Dr. Robert H. Abzug is Professor of History and American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

America and the Holocaust Anne Frank's diary entry for June 6, 1944, begins: "This is D-Day" ... this is the day. ... The best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are approaching." Frank's excited assessment reflected well on what for twenty-five years, until about 1970, stood as the main image of America's relation to what we now call the Holocaust. We were liberators pure and simple, the destroyers of Hitler's war machine and rescuers of a saving remnant in the concentration camps. In this first rendering of America and the Holocaust, we had discovered the reality of Nazi genocide late in the war and really believed it only after seeing the awful scenes in the liberated camps. Newsreel images seemed to tell it all: outraged American officials and soldiers viewing piles of dead bodies and ministering to emaciated survivors. Such scenes at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other camps gave new meaning to the war and to the Allied victory over Germany. Since the late 1960s, however, historians have raised a series of questions concerning the relation of the Allies to the Holocaust. When did the Allies actually come to know about Nazi genocide? Could anything have been done during the war to rescue victims or stall the perpetrators of genocide? If so, to what degree did the Allies avail themselves of these opportunities? The answers have not been comforting. Such scholars as David Wyman, Henry Feingold, Saul Friedman, Martin Gilbert, Walter Laqueur, Deborah Lipstadt, and others effectively have made a shambles of the simple drama of liberation, and left in its place a disturbing story of indifference and betrayal. One distressing discovery was how early the Allies became aware of Nazi plans and actions for mass murder. Numerous historians have demonstrated that the West possessed verifiable contemporaneous accounts of the wanton murder of Jews in the Polish campaign of 1939, their relocation into ghettoes in the following year, and their slaughter in the fields of Russia in 1941. Historians also have confirmed that the Allies had accurate reports of the operations of various extermination camps as early as the autumn of 1942, just months after such operations began in earnest. They point out that in 1943, the Polish underground courier Jan Karski brought his eyewitness accounts of the extermination camp at Belzec and the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto to members of the British government as well as to President Roosevelt and other American officials. This information was not simply in the hands of government intelligence services. Newspapers and news magazines regularly reported news of massacres, population relocations, and Nazi rhetoric concerning the Jews. As information leaked out of Europe concerning the extermination camps, this too appeared in the American press. Furthermore, in July 1944, newspapers and magazines reported the Russian capture of Majdanek and included pictures of its warehouses filled with clothing, eyeglasses, and human hair. In that same year, Jan Karski recounted his eyewitness accounts and futile visits to London and Washington in The Secret State. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. More important, these same scholars have formulated a dismal picture of Allied failure to use such information. Time after time, they argue, officials in London and Washington had the opportunity to act more aggressively against Nazi genocide and to rescue refugees even while prosecuting the war. Time after time, they refused. In the most sensational example, Wyman contended that by 1944 detailed maps and reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz and Birkenau existed, making strategic bombing possible. When several groups recommended bombing the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the railroad tracks leading to the camp, the U.S. Army Air Force and the British Air Force both refused. They cited the need to concentrate on military targets and the distance of the target from existing air bases. Yet, as Wyman pointed out, the Army Air Force had already carried out a successful bombing raid on the Buna plant that was part of the Auschwitz complex. The British, in particular, impeded rescue plans because they feared that "to unload an even greater number of Jews on to our hands," as one official put it, would put pressure on England to open Palestine for refugee settlement. At various times during the war, when small numbers of escapees tried to sail out of Europe to Palestine, the Royal Navy badgered them, turned them around, left them adrift, or interned them in squalid camps. Nor did the Western allies channel aid to Jewish partisan movements, this despite ardent pleas for help during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and similar actions. One shining exception to this policy of inaction is evident. Sidestepping State Department and Congressional opposition, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau convinced President Roosevelt in January, 1944 to set up the War Refugee Board by executive order and to charge it with a mission of rescue. At its head was John Pehle, a Christian deeply committed to the proposition that the rescue of Jews and others from the Nazis would only bolster, and not interfere, with the war effort. Deputies of the WRB fanned out over neutral and even occupied Europe, searching for ways and means of saving Jews. The War Refugee Board did its work despite the obstruction of the State Department, the Russians, and the British, and despite indifference or opposition in Congress. The WRB involved itself in various small rescue operations, but it is known for one great accomplishment: the support and funding of Raoul Wallenberg in his work to save the Jews of Hungary from shipment to Auschwitz in 1944. It was a mission that, in total, saved the lives of 20,000 Hungarian Jews. Some have used the WRB to illustrate how much more might have been done, and they argue that it was an example of "too little and too late." In all, the evidence of knowledge and inaction is so overwhelming that it has all but destroyed the older liberator image of the Allies in relation to the Holocaust. In the most influential rendering of the new picture, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-45, David Wyman, a Christian scholar, gave no quarter: "America, the land of refuge, offered little succor. American Christians forgot about the Good Samaritan. Even American Jews lacked the unquenchable sense of urgency the crisis demanded. The Nazis were the murderers, but we were the all too passive accomplices... The Holocaust was certainly a Jewish tragedy. But it was not only a Jewish tragedy. It was also a Christian tragedy, a tragedy for Western civilization, and a tragedy for all humankind. The killing was done by people, to other people, while still others stood by." As a judgment on the American past that developed in a period of general, highly critical reassessment, this vision passed beyond academia into public consciousness and rhetoric. Even before the publication of Wyman's book, the survivor and writer Elie Wiesel spoke for the victims as the evidence of Allied inaction came to the fore. "During the turmoil the victims were naive enough to feel certain that the so-called civilized world knew nothing of their plight. If the killers could kill freely, it was only because the Allies were not informed. . . . They were wrong. . . . People knew-and kept silent. People knew-and did nothing. . . . No effort was initiated, no political or military operation undertaken to save them. . . . It was an amazing display of detachment, of laissez faire, de-monstrating an attitude shared, in fact, by the leaders of the free Jewish communities." . . . ("A Plea for the Survivors," published originally in the New York Times Magazine, August 1978) Such historical judgments have become incorporated into our vision of current affairs. Thus many have drawn a parallel between the Holocaust and recent enormities in Bosnia and Rwanda, and have urged action using a bold analogy: Then we stood by and millions perished. This time we must act. Clearly the example of Allied inaction profoundly informs our sense of global responsibilities, whether in the case of humanitarian aid, contemplated interventions, or immigration policies. Whether we act or not in any specific case, the shadow of Auschwitz remains. It is one thing to compile overwhelming evidence of inaction, another to explain it. Why was so little done? The new scholarship has given a number of explanations. The legacy of fabricated anti-German stories from World War I predisposed many to dismiss reports about roundups and mass killings as atrocity propaganda. Anti-Semitic feeling was never higher in England and America than during World War II, further compromising efforts toward action. Even friendly officials balked at extraordinary action lest anti-Semitic sentiment be stirred up and hinder the war effort. Wyman especially emphasizes the role of hostility toward Jews among key members of the State Department. He brands as anti-Semitic the venerable Breckenridge Long, who wielded enormous power over immigration, for limiting Jewish emigration to the United States before and during the war. Wyman also condemns American Jewish organizations for feuding among themselves and for being too reticent about demanding action (though he also recognizes the uncomfortable position in which public expressions of anti-Semitism placed them). Thus anti-Semites, petty and mean-spirited bureaucrats, cowardly politicians, and a passive as well as unbelieving citizenry formed the cast of characters of a drama in which only toleration, good will, and courage were needed to save, in Wyman's estimate, at least a few hundred thousand and perhaps as many as close to two million lives. More recent work in the field, however, sees more complicated historical and moral issues raised by the subject. In American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945, Alan Kraut and Richard Breitman, two perceptive recent historians of the refugee question before and during World War II, have noted of Wyman's general stance: "This sweeping judgment may seem morally appropriate, in view of the magnitude of the tragedy, but it obliterates important distinctions of behavior among individuals and among governments. . . . And to castigate every politician or private citizen who did not "move heaven or earth" in a desperate effort to halt the final solution is to condemn virtually the whole world." But it is not only on the basis of moral unreasonableness that such condemnations have been called into question. Taking a less moralistic, more pessimistic reading than Wyman, Kraut, and Breitman argue that we should not exaggerate what might have been done effectively to save Jews and others from the grip of the Nazis. Wyman's case concerning the bombing of Auschwitz, for instance, depends on an inordinate confidence in the accuracy of bombing strikes, something that has been disputed by various experts who say that it would have been as likely as not that more Jews might have been killed in the raids than saved. Members of the World Jewish Congress made this point at the time. In any case, it is clear that even the most successful bombing raid would not have done much to end the slaughter. As for immigration restriction, which Wyman attributes to anti-Semitism, Kraut and Breitman argue was the result of the State Department's narrow, bureaucratic self-image as gatekeeper for America-that is, to protect the nation from spies and unsupportable or unassimilable refugees in times of economic crisis and, later, war. In any case, Kraut and Breitman read the statistics more generously than Wyman. Instead of emphasizing how many refugees were turned down, they note that almost 150,000 Germans, mostly Jews, came to this country legally between March 1938 and September 1939, half of those who applied. This was true despite the opposition of many in Congress and public fears of job competition. Further challenge to Wyman's thesis that anti-Semitism was the leading cause of immigration restriction just before and during the war comes from the Israeli scholar, Haim Genizi. Genizi's research on the activities of governmental agencies as well as Christian church and lay groups demonstrates that Americans offered quite as little help to Christian refugees from Europe as they did to Jews. Anti-Semitism was certainly a factor, but it may not have had as much differential impact as Wyman and others have suspected. Such findings can hold little comfort for us. Kraut, Breitman, and Genizi if anything paint a more pessimistic picture of affairs during the war than the one presented by the earlier generation of scholars. At least in Wyman's scenario, if certain individuals had not been making decisions and more charitable souls had replaced them, things might have looked better for Europe's Jews. Kraut and Breitman emphasize instead the problems endemic to bureaucratic decision making that would have affected any policymaker. They also make the very important argument that the Germans were relentless in their determination to kill Jews, and that negotiations or other efforts to save their would-be victims seemed doomed to failure except through total military victory. Genizi adds his own portrait of American limits on aid to refugees of any religion and ethnicity. In 1943, Jan Karski made the general point as he observed this history unfolding: "The world has become cold and unfriendly, nations and individuals separated by immense gulfs of indifference, selfishness, and convenience." If nothing else, the various interpretations of Allied inaction isolate an extraordinary and unresolved philosophical question concerning consciousness and free will. If Wyman and others who stress anti-Semitism and evil characters as the villains in this story are right, all it would have taken to rescue many more Jews was the replacement of these villains by those who saw more clearly the great moral issues involved. By Kraut and Breitman's lights, even those moral men and women, had they been in positions of power, would have been compromised (perhaps without knowing it) by the same commitments to a bureaucratic ethos of service and orderly procedure. In any case, they would have faced a Nazi will bent upon the destruction of the Jews. How can the historian measure the strictures which limits on free will and consciousness bring to any historical circumstance? Where lay the margin for choice in the real historical setting? It is a question our policymakers face every day with regard to such human crises as those of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Haiti. The final irony of this literature, at least in this historian's mind, is that one inevitably returns to the importance of the vast and costly military campaign that brought final victory in Europe, an effort that gets only passing acknowledgment from Wyman and others. Raoul Wallenberg's mission was only possible in the wake of D-Day, when it was clear to the Hungarians that the last chapter of the war had begun to be written. Even if the Allied governments had displayed the best of intentions toward the Jews of Europe, and they certainly didn't, only marginally more could have been saved until military victory was clearly in sight. In detailing moral obtuseness in the West, few have taken the time to appraise realistically what could have been done in the face of an enemy so difficult to master on the battlefield. Anne Frank had no illusions about this. Only in total military victory would come liberation. "Now it doesn't [only] concern the Jews any more," she wrote on June 6; "it concerns Holland and all occupied Europe." Frank thought she might be back in school that September. Unfortunately, the Germans remained strong, and stopped the Allies for a long, cruel moment at the Battle of the Bulge. But Anne Frank almost made it. After surviving Auschwitz, she succumbed to typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, just a month before the British liberated the camp.