CHAPTER NINETEEN

SEEKING TO SAVE JEWS

On 4 July 1944 a short but graphic report reached the Foreign Office in London, revealing that the ‘unknown destination in the East’ to which there had been so many reports of Jewish deportations, was the SS-run camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The report was a telegraphic summary of a much larger one that was still on its way, detailing the nature and extent of mass murder at Auschwitz since the summer of 1942. The report also revealed that the Jews of Hungary, who for the previous three months had been deported to an ‘unknown destination’ on a daily basis, were being gassed at Auschwitz at a previously unheard of rate of 12,000 a day.

This horrific news reached the West as a result of the escape from Auschwitz of four Jews who, on reaching Slovakia, compiled an eyewitness report of what they had seen at Auschwitz. These reports were then smuggled to Switzerland, from where they were telegraphed to London, Washington and Jerusalem.1 As soon as Weizmann learned the true nature of Auschwitz, and that deportations there were still taking place in Hungary, he went to the Foreign Office to see Anthony Eden, together with Moshe Shertok, the Jewish Agency official in charge of diplomatic contacts and initiatives. The meeting took place on 6 July 1944. Eden immediately passed on their news, and their urgent requests, to Churchill.

Among their requests, Weizmann and Shertok appealed to the Allies to bomb the railway lines leading from Budapest to Auschwitz, along which it was suddenly clear that several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews had been, and were still being, transported to their deaths. Churchill’s response was immediate, and positive: ‘Get anything out of the Air Force you can,’ he wrote to Eden, ‘and invoke me if necessary.’2

Churchill’s emphatic instruction did not need to be carried out. Three days after he endorsed the bombing of railway lines leading from Hungary to Auschwitz, the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz was halted. Churchill later learned, from a decrypted message from the Turkish Ambassador in Budapest to the Turkish Foreign Minister in Ankara, that it was the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, who had called for an end to the deportations.3

When Horthy told the German Minister to Hungary, SS General Veesenmayer, that the deportations must stop, Veesenmayer was indignant, but had neither the men nor the political power to continue the deportations without Hungarian Government support. The immediate cause of Horthy’s intervention was an American daylight bombing raid on Budapest on 2 July. This raid had nothing to do with the appeal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz; it was part of a long-established pattern of bombing German fuel depots and railway marshalling yards. But the raid had gone wrong, as many did, and several government buildings in Budapest, as well as the private homes of several senior Hungarian Government officials, had been hit.

These buildings and homes included some that had been listed in a telegram sent from Switzerland to the Foreign Office in London by a British diplomat, Elizabeth Wiskemann, who – deliberately without using a code – had suggested bombing specific buildings in Budapest in order to force the Hungarian Government to stop the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. In her open telegram – read, as she had intended, by the Hungarian intelligence service – she gave the location of government buildings involved in organising the deportations, including the police and railway ministries without whom the deportations could not take place, and also the home addresses of Hungarian Government officials involved.

When the Hungarian intelligence services read this telegram they concluded that the American air raid of 2 July was a deliberate answer to it, and a warning – which clearly could be repeated – to halt the deportations. Neither General Wiessenmayer, nor Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann, who was in Budapest about to begin the deportation of all 120,000 Jews there – the last surviving Hungarian Jewish community – had any option but to defer to the Hungarian Government’s demand, and the deportations ceased.

Before news of this decision became known, the Jewish Agency asked the British Government for broadcasts over the BBC in order to give publicity to the deportations. Churchill’s response was emphatic. ‘I am entirely in accord,’ he informed Eden, ‘with making the biggest outcry possible.’4 This was done, with radio broadcasts from London not only describing the truth about Auschwitz, but also warning Hungarian railway workers, in their native tongue, that if they participated in the deportations – which could not be carried out without them – they would be branded as war criminals and brought to justice when the war was over. On 5 July Eden told the House of Commons that ‘there are unfortunately no signs that the repeated declarations made by His Majesty’s Government in association with the other United Nations of their intention to punish the instigators and perpetrators of these frightful crimes have moved the German Government and their Hungarian accomplices either to allow the departure of even a small proportion of their victims or to abate the fury of their persecution. The principal hope of terminating this tragic state of affairs must remain the speedy victory of the Allied nations.’5

Churchill knew that the war could only be brought to an end by an Allied victory; by continuing and often uncertain exertions, incurring heavy losses on land, at sea and in the air. Even as the Hungarian Jewish fate hung in the balance, British, American, Canadian and Polish troops were engaged in battle in Normandy, confronting a German force far more tenacious than they had anticipated, and suffering heavy losses. By the first week of July, after a month of fighting, the Allies had yet to break out of the Normandy beachhead. It was to take them more than six months to fight their way eastward to Germany.

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In the second week of July, Churchill was told of an Anglo-American dispute about thirty-two Hungarian Jews who managed to buy their freedom by handing the SS their factories and properties, and had been flown from Hungary to neutral Lisbon. On 8 July a telegram from the British Ambassador in Lisbon warned of the American State Department’s fear that the arrival of these Hungarian Jews ‘is a German move to plant suspicion in Soviet minds’ – suspicion concerning a separate peace between Germany and the western Allies.

Churchill dismissed the State Department’s apprehension out of hand, writing to Eden on 10 July: ‘Surely this only means that these poor devils have, at the cost of ninety per cent of their worldly possessions handed over in useful condition, procured an opportunity to escape from the butcheries to which their fellow-countrymen are doomed.’ Churchill added that, with regard to the ambassador’s fears that the Soviet Union would be suspicious of a possible peace feeler, ‘the only suspicion planted in my mind is that some of these German murderers have lined their pockets well with a view to their future. I presume you will discount any far-fetched Russian suspicions by telling them all about it, and even possibly mentioning the kind of interpretation I put upon this action. It is a naked piece of blackmail on threats of murder.’6

The State Department still feared a Soviet accusation of separate peace negotiations between Britain, the United States and Germany, and continued to oppose any help for the rescue effort. Churchill urged Eden to ignore this fear, writing to him on 6 August: ‘It seems to be a rather doubtful business. These unhappy families, mainly women and children, have purchased their lives with probably nine-tenths of their wealth. I should not like England to seem to be wanting to hunt them down. By all means tell the Russians anything that is necessary, but please do not let us prevent them from escaping.’ Churchill added: ‘I cannot see how any suspicion of peace negotiations could be fixed on this miserable affair.’7

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On 11 July, five days after the halting of the deportations from Hungary, Churchill was asked whether Britain should open negotiations, as the Jewish Agency wished it to do, with the SS. The Jewish Agency wanted to follow up what we now know to have been an SS deception plan, giving the SS goods and money for the release of Hungarian Jews who had, in fact, already been murdered. In rejecting any such negotiations, even through a neutral power, Churchill’s reaction to the escapees’ report of the mass murders at Auschwitz was emphatic and unequivocal. ‘There is no doubt,’ he wrote to Eden, ‘that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe.’

Churchill did not limit his reaction to outrage. His comment continued: ‘It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. Public declarations should be made,’ Churchill instructed, so that everyone connected with the murders ‘will be hunted down and put to death.’8

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and the Jewish industrialist Lord Melchett, had both written to Churchill in the first week of July about the deportation of Hungarian Jews and German plans to kill all the deportees. On 13 July Churchill replied to both men, in similar terms, telling Melchett that he could add nothing to Eden’s statement of 5 July and adding: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that we are in the presence of one of the greatest and most horrible crimes ever committed. It has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great state and one of the leading races of Europe. I need not assure you that the situation has received and will receive the most earnest consideration from my colleagues and myself but, as the Foreign Secretary said, the principal hope of terminating it must remain the speedy victory of the Allied Nations.’9 In his letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Churchill re-iterated the sentence: ‘I fear we are the witnesses of one of the greatest and most horrible crimes ever committed in the whole history of the world.’10

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On 3 July the War Cabinet discussed another Jewish Agency request, for a Jewish military force to fight alongside the Allied forces in Italy. Churchill was still much in favour of such a force, but the Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, objected to a Jewish Division – 12,000 men – as ‘quite impracticable for quantative reasons,’ and expressed his ‘grave doubts’ as to the ‘practicability’ even of a Brigade Group half that number, for the formation of which ‘he was averse.’ In response, Churchill told the War Cabinet that he felt ‘that in view of the sufferings which the Jewish people were at present enduring there was a strong case for sympathetic consideration of projects in relation to them.’ He would accept the objections to a full Division, but felt that ‘we should not refuse to examine the possibility of a Brigade Group.’11

The War Office remained hesitant, even hostile, stating only that the idea of a Jewish force would be ‘carefully examined.’ Churchill was not impressed. ‘When the War Office say they will “carefully examine” a thing,’ he wrote to the Cabinet Secretary on 10 July, ‘they mean they will do it in.’12 But he continued to press for the formation of a Jewish Brigade Group, writing to Grigg on 26 July: ‘I like the idea of the Jews trying to get at the murderers of their fellow-countrymen in Central Europe, and I think it would give a great deal of satisfaction to the United States.’ During the earlier discussion, the War Office had also opposed a special flag for the Jewish Brigade Group. Churchill was not convinced. ‘I cannot conceive,’ he wrote in his letter of 26 July, ‘why this martyred race, scattered about the world, and suffering as no other race has done at this juncture, should be denied the satisfaction of having a flag.’13

In explaining to Roosevelt what he wanted done, Churchill telegraphed to Washington on 23 August that after ‘much pressure’ from Weizmann he had arranged that the War Office would raise a Jewish military force ‘in what you would call a regimental combat team.’ Churchill commented: ‘This will give great satisfaction to the Jews when it is published and surely they of all other races have the right to strike at the Germans as a recognisable body.’ Churchill added: ‘They wish to have their own flag which is the Star of David on a white background with two light blue bars. I cannot see why this should not be done. Indeed I think that the flying of this flag at the head of a combat unit would be a message to go all over the world.’ If the ‘usual silly objections’ were raised, Churchill added, ‘I can overcome them.’14

The War Office finally deferred to Churchill’s persistence, announcing on 19 September the formation of a Jewish Brigade Group to take part in active operations. At last the Jews could participate, as Churchill wished, as a specifically Jewish force, with their own flag, in the Allied fight against Nazism. The first five thousand Jewish volunteers were organised into three infantry battalions and sent to the war front in Italy, where they formed an integral – and proud – part of Field Marshal Alexander’s forces. They were the only Jewish formation in the Second World War, in any army, that fought under the Jewish flag. In Palestine, those who had not enlisted earlier in the Palestinian Jewish battalions in 1940, or in the Palestine Regiment in 1942, were eager to face the German enemy.

The Jewish community in Palestine had listened to Churchill’s radio speeches since 1940, and seen him many times on the cinema newsreels. The slogan that had first appeared under his portrait in the public streets – ‘Winning Winnie’ – intended by the officials to exert an optimistic influence, had no resonance with the Hebrew and Yiddish-speaking population. The slogan was therefore changed to the similar, up-beat call of ‘Win We Will’, printed in its Hebrew version in bold biblical-style letters. In the words of one young man then in Palestine, Igo Feldblum, ‘Confident in this prophecy, many enlisted in the Jewish Brigade and fought alongside the Allies.’15

In all, 30,000 Palestinian Jews fought in the British forces in the Second World War. More than seven hundred were killed in action.

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Throughout the summer of 1944, Greek Communist insurgents, who were fighting the German occupation forces, hoped to take power in Greece when the Germans were driven out. Churchill was warned by the British Foreign Office that money – provided through clandestine channels by the United States – was being paid to Greek Communists to protect Jews fleeing imminent arrest and deportation. These Jews were refugees from Hungary who had been fortunate to have had enough money to bribe the Hungarian authorities to allow them to travel to Greece. But following the German occupation of Hungary, the Germans had begun to hunt down Hungarian Jews in Greece for deportation.

British policy was to boycott the Greek Communists in every way, but Churchill felt that saving Jews had priority over any such consideration. Asked to press the United States to halt the flow of money, he declined. ‘It is quite possible,’ he wrote, ‘that rich Jews will pay large sums of money to escape being murdered by the Huns.’ It was ‘tiresome’ that this money should get into the hands of the Communists, ‘but why on earth we should go and argue with the United States about it I cannot conceive.’

Churchill’s chief argument was a moral one. ‘We should take a great responsibility if we prevented the escape of Jews, even if they should be rich Jews,’ he wrote, and added, in scathing tones: ‘I know it is the modern view that rich people should be put to death wherever found, but it is a pity that we should take up that attitude at the present time. After all, they have no doubt paid for their liberation so high that they will only be poor Jews, and therefore have the ordinary rights of human beings.’16

On 26 August 1944, Randolph Churchill took his father a copy of the full report of the four escapees from Auschwitz. This had been issued a month and a half earlier as an official document by the War Refugee Board in Washington, but never sent to Churchill, who had only been shown the summary version telegraphed to London at the beginning of July. Not for the first time, Randolph had alerted his father to an aspect of the Jewish fate that had not reached the Prime Minister through official channels.

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Among the letters Churchill received in September 1944 was one from Harold Laski, then a senior member of the Labour Party executive. Laski wanted the nation to erect a statue in Churchill’s honour after the war. ‘As I look at the Europe Hitler has devastated,’ he wrote, ‘I know very intimately that, as an Englishman of Jewish origin, I owe you the gift of life itself.’17 Churchill replied, ‘I value the thought which inspired you to send it.’18 But he felt a park in one of the heavily bombed areas of south London would be a more fitting memorial than a statue.

That October, when Churchill was in Moscow for negotiations with Stalin about the future of Poland, the Jewish Agency learned that the Jews of Budapest, who had been saved from deportation in July, were again in danger. On 16 October Weizmann wrote to Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, John Martin, asking that, as a precondition of Allied peace negotiations with Hungary, ‘all steps be taken by Hungary to protect Jews from German attempts to exterminate them.’ Churchill’s Private Office decided not to forward the appeal to him, and he never saw it.19

Shortly after Churchill’s return from a visit to Moscow, the Jewish Agency learned that renewed deportations to Auschwitz were taking place in Poland, and asked for a public Allied protest. The Foreign Office was sceptical, but Churchill was not, writing to Eden: ‘Surely publicity given about this might have a chance of saving the multitudes concerned.’20 At Churchill’s suggestion, the British Government consulted both the United States and the Soviet Government. The Americans replied that they wished to issue a warning. The Soviet Government made no reply. Britain and the United States acted without the Soviets, broadcasting a denunciation of the deportations from Washington and London on 10 October. As Churchill wished, the wording was unambiguous: ‘If these plans are carried out, those guilty of such murderous acts will be brought to justice and will pay the penalty for their heinous crimes.’21

This warning brought an immediate response from Berlin, denouncing the reports on which it was based as ‘false from beginning to end.’ At the Foreign Office, Frank Roberts noted: ‘A satisfactory reaction. Our declaration may for once have been worth while.’22