Analyzing Allied Inaction in the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism or Military Necessity?

Written by Lucas Flood | May 2021 |

Even in the midst of the deadliest conflict in human history, the legacy of the Holocaust looms large. In the decades since the Second World War, many scholars have worked to determine the roles and responsibilities of the Axis and Allied Powers in the deaths of six million Jews. While Nazi Germany was clearly the perpetrator of the Holocaust, the role of other nations in response to the tragedy is less certain. When examining the actions and missed opportunities of the Allied powers in response to Hitler, historians have tended to focus on Allied refugee policies, Allied reporting on the realities of Nazi occupation throughout Europe, and the decisions made about military intervention targeted at Nazi concentration camps. Among scholars, controversy exists about the role of the United Kingdom and the United States in blocking the immigration of Jewish refugees to safe zones around the world. Additionally, scholars have disagreed about the roles of the Allies in failing to publicize the horrors of the Holocaust, especially after confirmation of Nazi atrocities. Some historians, such as David S. Wyman and Michael J. Cohen, have placed blame for Allied inaction towards the Holocaust on anti-Semitic movements in the United States and United Kingdom. Other scholars, including James H. Kitchens III and Richard H. Levy, have argued that military challenges limited Allied options, particularly in regard to proposals to bomb the killing centers of Auschwitz. Through analysis of the main sources on the Allies and the Holocaust, one is able to better understand the historiographical debates about the role of the United Kingdom and the United States in one of the greatest atrocities in human history.

Before discussing the scholarly approaches to the specific issues surrounding the Allied response to the Holocaust, it is first necessary to understand the foundational work on the actions and national administrations of the two most important Allied figures in regard to the Holocaust and the Second World War: Sir Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Michael J. Cohen, in his work Churchill and the Jews, argues Churchill’s thoughts and actions on Jewish issues were often contradictory. For example, in February 1920, Churchill contributed to an article discussing the “role of ‘international and for the most atheistical Jews, in the rise of Bolshevism.”[1] Despite the anti-Semitic language of the article, Cohen argues Churchill was pro-Zionist, albeit because of a desire to achieve British hegemony in the Middle East, and always sought to be pro-Jewish throughout his career.[2]

For his part, Roosevelt reportedly supported Jews to a greater extent than Churchill, both before and during his presidency. In FDR and the Jews, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman reference Roosevelt’s decision to oppose discrimination against Jews in 1930 and Roosevelt’s groundbreaking decision to criticize anti-Semitism in 1932 as examples of Roosevelt’s pro-Jewish beliefs.[3]  Breitman and Lichtman argue that of the other world leaders at the time, FDR did the most to advocate for Jewish immigration to Palestine.[4] In Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews, Shlomo Aronson further defends Roosevelt, pointing to his active criticism of Nazi anti-Semitic pogroms on the night of November 9-10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, Roosevelt’s establishment of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, and his efforts to find places of refuge around the world for Jewish refugees.[5] Most importantly, about 15 percent of Roosevelt’s presidential appointees were Jewish, including Henry Morgenthau Jr. in the Treasury Department, Solicitor General of the Labor Department Charles E. Wyzanski Jr, and Mordecai Ezekiel, an economic advisor to the secretary of agriculture.[6]

Roosevelt’s administration was not entirely pro-Jewish, however. Even though many of Roosevelt’s most important advisors were Jewish, key figures in the State Department, including Undersecretary of State William Phillips and Assistant Secretary of State Wilbur J. Carr, succeeded in blocking executive action designed to allow Jewish immigration from Germany in April of 1933. Breitman and Lichtman describe Phillips and Carr as “restrictionists…[holding] anti-Semitic beliefs in a department rife with such sentiments.”[7] Such attitudes continued throughout the course of Roosevelt’s time in office, leading Wyman to accuse the State Department of being “entirely callous” to the fate of the Jews by the end of 1942. Congress was not any better. Wyman writes, “Most members of Congress seemed to know little and care less,” despite confirmed reports of genocide.[8] The problem of anti-Semitism in the Roosevelt administration would not be fully revealed until January 16, 1944, when Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau cited overcoming the political backlash of overt anti-Semitism in the State Department as a reason for the establishment of the War Refugee Board.[9]

The anti-Semitism of the State Department did not develop in a void. Wyman argues American policy towards Jewish immigration stemmed from “three important aspects of American society in the 1930s: unemployment, nativistic restrictionism, and anti-Semitism.”[10] Fear of increased unemployment due to large numbers of immigrants was an important factor in American politics in the 1930s. Wyman emphasizes his point, citing multiple national opinion polls conducted in 1938. The results were emphatic: seventy-one to eighty-five percent of respondents opposed increasing quotas for refugees. Even in 1943, in the midst of reports of awful conditions for displaced persons throughout Europe, seventy-eight percent of the American public thought it would be a bad idea to accept more immigrants after the war.[11] In addition, Wyman argues Christian secular and religious leaders, along with American Jews, failed to properly exert their influence on the United States government.[12]

In contrast, Wyman argues some British calls for action to prevent the Holocaust were much louder than simultaneous efforts in the United States. According to Wyman, British Christian church leaders and key members of parliament were on the frontlines, leading the charge for intervention.[13] However, in similar fashion to the United States, calls for British policies supporting Jewish refugees were often dismissed due to domestic problems and bureaucratic disagreements. High unemployment, fears of Nazi spies posing as refugees, and concerns about the potential for Nazi leadership creating a logistical nightmare by “dumping” hundreds of thousands of refugees on the Allies all contributed to ongoing debates between the British Home Office and the Colonial Office over Jewish emigration out of continental Europe. Raul Hilberg, the author of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, reveals the two offices often clashed over the long-term destination of potential Jewish refugees, both before and during the war, “the former in favor of more generous admissions to Palestine, the latter opposed.”[14] American and British opposition to Jewish immigration is particularly problematic when contextualized with Hitler’s rhetoric and policies in the 1930s in favor of Jewish emigration from Germany. Without taking any of the inherent blame for the Holocaust away from Hitler, the Nazi party, and the German people of the 1930s and 1940s, it is important to remember that, despite anti-Hitler rhetoric from Churchill and Roosevelt, England and the United States actually tightened refugee policies to prevent Jewish immigration.[15]

The fact refugee policies did not drastically change over time is made even more significant by the existence of the Riegner Telegram, received by the Allies in July of 1942. Dr. Gerhardt Riegner, a former Doctor of Law from Berlin and the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, passed detailed information to the Allies in July of 1942 about the Holocaust from an unnamed “German industrialist”.[16] Unfortunately, Laqueur paints a very negative picture of the dismissal of information about the Holocaust by Allied governments. In light of the Riegner Telegram and reports in local newspapers across Europe, “no intelligence service in Europe could possibly not help hearing about the ‘final solution’ in 1942 for the simple reason that it was common knowledge on the continent.”[17] Laqueur argues British officials knew what was going on and simply attempted to soften the impact of news of Jewish extermination. To a modern-day reader, the charge of whitewashing the Holocaust is a serious offence. However, Laqueur contends British officials made the decision to minimize reports of the Holocaust in late 1942 and early 1943 due to the complexities of British public responses to initial reports of genocide. According to Laqueur, the British people first tended to believe targeted individuals must have done something especially wrong to deserve such treatment. Secondly, British officials were afraid the shocking truths about the final solution would be dismissed as ridiculous propaganda. Finally, officials found “anti-Semitism appears actually to have been revived by the authoritative disclosures of the Nazis systematic massacres of the European Jews.”[18]

Wyman makes a similar argument in his work, listing among the reasons stated for the Allies to avoid involvement, “the fear that special action for the Jews would stir up anti-Semitism.”[19] Wyman concludes his analysis by pointing to the White House’s fear of being viewed as too focused on Jewish issues. The findings of both Laqueur and Wyman are important to understanding the role of anti-Semitism in decision making by widening the scope of individuals examined. Instead of only looking at American and British officials, Laqueur and Wyman provide valuable evidence for the presence of anti-Semitism in the general public. In his work, Wyman discusses several examples of anti-Semitic acts in the United States in the 1930s, writing: “Jewish cemeteries were vandalized, synagogues were damaged as well as defaced with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans, anti-Jewish markings were scrawled on sidewalks and Jewish stores, and anti-Semitic literature was widely distributed.”[20] Even in light of first-hand experience with anti-Semitism in America, it can be confusing as to why the United States waited so long to act to hamper Nazi extermination of the Jews. As Wyman discusses, fourteen months passed between the November 1942 announcement of the Holocaust to the American people and a tangible American response in January 1944 with the establishment of the War Refugee board.[21]

Beyond attempts to address the refugee crisis through the War Refugee board, some Holocaust scholars have argued the Allies should have taken even more definitive action through the thorough bombing of the railways, facilities, and crematoriums of the Auschwitz complex. Cohen argues it is “in the logistical arguments, that the key to the Allies’ rejection of the scheme [to bomb the crematoriums and gas chambers of Auschwitz] lies.”[22] Wyman devotes an entire chapter of his work to the possibilities surrounding the bombing of Auschwitz. As Wyman notes, American bombers hit the industrial areas of Auschwitz with great success on August 20, September 13, December 18 and December 26, 1944.[23] Wyman’s argument, then, is the Americans could easily have hit the crematoriums and gas chambers of Auschwitz as well; a mission that would “definitely” have “been precise enough to knock out the mass-murder buildings.”[24] Nevertheless, Richard H. Levy, in “The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited: A Critical Analysis,” contends that if the Allies had utilized the heavy bombers equipped with the necessary firepower to knock out the rail lines, crematoriums, and gas chambers of Auschwitz, the ensuing destruction would have come at the cost of killing hundreds, if not thousands of inmates, without definitively curbing Nazi killings.[25] Wyman does not adequately address the quantity of Jewish deaths that would have resulted from bombing the killing centers, simply writing that “some of the bombs probably would have struck nearby Birkenau.”[26] To his credit, Wyman does provide an alternative to highly inaccurate heavy bombers, positing the “most effective means of all…would have been to dispatch about twenty British Mosquitoes to Auschwitz.”[27] Due to the perceived ease of Allied bombing raids on the killing centers, Wyman places the blame for a lack of bombing on the Allied decision to pursue total military victory over any other goals. Wyman argues that to “the American military, Europe’s Jews represented an extraneous problem and an unwanted burden.”[28] For the British, Cohen argues Churchill’s first priority was always achieving military victory, not rescuing the victims of Nazi rule.[29]

Levy and Cohen are not the only scholars to discuss Wyman’s bombing proposal. James H. Kitchens III argues that Wyman, as a historian of refugee policy with little to no experience in military history, was unqualified to make an argument for the feasibility of an air attack on relatively small targets within Auschwitz.[30] On the contrary, Kitchens argues Auschwitz would have been nearly out of the fuel range of the B-25 medium bombers, P-38 fighter-bombers, or D.H. 98 Mosquito light bombers needed to conduct a precise raid. Additionally, Kitchens points to the challenges of flying over the formidable Alps and Carpathians mountain ranges in a necessarily low altitude mission, designed to avoid triggering German radar. Even if B-25s, P-38s, and D.H. 98s could have made it to the target, the fuel load required would have vastly decreased the planes’ bomb payloads, casting much doubt on Wyman’s conviction that “about twenty British Mosquitoes” would have been the “most effective means of all.”[31] In light of the tactical problems associated with bombing specific installations at Auschwitz, Levy and Kitchens’ analyses of Allied decisions not to bomb killing centers hold more weight than Wyman’s work. Levy and Kitchens agree that bombing Auschwitz’s killing centers would have required diverting vital resources from campaigns designed to end the war, raised moral questions about killing the inmates of Auschwitz, and ultimately failed to stop the killings.[32]

Walter Laqueur, in The Terrible Secret, concludes his work simply, arguing that “Neither the United States Government, nor Britain, nor Stalin showed any pronounced interest in the fate of the Jews.”[33] Wyman specifically criticizes both the State Department and President Roosevelt for American ineptitude towards the Holocaust. In the midst of examining Wyman’s oftentimes combative argumentation, it is important to compare his work to the work of other Holocaust scholars. Michael R. Marrus, while appreciating the considerable research supporting Wyman’s work, argues Wyman too often interpreted missed opportunities to help the Jews as intentional and malicious actions grounded in anti-Semitism.[34] Marrus’ criticism holds weight, especially in light of the unprecedented nature of Hitler and the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution.’

Besides Marrus’ specific rebuttal of Wyman, Hilberg uniquely theorizes the Allies did not prioritize the rescue of Jews because the “currency of the Second World War was the bullet, shell, and bomb;” with which “one could obtain praise and often additional arms; with plight one could buy neither care nor help.”[35] Hilberg’s contention is curious, if not simply for the lack of other members of academia espousing such an argument. On first glance, Hilberg and Wyman seem to have some points in common. Both argue Roosevelt decided to focus on other issues during the times of action on the Holocaust. However, Wyman’s overall conclusion does not leave the reader with the same pragmatic Roosevelt that Hilberg defends. Instead, Wyman specifically indicts the leadership of President Roosevelt, concluding that “Roosevelt’s overall response to the Holocaust was deeply affected by political expediency.”[36] Cohen’s conclusionis similar for Churchill. Despite Churchill’s aggressive opposition to Nazi Germany, there is an “almost total absence of any meaningful gesture or action by him to save Hitler’s Jewish victims.”[37]

Historians have debated the efficacy of decisions made throughout the Second World War since the war itself. As the event embodying the hateful and violent racism of the Nazi party, the Holocaust has received its fair share of scholarship over the years. A variety of social, political, and military historians have researched and wrote about the relationship of the Allies and the Holocaust. Scholars critical of American and British responses tend to place at least some degree of culpability on the Allies. After all, American and British immigration policy had substantial impacts on the efforts of Jews fleeing oppression in Nazi-controlled Germany before the war began. Scholars argue restrictive immigration policies forced Jewish refugees to return to an increasingly violent Nazi Germany. From analysis of the work of Wyman, Cohen, Breitman and Lichtman, it is clear that anti-Semitism played a role in delaying Allied responses to the Holocaust, even if Marrus is correct in arguing that Wyman went too far in his work. The role of anti-Semitism in the Allied decision to only target the economic portions of Auschwitz for bombing is not nearly as well-established. While Wyman and others certainly have a persuasive and passionate argument, it became abundantly clear through historiographical analysis of the work of Kitchens and Levy that the plan was denied due to its infeasibility from a strategic military perspective, instead of Wyman’s accusation of American and British anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, and perhaps surprisingly to some, anti-Semitism did play a role in other Allied responses to the Holocaust. In the end, it is clear that Nazi Germany was the instigator and perpetrator of the Holocaust. However, the roles of other actors, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, are not quite as simple to ascertain. The Anglo-American response to the Holocaust was defined by a series of hard decisions, made in the context of domestic anti-Semitic movements and the challenge of understanding the unprecedented scale and magnitude of the Holocaust.

[1] Michael J. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews, (Frank Cass Publishers: London), 55.

[2] Cohen, 343-345.

[3] Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013), 37, 42.

[4] Breitman and Lichtman, 92.

[5] Shlomo Aronson, Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118.

[6] Breitman and Lichtman, 65.

[7] Breitman and Lichtman, 69.

[8] Wyman, 103.

[9]Breitman and Lichtman, 235-236.

[10] Wyman, 6.

[11] Wyman, 8.

[12] Wyman, 205.

[13] Wyman, 104.

[14] Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 252.

[15] Karen J. Greenberg, “The Burden of Being Human,” in FDR and the Holocaust, ed. Verne W. Newton, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 31.

[16] Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company:1980), 77

[17] Laqueur, 65-67.

[18] Laqueur, 92.

[19] Wyman, 337.

[20] Wyman, 10.

[21] Wyman, 205.

[22] Cohen, 325.

[23] Wyman, 299-300.

[24] Wyman, 302.

[25] Richard H. Levy, “The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited: A Critical Analysis,” in FDR and the Holocaust, ed. Verne W. Newton, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 245.

[26] Wyman, 302.

[27] Wyman, 302-303.

[28] Wyman, 307.

[29] Cohen, 355.

[30] James H. Kitchens III, “The Bombing of Auschwitz Reexamined,” in FDR and the Holocaust, ed. Verne W. Newton, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 188-189.

[31] Kitchens III, 194; Wyman, 303.

[32] Kitchens III, 204; Levy, 262.

[33] Laqueur, 202.

[34] Michael R. Marrus, “Bystanders to the Holocaust,” in FDR and the Holocaust, ed. Verne W. Newton, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 157.

[35] Hilberg, 249-250

[36] Wyman, 312.

[37] Cohen, 325.