Inferno - Max Hastings [325]
If the Nazis bore responsibility for the Holocaust, they were assisted in their crimes by some, if not most, of the regimes of occupied Europe. Anti-Semitism, albeit less homicidal than in Germany, was a commonplace phenomenon. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish writer briefly conscripted into the Romanian army, noted the attitude of many of his fellow soldiers, which contributed to their acquiescence in Nazi dominance of Romania’s polity: “Voichita Aurel, my comrade in the Twenty-First Infantry, said something yesterday about Captain Capsuneanu, something that sums up a whole Romanian style of politics: ‘He’s a real mean bastard who’ll beat you and swear at you. But there’s one good thing about him: he can’t stand yids and lets us have a go at them too.’ ” Sebastian wrote: “That is precisely the consolation that the Germans offer the Czechs and Poles, and which they are prepared to offer the Romanians.” The German occupation of France institutionalised a French anti-Semitism that was already widespread, and which the Vichy government was happy to make explicit.
SO MANY PROMINENT NAZIS spoke explicitly and publicly 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 Bełżec, 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 equivalence, 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 eastern 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