No Substitute for Victory

__"The Myth of Rescue" by William Rubinstein, in Prospect (July 1997), 4 Bedford Sq., London WC1B 3RA; "The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited: A Critical Analysis" by Richard H. Levy, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Winter 1996), Oxford Univ. Press, 2001 Evans Rd., Cary, N.C. 27513.__

Historians such as David Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews (1984), have argued that, out of indifference and anti-Semitism, the United States and Britain failed to do much to rescue Europe’s Jews from the Holocaust. This view has gained wide currency, but it completely misconstrues the situation that the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe faced, contends Rubinstein, a professor of history at the University of Wales, at Aberystwyth.

Before World War II, Nazi policy was to expel as many Jews as possible, not to kill them. The claim by Wyman and other critics that the West erected "almost insuperable barriers" to their emigration while "‘there was still time,’" Rubinstein says, is belied by the facts: 72 percent of Germany’s Jews, and an even higher percentage of Jewish children, "managed to flee before this became impossible [in late 1940], one of the greatest rescues of any beleaguered group in history." After Kristallnacht in November 1938 made it obvious that Jews had no future in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, no new Western barriers to Jewish immigration were raised, he notes. "On the contrary, more Jews left Germany in 1939 than in any other year." Britain radically liberalized its immigration policies for their benefit.

The Jewish refugees who escaped Hitler before the war came exclusively from Germany and its satellites, Rubinstein points out. While continental Europe then had a Jewish population of about 10 million, Germany in 1933, when Hitler came to power, was home to only about 500,000 Jews and Austria, 190,000. The Jewish population of the Sudetenland and other parts of Czechoslovakia that Hitler annexed during 1938–39 after the Munich accords was 115,000. The vast majority of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust lived elsewhere—in eastern Europe, particularly Poland, the Soviet Union, and Hungary— and, before the war, were not under Nazi domination and were not refugees.

The situation changed drastically, Rubinstein notes, with Hitler’s rapid conquest of most of continental Europe between 1939 and 1941. "From late 1940, Jews were specifically forbidden to emigrate from Nazi-occupied territory." Now, the Jews became prisoners, the barriers to their emigration "raised by the Nazis themselves, not by the western allies." And now, "only the military liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe could rescue any significant number of Jews."

Wyman and others have indicted the Allies for failing to bomb the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz. That possibility was widely discussed by Jewish leaders and British and American officials in the summer of 1944, notes Levy, a retired aeronautical engineer, in an extensive analysis of the controversy. Only the heavy bombers of the U.S. 15th Air Force, based in Italy, were capable of striking at Auschwitz, and the targets, including underground gas chambers, would have required very heavy bombing. The raids could well have failed to destroy all the gas chambers, would have impinged on the war effort, and probably would have killed or wounded thousands of the Jewish inmates. That would have given the Germans a pretext for blaming the deaths at Auschwitz on Allied bombing. For these reasons, Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress in New York and David Ben-Gurion of the Israeli "government-in-embryo" in Palestine opposed the idea at the time. Writes Rubinstein: "Only by winning the war as quickly as possible, and destroying the Nazi scourge, could the surviving Jews of Europe be liberated."