ja chank 2008 - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

Eden did not say that the Jews had been killed; he said they were being killed. Even if
the Allies did not know all the details of Nazi policies, and all the specifics of Auschwitz,
as opposed to other camps and other killing locations, how much of a handicap to policy
was that? Gilbert’s notion that it was “difficult for the Allies to do anything” was
virtually sophomoric. Was bombing Germany day and night during 1942 and 1943
‘difficult’? It was ‘difficult’ but it was being done. Was helping out and supplying
French and Yugoslav and Norwegian resistance movements ‘difficult’? That was also
being done from British and American resources. Ships sailed and planes flew and
soldiers fought.
Interestingly, earlier in the same work, Gilbert had written that ‘many’ British policy
makers “opposed the appeals on behalf of [Jewish] refugees [because they] were
particularly ‘afraid’ as they expressed it, of the ‘danger’ of ‘flooding’ Palestine, and
indeed Britain with Jews. They argued that even the arrival of a few thousand Jewish
refugees in Britain would provoke an outburst of antisemitism. These same policy makers
were also wary of what they regarded as a parallel 'danger' of falling for what one of them
[?!] referred to as Jewish ‘sob-stuff’”. And some, he wrote, also spoke of “customary
Jewish exaggeration”. 5
It would hardly be a matter of literary license to label the policy-makers’ attitudes that
Gilbert described here as fundamentally antisemitic. But, if this was the case, was it not
likely that various other British policies with respect to the Holocaust - not just refugee
issues - might have been affected by such attitudes? Was it even possible perhaps that
there were some British policy-makers who thought that Hitler's killing of the Jews -
who, if left alive, might some day seek to ‘flood’ Palestine - wasn't such a bad idea?
After all, it was in 1942 that Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, made
this infamous observation in his diaries:
The question of Jewish persecution in Europe is being given top news priority by
the English and the Americans ... At bottom, however, I believe that both the
English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riffraff.
6
In his major work, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Collins, 1986, 959 pp.),
Gilbert concluded the discussion of the extermination of European Jews in an Epilogue of
several pages subtitled, “I will tell the world”. He described the apparently special
character of the Holocaust among Hitler's many crimes: “It was the Jews alone who were
marked out to be destroyed in their entirety: every Jewish man, woman and child”. But in
this work Gilbert gave virtually no attention to the attitude of the Allied states toward this
horrible process from its early days in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 and 1941 to its gas
chamber conclusion from 1942 to 1945.
5 Gilbert reported that during a 19 May, 1942, debate in the House of Commons on possible British
sanctuary for Jewish refugees, the argument was made by one MP, Herbert Butcher, that such refuge
should be denied to Jews in order to prevent a likely increase in British antisemitism. Ibid., p140, and
p339.
6 See L. P. Lochner (ed.) The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (New York: Doubleday, 1948) 13 December,
1942 entry. p241. Italics are mine.