Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [262]
That July, in the face of new intelligence reports about the operations of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Churchill wrote to Eden in the most explicit terms he used during the war about the nature of Nazi action against the Jews: “There is no doubt963 that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world … It is clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death.” Yet once again, the British dismissed the notion of bombing the death camps’ facilities or transport links, partly on the grounds of inefficacy, that any damage could be readily repaired, and that anyway only the USAAF’s day bombers were capable of the necessary precision, and partly on the spurious grounds that deportations of Jews from Hungary—reports of which prompted Churchill’s note—appeared to have ceased.
Even at this stage, the scale of Nazi killings eluded British policymakers. An intelligence officer964 privy to Ultra decrypts who lectured to senior soldiers in 1944 about Germany’s machinery of repression spoke in his briefings of killings in the thousands, not the millions, and did not explicitly mention Jews. Likewise the November 1943 joint Allied Moscow Declaration, warning of retribution against Germans who participated in “wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in the slaughter inflicted on the people of Poland or in territories of the Soviet Union,” omitted Jews.
British and American intelligence possessed enough information by late 1944, from Ultra and escaped Auschwitz prisoners, to deduce that something uniquely terrible was being done to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, if the right conclusions had been drawn from the evidence. The failure of either government to act has incurred brutal strictures from postwar critics. Yet Churchill, Roosevelt and their principal subordinates seem to deserve some sympathy for their admittedly inadequate responses. First, an instinctive reluctance persisted both in London and Washington to conceive a European society, even one ruled by the Nazis, capable of killings on the titanic scale exposed in 1945–46. Second, evidence about the massacre of Jews was still perceived in the context of other known mass killings of Russians, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Italians and other subject races. The British, especially, were wary of repeating the mistakes of the First World War, when reports of German atrocities, though real enough, were wilfully exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Such exploitation roused postwar anger among British people towards their own government.
Finally, given the known limitations of precision bombing even where good target intelligence was available, the case for specific action against the Nazi death machine seemed overborne by the overarching argument for hastening military victory to end the sufferings of all Europe’s oppressed peoples. The airmen could be sure that any bombing of the camps would kill many prisoners. It is the privilege of posterity to recognise that this would have been a price worth paying. In the full tilt of war, to borrow Churchill’s phrase from a different context, it is possible to understand why the British and Americans failed to act with the energy and commitment which hindsight shows to have been appropriate. Temperate historians of the period recognise a real doubt about whether any plausible air force action would substantially have impeded the operations of the Nazi death machine.
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