Hitler and the Holocaust (41 page)

1.
Wyman,
Abandonment of the Jews
, xv. See Peter Novick,
The Holocaust in American Life
(Boston, 1999), 47–59, for a contrary view.

2.
Ibid., 124–37.

3.
David Wyman, “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed,”
Commentary
65 (May 1978): 37–46; Richard S. Levy, “The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited: A Critical Analysis,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
10 (1996): 267–98.

4.
Meyer Weinberg,
Because They Were Jews: A History of AntiSemitism
(New York, 1986), 214.

5.
Leo Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and
The International Jew
,”
American Jewish History
69 (June 1980): 437–77; Robert Singerman, “The American Career of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
,”
American Jewish History
70 (September 1981): 48–78; Albert Lee,
Henry Ford and the Jews
(New York, 1980), 29–31, 46–51.

6.
Leo Ribuffo,
The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War
(Philadelphia, 1983).

7.
Ralph L. Kolodny, “Catholics and Father Coughlin: Misremem-bering the Past,”
Patterns of Prejudice
19.4 (1985): 15–25.

8.
Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut,
American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945
(Bloomington, 1987), 70–73.

9.
Weinberg,
Because They Were Jews
, 220ff.; Wyman,
Abandonment
, 14–15.

10.
Quoted in Melvin J. Urofsky,
We Are One! American Jewry and Israel (New
York, 1978), 49; Fred L. Israel, ed.,
The War Diary of Breckinridge Long: Selections from the Years 1939–1944
(Lincoln, Nebr., 1966); Breitman and Kraut,
American Refugee Policy
, 112–45.

11.
Wasserstein,
Britain
, 244–49.

12.
The report suggested
inter alia
that “we may as well take down the plaque from the Statue of Liberty and black out the ‘lamp beside the golden door,’ ” ibid., 294.

13.
Wyman,
Abandonment
, 210–15.

14.
Feingold, “Was There Communal Failure?” 60ff.; Haskell Lookstein,
Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1933–1945
(New York, 1986).

15.
Alex Grobman, “Reactions of American Jewry Through the American and Jewish Press, 1939–1942,” M.A. thesis (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1978); Rafael Medoff,
The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust (New
York, 1987).

16.
See Yitshaq Ben-Ami,
Years of Wrath, Days of Glory
(New York, 1982); Wyman,
Abandonment
, 90–92, 253–54.

17.
Wyman,
Abandonment
, 345–47.

18.
Aaron Berman,
Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism, 1933–1948
(Detroit, 1990), 80–89.

19.
Aaron Berman, “Rescue Through Statehood: The American Zionist Response to the Holocaust,” in Cesarani,
Final Solution
, 228–45; Monty Penkower,
The Jews Were Expendable
, 2d ed. (Detroit, 1988), 92.

20.
Berman,
Nazism
, 86–87.

21.
The Riegner telegram is in Berenbaum,
Witness
, 252–54; for the British response, see Wasserstein,
Britain
, 168–69; on the American reaction, Wyman,
Abandonment
, 42–43, 128–29. Also Walter Laqueur,
The Terrible Secret
(London, 1980), 79–83, and Penkower,
Jews
, 64–70.

22.
Wyman,
Abandonment
, 90, estimates the crowd at forty thousand, a record at Madison Square Garden.

23.
Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936–1946,”
American Jewish History
84.3 (September 1996): 221–51; at 242. Ben Hecht wrote the script, Billy Rose produced, Moss Hart directed, and Kurt Weill created the score. Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were the narrators. These stars were among the most prominent artists and entertainers of Jewish origin in America.

24.
Wasserstein,
Britain
, 189–94; Penkower,
Jews
, 98–121.

25.
Wasserstein,
Britain
, 196. For Canadian attitudes regarding Bermuda, see Abella and Troper,
None Is Too Many
, 126–47.

26.
Wasserstein,
Britain
, 201.

27.
Ibid. For the American side, see Wyman,
Abandonment
, 104–23, 341–43. It should be noted that in 1942, publicity, protest, and calls for action regarding the Holocaust (especially by Christian church leaders and MPs) were much more vocal in Britain than in the United States. A year later, the position was reversed. See Tony Kushner, “Rules of the Game: Britain, America, and the Holocaust in 1944,” in
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
5 (1990): 381–403.

28.
Feingold,
Politics of Bearing Witness
, 169–201.

29.
Wyman,
Abandonment
, 288–307; Martin Gilbert,
Auschwitz and the Allies: The Politics of Rescue
(London, 1983), 307–17.

30.
Gilbert,
Auschwitz
, 316–27.

31.
Ibid., 216, 245.

32.
Berenbaum,
Witness
, 296–304, for the documents.

33.
Ibid., 298–300.

34.
Ibid., 304 (McCloy’s letter of 14 August 1944).

35.
Richard Breitman, “The Allied War Effort and the Jews, 1942–3,”
Journal of Contemporary History
20 (1985), 135–57, and
Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned; What the British and Americans Knew
(London, 1999), 88–109, on the British, and 228–30 for a comparison between Roosevelt and Churchill.

36.
Breitman,
Official Secrets
, 192ff

37.
Gilbert,
Auschwitz
, 184.

38.
Quoted in Marrus and Paxton,
Vichy France
, 196.

39.
Ibid., 196–97.

40.
Joseph Heller, “Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Palestine Problem at Yalta,”
Wilson Library Bulletin
, new series, 30.41–42 (1977): 25–35.

41.
Ibid.

42.
Quoted by Berman, “Rescue Through Statehood,” 237.

43.
Ibid., 239.

44.
Yisraeli, “Third Reich,” 343ff.; Y. Gelber, “Hamediniut Hatzionit Veheskem Haha’avarah,”
Yalkut Moreshet
18 (1974): 23–100; Edwin Black,
The Transfer Agreement
(New York, 1984), 146–53, 166.

45.
David Ben-Gurion,
Ba ma-arakhah
(Tel Aviv, 1949), 3:14.

46.
On the responses of the Yishuv and the Zionist movement to the Shoah, see Yoav Gelber, “Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry, 1939–1942,”
Yad Vashem Studies
13 (1979): 169–209; Dina Porat, “Palestinian Jewry and the Jewish Agency: Public Response to the Holocaust,” in R. Cohen, ed.,
Vision and Conflict in the Holy Land
(New York, 1990), 246–73; Dina Porat,
The Blue and Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939–1945
(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 239–62; the more partisan and tendentious Tom Segev,
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust
(New York, 1993), 97–110; on Mapai, see Y. Weitz,
Muda’ut ve hoser onim: Mapai lenokhah hashoah, 1943–45
(Aware but helpless: Mapai and the Holocaust) (Jerusalem, 1994).

47.
Shabtai Teveth,
Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886–1948
(Boston, 1987), 854–60, and
Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust
, 221–60; see also Tuvia Friling, “Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust
of European Jewry, 1939–1945: A Stereotype Re-examined,”
Yad Vashem Studies
18 (1988): 199–232, for context and perspective.

48.
Chaim Barlas,
Hatzalah Bimei Shoah
(Tel Aviv, 1975), 293–95; Berenbaum,
Witness
, 296ff.; Gilbert,
Auschwitz
, 299–322; and Wasserstein,
Britain
, 309ff.

49.
Quoted in Teveth’s
Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust
, 212–13.

50.
Gilbert,
Auschwitz
, 285, 304ff., 319; Wasserstein,
Britain
, 313–20.

51.
See Alex Weissberg,
Desperate Mission: Joel Brand’s Story
(New York, 1958), and Brand’s own Hebrew memoir,
Beschlichut Nidonim Lemavet
(Tel Aviv, 1956); J. S. Conway, “The Holocaust in Hungary: Recent Controversies and Reconsiderations,” in Randolph Braham, ed.,
The Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry
(New York, 1986), 1–33; Gilbert,
Auschwitz
, 217–28, 240–44, 253–55; and Bauer,
Jews for Sale?
172–95.

52.
Idith Zertal, “The Poisoned Heart: The Jews of Palestine and the Holocaust,”
Tikkun 2.1
(1988): 79–83, is vehemently critical; for more nuanced verdicts, see Dina Porat, “Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust,” in R. Zweig, ed.,
David Ben-Gurion: Politics and Leadership in Israel
(London, 1991), 145–70; and Tuvia Friling,
Hetz ba-arafel: David Ben-Gurion, Hanhagat Ha-yishuv ve-nisionot Hatzalah be-Shoah
(Arrow in the dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv leadership, and rescue efforts during the Shoah) (Beer-Sheva, 1998), 2.657ff

53.
Wasserstein,
Britain
, 45, 66–69.

54.
Ibid., 143–52.

55.
Ibid., 145.

56.
Ibid., 37.

57.
Quoted by Martin Gilbert in “The Most Horrible Crime: Churchill’s Prophetic, Passionate, and Persistent Response to the Holocaust,”
The Times Literary Supplement
, 7 June 1996, 3–5.

58.
Wasserstein,
Britain
, 280.

59.
Ibid., 275–79.

60.
Gilbert, “Most Horrible Crime”; for the other side of the coin and a much more critical view, see Michael J. Cohen, “Churchill and the Jews: The Holocaust,”
Modern Judaism
6.1 (February 1986): 27–49.

61.
Ibid.

62.
Ibid.

63.
Gilbert,
Auschwitz
, 270.

64.
Ibid., 305.

65.
On the mind-set of British officialdom, Wasserstein,
Britain
, 350–55.

66.
Quoted in Breitman,
Official Secrets
, 209.

67.
Ibid., 93; Gilbert, “Most Horrible Crime,” 4.

68.
Breitman,
Official Secrets
, 106.

69.
Ibid., 171.

70.
Ibid.

71.
Wasserstein,
Britain
, 188.

72.
Breitman,
Official Secrets
, 119. He shows that the British government and its intelligence services knew about the Holocaust earlier than previously assumed. This information included reports about Auschwitz and the death-camp system in Poland well before the summer of 1944, contrary to what Martin Gilbert had imagined twenty years ago. See Barbara Rogers, “British Intelligence and the Holocaust:
Auschwitz and the Allies
Re-examined,”
The Journal of Holocaust Education
8.1 (summer 1999): 89–106.

73.
Laqueur,
Terrible Secrets
229–38; Thomas E. Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski,
Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust
(New York, 1994) 117–19, 142–47; Gilbert,
Auschwitz
, 93–95; Breitman,
Official Secrets
, 146–50; and the documents in Berenbaum,
Witness
, 256–61.

74.
Berenbaum,
Witness
, 249–50. See also the heart-rending appeal of Shmuel Zygelbojm, the Jewish representative on the Polish National Council based in London, on 246–47. In protest against the indifference of a world “which witnessed the extermination of the Jewish people without taking any steps to prevent it,” he committed suicide in London during the autumn of 1942.

75.
Laqueur,
Terrible Secret, 236.

76.
Ibid., 121, and E. Raczynski,
In Allied London
(London, 1962). See also the two comprehensive volumes by David Engel,
In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942
(Chapel Hill, 1987), 157–213, and
Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945
(Chapel Hill, 1993), 15–167; on Karski’s mission to the United States, see Engel,
Facing a Holocaust
, 2:89–94.