The Anthony Eden statement to the House of Commons of 17 December 1942 was the formal public acknowledgement by the Allied governments of the systematic German murder of European Jewry. The statement, made by the Foreign Secretary in response to the Riegner telegram of August 1942 and the substantial subsequent intelligence the Allies had received, was followed by a one-minute silence in the Commons, the only occasion in the parliamentary history of the period on which such a silence was observed for a foreign event. The statement is the documented moment at which the systematic killing of European Jewry was acknowledged at the highest level of British government in public.
The build-up
The substantial information that produced the December 1942 statement had reached the British government over the preceding months from several sources. The Bletchley Park decryption of Order Police signals had been yielding daily reports of Einsatzgruppen killings on the Eastern Front from mid-1941 onwards. The Riegner telegram of 8 August 1942, transmitted from Geneva to Sidney Silverman MP and via the World Jewish Congress in New York to Stephen Wise, reported that the German plan was to kill the entire Jewish population of occupied Europe by the use of cyanide gas. The Polish underground had been pressing detailed information on the extermination camps in occupied Poland through to the Polish government-in-exile in London, which had been pressing it on the Foreign Office. The Bund report of May 1942, smuggled out of Warsaw, had described the systematic murder of Polish Jewry in detail.
The British government’s initial response to the Riegner telegram had been substantial scepticism. The Foreign Office had instructed the British legation in Berne in late August 1942 not to forward the substance of the telegram to the World Jewish Congress in London until the underlying intelligence could be corroborated. The corroboration arrived through multiple subsequent channels through the autumn of 1942. By early December 1942 the Foreign Office position was that the substance of the killing programme could be publicly acknowledged.
The drafting of the statement was a joint Allied operation. The Foreign Office worked in November and December 1942 with the State Department in Washington and the Soviet Foreign Commissariat in Moscow on a coordinated declaration that the eleven Allied governments and the French National Committee would jointly issue. The agreed text was substantially Eden’s drafting; the political weight of the statement came from its joint signature by all the Allied powers.
The statement
Eden read the agreed declaration to the Commons at the start of business on the afternoon of Thursday 17 December 1942. The relevant passages:
The attention of the governments of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of Belgium, of Czechoslovakia, of Greece, of Luxembourg, of the Netherlands, of Norway, of Poland, of the Soviet Union, of the United Kingdom, of the United States of America, of Yugoslavia, and of the French National Committee, has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.
From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.
The above-mentioned governments and the French National Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. They declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny. They reaffirm their solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end.
The Speaker, on the conclusion of the statement, called the House to its feet. The Members stood in silence for one minute. The Hansard record notes the silence as a unique parliamentary procedure for the period; no foreign event before or during the war produced a comparable observance.
What the statement did and did not do
The statement was the formal public acknowledgement by the Allied governments that the systematic murder of European Jewry was occurring. It was, on the historiographical view that emerged in the work of Bernard Wasserstein and Walter Laqueur, the moment at which the abstract Allied knowledge became an Allied public commitment. It produced the substantial public demand in Britain for substantial subsequent rescue operations that culminated in the Bermuda Conference of April 1943.
It did not produce the operational responses that, on the wartime intelligence, would have been justified. The Bermuda Conference produced almost nothing. The Palestine Mandate restrictions were maintained. The bombing of the railway lines to Auschwitz was not undertaken when it became operationally possible in 1944. The British and American refugee admissions were not substantially expanded. The acknowledgement of December 1942 was the high point of the Allied public response to the killing during the war; the operational follow-through was substantially less than the rhetoric had implied.
The historians’ view is that the statement nonetheless mattered. It established the Allied position on the record. It was the basis on which the post-war war-crimes prosecutions were eventually built. It produced the first substantial public conversation in Britain about what was being done in occupied Europe. The conversation did not produce the policy outcomes its participants pressed for. The conversation took place.
See also
- What the Allies Knew and When
- The Einsatzgruppen
- The Netherlands
- Yugoslavia
- The British Dimension
- Churchill and the Holocaust
- Eleanor Rathbone MP
Sources
- Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979 (revised edition 1999)
- Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution”, Little Brown, 1980
- Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew, Hill and Wang, 1998
- Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History, Blackwell, 1994
- Hansard, House of Commons, vol 385, cols 2082-2087, 17 December 1942 (the full text of the Eden statement and the recorded silence)
- Foreign Office records on the drafting of the December 1942 declaration, FO 371/30923 and related files, The National Archives, Kew
- Records of the World Jewish Congress London office on the Riegner telegram and its forwarding, AJ/WJC/Geneva files, AJC archives, New York