War aim or by-product?

Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. (The story of Witold Pilecki.) New York: HarperCollins, 2019, $28.99, Amazon $20.49, Kindle $13.99.

By 1 August 1946 the world knew the full truth of the Holocaust. Churchill said: “I had no idea, when the war came to an end, of the horrible massacres which had occurred.” Though he had reports from 1942 to 1944, his statement was broadly true. He did not realize the full magnitude and number of death camps until they were all liberated. Even then, it took time to reconstruct much evidence destroyed by the Nazis. Throughout the war,  many civil servants and ministries insisted that saving the Jews was not a war aim. but a by-product of victory.

“Show us the proof”

In the event, to save Jews, it was necessary to show proof of Nazi genocide. The evidential mountain was harder to scale given attitude of officialdom. Churchill knew and resented the broad anti-Semitism in his and Allied governments. The Jews, some officials said, exaggerated their mistreatment and were “prone to wailing.”

Similar arguments surfaced against Jewish immigration to the West at the Evian and Bermuda refugee conferences (1938, 1943). They added weight to Hitler’s assertions that nobody in the world wanted Jews among them. In Britain the Mandate of Palestine added another complication. Large numbers of Jewish refugees there, it was said, risked provoking the Arab population.

A problem with History as an intellectual discipline is that it is too easy after the fact. During the Second World War, nobody knew for a long time who would prevail. By the time they did, it was too late for hundreds of thousands. During the war, industrial genocide on the scale actually being practised was unknown to human beings, unimaginable to many. They learned too late.

Witold Pilecki: “Were we all…people?”

…was an ordinary person who did extraordinary things. In September 1940, he walked into a Nazi roundup of Poles with the object of being sent to Auschwitz. In 1940-41, Auschwitz mainly contained Poles. By 1942, however, Jews were the main component, and a grim change occurred. Poles had been persecuted; Jews were murdered. Pilecki reported the changing events, the construction of the gas chambers and crematoria. Eloquently, he contrasted the placid scene in the world beyond the fences:

When marching along the grey road towards the tannery in a column raising clouds of dust, one saw the beautiful red light of the dawn shining on the white flowers in the orchards and on the trees by the roadside, or on the return journey we would encounter young couples out walking, breathing in the beauty of springtime, or women peacefully pushing their children in prams. Then the thought uncomfortably bouncing around one’s brain would arise…. swirling around, stubbornly seeking some solution to the insoluble question: Were we all…people?”

After three years Pilecki escaped. He lived to survive the Nazis, only to fall to Poland’s next abusers, the Communists. He fought in the Warsaw Uprising in August-October 1944, and remained loyal to the government-in-exile after the Communist takeover. In 1947, he was arrested by the secret police and executed after a show trial. Fairweather’s Pilecki account is not altogether new. It was first told in Fighting Auschwitz (1975) by the Polish historian Józef Garliński, himself a former Auschwitz inmate.

Passing word to London

Pilecki reported to Underground leader Stefan Rowecki in October. Already Poles were asking that, “for the love of God,” Auschwitz should be leveled. It might be a suicide mission and cause panic, Pilecki opined, but some prisoners might escape. Rowecki send reports to Wladyslaw Sikorski, premier of the exiled government in London. Pilecki reported installation of the first gas chamber in mid-1942.

Sikorski had a problem. Many British hosts thought of Poles as “unruly foreigners with hard-to-pronounce names. ‘Sozzle-something,’ Churchill is reported to have called the senior Polish commander Kazimierz Sosnkowski.” The British knew of German concentration camps being used to corral enemy soldiers. They were reluctant to accept Polish reports of atrocities.

Then there was the mechanics of an attack. Britain was  struggling to keep its bombers airborne, let alone hit targets as far east as Poland. Too often, “bombing” consisted of opening the bomb bays after having flown for “about the right amount of time”! Sometimes the enemy had no idea what they were aiming at.

Portal, Prime Minister and Pope

Fairweather says Churchill’s schedule was too full to hear them, which contradicts the evidence (see Addendum below). Pilecki’s appeals reached the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal. His response was curt. Bombing Auschwitz was a diversion, he said, given the need to concentrate on German industrial plants. The “weight of bombs” at this distance with the limited force available [was] very unlikely to cause enough damage to enable prisoners to escape.”

In November The New York Times published the first reports of exterminations at Auschwitz in western media. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress brought a report mentioning Auschwitz to Roosevelt. FDR said he was aware, but did nothing. “Roosevelt didn’t reveal his concerns about stoking anti-Semitism at home by focusing on Jewish suffering.” Fairweather makes a powerful case that Anglo-American governments were chary about provoking more anti-Semitism.

Fairweather reports that the Foreign Office “repeatedly told the Poles, reprisals are such are ruled out…. The Poles are being very irritating over this.” He does not report that Churchill himself discussed bombing reprisals as early as December 1942. (See addendum.)

Pilecki’s “Polishness”

In fairness, Fairweather notes that Pilecki never saw the Holocaust “as the defining act of World War II.” His essence was “his Polishness or his sense of national struggle.”

We asked Esther, Lady Gilbert, a Holocaust historian like her late husband Sir Martin, for her view of The Volunteer. Its story, she believes, is “of the Polish experience, horrible as that was. But if by ‘Holocaust’ we specifically mean the intention to wipe out every last Jew and Jewish community, it is not a Holocaust story. The Polish Underground split between the Armia Krajowa, the Home Army, and the Armia Ludowa, the Polish Communists. If better organised and working together, he might have made more impact.”

One good effect of Pilecki’s reports, Lady Gilbert continues, was the Allied War Declaration of December 1942. It was plain, and stark: “German authorities, not content with denying [Jews] the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.”

The Auschwitz Protocols

Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz in April 1943. Reports that Auschwitz was exterminating masses of Jews came with eye-witness escapees’ reports (the Auschwitz Protocols) between December 1943 and April 1944. These prompted Churchill’s famous command: “Get everything out of the air force you can, and invoke me if necessary.” As in 1941, the plenary authorities considered, and again said no, mainly for the same reasons. The full account is in Sir Martin Gilbert’s definitive book, Auschwitz and the Allies.

Fairweather says bombing the camp would have “alerted the world” to what was going on. Perhaps not. The Allied Declaration had alerted the world, with little reaction. The Germans were adept at covering up. Even when presented with Auschwitz Protocols, Allied officials found reasons not to send bombers. Some distrusted Polish underground sources. Military priorities motivated others. Well into 1943, just holding their own was a challenge. Then there was the question of Jewish objections to bombing the inmates—a widely shared view.

Fairweather says the decision not to bomb was “unconscionable.” In hindsight, it certainly seems so. At the time? Thoughtful people may differ over that. History stumbles along the trail of the past, Churchill said, trying to “kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”

A place among the Righteous

Fairweather believes Pilecki and his compatriots do not receive the credit they deserve. Getting himself shipped to Auschwitz was a breath-taking act of bravery. History will value Pilecki’s eloquent story of the victims of Nazi, and later Communist, crimes against humanity.

We searched for the name of Witold Pilecki on the website “Righteous Among the Nations,” part of the Yad Vashem Memorial site in Jerusalem. Lady Gilbert explains the reasons in her comment below.

Addendum by Richard Langworth

In 1940, Fairweather has Churchill “on the roof of his secure accommodation” watching the Blitz. Rooftops in the Blitz were not secure. Staffers talked the PM down for his own safety. Churchill did not sit there contentedly watching the fires.

More serious is the assertion that the Poles couldn’t get Churchill’s attention because his schedule was too busy. A cursory reading of The Churchill Documents would show he made time for much less serious things than this. He had a capacity for detail that put many to shame. And the record shows that he made time for the Poles.

Eight days after the December 1942 Allied Declaration, Sikorski described the “mass expulsion of the Polish population, slaughter and mass executions” in five Polish districts. He did not mention Jews. The Chiefs of Staff Committee met on 31 December. There, Churchill asked Portal about bombing “certain targets in Poland” as a reprisal—as the Poles had asked. Portal replied January 3rd:

…the carrying out of air attacks as  reprisals…would be an explicit admission that we were bombing civilians as such and might well invite brutal vengeance on our air crews. [The Polish request is] more strictly a political warfare matter and relates to the Jews. [Hitler] has so often stressed that this is a war by the Jews to exterminate Germany that it might well be, therefore, that a raid, avowedly conducted on account of the Jews, would be an asset to enemy propaganda.

* * *

Three days later Portal amplified his reasoning. Fairweather notes that the Polish 303 Squadron shot down more Germans in the Battle of Britain than any other unit. Portal’s words show that he too appreciated the Poles’ brave contribution. From Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 222:

It would be “very unprofitable [Portal wrote] to divert our best bombers to Polish targets and to keep them waiting for long periods for the moonlight and good weather without which they could not locate such distant objectives.” In addition, “the small scale of attack” which Britain could produce at such a distance “would not be impressive as a reprisal.” It would be more effective, Portal wrote, after a successful air-raid over Germany, to emphasise “to the world” the part played in such a raid by the Polish Air Force.”

It seems so simple in retrospect: bomb Auschwitz, stop the killing. Our knowledge of the horror overwhelms contemporary factors. Portal added that a reprisal, however ineffective would overwhelm the RAF “with requests from all other Allies that we should also redress their grievances in the same way.” The result would be nothing but “token reprisals which would not only be completely ineffective as deterrents but would also destroy the last shred of the cloak of legality which at present covers our operations.” —RML

The Auschwitz myth

“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders,” Churchill wrote. [1] A war leader is “the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations—all take their seat at the Council Board….” [2]

Churchill’s most flagrant inaction, according to many critics, was failing to bomb Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp, or the rail lines leading to it. Everyone knows Churchill received confirmation of the full extent of the Holocaust too late to halt the worst of it. The controversy is over what he did when he did learn of it, particularly Auschwitz.

The sum of all fears

Rumors of what was happening had circulated from early in the war. But not until June 1944 did five Auschwitz escapees bring concrete evidence which fully awakened the Allies. Churchill received the details on 27 June 1944, following a telegram from Richard Lichtheim. A German Zionist in Switzerland, Lichtheim had contacted the British legation in Berne.

He reported the deportation of nearly half of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews to Auschwitz. There in the past year over 1.5 million European Jews met their deaths. He offered detailed reports on four crematoria, burning 12,000 gassed Jews per day. [3] The same week, the Manchester Guardian reported this news.

Churchill read Lichtheim’s report and minuted Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: “What can be done?” [4] Amid the horrific facts, confusion reigned. The Jewish Agency was actually pondering an offer from Adolf Eichmann, an organizer of the “Final Solution.” Eichmann proposed to trade surviving Jews for military equipment: “I am prepared to sell you all the Jews. I am also prepared to have them all annihilated.” Eichmann expressed himself indifferent: “It is as you wish.” [5]

Churchill had incomplete information, but his reaction was unequivocal:

There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. [6]

The Jewish Agency’s requests

A week after the Lichtheim telegram, Churchill and Eden received the report from the five Auschwitz escapees. Their concern, and that of the Jewish Agency, was that deportations of Hungarian Jews were still occuring. Two days later, Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok, the two senior Zionists in Britain, made five urgent requests. The first four were (1) an Allied declaration of readiness to admit Jewish refugees. (2) Issuance of protective documents for Budapest Jews by nations with embassies there. (3) War crimes charges against any Hungarians involved in deportations. (4) A similar warning by Stalin. The British government acceded immediately. Churchill himself drafted a declaration he hoped Stalin would issue.  

The fifth and key request by Weizmann and Shertok was to bomb the railway lines leading from Budapest to Auschwitz, or the death camp itself. When Churchill read this, wrote Martin Gilbert,

he did something I’ve not seen on any other document submitted to Churchill for his approval: He wrote on it what he wanted done. Normally, he would have said, “Bring this up to War Cabinet on Wednesday,” or, “Let us discuss this with the Air Ministry.” Instead, he wrote to Eden on 7 July: “Is there any reason to raise this matter with the Cabinet? Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.” I have never seen a minute of Churchill’s giving that sort of immediate authority to carry out a request. [7]

“Out of our power”

Eden immediately conveyed Churchill’s order to Minister of Air Sir Archibald Sinclair, asking him to report back. With a lack of celerity we may regret and even deplore, Sinclair didn’t reply until July 15th. He considered destroying the railways “out of our power.” It worked in Normandy only by “enormous concentration” of bombers, and at much shorter range from airbases. Bombing Auschwitz by night (the RAF’s usual mission) was declared impossible. Daytime bombing (the US Army Air Force mission) would be “costly and hazardous.” But Sinclair would be happy to pass the query to Americans. “A characteristically unhelpful letter,” Eden noted. “He wasn’t asked his opinion of this; he was asked to act.” [8]

Sinclair’s request went U.S. Undersecretary of War John J. McCloy, who had actually been approached earlier by Jewish leaders. They asked him authorize bombing the railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. He refused. He would again. In all, five separate requests to bomb Auschwitz or its rail lines reached McCloy’s desk. Each was denied. After the fifth request, McCloy said bombing could only be done by diverting essential air support from vital operations. Even then it would be of “doubtful efficacy.” It might provoke “even more vindictive action by the Germans. [9] It is hard to conceive of more “vindictive action.”

The options difficult, the choices appalling

Jews themselves frequently argued against bombing Auschwitz. One was Leon Kubowitzki, head of the Rescue Department of the World Jewish Congress. Kubowitzki argued that bombing meant that “the first victims would be the Jews who are gathered in these camps.” [10]

Kubowitzki’s alternative was to dispatch paratroopers to seize the camps and liberate the inmates. But where would they go? This was not clear, nor were available resources at hand. Bombing Auschwitz would certainly mean death for most inmates. Balance that against saving future victims who had not yet arrived. There was also the question of whether the Germans would simply rebuild Auschwitz, or transport Jews elsewhere. The options were difficult to measure, the available information sparse and vague, the choices appalling.

The mythology of Auschwitz

The evidence of Churchill’s concern and urge to act seems plain, but he has his critics. The most effective of these, Michael J. Cohen, leveled several charges against Churchill and Martin Gilbert. [11] Cohen quoted Churchill’s striking July 7th order, “get what you can out of the RAF,” but omitted Churchill’s two imprecations: invoke his name, and bypass the War Cabinet. Churchill’s description of “the greatest and most horrible crime in the whole history of the world,” Cohen wrote, simply retreaded something Churchill said about Turkish massacres of Armenians. No such earlier quotation is among Churchill’s writings or papers.

Cohen did not credit Churchill for granting the Jewish Agency’s first four requests, which unquestionably saved Jewish lives. He rightly pointed out that Auschwitz continued to murder people for months after deportations from Hungary ended. In August, for example, thousands of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were deported to Auschwitz. More than half perished immediately. According to Gilbert, for weeks these Lodz deportations, and trainloads from Rhodes and elsewhere remained unknown. But enough was known, Gilbert adds, “to stimulate a further Jewish request for the bombing of the camps.” On 8 August “the World Jewish Congress appealed to the War Refugee Board in Washington….” [12]  This was the fifth and final plea that John McCloy denied.

On July 8th, a day after the Jewish Agency’s five requests, Churchill prodded Eden for an Allied “tripartite declaration…. I am entirely in accord with making the biggest outcry possible.” Two days later, he was pressing for a Jewish Brigade Group, something he campaigned for and finally saw accomplished in October. [13]

“Surely publicity might have a chance…”

Professor Cohen ignored these evidences of Churchill’s continued concern. Instead he claimed Churchill “turned down the bombing project” in letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Melchett on 13 July.

The facts are very different, as one may learn by reviewing the actual letters. There is nothing in either letter about “turning down” the bombing. Churchill wrote Melchett and the Archbishop “that the most earnest consideration has been given by my colleagues and myself to this matter and to the question whether any action is open that might stay the criminals.” He added, correctly, that the “principal hope” of Jews was “the speedy victory of the Allied Nations.” [14] This cannot be interpreted as a refusal to bomb Auschwitz or its rail lines. Indeed, Churchill would not have the Air Ministry’s appraisal for another four days.

Professor Cohen agreed that deportations of Jews from Hungary ceased on 9 July. But he alleged that the deportations from elsewhere, which cost 150,000 lives between July and November, “never occurred to Churchill.” Yet in October 1944, when reports of continued murders reached him, Churchill wrote to Eden: “Surely publicity given about this might have a chance of saving the multitudes concerned.” [15]  The Soviets had demurred, furious over charges of Red Army massacres of Poles in the Katyn Forest. The Anglo-Americans, however, issued joint warnings. To everyone’s surprise, Berlin responded: “These reports are false from beginning to end.” (If you’re going to lie, lie big.)

“A gruesome duty”

Advancing Allied troops discovered  the full extent of the Holocaust in early 1945. Churchill wrote to his wife, who was in Moscow, of  “horrible revelations of German cruelty in the concentration camps.” Eisenhower asked for a visit by a Parliamentary delegation. He wrote: “They will go to the spot and see the horrors for themselves—a gruesome duty.”¹⁶

The crucial days of June and July 1944, when news of the Holocaust arrived in London, confirmed Churchill’s descriptions of war: unforeseeable and uncontrollable events, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprises and awful miscalculations. Whatever we may think of the decision not to bomb Auschwitz or its rail lines, it was not based on Allied attitudes toward the Jews. It was based on military priorities and resources as seen at the time.

When Churchill first heard of the massacres, he faced another priority. It was to break out from the Normandy beachhead. The Allied invading armies had not yet reached Caen and St. Lô. It would be ten more days before St. Lô fell and the armies could begin their advance across France. Also, at home, Churchill faced another massacre—of British civilians from Hitler’s flying bombs. No one at the time knew whether these were a feeble, last-ditch effort or a new form of airborne destruction.

Churchill was not, as some of his partisans like to believe, all-prescient and all-knowing. But it is wrong to believe he did not do all he could in response to the horror of Auschwitz.

Endnotes

1. 1. Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself: In his Own Words, 187.
   2. Ibid., 192.
   3. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 251. The initial estimate was 15,000, a slight exaggeration.
   4. Ibid., 252; Churchill Archives Centre, Premier Papers, 4/51/10.
   5. Ibid., 201-02; Churchill Archives Centre, Foreign Office Papers, 371/42811.
   6. Churchill to Eden, 11 July 1944, Foreign Office papers, 371/42809.
   7. Martin Gilbert, “Churchill and the Holocaust,” Holocaust Museum, Washington, 8 November 1993, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Proceedings of the International Churchill Societies 1992-1993, 57.
   8. Gilbert, Auschwitz, 285.
   9. David S. Wyman, “Why Auschwitz was Never Bombed” in Commentary, May 1978 65(5): 40.
   10. 10. Leon Kubowitzki to War Refugee Board, 1 July 1944.
   11. Michael J. Cohen, “The Churchill-Gilbert Symbiosis: Myth and Reality,” review of Gilbert’s Churchill and the Jews, in Modern Judaism, 2008 28(2): 204-28. See also his 1985 book, Churchill and the Jews.
   12. Gilbert, Auschwitz, 302-03.
   13. Prime Minister’s Personal Minutes M 806/4 (8 July 1944) and C 45/4 (10 July 1944), Churchill Archives Centre.
   14. Winston S. Churchill to the Archbishop of Canterbury; Churchill to Lord Melchett, both 13 July 1944, Chartwell Papers CHAR 20/138A, in Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, Normandy and Beyond: May-December 1944.
   15. Premier Papers, 3/352/4/ folio 70. Gilbert, Auschwitz, 325.
   16. Winston S. Churchill to his wife, 20 April 1945, in Mary Soames, ed., Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, 527.