Politicians, historians and the Holocaust
Do you know about Godwin's law? You may not know it's called that, but the gist of it is: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches". Not only online, of course. There was an example of it this week, when the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, speaking on Iran, held up a historic correspondence from 1944 between the US War Department and the World Jewish Congress, in which the Under Secretary of War gave reasons for his government's refusal to bomb Auschwitz.
Surely Godwin's Law doesn't apply to Israel and its Prime Minister? If anyone has carte blanche to invoke Nazi crimes, the perils of appeasement and to keep alive the memory of victims of the Shoah, is it not the leader of the country which rose from the ashes of those crimes? Absolutely, but that is no reason for listeners to Mr Netanyahu's speech to forget that when politicians use history, it is rarely in the way historians do. That is, they use those bits of the historical record that assist their argument, rather than sifting the evidence and seeing where it all leads them.
I do not presume to go into the case Mr Netanyahu was making for potential military action against Iran. I am ignorant of the details and TLS history editors are probably not the best people to pronounce on matters of international current affairs. But history is another matter. So let's concentrate on that.
Mr Netanyahu's historical point is that the Allies, specifically the Americans, could have stopped the Holocaust if they had bombed Auschwitz, and that the most shocking part of Under Secretary McCloy's refusal was his worry that such a policy might provoke "more vindictive action" from the Nazis. "More vindictive than the Holocaust?", Mr Netanyahu asks. Put like that, there can only be one answer, as the Prime Minister knows.
Yet the question of "bombing Auschwitz" remains a fraught one, historically. It did not become a tactical possibility until late in the war, when Aliied advances brought the camp and its railway line into range. It would have been extremely difficult to do, and would have had to have been carried out in broad daylight. Reviewing William D. Rubinstein's book, The Myth of Rescue, in the TLS in 1997, Professor Richard Overy, a leading authority on air power, wrote that Rubinstein was "right to be sceptical about what effect this might have had. Bomb damage for priority projects was quickly repaired; . . . It is unlikely that a single attack of dubious accuracy could have halted the extermination, though it might have had a significant political or psychological impact".
Not all Jewish leaders called for such action. A month before the request from the World Jewish Congress was made, David Ben-Gurion said “We do not know the truth concerning the entire situation in Poland and it seems that we will be unable to propose anything concerning this matter,” though later, he was persuaded. Even the appeal itself was unclear as to how to proceed, or what the purpose of bombing might be. The request from Ernest Frischer, a member of the Czech government in exile, said:
"I believe that destruction of gas chambers and crematoria in Oswiecim by bombing would have a certain effect now. Germans are now exhuming and burning corpses in an effort to conceal their crimes. This could be prevented by destruction of crematoria and then Germans might possibly stop further mass exterminations especially since so little time is left to them. Bombing of railway communications in this same area would also be of importance and of military interest."
Is it not possible that, in the middle of an all-out assault on the source of Nazi crimes (this was 1944, after all), officials read that "might possibly stop" as just one more idea among many presented to them to hasten the end of the war for a portion of the population of Europe, when the aim was to rid all Europe of Nazi tyranny? The Allies had agreed that diverting resources away from their overall strategy was likely to delay the end of the war, not hasten it.
I am not arguing that Auschwitz couldn't have been bombed, or that Jewish lives couldn't have been saved; the case is unproven on either side. But what is certain is that nobody knew at the time, and pace the implication of Mr Netanyahu's comment -- that today, "The American government today is different", as if the US government of 1944 was unconcerned about the fate of the Jews -- if the refusal was wrong (and it is by no means certain it was), the letter he quotes shows that the error was not due to indifference or something worse, but to strategic miscalculation, something unavoidable in the middle of the biggest war the world has ever seen.
"Never again" is a sentiment that brooks no opposition, but we owe it to our predecessors to acknowledge that, yes, decisions about international policy seem hard now, at a time of relative peace, satellite technology, vast reams of information, and the certain knowledge of historic crimes. But they were almost inconceivably harder in the circumstances of 1944.