CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘These Vile Crimes’

On 21 June 1941 the armed might of Germany turned against the Soviet Union. As the German Army advanced, SS killing squads began the systematic mass murder of Jews in every captured town and village. Top-secret German police radio messages about this, and about the mass murder of non-Jewish Soviet citizens, were intercepted by British Intelligence, and shown to Churchill. He had to be careful not to reveal his source, for fear of alerting the Germans to the fact that their most secret communications – including many of their daily military, naval and air force instructions – were being read by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. Although he could not therefore mention Jews directly, Churchill, in his broadcast on 24 August when speaking about German atrocities in Russia, stated without prevarication that ‘whole districts are being exterminated.’ He added, ‘We are in the presence of a crime without a name.’¹

That crime continued. On 27 August Churchill was shown a German police decrypt reporting the execution of 367 Jews in South Russia; on 1 September a report of the shooting of 1,246 Jews; on 6 September of the shooting of 3,000 Jews; on 11 September, more than five thousand Jews near Kamenets-Podolsk. Churchill was informed that day by Bletchley Park: ‘The fact that the Police are killing all Jews that fall into their hands should by now be sufficiently well appreciated. It is not therefore proposed to continue reporting these butcheries specially, unless so requested.’² In fact, the murder later that month of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev was not known at Bletchley Park, as the German police units in Russia had been warned from Berlin not to compromise their ciphers. But within two months of Churchill’s broadcast, sufficient details of the mass killing of Jews had become known through sources other than Germany’s own top-secret radio signals. Churchill took advantage of this on 14 November, when he sent a personal and signed message to the Jewish Chronicle, which the weekly newspaper printed in full.

‘None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew,’ Churchill wrote, ‘the unspeakable evils wrought on the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazi’s first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity. He has borne and continues to bear a burden that might have seemed to be beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit; he has never lost the will to resist. Assuredly in the day of victory the Jew’s sufferings and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. Once again, at the appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world.’³

* * *

On 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked both United States and British possessions in the Far East and the Pacific Ocean. Four days later, as the United States faced formidable setbacks in the Pacific, Hitler declared war on her: the country that had tenaciously declined to declare war on him for more than two years, despite his conquests and wide-ranging destruction. Churchill, travelling by sea to Washington, secured an American commitment to seek the defeat of Hitler before that of the Japanese. The ‘swell of victory and liberation,’ he told the House of Commons on his return from Washington, was ‘bearing us and all the tortured peoples onwards safely towards the final goal.’⁴

Then, as in the months and years ahead, as the Allies struggled to come to grips with a determined, relentless enemy, the fate of those ‘tortured peoples’, including the Jews, but also Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Greeks, was first and foremost dependent on the ability of the Allies – principally the British, Americans and Soviets – to halt the onward march of German power, and then, at great cost to themselves in the lives of their soldiers, sailors and airmen, to drive the invader back from his mastery of Europe – mastery which, in December 1941, extended from the Atlantic coast of France to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.

* * *

On 11 February 1942, Chaim Weizmann’s younger son, twenty-five-year-old Flight Lieutenant Michael Weizmann, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, was shot down over the Bay of Biscay. His body was never found, and Weizmann asked Churchill to try to find out if, by chance, he has managed to get ashore in Spain and had been interned, or been taken prisoner of war. Churchill did what he could, but there was nothing to report.⁵

* * *

In Churchill’s mind, the Jewish fate in Europe and the Jewish future in Palestine were inextricably linked. Greatly unwelcome to those who had created the 1939 White Paper policy – many of them his wartime colleagues – were his interventions to allow Jewish immigrants to remain in Palestine when their lack of Palestine Certificates made them subject to deportation. When he discovered, on 2 February 1942 – alerted to the fact by his son Randolph – that 793 illegal immigrants who had reached the coast of Palestine on board the Darien, and been interned in a camp in Palestine, were about to be deported to Mauritius, he instructed Lord Moyne to release the refugees from internment and allow them to remain in Palestine. Churchill pointed out that up to the time that the decision to deport the Darien refugees had been taken: ‘It looked as if we should be subjected to a wave of illegal immigration, but now that the whole of south-eastern Europe is in German hands, there is no further danger of this.’⁶

Lord Moyne was not convinced, writing to Churchill on 7 February: ‘Any relaxation of our deterrent measures is likely to encourage further shipments of the same kind.’ The fate of the Darien passengers, Moyne insisted, would be a test case of the government’s determination to adhere to their proclaimed policy, and any concessions would cause great damage to the British Government’s ‘reputation in the Middle East for trustworthiness and firmness.’⁷

Churchill persevered, and the Darien passengers were allowed to remain in Palestine. But at a meeting on 5 March the War Cabinet insisted on laying down, as a basic principle of British policy, that: ‘All practicable steps should be taken to discourage illegal immigration into Palestine.’⁸ Entrenched policies and prejudices were impossible to dislodge, yet Churchill never gave up in the battle for his Palestine policy. It was still two years before the 1939 White Paper would come into effect, with its automatic Arab majority, putting an end to all Jewish hopes of sovereignty. On 27 April 1942, in a War Cabinet memorandum, he informed his colleagues with stark brevity: ‘I cannot in any circumstances, contemplate an absolute cessation of immigration into Palestine at the discretion of the Arab majority.’ Churchill suggested not only a future Jewish self-governing regime in Palestine, but, in addition, turning two former Italian colonies, Eritrea on the Red Sea and Tripolitania (part of today’s Libya) on the Mediterranean, ‘into Jewish colonies, affiliated, if desired, to the National Home in Palestine.’⁹

At no point during his wartime premiership were Churchill’s sympathies to Zionist aspirations shared by the majority of his Cabinet. Oliver Harvey, Anthony Eden’s Private Secretary, noted in his diary that year, about the Foreign Secretary: ‘Unfortunately AE is immovable on the subject of Palestine. He loves Arabs and hates Jews.’¹⁰

* * *

For two years the main focus of the British war effort was to avoid defeat, invasion, and destruction from the German air bombardment. By mid-1942 the tide was turning. Determined British efforts on land, at sea and in the air, and Churchill’s own daily endeavours, searched for every means of weakening the German war machine until such a time as the liberation of Europe could begin. On 5 July, as the fighting raged in North Africa, Churchill wrote to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Cranborne, with regard to the creation of a Jewish militia in Palestine, a scheme still opposed by both the War Office and the Colonial Office: ‘Now that these people are in direct danger,’ Churchill wrote to Cranborne, ‘we should certainly give them a chance to defend themselves.’

On an even more sensitive matter, Churchill went on to warn Cranborne: ‘It may be necessary to make an example of these anti-Semite officers and others in high places. If three or four of them were recalled and dismissed, and the reasons given, it would have a salutary effect.’¹¹ These were strong words, proof to many of Churchill’s colleagues that he was, indeed – in the words of General Spears – ‘too fond of Jews.’ Indeed, Churchill went so far, that September, as to warn Spears himself – then British Minister-Resident in Lebanon – ‘against drifting into the usual anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic channel which it is customary for British officers to follow.’ Spears had opposed what Churchill described as ‘my old idea of four States in a Confederation, of which three were Arab and one Jewish.’¹²

No anti-Semitic officers were dismissed, nor would the Cabinet Ministers concerned withdraw their opposition to a specifically Jewish military force. On 6 August, however, after the British and Commonwealth forces had been forced back deep into Egypt by Rommel’s Desert Army, there were calls throughout Palestine for Jewish and Arab volunteers, and a Palestine Regiment was established. Enough volunteers came forward to form three Jewish battalions and one Arab battalion, all wearing British insignia. After several weeks of intense training in Palestine, they were sent across the Suez Canal to the battle zone.

* * *

In German-dominated Europe, the deportation of Jews to their deaths in distant camps in German-occupied Poland, deportations that had begun in July 1942, was reaching a crescendo. On 7 September 1942, The Times reported the ‘unabated ruthlessness’ of the round-up of Jews in France by Vichy French police. Women and children, it stated, were ‘suddenly notified’ that they could visit their relatives in various internment camps, and were then ‘forced to accompany the deportees without being given any opportunity to make preparations.’ Recently ‘a train containing 4,000 Jewish children, unaccompanied, without identification papers or even distinguishing marks, left Lyons for Germany.’¹³ The destination in Germany was known, both to The Times and to Churchill, only as ‘somewhere in Poland’. Their destination was in fact Auschwitz, although this was not known either in France or by the Allied nations.

Churchill reacted immediately. Speaking in the House of Commons on the day after the report in The Times, he pointed out that the ‘brutal persecutions’ in which the Germans had indulged ‘in every land into which their armies have broken’ had been augmented by ‘the most bestial, the most squalid and the most senseless of all their offences, namely, the mass deportation of Jews from France, with the pitiful horrors attendant upon the calculated and final scattering of families.’ Churchill added: ‘This tragedy fills me with astonishment as well as with indignation, and it illustrates as nothing else can the utter degradation of the Nazi nature and theme, and the degradation of all who lend themselves to its unnatural and perverted passions.’ Pausing for a moment, Churchill declared: ‘When the hour of liberation strikes in Europe, as strike it will, it will also be the hour of retribution.’¹⁴

Britain redoubled its efforts to drive Hitler from his conquests. In September 1942 the war was being waged in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Western Desert, and in the air above Germany night after night, relentlessly, to the limit of the bombers’ range. At the same time, Churchill was determined to find a way to land on European soil and begin the liberation of the continent. It was to involve almost two years of intense planning before the Normandy landings could take place.

In the autumn of 1942 more details reached the West about the mass murder of Jews in camps set up for that purpose on occupied Polish soil – Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor and Belzec – camps that lay far beyond the limits of Britain’s bombers. On 29 October at the Albert Hall in London, Christian and Jewish leaders led a public protest against the massacres. Churchill, who was then in the United States, sent a letter to be read out by William Temple, the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘I cannot refrain,’ Churchill wrote, ‘from sending, through you, to the audience which is assembling under your Chairmanship at the Albert Hall today to protest against Nazi atrocities inflicted on the Jews, the assurance of my warm sympathy with the objects of the meeting. The systematic cruelties to which the Jewish people – men, women, and children – have been exposed under the Nazi régime are amongst the most terrible events of history, and place an indelible stain upon all who perpetrate and instigate them. Free men and women denounce these vile crimes, and when this world struggle ends with the enthronement of human rights, racial persecution will be ended.’¹⁵

Three days later, from Washington, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Churchill sent a telegram to Weizmann: ‘My thoughts are with you on this anniversary. Better days will surely come for your suffering people and for the great cause for which you have fought so bravely.’¹⁶ That great cause was Zionism. That day, Churchill also sent a message to the Jewish Chronicle, re-iterating and adding to his message of a year earlier: ‘None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew the unspeakable evils wrought on the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazis’ first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity. Assuredly in the day of victory, the Jews’ sufferings and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. Once again, at the appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world. Once again, it will be shown that, though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.’¹⁷

That winter the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem asked that 4,500 Bulgarian Jewish children, with five hundred accompanying adults, should be allowed to leave Bulgaria for Palestine. The new Colonial Secretary, Oliver Stanley, put the request to Churchill, pointing out that British public opinion had been ‘much roused by recent reports of the systematic extermination of the Jews in Axis and Axis-controlled countries.’¹⁸ Churchill replied to Stanley’s request: ‘Bravo!’ and he added, ‘But why not obtain, as you will, the hearty endorsement of the War Cabinet?’ Churchill had already arranged for the rescue effort to be put on the War Cabinet agenda.¹⁹

Thus encouraged by Churchill, Stanley successfully approached the Turkish Government to allow transit through Turkey. Before the arrangements could be finalised, the British Government offered to take a further 29,000 Jews, children and their adult escorts, from throughout South-Eastern Europe. These would come within the existing 1939 White Paper numbers – including the 25,000 emergency certificates – and could thus be justified, in the words of the Foreign Office, to ‘Moslem and Arab opinion’. Once more, the Turkish Government agreed to safe passage.²⁰ It was his ‘most urgent desire,’ Oliver Stanley wrote to a Member of Parliament as the project seemed to falter, ‘that everything possible should be done to give effect to these immigration schemes with promptitude and alacrity.’²¹ But a telegram from Clifford Norton, the senior British diplomat in Switzerland, a key neutral listening post, stated that the rescue plans had ‘come to the ears of the Germans who are successfully insisting on a stiffer line.’²²

German intervention had been stimulated by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who, having fled from Palestine in 1938 to avoid arrest by the British for his part in the Arab revolt, was then in Berlin. Determined to keep Jews from Palestine, on 12 May Haj Amin asked Hitler to press the Bulgarian Government not to allow the children to leave. His intervention was effective. On 27 May Clifford Norton reported from Berne that the Bulgarian Government ‘have now decided, clearly under German pressure,’ to close the Bulgarian-Turkish frontier ‘to all Jews.’²³

* * *

In December 1942, Churchill was shown a report from a Polish courier, Jan Karski, a Roman Catholic member of the Resistance, who had made his way to Britain. Karski described how he had seen several thousand Jews being forced with great brutality by heavily armed SS men into the cattle cars of a train for an unknown but clearly horrendous destination: in fact to the death camp at Belzec. Karski’s account, widely publicised, and broadcast over the BBC, was recognised as a culminating truth towards which, since the summer, many fragmentary pieces reaching the West, had contributed.

Jewish and Christian leaders in Britain pressed for a public statement by the Allies that would tell the world that the fate of the Jews was something beyond the normal cruelties of war; that it was a deliberate attempt not only to destroy Jews in vast numbers, but to kill every Jew in Europe within SS grasp. In the War Cabinet, Anthony Eden supported a public declaration. ‘It was known,’ he said, reporting the most recent information to reach London, ‘that Jews were being transferred to Poland from enemy-occupied countries, for example Norway; and it might be that these transfers were being made with a view to wholesale extermination of Jews.’²⁴

When issued on 17 December 1942 from London, Washington and Moscow simultaneously, and widely broadcast, the impact of the Allied Declaration was, as Churchill wished, considerable. Its central paragraph united not only Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, but also the eight Governments-in-Exile – those of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia – as well as General de Gaulle’s French National Committee, in condemnation ‘in the strongest possible terms’ of what it described as ‘this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.’

In describing the deportations the declaration was graphic: ‘None of those taken away are ever heard of again,’ it stated. ‘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’ were ‘reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children.’

One focus of the declaration was Churchill’s call for retribution. Despite initial hesitation from Washington, which would have preferred the word ‘alleged’ to be placed before the word ‘crimes’, Churchill had insisted that the declaration make clear, not only that the Germans were pursuing a ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’, but that those committing these crimes against the Jews would be hunted down after the war and brought to trial.²⁵

After Eden read out the declaration in the House of Commons, James de Rothschild, speaking as a British Jew, said he hoped that, as broadcast by the BBC, the declaration might ‘percolate throughout the German-infected countries,’ and that, in doing so, it would give ‘some faint hope and courage to the unfortunate victims of torment and insult and degradation.’ Rothschild also hoped that when news of the declaration reached the Jews inside Europe, they would feel ‘that they are supported and strengthened by the British government and by the other United Nations,’ and that the Allies would ‘continue to signify that they still uphold the dignity of man.’²⁶

On the day of the Allied Declaration, the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), founded in 1925, held a mass protest meeting at the Wigmore Hall, London. During the meeting a message was read out from Churchill’s wife, Clementine, in which she wrote of Hitler’s ‘satanic design to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe,’ and informed the assembled ladies: ‘I wish to associate with you in all your grief, and I pray your meeting may help to keep the attention of the British people focused upon the terrible events which have occurred and are impending in Nazi Europe.’²⁷

Amid all the pressing concerns of the war on land, at sea and in the air, and the desperate struggle to find the means to challenge the continuing Nazi domination of Europe, Churchill always made time to deal with Jewish issues. Only two weeks after the Allied Declaration, which gave such encouragement to the Jews that their fate was not forgotten, he supported a request by the Polish Government in London for air raids on Germany, with leaflets to be dropped at the same time as the bombs, ‘warning the Germans,’ Churchill informed his Chiefs of Staff Committee, ‘that our attacks were reprisals for the persecution of the Poles and the Jews.’ At their meeting on the evening of 31 December, he asked if it would be possible for the Royal Air Force to undertake ‘two or three heavy raids’ on Berlin during the first period of favourable weather in January. The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, warned that any such raids ‘avowedly conducted on account of the Jews would be an asset to enemy propaganda.’²⁸

Churchill had no power to overrule his air chief on operational matters, but he continued to keep a vigilant eye on all Jewish issues. On 6 February 1943, after a five-hour flight to Algiers, from where the Vichy French authorities had been ejected three months earlier, he discovered that the Vichy laws against the Jews of Algeria were still in force there. He insisted they be repealed at once. This was done.²⁹

Back in London from North Africa, at lunch with the Spanish Ambassador on 7 April, Churchill protested at the Spanish Government’s closure of the Franco-Spanish frontier in the Pyrenees to Jewish refugees. Churchill told the Ambassador ‘that if his Government went to the length of preventing these unfortunate people seeking safety from the horrors of Nazi domination, and if they went farther and committed the offence of actually handing them back to the German authorities, that was a thing which would never be forgotten and would poison the relations between the Spanish and British peoples.’³⁰

Churchill was able to see, from intercepted diplomatic telegrams from the Spanish Ambassador in London to his government in Madrid, that the message was passed on. He also learned within a few days that the Spanish authorities had re-opened the border for Jewish refugees.

* * *

In April 1943 the Jews of Warsaw, faced with a renewal of the deportations that had begun the previous summer, rose up against the German occupation forces. The revolt, which took place far beyond the range of any possible Allied help, was crushed with the utmost severity and cruelty. Fifty years later, Churchill’s grandson Winston – Randolph Churchill’s son – was invited to London University to address an anniversary commemoration of the revolt. Following his speech a woman in the audience had approached him. At the time of the uprising, she said, ‘I was a girl of just twelve. We had all been herded into the Ghetto – supposedly for our safety. But then people all around us started to disappear, we knew not where – we were all very frightened. We had one of the few radios in the Ghetto and, whenever your grandfather was due to broadcast on the BBC, my family and our friends would gather round. I could not understand English, but I knew that if I and my family had any hope of coming through this war alive, it depended upon that one, strong, unseen voice … I was the only member of my family to survive. I was liberated by British forces in 1945.’³¹

* * *

There were many calls in the British Parliament, and from Jews and their friends elsewhere, including the United States, for more to be done to give sanctuary to Jews who managed to escape the Nazis. The result of these calls was a conference held in Bermuda in May 1943. Taking the lead, Britain agreed to allow all Jewish refugees who had reached neutral Spain to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and be given sanctuary in Allied-controlled North Africa. When the United States Government opposed this, Churchill intervened directly with Roosevelt, telegraphing to the President that the ‘need for assistance to refugees, in particular Jewish refugees, has not grown less since we discussed the question.’ Churchill added: ‘Our immediate facilities for helping the victims of Hitler’s anti-Jewish drive are so limited at present that the opening of the small camp proposed for the purpose of removing some of them to safety seems all the more incumbent on us.’³²

Churchill’s initiative was successful; many hundreds of Jewish refugees from Nazism, who were being held in detention camps in Spain, made their way to a safe haven. But the number of refugees able to escape Nazi-dominated Europe was minimal. If more had been able to leave, there were still 33,000 unused Palestine Certificates within the 1939 White Paper quota. From 1 April 1939 to 31 March 1943 the total number of Jews reaching Palestine both legally and illegally had been 41,169. This left 33,831 certificates still unused.³³

At the end of June 1943 the distinguished Socialist thinker, Harold Laski – the son of Churchill’s Manchester friend Nathan Laski – sent a letter to Churchill, complaining that in a recent speech Churchill had made no reference to the Jews. ‘Although in my speech at the Guildhall,’ Churchill replied, ‘I referred only to the wrongs inflicted by Hitler on the Sovereign States of Europe, I have never forgotten the terrible sufferings inflicted on the Jews; and I am constantly thinking by what means it may lie in our power to alleviate them, both during the war and in the permanent settlement which must follow it.’³⁴

* * *

By the summer of 1943 as many as two and a half million of Poland’s three and a half million Jews had been killed. A further million Jews in western Russia and the Baltic States had likewise been murdered. The deportations from Western Europe to death camps in the East continued. On 24 July at the Prime Minister’s country residence, Chequers, Churchill gave supper to the British air ace, Guy Gibson, and his wife Eve.

Gibson was about to embark on a goodwill mission to Canada and the United States. ‘We were shown a film, captured from the Germans,’ Eve Gibson later wrote, ‘depicting the atrocities inflicted on the Jews and the inhabitants of occupied countries. It was quite ghastly and the Prime Minister was very, very moved. He told me that it was shown to every American serviceman arriving in this country.’³⁵ Some of these were airmen who would be bombing Germany day after day without respite. Others were soldiers who had begun training for the cross-Channel landings, less than a year away.

Churchill cast about for whatever means were possible to impede or halt the German atrocities. It might, he told the War Cabinet, have a ‘salutary effect’ on the Germans if Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union were to make an immediate declaration ‘to the effect that a number of German officers or members of the Nazi Party, equal to those put to death by the Germans in the various countries, would be returned to those countries after the war for judgement.’³⁶

With War Cabinet approval, Churchill drafted a declaration that he then sent to Roosevelt and Stalin. As the Allied armies were advancing, it read, ‘the recoiling Hitlerites and Huns are redoubling their ruthless cruelties.’ All those responsible for, or having taken a consenting part ‘in atrocities, massacres and executions’ were to be sent back to the countries ‘in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of those liberated countries.’

Churchill’s draft declaration continued: ‘Let those who have hitherto not imbued their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth, and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice may be done.’ Such a declaration, Churchill believed, would make at least ‘some of these villains shy of being mixed up in butcheries now that they know they are going to be beat.’³⁷

Eden did not want so explicit a declaration, writing to Churchill on 9 October: ‘Broadly, I am most anxious not to get into a position of breathing fire and slaughter against War Criminals, and promising condign punishments, and a year or two hence having to find a pretext for doing nothing.’³⁸ Churchill persevered, and prevailed. On 1 November 1943 the Allies issued the Moscow Declaration, which followed almost exactly the wording of Churchill’s draft. The Allies would compile a list of the ‘abominable deeds … in all possible detail’ from throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. They would then pursue those who had joined ‘the ranks of the guilty … to the uttermost ends of the earth’, and would deliver them to their accusers ‘in order that justice may be done.’³⁹

The hope was twofold: to deter the killers, and to assure the Jews of the world that, when Germany was defeated, justice would be done. As a result of the Moscow Declaration and Churchill’s persistence, German war criminals captured by the Allies were sent for trial to the countries where they had committed their crimes. Some of the most notorious, 5,000 in all, were executed in Warsaw, Cracow, Prague and Bratislava, the scenes of their worst excesses.