Anthony Eden & the Holocaust

[Von Schadewald]

This article "Sir Anthony Eden - Friend or Foe" appeared in the 31 January 2008 Jewish Tribune.






Is there an anything blatantly wrong or unfair in the following from the article?



Prejudice was common within the establishment but during the Nazi persecutions it crucially left Jews to their
awful fate; echelons of the civil service conspired to filter information to Prime Minister Winston Churchill (known to
be sympathetic to Jews) and block his initiatives. Contrary to official protestations, British intelligence actually knew of the Jews' massacres from 39 by eavesdropping on German radio messages. Many of the atrocities committed by the German Order Police (Ordnungspolizei or orpo) were reported in ordinary code which were easily broken; in co-operation with Polish intelligence, the British could also decipher the secret Enigma coding machines used by the Einsatzgruppen.

The British followed transports of Jews all the way to the killing grounds, knew the names of the units involved, the
officers in charge, the number of the transported Jews and location of executions. Daily summaries of this raw
intelligence were relayed to Churchill who circled in red the numbers of the Jews killed but after a few months, reports
of Jewish killings were systematically removed from his briefings. British hypocritical affectations of ignorance went
even further when the Polish Underground smuggled in eyewitnesses to the carnage.

A young Polish diplomat, Jan Karski, who had escaped from both the Soviet Army and Gestapo, was smuggled twice into
the Warsaw Ghetto and once into Belzec Death Camp before illegally crossing 39 borders to get to London and Washington
during late '42 to plead for Allied action. But his descriptions of the systematic massacres or German methods of killing
including gas and electric-shock chambers or hammerluft air-pressure were roundly discounted by M15 as unbelievable.

William Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee who had access to the Enigma decodes, summed up the reports of atrocities as not credible - Jews and Poles were merely "exaggerating German atrocities to stiffen our resolve" and he was more interested in military intelligence on the Germany Navy than the fate of dying Polish Jews.

All references to Jews were deleted from the War Cabinet minutes concerning Karski's account and when Eden wrote
to Churchill on the subject, he also removed everything which mentioned Jews being murdered. Eden refused to let
Karski report personally to Churchill because he felt it was "his duty to protect the elderly and overworked Prime Minister
from too many petitioners" When Eden met the emissary he was more interested in Polish-Soviet relations and their future borders than any Allied action on behalf of murdered Jews. A minute's silence in the Commons and vague declarations was the most he would offer.

When the Polish Foreign Affairs issued a note to Allied and neutral governments on the mass extermination of Jews in
German-occupied Poland and requested retaliatory bombing of German cities, both British and American governments
refused to act. Yet Eden knew the truth. During Sep '42 Goebbels had delivered an unusually transparent message to 60 Berlin newspaper editors, 'There are still 48.000 Jews in Berlin, they know with vith deadly certainty that as the war progresses they will be packed off to the East and deliveredup to a murderous fate. They already feel the inevitable harshness of physical extermination and therefore harm the Reich whenever possible whilst they yet live."

The British copy of this text is actually initialled by Eden.

When Churchill asked Eden on 14th Dec '42 whether reports about "the wholesale massacre of Jews by electrical methods" were true, Eden replied "Jews are being withdrawn from Norway and sent to Poland, for some such purposes evidently ... but am however unable to confirm the method of killing". Months after both England and the American State Dept. had confirmed the dimensions of the Holocaust, Eden met Roosevelt in Washington where Eden expressed his fear Hitler might actually accept an offer from the Allies to move Jews out of areas under German control!

The US Secretary of State Cordell Hull had urgently pressed Eden for a solution to 60-70 thousand Jews threatened with
extermination in Bulgaria and Eden replied, "the whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very difficult and we should
move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that, the Jews of the world will
be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany! Hitler might well take US UP on any such offer and there
simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them' The British are ready to take
about 60,000 more Jews to, Palestine but the problem of transportation even from Bulgaria to Palestine is extremely
difficult. Furthermore, any such mass movement would be very dangerous to security because the Germans would be
sure to plant a number.of their agents in the group."

A few months later at Chequers, Churchill saw a captured German film depicting atrocities inflicted on Jews and
inhabitants of occupied countries -"it was quite ghastly and the Prime Minister was very, very moved". Casting about for
whatever means possible to impede or halt the German atrocities, he told the War Cabinet it might 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 judgment." But Eden tried to water down any
explicit declarations, "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."

Ten months later they locked horns again over Hungarian Jewry. Writing a private but stiff memo, Churchill called it "probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great state and one of the leading races of Europe ... this is no ordinary case and should not be subject to negotiations of any kind on this subject".

By then the secret of Auschwitz had become public knowledge when escapees from the prison camp escaped with detailed reports and plans relayed via Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl reaching Zurich, London or Washington amid urgent demands for bombing raids to stop the recently begun Hungarian deportations gassing 12,000 daily. Eden suggested to Churchill, Weizmann and Shertok's request should be discussed by cabinet and relayed to Stalin but Churchill forcefuity repiled, "Is there any reason to raise these matters in Cabinet? You and I are in entire agreement! Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me necessary!".

But Eden did not "get anything he could" or "invoke Churchill. Instead, he accepted Air Minister Archibald
Sinclair's (a close Churchill friend) claim that Allied bombing of Auschwitz's railway spur and extermination facilities could
not be carried out and would be of little benefit to prisoners - try the Americans! Actually, Allied reconnaissance aircraft
were already flying repeatedly over the area taking aerial photograph s. Years later in the JC letter columns in a reply
to an article by R' S B Unsdorfer (late editor of the Jewish Tribune) the Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur"Bomber"
Harris admitted it could have been feasible but he had never even been consulted! Nor was there a good reason against
bombing railway bridges and tunnels as part of the ongoing Allied disruption of communications, as proposed by R'
Michoel Ber Weissmandl.

Fortunately for the remnants of Hungarian Jewry, Providence intervened and three days after Churchill's emphatic endorsement of the bombing of Auschwitz. their deportations to Auschwitz were halted at the request of Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy. A few weeks earlier a British diplomat, Elizabeth Wiskemann, deliberately sent an open, un-coded telegram to the Foreign Office in London listed Budapest government buildings involved, including police and railway ministries, and home addresses of relevant officials and suggested bombing them to force the Hungarian Government to stop the deportations; the cable was duly read by the Hungarian intelligence as intended.

Soon afterwards a regular American daylight bombing raid on Budapest fuel depots and railway marshalling yards went
wrong and "accidentally" hit several government buildings and private homes of senior government officials including
a large group of auxiliary police brought in to supervise deportations from Budapest. The intelligence services
wrongly concluded the air raid was in deliberate response to the cable, clearly implying this could be repeated, and a
terrified Horthy ordered Eichmann and Wiessenmayer to reluctantly stop.

A month after inadequately pressing for bombing Auschwitz, declassified papers reveal Eden also frustrated plans to save Jewish dignitaries sheltering under the protection of South American passports. Many were prominent Agudists or religious leaders who had received these life-saving passports from the Sternbuchs and instead of being condemned to death had been recognised as foreign Austauschjuden (exchange-Jews) and kept in preferential camps like Vittel orTheresienstadt to be bartered for Germans abroad. But the Red Cross and South American governments suspected their citizenship was not genuine and hesitated to recognise them; the Gestapo allowed them a month to contact abroad and authenticate their credentials - which produced a flood of desperate letters, phone-calls and cables - until they were shipped off to Bergen-Belsen.

The American War Refugee Board asked Britain to accept a swap with expatriate German nationals in Latin America
but Eden rejected the proposal because he was concerned the freed Jews would emigrate to Palestine and stir up
trouble! "Most holders of these documents are of Jewish race who have been accepted as immigrants to Palestine
and the passports are good for a journey thither provided the holders succeed in leaving enemy or enemy-occupied
territory. In these circumstances it appears doubtful it will ever be possible to carry out the exchange envisaged by the
US Government."

Though he must have known those Jews' lives were literally on the line, he however "hoped the German Government
will abstain from exterminating these people and will keep them in camps open to outside inspection" if it was made
aware they might at some point be bartered for Germans. In the event some were killed quite quickly while conditions in
Belsen deteriorated so awfully, the film of its liberation is still shown today as a showcase of German barbarity.

With such a background, how come Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden encouraged and co-operated with Israel in the
'56 Suez invasion? Indeed it was more his intense loathing for Nasserw whom he saw as a latter-day Mussolini or Hitler that-as described by one of his biographers -"forced him into a pact with the devil!" Like Harbonah of old, he was motivated less by "love of Mordechai" and more bv "hatred of Haman".

Whatever 'the reason, Suez brought about his downfall and political demise – and signaled the end of England as a colonial power.

[steve248]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

[Von Schadewald]

Is there anything factually incorrect or unacceptably biased in the article?

[JTG]

Was anything posited?

[steve248]

In keeping with what I know personally without going off to British archives to check out some dubious facets of this article:

"...British intelligence actually knew of the Jews' massacres from 39 [1939] by eavesdropping on German radio messages...": This is not correct. There are no such messages with this content.

"...Many of the atrocities committed by the German Order Police (Ordnungspolizei or orpo) were reported in ordinary code which was easily broken...": This is not correct. Some of these messages took several days to decipher due to regular changes by the German to the ciphers.

"...the British could also decipher the secret Enigma coding machines used by the Einsatzgruppen...": Only the technical part of this sentence is correct, i.e. the British deciphered messages from the Enigma machines; however, they could not decipher the ciphers used by the Einsatzgruppen that mention any massacres.

Reports to Churchill "of Jewish killings were systematically removed from his briefings...": This is not correct in the sense that the article author would have us believe. Every day Churchill was provided with a digest of deciphered German material by MI 6. Towards the end of September 1941 (I don't have the date to hand) the cover note of one digest provided to Churchill said they would no longer provide the German police reports of massacres because they had become so regular. Churchill had the opportunity to say keep providing it.

Jan Karski visiting "Belzec Death Camp": this is not correct. He actually visited "Izbica Transit Camp near Belzec" - Karski's hadwritten report on his Polish experiences after arriving in London. Report available in the archives of the Sikorski Museum, London.

The article author takes it for granted in this age of instant communication worldwide that the same system operated in WW2. "...During Sep '42 [1942] Goebbels had delivered an unusually transparent message to 60 Berlin newspaper editors. There are still 48,000 Jews in Berlin, they know...they will be packed off to the East...": In fact the report on this Goebbels meeting did not actually arrive in Britain until early 1943.

The quoted exchanges between US State Dept and UK Foreign Office can be seen in hindsight as what to do with a possible propaganda coup for Germany. The well-publicized wartime scheme of "Jews for trucks" (Hungary, 1944) is not mentioned in the article for some reason.

The article author if he had read more British and American intelligence papers - as supplied to their respective governments - would have noted that the military war was always the war to be won. The rescue of Jews and other civilian populations was simply not on the agenda until the war was won.

I don't think Suez signalled the end of British's colonial empire - the signals were there a decade before.

[David Thompson]

I'm having problems with the fact that there's no link to the original article, and the posted excerpts are unsourced. That's never a good sign.

[Von Schadewald]

Orthodox Jewish Holocaust historian Dr David Kranzler
http://www.holocaust-trc.org/kranzler.htm
died recently.

Amongst his books was "Thy Brother's Blood" http://antiqbook.com/boox/readin/12141.shtml that flayed not gentiles, but the secular Jewish Establishment.



"The article on Dr Kranzler's Holocaust research reminded one of the vexed question of how much did the Allies know and when.

In true Amolekite tradition the Germans placed higher priority on Judenevakuierung over military traffic.

For example, in 1943 the Germans had no better use for their trains, which were desperately needed for the Eastern Front, than to use them to transport 46,000 Sephardi Jewish men, women and children from the coastal paradise of Salonika to the hell of Auschwitz.

The rumors of death camps received in late 1943 and early 1944 were enough to order RAF reconnaissance flights. There were five aerial photography missions flown between early April and November 1944. The first flight was before the flood of Hungarian Jews arrived as part of SS operations to eliminate that country's Jews commanded by Adolf Eichmann.

This mission photographed a new rail spur that, unknown to the photo interpreters, was part of the upgrade of Birkenau's facilities to handle the anticipated influx of Hungarian Jews. The next mission was flown on June 26 near the end of the first phase of the German deportations, by when many of the Hungarian Jews had already passed through the gas chambers.

It was feasible that the Allies could have carried out a precision bombing raid to cut the rail link or destroy the gas chambers which had been pinpointed. Instead the Allies chose to raid the IG Farben Buna rubber plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz, because they viewed it as "a more viable target".

German witnesses stated post-war that had the Allies destroyed the rail link it would have taken months to repair due to the lack of materials. But even if the railway lines had been completely destroyed, the Nazis would have redirected prisoners to other camps via truck for execution. Or else they would have sacrificed some of their customary secrecy and installed the mass-murder equipment further west to eg Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, etc..

From their point of view, why would the Allies bother? It wouldn't have progressed their war effort a single iota. Their war against Germany was not about saving Jews, regardless of the image of WWII we are presented with today. "Because of the oppression of your brother Yaakov, you will blanch with shame and be cut off for ever... you stood by on the day foreigners plundered his wealth and aliens entered his gates...you too are like one of them...you should not have stood at the exit point to destroy his refugees... you should not have handed over his remnant on the day of disaster" (Ovadiah 1).

The head of RAF Bomber Command Air Chief Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris told the Ma'ariv newspaper in 1961: "I can't recall that I ever heard of such a plea to bomb Auschwitz. To the best of my recollection I never knew of the existence of the German extermination camps until we liberated Bergen Belsen in 1945".

Britain's response to the Jewish plight in WW2 may have been unimpressive and less than spirited, but the British were the only nation to have fought against Nazi tyranny from the beginning to the end, and the record of other countries was far, far worse, let alone the dreadful culpability and inactivity of the Jewish Agency and secular Zionist leaders in the USA and Palestine during the Holocaust"

[steve248]

David, if you are referring to my response the reason for not sourcing my answers is simple: there is no easy reference to quote. However all the information I gave can be found in the UK National Archives:

Information about, and the decoded messages themselves, are in Class List (Record Group) HW 16 and HW 19;

The daily digest of decoded material given to Churchill is in Class List HW 1;

The (British) Foreign Office material is in Class List FO 371;

I quoted the Sikorski Museum for the Jan Karski correction - a fact he confirmed in the last stages of his life. He was never in the Belzec death camp itself.

The UK National Archives can be found at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

[tonyh]

From their point of view, why would the Allies bother? It wouldn't have progressed their war effort a single iota. Their war against Germany was not about saving Jews, regardless of the image of WWII we are presented with today.

This is quite true. But one also has to ask, why would the Allies destroy the single greatest propaganda coup that the Germans had handed them? The propaganda value of the likes of Auschwitz etc was of far more worth to the post war account, than yet another bombed target in Europe.


Tony

[David Thompson]

steve248 wrote:

David, if you are referring to my response the reason for not sourcing my answers is simple: there is no easy reference to quote.

I was referring to the article which initiated the thread, rather than your post.

[Von Schadewald]

The article does not give any sources.

Do you want the text/a scan of the whole article?

If it has risen to the level of a calumny or travesty against the memory and reputation of Anthony Eden, maybe it warrants a response, whch they are likely to publish, as being an Orthodox Jewish paper, they follow Kranzler, Ben Hecht, Rabbi Weissmandl etc, in putting more blame on the Jewish Agency, Stephen Wise, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry and the secular Zionists, than they do on the Allies, for the failure to save Jews in 1944-45.

Eden came from an era when Jews were the only minority in the UK, and whilst I doubt he was an antisemite or judophobe, he probably reflected the mindset of many of that era, in not being overly-concerned or too enamoured with Jews.

[David Thompson]

Von Schadewald -- You wrote:

Do you want the text/a scan of the whole article?

Not if it doesn't give any sources. In that case, it's worthless to persons interested in historical research, and only amounts to some fellow's notion.

[stevebeste]

In the case of the Polish Jews held in Vittel, the Gestapo knew that most of their papers were false because Gestapo agents sold the visas to the Jews in Warsaw before transporting them to Vittel.

The visas were legitimately issued by the foreign governments, but the people named had already been shipped to the Death Camps. The Gestapo used the possibility of buying the exit Visas to lure wealthy Jews out of Aryan Warsaw.

[waldzee]

steve248 wrote:

David, if you are referring to my response the reason for not sourcing my answers is simple: there is no easy reference to quote.

I was referring to the article which initiated the thread, rather than your post.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
the best answer I ahve found came from David Ben Gurion in 1944

Teh arguement for :
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... ombau.html

Ben Gurion's response:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... 01610.html

[waldzee]

The death camps were, by August 19 , 1944
http://www.emersonkent.com/map_archive/ ... c_1944.htm
Just across the border from the Soviet union, & in their area of ''precision attack".
( Edit: a detail lost on the new age historians who hold America & Britian nefariousness responsible for the War...)