ja chank 2008 - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

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SIR MARTIN GILBERT: THE HOLOCAUST IN A SANITIZED INTERPRETATION Alexander J. Groth Alexander J. Groth is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of California, Davis. A variation on Holocaust denial is a more subtle attempt to absolve so-called bystanders, especially Allied governments, of complicity in the mass murder of European Jews. A foremost example of those who disguise the Allied role is the eminent British-Jewish historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Sir Winston Churchill and prolific, widely cited, author of historical narratives focused both on the Holocaust and the Second World War. Gilbert’s ‘sanitizing’ method is analyzed and illustrated here in relation to the proposition that Hitler's Final Solution might have been, and certainly should have been, variously obstructed and impeded by “third parties” - the Allies foremost among these - not only in relation to the events of 1941-1942 and subsequently, but also 1940-1941. Holocaust denial is simply too obvious a falsehood to command a significant following within the world's respectably intellectual circles. The denial of Allied passivity and collusion with the perpetrators, however, is quite another matter. There are respectable scholars and historians who distort the reality of the Holocaust because it seems that they cannot face up to the indifference and the complicity of non-Nazis, and especially of Allied governments, in the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe under the auspices of Hitler's regime. 1 Gilbert has recounted and reconstructed some of the most horrible scenes and events from the whole European landscape of Jewish martyrdom and Nazi inhumanity. Simultaneously, however, he has promoted two arguments to absolve the Allies of responsibility in the Holocaust, viz. lack of information, and a technical-physical inability to act in any timely or effective fashion. In order to sustain this interpretation, Gilbert has (1) gone to great lengths to disguise, obscure, and distort what was known about the killings and also what was knowable (and what is ‘knowable’ always depends, to some extent at least, on someone's interest in knowing…); he has also (2) resorted to gross misrepresentation of alleged Allied inability to act in response to that which was either known or knowable; and (3), he has exhibited a consistent unwillingness to make inferences from Allied rhetoric and behavior which suggested that lack of desire, rather than lack of information or capability, was at the root of Allied behavior with respect to the Holocaust. 1 Obviously, many people of all sorts - including even some Jews - remained indifferent to the Holocaust when they should have acted or spoken, but the moral culpability of the Allies was greater than most because, extrapolating from Immanuel Kant’s linkage between capability and obligation, passivity in the face of a crime would always be a greater fault in a police officer or soldier than it would be in an elderly woman, in a child, or in a disabled person, and, by extension, in “an average civilian”.
To put the matter into proper perspective, one needs to take into account Allied recognition of the fact of the Holocaust. This recognition was embodied in the Allied Declaration of 17 December, 1942, issued on behalf of the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the French National Committee. It was made public by British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden in the House of Commons. It asserted that: ...the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler's oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettoes established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews. ...None of those taken away are ever heard of again. ... the number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children. 2 Eden observed that the reports upon which the Allied declaration was based were ‘reliable’, and that they had reached the British government ‘recently’. In the conclusion of the official declaration, Eden said that Allied governments condemned the “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination”. He said nothing about any possible assistance to the victims. Virtually any Jew who had survived these times, especially in East-Central Europe, is cognizant of the important effect of local antisemitism on the success of Hitler’s Final Solution. To be sure, there were heroic individuals in all European societies who ran all the risks of murderous Nazi reprisals in order to do what they could to help and rescue Jews. There were some “shining stars” like Oskar Schindler and Jan Karski. But, in very great numbers, there was also collaboration between Nazi killers and antisemitic sympathizers, people who identified and turned over Jews to their murderers, people who assisted in the roundups and the killings, and who also, in many cases, simply refused to give Jews any assistance or even sympathy, that is, people who remained wholly indifferent to, and passively accepting of, the Nazi mass killing of the Jews. For these people, a public word from the very prestigious figure of Winston Churchill, as indeed also from Franklin Roosevelt, would have been significant. It could have made a life-or-death difference for thousands of Jews who were “turned in”, and for thousands who could have been assisted but were not. Nazi liquidation of European Jewry occurred disproportionately - certainly for a majority of the roughly six million - in only six principal extermination camps. These were Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor. All these camps were located on the territory of pre-war Poland. Although the Polish underground movement reported throughout the war on the extermination of the Jews to its political leadership in London, it made no effort to interfere with the killing process in or around these camps. There were no Polish attacks 2 Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser. vol. 385 (1942) p2083.
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Page 53 and 54: SOME JEWISH BOOKSELLERS AND BOOKSHO
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ja chank 2008 - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

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