Churchill and the Holocaust

Winston Churchill’s record on the Holocaust is one of the most-debated questions in modern British political history. The case for him is that he was the most clear-sighted Western leader of the period on the nature of the Nazi regime, that he gave the broadcast of 24 August 1941 in which he described the murder of the Jews of the East as “a crime without a name”, and that he led the war that ended the killing. The case against him is that the substantial information that reached the British government from 1942 onwards about the systematic murder of European Jewry did not produce the policy responses that, with hindsight, it should have produced: the bombing of the railway lines to Auschwitz was not undertaken, the pre-war refugee policy was not substantially changed, and the wartime Mandate policy on Palestine was maintained at substantial cost to the Jewish refugees who could not reach there. Both cases are real. Neither is the whole record.

The pre-war years

Churchill had been substantially clear about the nature of the Nazi regime from 1933 onwards, when most of the British political class had not been. His Commons speeches of the 1930s on German rearmament, on the persecution of German Jewry, and on the failure of the appeasement policy are the documented basis for his post-war reputation as the Cassandra of the period. He had given substantial space in his speeches to the position of German Jews under the Nuremberg Laws and after Kristallnacht, and had written in The Strand Magazine in 1937 (in an article titled “The Truth about Hitler” that was withheld from publication on the advice of his publishers) that the regime’s antisemitism was the central feature of its character.

His pre-war record on Jewish refugee policy is more mixed. As Colonial Secretary in 1921 to 1922 he had supported the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine and had presided over the establishment of the British Mandate. As a backbench MP through the 1930s he had supported substantial Jewish immigration to Palestine, opposing the 1939 White Paper that restricted it. On wider refugee policy he had supported the Kindertransport but had not pressed the Chamberlain government to expand the small numbers admitted to Britain itself.

The crime without a name speech

Churchill’s broadcast of 24 August 1941, delivered six weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was the first public statement by a major Allied leader to identify the systematic murder of Jews on the Eastern Front as a distinct phenomenon. The relevant passage:

The aggressor retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands, of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.

Churchill had been briefed on the killings on the Eastern Front by the Bletchley Park decryption of the Order Police signals, which were yielding daily reports of mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliary units from July 1941 onwards. The “crime without a name” formulation reflected the fact that the legal vocabulary for what was being done did not yet exist; the word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin three years later, in 1944.

The wartime years

The substantial wartime information that reached the British government about the systematic murder of European Jewry came from several sources. The Bletchley Park decryption of Order Police signals provided continuous tactical intelligence on the killings on the Eastern Front from mid-1941 onwards. The Riegner telegram of August 1942, transmitted from Geneva to the World Jewish Congress in London and New York via the British and American legations, reported that the German plan was to kill all of European Jewry. The Karski mission of late 1942 and 1943 provided eyewitness testimony from a Polish underground courier who had been smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and into a transit camp. The Vrba-Wetzler report of April 1944, smuggled out of Auschwitz, described the gassing operations there in technical detail.

The Allied response to this information has been the subject of substantial historiographical argument. The Anthony Eden statement to the Commons of 17 December 1942, in which the Allied governments jointly condemned the German murder of Jews in occupied Europe, was the formal public response to the Riegner telegram. The proposed bombing of the railway lines to Auschwitz, requested by the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency in the summer of 1944, was passed by the British Air Ministry 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. Churchill personally supported the bombing proposal in a minute to Eden of 7 July 1944 (“Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary”), but the operational decision was the Americans’ and the result was as it was.

What the record shows

Churchill’s record on the Holocaust is the record of a wartime leader operating within the substantial constraints of a war that he was not, until late 1942, winning. The constraints did not absolve him of the moral judgement that the surviving record requires. The pre-war refugee policy was insufficient. The Palestine Mandate policy was maintained at substantial cost. The bombing decision was defensible as a matter of military priority and indefensible as a matter of moral priority. The wartime intelligence was acted on slower than it could have been. None of this overturns the case that Churchill was the most clear-sighted Western leader of the period on the nature of the Nazi regime, that the war he led was the war that ended the killing, and that the wartime alternative to his leadership of Britain was substantially worse for the Jews of Europe than the leadership he provided. The two parts of the record stand together. The serious historians of the period, including Sir Martin Gilbert (Churchill’s official biographer and a substantial Holocaust historian in his own right), have presented both.

See also

Sources

  • Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, Henry Holt, 2007
  • Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, Michael Joseph, 1981
  • Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979 (revised edition 1999)
  • Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew, Hill and Wang, 1998
  • Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Allen Lane, 2018
  • Winston Churchill, broadcast of 24 August 1941, in The Unrelenting Struggle: War Speeches, Cassell, 1942
  • Winston Churchill, minute to Anthony Eden of 7 July 1944, FO 371/42809, The National Archives, Kew
  • Hansard, House of Commons debates 1933-1945, particularly the speeches of 24 March 1938, 5 October 1938 and 17 December 1942