Richard Breitman
Subject: Should the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz?
Bio: Emeritus Professor of History at American University and author of Calculated Restraint: What Allied Leaders Said About the Holocaust
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is Should the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz?
Our speaker is Richard Breitman who is an Emeritus Professor of History at American University and the author of a new book entitled Calculated Restraint: What Allied Leaders Said About the Holocaust.
I want to learn from Richard about whether the allies should have bombed the rail lines to the concentration camps and if Roosevelt and Churchill should have said more to warn the Jews of Europe to the Holocaust so that the Jews could have gone into hiding.
This discussion was held at a conference that I hosted recently in Washington DC, so you will be hearing questions from me as well as a few of my friends.
Richard, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Richard Breitman:
Adolf Hitler announced his intentions to the world in a speech on January 30th, 1939, in which he threatened that a war would result in the annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe.
He was sincere. Hitler till his dying day was committed to killing as many Jews as Nazi Germany could reach. The Allies were not responsible for Hitler’s mass murder through shootings and then through gas chambers and crematoria.
The broader point is that without good military strategy, the Holocaust would’ve been worse than it actually was. Because if you look at the rival politicians in the UK or the United State would not have pursued the war aggressively.
Churchill referred to the Holocaust on August 24th, 1941, Stalin a few months later, but it was Roosevelt who gave the only detailed statement about the Holocaust and not until 1944.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that Hitler had said many times that he wanted to eliminate the Jews in Europe, but anti-Semites say this all the time. The Hamas charter includes that same declaration. He was the guy that actually did it. He kept it hidden because it is embarrassing and would have been a public relations problem, but the Jews in Europe knew it was a catastrophe. Tell us about the key insight that your book is trying to answer.
Richard Breitman:
When American Jews heard in the second half of 1942 that the Nazis were planning to exterminate all the Jews of Europe, they asked the president to make a statement. They did not know what else could be done militarily. The allies were not yet winning the war, and they certainly were not going to say, take some bombers and paratroops and do what you can to save Jewish civilians in ghettos and concentration camps when every effort was being made to win the war. But they thought the President could speak out, and I agree. And what he and Churchill did was a joint government statement issued on December 17th, 1942, which for the first time stated that Nazi Germany was pursuing a policy of exterminating the Jews.
15 other nations joined that statement. It was the first official recognition of what was happening, but it was not a presidential or a speech of the Prime Minister. It did not command the attention of the full government apparatus in either country. And it did not alert Jews in Europe who had not yet been rounded up to the danger that they were facing. So, it mattered but not enough.
Larry Bernstein:
The SS St. Louis had a thousand European refugees, and they sent it back to Europe. The State Department bureaucracy was resistant to providing visas to Jews to the United States. How do you think about our State Department’s decision to limit Jewish immigration out of Europe?
Richard Breitman:
The State Department was a conservative organization that employed some people who were antisemitic. The story of the SS St. Louis is often told with distortion. The St. Louis sailed from Hamburg with 937 passengers, virtually all Jewish refugees. They were headed for Cuba, not for the United States because at that point, the American immigration quota from Germany was filled. They could not legally land in the United States. They had purchased tourist visas to Cuba.
The Cuban government was selling them in Europe after a private conference between Roosevelt and Batista. That was two days after Kristallnacht and Batista went away saying he was going to do something for the Jews in Europe. Cuba changed its policy while the ship was enroute to the United States that it would only accept Cuban immigration visa and not tourist visas. Except for a small number of passengers who had Cuban immigration visas were allowed in. The German captain of the ship, didn’t know what to do, sailed off the coast of Florida. The press picked up the story. It looked like going back to Germany was the only option, but a body called the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees worked with the State Department, and in the end, Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands took in all the passengers remaining on the ship. This was June 1939. This was before the war and the Holocaust. And nobody could tell that German armies were going to sweep through France and take over much of Western Europe.
Why didn’t the president intervene? He had intervened once before to stretch the quota after Kristallnacht when he decided that people on visitors’ visas to the United States, 10 to 20,000 of them from Germany and Austria could stay indefinitely in the country. And he took flak from Congress in June 1939.
His highest priority was to pass modifications of the neutrality acts that would allow the United States to aid Britain and France, which looked like they might be targets of Nazi Germany. He had to face a difficult Congress with several southern congressmen who were antisemitic. He did not think it was worth the risk. You can criticize that decision. In the end, roughly two thirds of the passengers of the SS Louis survived.
Hugh Nickola:
It seemed to me from the book that the Hungarian people were purposely left in the dark in 1944. It was not publicized to the average Jewish person in Hungary just how dangerous the situation was. And therefore, they stayed.
Richard Breitman:
They didn’t have many options for leaving, and that was the problem. But after Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board, that body did what it could to publicize what was likely to happen in Hungary. They dropped leaflets, they had radio broadcasts on what was later called the Voice of America. So, there was an effort to alert them, but too many Hungarians were complacent that Admiral Horthy would not go along with Hitler and that the Germans would not be able to carry this out by themselves.
But in fact, they did not have to carry it out themselves because the Hungarian government that was installed after the German occupation was almost as antisemitic as the Nazi regime. They had full cooperation of the Hungarian police and other government agencies. There are debates to this day about what more could Hungarian Jewish leaders have done to spread the word about the coming deportations to Auschwitz. But most Hungarians did not want to believe it.
Jay Greene:
There are various efforts in the Jewish community to combat antisemitism with education. Research that I have done with colleagues examines this. People with higher levels of educational attainment have higher levels of antisemitism in the United States.
Richard Breitman:
Nazi Germany was a highly educated country and that some leaders of the mobile killing units whose job was to shoot Jews had doctorates. Education by itself is insufficient to restrain people from carrying out violent acts. It is partly a question of culture in the 1930s and 1940s. The culture was changing towards the acceptance of violence.
James White:
I recently read Ian Kershaw’s book, Fateful Decisions. He talks about the decision to exterminate the Jews evolved organically from deportation to Madagascar, to deportation to the wastes of the Soviet Union, to shooting, to mobile gas vans, to gas chambers. My question is, to what extent is the silence of the Allies attributable to the organic nature and evolution of the mechanics of the Final Solution.
Richard Breitman:
I am familiar with Ian Kershaw’s work. I do not agree with it. Hitler’s speech of January 30th, 1939 that Hitler was already convinced this is what he wanted to do, what he didn’t know was how to carry it out.
If he simply wanted to get Jews out of Europe, there was a body the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which was trying to settle Jews mostly in the Western hemisphere. Hitler hated it. He refused to cooperate with it. He saw it as a tool of Jewish and American interests that was inherently anti-German. So, it does not fit that Hitler was undecided. His objective was far reaching. If the Allied armies had not won the Battle of North Africa in 1942, the Holocaust would have spread to the Arab countries of North Africa and to Palestine. There was already an Einsatzgruppen set up to go into Palestine to shoot the Jews there.
That is my fundamental argument with this gradualist approach. It was gradualist in terms of which territories the Germans controlled, and it was gradual in terms of the methodology, but it was not gradual in terms of the goal.
James White:
Larry mentioned that the details were not publicized to the world; they did try to hide it. How did that contribute to the reluctance of allied leaders in taking a strong position because they did not know what was happening or did they have a sharp idea and held their tongue anyway?
Richard Breitman:
My quick answer to when did they know is the second half of 1942. You can argue that Churchill knew earlier because the British were intercepting German police messages and were able to see that there was a pattern of executing Jews.
Churchill gave a speech on August 24th, 1941, which was interpreted as a speech about the Holocaust. He did mention German police troops executing Russian patriots defending their native soil, killing scores of thousands. But he did not mention Jews.
You can argue that Churchill did not have enough evidence then, or you can argue the broader problem, which was that allied leaders knew that Nazi Germany was declaring in propaganda day after day that the allies were only fighting a war against Germany on behalf of the Jews, and they did not want to seem to give evidence to support that propaganda.
They would frequently denounce Nazi and Japanese atrocities, but it was atrocities in general. And that is why I wanted to pay particular attention to when they considered saying this is happening particularly for the Jews. And that came with the international Declaration on December 17th, 1942. And in Roosevelt’s case, it came in a press conference on March 24th, 1944, Roosevelt told the reporters, this is one of the blackest crimes in history happening day after day to the Jews.
Keith Hennessey:
Can you comment on the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust?
Richard Breitman:
The Catholic Church was led by Pope Pius XII, who is a very controversial figure. Now that Vatican archives have been open to outside scholars, some particularly good work by Daniel Kertzer showing that Pope Pius had good knowledge of what was happening and chose to protect the interests of the Catholic Church and not to deal with the universal issue. He did in 1944 try to influence Admiral Horthy in Hungary without specifically mentioning Jews. He did come out against persecution by race or religion. He was rather late to the story.
Alan Scholnick:
What was the reporting taking place in U.S. media, New York Times to measure it against the delay in official recognition by allied leaders relative to what was known on the ground in the US?
Richard Breitman:
There were some knowledgeable journalists, but the United States was handicapped because when Germany declared war on the United States, American reporters were interred at a former spa in Germany. And at that point, deportations from Germany had barely begun and the gas chambers were not yet operating. Reporters’ knowledge was limited. They knew more about the euthanasia killings, where those with physical or mental handicaps who were Germans that were gassed because it started before the Final Solution.
Nobody had concrete evidence. People did not want to believe, except some Jewish officials who were extremely well-informed. The one story that became particularly important in the United States was a telegram from the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York, in which he reported that Hitler’s headquarters was implementing a plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. And that a huge crematorium had been built and that poison gas was being used. And that story ultimately after some delay, was confirmed by the number two man in the State Department who told Rabbi Wise, I can’t publicize this and it might do some good if you did. And Wise held a press conference, and it was covered, but it was buried in the Times.
Alan Scholnick:
What year was that telegram?
Richard Breitman:
August 1942. It was sent to the United States, and it was confirmed by Sumner Welles, the Under Secretary of State in November 1942.
Colin Teichholtz:
It seems to me that the single most important thing that the allies could do to reduce the impact of the Holocaust was to defeat the Nazis. The focus of your book was on when those leaders knew and were willing to communicate about it. I am curious in a counterfactual where those leaders did communicate as soon as they had the information, what do you think the impact of that would have been?
Richard Breitman:
Hard to talk about numbers, but I do think warning Jews in Europe what was coming would have motivated tens of thousands to try to escape or go into hiding. Particularly in Hungary where the Hungarian-Jewish community was 750,000. The Holocaust in Hungary didn’t come until the German occupation in March 1944. They had all that time to learn what was happening, but it was not hammered home enough that this was going to come to them too. There was not much Hungarian resistance. The general feeling among the historians who have studied the Holocaust in Hungary was the Hungarians were more worried about the Soviet Union than they were about the German occupation.
There were not many allies for the Jews. But the one institution that played a beneficial role is the War Refugee Board, which had a representative the Swedish businessman turned diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg distributed protective papers, and more than a hundred thousand Jews in Budapest survived, and they never would have made it without outside assistance. Between April and June of 1944, the Nazis deported and killed 90% of 437,000 Jews. They were very efficient.
Alex Graham:
I was fortunate enough to host a book club dinner in Toronto for Anna Porter, whose book Kastner’s Train that told an amazing story about Kastner a Hungarian Jew who negotiated with Eichmann and got 1200 Jews out on a train, including 10-year-old Peter Munk, who went on to fame and fortune in Canada as the founder of Barrick Gold. Kastner was ultimately found guilty in a court in Israel of having sold his soul to the devil for not disclosing more to the broad Hungarian Jewish population, and ultimately was assassinated. I’m curious to the culpability of Western leaders versus people who were in the community and had a sense of what was going on as well.
Richard Breitman:
Kastner to this day is a very controversial figure. I have read that George Soros still hates him. When Jewish leaders in Budapest started negotiating with Nazi officials, including Eichmann, they thought they might be able to bring about a cessation of deportations. Eichman was very committed to his mission, and the Nazis had used deception in one country after another. After a few weeks, Kastner recognized that they could not save most of the people and that the best that they could aim for was to get specific groups of Jews out as a way of testing Nazi intentions. And that is the reason 1,684 Jews on two train loads got to Switzerland, but it was not the original goal. The original goal that Kastner was hoping for was to stop the deportations.
Larry Bernstein:
Should the allies have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz?
Richard Breitman:
Bombing the rail lines would have done virtually no good. Germans were repairing rail damage within a day. You could not ask pilots to risk their lives flying more than 600 miles to bomb something that was going to be immediately fixed.
The War Refugee Board was trying to save people looked at the situation. They said, this is what is being suggested by some Jewish officials in Europe. But we do not know if this will do any good, and in retrospect it would not have.
You can make a slightly better argument for bombing bridges, but bridges are hard to destroy. Bombing the gas chambers and crematoria, Benjamin Netanyahu uses that example of what could have saved millions of Jews during the Holocaust. The allies could not reach Auschwitz, which was the only extermination camp still operating until the middle of 1944. They did not know specifically which buildings were the gas chambers and crematoria. They did not have good photographic intelligence. So, you can argue that they should have tried, but this is not the precision bombing of the 21st century. This was bombing at a time when planes were lucky if they got within five miles of the target, and only the lead plane in a formation could aim because the others had to release at the same time and follow the leader. So, this really was a long shot.
Larry Bernstein:
My grandparents were in France during the war with my mom, they were hiding starting in 1942. They knew that Jews were being rounded up and taken to the East. They did not know about the gas chambers per se. There was widespread knowledge in the Jewish community that the East was a big problem, that this was not somewhere you escape from. It was a death sentence.
There was a roundup in Marseilles that occurred in January 1943, and the Jews were all sent to Auschwitz. My grandparents escaped. They did not need a statement from Churchill or Roosevelt that this was a problem.
It is simply hard to believe that it was easy for the Germans to accomplish it, often with the assistance of the local community. It was the French police that did the roundup. It was the French trains that went to Auschwitz. They did it. They did not circumvent it.
Richard Breitman:
In many occupied countries, the Germans were short of manpower, and they were looking for local collaborators to help, in which case getting the police is the best possible solution. And they were looking for the Jews themselves to contribute to their own destruction by organizing and telling the Jews that if you pay ransom, you may get beneficial treatment.
Lev Mikheev:
What about organizations like the Red Cross?
Richard Breitman:
The story of the Red Cross is a very dark one. During the war, they disowned responsibility for concentration camp prisoners, particularly Jews, until an extremely late date. If you are looking for reasons why Israel is aggressive in stressing the importance of the Holocaust, it’s because there was no one for some time to take responsibility or to aid the Jews of Europe.
Larry Bernstein:
Richard, can you please wrap things up.
Richard Breitman:
What I am asking for you to do is look at the evidence and to balance the omissions of the allies during the Holocaust with the commitment to fighting the war and ending the Holocaust. I have documentary evidence that Roosevelt hoped as of December 1942 that Germany was going to collapse, in which case it did not make sense to divert resources. But then as 1943 dragged on Roosevelt was told if you wait till the end of the war, there may be no Jews left contributed to his decision to speak out in March 1944.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Richard for speaking on today’s podcast. If you missed the previous episode, the topic was Will the EU Hold Together?
Our speaker was Nicolas Veron who is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel in Brussels as well as at the Peterson Institute in DC. He is also the author of the book entitled Europe’s Banking Union at Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative.
Nicolas discussed the resilience of the European Union and how it has been affected by the European banking crisis, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, and fears of increasing immigration.
I would like to make a plug for next week’s podcast with William Easterly who is a Professor of Economics at NYU and the author of a new book entitled Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest. I want to hear from Bill about the tyranny of experts and the lack of consent for their work in the developing world.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Will the EU Hold Together?, here.
