The Holocaust didn’t really get started until October 1939. The United Kingdom had already declared war on Germany. What were they supposed to do? Declare double secret probation war?
Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with post-war UKs treatment of displaced Jews trying to go to Palestine. And the ones already there.
Freddy’s “memoirs” reasoning makes sense.
Also, considering that the books were written in the late 40s, early 50s, I suspect that a desire to not alienate/discomfit the West’s new friends in Germany, who were helping us keep the Soviets in check, also may have been a factor in any conscious decision to not reference the Holocaust.
Anyone can go read posts I’ve made and see I’m a strong supporter of Israel. But let’s not put the issue of the Holocaust and British Palestine in the same basket. If Britain had enacted unlimited immigration to Palestine as a response to the Holocaust it wouldn’t have saved the victims. Germany wasn’t letting Jews leave German-controlled territory at that point.
Before getting into a national dick-waving contest, which is completely irrelevant to Captain Amazing’s point, at least get some facts straight. 7 December 1941 is the date Japan attacked US and European possessions in Asia and mutual declarations of war declared (as an afterthought by Japan). 11 December 1941 is the date Nazi Germany declared war on the US, a good part of the reason being the US was already in an undeclared naval war with Nazi Germany and had been since summer 1941, escorting British and Canadian convoys with orders to shoot on sight any Axis vessels encountered. From wiki on neutrality patrols, bolding mine:
It is, and always has been, difficult to get peoples to fight wars to altruistically save others. After all, it’s their blood and treasure being used. WW2 was no different. Even then, before the war Nazi persecution of the Jews, while rather pronounced, wasn’t at an intensity that was unique, and for many worldwide anti-Semitism didn’t have the degree of damnable disrespectability that it now has.
So to censure Churchill for ‘doing nothing’ about the Holocaust is a gigantic red herring. There was precious little going on in September 1939 re: the Jews for him to ‘do’ anything about - and he wasn’t even in government. When they did receive intel on the Holocaust, what more could he do other than continue to prosecute the war? What?
Actually British participation in World War II was one of the exceptions. Germany had no real quarrel with Britain. Hitler would have been perfectly happy to have left Britain and the British Empire alone.
Britain declared war against Germany because of the German threat to other countries like Poland. And even after Germany had conquered most of continental Europe and offered to negotiate an end to the war with Britain, the British insisted on fighting on. This despite the fact that Germany was probably stronger than Britain by this point.
So while Britain might not have been fighting specifically for the Jews, it was generally fighting for all the people in occupied Europe - the Poles, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Czechs, the Yugoslavians, the Greeks, and the Jews alike.
I would say that rarely has any country fought a war for less sordid reasons than the British did in World War II.
^
There can be no one dominant power on the continent. That was British policy since…well before there was a Britain. Thats why Britain went to war in 1914, and 1939. And 1791 and 1757 and 1741, and 1701…
Thats why Britain went to war. No other reason.
Granted, although I didn’t say it was impossible, merely difficult. And that difficulty is shown in how the UK stood by for several decades while the Nazis threatened their neighbours and the Chamberlain government was essentially shamed into action by the Hitlerite repudiation of Munich.
I guess it was a time when Britain’s interests and the cause of Right were one and the same, which is rare.
That’s not true. It was a part ofsomething that had a huge impact on the German ability to wage war.
Oops, I said decades in my previous post when I obviously meant years :smack:
As Freddy says, they’re Churchill’s memoirs. And what was or wasn’t going on in occupied Europe with respect to the Jews, and what the British did or didn’t know about it at any particular time, wasn’t something that was taking up a lot of his time or correspondence as wartime Prime Minister.
There’s a curious overlap here with criticism of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film, Der Untergang, which depicts the final weeks in Hitler’s life in, I understand, scrupulously historically accurate detail. Some critics objected that the film makes no reference at all to the Holocaust, but the defence is that this is probably historically accurate; it wasn’t being much discussed in the Reichskanzlerei in Berlin in April and May 1945.
The Holocaust horrifies us; it eclipses almost everything else we know about the Second World War. But the fact is that it didn’t particularly preoccupy the leaders on either side. They had a war to fight.
Bear in mind that Churchill wasn’t in office then.
The book was very much Churchill ‘getting his version of history in first’, as he had done after the last war and had often said he would do again once the war was over (“Another one for his book” was a common reaction in the civil service & government to his sonorous memos circulated round Whitehall in the early months of the war). He wasn’t greatly interested in what had gone on in the Eastern Front, and he had no access to primary sources from Russia or Japan, though to make it a history of the war he had to include something. Partly it was written to recoup his fortunes, for he had expensive tastes and little attention to domestic economy. His access to official papers was exceptional and even the Attlee administration who were nominally his political enemies were somewhat in awe of the inside story he had to tell and allowed him unprecedented access to the papers even by the easier canons of the day (and previous war leaders had just taken all their papers with them on departing). The public got the impression that every word was Churchill’s own, and his publishers were not inclined to disillusion them. In fact much of the text was drafted by his assistants, Pownall and Bill Deakin and a host of juniors, although Churchill edited and corrected everything. He was inhibited in his criticism by, in the early volumes, his belief that he could sort out all current political difficulties with Stalin if he could only persuade him to another summit meeting. Also his criticisms of De Gaulle and Eisenhower had to take account of their both being national leaders by then with whom he would have to deal on his return to the Premiership.
Remember that the Holocaust (a word that wasn’t coined to describe it until the 1960s) wasn’t really emphasised as a unique event until the 1960s and the Eichmann trial and the West German trials of (some) major culprits. A stream of books and films followed. The trials of major German war criminals in 1946 and 1947 received publicity all right but everyone had heard by then that Nazis were evil and exterminating the Jews and others were just some of the crimes they were charged with.
I am baffled about that so many people here think that the only thing the Allies could have done about the Holocaust is fight the war.
It has been discussed many times on this very board the issue of bombing the death camps which many Jewish leaders agitated for and which the Allies refused to carry out.
Lot of people are still angry over that.
Also, the existence and magnitude of the death camps were well known to the Allied leadership and there was again agitation to make this a key matter in propaganda, but again, refused. Some of the people behind the Holocaust would have been less eager to fulfill their duties if they were aware of how much the Allies knew and how prominent a matter this was to them.
After the war, there was some denial of such knowledge among Allied leaders to ease their conscience about their decisions, which may be relevant to the OP.
I know this question is about Jews but couldn’t it equally be about gypsies, homosexuals, anyone remotely Soviet, ethnic Poles, the handicapped, etc.
Did Churchill dedicated swathes of his volumes to those groups and ignore Jews, or did he concentrate on somehow avoiding defeat and annihilation, and engineering victory?
In that the ‘Final Solution’ applied only to them, they were (among Romani) specifically targeted for total annihilation. Churchill acknowledge this in 1941;*
“None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew the unspeakable evils wrought upon the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime… Assuredly in the day of victory the Jew’s suffering and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten.”*
Yet in his memoirs did he does seem to forget; I mean not even a paragraph!
Previous GD thread on this very subject. Churchill seemed to be on board when Hungarians were being deported to Auschwitz, but later dropped it. However the position of SHAEF was that all military resources should be used destroy to Wehrmacht. The Dutch begged Eisenhower for an offensive into the northern Netherlands in winter 1944 when they were starving, but he refused (eventually the Allies did drop food in Operation Manna). Even so, Churchill was certainly not scared of debate or controversy about his actions, he talks at length about Mers-el-Kebir for example which pissed the French off no end.
I never knew that history of the term dated from the '60s, interesting. Although I think Churchill would have recognised its magnitude before the general public would.
Well, that’s just it; the mechanised and bureaucratic process and the totality were the unprecedented elements that make it stand out even among other historical mass-murders.
Keep in mind what you’re talking about is a debate not a proven fact. People at the time didn’t ignore what the Nazis were doing; they just felt that fighting the war was a better response than bombing the camps.
And you can see their point. The idea that the best response to the Nazi program of killing Jews was to drop bombs on those same Jews isn’t non-controversial. You can argue that killing some Jews now might save more Jews later but it’s easy to see why people would seek other suggestions that didn’t require you to kill the people you were trying to protect.