The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis - Softcover

Rubinstein, W.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415212499 ISBN 13: 9780415212496

Verlag: Routledge, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

In this controversial book the author challenges the convention that the allies did little or nothing to rescue Europes Jews. The author responds to the controversy caused by his views in a new introduction to this edition.

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William D.Rubinstein

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The Myth of Rescue

Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the NazisBy William D. Rubinstein

Routledge

Copyright © 1999 William D. Rubinstein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0415212499

Chapter One

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF RESCUE

There can be few subjects in the whole range of modern history on whichcontemporary opinion differed so sharply from the views of laterhistorians and authors than the topic of the rescue of Jews by thedemocracies during the Nazi Holocaust. During the Second World War, Jews(and non-Jewish anti-Nazis) looked upon the celebrated leaders of thegreat democracies at war with Nazi Germany--Winston Churchill and FranklinD. Roosevelt--as the heads of the armies of liberation which would freethe whole world, and the Jewish people in particular, from the Naziscourge. In December 1944, Joseph Hertz, the British Chief Rabbi, issued abirthday message to Winston Churchill which read:

But for your wisdom and courage there would have been a Vichy England lying prostrate before an all-powerful Satanism that spelled slavery to the western peoples, death to Israel, and night to the sacred heritage of man. May Heaven grant you many more years of brilliant leadership in the rebuilding of a ruined world.

American Jews constituted `the most loyal and loving' of Franklin D.Roosevelt's constituencies; to American anti-semites, Roosevelt's policieswere so philosemitic and influenced by `Jewish power' as to constitute the`Jew Deal'. A Jewish Republican Congressman of the 1930s, Jonah J.Goldstein, concluded that `the Jews have three velten [worlds]: die velt[this world], yene velt [the next world], and Roosevelt'. Yet recentlymuch has changed. Commenting upon `the strange turn in the attitude ofAmerican Jews towards Franklin D. Roosevelt in the recent past', thefamous historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr noted that:

For a long time [Roosevelt] was a hero. No president had appointed so many Jews to public office. No president had surrounded himself with so many Jewish advisers. No president had condemned anti-Semitism with such eloquence and persistence. Jews were mostly liberals in those faraway days, and a vast majority voted four times for FDR.

This great and profound change in the perception of the Allies andtheir leaders arose fairly abruptly between the late 1960s and themid-1980s, wholly as a result of a near-universal perception that theAllies did virtually nothing to rescue Europe's Jews during the Holocaust.By the late 1980s, every examination of the Allied response to theHolocaust was compelled to take into account the belief, by then virtuallyuniversal, that the democracies `did nothing' during Hitler's `FinalSolution', and were--to many--guilty of being virtual accomplices in theHolocaust. The list of alleged Allied failures is long, ranging fromclosing their doors to Jewish refugee emigration prior to and during theHolocaust, forestalling the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine whenthis was most necessary as a place of refuge, failing to bomb Auschwitz orany other death camp, failing to engage in negotiations with the Naziswith the aim of bartering for Jewish life and failing, until early 1944,to create any specialised government agency to save Jewish lives,oblivious to the fact that Hitler was engaged in a `war against the Jews'.The alleged reasons for these failings were also manifold, includingstrong and pervasive anti-semitism and anti-Zionism among both theAmerican and British opinion-makers and masses, ignorance of Naziintentions, bureaucratic inertia and an inability to internalise theunbelievable horrors of the Holocaust during the war itself. As well, itis widely suggested that the Jewish communities of the democracies were,by later standards, extraordinarily supine during Jewry's hour of greatestneed, deeply divided and afraid to become overly visible or demonstrativeduring a world war.

These are seemingly powerful arguments, repeatedly reiterated by experthistorians and by now entrenched in the popular imagination. Yet all ofthese arguments in my opinion are wrong and lacking in merit; the rest ofthis work will show why they are grossly misleading and inaccurate. It isfirst worth examining how the historiography of rescue emerged, in itscontemporary form, and how the Jewish and anti-Nazi view of Churchill andRoosevelt as supreme heroes and liberators changed so radically.

For the first twenty years or so after the end of the Second World War,probably no historical work on the Holocaust criticised the actions of theAllies or suggested that much more could have been done which was notdone. All of these early works on the Holocaust, not surprisingly,focused upon the guilt of the Nazis and their allies. Perhaps the firstconsidered work to attack the Allies for their failures in rescuing Jewswas a little-noted article by Reuben Ainsztein, a Holocaust survivor whowas well known as a historian of Jewish revolt in the ghettos andconcentration camps, entitled `How Many More Could Have Been Saved?'Ainsztein's article, which appeared in the British periodical JewishQuarterly in 1967, contained a surprisingly large component of thecritique of Allied policy which has since become standard, years beforeother historians made the same point. For instance, it offered an accurateexamination of when news of the `Final Solution' first became known in theWest, more than a decade before this question was examined in detail byother historians. Ainsztein's claim (p. 17) that

the racist and antisemitic elements in the United States, allied with the still powerful isolationist forces, were strong enough even in 1943 to provide President Roosevelt and his State Department with excuses for not doing anything that might be interpreted as making the rescue of Jews one of America's war aims

has been echoed in dozens of subsequent examinations of this question. Yetit must also be said that, remarkably early, Ainsztein managed to makevirtually every historical and logical error one could possibly make inexamining this question, including the fons et origio mali, the convictionthat the limited number of refugees accepted by the United States afterthe war began was due to its restrictive immigration laws, rather than tothe fact that Hitler prevented these Jews from emigrating, prior togenocide. Perhaps only the alleged failure to bomb Auschwitz--notmentioned by Ainsztein--is absent from the now-standard bill ofindictment.

Ainsztein's unnoticed article appeared shortly before the first booksto take the failure of the Allies as their themes: Arthur Morse's WhileSix Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York, 1968) andDavid S. Wyman's Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938--1941(Boston, 1968). The 1970s saw yet more books on this theme, among them thebalanced and scholarly monograph by Henry L. Feingold, The Politics ofRescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938--1945 (NewBrunswick, NJ, 1970), a work which is, nonetheless, critical of Americanpolicy and already aware of the new, negative interpretation of thistopic, and also such works as Saul Friedman's No Haven For the Oppressed:United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938--1945 (Detroit, 1973)and Herbert Druks' The Failure to Rescue (New York, 1977), whose titlesaccurately indicate their perspective.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s there appeared the writings whichprobably had the most significant impact upon the notion that the Alliesfailed to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. They were by David S. Wyman,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Routledge
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0415212499
• ISBN 13: 9780415212496
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 298
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Routledge; https://www.routledge-ny.com/; ; Stockst?dter Str. 20; Gro?ostheim; Bayern; Deutschland