A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (48 page)

In 1939, Europe was home to about 9 million Jews; two out of every three of them were murdered during the war. In Germany, only about 20 percent survived; in Hungary, the percentage was a little higher, about 25 percent; but in Poland, only 8 percent were still alive.

In January 1945, as the Russians approached Auschwitz and other camps in Poland, the Germans forced thousands of prisoners to trudge through ice and snow to camps in Germany. About 250,000 died along the way. By spring, the Americans and the British were entering Germany. So were a number of war correspondents, including the American writer Meyer Levin. Within days of his arrival in Germany, a Polish refugee took Levin to see the camp outside Ohrdruf. He later described what he saw that day:

Gen. Eisenhower and other U.S. officials including Gens. Patton and Bradley viewed the charred remains of Jews and other prisoners. Those remains were burnt before German officials fled the camps.

We drove through the gate and halted. A circle of dead men lay there, in the striped slave uniforms which we now saw for the first time; these cadavers were fleshless; in back of each tight-skinned shaven skull was a bullethole
.

The Pole opened the door of a shed. There was a cordwood stack of stiff naked human bodies, a stack as high as we stood. The bodies were flat and yellow as lumber. A yellow disinfectant was scattered over the pile
.

We had known. The world had vaguely heard. But until now no one of us had looked on this…
.

There is not often a meaning in being first, in getting somewhere first so as to rush out a moment ahead of the others with the “news”; but today I somehow knew that I had had to find and experience this without anyone’s having told what it would be like. This was part of my personal quest. This was the source of the fear and the guilt in every human who remained alive. For human beings had had it in them to do this, and we were of the same species.
³⁴

A few days later, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, and Generals Omar Bradley and George S. Patton, Jr., also toured Ohrdruf. Eisenhower later described his response:

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or the assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.”… I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.
³⁵

Eisenhower insisted that Germans from a nearby town visit the camp so that they could see what had been done in their name. He also required that American soldiers tour the camp, so that they could see the evil they were fighting. Despite these efforts, many Jewish survivors found that they were still outsiders who were no more welcome in 1945 than they had been in 1939, the year the war began.

(1945–1979)

In the spring of 1945, Joseph Pulitzer, the editor of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
, joined a group of American journalists on a tour of recently liberated concentration camps. At Buchenwald, Pulitzer entered a room filled with dying men. Only one was strong enough to lift his head. Pulitzer described him as “a Polish lad of perhaps 17.” When asked why he was in the camp, the young man replied, “Because I am a Jew. You understand that? Because I am a Jew.”
¹

Pulitzer did not say whether the young man recovered. He may not have; many died within a few weeks of liberation. For those who did not die—Jews who survived the camps, emerged from hiding, or returned from serving in the Soviet army or with various resistance groups—life after the war was difficult. “They very rarely located a relative or friend alive; they found whole Jewish communities destroyed; and they felt themselves unwelcome, despised, and hated in an atmosphere of virulent antisemitism.”
²
Despite the Holocaust and efforts to bring those responsible for the murders to justice, antisemitism remained a force in the world.

By V-E Day—May 8, 1945, the day the Allies declared victory in Europe—about 30 million children, women, and men had been displaced across the continent. Some, like the young Jew that Pulitzer met, had been imprisoned by the Nazis. Other displaced persons (DPs) had fled their homes to avoid Communist rule as the Soviet army advanced through eastern Europe. Those who had collaborated with the Germans were also on the run; they feared they would be tried for treason or murdered if they returned home.

Among those millions of DPs were a few hundred thousand Jews. Most were physically and emotionally shattered. An eight-year-old orphan liberated from Buchenwald had to be “taught how to ‘eat’ again…. First, a quarter-slice of bread, then a half-slice.”
³
A 16-year-old released from Bergen-Belsen felt “that something in me was frozen, numb. I heard there
was a concept called ‘a heart of stone,’ and I thought this had happened to me, that I will no longer be able to laugh or cry.”
⁴
In time, both boys relearned how to eat, laugh, and cry, but the process was slow, painful, and often complicated for them and thousands of other Jewish survivors, young and old alike.

Before the war ended, the Allies—led by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had tried to prepare for their occupation of “Greater Germany.” They restored the national identities of Austria and Czechoslovakia. They also divided Germany and Austria into four zones of occupation (American, British, French, and Soviet). Every zone had the same goal: to send every DP home as quickly as possible. Until transportation became available, the Allies set up emergency centers to provide food, shelter, and medical care. Those who refused to go home were to be turned over to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) for resettlement elsewhere.

This massive effort was extraordinarily successful: millions of people were home within weeks of the war’s end, including many Jews. Yet despite the Allies’ best efforts, about 1.5 million DPs were still in emergency centers six months after the war, including about 75,000 Jews mainly from eastern and central Europe. Almost all of these DPs were in the American, British, and French zones of occupation. The Soviets shipped nearly all of the refugees in their zone to their home countries, whether they wanted to go or not.

Nationality determined how a refugee was treated. As a result, the Allies regarded German and Austrian Jews not as victims of the Nazis but as “ex-enemy nationals.” And they, along with many other Jews, found themselves in DP camps alongside former concentration camp guards who now claimed DP status.

Not surprisingly, many Jewish DPs viewed with suspicion the very people who were trying to help them. One U.S. army intelligence agent saw their distrust as a sign of mental instability. He claimed, “The slightest remark or any official measure, be it one not even intended to apply to [Jewish DPs], would be discussed on a single criterion: ‘Is it or is it not antisemitic?’”
⁵
He and other officers showed little understanding of the anguish and terror Jews had experienced or the depth of their losses. The battle-weary veterans who had witnessed conditions in the camps had been rotated home. The soldiers who dealt with the DPs were recent arrivals who had not seen the horrors of the camps.

Physicians and other relief workers were also unprepared for their encounter with survivors of genocide. One relief worker recalled how hard
it was to get “these people” to shower. “Women screamed,” the worker noted, and “quite a few” had to be “forcefully pushed or carried in.”
⁶
Jewish DPs had good reason to fear communal showers. If the relief worker had asked, he might have learned that the Nazis had disguised gas chambers as showers. But the worker did not ask, and the Jews in his care did not know how to explain.

A number of American soldiers and army chaplains, particularly Jewish chaplains, were troubled by the treatment of Jews in DP camps. Some wrote letters home describing the refugees’ plight. Many urged relatives and friends to pass on this information to reporters, politicians, and relief agencies. A few letters reached U.S. President Harry S. Truman. So did complaints from Jewish relief agencies that had been denied permission to enter the camps to help survivors.

At Truman’s request, the U.S. State Department sent Earl G. Harrison to Germany and Austria to investigate. Harrison was the dean of the law school at the University of Pennsylvania and had served on various international commissions on the refugee crisis. The army prepared for his visit by arranging for him and his team to see the best-run camps. When that news reached Rabbi Abraham Klausner, an army chaplain assigned to Dachau, he saw to it that Harrison saw the worst camps as well as the best. As a result, Harrison and his advisers toured about 30 camps and interviewed dozens of officers, relief workers, soldiers, and Jewish DPs. On August 24, 1945, Harrison sent Truman a “bombshell”:

[W]e appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.
⁷

What prompted Harrison’s bombshell? He provided Truman with the following explanation:

Generally speaking, three months after V-E Day and even longer after the liberation of individual groups, many Jewish displaced persons and other possibly non-repatriables are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences, in camps of several descriptions (built by the Germans for slave-laborers and Jews), including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions, in complete idleness, with
no opportunity, except surreptitiously, to communicate with the outside world, waiting, hoping for some word of encouragement and action in their behalf.
⁸

Harrison believed that conditions were unlikely to improve until the Allies treated Jews as a special group, even though it is “not normally desirable to set aside particular racial or religious groups from their nationality categories.” He argued, “[T]he plain truth is that this was done for so long by the Nazis that a group has been created which has special needs. Jews as Jews (not as members of their nationality groups) have been more severely victimized than the non-Jewish members of the same or other nationalities.”
⁹

Truman sent U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the head of the Allied forces in Europe, a copy of Harrison’s report along with a letter demanding that the armed forces do better. Although Eisenhower complained that Harrison had ignored the successes of the army in saving lives, he ordered his officers to set up separate camps for Jewish DPs and make their needs “a priority.” But many officers had a different view of their priorities. As a result, how Jews were treated depended on who was in charge of a particular camp.

Most Jewish DPs in the American zone were in southern Germany—an area administered by General George S. Patton, Jr. In a diary entry dated September 15, 1945, Patton expressed his disdain for Harrison and the DPs. He wrote, “Harrison and his ilk believe that the DP is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.”
¹⁰

A number of officers and ordinary soldiers shared Patton ‘s prejudices, and their experiences with Jewish DPs reinforced their view of Jews as “different,” even dangerous. Harrison also found that many soldiers and officers viewed “statelessness” as if it were “a loathsome disease.” Others seemed to think that DPs were in camps because they had done something wrong, when in fact they were there only because they had no other place to go.

Setting up camps for Jewish DPs was a stopgap measure. It did not address what Harrison saw as the central problem: Jewish DPs had nowhere to go. Little or nothing was left of their previous lives. Their families had been murdered and their communities destroyed.