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By Root 1177 0

of his country’s sufferings, but explicitly of conditions in the Jewish ghettos, and of the extraordinary achievement he claimed of having penetrated the Nazi death camp at Bełżec. While he was received courteously enough by the Polish exile prime minister, Gen. Władysław Sikorski, by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and later in Washington by President Roosevelt, he was afflicted by a dismal sense of awareness that the horrors he described somehow lost their force and magnitude in safe, unoccupied Allied capitals. “In London these things bulked small,” he wrote. “London was the hub of a vast military wheel, the spokes of which were made up of billions of dollars, armadas of bombers and ships and staggering armies that had suffered great loss. Then, too, people asked where did Polish sacrifice rank next to the immeasurable heroism, sacrifice and sufferings of the Russian people? What was the share of Poland in this titanic undertaking? Who were the Poles? … We Poles had no luck in this war.” Karski was discouraged by his own leaders from over-emphasising the Jewish persecution, lest it should detract from the force of his account of the plight of Poland as a whole.

Arthur Schlesinger, relatively highly informed by his work for the Office of Strategic Services, wrote of his own state of knowledge about the fate of Europe’s Jews in 1944: “Most of us were still thinking of an increase in persecution rather than a new and barbaric policy of genocide … I cannot find colleagues who recall a moment of blazing revelation about the Final Solution.” Likewise the British intelligence officer Noel Annan: “It took some time … for the enormity of Germany’s crimes against the Jews to sink in. In intelligence we knew of the gas ovens, but not of the scale, the thoroughness, the bureaucratic efficiency with which Jews had been hunted down and slaughtered. No one at the end of the war, as I recollect, realised that the figure of Jewish dead ran into millions.” In the entire archive of Britain’s wartime secret service, no mention occurs—or none at least which survives—about persecution of the Jews or the Holocaust, probably because the SIS was never invited to investigate these issues. 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.

The 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.’ But the stories about German concentration camps were atrocity stories: therefore they were lies—so reasoned the average man.” Surveys found that most of Roosevelt’s nation continued to regard the Germans as fundamentally decent and peaceful folk, led astray by their leaders. As late as May 1945, when newsreels of the concentration camps had been shown around the world, 53.7 percent 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