The Historiography of the Holocaust

Britain, the United States and the Holocaust 265
‘undesirable concentration of them in towns’. When this failed, unsurprisingly
given their physical state, the Jewish survivors were kept out while at the same
time the British government enabled hundreds of thousands of continental
non-Jews, some of whom had been Nazi collaborators, to enter because they
were seen as desirable, assimilable immigrants. 58
Bevin’s policies, however, followed on from those of his rival and fellow
Labour cabinet minister Herbert Morrison, who had been Home Secretary from
1940 to the end of the Second World War. Both men were sincere anti-Nazis at
home and abroad, and Morrison on a personal level was surrounded by Jewish
friends and work colleagues. 59 On the one hand, the label ‘antisemite’ does not
seem to help other than to provide a neat but ultimately superficial explanation
of their policies. On the other, to reject the possibility that Jewishness had
anything to do with official thinking avoids confronting the contemporary
obsession with the subject. 60 Indeed, the almost total restrictions on Jewish
refugees from September 1939 to 1950 enforced by the British government has
to be explained, and this can be done only by analysing how liberal ambivalence,
especially the idea that Jews bring antisemitism with them, was taken to
its logical extreme, becoming in itself ingrained in ‘bureaucratic mentality and
practice’. 61
The reality is that most responses from government, state and public in
Britain and the United States were marked by a fundamental ambivalence to
Jews and Jewish suffering. Not only is ambivalence difficult to pigeonhole, but
it is fluid and dynamic, able to respond to different impulses and demands in an
unpredictable manner. During the war and in contrast to the pre-war months,
British officials learned to deal with calls to aid Jews in the most universal way
possible (that is to win the war and reject the idea that Jews particularly were
being singled out for persecution). In the United States, however, pressure from
Jewish and non-Jewish campaigners outside Congress, and from within the
state structure in the Treasury Department, led to the formation of the War
Refugee Board in January 1944. Although the word ‘Jew’ was not incorporated
in its title, the major function of the War Refugee Board (WRB) was to save
Jewish lives. Indeed, it has been claimed that through its work over 100,000 Jews
were helped, especially through relief work in Hungary. A recent account has
attempted to debunk the idea that the efforts of the WRB saved Jewish lives:
‘It is entirely possible that a searching and critical view of the role of the Board
would conclude that the War Refugee Board actually rescued no Jews at all.’ 62
Such a critique is simplistic and reflects a general lacuna in the existing historiography
that ‘In discussions about the Allied response to the Holocaust, scholars
have underplayed the relief question in favour of focusing on the question of
immigration and rescue.’ 63 The WRB was relatively marginal within the US state
apparatus and most of its resources came from Jewish sources. Nevertheless, its
aim was particularistic; it focused on the persecuted and not, as was the official