want to tell the story about how the Allies, under his leadership, stood by and did nothing while the Jews of Europe were murdered. [/QUOTE]
Lets assume for a moment that we had full knowledge that the Jews were being killed. What is it you think we could have done? To stop the massacre we would have needed to be on German soil and there was a very small problem with that, the German Army.
I’m very curious to know what you think the Allies should or could have done had we known about this say in 1941 or 1942? Aside from a strongly worded letter we couldn’t have done much at that point to stop it.
In what possible sense can Churchill, or any of the allies, be said to have ‘done nothing’ about the Jews of Europe being murdered? What, pray, could they have done (even if they had known much more about the holocaust than they did) except strive as hard as they could to defeat the Nazis, which is exactly what they did?
Not to take away from the Holocaust, but it was neither a reason for the Allied entry into the war, nor was it something that severely impacted the German ability to make war one way or the other, except insofar as that sort of German behavior added to the resistance in occupied countries.
From a purely pragmatic perspective, you could write about the war and the military operations therein without even mentioning it.