Highview College Year 10 English

Holocaust

StoriesReading Material

The following material has been adapted from:

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Department of Multicultural Education, Florida Holocaust Studies Curriculum , Revised 2009

There is a lot of material here and you are not expected to read all of it. You are expected to use it to support your understanding of the background to the events that occurred in Europe during World War 2. Your teacher will direct you to specific parts of the material where necessary. You may be asked to read some sections for homework as preparation for classes.

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ESTIMATED NUMBER OF JEWS KILLEDIN THE FINAL SOLUTION Estimated Pre- Final Estimated Jewish Solution Population

Country Population Annihilated PercentPoland 3,300,000 3,000,000 90%Baltic countries 253,000 228,000 90%Germany/Austria 240,000 210,000 90%Protectorate 90,000 80,000 89%Slovakia 90,000 75,000 83%Greece 70,000 54,000 77%The Netherlands 140,000 105,000 75%Hungary 650,000 450,000 70%SSR White Russia 375,000 245,000 65%SSR Ukraine* 1,500,000 900,000 60%Belgium 65,000 40,000 60%Yugoslavia 43,000 26,000 60%Romania 600,000 300,000 50%Norway 1,800 900 50%France 350,000 90,000 26%Bulgaria 64,000 14,000 22%Italy 40,000 8,000 20%Luxembourg 5,000 1,000 20%Russia (RSFSR)* 975,000 107,000 11%Denmark 8,000 -- --Finland 2,000 -- --Total 8,861,000 5,933,900 67%

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THE NEW REPUBLIC THE MASSACRE OF THE JEWS By Fry, V.

THERE ARE some things so horrible that decent men and women find them impossible to believe, so monstrous that the civilized world recoils incredulous before them. The recent reports of the systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi Europe are of this order. We are accustomed to horrors in the historical past, and accept them as a matter of course. The persecution of the Jews in Egypt and the Roman Empire, the slaughters of Genghis Khan, the religious mania which swept Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Indian massacres in America, and the equally brutal retaliations of the white men-all these we credit without question, as phenomena of ages less enlightened than our own. When such things occur in our own times, like the Armenian massacres, we put them down to the account of still half-barbarous peoples. But that such things could be done by contemporary Western Europeans, heirs of the humanist tradition, seems hardly possible. Our skepticism has been fortified by our experience with “atrocity stories” during the last war. We were treated, during that war, to many accounts of German atrocities. We were told of the rape of nuns, the forced prostitution of young Belgian girls, of German soldiers spearing infants on their bayonets, or deliberately and wantonly cutting off their hands. Later, when the bitterness of war had subsided, and Allied investigators were able to interview the populations of the formerly occupied countries, and scholars were let loose on the documents, most of these atrocities were found to have been invented. The natural reaction was to label all atrocity stories “propaganda” and refuse to believe them. That habit of thought has lasted down to the present day. The Nazis have given us many reasons to change our thinking habits since they assumed power, but we have been slow to learn the new lesson. I remember how skeptical I was myself the first time a Nazi official told me that Hitler and Goebbels were bent on the physical annihilation of the Jews. On July 15, 1935, the S.A. staged its first pogrom in Berlin. I was in Berlin at the time and witnessed the whole thing. I saw the S.A. men, unmistakable despite their mufti, throwing chairs and tables through the plate-glass windows of Jewish-owned cafes, dragging Jewish men and women out of buses and chasing them up the streets, or knocking them down and kicking them in the face and belly as they lay prostrate on the sidewalk. And I heard them chanting their terrible song: Wenn Judenblut vom Messer spritzt, Dann geht es nochmal so gut! “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, Then everything will be fine again.” The next day, in a state of high indignation, I went to see “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, then chief of the Foreign Press Division of the Propaganda Ministry. On my way to his office, I learned that one of the victims of the previous night’s bestiality had already died of his injuries. Yet, when Hanfstaengl told me, in his cultured Harvard accent, that the “radicals” among the Nazi Party leaders intended to “solve” the “Jewish problem” by the physical extermination of the Jews, I only half believed him. It was not much more than a year after the Blood Bath of June 30, 1937, yet even then I could not believe that there were men in positions of power and authority in Western Europe in the twentieth century who could seriously entertain such a monstrous idea. I learned better in November, 1938, when the Nazi leaders openly encouraged the burning of synagogues, the pillage of Jewish homes and the murder of their inhabitants. One reason the Western world failed to rouse itself more promptly to the Nazi menace was surely this tendency to dismiss as impossible fantasy the many warnings the Nazis themselves gave us. We made the terrible mistake of judging the Nazis by our own standards, failing even after the war had begun to realize how completely they had renounced, if indeed they had ever espoused, those standards. Even today, after more than three years of the Nazi kind of war in Europe, and more than one year of direct experience with it ourselves, there are still far too many among us who do not understand the nature of the enemy--an enemy who will stop at literally nothing to achieve his ends. And his ends are the enslavement or annihilation not only of the Jews but, after them, of all the non-German peoples of Europe and, if possible, the entire world. The program is already far advanced. According to a report to the President by leaders of American Jewish groups, nearly 2,000,000 European Jews have already been slain since the war began, and the remaining

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5,000,000 now living under Nazi control are scheduled to be destroyed as soon as Hitler’s blond butchers can get around to them. Of the 275,000 Jews who were living in Germany and Austria at the outbreak of the war, only 52,000 to 55,000 remain. The 170,000 Jews in Czecho-Slovakia have been reduced to 35,000. The figures for Poland, where the Nazi program has been pushed very rapidly, are uncertain. There were 3,300,000 Jews in Poland at the beginning of the war, but some 500,000 fled to Russia, leaving approximately 2,800,000 behind. By the beginning of the summer of 1942, this number had already been reduced to 2,200,000, and deportations and massacres since that time have been on an ever increasing scale. In the ghetto of Warsaw, in which 550,000 Jews once dwelt, there are today fewer than 50,000. In the city of Riga, Latvia, 8,000 Jews were killed in a single night. A week later 16,000 more were led into a woods, stripped and machine-gunned. It is not merely Central and Eastern Europe which are being “purged,” or rendered “Judenrein,” as the Nazis like to say. The Netherlands has already given up 60,000 of its 180,000 Jews. Of the 85,000 who once lived in Belgium only 8,000 remain today, while of the 340,000 Jews of France, more than 65,000 have been deported. Even Norway has begun to ship her Jewish citizens eastward to the Nazi slaughter houses and starvation pens. The methods employed by the Nazis are many. There is starvation: Jews all over Europe are kept on rations often only one-third or one-fourth what is allowed to non-Jews. Slow death is the inevitable consequence. There is deportation: Jews by the hundreds of thousands have been packed into cattle cars, without food, water or sanitary conveniences of any sort, and shipped the whole breadth of Europe. When the cars arrive at their destination, about a third of the passengers are already dead. There are the extermination centers, where Jews are destroyed by poison gas or electricity. There are specially constructed trucks, in which Jews are asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from the exhausts, on their way to burial trenches. There are the mines, in which they are worked to death, or poisoned by fumes of metals. There is burning alive, in crematoria, or buildings deliberately set on fire. There is the method of injecting air-bubbles into the blood stream; it is cheap, clean and efficient, producing clots, embolisms and death within a few hours. And there is the good old-fashioned system of standing the victims up, very often naked, and machine-gunning them, preferably beside the graves they themselves have been forced to dig. It saves time, labor and transportation. A few weeks ago a letter reached me from Paris. It had been smuggled over the demarcation line and two international borders and mailed in Lisbon. It told of the deportation of the Jews of Paris, which occurred in July. All Polish, Czech, German, Austrian and Russian Jews between the ages of two and fifty-five were arrested. The women and children, to the number of 15,000, were herded into the notorious Velodrome d’Hiver, where they were kept for a week, without any bedding but straw, with very inadequate food, and with virtually no sanitary facilities. Then they were packed into cattle cars and shipped to an unknown destination in eastern Europe. My informant, a member of the trade-union underground, tells me that some days later a French railway worker picked up a scrap of paper on the tracks. On it was written this message: “There are more than fifty women in this cattle car, some of them ill, and for days we have been refused even the most elementary conveniences.” Another letter, from a French Red Cross nurse who worked in the Velodrome, tells exactly the same story, describing it as “something horrible, fiendish, something which takes hold of your throat and prevents you from crying out.” A German Social Democrat, whom I know well, sent me a long report on the deportations, written at the beginning of September. “I am an incorrigible optimist,” he concluded, “but this time I see dark times ahead . . . . I am afraid not many of us will live to see the end of this war.” And a Frenchman, not himself a Jew, wrote a long report on the deportations and had it brought to me in a toothpaste tube. “We were at the Camp des Miles (near Marseilles) the day the last train left,” he says. “The spectacle was indescribably painful to behold. All the internees had been lined up with their pitifully battered valises tied together with bits of string. Most of them were in rags, pale, thin, worn out with the strain, which had dragged out for more than a week. Many of them weeping....There was no sign of revolt: these people were broken. Their faces showed only hopeless despair and a passive acceptance of their fate.” Later, when Jews not already in concentration camps were being rounded up, he wrote: “A large number of these desperate people, in just about all sections, tried to end their lives. In Marseilles, in the Cours Belsunce (the heart of the city), a refugee couple jumped out of the window at the very moment the

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police arrived to arrest them....Many, realizing the danger they were in...disappeared from their homes and hid.” These are all letters I myself have received from persons I know, or know to be reliable. They concern only France. But the evidence for the other countries is of a similar, direct sort. There are, for instance, the two pathetic letters from Warsaw. I have seen photostats of them, and of the envelopes in which they were mailed, in the office of the American Jewish Congress written in German, they passed the German censor only because he did not understand the few Hebrew words in them, taking them, as he was intended to, for proper names. “I spoke to Mr. Jaeger,” one of them goes. (“Mr. Jaeger” means the Germans.) “He told me that he will invite all relatives of the family Achenu (Hebrew for “our brethren,” i,e., the Jews), with the exception of Miss Eisenzweig (probably means those working in the iron mines), from Warsaw to his mansion ‘Kewer’ (Hebrew for “tomb”). Uncle Gerusch (Hebrew for “deportation”) also works in Warsaw; he is a very capable worker. My friend Miso (Hebrew for “death”) now works with him. I am alone here; I feel very lonely....Please pray for me.” The New York office of the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland has received from a Polish Socialist underground worker known to it an account of gas executions the details of which are as revolting as they are convincing. In the office of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva there is an affidavit, attested copies of which have been received here, recounting the extraordinary odyssey of a Polish Jew who was living in Brussels. On August 12 he was arrested and deported to Rumania. There were seventy men in his cattle car, packed in like crowds in the subway during rush hour. After two and a half days, their train stopped in Upper Silesia, and they were allowed to get out of the car, have a short rest, and eat a little soup. Those too exhausted to continue the journey were carried away, as were all boys between fourteen and twenty (to work, it was said, in the coal mines and the iron mills). The others were then loaded back into the cars and shipped on to the Ukraine. There were led away. The others were given the uniforms of the Todt Organization and set to work building fortifications. From where they were working they could hear the rumble of big guns to the east, and once they saw a sign reading “Stalingrad-50 km.” The Jew from Brussels made friends with a young Bavarian officer, not a Nazi, and learned from him that the men who had not been able to work had all been immediately shot. Anyone who was sick for more than two days was shot also, the officer said. In the end the officer helped the Jew to hide himself in a train which was returning to the West. After many days the Jew found himself on a siding at the Gare de l’Est in Paris. From there he made his way to Switzerland, where he told his story. This is the nature of the evidence. Letters, reports, cables all fit together. They add up to the most appalling picture of mass murder in all human history. Nor is it only the Jews who are threatened. Polish authorities assert that many hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles have been slain with equal callousness, and soberly warn the entire Polish people may be wiped out before this war is over. The decimation of the Greek people is a matter of record. The Nazis are evidently quite indifferent to it, if they do not actually welcome it. Thousands of French will die of hunger and cold this winter, and thousands more will never be born, fewer because the fathers who might have begotten them are being held in Nazi prison camps, or because the mothers are too undernourished to carry them. The same thing is true of many other countries of Europe. And by their executions of “hostages” the Nazis are systematically destroying the potential leaders of democratic movements in all the countries they have overrun. We must face the terrible truth. Even though Hitler loses this war, he may win it anyway, at least as far as Europe is concerned. There are reports, apparently trustworthy, that the Nazis and the German army are prepared for eventual retreat, and that their plans call for the extermination of every living thing and the destruction of all physical property in the areas they may be forced to evacuate. When we remember that, even after the war of 1914-18 was hopelessly lost the German army was retreating in confusion on the Western Front, it still found time, and the will, wantonly to destroy the factories and flood the mines in its path, we may well believe that this time it will be even more thorough, go even more berserk. If this happens, we shall be confronted with the most frightful dilemma imaginable. Every man, woman and child in Europe will become a hostage, a means of blackmail. If we continue the war, they will die. Yet if we do not continue the war, the Nazis will have won all they can then hope to win-time. Time to regroup their forces, divide ours and strike again. Our only course then will be to overwhelm them so rapidly that they will not be able to carry out their threats. For that we shall need all the strength we can possibly muster, and all the courage. The Nazis will certainly hope to cut off our allies one by one by

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threatening the total annihilation of their peoples if they continue to oppose them. We and our allies must be prepared to face the challenge unflinchingly. Meanwhile, there are some things which can be done now, slight as the chances are that they will have much effect in deterring Hitler and his followers from their homicidal mania. President Roosevelt could and should speak out again against these monstrous events. A stern warning from him will have no effect on Hitler, but it may impress some Germans like the officer who helped the Jew from Brussels to escape. A similar warning from Churchill might help, too. A joint declaration, couched in the most solemn terms, by the Allied governments, of the retribution to come might be of some avail. Tribunals should be set up now to begin to amass the facts. Diplomatic warnings, conveyed through neutral channels, to the governments of Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania might save at least some of the 700,000 to 900,000 Jews still within their borders. The Christian churches might also help, at least in countries like France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, the Pope by threatening with excommunication all Catholics who in any way participate in these frightful crimes, the Protestant leaders by exhorting their fellow communicants to resist to the utmost the Nazis’ fiendish designs. We and our allies should perhaps reconsider our policy of total blockade of the European continent and examine the possibilities of extending the feeding of Greece to other occupied countries, under neutral supervision. Since one of the excuses the Nazis now offer for destroying the Jews and Poles is that there is not enough food to go around, we might at least remove the grounds for the excuse by offering to feed the populations of the occupied countries, given proper guarantees that the food will not fall into the hands of the enemy. If we do any or all of these things, we should broadcast the news of them day and night to every country of Europe, in every European language. There is a report, which I have not been able to verify, that the OWI has banned mention of the massacres in its shortwave broadcasts. If this is true, it is a sadly mistaken policy. We have nothing to gain by “appeasing” the anti-Semites and the murderers. We have much to gain by using the facts to create resistance and eventually rebellion. The fact that the Nazis do not commit their massacres in Western Europe, but transport their victims to the East before destroying them, is-certain proof that they fear the effect on the local populations of the news of their crimes. Finally, and it is a little thing, but at the same time a big thing, we can offer asylum now, without delay or red tape, to those few fortunate enough to escape from an Aryan paradise. We can do this without any risk to ourselves because we can intern the refugees on arrival, and examine them at leisure before releasing them. If there is the slightest doubt about any of them, we can keep them interned for the duration of the war. Despite the fact that the urgency of the situation has never been greater, immigration into the United States in the year 1942 will have been less than ten percent of what it has been in “normal” years before Hitler, when some of the largest quotas were not filled. There have been bureaucratic delays in visa procedure which have literally condemned to death many stalwart democrats. These delays have caused an understandable bitterness among Jews and non-Jews in Europe, who have looked to us for help which did not come. My Marseilles correspondent, who is neither a Jew nor a candidate for a visa, writes that, “in spite of the Nazi pressure, which she feels more than any other neutral, and in spite too of the reactionary tendencies of her middle class, the little country of Switzerland will (by accepting 9,000 refugees from Nazi terror since July) has contributed more to the cause of humanity than the great and wealthy United States, its loud declamations about the rights of the people and the defense of liberty notwithstanding.” This is a challenge which we cannot, must not, ignore. VARIAN FRY In the Depths of Darkness, USHMM, 1992. Reprinted with permission USHMM. JERUSALEM REPORT (Jerusalem, Israel) Jan. 12, 1995, pp. 26-30 (c) 1995 by The Jerusalem Report. For subscription information, please call 1-800-827-1119 or write Jerusalem Report, 22 Rehov Rivlin, PO Box 1805, Jerusalem 91017, Israel.

WHY THE ALLIES DIDN’T BOMB AUSCHWITZ By David Horovitz Fifty Years After the Liberation of the Most Notorious Nazi Death Camp, It Has Become Almost Accepted Wisdom That the Allies Could and Should Have Acted to Stop the Killing. But Not Only Would a Successful Assault Have Been Almost Impossible Complex; It Could Well Have Cost More Lives than It Saved.

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On September 13, 1944, a force of American bombers, pursuing the Allied strategy of attacking the oil-production sites on which the Nazi war effort relied, launched an assault on Monowitz, a synthetic-oil plant that lay just four kilometers to the east of the Auschwitz main camp, and less than eight kilometers from the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers. Running into intense anti-aircraft fire, the bombers were able only to inflict slight damage on the factory. Many of their bombs missed the target altogether. Some of them, quite by accident, fell on Auschwitz, hitting a clothing workshop--in which 23 Jews and 17 other inmates were killed, and destroying the SS barracks--killing 30 people in a bomb shelter, and damaging a railway embankment and the sidings that led to the crematoria. Four and a half months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops “liberated” the 7,600 Auschwitz survivors--the last remnants of humanity in a camp where, over the previous 2-1/2 years, millions of Jews and others had been systematically murdered in the gas chambers. (Estimates of the dead range from one to four million; the camp’s first commandant, Rudolf Hess, confessed that he “personally arranged the gassing of two million persons between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943.”) Fifty years after the camp’s liberation, it has become almost accepted wisdom among many Holocaust historians, analysts and survivors that the Allies could have put a halt to the mass murder at Auschwitz --that a straightforward air assault could have saved many hundreds of thousands of lives. And with the luxury of hindsight, such a claim initially seems well-founded. That accidental September 1944 bombing raid would appear to prove beyond question that an air assault on Auschwitz was well within Allied capabilities. “There’s no doubt that it was possible,” says David Silberklang, a historian supervising the current expansion project at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. “There’s no question that the planes could have got there.” And tempting though it may be to seek scapegoats among the Allied military strategists, to blame antisemitism for what otherwise appears to be inexplicable indifference to the plight of the Auschwitz victims, an open-minded examination of the controversy reveals that bombing the camp constituted a for more complex operation than many historians would have us believe. In fact, the first Jewish requests for Allied intervention came far too late in the war to save the vast majority of Auschwitz victims. What’s more, a one-time raid by inaccurate heavy bombers might well have killed more Jews than would have been saved, while damaging the camp only superficially. And although a sustained air assault on Auschwitz could have put it out of action, that kind of mission would have constituted a major diversion from the main Allied war effort--which was to crush the German war machine as quickly as possible. Irving Uttal, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who himself flew bombing missions over Nazi targets in World War II, argues that Auschwitz neither could nor should have been targeted. He reasons, with the personal experience to back up the claim, that the successful bombing of tiny targets like the Birkenau gas chambers from 25,000 feet would have required several missions, and thousands of tons of bombs, dropped by dozens of planes. Losses would have been heavy. And the diversion from the main war effort would have delayed the end of the war, and cost many more lives. In his introduction to a persuasive and articulate analysis of the issue, published in the Journal of Military History, James H. Kitchens III, an archivist at the United States Air Force Historical Agency, sums up succinctly: “Operational constraints, rather than prejudice, prevented Allied authorities from bombing Auschwitz.” Allied leaders made the mistakes that all humans do, he writes, “but the available evidence suggests that avoidance of death camp bombing out of prejudice was not one of them.” Disgusted by “all the nonsense” published over the past 50 years about how simple it would have been to bomb Auschwitz, and how so many Jews’ lives could so easily have been saved, Richard H. Levy, a retired engineer from Seattle, has also just completed a lengthy research paper, “The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited --A Critical Analysis,” to be published by St. Martin’s Press of New York. “The treatment of the operational aspects of this affair by so-called historians of the Holocaust is pathetic,” he fumes. “Many of them leap to the conclusion that the bombing could easily have been done, and then jump straight from this to the view that the failure to do it was politically motivated.” Auschwitz historians do not agree on all that much. But there is little dispute about one issue; the time when detailed, credible news reached the Allies about what was going on at the camp.

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It may be true that from late 1942, until the spring of 1944, there were indications reaching the West the Jews were being put to death there. In his landmark study “Auschwitz and the Allies” British historian Martin Gilbert details the rumors of a “large concrete building” on the Russian-Polish border “where people are killed by gas and are burned”; the second-hand reports of “masses of Jews” being “exterminated en masse”, the letter that told of “shooting and burning” at Auschwitz. But it was only in late June to early July 1944, with the receipt of first-hand reports from four Auschwitz escapees, that the “unknown destination” to which so many Jews were disappearing was revealed in all its horrifying detail, and the pleas for action, made by Jewish leaders to the Allies, began. And by then, the overwhelming majority of Jews who were to die at Auschwitz-Birkenau had already met their fate. Nevertheless, the gas chambers were still operating, and tens of thousands more Jews were wiped out before they were finally dismantled in November. Transports to Auschwitz through late spring, summer and autumn carried Hungarian Jews by the tens of thousands; Jews from Corfu, Athens, Rhodes; from northern Italy; from Transylvania; from Paris, Belgium, Berlin, Slovakia; Jews from other concentration camps who had outlived their usefulness; the Jews of the Lodz ghetto . . . . The list of those ready to blame the Allies for unconscionable inaction is long, and lengthening. In “Auschwitz and the Allies,” Gilbert argues unequivocally that, when urged by Orthodox and Zionist leaders to intervene in the late spring and early summer of 1944, the Allies had “the technical ability to bomb both the railway lines leading to the camp and the gas chambers in the camp itself.” The oil-production plants in the Auschwitz area were, after all, bombed repeatedly by the Allies that year. Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel has blithely leveled blame at “a slow insensitive bureaucracy” for the failure to act. Michael Berenbaum, in his book The World Must Know--The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, asserts that the U.S. Air Force had the capability from May 1944 to strike Auschwitz “at will.” In a newly published book entitled The Secret War Against the Jews, John Loftus and Mark Aarons state boldly that “for the price of a few American bombs, the death camps remained open.” And David Wyman, the American author of another major Holocaust study, The Abandonment of the Jews, scoffs at the U.S. War Department for rejecting the bombing pleas on the grounds of impracticability, calling this stance “no more than an excuse for inaction.” Wyman argues that the Allies had complete control of the skies over Europe--and thus nothing to fear from the German air force; that their planes had the range to reach the target; that aerial bombing could “definitely” have been precise enough to knock out the gas chambers; and that even the weather was on the Allies’ side during August and September of 1944. Wyman, a history professor whose biography makes no mention of any military expertise, even goes on to specify the variety of planes that could have been used for the mission--heavy bombers, more accurate lower-flying Mitchell bombers, Lightning dive-bombers, of finally, British Mosquito fighter-bombers. Both military historian Kitchens and Lt. Col. Uttal, the latter a veteran of 35 World War II bombing missions over Germany who is now retired and living in California, systematically counter all of Wyman’s arguments. Contradicting Wyman’s claim that the Alllies had complete control of the skies, Uttal notes that, through 1944, the Germans concentrated many of their fighters on the defense of oil plants like those in the Auschwitz area. He cites an October bombing raid at the Merseberg oil plant, in which 400 Nazi fighters attacked the bomber force and shot down 26 planes. Kitchens adds that the Monwitz oil plant close-by Auschwitz was defended by 79 heavy guns. “Wheeling formations of heavy bombers over Birkenau could hardly have avoided this defensive umbrella.” Uttal next details the sheer mass of planes, raids and bombs that would have been required to put the partly subterranean Auschwitz gas chambers out of action. By way of comparison, he notes that it took no fewer than 10 separate bombing raids, from July to November 1944, with fleets of between 100 and 350 heavy bombers, for the Allies to cripple the synthetic oil plant at Blechhammer, near Auschwitz. Quoting the definitive, “The Army Air Forces in World War II,” he recalls that bombers attacking oil refineries at Ploesti required almost 6,000 sorties and 13,464 tons of bombs to achieve their mission. Three-hundred and fifty bombers were lost. Uttal goes on to note that World War II heavy bombers “only hit their bulls-eyes 3 percent of the time,” explaining the difficulties of picking out targets when navigating at altitudes of 25,000 to 30,000 feet. And

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Kitchens exposes the impracticalities of using the other aircraft suggested by Wyman. He acknowledges that the Mitchells might just have reached Auschwitz at the limit of their endurance, but the necessity of flying in mass formations for protection would have cost any element of surprise and led to prohibitive losses. He notes that that Lighting dive-bombers were used only once, experimentally, in a June 1944 attack on the Ploesti oil refinery, when 22 out of 94 planes were lost, and the plant resumed operations eight days later. And he states that no Mosquito bombers were even stationed in the Mediterranean in the summer of 1944. Even had they been, the chance of success for an operation at the limits of their range, given that they had no defensive armament, he asserts, “beggars belief.” Prof. Martin van Crefeld, a renowned Hebrew University military historian, confirms that repeated bombing runs would have been required for Auschwitz to have been put out of action for good. He says the camp was comparable as a target to the site at Penemunde, an island off the Baltic coast, where the Germans were assembling V-2 rockets. “The Allies launched one air attack on it in 1942 or 1943, and damaged it, but didn’t succeed in closing it down.” Van Crefeld adds that, had the Allies decided to target Auschwitz repeatedly, the Germans would have hit back. “If the Germans knew they were coming, the bombers would have met with opposition. In October 1943, Allied bombers attacked the Nazis’ main ball-bearing manufacturing center, at Schweinfurt. The first assault didn’t do much damage. When the Allies attacked again, almost 100 bombers were lost.” For Uttal, Kitchens and Van Crefeld, these factors serve to bolster the official Allied argument, set out by the U.S. War Department in June 1944, but dismissed and even derided by so many historians, “that the suggested air operation is impracticable...(and) could be executed only by diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere...It is considered that the most effective relief to victims of enemy persecution is the early defeat of the Axis, an undertaking to which we must devote every resource at our disposal.” Fumes Uttal: “Gilbert, Wyman and others speculate about what might have happened had missions been diverted from the grand air plan to the bombing of Auschwitz. The contrary arguments are historical facts--that riveting to our strategy defeated Germany sooner, not later. Killing ceased in the death camps and on the battlefields. And Jews were rescued from Nazi-occupied countries before they could be transported.” This argument finds support in the postwar testimony of the German armaments and war production minister, Albert Speer, who told his Allied interrogators in July 1945 that the Allied strategy of attacking German oil production, refining and storage facilities had been devastatingly effective. By the winter of 1944, he said: “So far as the army was concerned, the shortage of liquid fuel...became catastrophic.” For proof of this, Richard Levy cites the Nazi offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944, which failed to reach Antwerp and repeat the overwhelming Nazi victory of 1940. “A contributing factor was the enemy’s shortage of fuel,” notes Levy. Had the U.S. planes that bombed the synthetic fuel plants in the Auschwitz area been diverted to bomb Birkenau instead, he argues simply, “fuel would have been less short.” straightforward as some historians have suggested, it might well be argued that such a mission should have at least been attempted. If the Allies could have bombed Auschwitz, however inconvenient a diversion from the overall strategic goals, it seems reasonable to suggest, surely they should have bombed Auschwwitz. “People were coming in at 10,000 or 15,000 a day,” recalls Leo Laufer, a survivor who was at Birkenau from August 1943 to November 1944. “A few bombs at the railroad sidings, even if the damage had only taken a few weeks to repair, could have meant a hundred thousand people or more saved. The transports would have had to be diverted somewhere else, and there were no alternative sites where that many people could have been eliminated.” And the fact is that, far from being considered in depth, an assault was quickly rejected in Britain as being beyond the power of the Royal Air Force and was never seriously evaluated by military strategists in the United States. Jewish Agency pleas were backed in Britain by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. but the Air Ministry was disinclined to act; in Washington, John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary for war, bluntly ordered his juniors to “kill” the idea.

Hugo Gryn, now a leading British Rabbi, was a teenager in Birkenau. Recalling the sound of Allied bombers passing overhead to bomb other targets, he told Gilbert that “one of the most painful aspects of being in the camp was the sensation of being totally abandoned.”

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But more important than the psychological comforting of Auschwitz’s Jews, the real question is whether the pounding of the camp could have saved lives. Wyman has absolutely no doubt. He estimates that 150,000 Jews were gassed between early July, when requests for bombing Auschwitz began arriving in Washington, and the dismantling of the gas chambers in November. And had bombing raids been approved right away, he suggests, “the movement of the 437,000 Jews who were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz would most likely have been broken off.” Not so, counters Richard Levy in his new study. The July 1944 appeals to bomb Auschwitz, he states, “coincided with the end of the massive Hungarian deportations and murders.” It was “never possible,” he goes on, that bombing could have interrupted the large-scale murder of the Hungarian Jews.” And as the rate of murder at Auschwitz “dropped drastically after mid-July 1944,” he concludes, “it became much less likely that a raid would have seriously disrupted the killing operations.” Uttal asserts, furthermore, that the Nazis could have rapidly recovered from even a highly successful air assault, causing widespread damage. He quotes German armaments minister Speer noting after air raids on oil-production facilities, that “it was possible to start a plant up again within six or eight weeks after an attack, thanks to our repair measures.” With the “resident” population at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 hovering above the 100,000 mark, what’s more, inaccurate bombing could have meant more lives lost than saved. Wiesel has himself written that “if a bomb had fallen on the blocks” where the Jews were housed at Auschwitz, “it alone would have claimed hundreds of victims on the spot.” Air Force historian James Kitchens is unequivocal: B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers, he states simply, “were designed to bomb from 15,000 to 30,000 feet. Unfortunately, from these heights, the pickle barrel placement required to hit chosen buildings without collateral damage was utterly impossible.” He cites Air Force studies to show that, “under optimal conditions,” at least half of the bombs dropped would have fallen more than 500 feet from their target, and then notes soberly that two of the Birkenau gas chambers were just 300 feet from camp housing. A 1983 study carried out by Pierre Sprey, a weapons analyst in the Office of the Assistant U.S. Secretary of Defense, estimated that, had heavy bombers assaulted Auschwitz, a third of the bombs would have hit the prisoner barracks area. The Hebrew University’s Prof. Van Crefeld argues that, had the Allies used a few dozen of their inaccurate heavy bombers for a single raid on Auschwitz, the Jews would have been the main victims. “We’ve all seen the photographs of long lines of Jews at Auschwitz being guarded by three German officers and a dog,” he says. “That’s how it was. A minuscule number of Germans and masses of inmates. A single heavy bombing run would simply have saved the Germans work. Ninety percent of those killed would have been Jews. And the camp would not have been permanently destroyed. The Nazis could have rebuilt fairly quickly.” In August and September of 1944, the Allies did depart from their overall objective of ending the war as speedily as possible; they overcame the technical difficulty, and sent dozens of aircraft on dozens of missions to drop arms and supplies to the Poles fighting against the Germans in Warsaw. Losses were heavy, and most of the equipment didn’t reach the Polish Home Army. “Despite the tangible cost, which far outweighed the tangible results achieved,” a U.S. Strategic Air Forces report explained, “this mission was amply justified...America kept faith with its allies.” For Wyman, the fact that the Allies were prepared to divert considerable airpower to such a mission, but not for the similar task of bombing Auschwitz, amounts to the clearest proof that “to the American military, Europe’s Jews represented an extraneous problem and an unwanted burden.” For Uttal, noting that “we never parachuted food to millions of Soviet troops starving to death in Nazi POW camps, nor attempted to aid U.S. and British servicemen in German and Japanese POW camps,” the Warsaw aid drops were simply a “misguided exception” to the rule that “all humanitarian diversion objectives were subordinated to military needs.” Gilbert comes down somewhere in between, suggesting in his book that “the story of the negative Allied response to many of the Jewish appeals for help was one of lack of comprehension and imagination, in the face of the ‘unbelievable.’” He notes, after all, that “many Jews likewise found the scale of slaughter difficult to grasp.” Indeed, in the half-century that has passed, many people seem to have forgotten that the Jewish appeals for the bombing of Auschwitz were neither convincingly argued nor even widely supported. “Informed Jewish opinion,” says Levy, “was on the whole against the operation.” No less a figure than Leon

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Kubowitzki, head of the Rescue Department of the World Jewish Congress, publicly opposed the bombing, arguing in a letter to the U.S. Government War Refugee Board that “the first victims would be the Jews” and that an Allied air assault could serve as “a welcome pretext for the Germans to assert that their Jewish victims have been massacred not by their killers, but by Allied bombers.” The Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem voted against even making a bombing request. And while the Agency’s Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok pleaded for a bombing during one meeting with Anthony Eden, they later drafted a memo acknowledging it would have little practical effect. “No one produced a coherent argument at the time that bombing Auschwitz was feasible, proper and likely to be effective,” states Levy. “No one argued any part of the subject directly to U.S. President Roosevelt, who was the only person who could possibly have ordered the operation.” One other crucial consideration, easy to overlook 50 years on, is that while we, today, can see that an Allied victory was virtually inevitable by 1944, the military strategists of the day had no such assurance. Every bombing raid was potentially crucial, every diversion from the main strategic aims potentially catastrophic. Just one reason cited by Levy for the sense of urgency: “The Allies were never quite sure how much progress the Germans had made on their A-bomb project.” It’s easy, from the armchair of history, to point accusatory fingers of blame, to talk of antisemitism, to deride the single-minded Allied commitment to the speediest possible crushing of the German war machine. Fifty years later, asks Uttal, “Isn’t it time to end the slander?”

VOICES FROM THE HOLOCAUSTInterview with Jan KarskiBy Harry James CargasFor his extraordinary efforts to assist Jews during the Holocaust, Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic diplomat, was recognized as an authentic hero and benefactor by Yad Vashem, where a tree bearing his name was planted in the "Alley of the Righteous Gentiles among the Nations.” He earned two master’s degrees from the University of Lvov in 1935 (in Law and Diplomatic Sciences) and continued his education in Germany, Switzerland, and Great Britain. Karski then entered the Polish diplomatic service. He was mobilized in 1939, taken prisoner by the Red Army, and sent to a Russian camp. He quickly escaped, returned to Nazi-occupied Poland, and joined the underground resistance movement. Because of his knowledge of languages he was used as a courier, making several trips between France, Great Britain, and his homeland. In 1940, he was captured by the Nazis but was rescued by the Polish Underground and was later sent to meet with high-level figures, including Anthony Eden and President Franklin Roosevelt. After the war he refused to return to Poland and became an American citizen. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University. On several occasions, he was sent by the State Department on lecture tours speaking in sixteen nations. Dr. Karski’s book Story of a Secret State (1944) was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His major work appeared in 1984: The Great Powers and Poland, 1919-1945 (From Versailles to Yalta). He was awarded Poland’s highest military decoration, several honorary degrees, and many tributes for his life’s work.

HJC: What role did you play in alerting the West to the true nature of what was happening to Jews under Nazi occupation in Poland? JK: In the summer of 1942, Mr. Cyril Ratajski, a delegate from the Polish government in exile, approved a request that I be sent on a secret mission to London as a courier for himself and for the leaders of the political parties organized in the Central Political Committee. This was to be my fourth secret trip between Warsaw, Paris, and London. HJC: You were active in this work even though you had once been captured and tortured by the Nazis. JK: The Gestapo arrested me and they beat me and beat me and beat me. I couldn’t stand it. So I took a blade that I had hidden under the sole of my shoe and I cut my wrists. I was afraid they could make me talk and I knew all kinds of important information. I was taken to a hospital because I was in very bad shape and the Nazis wanted to keep me alive, to extract the facts from me. I was placed in a room with a guard outside the door. The Polish doctor who was taking care of me, while changing my

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bandages, whispered in my ear: “You must be sick, be very, very sick. We want to keep you here as long as possible.” From that moment I simulated that I was dying. Some time later I conceived a plan. I pretended that since I was dying, I had to go to confession. I said that as a Catholic who tried to commit a suicide which may still be successful, I faced eternal Hell. One of the hospital nuns got permission for me from the guard. I was wheeled into the chapel and confessed to a Polish priest. Then I whispered to him a woman’s name and address. “Someone must go to her,” I explained. I used my pseudonym, Witold. The priest began to cry. He said, “People looking for sanctuary are abusing the church. You cannot use confession for such a purpose.” But then he asked me her name and address. Two or three days later this woman came to my room dressed in a nun’s habit. I told her of my fear of going back to the Gestapo and warned that I must either be saved or be given poison. In a couple of days she returned with some apples and hid some cyanide under my pillow. She told me to take it only under extreme circumstances and that they would attempt to save me. Jozef Cyrankiewicz, the leader of the Socialist Underground in Cracow, organized my escape. I was to take off my hospital clothes. When the doctor entered the room with a cigarette, that was my signal to go to the window which was above a flower bed and jump. Naked I jumped, and two husky men were below. They caught me, took me to a little boat on some river, and then to a little estate whose owner at that time was Major Lucian Slawik. I remained there for about four or five months. That was a pattern that the underground had developed because they could not trust escapees. Perhaps the Gestapo let them go using them using them as spies. HJC: Back to 1942-Jewish leaders contacted you about your mission? JK: Yes, members of the Socialist Bund and the Zionists learned about it and gained permission to use my services in order to communicate with their people in London and also with the Polish government in exile as well as other Allied authorities. I was not told the names of these two men, of course, and this was proper procedure. Most postwar literature identifies them as Leon Feiner (Bundist) and Adolf Berman (Zionist)-although Walter Laquer, in his book The Terrible Secret, suggests that the Zionist representative may have been Menachem Kirschenbaum. Basically, the message given me to relay was as follows: “The massacre of Jews was not motivated by German military requirements. Hitler and his accomplices decided on a total annihilation of Jews regardless of the outcome of the war. Jews in Poland are helpless. They cannot rely on the Polish Underground or the general population. Some individuals are being saved but only the Allied governments can effectively help. Historically, responsibility will rest on the Polish and the Allied governments if they fail to undertake appropriate measures.” HJC: A number of concrete steps were offered, were they not? JK: I will mention the major ones exactly as I did at the International Liberators’ Conference in Washington in 1981, of which you were a part. First, a public announcement that prevention of the overall Allied war strategy, at the same time informing the German nation through radio, air-dropped leaflets, and other means about their government’s crimes committed against the Jews. Secondly, available data on the Jewish ghettos, concentration and extermination camps, names of the German officials directly involved in the crimes, statistics, facts and methods used should be spelled out. And public and formal demand for evidence that such a pressure has been exercised and Nazi practices directed against the Jews stopped. Third, public and formal appeals to the German people to exercise pressure on their government to make it stop the exterminations. Fourth, placing the responsibility on the German nation as a whole if they fail to respond and if the extermination continues. Fifth, public and formal announcement that, in view of the unprecedented Nazi crimes against the Jews and in hope that those crimes would stop, the Allied governments were to take unprecedented steps. HJC: You mentioned other steps at the Liberators’ Conference as well. JK: I did. These included the action of bombing special objects in Germany in retaliation for crimes committed against the Jewish people. German civilians would be warned ahead of time and told

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specifically that these attacks were a direct response to the attempted genocide of the Jews. Next, German prisoners of war would be apprised of these crimes directed towards Jews. Any of these prisoners who continued to profess solidarity with the Nazis would he held responsible. The same would be true of German nationals living in Allied countries. Finally, Jewish leaders in London, particularly Szmul Zygelbojm and Ignace Swarcbard, were solemnly urged to spare no effort in pressing the Polish government in exile to forward these demands to the Allied officials. HJC: Will you say something about your representation to the President of the Polish Republic, Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz? JK: My message to him was that many who persecuted Jews claimed to be Catholic. Religious sanctions from the Vatican, including excommunication, are within the Pope’s jurisdiction, and statements from the Pope might have a strong impact on the German people. Hitler was a baptized Catholic and possibly he too might thus be made to reflect. I was ordered to deliver this message to President Raczkiewicz only. Otherwise it might become counterproductive in the hands of certain Jewish leaders. The message I was to deliver to the prime minister and commander-in-chief, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, to Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the minister of interior, and to Zygelbojm and Swarcbard was quite different. I was to tell them that while the Polish people in general were sympathetic to the problems of Jews, many Polish criminals rob, blackmail, denounce or even murder Jews in hiding. The Underground authorities must apply punitive measures against them, including executions-which must be publicized in the Underground press as a warning to others. HJC: As I understand it, you carried a specific message to Allied leaders as well as international Jewish leaders. JK: Correct. Much of it was an urgent appeal for funds. Gestapo leaders at every level were corruptible. Some Jews could buy their way out of Poland. Forged passports, accompanied by bribe money, would be useful. Allied countries must pledge sanctuary for the fleeing Jews. Money should be made available to Christian families in Poland which hide Jews because these families themselves are living at a low level of subsistence. HJC: You had two meetings with the Jewish leaders in Poland before you embarked on your mission to London. Was it not at the second encounter that they asked you to undertake further, extraordinary risks? JK: They feared that my report would seem too incredible and a result of hearsay. They thought it would be greatly enhanced if I came to the Allies as one who had witnessed what he talked about. They claimed contacts, even with Gestapo members, and asked me if I would allow myself to be smuggled into both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Belzec concentration camp. HJC: How did you react to such an invitation? JK: I agreed immediately. I didn’t even think about it at the time. With the atmosphere that prevailed in Poland, with my previous missions, my background, I was an automaton. I did what I was asked to do. I gave it no thought. So I visited the (Warsaw) Ghetto two times in October of 1942, and a brief time after that I was smuggled into and out of Belzec. Two or three days later I began my secret trip to London. In November, I began reporting in London. I want to emphasize that my Jewish messages were only a portion of my overall assignment, but here I will confine myself to that part of my mission. From November 1942 until June 1943 I was in personal contact with a great many important persons. I will name some of them: among the Poles were the previously mentioned Zygelbojm and Szwarcbard along with the Socialist Grosfeld and the liaison to Cardinal Hland (who at that time was living in the Vatican), Monsignor Kaczynski. There were four members of the British War Cabinet: Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden; Hugh Dalton, president of the Board of Trade; Arthur Greenwood, Labor Party; and Lord Cranborne, Conservative party. There were others as well: Lord Selbourne of the War Office, European Underground Resistance; Ellen Wilkinson, a Labour Parliament member; Anthony Biddle, American ambassador to the Polish government; and such nongovernment persons as H.G. Wells, Arthur Koestler, and journalists, editors, publishers from various influential periodicals.

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HJC: Can you point to any results that may have been caused by your discussion with these men and women? JK: I cannot say that I alone am responsible—there were other reports as well. But let me mention some positive actions. Two weeks after I began my reporting, the Polish National Council passed a resolution condemning the murder of Jews and committed the government to move immediately. That was on December 7. On the tenth, the Polish government formally appealed to the Allied governments concerning the plight of Jews in Poland. Exactly one week after that the Allied Council, made up of representatives of all the Allied governments, unanimously passed a public appeal on the situation. On December 19, President Raczkiewicz sent a communique to Pope Pius XII asking his intervention on behalf of the Jews. One month later, Poland’s foreign minister, Edward Raczynski, presented his government’s demand on behalf of Polish Jews at the Allied Nations’ Council, asking for many of the actions I mentioned earlier. He did not ask for reprisals against German war prisoners or German nationals living in Allied nations. He considered such demands as contrary to the acceptable practices of international relations. All of Raczynski’s demands were rejected by Anthony Eden, who merely offered vague promises to intervene in some neutral countries. HJC: You did tell me once that your talk with Eden did not please you. JK: I had admired Anthony Eden very much. For me he was the epitome of the career government official—competent, dignified, intelligent. But my opinion changed when I found him very abrupt and unwilling to discuss the problem of the Jews in Poland. He refused to hear me on this subject. In spite of this major obstacle, many articles based on my information began to appear in the British press early in 1943. Public demonstrations were organized. A pamphlet titled “The Fate of the Jews,” co-authored by Thomas Mann, Alexey Tolstoy, and myself, was published in May. JK: I went in June 1943, at the suggestion of Ambassador Biddle, and remained there until August. HJC: You met with President Roosevelt. JK: After having been told I would have twenty minutes with him, our meeting lasted an hour and twenty minutes. I did not notice that Roosevelt was ill, weak. The impression he made was as master of the world. The impression that he conveyed was that he didn’t deal with people, with countries, with Poland—he dealt with the human race. He would arrange, finally, order in the world after the war. He made this kind of an impression on me. Then the Jewish problem. Yes, he did ask me questions—I answered those questions. And then I caught him in a trap. Roosevelt’s secretary opened the door, for the second time, “Mr. President, people are waiting for you.” I realized that the meeting was coming to the end. So I got up then said to him: “Mr. President, I am going back to Poland, everybody will know I saw President Roosevelt. Everybody will ask me, ‘What did the President tell you?’ Mr. President what am I going to tell them?” You never forget this kind of a thing. He was smoking his cigarette and said, “You will tell your leaders that we shall win this war! You will tell them that the guilty one will be punished for their crimes.” Smoking, smoking. “Justice, freedom will prevail. You will tell your nation that they have a friend in this house. This is what you will tell them.” At that time hearing from Roosevelt, “Your nation has a friend in this house,” I was convinced that I heard the voice of almighty God. I settled all problems. I, Jan Karski, made the president a friend of my country. That was my impression. Only when I then walked to the car with the Polish ambassador who accompanied me he said, “Well, the president did not say much.” He was clever. About the dead Jews, Roosevelt said nothing. So I was disappointed after all. HJC: I know that on a second visit to this nation, beginning late in 1943, you gave some two hundred lectures and wrote a number of articles in leading magazines and newspapers, then published your book Story of a Secret State, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. But did you speak directly with other prominent Americans as you did with British figures? JK: Yes, indeed. I will name some: Secretary of State Cordell Hull; Secretary of War Henry Stimson; Attorney General Francis Biddle; Archbishop Delegate; Dr. Nahum Goldman, president of the American Jewish Congress; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who headed the World Jewish Congress, etc. I spoke with many prominent journalists including Walter Lippman, Dorothy Thompson, William Prescott, and others. HJC: Why did you not return to Poland?

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JK: Prime Minister Mikolajczyk told me that it was too risky. The German radio had mentioned my activities in America and I was too easily identifiable by the scars on my wrists when I tried to commit suicide. It was decided that I had become too public a figure. ©1993, from Voices from the Holocaust by James Cargas.

International Apathy JOHN PEHLE Discovering the Final Solution. I can only tell this audience how the enormity of this tragedy came home to me and my colleagues in the United States Treasury Department. In 1943, I was serving as assistant to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and as director of the Foreign Funds Control. This agency had the responsibility of controlling the assets in the United States of persons and institutions in the enemy-occupied countries. It also had the responsibility of passing an people’s communications within enemy-occupied territory. It was our policy to deny all the applications for communications with the territory. This rigid policy, I think, can be likened to the Allies’ position on unconditional surrender. It was a black and white sort of decision. But in due course, some of the Jewish relief organizations came to us and said they needed desperately to be able to communicate with their people in occupied France who were assisting Jews who were fleeing over the mountains into Spain where they were welcomed by the Spanish people. They need the right to communicate with their agents, and this could only be done through State Department channels. They needed license from us to do it. So after some soul-searching, we granted such licenses, and we discovered after a period that none of these communications was going forward. When we asked some of our sympathetic friends in the State Department concerning the State Department policy which seemed to be blacking these communications, we were supplied with a cable recently received from the United States legation in Switzerland, which was sent on behalf of one of the Jewish relief organizations. This cable described the wholesale murder of Jews by the Germans. The Minister went on to say in the cable that he was sending us information despite the instructions he had received previously form the State Department not to forward such information for Jewish relief organizations except in the case of emergency, and that the reports were so grave that he felt he should send it anyway. When Secretary Morgenthau asked the State Department for a copy of the cable that had previously been sent saying not to allow your facilities to be used for this purpose, he was furnished with a cable from which these instructions had been deleted. Obviously, the State Department was not prepared to defend its censorship edict. These were the series of events that first brought to the attention of a group of us from the Treasury Department what was happening in Europe to the Jews and what was being kept form the American people. When Secretary Morgenthau, Randolph Paul, who was General Counsel at the Treasure, and I met with President Roosevelt at a special meeting one Sunday afternoon, we brought these facts forcibly to the President’s attention. He directed us to take immediate action in remedying the situation. The Treasury staff prepared and the President signed an Executive Order, number 9417, establishing the War Refugee Board. This Board consisted of the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and the Security of War. I was made executive director. This was on January 22, 1944. It was very late to attempt to carry out the assignment we had been given. One essential thing that the establishment of the Board and the Executive order establish it did, was that, overnight, it changed the policy of the United States government from one of indifference to one of affirmative action to aid the war refugees. The Executive Order stated the new policy in precise language. “It is the policy of this government to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.” The War Refugee Board was given tools to carry out its assignment. We were given money from the President’s confidential funds. We fought for the right to have representatives abroad with diplomatic status, and were able to place representatives in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Sweden, and

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London. I cannot say that the War Refugee Board accomplished any miracles, but it was not for lack of trying. Our representative in Sweden, Iver Olsen, was instrumental in the appointment by the Swedish government of Raoul Wallenberg as its diplomatic representative in Hungary and War Refugee Board funds helped finance Wallenberg’s courageous and successful intervention in Hungary on behalf of Jews who had been sentence to death. We assisted the private relief agencies in their work. We convinced most Latin American Governments not to disavow passports which their representatives in Europe had issued without authority, which resulted in a special camp being established by the Germans for people who held such passports, many of whose lives were saved. But by and large, I am afraid that the American effort to save the oppressed people of Europe was too little and too late. With reference to what Marvin Kalb said about the difficulty of accepting the existence of the Holocaust, one experience I had highlights this difficulty. In the spring of 1944, the War Refugee Board received two eyewitness accounts of what was happening in the German death camps. We felt that these were detailed accounts that explained exactly what was happening and how it was happening and we felt that these documents should put to rest any remaining doubts about the execution of Hitler’s program. We duplicated these reports and released them with the War Refugee Board imprimatur with a one-week release date so that the press would have a chance to digest the reports and write their stories. I recall the next day I received a telephone call from Elmer Davis, who was director of the Office of War Information. Elmer Davis was a well-known and respected liberal journalist. He asked me to withdraw the release. I was astounded by his reaction, so I went to his office and talked to him and his staff. They felt that no one would believe what we were saying, and that therefore, they would tend to disbelieve other statements made by the Office of War Information relating to the war effort. They referred to the Belgian atrocity stories in World War I, some of which turned out to be false. In any event, we did not withdraw the release and the facts were printed in detail in The New York Times and in many national publications. I only refer to this incident to add some evidence of the reluctance of the human mind to accept the existence of the so-called Final Solution. Finally, I tend to be an optimist. I believe that knowledge of the Holocaust can help prevent future genocides. While the War Refugee Board, despite all its struggles, was only able to bring 1,000 refugees to the United States outside immigration quotas, since then hundreds of thousands of refuges form all over the world have been welcomed to the United States. We can only pray that the world in some ways, at least, is improving. Cover letter by Jewish Community Leaders to President. In the Depths of Darkness. Washington, DC USHMM, 1992, p.159-1609th-12th Grade- Holocaust Studies Curriculum-US HISTORY 85 Department of Multicultural Education, Revised 2009, The School District of Palm Beach County, Florida Holocaust Studies Curriculum All Rights Reserved 9th-12th Grade- Holocaust Studies Curriculum-US HISTORY 86 Department of Multicultural Education, Revised 2009, The School District of Palm Beach County, Florida Holocaust Studies Curriculum All Rights Reserved 9th-12th Grade- Holocaust Studies Curriculum-US HISTORY 87 Department of Multicultural Education, Revised 2009, The School District of Palm Beach County, Florida Holocaust Studies Curriculum All Rights Reserved SECRET

PERSONAL REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT1

One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated.

This Government has for a long time maintained that its policy is to work out programs to save those Jews and other persecuted minorities of Europe who could be saved.

You are probably not as familiar as I with the utter failure of certain officials in our State Department, who are charged with actually carrying out this policy, to take any effective action to prevent the extermination of the Jews in German-controlled Europe.

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The public record, let alone the facts which have not yet been made public, reveals the gross procrastination of these officials. It is well known that since the time when it became clear that Hitler was determined to carry out a policy of exterminating the Jews in Europe, the State Department officials have failed to take any positive steps reasonably calculated to save any of these people. Although they have used devices such as setting up intergovernmental organizations to survey the whole refugee problem, and calling conferences such as the Bermuda Conference to explore the whole refugee problem, making it appear that positive action could be expected, in fact nothing has been accomplished.

The best summary of the whole situation is contained in one sentence of a report submitted on December 20, 1943, by the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate, recommending the passage of a Resolution (S.R. 203), favoring the appointment of a commission to formulate plans to save the Jews of Europe from extinction by Nazi Germany. The Resolution had been introduced by Senator Guy M. Gillette in behalf of himself and eleven colleagues, Senators Taft, Thomas, Radcliffe, Murray, Johnson, Guffey, Ferguson, Clark, Van Nuys, Downey and Ellender. The Committee stated:

"We have talked; we have sympathized; we have expressed our horror; the time to act is long past due."

Whether one views this failure as being deliberate on the part of those officials handling the matter, or merely due to their incompetence, is not too important from my point of view. However, there is a growing number of responsible people and organizations today who have ceased to view our failure as the product of simple incompetence on the part of those officials in the State Department charged with handling this problem. They see plain Anti-Semitism motivating the actions of these State Department officials and, rightly or wrongly, it will require little more in the way of proof for this suspicion to explode into a nasty scandal. 1 Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y., Morgenthau Diaries, Book 694, pp. 194-202, 1/16/44, Doc 5.

In this perspective, I ask you to weigh the implications of the following two cases which have recently come to my attention and which have not as yet become known to the public: I.

World Jewish Congress Proposal to Evacuate Thousands of Jews from Rumania and France.

On March 13, 1943, the World Jewish Congress representative in London sent a cable to their offices here. This cable stated that information reaching London indicated it was possible to rescue Jews provided funds were put at the disposal of the World Jewish Congress representation in Switzerland.

On April 10, 1943, Sumner Welles cables our Legation in Bern and requested them to get in touch with the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland, who Welles had been informed was in possession of important information regarding the situation of the Jews.

On April 20, 1943, the State Department received a cable from Bern relating to the proposed financial arrangements in connection with the evacuation of the Jews from Rumania and France.

On May 25, 1943, State Department cabled for a clarification of these proposed financial arrangements. This matter was not called to the attention of the Treasury Department at this time although the Treasury has the responsibility for licensing all such financial transactions.

This whole question of financing the evacuation of the Jews from Rumania and France was first called to the attention of the Treasury Department on June 25, 1943.

A conference was held with the State Department relating to this matter on July 15, 1943.

One day after this conference, on July 16, 1943, the Treasury Department advised the State Department that it was prepared to issue a license in this matter.

It was not until December 18, 1943, after having interposed objections for five months, that the State Department, precipitously and under circumstances revealing the fictitious character of their objections, instructed Harrison to issue the necessary license.

During this five months period between the time that the Treasury stated that it was prepared to issue a license and the time when the license was actually issued delays and objections of all sorts were forthcoming from officials in the State Department, our Legation in Bern, and finally the British. The real significance of these delays and objections was brought home to the State Department in letters which I

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sent to Secretary Hull on November 23, 1943, and December 17, 1943, which completely devastated the excuses which State Department officials had been advancing.

On December 18, I made an appointment to discuss the matter with Secretary Hull on December 20. And then an amazing but understandable thing happened. On the very day I made my appointment, the State Department issued a license notwithstanding the fact that the objections of our Legation in Bern were still outstanding and that the British had indicated their disapproval for political reasons.

State Department officials were in such a hurry to issue this license that they not only did not ask the Treasury to draft the license (which would have been the normal procedure) but they drafted the license themselves and issued it without even consulting the Treasury as to its terms. Informal discussions with certain State Department officials have confirmed what is obvious from the above-mentioned facts.

This wasn't all that my letter and appointment precipitated. I had told Secretary Hull that I wished to discuss the British objections -- in simple terms, the British were apparently pre-pared to accept the probable death of thousands of Jews in enemy territory because of "the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued". Accordingly, on that day of "action" for our State Department, December 18, they sent a telegram to the British Foreign Office expressing astonishment at the British point of view and stating that the Department was unable to agree with that point of view.

Breckenridge Long, who is in charge of such matters in the State Department, knew that his position was so indefensible that he was unwilling even to try to defend it at my pending conference with Secretary Hull on December 20. Accordingly, he took such action as he felt was necessary to cover up his previous position in this matter. It is, of course, clear that if we had not made the record against the State Department followed by my request to see Secretary Hull, the action which the State Department officials took on December 18 would either never have been taken at all or would have been delayed so long that any benefits which it might have had would have been lost.

II.

Suppression of Facts Regarding Hitler's Extermination of Jews in Europe

The facts are as follows:

Sumner Welles as Acting Secretary of State requests confirmation of Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews. Having already received various reports on the plight of the Jews, on October 5, 1942 Sumner Welles, as Acting Secretary of State, sent a cable (2314) for the personal attention of Minister Harrison in Bern stating that leaders of the Jewish Congress had received reports from their representatives in Geneva and London to the effect that many thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe were being slaughtered pursuant to a policy embarked upon by the German Government for the complete extermination of the Jews in Europe. Welles added that he was trying to obtain further information from the Vatican but that other than this he was unable to secure confirmation of these stories. He stated that Rabbi Wise believed that information was available to his representatives in Switzerland but that they were in all likelihood fearful of dispatching any such reports through open cable or mail. He then stated that World Jewish Congress officials in Switzerland, Riegner and Lichtheim, were being requested by Wise to call upon Minister Harrison; and Welles requested Minister Harrison to advise him by telegram of all the evidence and facts which he might secure as a result of conferences with Riegner and Lichtheim.

State Department receives confirmation that the extermination was being rapidly carried out. Pursuant to Welles' cable of October 5, Minister Harrison forwarded documents from Riegner confirming the fact of extermination of the Jews (in November 1942), and in a cable of January 21, 1943 (482) relayed a message from Riegner and Lichtheim which Harrison stated was for the information of the Under Secretary of State (and was to be transmitted to Rabbi Stephen Wise if the Under Secretary should so determine). This message described a horrible situation concerning the plight of Jews in Europe. It reported mass executions of Jews in Poland; the Jews were required before execution to strip themselves of all their clothing which was then sent to Germany; in Germany deportations were continuing; many Jews were being deprived of rationed foodstuffs; no Jews would be left in Prague or Berlin by the end of March, etc.; and in Rumania 130,000 Jews were deported to Transnistria; about 60,000 had already died and the remaining 70,000 were starving; living conditions were indescribable; Jews were deprived of all their money, foodstuffs and possessions; they were housed in deserted cellars, and occasionally twenty to

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thirty people slept on the floor of one unheated room; disease was prevalent, particularly fever; urgent assistance was needed.

Sumner Welles furnishes this information to the Jewish organizations. Sumner Welles furnished the documents received in November to the Jewish organizations in the United States and authorized them to make the facts public. On February 9, 1943, Welles forwarded the messages contained in cable 482 of January 21 to Rabbi Stephen Wise.

The receipt of this message intensified the pressure on the State Department to take some action.

Certain State Department officials attempt to stop this Government from obtaining further information, from the very source from which the above evidence was received. On February 10, the day after Welles forwarded the message contained in cable 482 of January 21 to Rabbi Wise, and in direct response to this cable, a most highly significant cable was dispatched to Minister Harrison. This cable, 354 of February 10, read as follows:

"Your 482, January 31

"In the future we would suggest that you do not accept reports submitted to you to be transmitted to private persons in the United States unless such action is advisable because of extraordinary circumstances. Such private messages circumvent neutral countries' censorship and it is felt that by sending them we risk the possibility that steps would necessarily be taken by the neutral countries to curtail or forbid our means of communication for confidential official matter.

Hull (SW)"

The cable was signed for Hull by "SW" (Sumner Welles). But it is significant that there is not a word in it that would even suggest to the person signing that it was designed to countermand the Department’s specific requests for information on Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews. The cable has the appearance of being a normal routine message which a busy official would sign without question. On its face it is most innocent and innocuous, yet when read together with the previous cables is it anything less than an attempted suppression of information requested by this Government concerning the murder of Jews by Hitler?

It is also significant that the message which provoked the ban on further communications to this character was not addressed to private persons at all but was addressed to Under Secretary Welles at his own request and the information contained therein was only to be transmitted to the World Jewish congress if Welles deemed it advisable.

Thereafter on April 10, 1943, Sumner Welles again requested our Legation for information (cable 877). Apparently he did not realize that in cable 354 (to which he did not refer) Harrison had been instructed to cease forwarding reports of this character. Harrison replied on April 20 (cable 2460) and indicated that he was in a most confused state of mind as a result of the conflicting instructions he had received. Among other things he stated:

"May I suggest that messages of this character should not (repeat not) be subjected to the restriction imposed by your 354, February 10, and that I be permitted to transmit messages from R more particularly in view of the helpful information which they may frequently contain?"

The fact that cable 354 is not the innocent and routine cable that it appears to be on its face is further highlighted the efforts of State Department officials to prevent this Department from obtaining the cable an learning its true significance.

The facts relating to this attempted concealment are as follows:

(i) Several men in our Department had requested State Department officials for a copy of the cable of February 10 (354). We had been advised that it was a Department communication; a strictly political communication, which had nothing to do with economic matters; that it had only had avery limited distribution within the Department, the only ones having anything to do with it being the European Division, the Political Adviser and Sumner Welles; and that a copy could not be furnished to the Treasury.

(ii) At the conference in Secretary Hull's office on December 20 in the presence of Breckinridge Long, I asked Secretary Hull for a copy of cable 354, which I was told would be furnished to me.

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(iii) By note to me of December 20, Breckinridge Long enclosed a paraphrase of cable 354. This paraphrase of cable 354 specifically omitted any reference to cable 482 of January 21 -- thus destroying the only tangible cue to the true meaning of the message.

(iv) I would never have learned the true meaning of cable 354 had it not been for chance. I had asked one of the men in my Department to obtain all the facts on this matter. He had previously called one of the men in another Division of the State Department and requested permission to see the relevant cable. In view of the Treasury interest in this matter, this State Department representative obtained cable 354 and the cable of January 21 to which it referred and showed these cables to my representative.

The facts I have detailed in this report, Mr. President, came to the Treasury's attention as a part of our routine investigation of the licensing of the financial phases of the proposal of the World Jewish Congress for the evacuation of Jews from France and Rumania. The facts may thus be said to have come to light through accident. How many others of the same character are buried in State Department files is a matter I would have no way of knowing. Judging from the almost complete failure of the State Department to achieve any results, the strong suspicion must be that they are not few.

This much is certain, however, the matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust too great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent, callous, and perhaps even hostile. The task is filled with difficulties. Only a fervent will to accomplish, backed by persistent and untiring effort can succeed where time is too precious.

[signed] HENRY MORGENTHAU JR. Jan. 16, 1944 Secret Report to the President. Morgenthau, H. Morgenthau Diaries, 1991. Reams, R.B. Memorandum to Mr. Hickerson/Atherton. In the Depths of Darkness. Washington, DC: USHMM, 1992, p.164. Memo Describing Deportations. In the Depths of Darkness. Washington, DC: USHMM, 1992, p.151. Letter from Pehle to McCloy (11/8/44) Social Education, April/May, 1993, page 152. Letter from McCloy to Pehle (11/18/44) April/May, 1993, page 152

Choices in a Time of Crisis In America and the Holocaust, Kurt Klein recalls, “In September of ’42 some of the letters we had sent to our parents were returned to us stamped ‘Return to sender, moved, left no forwarding address.’ We feared the worst, but of course didn’t know the details.” In January of 1942, Nazi leaders gathered at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin to discuss the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” That meeting did not mark the start of the Holocaust. Jews were being killed long before the meeting. It was significant, mainly because it turned the “final solution” over to the bureaucrats. The murder of Jews would now be carried out in a systematic way. It would be done according to rules and regulations. By spring the Nazis were ready to carry out their plans. At that time, after two and one half years of war, one-fourth of all the Jews who would be killed by the Nazis had already died. Just eleven months later–by February of 1943– three-fourths were dead. Knowledge can be divided into three parts: receipt of information, acknowledgement of the information, and action based on that information. In the summer and fall of 1942, a number of people received bits of information about the deportations and mass murders. For some, like Kurt Klein, that information was a stamped notice on letters returned from Europe. For others it was more detailed. That summer, Euard Schulte, a German industrialist who owned mines not for from Auschwitz, learned about the Wannsee meeting. On July 30, he traveled to Zurich, Switzerland, to tell a trusted business associate that the Nazis were planning to deport the Jews to concentration camps in the East where they would be “at one blow exterminated in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish Question in Europe.” With Schulte’s approval, the businessman gave that information to a leader in Zurich’s Jewish community. He in turn told Gerhart Riegner, the Swiss representative to the World Jewish Congress, an international group committed to protesting Nazi persecution and aiding refugees. Riegner now had to decide what to do with the information. He began by investigating Schulte. He discovered the Germans had passed on information before and that information had proved to be

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accurate. Riegner also compared Schulte’s report with other data he had gathered. It seemed to explain things he found puzzling. If the Jews were being sent to the east to work, why were old people and children included in the transports? Why were the deportations so brutal? The more he probed, the more convinced he became that Schulte was telling the truth. Riegner decided to send the information to Stephen Wise, the head of the American Jewish Congress, and to the US State Department. He also sent copies to Sidney Silverman, a member of Parliament and the British representative to the World Jewish Congress, and the British Foreign Office. In a world at war, such messages are not sent through the mail or delivered over the telephone. Riegner had to send them through diplomatic channels. That meant persuading the American and the British legations in Zurich to pass them on. At the American consulate, Riegner spoke to a young official who was convinced that Riegner was sincere but was skeptical of the information he was sending. Despite his doubts, he recommended sending it on to Washington. His superior, Leland Harrison, agreed but attached a note questioning its accuracy. A few days later, the message arrived at the Division of European Affairs at the State Department. Now officials there would have to make some important decisions. Should they send it to Rabbi Wise? Tell the President? Investigate further? The group decided not to send the message to Wise. Instead officials simply filed it. Some of them wanted to instruct the Bern legation to refuse any more such messages. But this suggestion was not implemented. At about the same time, the British Foreign Office received the same message and made a different decision. Although officials there were also unwilling to act on the message, they did decide to send a copy to Silverman. At Riegner’s request, he then sent the information it contained directly to Wise. Riegner’s message finally reached Rabbi Wise on August 28. He too had to make some difficult choices. To verify the information, he arranged a private meeting with the Undersecretary of State. At that meeting Sumner Welles asked Wise to say nothing about the message until its accuracy could be checked. Wise agreed. He kept that promise throughout the fall of 1942, even as he received more and more accounts of mass murder. He did, however, pass on each new message to Undersecretary of State Welles. In October Welles asked Leland Harrison to corroborate Riegner’s message. The next day Harrison alerted Welles to numerous reports from both Jewish and non-Jewish sources. On October 22, Harrison met with Riegner and Richard Lichtheim, the Geneva representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. The two gave him a 30-page report with specific evidence, including a country-by-country breakdown of the number already dead. They also provided independent confirmation of the murders from a high official in the International Red Cross. Harrison carefully checked out the sources of the information the men provided. He then sent a report to Welles. After receiving that information on November 24, Welles released Wise from his promise to remain silent. To focus attention on the murders, Wise immediately arranged press conferences in Washington and New York. Jewish leaders also set aside a national Day of Mourning and Prayer. Special services were held in synagogues. Jewish workers in factories and stores stopped production for ten minutes of silent prayer. Several radio stations also went silent. As a result of such efforts, the story received widespread coverage but rarely on the front page. To many journalists, it seemed too incredible to be true. In her biography of the Roosevelts, Doris Kearns Goodwin reports that immediately after the Day of Mourning, Eleanor Roosevelt noticed a small item buried in the paper that filled her, she said, “with horror.” Goodwin explains, “In Poland, it was reported more than two-thirds of the Jewish population had been massacred. News of massive killings in Poland had been leaking out for months, but this was the first time that Eleanor had fully absorbed the enormity of the slaughter.” On December 17, 1942, the governments of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union issued a joint declaration stating that “the German authorities not content with denying to persons of the Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule had been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.”

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99Although the Allies now acknowledged the mass murders, they did nothing to stop them. They insisted that the best way to end the killings was by winning the war. A number of people disagreed. They wanted the Allies to rescue as many Jews as possible. To do so, they would have to shape public opinion. One group decided to place a series of advertisements in newspapers across the nation in hopes of making Americans more aware of what was going on. These activists were led by Peter Bergson, a young Jew from Palestine with a flair for public relations. For example, when the New York Times revealed in February of 1943 that the Rumanian government was willing to release 70,000 Jews to the Allies for 20,000 lei per refugee, the Bergson group put the story in terms anyone could understand. They ran an ad in the newspapers across the country in bold letters, the headline read:

FOR SALE TO HUMANITY 70,000 JEWS GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS AT $50 A PIECE Advertisements combined with rallies and petitions began to show results by early spring. The United States and Britain announced plans for a conference on refugees. It was set for April 19, 1943, in Bermuda. But when the Bermuda Conference ended with no plan of action, the campaign resumed. The Bergson group highlighted not only failures but also successes. In October, when the Nazis decided to deport all 6,000 of Denmark’s Jews, the Danish people managed to smuggle them into Sweden. The Bergson group celebrated the event with an ad that proclaimed, “It Can Be Done!” One of the most powerful ads appeared after a conference in Moscow. There the Allies issued a statement outlining the atrocities for which the Nazis would be held accountable after the war but failed to mention the mass murder of European Jews. The statement was made public on November 2, 1943. Three days later, this ad appeared in newspapers across the country: I have an Uncle who is a Ghost . . . . He was elected last April by the Two Million Jews who have been murdered by the Germans to be their World Delegate. Wherever there are Conferences on how to make the World a Better Place, maybe, my Uncle Abraham appears and sits on the windowsill and takes notes. Last night my Uncle Abraham was back in a Certain Place where the Two Million murdered Jews met . . . . “Dishonored dead,” said my Uncle Abraham, “ . . . of the Moscow Conference I have this to report. The Conference made a promise that the world was going to punish the Germans for murdering all the different peoples of Europe—Czechs, Greeks, Serbs, Russians, French hostages, Polish officers, Cretan.” “In the Kremlin in Moscow, in the White House in Washington, in the Downing Street Building in London where I have sat on the window sills, I have never heard our name. The people who live in those buildings—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill—do not speak of us. Why, I don’t know . . . .” A Woman Ghost from the Dynamite Dumps of Odessa spoke.

“If they didn’t mention the two million murdered Jews in the Conference, isn’t that bad for four million who are still alive? The Germans will think that when they kill Jews, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill pretend nothing is happening.”

And from the Two Million Ghosts came a great cry . . . My Uncle Abraham raised his hand. “Little children,” my Uncle Abraham spoke: “Be patient. We will be dead a long time. Yesterday when we were killed we were changed from Nobodies to No bodies. Today, on our Jewish tomb, there is not the Star of David, there is an Asterisk. But, who knows, maybe Tomorrow--!” This ended the Meeting of the Jewish Underground. My Uncle Abraham has gone to the White House in Washington. He is sitting on the windowsill two feet away from Mr. Roosevelt. But he has left his notebook behind. A Guide to the American Experience Documentary America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. ©1995

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Choosing to Rescue In America and the Holocaust Will Rogers, Jr. says, “I did what anyone would have done. I was not concerned with the outcome so much as I was with making a statement and that somebody makes a statement and that my country makes a statement. I did very much want the United States—as a country and as a nation—to protest and to stand for the rescue of these people when it could be done.” Will Rogers, Jr. and others in Congress who shared his views wanted the President to create a special government rescue agency designed to save the surviving Jews of Europe. In November of 1943, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives launched hearings into proposed legislation that would establish such an agency. Behind closed doors, Breckinridge Long insisted to committee members that there was no need for a rescue agency as the United States was already doing all it could for the refugees. Long claimed that “we have taken into this country since the beginning of the Hitler regime and the persecution of the Jews, until today, approximately 580,000 refugees.” He implied that most of them were Jews. Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn was quick to point out that Long’s 580,000 refugees were in the main ordinary quota immigrants coming in from all countries and the majority were not Jews.” No more than 250,000 refugees who had been granted visas had entered the nation. Only about 138,000 of them were Jews. Celler blamed Long for the “tragic bottleneck in the granting of visas.” As pressure to help the refugees mounted in Congress, Long found himself under attack from yet another source: the Treasury Department. In late 1943, three young lawyers in the department—Randolph Paul, John Pehle, and Josiah DuBois—were troubled by their recent contacts with the State Department. One of the three, John Pehle, had discovered that the State Department was actively blocking the transfer of private funds intended for the rescue of Jews. The three decided to investigate further. In doing so, they stumbled across a reference to a cable, which they hoped would shed additional light on the State Department’s actions. (What they didn’t know at first was that State Department cable number 354, dated February 10, 1943, instructed its representative not to send more messages like an earlier telegram from Gerhaart Riegner to Stephen Wise which described massive killings of Jews in Poland. In effect cable number 354 was designed to cut off the flow of information about the Holocaust.) When the three asked for copies of the cable, the State Department refused to comply. The Treasury Department officials could have shrugged off the matter at this point, but they felt they had a responsibility to find out exactly what was going on and why. So DuBois contacted an acquaintance who worked as an aide to the Assistant Secretary of State. At the risk of his own job, the aide, Donald Hiss, decided to secretly show DuBois copies of the cable. It revealed that in early 1943 the State Department had suppressed vital information about the massive murders of the Jews. The three men showed the evidence to their boss, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Morgenthau was one of the first Jews to hold a cabinet position. He was also a close friend of the President. Until 1942, Morgenthau seemed to distance himself from the Jewish catastrophe in Europe. He later said that his attitude changed on the day in 1942 when “Dr. Wise and his son James came to call on me and read that unbelievable cable telling about the crematoriums in Europe. I think that day changed my life.” Now Morgenthau had to figure out what to do with the evidence his aides had uncovered. He decided to meet with the Secretary of State. Long, who was also at the meeting denied any wrongdoing and tried to shift blame to an aide. During the course of the meeting, Morgenthau said to Long, “The United States of America was created as a refuge for people who were persecuted the world over, starting with Plymouth. And as Secretary of the Treasury for 135 million people, I am carrying this out as Secretary of the Treasury not as a Jew.” Before the meeting ended, Morgenthau off-handedly repeated his department’s request for a copy of cable number 354. When the cable arrived, Morgenthau and his staff discovered that the cable did not match the one Hiss had shown to DuBois. It had been altered in hopes of covering up the fact that State Department officials had tried to stop the flow of critical information about the massive killing of the Jews. There

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was now direct evidence of the State Department’s attempt to block information about the Holocaust as well as an attempt to cover up that action. When Morgenthau was confronted with this new evidence, he asked Paul to prepare a memo. The thrust of the 18-page memo entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews” is evident in its opening passages: One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, in continuing unabated. This Government has for a long time maintained that its policy is to work out programs to save those Jews of Europe who could be saved. I am convinced on the basis of the information which is available to me that certain officials in our State Department, which is charged with carrying out this policy, have been guilty not only of gross procrastination and willful failure to act, but even of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler. I fully recognize the graveness of this statement and I make it only after having most carefully weighed the shocking facts, which have come to my attention during the last several months. Unless remedial steps of a drastic nature are taken, and taken immediately, I am certain that no effective action will be taken by this Government to prevent the complete extermination of the Jews in German controlled Europe, and that this Government will have to share for all time responsibility for this extermination. The tragic history of this Government’s handling of this matter reveals that certain State Department officials are guilty of the following: They have not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler but have even gone so far as to use this Government machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews.

1. They have not only failed to cooperate with private organizations in the efforts of these organizations to work out individual programs of their own, but have taken steps designed to prevent these programs from being put into effect.

2. They not only have failed to facilitate the obtaining of information concerning Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe but in their official capacity have gone so far as to surreptitiously attempt to stop the obtaining of information concerning the murder of the Jewish population of Europe.

3. They have tried to cover up their guilt by:

a. concealment and misrepresentation; b. giving of false and misleading explanations for failures to act and their attempts to prevent action; and c. the issuance of false and misleading statements concerning the ‘action’ which they have taken to date.

Upon reviewing the document, Morgenthau changed the title to “A Personal Report to the President” and toned down the inflammatory language. But he did not tone down the implications of a nasty political scandal. After Morgenthau and his aides presented the memo to the President, Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board. Placed under Morgenthau’s supervision, it saved about 200,000 Jews through a combination of diplomacy, bribery, and extraordinary commitment from such dedicated agents as Raoul Wallenburg. John Pehle, who headed the board, later remarked that “What we did was little enough. It was late . . . Late and little, I would say.” A Guide to the American Experience Documentary America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. ©1995

ESTHER COHEN To speak of liberation and what it means to me is to speak from the heart and the soul, and probably for hours. But in respect to the time element, I have taken the privilege of just writing out a few notes and giving you one feeling that I have.

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At the actual time of liberation, I do not think I truly believed it was over. Certainly, hard as I tried, I could never begin to understand the madness, the blackness, and the brutality of the years past that were now over. What I did know was that for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, people had smiles on their faces, even if those smiles lasted only a moment, as their minds flashed back to those lost, to a world gone mad, to acts and events that were beyond human comprehension. What I remember best is my father taking me in his arms and saying to me, “My dear child. Our family, once a strong beautiful tree, is no more. They have chopped it in pieces and cast those pieces in the inferno. But a branch has survived, and now that branch must grow, and from it must come new life.” Those words and my mother’s eyes when she looked at me have remained in my heart and my soul as a reminder that somehow I lived when so many others did not. But it was some time later that I began to feel free and secure. It was in the United States, in New York, at our first apartment – a small room with two cots and a small bathroom down the hall shared with many families. It was and is to this day the best place I have ever lived in, for in that small room I could read, I could dream, I could do whatever my heart desired, and no one could come to harm me. I was free – free at last. I could go to school, walk the street, I could go to the synagogue with my family on the Sabbath; I could even have friends with whom I could argue about different issues, and they would still be my friends. I could no longer be hurt because I was born a Jew. As the years went on, the meaning of being free took on much deeper feelings. There was the inevitable question of “Why me? Why did I survive?” Eventually I gave up on that question, for I knew that I would never have the answer. But yet, some answers did come to other questions. Yet, there were people out there who cared, who were willing to give their lives so that we could live and maybe, more importantly, so that mankind might have a just reason to go on. For as our brothers and sisters were dying, with them was vanishing any and all reason for the human race to continue. It is today in this room that I feel the meaning of liberation. It is at the polling booths in my city when I am free to follow my conscience that I know the full meaning of my liberation. It is when I watch the sun rise in Jerusalem that I joyfully cry for being free. I thank God, and I thank the men and women who fought so valiantly to free me and to restore justice and reason. I will never forget. Cohen, E. “Eyewitness Account” Liberation. Washington DC: USHMM, 1991

Testimony

Eyewitness Accounts THE LIBERATORS “Days of Remembrance” The United States and the Soviet Union fought together as Allies in World War II. In 1944-45, the armies of the two countries moved toward Germany from opposite directions. The American Army moved East across Germany toward Berlin in early 1945. As the troops progressed they liberated scores of concentration camps. Soldiers of all ranks were amazed and horrified at what they saw: As we kept moving in closer, about three miles from the town, we came across oh, maybe eight to ten huge warehouses set on a field. We could see these from a great distance away and as we got closer we went to these warehouses and were amazed to find what was in there. We more or less broke in. They were unattended. There were no guards or anything. The Germans were pulling out before us as we kept moving along. We got into these warehouses and it was an astounding sight. They were each approximately eight to ten stories high, and each floor had a different food commodity on it, as far as the eye could see. Thousands of boxes, say, tins of salmon, would be in one, sardines in another. Another floor had chocolate … chocolate from all the countries the Germans had been in. It seems that every time they went into a country and occupied it they would literally strip the country of all the commodities and ship it back, and this evidently was one of the depots where all these supplies were stored, commodities, foods, primarily wines of all sorts in the baskets and all. I remember I was impressed by the fact that there was enough food there to feed the entire countryside. Of course, we “liberated” lots of cases. The liquor we took out with us and the

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wines and I remember taking cans of sardines and having trouble opening them. But at any rate, in contrast to what we found when we went into Nordhausen . . . That’s what really bugged me. Here was all this food stocked in warehouses and yet three miles away there were people eating horses’ heads because that’s all they had. People, who literally had not eaten or been given water for weeks at a time. We had no knowledge at all of what we were going to find. When we came to the source of this big, heavy odor, we had gone through the factory, through the town and now on the other side of the town here was Nordhausen, the camp. It had barbed wired fences and all. We had no concept of what we’d find there. We heard machine guns fire as we came into the one end of the camp. We discovered later that that machine gun fire was the last German troops pulling out, indiscriminately machine-gunning anyone who was still able to stand on their feet, any one of the prisoners in the camp. But there weren’t too many of these because when we actually got into the camp through the barbed wire, we saw row upon row of bodies just stacked like cordwood maybe five feet high as far as the eye could see. We later were told there were approximately five or six thousand inmates of whom just a handful were able to ambulate. All the others had either been shot down or were in an advanced state of emaciation. Even though they were working in the factory they’d been herded through the gate, through the town into the underground factory and herded back again like cattle. No food was given to them and as they died of hunger that’s where they lay. The guards would stack them in these rows. And that’s what we found when we came through the gate. The stench was coming from this area. This was the smell that covered the entire countryside . . . for miles around. And yet, when we asked these people in the town, the civilians, a couple of days later, how could they permit such things to exist, they said they did not know there was a camp like that next to them. They were just townspeople who minded their own business, etc. etc. The first thing we saw after the barbed wire entanglement that we went through was, like, cordwood stacks, but as we got closer we saw they were human beings, were bodies, totally emaciated, many of them naked, no clothes. The ones that had clothes had the striped uniforms which we learned after a while were the typical uniforms of the concentration camps. The ones that were naked were just bones. I have pictures that I took which I look at once in a while to remind me it actually happened. Just bones. Eyes -- all you saw were wide, huge eyes because the sockets were shrunken and I just can’t describe it. The thing that really bugged me was bodies were lying there stacked up, but when we saw movement, like three bodies down, an arm was moving, you realized that among these people, there were living people who were in these piles. So immediately we got to work trying to separate, trying to pull out the ones that were alive and that’s when we realized that we’re gonna have to give them medical attention. Being with the medics, I left half my platoon there to untangle them, get them on litters. Meanwhile, other groups came up, other medical battalions and units; infantry men dropped their rifles, dropped their guns and began sorting these people out. I took the first load of trucks and ambulances back to our clearing station, about a mile or so out of town from the camp where we had set up a station, for the handling of wounded soldiers primarily those who’d been hit in battle. But we stopped all that and began taking care of them from a medical standpoint. These were all political prisoners and they were lumped together indiscriminately. We ran across Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, Spaniards. You name it. It just seemed as though it was a microcosm of the entire world and each one of those nationalities had Jewish representation. In other words, I remember talking to someone who looked about, oh, I would say, just, just old and emaciated. It turned out to be a seventeen year old Jewish girl. We spoke in Yiddish, too. I remember this very vividly. And she kept asking for water, “Wasser.” But we had learned by then if we gave them water orally it would kill them.

David Malachowsky, Staff Sergeant, VII Corps, 104th Infantry Division, 329th

Medical Battalion Company D We had gone through the Bulge, we had seen the horrors of war: death, people who were wounded. Many of us came very close to losing our lives during that period. But we had no knowledge, and our

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first encounter came one day when we were asked to go to a place outside of Weimar, Germany. It wasn’t a mission of battle, it was just to go. And we came to this place, which was somewhat like a security place, a place you might see in any urban center that was a prison. But we were totally unprepared—at least I was, for what I encountered when I went to Buchenwald. The outside was very beautiful. It was in a suburban-type community, the grass was well manicured and cared for. And then you go inside, and then all of a sudden the stark horror of it all strikes you. And that’s the way I encountered it at the age of 19. When I walked in I saw what should be considered human beings, that had been reduced to the point where they were just merely surviving. I called them the walking dead, because I felt they had reached the point of no return. We all expressed horror. We were aghast at what we saw. How deep that feeling was is hard to say. I cannot even speak for myself, in terms of how deep that hit me because I felt that I pushed it aside. I sort of covered it up; I didn’t want to deal with that. It was too traumatic. And like most people, you have to find some kind of security blanket, some way to insulate yourself from the horror. And I sort of pushed it away, and I never talked about it at all. There were those survivors who hadn’t been there very long, who were much more healthy. But then I got to those who had probably been there for some time or who had gone through the tortures and the dehumanizing kind of things. There was a variety there, you might call it a smorgasbord. I talked to a young fellow who was there who spoke very good English. He said that at first the camp had held something like 300,000. But when we came on the scene it was less than 20,000. And we talked to him and he said that the Germans got rid of political prisoners first. They were really frightened of them, and then they began to systematically work on Jews. Jews had high priority, for extermination and of course Gypsies, and others. I had been told by this young man that most of the Jews had been exterminated. We saw the whole works. The crematorium . . .There was a fellow there who spoke English – a young fellow – and he must have been a student before being incarcerated. He walked around with us. And as we walked I looked at different things – people defecating in the holes in the ground, there were no tissues, no sense of dignity – just go ahead. Someone retching out of a window, where they had been encapsulated in such large numbers in a small space in the barracks. I saw clothing, it must have been baby clothing that they had and the part piled up for their own use, later I guess. Then we saw the crematorium where the dead bodies were outside, stacked up like cordwood, and we went into the crematorium and you could see the residue in the ovens – the rib cages, the skulls. And it was so hard to believe – to try to understand why. What did these people do that merited this kind of treatment? And it boggles the mind when you think that it had gone on for almost ten years before we got into the war! Why wasn’t it dealt with? Why did nobody scream and shout, “Stop!” They never did. And we saw the laboratory where they were experimenting on different people, and the parts of the body. And then there was the torture chamber, and you could see the stains of the blood on the stone, and on the wall. They even had the instruments. Some of them were still there.

Leon Bass, Sergeant, 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion When the German SS troops guarding the concentration camp at Gunskirchen heard the Americans were coming, they suddenly got busy burying the bodies of their victims – or rather, having them buried by inmates – and gave the prisoners who were still alive what they considered an extremely liberal food ration: One lump of sugar person and one loaf of bread for every seven persons. Then, two days . . . before we arrived, the SS left. All this I learned from talking to inmates of the camp, many of whom spoke English. Driving up to the camp in our jeep, Cpl. DeSpain and I first knew we were approaching the camp by the hundreds of starving, half-crazed inmates lining the roads, begging for food and cigarettes. Many of them had been able to get only a few hundred yards from the gate before they keeled over and died. As weak as they were, the chance to be free, the opportunity to escape was so great they couldn’t resist, though it meant staggering only a few yards before death came.

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Then came the next indication of the camp’s nearness – the smell. There was something about the smell of Gunskirchen I shall never forget. It was strong, yes, and permeating, too. Some six hours after we left the place, six hours spent riding in a jeep, where the wind was whistling around us, we could still detect the Gunskirchen smell. It had permeated our clothing, and stayed with us. were emaciated and discolored and covered with insects and worms. These were human beings. Their crime was not being a German.

Fred Friendly, noted Journalist, dispatch, May 24, 1945 Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio, for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald. It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar, and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. And it was built to last… I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond where well-fed Germans were plowing. A German, Fritz Kersheimer, came up and said, “May I show you around the camp? I’ve been here ten years.” An Englishman stood to attention saying, “May I introduce my self? Delighted to see you. And can you tell me when some of our blokes will be along?” I told him, “Soon,” and asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovakians. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses; there were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description… There was a German trailer, which must have contained another 50 [bodies], but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant - murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. Thursday I was told that there were more than 20,000 in the camp; there had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now? From Edward R. Murrow’s CBS Radio Broadcast from London, April 15, 1945

Tanks, trucks, ammunition carriers, blood spattered soldiers, bedraggled soldiers – worn, dying, on horses, on feet, pitiful, not brave, just spent, wretched looking. They have no nationality, no politics, no ideology. They are just battle weary and worn. Who are they? What do they want from us? Why don’t they go home and get bandaged with gauze and love? Men, you need care. Do not spend the little strength you have on killing us. Seek solace, not hate. Seek out your children. They need your love. They need to give you theirs. Stop killing. Stop it. But wait. Wait. These men are wearing strange uniforms. They are not German or Hungarian. They are unfamiliar. And there is a red flag – red, red. Red is not German, red is Russian. We are … we are – What? What are we? We … we are … we are liberated! Barefoot, wearing only a single garment each, we all surge out into the brutal January frost and snow of eastern Germany and run toward the troops. Shrieks of joy. Shrieks of pain. Shrieks of deliverance. All the pent-up hysteria accumulated over years of pain and terror suddenly released. I have never since heard sounds like those we uttered, sounds released from the very depths of our being. The sheer force of it must have scattered the ashes of Auschwitz to every corner of the universe, for our cries of joy suddenly turned into a bitter wail: “We are liberated! We are liberated! But where are they all? They are all dead.”

Isabella Leitner, Auschwitz Survivor

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Days of Remembrance,” The Liberators. Washington DC: USHMM, 1991

Liberation – Reflections of a Survivor Vladka Meed

This year, the world will mark the end of World War II. 50 years have passed. With great curiosity, searched out the May 8, 1945 issue of The New York Times. Headlines on the first page proclaims: “he War in Europe is Ended” – “Surrender is Unconditional.” Right below, I read: “The surrender took place at a little red schoolhouse in Reims, France, the headquarters of General Dwight David Eisenhower. The surrender brought the war in Europe to a formal end after five years, eight months and six days of bloodshed and destruction.” On the same page of the Times, a photograph showed a mass of people filling New York’s Times Square in a spontaneous celebration. “Time Square was thronged from mid morning on with wildly jubilant celebrators, who tooted horns, staged impromptu parades and filled the canyon between the skyscrapers with fluttering scraps of paper. However, the great bulk of the city’s population responded with quiet thanksgiving that the war in Europe was won.” While eagerly reading these historic words, my thoughts raced back to another place. The Polish winter of 1944-45, a bitter cold, snowy winter; Ben and I, posing as Christians, lived in a small village called Kurczowa Wies. We came there after the unsuccessful Polish uprising of 1944 when, on German orders, all of Warsaw was to be evacuated. In this Village were the headquarters of a German military unit. We were given permission to stay and work, Ben as a field hand and I s a seamstress. The days in the village were filled with work and were full of apprehension. There was no radio, no newspaper, only constant rumors among the peasants. Something, something is surely going to happen on the nearby military front. The German soldiers stationed in the village were avoiding contact with the Poles. They became more silent, nervous, constantly in a rush. On the night of January 16, 1945, we were suddenly awakened by a close heavy artillery bombardment which stopped in the early morning. Ben went out as usually to is work place, but came right back, yelling excitedly – “the Russians, the Russians are here!” I couldn’t believe it – such a change over night – but he assured me that he had seen, with his own eyes a Russian tank crossing the fields. We ran out. The whole village was already in turmoil. No more Germans, their headquarters were dark and empty. During the night all of them had left in great haste. They had not anticipated that events would happen so fast. Suddenly, as if on command, some peasants started to run to the German warehouse, to their stables, grabbing whatever they could – a horse, a cow, a wagon, tools. We stood forlorn, looking on in bewilderment, not knowing what to do. Had our enemy really disappeared? We dreamed of this moment during all the horrible years of war and finally, when the dream came true, we felt forlorn tense strangers in this village, city people, outsiders. We could still be recognized as Jews. Just one suspicious remark of a peasant and our fate would be sealed. We had to get out of this place as fast as we could, but to where? Back to liberated Warsaw? We knew that Warsaw was virtually destroyed during the 1944 uprising, but Warsaw was the city where we were born, where we had lived and where some of our hidden friends could still be waiting for our return. In the early morning, quietly and without good-byes, we left the village. The road to Warsaw was crowded with trucks, vans and marching soldiers, followed by civilians returning to their homes – we among them. Tired and hungry after three days of walking, we finally reached the outskirts of the city, Praga, the place where Ben’s family was once in hiding. From there, we went right away to a bombed out house on Sienna Street, where, under the rubble, a bunker which Ben had built, a group of eight Jews were hidden, among them close friends Shifra Shefner, Klara Falk and her son and four survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Chika and Boruch Spiegel, and Masha and Jacob Putermilch. Before leaving the city, we had promised them that if we survived, we would return to dig them out from under the rubble. Almost four months had passed since we had seen them. Would they still be

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alive? For two days Ben dug at the frozen debris, calling their names, but without results. On the third day he found them, emaciated, disheveled, wandering around their hiding place. Yes, they had heard the attempts to reach them, but they were convinced that someone had discovered them and they were ready to kill the intruder. At the last moment they decided to leave the bunker and to go down into the sewer, where they stood, bent over, in the cold, dirty water, for a whole night, not knowing that the Germans were gone. It was only the noise of the constant clatter of tanks which made them venture out and learn that they were finally free. We were so happy to see them alive! Yet, Warsaw was not a place to remain – ruined, bombed out houses, streets full of debris and dirt, filled with military trucks, with tanks, soldiers and civilians; people constantly milling, searching for food, for water. In this chaotic state, we felt the excitement of the military advances in the air. The war was still going on, but the front line was moving further and further to the West. We had to find a place to stay and moved also to the West, to the newly liberated city of Lodz. Lodz was not in ruins, and it very soon became the place where Jewish survivors came to meet other Jews. They gathered at the newly organized Jewish Committee, searching for familiar faces, looking for someone they know or from whom they could get information. Most of them rushed to other places to continue their search. Walls and doors in the committee headquarters were covered with scraps of paper, with notes, describing the writer and begging news. Did anyone know, did anyone hear of someone with such and such a name? The air was filled with nervousness; people were reading, writing, pushing, going from one end of the hall to the other. From time to time an unexpected greeting, a loud outcry – “Oh, whom I see!” A noisy greeting, hugging. For a moment, eyes would turn to the lucky reunion with envy and then back to reading the scraps of paper on the walls. Yes, I, too, envied the ones who found someone. Deep inside, I knew that none of mine would come back. They went with the Warsaw Jews directly to the death camp Treblinka, to the gas chambers. And yet, I, too, came very day and read the messages on the walls. I even put up my own note. Maybe, after all, my sister, my brother – they were so young – maybe they were sent somewhere else, to a labor camp and maybe, maybe, they had survived??? Days passed in futile search. I started to work at the Culture Department of the Jewish Committee. Spring was coming. From the radio we learned of the advances of the Russians and the other Allied Forces – of the crushing of the German Army. The war was coming to an end, but I didn’t feel any joy. Although life around me started to normalize, I was like an outsider, not part of it, still waiting for something. The thought of tomorrow, of the future, was vague, uncertain. And so came May 8th – the end of the war, welcomed, but without rejoicing. The day was like any other day. The official news of the German surrender had been expected. We greeted it without excitement, without jubilation. Vladka Meed, Founder and Program Director of the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Fellowship Program, was active in the Jewish Fighters’ Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto

Eyewitness Accounts Sigmund Strochlitz It is with a sense of obligation and humility that I will share with you the grim realities the survivors faced immediately after being liberated from the Nazi inferno. Having forgotten how people live, only knowing how people die – not how they die in real life, in normal life, but how they die in flames – we survivors reentered this world, accepted leadership positions, and became a source of vitality and a testimony to the indestructible spirit of the Jewish people. Let me turn the clock back to those days when the gates of hell were shut and the chimneys of concentration camps stopped vomiting black clouds of human flesh, and we were told we are free. It was April 15, 1945 – liberation day. It is anchored in my mind and even compared by some survivors with the stories of Biblical salvations. Our prayers for liberation that we uttered in silence, in desperation, and perhaps more in defiance, and our hopes to survive that we nourished for such a long time became on that sunny, bright Sunday morning a reality. Yet, there was no joy or any

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senescence of happiness among survivors of Hitler’s Final Solution. We felt strangely empty, with a submerged sense of guilt for having survived. The Western world was celebrating victory and rightfully and properly so. We were the remnants of once-flourishing Jewish communities, broken physically and mentally, and confused on our liberation day by the sheepish and cowardly behavior of the Nazi murderers and bewildered by the actions and reactions of our liberators. We suspected that the Germans, the perpetrators of the greatest crimes against the Jewish people and mankind, even though badly defeated and living in abject poverty, would be able in time on their own soil to rebuild their lives and their homes. Only we alone were facing an uncertain future. We alone could not go back. There were no homes anywhere. Where once our ancestors lived for generations, there were no families waiting for us. Only stones, stinking of indignity and humiliation, were there to greet us. This was not a happy ending. It was the beginning of something unknown, disturbing. An empty victory. Furthermore, the hostile or, at best, indifferent behavior of the local population during the war gave us good reason to believe that we would not be received with open arms by those who took over our homes and our possessions. The cries were loud, and yet mute. We only sensed freedom in solitude, reading on one another’s despairing faces the knowledge that tomorrow would bring no one else back to share the burden of facing a new reality alone. The natural instinctive reaction during those first weeks of liberation – as I so well remember – was to look for somebody to lean on. We were yearning for something to hold onto, to have faith in, to draw us forward, to bring us back into the mainstream of life. But we were looking in vain. Our liberators to whom our gratitude was boundless, the victors for whom our admiration was limitless, traumatized by the experiences of a horrible war and shocked by what they had encountered in the liberated camps, were eager to return to civilian life and be reunited with their families. For the Allied governments, after years of exhausting fighting, the monumental problems of postwar awakening were their first priority and, again rightfully so. So, with every passing day, it became more evident to us that we must not appear before the world as separate individuals, but that we were a community, a family united by what we had lived through together, by what we had felt together, and that we were no more the Jews that once lived in Poland, France, Hungary, or in any other part of Europe. We were the Jews, the survivors, who could and must find comfort and meaning in supporting each other and only hoping that in time the world would recognize the need to resettle us. Accepting that premise was difficult for those few who were arguing that if they had known what the outside world was going to be like, they would have given in long ago. We understood them even if we disagreed. We lived for many years in liberated camps or in cities among the murders. The gates of Palestine were shut. Nobody really wanted us. We finally became an embarrassment, and with the help of President Truman, those armed with courage went to Israel to build a Jewish homeland. Some attracted by the vision of a comfortable and easy life landed in the United States, while others scattered and dispersed all over the world – not bitter, not sinking into a paralyzing sadness, somber and riddled with doubts, but determined not to become prisoners of yesterday, victims unable to meet new challenges. Grief did not become our master. We chose to rebuild our shattered lives, raising families in strange cultures, coping with unknown behavior patterns, making contributions to our adopted countries, and helping to build societies based on freedom and justice for all. The pain, however, was constant, residing silent in the private places of the heart. The wounds opened, however hidden in the innermost recesses of our minds. The past was shred in the privacy of our homes only with those who survived the cataclysm, even though the desire to bear witness, to tell the world what happened, was essentially what kept many of us alive. Today it is with pride and perhaps a sense of accomplishment that I whisper, mindfully of our irreplaceable losses: We survivors did not waste our lives. Eyewitness Accounts, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council

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HATE GROUPS IN AMERICA: A Record of Bigotry and Violence Report Summary At least 67 racist and anti-Semitic hate organizations -- openly advocating or engaging in acts of violence -- are active in the United States today, and there are some 50 publications which regularly spread bigotry. The past six years have been one of the more violent periods in the history of American hate groups, even as membership generally has declined sharply. This violence resulted in sweeping crackdowns by federal and local law enforcement authorities against far-right extremists that sent many of them to prison. The pattern of violence has included bombings, armed robberies and murders such as the fatal shooting of Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg, the bombing of synagogues in Indiana and Idaho, the arson of a Missouri church and the attempted bombing of a natural gas pipeline in Missouri. Extremists have conspired to commit sabotage on large scale by, for example, destroying dams which provide water and electric power to major American metropolitan centers. The ultimate aim, according to these extremists, is to overthrow the American government and establish a white supremacist regime -- plans that were aborted by vigorous law enforcement action. These violent elements in the movement have achieved a spectacular pre-eminence over older and larger factions. Among the major findings of the ADL survey of hate groups in America: The Ku Klux Klan: Although Klan membership has declined approximately 50 percent since 1982 with its leadership weakened and splintered, a relatively small number of violent racists have had an inordinate impact. Although the Klan attempts to project a respectable, patriotic image, this is only a mask for White supremacist ideology directed against Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Orientals and other minorities. According to the Justice Department, more than 150 persons, including at least 84 Klan members have been prosecuted for racially motivated violence from 1979 to 1985. “Identity Church” movement: The violence-prone, pseudo-theological hate groups, which have been weakened by the arrest and imprisonment of many of its members in recent years, generally subscribe to the belief that Anglo-Saxons are the Biblical “chosen people,” not Jews. One former member of The Order, a group which subscribes to Identity Doctrines, testified in federal court that the ultimate goal of the organization was the “annihilation of the Jewish race.” Formed in 1983, The Order embarked on a series of violent crimes mainly on the West Coast and Mountain states as part of a revolution to overthrow the United States government that culminated in more than two dozen arrest in 13 states. The crimes included bank robberies, counterfeiting operations, arson, holdups of armored vehicles, shootouts with agents of the FBI, an assassination and a synagogue bombing. Most of The Order’s violence-prone members are currently serving lengthy prison sentences after a four-month federal court trial in Seattle in 1985. Several of them are among ten Whit supremacists indicted in 1987 by a federal grand jury in Fort Smith, AR, and charged with “seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the United States government. They are now on trial. Neo-Nazi organizations: Consisting of small numbers, estimated at several hundred throughout the United States, they are involved in nation-wide distribution of anti-Semitic hate propaganda through periodicals, books, posters and even material which can be obtained through computer

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networks. A large Neo-Nazi propaganda mill is operated by Liberty Bell publications of Reedy, West Virginia. A recent phenomenon is the growth in Skinhead gangs who wear Neo-Nazi insignia, preach hatred against Blacks, Jews and other minorities, attack individuals and engage in vandalism and other criminal acts. They are now operating in Chicago, where the most active group is located, the San Francisco Bay area, in Central Florida, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Oklahoma City and Portland, Oregon. Among acts of violence they have perpetrated were the terrorizing of a Black woman in San Jose, California, who was told “niggers pay a toll” and threatened with being strung up when she tried to enter a park. The Neo-Nazi movement is now at its “lowest ebb” since George Lincoln Rockwell funded the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s. the most direct successor of Rockwell’s original organization is the New Order, formerly the National Socialist White People’s Party, which is based in New Berlin, Wisconsin. Another active Neo-Nazi group is the National Alliance headquartered in Mill Point, West Virginia, and headed by long-time racist leader and antisemite William Pierce. The National Alliance is active in distributing hate propaganda materials which allege a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and deny the reality of the Holocaust. Abraham H. Foxman, ADL’s national director, stated, “If America is to continue to meet the challenge of hate and violence by organized bigots, government and law enforcement officials, community and religious leaders and educators must take even more vigorous measures to monitor their activities and combat them.” Praising the recent crackdown by federal and local authorities against the extremists, he said, “Even a relative handful of racists who still engage in vandalism or terrorist acts can have a ripple effect and poison the atmosphere of a democratic society.”

RESPONSES TO REVISIONIST ARGUMENTS http://www.wiesenthal.com/resource/revision.htm The following questions are routinely posed by “Historical Revisionists” in their efforts to deny the existence of the Holocaust. The responses to these arguments were prepared by Center Researcher Aaron Breitbart. 1. The Holocaust was merely Allied propaganda. 2. There is no proof that the Holocaust occurred. 3. The estimates of Jewish losses during the Holocaust are greatly exaggerated. There were never

even 6 million Jews in Germany. 4. Didn’t the International Committee for the Red Cross report that only 300,000 people had

perished in the German concentration camps, not all of them Jews? 5. Nazi policy towards the Jews was emigration, not extermination. 6. Not a single document has been found with Hitler’s signature ordering the extermination of

the Jews. 7. Zyklon B was a fumigant. It wasn’t a practical agent for mass murder. 8. If Zyklon B is so highly toxic, how could bodies have been removed from gas chambers only

minutes after execution? 9. Zyklon B is so highly flammable that a single spark from the ventilation system or the immense

heat created by the nearby furnaces would have resulted in an explosion. 10. There is no proof whatsoever that the Nazis ever murdered anyone in gas chambers. 11. American engineer and execution “expert,” Fred Leuchter, proved that the “so-called” gas

chambers at Auschwitz could not have been used for their “alleged” purpose. 12. Didn’t Simon Wiesenthal himself state that there were no extermination camps in Germany? 13. For years, the death statistics at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been put at well over 3 million.

Recently, however, a memorial plaque at the former death camp estimates Jewish losses closer to 1 million. Shouldn’t the new figures imply that Jewish losses for the Holocaust are much lower than previously thought?

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Responses: 1. The Holocaust was merely Allied propaganda. The Allies actual ignored reports filtering out of Europe about the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Even when convinced of their veracity, they tried to withhold the information from the public. On August 8, 1942, Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress of Geneva, Switzerland, asked the United States legation in Switzerland to relay information about Germany’s plan to exterminate all European Jews under its control to American Jewish Leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. The information had been given to Riegner by a highly placed German official. Instead of delaying the message, the United States Department actually withheld it and ordered its Swiss legation not to rely on any such reports in the future. In the same year, a member of the Polish Underground Jan Karski had secretly been smuggled into a German concentration camp in Poland. Making his way out he was sent to London by the Underground to deliver his report on the horrors he witnessed. Karski spoke with both Roosevelt and Churchill. History records, however, that Karski’s pleas were largely dismissed. One need only check the major newspapers of the period to realize how little attention was paid to Nazi atrocities. If the Holocaust were merely “propaganda,” why did the Allies go to such lengths to downplay it? 2. There is no proof that the Holocaust occurred. No crime in history has been as well documented as the Holocaust. Proof of the Holocaust is multi-faceted. It is demonstrated by a myriad of documents, the majority of them Nazi-authored, captured by Allied troops before the Germans had a chance to destroy it. The list included detailed reports of mass shootings and gassings. Some 3,000 documents on the destruction of Europe’s Jewish community by the Nazis were, in fact, presented by the prosecution before war crimes’ tribunals at Nuremberg. The first-hand testimony of survivors who lived through the horrors of the death camps as well as the reports and confessions by the perpetrators leave little doubt as to the nature of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Horrifying films and photos of killing operations and their aftermath can only begin to give us a picture of the extent of Nazi bestiality; as do the reports of Allied generals and at troops who were sickened by what they saw at sites of slaughter they had just liberated. Interestingly enough, Nazi war crimes’ suspects who stood trial in the post war years for their misdeeds never claimed that the crimes of which they were accused were fictional. They instead argued that they were “only following orders.” The evidence is, in fact, so overwhelming that on October 9, 198l, Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the California Superior Court, took judicial notice of the Holocaust ruling that, “The Holocaust is not reasonably subject to dispute. It is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to resources of reasonable indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact.” 3. The estimates of Jewish losses during the Holocaust are greatly exaggerated. There were never even 6 million Jews in Germany. It is true that Germany had fewer than 600,000 Jews when Hitler came to power in 1933. The majority of Jews murdered by the Nazis, however, did not live in Germany. They resided in the countries which Germany invaded during the war, especially Poland and areas of the former Soviet Union, where millions of Jews once made their homes. In fact, the Protocol of the Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), a German document outlining the Nazi plan to annihilate European Jewry, lists over 11 million Jews throughout the continent. The 6 million figure can be demonstrated by comparing Europe’s Jewish population before and after the war. Even after making allowances for those who fled Europe and others who could be expected to die due to natural causes, there are nearly 6,000,000 people who cannot be accounted for. Authentic German documents confirm the slaughter of Jews in the millions. The famous “Korherr Report” (named after Richard Korherr, chief statistician for the SS) puts the number of Jewish losses at more than 2,454,000 by the end of 1942 alone. The war in Europe would not end until May, 1945. The Anglo-American Commission of Enquire, meeting in April 1946, put the total Jewish

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Holocaust losses at 5,721,500. On the basis of wartime statistical reports on ghettos, concentration camps and mass murder operations carried out by the Nazis, historian and international jurist, Jacob Robinson, arrived at a figure of 5,820,960. German historian, Helmut Krausnick, put the number of Jewish losses nearer to seven million. While the exact figure will never be known, scholars of the Holocaust find the rounded-off figure of six million to be in line with all the evidence. 4. Didn’t the International Committee for the Red Cross report that only 300,000 people had perished in the German concentration camps, not all of them Jews? The Red Cross never issued such a statistic nor has it offered any estimate of the number of victims who perished in the camps. In its bulletin of February 1, 1978, the Red Cross declared that it had never compiled, much less published such statistics. The 300,000 figure was actually taken from the Swiss paper Die Tat, in 1955. This estimate, however, was only a figure for the number of Germans who perished in the concentration camps. No mention of any Red Cross figures, however, was ever made by the paper. Despite the obvious deception, Holocaust deniers continue to peddle it, hoping that few people will actually check the sources. 5. Nazi policy towards the Jews was emigration, not extermination. From the beginning, the Nazis made no secret of their goal of creating a “Jew-free” Germany and Europe. One of the earliest methods was, indeed, forced emigration. But on November 10, 1941, precise instructions from Berlin to kill the Jews in his area were received by higher SS and police leader, Friedrich Jeckeln from Berlin, stating, that pursuant to the Fuehrer’s order, Jews would no longer be allowed “to emigrate,” instead they would be evacuated.” In his October 4, 1943 speech to SS general in Poznan, SS Chief, Heinrich Himmler, left no doubt as to the meaning of evacuation. “I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people,” he declared. “Evacuation” had been a Nazi code word for murder even earlier. In the Spring of 1940, 1,558 mental patients had been transferred from sanatoriums in Eastern Prussia for “evacuation” near the Soldau concentration camp. They were never heard from again. The Nazis attempted to hide their intentions by the use of code words. “Resettlement” was commonly used to describe the deportation of Jews to the gas chambers, hence SS Major Francke-Gricksch’s 1943 report on Auschwitz in which he remarks that the camp’s “resettlement furnaces” were capable of burning 10,000 bodies a day. Despite the attempts of deception, Victor Brack, one of the chief architects of Hitler’s “euthanasia” experiments, testified to the war crimes’ tribunal at Nuremberg, that it was no secret among the Nazi hierarchy that “the Jews were to be exterminated.” 6. Not a single document has been found with Hitler’s signature ordering the extermination of the Jews. This is true. Hitler was not about to repeat the mistake he had made earlier when he initialed his “euthanasia order,” condemning over 70,000 German mental patients to death at so-called “charitable care facilities” such as Hadamar and Grafineck. (Ironically, the first victims of Nazi gassings were actually non-Jewish Germans). Popular protest which threatened his popularity eventually forces Hitler to abandon his euthanasia experiment, or at least take it underground. Never again would Hitler initial any document connecting himself to mass killings. Nevertheless, historians have been able to establish with convincing certainty that the order to exterminate millions of Jews came directly from Hitler. On November 10, 1941, higher SS and police leader, Friedrich Jeckeln, received orders to liquidate the Jewish population of Riga. He was informed by his superior, Hinrich Lohse, that it was “the Fuehrer’s wish.” A few months earlier, Gestapo Chief, Heinrich Mueller, sent a message to the commanders of the 4 Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads active in Eastern Europe) advising them that “the Fuehrer was to be informed about the work of the Einsatzgruppen on a continual basis. Discussing the liquidation of Jews in Eastern Europe, SS Chief, Heinrich Himmler, told SS Gruppenfuehrer, Gottlob Berger, “the occupied East will be freed of Jews. The Fuehrer has placed the execution of this difficult order on my shoulders. Hitler’s involvement in the “Final Solution” extended to gassing operations. On October 25, 1941 a directive addressed to Hinrich Lohse regarding the use of special “gassing vans” came by way of

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German Judge, Dr. Erhard Wetzel. Wetzel had been summoned to the Chancellory and informed that the directive he was to prepare was, in fact, a “Fuehrer order.” On February 4, 1943, Hitler equated the extermination of the Jews with having “exterminated a bacterium.” In his January 30 speech to the Reichstag 4 years earlier, Hitler warned that in the event of war, “The result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” Those who argue that Hitler did not order, approve, or even know about the wanton murder of millions of Jews and others during the Holocaust, do so in direct contradiction of all the evidence. 7. Zyklon B was a fumigant. It wasn’t a practical agent for mass murder. Ordinarily, Zyklon B (a hydrogen cyanide preparation) was used as an insecticide. Hydrogen cyanide, however, is actually more dangerous to humans than insects. When the Level of HCN reaches only 300 parts per million, it will kill a person within a few minutes. The amount of hydrogen cyanide required to kill a person of average weight is only 60 mg. Because Zyklon was, in fact, so toxic, its manufacturers warned personnel not to reenter a room fumigated with the gas for 20 hours after airing. In addition, a compound was added to the preparation emitting a powerful, intolerable odor – a warning agent that the gas was present. When purchasing Zyklon B for the death camps, the SS ordered the manufacturer to remove the warning compound, a clear indication of its intended use. 8. If Zyklon B is so highly toxic, how could bodies have been removed from gas chambers only minutes after execution? The death chambers were outfitted with special ventilation systems to remove any remaining gas. In addition, those prisoners charged with removing the bodies (the Sonderkommando) wore gas masks. 9. Zyklon B is so highly flammable that a single spark from the ventilation system or the immense heat created by the nearby furnaces would have resulted in an explosion. Zyklon B will explode -- at 60,000 parts per million. It only takes a concentration of 300 parts per million to kill a person in just a few minutes. (Less than half that amount will kill in less than an hour.) Clearly, the concentration of Zyklon used in the gas chambers was far below flammability or explosion levels. 10. There is no proof whatsoever that the Nazis ever murdered anyone in gas chambers. The use of gas chambers by the Nazis is proven by a wide array of evidence. Testimony by the perpetrators themselves as well as the first-hand accounts of prisoners, especially members of the Sonderkommando (groups of inmates forced to remove the dead from the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies) constitute only a part of the evidence. Documents including blueprints of the killing installations as well as orders for construction materials and Zyklon B (the deadly hydrogen cyanide preparation used for gassings at Auschwitz and Majdanek . . .carbon monoxide exhaust was used at other camps) survived the war as did some of the actual gassing facilities themselves. Photos clandestinely taken by prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau even show the disposal of corpses removed from the gas chamber. The manufacture, distribution and use of the deadly gas was clearly demonstrated at the ”Zyklon B Trial” in March 1946, Hamburg, Germany. Two of the defendants, Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, the owner and a major executive of a company that manufactured the gas were sentenced to death after notes of their trips to Auschwitz disproved their contention that they were unaware that the poison was used to kill inmates. Jean-Claude Pressac, a one-time skeptic of the gas chambers, had undertaken a careful study of Auschwitz in which he analyzed a wide variety of camp documents, photos, reports and blueprints. Pressac, who had at one time been intrigued by the Holocaust-denying theories of Robert Faurisson, concluded that his original skepticism could no longer be supported in the face of the evidence. In 1989, the Klarsfeld Foundation published his study, “Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers,” in which Pressac demonstrates the use of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people. Incidentally, Jews were not the first people gassed by the Nazis. The first victims of Nazi gassings were German mental patients condemned by Hitler’s “Euthanasia” order of 1939.

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11. American engineer and execution ‘expert’, Fred Leuchter, proved that the ‘so-called’ gas chambers at Auschwitz could not have been used for their ‘alleged’ purpose. In 1988, Fred Leuchter of Malden, Massachusetts was contacted by Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson and hired to prepare a report on the gas chambers of Auschwitz on behalf of Canadian Neo-Nazi, Ernst Zundel. Zundel was on trial on charges stemming from the distribution of Holocaust revisionist literature. With his client footing the bill, Leuchter visited the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek death camps. Upon returning to the United States, he published a lengthy report which concluded that the facilities he examined “could not have then been . . . utilized or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.” During the Zundel Trial, however, it became increasingly clear that something was terribly wrong with the “Leuchter Report.” As it turned out, Mr. Leuchter had no credentials as an engineer, and in fact, held only a bachelors degree in history. “Leuchter’s bizarre explanation that anyone who went to college knew enough mathematics and science to be an engineer, raised even more eyebrows. Judge Ronald Thomas listened to excerpts from the “Leuchter Report,” then castigated the author for his methodology which he labeled “preposterous,” before ruling that “Leuchter has no expertise.” Leuchter’s lack of credentials resulted in more than embarrassment at the Zundel Trial. Leuchter, who had represented himself as an engineer and execution expert to various government agencies for years, was indicted by the State of Massachusetts for imposture. Faced with the possibility of jail time if convicted, Leuchter reached a pre-trial agreement with the Court in which he admitted that he “was not and had never been registered as a professional engineer, “although had had represented himself as “an engineer able to consult in areas of engineering concerning execution technology.” As part of the humbling agreement Leuchter also agreed to cease and desist from the distribution of anymore engineering reports during his probationary period. An analysis of the “Leuchter Report” by Professor George Wellers in Paris concluded Leuchter’s “calculations to be an absurdity . . . . One can see in many ways to what degree this expert chemist (Wellers was unaware that Leuchter had no degree in any science) is operating outside the realities of the problem.” Concluding the analysis, Wellers characterized Leuchter’s interpretation as “false and absurd from start to end.” Despite his embarrassment from both academic as well as legal circles, Leuchter took his show to Germany. Arrested October 1933 on charges of inciting racial hatred, he was released on bail and allowed to return to the United States pending trial. Leuchter, however, refused to return to Germany for trial. A warrant for his arrest is still outstanding. Despite the exposure of the self-styled engineer and his report as fraudulent, both are still held in high esteem among Holocaust “revisionists.” 12. Didn’t Simon Wiesenthal himself state that there were no extermination camps in Germany? The Nazis classified their many hundreds of concentration camps on the basis of their primary function. In a very real sense, all were death camps because the death of the inmates, whether through overwork, starvation/disease, or outright murder, was ultimately expected. 12Those sites, however, which functioned as extermination centers (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno), were especially equipped for the gassing of hundreds of thousands of victims each (millions altogether). All of these camps were located in Poland, and for good reason. Poland had far more Jews than Germany and the rest of Western Europe combined. The Nazis also felt that the relative remoteness of Poland’s rural areas would also minimize reports. 13. For years, the death statistics at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been put at well over 3 million. Recently, however, a memorial plaque at the former death camp estimates Jewish losses closer to 1 million. Shouldn’t the new figures imply that Jewish losses for the Holocaust are much lower than previously thought? The figure of 3-4 million murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau was an invention of communist officials in Poland (and the former U.S.S.R.) which sought to blur the uniqueness of Jewish suffering at Auschwitz. To do this, they purposely overstated the number of non-Jewish casualties at Auschwitz-

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Birkenau by many times their true numbers. In a clever attempt to disguise the subterfuge, the figures for Jewish losses were inflated by nearly double so that their losses would still be larger than those of non-Jewish victims, though now by a much smaller ratio. With the end of communism in Poland and the former Soviet union, officials at the Auschwitz museum finally lowered the casualty figures in line with the estimates of historians who, for years, have insisted that between one and 1 ½ million people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 80-90% of them Jews. The figure of 6 million Jewish losses during the Holocaust has always been in line with the lower Auschwitz figures. Resources@wiesenthal.com Copyright © 1995, The Simon Wiesental Center 9760 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90035 Responses to Revisionist Arguments. © 1995. Reprinted with permission of the Simon Wiesenthal

HOLOCAUST DENIAL AN ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE PUBLICATION I. The Movement: What You Should Know

What is Holocaust Denial? Holocaust denial is a propaganda movement active in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe which seeks to deny the reality of the Nazi regime’s systematic mass murder of nearly 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II. Who started the movement? The roots of Holocaust denial can be found in the bureaucratic language of Nazi policy itself, which sought to camouflage the genocidal intent of what the Nazis called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” even as these directives were being carried out. After the war, former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers dismissed the overwhelming proof of the Holocaust established at the Nuremberg war crimes trial; similarly, an obscure group of post-War French Trotskyists and anarchists led by Paul Rassinier, seeking to advance their own political agenda, denounced evidence of the genocide as “Stalinist atrocity propaganda.” However, as an organized propaganda movement, Holocaust “revisionism” took root in 1979 when Willis Carto, founder of Liberty Lobby-the largest anti-Jewish propaganda organization in the United States-incorporated the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). The IHR is a pseudo-academic enterprise in which professors with no credentials in history1, writers without formal academic certification (such as David Irving, Henri Roques, and Bradley Smith), and career anti-Semites (such as Mark Weber, Ernst Zundel, and the late David McCalden) convene to develop new outlets for their anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and for some, pro-Nazi beliefs. Where is Holocaust denial active today? IHR has tapped into an international network of propagandists who write for the group’s Journal of Historical Review (JHR) and meet at its annual conventions. The leading activists affiliated with IHR include Mark Weber, Bradley Smith, and Fred Leuchter (USA); Ernst Zundel (Canada); David Irving (England); Robert Faurisson (France); Carlo Mattogono (Italy); and Ahmed Rami (Sweden). Of these activists, Bradley Smith, IHR’s “Media Project Director,” has attracted the most notoriety in the U.S., due to the series of “revisionist” advertisements which he has placed in college newspapers since 1991 for the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). What is CODOH? Though Smith claims the “Committee” is an independent entity devoted to promoting “open debate,” it is essentially an IHR front. CODOH was founded by Smith and JHR editor Mark Weber. Smith’s current co-director is Robert Countess, an IHR board member from Huntsville, Alabama. Its other Footnotes: 1For example, Revilo P. Oliver is a retired University of Illinois Classics teacher: Robert Faurisson earned a PhD. In literature from the University of Lyon; Arthur Butz is an engineer at Northwestern. leading representative,

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David Cole (who claims Jewish parentage), has spoken at IHR meetings and has appeared on talk shows with IHR leaders. CODOH’s ads and flyers list the IHR address and cite IHR sources. Are there laws regulating Bradley Smith’s activities? In Canada and Western Europe, Holocaust deniers have been successfully prosecuted under racial defamation or hate crimes laws. In the United States, however, the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, regardless of its political content. Nonetheless, though the First Amendment allows Holocaust deniers to produce and distribute their propaganda, it in no way obligates newspapers or other media outlets to provide them with a forum for their views. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 1974 decision, Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo, that “A newspaper is more that a passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment, and advertising. The choice of material to go into a newspaper…{constitutes} the exercise of editorial control and judgement.” Simply stated, to require newspapers editors or broadcasters to provide Smith, or any other individual, with a forum would deny the newspaper or other media their own First Amendment rights to operate a free press, without government coercion; such requirements would also diminish the public’s ability to distinguish historical truth from propaganda. Like the editor of a private newspaper, the editors of all private and most public college newspapers have a First Amendment right to exercise editorial control over which advertisements appear in their newspaper. The only situation in which an editor of a state university newspaper would not have this right would be if the university administration controlled the content of the campus newspaper and set editorial policy for the paper. In such case, the university would essentially function as an arm of the government, and prohibition of newspaper advertisements based on content would violate the First Amendment. There are few universities, however, where the administration exercises this type of control over the student paper. At public elementary and secondary schools, the administration has the right to refuse to print Holocaust denial advertisements in the student newspaper; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 1988 decision, Hazelwood School District v Kuhlmeier, that “educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over… the content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concern.” Based on that decision, it is clear that public school officials have the same right as student editors to reject Holocaust denial advertisements, since this propaganda encourages bias and prejudice, offends many individuals, and has a negative educational value.

What have academic authorities said about Holocaust denial? The History Department at Duke University, responding to a CODOH ad, unanimously adopted and published a statement noting: “That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is certainly correct; however, what historian do is very different from this advertisement. Historical revision of major events…is not concerned with the actuality of these events; rather, it concerns their historical interpretation-their caused and consequences generally. There is no debate among historians about the actuality of the Holocaust…there can be no doubt that the Nazi state systematically put to death millions of Jews, Gypsies, political radicals, and other people.” David Oshinsky and Michael Curtis, of Rutgers University, have written, “If one group advertises that the Holocaust never happened, another can buy space to insist that American blacks were never enslaved. The stakes are high because college newspapers may soon by flooded with ads that present discredited assertions as if they were part of normal historical debate. If the Holocaust is not a fact, then nothing is a fact…” Peter Hays, associate professor of history and German at Northwestern University, responded to a Smith ad by stating “Bear in mind that not a single one of the advances in our knowledge since 1945 has been contributed by the self-styled ‘Revisionists’ whom Smith represents. That is so because contributing to knowledge is decidedly not their purpose…This ad is an assault on the intellectual integrity…of academicians, whom Smith and his ilk wish to browbeat. It is also a throwback to the worst sorts of conspiracy-mongering of anti-Semitic broadsides…Is it plausible that so great and long-standing a conspiracy of repression could really have functioned?…That everybody with a

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Ph.D. active in the field-German, American, Canadian, British, Israeli, etc. – is in on it together’… If one suspects it is, might it not be wise to do a bit of checking about Smith, his organization and his charges before running to implausible an ad.”

Holocaust Denial Themes The following are summaries of major assertions employed by Holocaust denial propagandists, with brief factual responses. The Holocaust did not occur because there is no single “master plan” for Jewish annihilation. There is no single Nazi document that expressly enumerates a “master plan” for the annihilation of European Jewry. Holocaust denial propagandists misrepresent this fact as an exposure of the Holocaust “hoax”; in doing so, they reveal an ignorance and fundamentally misleading approach to the history of the era. That there was no single document does not mean there was no plan. The “Final Solution” – the Nazis’ comprehensive plan to murder all European Jews – was, as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust observes, “the culmination of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy.”1 The destruction process was shaped gradually: it was born of many thousands of directives.2

The development and implementation of this process was overseen and directed by the highest tier of Nazi leadership, including Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Goering, and Adolf Hitler himself. For the previous two decades, Hitler had relentlessly pondered Jewish annihilation.3 In a September 16, 1919, letter he wrote that while “the Jewish problem” demanded an “antisemitism of reason” – comprising systematic legal and political sanctions – “the final goal, however, must steadfastly remain the removal of the Jews altogether.”4

Throughout the 1920s, Hitler maintained that “the Jewish question” was the “pivotal question” for his Party and would be solved “with well-known German thoroughness to the final consequence.”5

With his assumption to power in 1933, Hitler’s racial notions were implemented by measures that increasingly excluded Jews from German society. On January 30, 1939, Hitler warned that if Jewish financiers and Bolsheviks initiated war, “the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”6 On September 21, 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, SD chief Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units operating in German-occupied territory) to forcibly concentrate Polish Jews into ghettos, alluding to an unspecified “final aim.”7 In the summer of 1941, with preparations underway for invading Russia, large-scale mass murder initiatives – already practiced domestically upon the mentally ill and deformed – were broadly enacted against Jews. Heydrich, acting on Hitler’s orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the “special tasks” of annihilation in the Soviet Union of Jews and Soviet commissars.8 On July 31, Heydrich received orders from Goering to prepare plans “for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question” in all German-occupied areas.9 Eichmann, while awaiting trail in Israel in 1960, related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that “the Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.”10 Rudolph Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that “in the summer of 1941…Himmler said to me, ‘The Fuhrer has ordered the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”…I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose.’”11

On January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference to discuss and coordinate implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann later testified at his trial: These gentlemen…were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all…they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination.12

Ten days after the conference, while delivering a speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin that was recorded by the Allied monitoring service, Hitler declared: “The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews…the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least for a thousand years.”13 On February 24, 1943, he stated: “This

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struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.”14

Between five and six million Jews were eventually killed in the course of Hitler’s Final Solution. Footnotes:

1. Israel, Gutman, (Editor in Chief). Encycopedia of the Holocaust. Volume 2, New York, 1990, p788. 2. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Student Edition), New York, 1985, p. 263. 3. See Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, New York, 1975, pp 150-166. 4. Gutman, Volume 2, p 489. 5. Ibid., p. 489. 6. Gutman, Volume 2, p 490. 7. Holocaust, Jerusalem, 1974 p. 104. 8. Gutman, Volume 2, p. 657. 9. Ibid., p. 492. 10. Ronnie Dugger, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, p. 48 11. Gutman, Volume 2, pp. 641-642. 12. Ibid., Volume 4, p. 1593. 13. Dugger, p. 48. 14. Holocaust, pp. 105-106.

There Were No Gas Chambers Used for Mass Murder at Auschwitz and Other Camps. Death camp gas chambers were the primary means of execution used against the Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis issued a directive implementing large scale gas chambers in the Fall of 1941, but by then, procedures facilitating mass murder, including the utilization of smaller gas chambers, were already in practice. Before their use in death camps, gas chambers were central to Hitler’s "eugenics” program. Between January 1940 and August 1941, 70,273 Germans – most of them physically handicapped or mentally ill – were gassed, 20-30 at a time, in hermetically shut chambers disguised as shower rooms.1

Meanwhile, mass-shooting of Jews had been extensively practiced on the heels of Germany’s Eastern campaign. But these actions by murder squads had become an increasingly unwieldy process by October 1941. Three directors of the genocide, Erhard Wetzel, head of the Racial-Policy Office; Alfred Rosenberg, consultant of Jewish affairs for the Occupied Eastern Territories; and Victor Brack, deputy director of the Chancellory, met at the time with Adolf Eichmann to discuss the use of gas chambers in the genocide program.2 Thereafter, two technical advisors for the euthanasia gas chambers, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth and a Dr. Kallmeyer, were sent to the East to begin construction of mass gas chambers.3 Physicians who had implemented the euthanasia program were also transferred. Mobil gassing vans, using the exhaust fumes of diesel engines to kill passengers, were used at Chelmno, Belzec, and Treblinka starting in December 1941.4 Gas chambers were installed and operated at Lublin, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942 until November 1944. Working with chambers measuring an average 225 sq.ft., the Nazis forced to their deaths 700 to 800 men, women, and children at a time.5 Two-thirds of this program was completed in 1943-44, and at its heght it accounted for 20,000 victims per day.6 Authorities have estimated that these gas chambers accounted for the deaths of approximately two-and-a-half to three million Jews. Footnotes:

1. Israel Gutman (Editor in Chief), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, New York, 1990, p. 453. 2. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, New York, 1985, p. 219. 3. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume 3, New York, 1985, pp. 873-876. 4. Gutman, Volume 2, pp. 541-544. 5. Holocaust, Jerusalem, 1974, p. 86. 6. Ibid., p. 87.

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Holocaust scholars rely on the testimony of survivors because there is no objective documentation proving the Nazi genocide. Another frequent claim of Holocaust “revisionists” concerns what they describe as the lack of objective documentation proving the facts of the Holocaust and the reliance by scholars on biased and poorly recollected testimonies of survivors. However, the Germans themselves left no shortage of documentation and testimony to these events, and no serious scholar has relied solely on survivor testimony as the conclusive word on Holocaust history. Lucy Dawidowicz, in the preface to her authoritative work, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, wrote, “The German documents captured by the Allied armies at the war’s end have provided an incomparable historical record, which, with regard to volume and accessibility, as been unique in the annals of scholarship…The National Archives and the American Historical Association jointly have published sixty-seven volumes of Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Va. For my work I have limited myself mainly to published German documents.”1 The author then proceeds to list 303 published sources – excluding periodical – documenting the conclusions of her research. Among these sources are the writings of recognizable Nazi policy makers such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess, and Alfred Rosenberg. Similarly, Raul Hilberg, in his three-volume edition of the Destruction of the European Jews, wrote, “Between 1933 and 1945 the public offices and corporate entices of Nazi Germany generated a large volume of correspondence. Some of these documents were destroyed in Allied bombings, and many more were systematically burned in the course of retreats or in anticipation of surrender. Nevertheless, the accumulated paperwork of the German 139 Department of Multicultural Education, Revised 2009, The School District of Palm Beach County, Florida Holocaust Studies Curriculum All Rights Reserved 9th-12th Grade- Holocaust Studies Curriculum-US HISTORY bureaucracy was vast enough to survive in significant quantities, and even sensitive folders remained.”2 It is thus largely from these primary sources that the history of the Holocaust has been compiled. A new factor in this process is the sudden availability for innumerable records from the former Soviet Union, many of which had been overlooked or ignored since their capture at war’s end by the Red Army. Needless to say, the modification of specific details in this history is certain to continue for a number of years to come, considering the vastness and complicity of the events which comprise the Holocaust. However, it is equally certain that these modifications will only confirm the Holocaust’s enormity, rather than – as the “revisionists” would – call it into question. Footnotes:

1. Lucy Dawidowicz. The war Against the Jews: 1933-1945. New York, 1975, p. 437. 2. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume 3, New York, 1985, p. 123.

There was no net loss of Jewish lives between 1941 and 1945. Another frequent “revisionist” assertion calls into question the generally accepted estimates of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In attempting to portray the deaths of millions of Jews as an exaggeration or a fabrication, Holocaust deniers wildly manipulate reference-works, almanac statistics, geopolitical data, bedrock historical facts, and other sources of information and reportage. For example, “revisionists” commonly cite various almanac or atlas figures – typically compiled before comprehensive accounts on the Holocaust were available – that appear to indicate that the world-wide Jewish population before and after World War II remained essentially stable, thereby “proving” that six million Jews could not have died during this period. The widely cited “six million” figure is derived from the initial 1945 Nuremberg trial estimate of 5.7 million deaths; subsequent censuses, statistical analyses, and other demographic studies of European Jewry have consistently demonstrated the essential accuracy of this first tally.1 After nearly fifty years of study, historian agree that between five and six million Jews perished during the course of the Nazi genocide.2

In The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz offers a country-by-country accounting of Jewish deaths:

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