Refusal to believe Nazi reality

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 22

Refusal to believe Nazi reality

Auschwitz and the Allies: The Politics of Rescue. By Martin Gilbert. Hamlyn, 1983. 355 pp. Illustrations. $19.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) For those who have read other accounts of Nazi Germany’s concentration camp network and its historical development this book must rank as one of the best-chronicled and researched accounts yet published. For others not so familiar, its objective, methodical presentation will open the incredulous mind to a smoothly functioning bureaucracy devoted to torture and murder. In the late 1930 s Germany had sporadically been enforcing ever more restrictive and brutal measures against its Jewish population. As other countries, such as Poland, were overrun in the early stages of the Second World War the Jews in these locations were included. Alongside these victims were various “political undesirables,” as well as those that did not fit into Nazi concepts of “racial purity” such as gipsies, homosexuals, and prisoners-of-war, particularly those from the Soviet Union. During 1942 the human round-ups collected thousands of people where before there had only been hundreds at a time. We now know that there was a specific plan designed in Berlin at the beginning of 1942 to kill all the Jews of Europe in the most efficient manner possible. The major extermination camp of Auschwitz had already been constructed with its gas chambers and crematoria, but it was a completely contained secret inside Germany. Frequent publication of segments of

information in the United States, describing the planned and frantically speeded-up slaughter by the Nazis (with a million already having perished in the years between 1939 and 1942) were ignored and kept out of the headlines. As some eye-witnesses of the camps, exchanged for German internees, revealed more, shock was followed by disbelief, but in the midst of the war no political action of any sort followed. For example, the advisers to the British Colonial Secretary of the day suggested that groups of children who might have been saved from massacre could not be accepted on “security grounds.” The Jewish Agency was stated to be presenting facts as “sob stuff’ and as a political manoeuvre. A spontaneous reaction against “atrocity stories” was seen to be rooted in the instinct to spare oneself pain against such reports as descriptions of Polish peasantry hardly able to endure the continual stench of putrefying flesh as lines of trucks, day and night, delivered human cargo to the j*as chambers. The question of letting Jewish refugees into Palestine led to party arguments about the claims of humanity versus the quota restrictions laid down in the British 1939 White Paper on the future of Palestine. It was not until mid 1944 that the existence and purpose of Auschwitz as a compact centre for the “final solution” of death to a people became world accepted knowledge. Even then, when British and American policymakers were asked to bomb the railway lines leading to it and the other places of destruction, this was

rejected as risking the lives of bomber pilots who each day were photographing it from the air. When on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops reached Auschwitz the two and a half years preceding had Seen at least two million Jews killed there, plus two million Soviet prisoners-of-war, Polish political prisoners, gipsies, and non-Jews from all over Europe. It is fully documented in this book that the Nazi propaganda and security machine was a highly efficient one. When confirmation of the destruction finally began to leak out, the dangers of political ploys and possible flooding by “hoards of surviving refugees” stopped action in the West. A few leaders such as Churchill were early convinced as to what was happening, but were diverted from any of their ideas being put into practice by Government lack of comprehension and imagination in the face of the “unbelievable.” Churchill, in July 1944, was moved to say “there is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible single crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” The book is a compelling account of the way in which one country in our relatively modern world can deceive the rest” and carry out a systematic, gigantic extermination of millions of men, women and children, whose only crime was a common nationality or religion. The thought that some of the organisers of this horror then became ranking officials in the administration of the Allied occupying powers — a point not covered in the book — is the final irony.