Authors: Mark Kurlansky
But in World War II, when Germany really was led by a lunatic, when Germans did mutilate and murder children, when they had death factories that actually did make soap out of human beings, little of this was included in the war propaganda. The governments of the Allied nations had not abandoned propaganda. And yet the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews, was a subject rarely touched upon in the media. Contrary to popular postwar claims, the Holocaust was not stopped by the war. In fact, it was started by it. Before the war, Jews had been stripped of their rights
and property and in some cases thrown into labor camps along with Communists and political dissidents. Various schemes emerged, including one in 1940, shortly after the war had begun, to deport Jews to Madagascar, a plan that failed because it would have had to be negotiated with France and Britain and this could not be done in wartime. Only in the isolation and brutality of wartime, in 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union in late June, when Germans had millions of additional Eastern European Jews under their control, did Germany dare to turn concentration camps into death camps. And only in January 1942, at a secret conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, did the Germans plan
Die Endlösung,
the “final solution,” killing them all. In the postwar world it became fashionable to view the Allied military effort as an attempt to stop the Holocaust. But in reality the Allies went to war over geopolitical concerns. If they had wanted to save the Jews, the best chance would have been not going to war. But as with the slaves in the American South, there were too few interested in the plight of Europe's Jews.
In recent years, formerly secret documents have been released that make it clear that the Allied governments and militaries were well aware of the genocide in progress and consciously chose not to interfere with it. The claim often made by German citizens, by the populations of Britain and America including Jews, and by the British and American governments that they didn't know what was happening is simply not true. The very efficient code decipherers of British intelligence were reading reports from death camps at least as early as 1943. They may have intercepted messages earlier, but documents confirming this are still not available. But it is known that they listened in on conversations about the unsatisfactorily slow killing rate at Auschwitz. A Polish agent, Tadeusz Chciuk-Celt, parachuted into Poland in 1942 and reported back on the killing. Also in 1942 the Polish underground reported on the mass extermination of Jews. In 1943, the Polish government in exile in London urged the British to bomb Auschwitz, where Polish political prisoners were being killed. In any event, by 1944 escaped
Auschwitz inmates had told the world exactly what was taking place there.
According to Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert, representatives of the Jewish Agency for Palestine met in the summer of 1944 with Winston Churchill, at which time they spoke with him about the accelerated deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz and urged him to bomb the rail lines to stop the deportation. But nothing was done. Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, who first informed the Allies of the operations of the Final Solution in 1942, went to both the Americans and the British in 1944 at the request of Slovak and Hungarian Jews and asked them to bomb Auschwitz. He was told: “It cannot be done. It is too far away.”
Studies of Allied reconnaissance photos of the I. G. Farben synthetic-oil plant, bombed four times in 1944 by the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy, show Jewish arrivals being marched to crematoriums and even the crematoriums themselves at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a mere five miles away. In fact, on September 13, 1944, the Fifteenth did bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau, but by accident. According to Dino Brugioni, who flew reconnaissance missions over Europe and later worked for the CIA, by the time the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz, on January 27, 1945, and the world “learned” of its horrors, the Allies had photographed the Birkenau death camp from the air at least thirty times.
The Jewish Agency, Riegner, and others who pleaded for help to stop the Holocaust had been repeatedly told: “We have a war to win.” For the Allies, stopping the Holocaust was militarily irrelevant, and from a purely strategic point of view this was probably true. But more to the point, neither Roosevelt, Churchill, nor most of all Stalin wanted to make the war about saving the Jews, because, as with freeing the slaves, going to war to save the Jews would not have been popular. The many anti-Semites in the United States, Britain, and France would have been, or at least it was supposed that they would have been, resentful of being asked to fight for Jews. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels repeatedly
claimed that the Allies were attacking Germany because they were controlled by Jews. Churchill and Roosevelt understood the potency of this claim and did not want to give it credence. Roosevelt had been criticized sharply after the 1936 election, when he slightly opened up Jewish immigration so that of the 300,000 Jewish refugees taken in by the world, who were a mere fraction of those trying to escape, two-thirds were received by the United States. This led to accusations that Roosevelt was “too close to the Jews,” or that he was being manipulated by them.
The Allies were so sensitive to these accusations that they even rejected several requests to simply announce that bombing raids that they were carrying out on German cities, in any event, were being carried out as vengeance for the death camps. Since the argument for these bombings of civilian targets was to destroy German morale, it was thought by some, including General Sikorski of the exiled Polish government, that it would have a demoralizing effect on Germans to know that their cities were being bombed because of Hitler's Final Solution.
Ever since the outset of the war, books and films have been using World War II to promote the concept of just war. A typical example is the 1998 Steven Spielberg movie
Saving Private Ryan,
which focuses on the 1944 D-Day invasion. This film is sometimes said to be antiwar because it uses a great deal of noise and special effects to make war look gory, though it does not make it look nearly as grim as Lewis Milestone's 1930 black-and-white adaptation of
All Quiet on the Western Front,
which had no special effects at all. Yet the 1998 World War II film, in sharp contrast to the 1930 World War I film, gives the message that this terrible sacrifice is “worth it,” which is the central lie in the promotion of warfare. Spielberg's saga, in a flourish worthy of Urban II, even argues that ignoring the Geneva Conventions and murdering prisoners of war is a reasonable act since the enemy is so insidious.
The same year that
Saving Private Ryan
was released, news broadcaster Tom Brokaw came out with a fairly typical example of post–World War II militarist propaganda, a book titled, without the
least embarrassment,
The Greatest Generation.
According to this book, this “greatest generation,” which first failed to oppose fascism and then repeated the slaughter of 1914 with even more ruthlessness, had “answered the call to save the world.”
Such orgasmic rhetoric has its roots in the war effort itself. In Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill the United States and Britain had talented leaders given to patrician eloquence. These were leaders who were, as Tolstoy wrote of Napoleon in
War and Peace,
“capable of justifying, in his own name and in theirs, all the duplicity, robbery and murder that ensued.” Churchill in particular was a master of Urban II–ship. The cause was holy, the enemy was Satan: Churchill's entire career was spent in the promotion of warfare. He was part of the World War I British government, one of the war promoters whose deceptions were denounced after the war.
But the claim that a just war was being waged in order to stop the Holocaust did not come until years later. The Allies were simply good; the Germans and Japanese bad; and those who fought for the Allies were heroes. In truth the “greatest generation,” like all men who go to war, were simply doing what they were told, exactly like the men of the lesser generation before them.
The difference was that the “heroes” of World War II were not allowed to talk about such things, were not allowed to air the many things troubling them, or even to admit to the guilt they felt. Scarcely any of the many World War II movies ever admitted that these men suffered psychological damage. Two of the rare exceptions were William Wyler's
The Best Years of Our Lives,
made right after the war, in 1946, and Nunnally Johnson's
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
which appeared ten years later, in 1956. The trauma of World War II veterans was so repressed that many did not even realize they were suffering until they started learning of the “syndromes” of Vietnam War veterans and noticed that much of it sounded very familiar.
War resister Ralph DiGia said, “World War II reinforced my belief that in war one becomes what the enemy is accused of being.” The Allies committed atrocities that would have appalled them if committed by anyone else. The outrage with which the British and the
Americans responded to the 1937 German bombardment of the Basque town of Gernika shows the extent to which those two populations regarded the deliberate bombing of civilian targets as an indefensible crime. Ever since a German zeppelin attack on London killed 127 people in October 1914, the British political leadership had been outspoken on the immorality of bombing civilians.
Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian general who had fought against Napoleon, maintained in his classic nineteenth-century text
On War
that war “theoretically can have no limits”; but the British and the Americans, and most other people in the world, thought it did; putting limits on it was what made it acceptable, and targeting civilians, especially with the new and deadly weapon of aerial bombardment, was thought to be an unacceptable excess. But the problem with war, as former Allied commander, later President Dwight Eisenhower, observed in a 1955 press conference, is that once you start, you get “deeper and deeper,” until the only limitation is “force itself.” Which was Ralph DiGia's point.
Allied bombing of German cities during World War II killed approximately 300,000 German civilians and wounded almost 800,000. It is an emotionally moving though legally and morally irrelevant argument that these are small numbers for a people who exterminated six million in death camps. Of course, at the time, that argument was not even being made. In late 1940 the Germans bombed Coventry from seven in the evening until past six the following morning. Six hundred residents and a fourteenth-century cathedral were destroyed. Now British Bomber Command was given instructions to retaliate on German cities, and the targets would be the center of the city. In 1942 they were specifically told not to aim for military targets, such as aircraft factories and shipyards, but at densely populated areas, since the goal was to destroy the population's morale, which had also been Germany's goal in Coventry. With demoralization in mind, working-class districts in particular were to be sought out.
What is surprising is that the British government does not appear to have noticed that the Germans had failed to damage morale in Coventry or London. On the contrary, those bombings seemed
to rally support among the British population for the war effort, although they did not rally support for retaliatory civilian bombings. Churchill presented the British raids as vengeance for German bombing, but opinion polls showed that the raids were much more popular in unaffected areas of England than among bombed populations such as London. War is always more popular with those who don't experience it. In fact, polls also showed that the raids remained popular only because most of the population insisted on believing that they were really against military targets.
Some in the military objected. Rear Admiral L. H. K. Hamilton protested, “We are a hopelessly unmilitary nation to imagine that we win the war by bombing German women and children instead of defeating their army and navy.” Some historians believe targeting civilians took away from military targets and may have actually prolonged the war. The bombing, with no military purpose, continued to the very end of the war, and the Germans fought on until their military was completely routed, without civilian morale ever becoming a factor.
In February 1945, when Germany was near surrender, Dresden was firebombed in a joint British-American attack in a way clearly designed to destroy the baroque center of the historic city. Historians estimate that between 100,000 and 130,000 people—a third of total German civilian casualties—died in that bombing alone. The fact that in so doing the Allies had destroyed Gestapo headquarters, stopping a deportation convoy the next day that would have meant the death of the remaining 198 Jews from a population of 5,000, was a mere coincidence of no relevance to Allied plans.
The killing of German civilians led the way for far worse slaughters of Japanese civilians by the Americans. Shortly after the Dresden success, the Americans had firebombed Tokyo with a similar result of about 100,000 civilians killed. Before the American atom bomb was completed, it was learned that the alleged reason for the American atomic bomb project, the German program to build an atomic bomb, had failed. This news did not slow down the building of America's nuclear weapons, which could now be used against the Japanese, even though Japan had no nuclear program. In justifying
the attack, Truman cited Pearl Harbor, where the United States had been attacked “without warning.” What he did not mention is that Pearl Harbor was an entirely military target, whereas in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, civilians were the target. His other explanation, that the bombs' purpose was “to shorten the agony of war,” was a thin justification, but one that Churchill immediately joined in on, saying that “to avert a vast, indefinite butchery … at the cost of a few explosions seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.”
This ignores the fact that Japan had been ready to surrender before the nuclear attacks but the United States insisted, as they had with Germany, that the surrender be unconditional. The Japanese wanted to negotiate. Those negotiations would have saved not only the enormous losses from a land invasion of Japan but the estimated 120,000 civilians who were killed from those “few explosions” and an equal number wounded, many horribly disfigured, and most of whom eventually died.