The international response to the persecution and murder of European Jewry was, on the whole, inadequate. Most governments did not lift their immigration quotas. Most international organisations did not act. Most religious institutions did not speak out. The Red Cross did not protest. The Allied governments did not bomb the death camps or the railways that fed them. Against that pattern of failure, however, ran a smaller and more hopeful pattern: of individual diplomats, of small religious communities, of neutral countries that broke their own rules, and of organised rescue operations that, between them, saved several hundred thousand Jewish lives that would otherwise have been lost.
The diplomats
Several individual diplomats issued protective documents to Jews under deportation orders, in many cases at significant personal risk and against the explicit instructions of their own governments. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Budapest in 1944, issued thousands of Schutzpasses, Swedish protective passports, to Hungarian Jews and rented buildings as Swedish protected houses. He saved tens of thousands of lives between July 1944 and his arrest by Soviet forces in January 1945. Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, did similar work on a comparable scale, with the protection of the Swiss flag rather than the Swedish.
Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania in 1940, issued thousands of transit visas to Polish and Lithuanian Jews fleeing east, against explicit Japanese Foreign Ministry orders. The visas allowed the holders to travel through the Soviet Union and Japan to safety. Sugihara was disciplined and dismissed from the Japanese diplomatic service after the war for his actions; he died in obscurity in 1986. He has since been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux in June 1940, issued around 30,000 visas to refugees fleeing the German advance, including thousands of Jews. The Portuguese government recalled him in disgrace and barred him from working in his profession. He died in poverty in 1954. Frank Foley, the British passport control officer in Berlin in the 1930s, issued visas to thousands of German Jews on his own authority, exceeding his instructions and stretching the British rules to their limit. Hiram Bingham IV, the American vice-consul in Marseille in 1940 to 1941, issued thousands of visas and transit documents in defiance of State Department instructions and helped rescue artists and intellectuals including Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt and Lion Feuchtwanger. Each of these diplomats has their own story, told on individual pages in the Righteous section of this site.
The neutral countries
Sweden, neutral throughout the war, accepted Jewish refugees in significant numbers, particularly the Danish Jews ferried across the Oresund in October 1943 and the Hungarian Jews who reached Sweden through Wallenberg’s operations. Switzerland accepted around 28,000 Jewish refugees, although Swiss border policy was inconsistent and many refugees were turned back at the border to be deported. Spain and Portugal both allowed Jewish transit, with varying degrees of obstruction; their record is complicated and is treated on their individual pages. Turkey, neutral until 1945, took in several thousand Jewish refugees and recruited around 200 Jewish refugee academics into the Turkish university system.
The Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the body whose function is the protection of civilians and prisoners in war, knew of the killing programme from at least 1942. It chose to remain publicly silent and to confine its protests to private diplomatic representations that produced little. The most-criticised single act of the wartime Red Cross was the 1944 visit to Theresienstadt, the Czech transit camp the regime had presented as a model Jewish settlement. The Red Cross delegation accepted the German presentation, signed off on the conditions, and reported favourably. The deportations from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz continued. The post-war Red Cross has formally acknowledged that the wartime organisation failed in its duties.
The churches
The Catholic Church’s response is the subject of a long historical literature. Pope Pius XII did not publicly condemn the Holocaust, despite repeated requests from various quarters. He authorised limited rescue operations within Catholic institutions, particularly in Italy, where convents and monasteries sheltered around 4,000 Roman Jews after the German occupation in October 1943. The argument over the Pope’s wartime conduct continues, with the Vatican’s gradual opening of its wartime archives producing new material in recent years.
Individual Catholic and Protestant communities saved Jewish lives at substantial personal risk. The most-celebrated case is the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Cévennes mountains of south-central France, a Huguenot Protestant community whose pastor André Trocmé led the rescue of around 5,000 Jews, mostly children, who passed through the village during the war. The Polish nun Matylda Getter sheltered around 250 Jewish children at her order’s Warsaw orphanage. The Italian priest Giorgio Perlasca, posing as a Spanish diplomat in Budapest, saved around 5,000 Hungarian Jews. Each is covered on its own page.
The organised rescue operations
Several organised Jewish rescue operations, run by Jewish bodies in occupied and neutral Europe, saved tens of thousands of lives. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), an American Jewish relief organisation, ran extensive operations in occupied Europe through neutral country offices. The Yishuv’s Jewish Agency for Palestine ran rescue programmes through its diplomatic representatives in neutral countries. The Working Group in Bratislava, led by Gisi Fleischmann, attempted to negotiate the ransom of Slovak Jewish lives directly with the SS in 1942 and 1943, with mixed success. The Brand Mission, in which the Hungarian Jewish negotiator Joel Brand attempted in 1944 to negotiate the rescue of one million Hungarian Jews in exchange for ten thousand trucks for the German army, failed but is one of the more astonishing footnotes of the period.
What it adds up to
The international response to the Holocaust did not save the great majority of European Jewry. It saved a fraction. The fraction is real. Around 250,000 to 300,000 Jewish lives are estimated to have been directly saved by the actions of named individuals and organised rescue operations. The figure is small against the six million who died, but it is large against the figures that were originally expected: in 1942 most observers had assumed that no significant rescue would be possible at all. The men and women who did the rescuing were almost always operating against the policies of their own governments, against the indifference of most of their colleagues, and at significant personal risk. They are part of the answer to the question of what could have been done. They show that more could have been done. They are the reason a quarter of a million Jewish people lived.
See also
- The Red Cross Reported Only 300000 Deaths
- Raoul Wallenberg
- Chiune Sugihara
- Sweden
- Pope Pius XII and the Vatican
- Aristides de Sousa Mendes
Sources
- Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, Henry Holt, 2003
- Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust, Wayne State University Press, 1981
- Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust, Ktav Publishing, 1993
- USHMM: Rescue