The British Dimension

Britain’s role in the Holocaust is more mixed than the postwar national story has tended to admit. Britain admitted refugees, ran the Kindertransport, broke the German military codes that gave the Allies real-time knowledge of the Einsatzgruppen, and fought the war that ended the killing. It also turned away ships of refugees, ran a Mandate in Palestine that prevented Jewish immigration at the worst possible moment, refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz when asked, and lost a number of opportunities to act earlier and faster. The picture is not a simple one and the page below does not try to make it one.

Around seventy thousand Jewish refugees reached Britain between 1933 and the outbreak of war. Around ten thousand of those were children on the Kindertransport, organised between November 1938 and September 1939 by a coalition of Quakers, Jewish welfare bodies and individual rescuers including Nicholas Winton, Frank Foley and Trevor Chadwick. The children were placed in foster homes and hostels. Most never saw their parents again. The Kindertransport is the part of the British record that the country is most ready to remember. The other parts are less easy.

The British government in the 1930s was not unsympathetic to Jewish refugees in private but was careful in public. Anti-Jewish feeling existed at every level of British society, and the Foreign Office was concerned about the political cost of looking too welcoming. The Evian Conference in July 1938, called by Roosevelt to coordinate refugee policy, produced almost nothing because Britain and the United States agreed in advance not to raise their own quotas. The 1939 White Paper on Palestine restricted Jewish immigration to the Mandate to seventy five thousand over five years, with further immigration to depend on Arab consent. The paper was British government policy throughout the war. Ships carrying Jewish refugees who reached Palestine were turned back. The Struma was sunk in the Black Sea in February 1942 with seven hundred and sixty eight refugees aboard, after British pressure on Turkey not to admit them.

Frank Foley, the Berlin passport officer, did the opposite of what his government wanted. Working out of the British embassy from 1933 to 1939, he stretched and broke every visa rule he could find. He hid Jewish refugees in his own house. He went into Sachsenhausen and Dachau in person to retrieve named prisoners. He saved tens of thousands of lives. He was not recognised in his own country during his lifetime. Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1999. Britain put up a statue of him in Stourbridge in 2005. He has his own page in this section.

Bletchley Park’s intelligence work mattered. From mid-1941 the British were reading the Order Police radio traffic and knew, in detail, the body counts the Einsatzgruppen were sending back from the eastern killing fields. The intercepts went to Churchill personally. He responded in his famous broadcast of August 1941 that Britain was witnessing a crime without a name. The intelligence was not made public during the war for reasons of source protection. It is now in the National Archives at Kew and is the most precise contemporary documentation of the killing in the east.

Jan Karski carried the same intelligence in person. A courier of the Polish underground, Karski had been smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto in August 1942 and, disguised as a Ukrainian guard, into a transit camp at Izbica from which Jews were being sent on to Bełżec. He reached London in November 1942 and met Anthony Eden, members of the War Cabinet, and the editorial leadership of The Times and the BBC. He reached Washington in July 1943 and met Roosevelt at the White House on 28 July. He gave detailed accounts of what he had seen. He was substantially disbelieved. Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court Justice, told him: “I am unable to believe what you tell me.” Karski reported Frankfurter qualifying it: “I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.” The intelligence reaching the Allies was therefore both signals-derived and human-witnessed by autumn 1942. The question of what could have been done with it remained an open one for the rest of the war and is not closed now.

The non-bombing of Auschwitz is the most contested British and American failure. By August 1944 the rail lines around the camp were within range of Allied aircraft based in Italy. The World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency formally requested bombing. The British Air Ministry passed the request to the Americans, who declined on operational grounds. The British did not push back. The Hungarian deportations of summer 1944 had ended by the time the request was rejected, but operations against the rest of the camp could in principle have continued into the autumn. The decision is defensible as a matter of military priority. It is not defensible as a matter of moral priority. It was a choice and the choice was wrong.

After the war Britain ran the British zone of occupation in northern Germany, including Hamburg and the area around Bergen-Belsen. The Belsen trial, held by a British military court at Lüneburg in autumn 1945, tried Josef Kramer, Irma Grese and forty three others; eleven were hanged. Britain hosted the Nuremberg trial work alongside the Americans, French and Soviets. It also took in approximately fifty thousand Jewish displaced persons in the years immediately after the war. And it admitted Hannah Arendt’s husband Heinrich Blücher, Sigmund Freud, the entire Warburg Institute and a long list of refugee scholars whose work reshaped postwar British intellectual life. Jimmy de Rothschild, the British politician and philanthropist, helped fund Kindertransport rescue and is recognised on his own page in the Righteous section.

The British dimension is, in short, a mixed record of partial generosity and substantial failure. It deserves to be remembered as both. The country that produced Frank Foley also turned the Struma away.

See also

Sources

  • Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979 (revised edition 1999, the standard study)
  • Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, 2000
  • Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History, Blackwell, 1994
  • Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide, Frank Cass, 1999
  • Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Basic Books, 1981 (for the Evian Conference context)
  • Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, Michael Joseph, 1981 (the principal study of the Auschwitz bombing question and Allied knowledge)
  • Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew, Hill and Wang, 1998 (on Bletchley intelligence and the Einsatzgruppen reports)
  • F. H. Hinsley and others, British Intelligence in the Second World War, HMSO, 1979-1990 (the official history; volume II covers the Einsatzgruppen decryption)
  • Michael Smith, Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews, Hodder and Stoughton, 1999
  • The 1939 White Paper on Palestine, Cmd 6019, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 17 May 1939
  • Records of the British zone of occupation in Germany 1945-1949, FO 1006, FO 1010 and related series, The National Archives, Kew
  • Bletchley Park records on Order Police decrypts, HW 16 series, The National Archives, Kew
  • The Belsen Trial transcript, The Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty Four Others, Hodge, 1949 (the William Hodge edition of the Lüneburg court record)
  • Winston Churchill, broadcast of 24 August 1941, in The Unrelenting Struggle: War Speeches, Cassell, 1942 (the “crime without a name” speech)
  • Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, Houghton Mifflin, 1944 (the contemporary memoir, written immediately after his Washington mission)
  • E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, John Wiley, 1994
  • Wiener Holocaust Library, London, refugee case files and oral histories, https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org
  • Imperial War Museum, Holocaust Galleries collections, https://www.iwm.org.uk