A Calculated Restraint: Examines Leaders’ Controversial Response To The Holocaust

“Churchill and Roosevelt believed that if they criticized Nazi persecution of the Jews, many Europeans and some Americans would have taken their words as evidence supporting Nazi accusations that Jews had great influence over their governments,” says Breitman. “Both men had to gauge the impact of their words at a time when antisemitism was prevalent throughout much of the world and the fate of civilization rested on military victory”.

When Churchill and Stalin alluded to Nazi mass killings of civilians in speeches during the second half of 1941, they said much less than they knew. Not until December 1942 did Allied governments issue a joint statement about Nazi Germany’s policy of exterminating the Jews of Europe. Roosevelt deferred his own public statement specifically about Nazi killings of Jews until March 1944, when his War Refugee Board thought he could deter Hungary from collaborating in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. FDR’s warning initially failed but had a delayed effect, serving to complement the War Refugee Board’s rescue efforts in Hungary.

Through close readings of public and private statements, Richard Breitman pieces together the competing motivations that drove each leader’s response to the atrocities. All three knew that their reactions would be politically sensitive, as Nazi propagandists frequently alleged that the Allies were fighting on behalf of theJews, and that Jews were the puppet-masters behind their governments. At a time of globally prevalent antisemitism, these lies held power. After the German invasion of the USSR, moreover, Stalin clearly wanted to focus on the threat to the Soviet state and its people. Nazi antisemitism did not fit into Communist ideology, and once the war in the East began, Stalin feared Nazi slaughter of the entire Soviet population.

Churchill and Roosevelt also realized that their complete silence about Nazi killings of Jews would prompt accusations of willful blindness.They usually finessed this dilemma by denouncing Nazi atrocities in general, prioritizing wartime constraints over moral considerations.

Moral critics have complained that the three Allied leaders could have done more to save Jews even while fighting the Axis and criticized Allied military decisions not to pursue the bombing of rail lines and the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For most of the Holocaust, none of the three was a rescuer. If they had spoken out more clearly against Nazi genocide it might have added credibility to warnings that Jews in Axis-controlled territories were already receiving. Breitman concludes, however, that ending the war was their main strategy to stop the Holocaust — for if the war in Europe had lasted longer, the Nazis would have killed hundreds of thousands more Jews. Bombing of rail lines was seen as ineffective during the war, and bombing of the gas chambers was a long-range, longshot mission that, even if accomplished, would not have halted Nazi killing of Jews through other means. The humanitarian efforts of the War Refugee Board in Hungary, resulting in the survival of about 119,000 Jews in Budapest, belie the claim that the Western allies were simply indifferent to the Holocaust in Hungary.

Timely and incisive, A Calculated Restraint sheds new light on the relationship between World War II and the Holocaust. Ultimately, the Allied leaders’ responses cannot be reduced to a matter of character. What they said — and chose not to say — about the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military demands that drove their decision-making. A Calculated Restraint also shows how the Holocaust still influences today’s extremist antisemitic movements and reactions to them. A Calculated Restraint (Harvard University Press; 352 pages; ISBN 9780674293649) is available at Amazon, Harvard University Press, Barnes and Noble and Bookshop.org.

Richard Breitman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at American University. His many books include FDR and the Jews, co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman; The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within; Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew; and The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution.

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