All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [323]
So many prominent Nazis spoke openly about their intentions towards the Jews that it remains remarkable that the Allied national leaderships were reluctant to accept their words at face value. Informed citizens in both Britain and America drew appropriate conclusions about what was happening, reinforced by eyewitness testimony from eastern Europe. Mrs Blanche Dugdale, a passionate British crusader for Jewish interests, wrote a letter published in the Spectator: ‘In March 1942, Himmler visited Poland, and decreed that by the end of the year 50 per cent of the Jewish population should be “exterminated” … and the pace seems to have been hastened since. Now the German programme demands the disappearance of all Jews … Mass-murders on a scale unheard-of since the dawn of civilization began immediately after the order was issued.’ Mrs Dugdale gave an account of the deportations, identifying Bełec, Sobibór and Treblinka as death camps. ‘Certain it seems that Polish Jewry will be beyond help if the murder-campaign cannot be stopped before the war ends.’ Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr informed the British by secret letter via Stockholm in March 1943: ‘At least nine-tenths of the [German] population do not know that we have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. They go on believing they have just been segregated … farther to the east … If you told these people what has really happened they would answer, “You are just a victim of British propaganda.”’
Within some Allied nations there was ambivalence, or worse, in defining attitudes to the greatest of all Nazi persecutions. Anti-Semitism was etched deep into Russian history and attitudes: in Moscow at Easter 1942, for instance, one of countless rumours sweeping the city asserted that Jews had been committing ritual murders of Orthodox children – the ghastly old east European ‘blood libel’ against the Jewish people. In 1944, the NKVD reported hearing people assert that ‘Hitler did a good job, beating up the Jews.’ The revelation of the death camps posed a dilemma for Moscow, which the Soviet authorities never entirely resolved. They could not applaud the Nazis’ slaughter of the Jews, but one historian has called the Holocaust ‘an indigestible lump in the belly of the Soviet triumph’. To acknowledge its enormity was to require a sharing of the Russian people’s overpowering sense of victimhood, which they were most unwilling to concede. In Soviet correspondents’ wartime dispatches, all references to explicitly Jewish suffering were excised by the censor. In 1945, when Russians heaped abuse on their defeated enemies, observant Germans noticed that almost the only charge not laid at their door was that of persecuting the Jews.
In Poland, where anti-Semitism was widespread, some people cited reports that Jews had welcomed the Red Army in September 1939 as evidence of their perfidy. When Jews in the Warsaw ghetto staged a brief and doomed revolt in 1943, a Polish nationalist underground paper wrote on 5 May: ‘During the Soviet occupation … Jews regularly stripped our soldiers of their arms, killed them, betrayed our community leaders, and openly crossed to the side of the occupier. [In one small town] which in 1939 was momentarily in the hands of the Soviets … Jews erected a triumphal arch for the Soviet troops to pass through and all wore red armbands and cockades. That was, and is, their attitude to Poland. Everyone in Poland should remember this.’ In the spring of 1944 some Jewish soldiers deserted from the Polish corps based in Scotland, citing disgust at anti-Semitism, which they said was no less apparent in the exile army than in their homeland.
Anglo-Saxons were not immune from such sentiments. British soldier Len England expressed shock at the attitudes of many of his barrack-room comrades, of a kind later vividly portrayed in Irwin Shaw’s description of US Army service in his novel The Young Lions. England wrote: ‘Two of the most intelligent people