All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [325]
Contrary to much popular modern mythology, the operational difficulties of bombing transport links to the death camps would have been very great, especially in 1942 when most of the Holocaust killings took place. Allied leaders considered reports of Jewish suffering in the context of atrocities being committed against occupied populations all over Europe. American diplomat George Ball wrote later: ‘Perhaps we were so preoccupied with the squalid menace of the war we did not focus on this unspeakable ghastliness. It may also be that the idea of mass extermination was so far beyond the traditional comprehension of most Americans that we instinctively refused to believe in its existence.’ Many Europeans and Americans who had been appalled by reported German atrocities in Belgium in 1914 concluded angrily after the First World War that they had allowed themselves to be fooled by Allied propaganda, for it emerged that the killings of civilians had been exaggerated. A world war later, the Western Powers were determined not to be similarly deluded again. It was to the perverse credit of British and American decency that many people were reluctant to suppose their enemies as barbaric as later evidence showed them to have been. George Orwell wrote in 1944: ‘“Atrocities” had come to be looked on as synonymous with “lies”. The stories about German concentration camps were atrocity stories: therefore they were lies – so reasoned the average man.’ Surveys found that most Americans continued to regard the Germans as fundamentally decent and peaceful folk, led astray by their leaders. In May 1945, when newsreels of the concentration camps had been shown around the world, 53.7 per cent of American respondents told pollsters they thought only a small part of the German people were ‘naturally cruel and brutal’.
None of the above diminishes in the smallest degree the responsibility of the Nazis, and of the German people, for the Holocaust. But it should be acknowledged that, even when overwhelming evidence became available, the Allied nations were slow to respond to the death camps. Though little could have been done to save their inmates, any more than the millions of Russian prisoners who died in German hands, an insouciance pervades Allied documentation of the period which does scant credit to Britain or the United States. Even if Jews were not persecuted in the Anglo-Saxon societies, nor were they widely loved. There remained until 1945 a resolute official unwillingness to assess their tragedy in a separate dimension from the sufferings of Hitler’s other captives, and of the occupied societies of Europe. Such insensitivity merits understanding, but rightly troubles posterity.
In the winter of 1941–42, a large number of Jewish deportees from Germany were shot immediately on their arrival at eastern destinations, but these killings were carried out at the discretion of local SS commanders; no general order was issued, decreeing either their preservation or their extinction. Late in November there was an eccentric intervention by Himmler himself, ordering a temporary halt to the killing of Reich Jews as distinct from easterners, though this check was soon reversed. To a remarkable degree, regional autonomy and logistical convenience – shortage of accommodation and food or, contrarily, of labour – still decided who lived and who died; but large-scale