All Hell Let Loose (85 page)

Anglo-Saxons were not immune from such sentiments. British soldier Len England expressed shock at the attitudes of many of his barrack-room comrades, of a kind later vividly portrayed in Irwin Shaw’s description of US Army service in his novel
The Young Lions
. England wrote: ‘Two of the most intelligent people I have yet met are confirmed Jew-baiters. The argument usually runs like this: where are the Jews in the army? There are none because they all have managed to get the soft jobs and have wangled out of conscription. In just the same way, the Jews were always the first to leave danger areas. The Jews hold the purse-strings, the country has been taken over by them. Individual Jews may be pleasant enough, but as a race they are the root of all evil.’

Murray Mendelsohn, a US Army engineer who had emigrated from Warsaw as a child with his family, was conscious of latent, if not active, anti-Semitism in his barrack room. His education and intelligence incurred the suspicion of his comrades, many of them former miners and construction workers. They nicknamed him ‘brain’ without admiration, ‘Not because I was that smart, but by comparison. I learned to be very inconspicuous.’ When the men of Easy Company 506th Airborne cursed their hated first commander, Lt. Sobel, they did so as the ‘fucking Jew’. Even in June 1945, when the concentration camps had been exposed to the world, an increasingly deranged Gen. George Patton denounced liberals who ‘believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applied particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals’.

Though Churchill decried in the most passionate terms reports of the Nazi extermination programme, his government – like that of Franklin Roosevelt – was unwilling to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees, even if the Germans could be persuaded to release or trade them. When Americans were polled in November 1938 about whether they believed Jewish fugitives from Hitler should be granted special immigration rights to enter the US, 23 per cent said yes, 77 per cent no. In August 1944 some 44 per cent of Australians who were asked if they would accept a settlement of Jewish refugees in the empty north of their country rejected the notion, against 37 per cent in favour. As late as December 1944, another survey of American opinion on the admission of Jews to the US showed that 61 per cent thought they should be given no greater priority than other applicants. A British Colonial Office official commented cynically on a December 1942 report about the death camps: ‘Familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.’ A Foreign Office official likewise deplored special pleading by ‘these wailing Jews’.

The Polish underground worker Jan Karski made his way to London in the autumn of 1942 after a fantastic odyssey across Europe, to provide an eyewitness account not only of his country’s sufferings, but explicitly of conditions in the Jewish ghettos, and of the extraordinary achievement he claimed, in having penetrated the Nazi death camp at Beł
ec. While he was received courteously enough by Polish exile prime minister Gen. Sikorski, by foreign secretary Anthony Eden and later in Washington by President Roosevelt, he was afflicted by a dismal sense of awareness that the horrors he described somehow lost their force and magnitude in safe, unoccupied Allied capitals. ‘In London these things bulked small,’ he wrote. ‘London was the hub of a vast military wheel, the spokes of which were made up of billions of dollars, armadas of bombers and ships and staggering armies that had suffered great loss. Then, too, people asked where did Polish sacrifice rank next to the immeasurable heroism, sacrifice and sufferings of the Russian people? What was the share of Poland in this titanic undertaking? Who were the Poles? … We Poles had no luck in this war.’ Karski was discouraged by his own leaders from over-emphasising the Jewish persecution, lest it should detract from the force of his account of the plight of Poland as a whole.

Arthur Schlesinger, relatively highly informed by his work for the Office of Strategic Services, wrote of his own state of knowledge about the fate of Europe’s Jews in 1944: ‘Most of us were still thinking of an increase in persecution rather than a new and barbaric policy of genocide … I cannot find colleagues who recall a moment of blazing revelation about the Final Solution.’ Likewise British intelligence officer Noel Annan: ‘It took some time … for the enormity of Germany’s crimes against the Jews to sink in. In intelligence we knew of the gas ovens, but not of the scale, the thoroughness, the bureaucratic efficiency with which Jews had been hunted down and slaughtered. No one at the end of the war, as I recollect, realised that the figure of Jewish dead ran into millions.’ In the entire archive of Britain’s wartime secret service, no mention occurs – or none at least which survives – about persecution of the Jews or the Holocaust, probably because SIS was never invited to investigate these issues.

Contrary to much popular modern mythology, the operational difficulties of bombing transport links to the death camps would have been very great, especially in 1942 when most of the Holocaust killings took place. Allied leaders considered reports of Jewish suffering in the context of atrocities being committed against occupied populations all over Europe. American diplomat George Ball wrote later: ‘Perhaps we were so preoccupied with the squalid menace of the war we did not focus on this unspeakable ghastliness. It may also be that the idea of mass extermination was so far beyond the traditional comprehension of most Americans that we instinctively refused to believe in its existence.’ Many Europeans and Americans who had been appalled by reported German atrocities in Belgium in 1914 concluded angrily after the First World War that they had allowed themselves to be fooled by Allied propaganda, for it emerged that the killings of civilians had been exaggerated. A world war later, the Western Powers were determined not to be similarly deluded again. It was to the perverse credit of British and American decency that many people were reluctant to suppose their enemies as barbaric as later evidence showed them to have been. George Orwell wrote in 1944: ‘“Atrocities” had come to be looked on as synonymous with “lies”. The stories about German concentration camps were atrocity stories: therefore they were lies – so reasoned the average man.’ Surveys found that most Americans continued to regard the Germans as fundamentally decent and peaceful folk, led astray by their leaders. In May 1945, when newsreels of the concentration camps had been shown around the world, 53.7 per cent of American respondents told pollsters they thought only a small part of the German people were ‘naturally cruel and brutal’.

None of the above diminishes in the smallest degree the responsibility of the Nazis, and of the German people, for the Holocaust. But it should be acknowledged that, even when overwhelming evidence became available, the Allied nations were slow to respond to the death camps. Though little could have been done to save their inmates, any more than the millions of Russian prisoners who died in German hands, an insouciance pervades Allied documentation of the period which does scant credit to Britain or the United States. Even if Jews were not persecuted in the Anglo-Saxon societies, nor were they widely loved. There remained until 1945 a resolute official unwillingness to assess their tragedy in a separate dimension from the sufferings of Hitler’s other captives, and of the occupied societies of Europe. Such insensitivity merits understanding, but rightly troubles posterity.

In the winter of 1941–42, a large number of Jewish deportees from Germany were shot immediately on their arrival at eastern destinations, but these killings were carried out at the discretion of local SS commanders; no general order was issued, decreeing either their preservation or their extinction. Late in November there was an eccentric intervention by Himmler himself, ordering a temporary halt to the killing of Reich Jews as distinct from easterners, though this check was soon reversed. To a remarkable degree, regional autonomy and logistical convenience – shortage of accommodation and food or, contrarily, of labour – still decided who lived and who died; but large-scale killings of eastern Jews, especially those unfit for work, continued through the winter. In Serbia, thousands of Jews and gypsies were executed in retaliation for partisan activity: local German commanders knew that prioritising such people as victims ensured Berlin’s approval.

Only one further step remained to be taken by the Nazi leadership: to order a transition from inflicting death arbitrarily and regionally towards imposing it by direct order from the top, in pursuit of an agreed policy of total extermination. In a speech on 12 December 1941, following his declaration of war on the United States, Hitler made plain his commitment to the destruction of the Jews, in supposed retaliation for their responsibility for the conflict. The implementation of the genocide programme was entrusted to the SS’s deputy chief, Reinhard Heydrich, to whom Himmler later paid unstinting posthumous tribute: ‘He was a character of rare purity with an intelligence of penetrating greatness and clarity. He was filled with an incorruptible sense of justice. Truthful and decent people could always rely on his chivalrous sentiment and humane understanding.’ These virtues were skilfully concealed on 20 January 1942, when at the Wannsee conference Heydrich mapped the road to the death camps. There is no record that he articulated an explicit commitment to murder all of Europe’s Jews, not least because the logistical obstacles remained formidable. Starvation still had a useful part to play; where convenient, victims could be worked to death. But the intended outcome was no longer in doubt: the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish problem would be accomplished in stages, only the last of which must await the war’s end.

There was considerable detailed discussion about the construction of extermination camps and the virtues of gas. The principal outcome of the conference was agreement that the SS would in future exercise absolute authority over the fate of Europe’s Jews; that no other Reich agency could appeal against its decisions; and that henceforward, policy would be directed towards the overarching aim of cleansing the entire Nazi empire. This was implemented with remarkable speed: in mid-March 1942, almost three-quarters of all those who perished in the Holocaust were still alive; eleven months later, the same proportion were dead.

A ministerial adviser enquired of SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik whether it might not be prudent to burn the bodies of the Nazis’ Jewish victims, rather than bury them: ‘After us there might come a generation that doesn’t understand the whole business!’ Globocnik replied, ‘Gentlemen, if there is ever a generation after us so feeble and weak-kneed that it doesn’t understand our great achievement, the whole of National Socialism will have been in vain … Bronze tablets should be buried stating that it was we who had the courage to carry out this momentous and so necessary task.’ Yet it is striking that, while Nazi leaders repeatedly and publicly averred their commitment to eliminating Europe’s Jews, detailed implementation of the Final Solution remained a closely guarded secret: even Hitler and his associates feared the global response, and especially the impact upon their own people, of public revelation of the death camps.

In the spring of 1942 Himmler refined a scheme to exploit concentration camp labour for both armaments production and the private profit of the SS. However, systemic incompetence and corruption ensured that little of value to the Reich was produced under SS auspices; on the contrary, the camp programme was a drain on Germany’s transport, manpower and general economic resources. Though millions of prisoners were put to work, mostly of a primitive kind, the SS never seriously attempted to reconcile its desire to extract useful services from its slaves with a consequent need to treat them with minimal humanity. Because its foremost aspiration was to produce mass death, it failed to produce much else save a ghastly harvest of human hair, gold teeth and discarded clothing.

At the beginning of June 1942, amid further mass deportations from the districts of Lublin and Galicia, the SS extended the policy of dispatching victims immediately on their arrival in camp reception areas. The concept of resettling Jews in the east had been abandoned, although a figleaf of pretence was sustained. Germany’s leaders now anticipated that their summer offensive in Russia would end the war, and the usefulness of Jewish slave labour. The Slovakian government allowed the shipment of 50,000 of its citizens to Auschwitz. A programme of deportations of western European Jews was introduced, conducted in collaboration with national security forces – the Nazi empire lacked resources to cleanse the occupied territories without the assistance of indigenous bureaucracies and law-enforcement agencies. Among the explicit purposes of the German government was to ensure that as many foreign regimes as possible were complicit in the massacre of Jews. In this, it achieved considerable success.

Posterity is fascinated by the ease with which the Nazis found so many ordinary men – to borrow the title of Christopher Browning’s classic study – willing to murder in cold blood vast numbers of innocents, of all ages and both sexes. Yet there is ample evidence in modern experience that many people are ready to kill others to order, once satisfied that this fulfils the wishes of those whose authority they accept. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were complicit in the deaths of millions of their fellow countrymen at the behest of Stalin and Beria, before the Holocaust was thought of. Germany’s generals may not themselves have killed civilians, but they were happy to acquiesce in, and even enthuse about, others doing so.