Failure to Rescue European Jewry: Wartime Britain and America

Abstract

During the years of the Holocaust, British leadership was unable to perceive that the smoke of the chim neys of the death camps meant that their own world was also aflame. Bernard Wasserstein, in a superbly documented book, relates the disheartening story of the consequence of that failure of imagination and will. Britain's rescue policy fre quently tended to serve as an adjunct to Berlin's murderous plans for the Jews of Europe. It was a reflection of the low estate of British power and of an altered perception of Jewish influence in the world. Far more than Washington, London decision makers felt threatened by the Nazi ability to "dump" thousands, perhaps millions of Jews. That accounts for the 1939 White Paper and for the consistent failure to act on rescue opportunities. But Wasserstein is able to document how the reluctance of British decision makers to save Jewish lives often went beyond the question of wartime priorities and strategic needs. They rejected plans to send food pack ages to certain camps even while they fed occupied Greece throughout the war; they blocked the forming of a Jewish army, and the bombing of the death chambers was thwarted despite the approval of Churchill and Eden. Clearly the failure to seriously attempt the rescue of millions of Jewish lives went beyond the exigencies of war.