CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

FROM WAR TO PEACE: ‘I SHALL CONTINUE TO DO MY BEST’

In March 1945 the Second World War was still being fought with great ferocity in northern Europe, on the Eastern Front, in the Balkans and in Italy. The Allied armies in Italy, commanded by Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, included the Jewish Brigade Group, with its Star of David insignia on which Churchill had insisted. On learning of Alexander’s successes on the battlefield, Churchill telegraphed, ‘Never, I suppose, have so many nations advanced and manoeuvred in one line victoriously,’ and he went on to note: ‘The British, Americans, New Zealanders, South Africans, British-Indians, Poles, Jews, Brazilians, and strong forces of liberated Italians have all marched together in that high comradeship and unity of men fighting for freedom and for the deliverance of mankind.’1

On 18 April, as Allied forces penetrated deep into Germany, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, telephoned Churchill about the entry of his troops into a concentration camp at Ohrdruf, near Gotha. The sight that met the American troops there was overwhelming in its horror: four thousand emaciated bodies dumped in ditches – Russian prisoners-of-war, Polish slave labourers, and Jews of a dozen nationalities, all of whom had died of starvation and disease, or who had been shot in mass executions as the Allied armies drew near. On the following morning, after American troops had reached Ohrdruf, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, telephoned a further message for Churchill about yet more camps that had been overrun, including Buchenwald. These, he explained, ‘are even indescribably more horrible than those about which General Eisenhower spoke to you yesterday and of which photographs have appeared in the press today.’ Buchenwald, near Weimar, was ‘the acme of atrocity.’

An American delegation, Eisenhower told Churchill, ‘might be too late to see the full horrors, whereas an English delegation, being so much closer, could get there in time.’2 Churchill agreed at once. Eisenhower’s hope, Churchill told Eden, was that the Members of Parliament and journalists ‘should be sent out at the earliest possible moment to inspect the indescribable horrors, far beyond any hitherto exposed, which are coming to light as the various torture camps are examined.’ Especially in the neighbourhood of Weimar, Churchill explained, ‘the atrocities have surpassed all example or indeed imagination.’3

That afternoon Churchill spoke to the House of Commons about the horror felt by the government at the proofs ‘of these frightful crimes now coming into view.’ Eisenhower had invited him, he explained, to send a group of Members of Parliament at once to his headquarters in order that they may themselves have visual and first-hand proof of these atrocities. The matter was of urgency, ‘as it is not possible to arrest the processes of decay in many cases.’ In view of this urgency, Churchill had come to the conclusion that eight members of the House of Commons and two members of the Lords should form a parliamentary delegation, and travel at once to the Supreme Headquarters, where Eisenhower would make all the necessary arrangements for their inspection of the scenes, whether in the American or British sectors of the front.

Churchill asked for volunteers for ‘this extremely unpleasant but none the less necessary duty.’ They must be chosen that afternoon, so that they could start the next day. ‘I hope,’ Churchill said, ‘the House will approve of the somewhat rapid decision I have taken.’4 The House of Commons did approve. ‘People are profoundly shocked here,’ Churchill telegraphed to Eisenhower that evening.5 And on the following morning he telegraphed to his wife Clementine, who was then visiting hospitals in the Soviet Union: ‘Here we are all shocked by the most horrible revelations of German cruelty in the concentration camps. General Eisenhower has invited me to send Parliamentary Delegation. I accepted at once and it will start tomorrow. They will go to the spot and see the horrors for themselves – a gruesome duty.’6

The British parliamentary delegation reached Buchenwald on 27 April. ‘One half-naked skeleton,’ they wrote in their report, ‘tottering painfully along the passage as though on stilts, drew himself up when he saw our party, smiled, and saluted.’ Ten days had passed since liberation. The number of daily deaths in the first days after the liberation of the camp had been a hundred or more. On the day before the visit of the parliamentarians, thirty-five inmates had died, ‘being already beyond the power of medicine to save.’7

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On 7 May 1945 the German armies surrendered unconditionally. The German war was over. The murder of six million Jews, and of more than ten million other captive peoples – Russians, Poles, Greeks and Serbs among them – was at an end. Churchill had been a central figure in the destruction of the German war machine and Nazi tyranny, driving forward the British war effort on land, at sea and in the air for five years. Simon Hass, a Polish Jew who survived the war in a Soviet labour camp, later recalled a fellow-prisoner’s comment as the war raged: ‘We have no bread, but we have Churchill.’8

Almost twenty years after the end of the war – and three days after Churchill’s death – Halina Neuman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote to the New York Times from her home in Newark, New Jersey: ‘May I have the privilege of telling your readers what Winston Churchill meant to us, the hunted, the persecuted, in hiding from the Nazis? When all the lights went out in Europe, in the black of the nights for months and months to come, his voice, his speeches kept us alive. He and his voice gave us the only hope that the evil would pass, and that the world was not coming to an end. God bless his memory.’9

The war against Germany was over, but the future of Palestine remained obscure. So too was the future of more than a hundred thousand Jews who had been liberated in the concentration camps or emerged from hiding, and were being gathered in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. Only a few of those in the DP camps wanted to go back to their homes in Central and Eastern Europe, homes that had been taken over by local people who did not want the few surviving Jews to return. For most survivors, Europe was the blood-soaked graveyard of their families, friends and communities. For many, it was Palestine that beckoned.

On 22 May 1945, two weeks after the German surrender, Chaim Weizmann wrote to Churchill, enclosing an appeal by the Jewish Agency for an end to all restrictions on Jewish entry into Palestine. ‘The Jewish people have waited till the end of the German war,’ Weizmann wrote, ‘not only for their deliverance from Hitler, but also from the injustice of the White Paper of 1939, which has so intensely aggravated both their sufferings and the loss of human life. We remember with gratitude how the voice of British conscience spoke through you.’

Perceptively, Weizmann told Churchill: ‘We have noted how, during the years of war, you have never let yourself be drawn into saying anything which could be interpreted as an acceptance of the White Paper. This has enabled me to urge upon my people patience. But now the German war is over. Under your leadership victory has come. Your word could never carry greater weight than it does now. The White Paper still stands. It is prolonging the agony of the Jewish survivors. Will you not say the word which is to right wrongs and set the people free?’ Weizmann added, in anguish: ‘The position of the Jews in the liberated countries is desperate, the political position in Palestine is becoming untenable, and so is my personal position as President of the Jewish Agency. The arguments I have been using cease to apply. What victory does not give us now, when is it to come? Every passing week, every reply in Parliament which treats the White Paper as law, increases the prescriptive interest of our opponents in that fatal document. This is the hour to eliminate the White Paper, to open the doors of Palestine, and to proclaim the Jewish State. It is my solemn duty to make to you this appeal for action, and for immediate action.’10

Churchill was sympathetic to Weizmann’s appeal, but he knew that his power to act was running out. On 23 May, the day after Weizmann’s letter, and two days after the Labour Party decided to leave Churchill’s all-Party coalition, the coalition was dissolved. The new ‘caretaker’ administration, headed by Churchill, was an entirely Conservative one. A large percentage of Conservative Members of Parliament were unsympathetic to the Zionist cause and supported the White Paper restrictions, for which they had voted six years earlier. Nor was this new administration more than a stopgap one; it would be in place only until the General Election gave voters the chance to replace it with Labour. The election results would be known in July.

On 9 June Churchill sent Weizmann a short answer to his letter of 22 May. ‘There can I fear be no possibility,’ he wrote, ‘of the question being effectively considered until the victorious Allies are definitely seated at the Peace table.’11 This had been Churchill’s stated plan for Palestine for more than a year.

There was considerable distress in Zionist circles at this reply. When it was discussed at the Zionist Political Committee in London on 13 June, Weizmann decried Churchill’s letter as ‘an insult to their intelligence.’ But he had discussed it with Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, John Martin, who was about to leave Downing Street for the Colonial Office, and Martin had told him that ‘it was absurd to think’ that Churchill had changed his opinion. He suggested that Weizmann propose to Churchill that they meet after the General Election. Ben-Gurion thought this was mere words, warning Weizmann that using the Election was the ‘only excuse’ Britain could give the Jews for telling them to wait.

For Ben-Gurion, Churchill’s letter was ‘the greatest blow they had received.’ Although Churchill had ‘no bad intentions towards them’ and still considered himself ‘as a friend of Zionism,’ the Jewish people were ‘absolutely powerless and helpless’ and it was ‘most evil to deceive people.’ Weizmann was also bitter. If Churchill ‘had wanted to settle things,’ he said, ‘he would have done so.’ As to the late President Roosevelt’s alleged remarks to Dr Stephen Wise, one of the leaders of American Jewry, that he favoured a Jewish State, Weizmann wondered whether that ‘was just moonshine – merely something to keep the wolf from the door.’12

That evening, 13 June, Weizmann saw Randolph Churchill. On the following morning Weizmann told his colleagues, including Ben-Gurion, that he had shown Randolph his father’s letter, at which Randolph had said, ‘Do not pay too much attention to what my father writes. He is tired and weary and worn.’ Weizmann told his colleagues that it was ‘all very well’ for Randolph to say that, but that he, Weizmann, ‘was left with a letter postponing an important decision to a very indefinite date.’13

On 15 June Weizmann wrote directly to Churchill, and straightforwardly: ‘My dear Mr Prime Minister: I would like to thank you for your note of June 9th, though I confess that its contents come as a great shock to me. I had always understood from our conversations that our problem would be considered as soon as the German war was over: but your phrase “until the victorious Allies are definitely seated at the Peace table” substitutes some indefinite date in the future. I can hardly believe this to have been your intention, because I am sure you realise what the continuance of the White Paper of 1939 is involving for the Jewish people. It bars the doors of Palestine against the surviving remnant of European Jewry, and many refugees have to wander or die, unable as they are to go to Palestine. As regards the 600,000 Jews in Palestine, the continuation of the White Paper means confinement to a territorial ghetto consisting of five per cent of the area of Western Palestine. They could hardly put up with this during the war; now it becomes unbearable. Every week in which Palestine continues to be administered under the White Paper renders the tragedy more acute. I most earnestly beg of you to bear all this in mind.’14

When no reply had reached Weizmann by 27 June, he vented his deep disappointment at a further meeting of the Zionist Political Committee. The Jews, he told his colleagues, ‘were only a small people.’ He could not fight Churchill, or Roosevelt’s successor as President, Harry S. Truman, but he could ‘keep his conscience clear’ by telling the leaders of the Western world, ‘You have done what you have done, but you cannot expect me to swallow it.’ Weizmann went on to tell his colleagues that he felt ‘very bitter; he had reached the end of a long road. They had tried their best. He had no confidence in the meeting of the Big Three. Nobody cared what happened to the Jews. Nobody had raised a finger to stop them being slaughtered. They did not even bother about the remnant which had survived.’15

Churchill had been still struggling to answer Weizmann’s letter of 15 June. His first reaction, in sending a copy of it to the Colonial Secretary, was: ‘I think it better to leave Dr Weizmann’s letter unanswered. But these notes may help you to put forward some ideas for a reply.’16 In the event, Churchill sent his own reply, dated 29 June. It was a serious attempt to set out the situation as he saw it. ‘My dear Weizmann,’ Churchill wrote, ‘I am afraid I can add nothing to my letter of June 9 except to explain that the Peace table means the Peace table for the settlement of problems arising out of the end of the war in Europe. I do not know what course the Great Powers will take about this. But I trust that after the July Conference, before the end of the year, there will be some coherent attempt on the part of the major Allies to settle the various outstanding territorial questions, and that would be the time when the Jewish position in Palestine would rightly fall to be considered.’

Churchill then explained to Weizmann his growing conviction that it was to the United States that the Jews of Palestine should look for satisfaction – and for statehood. ‘It has occurred to me for some time,’ Churchill wrote, ‘reading all the attacks in the American papers on the way Britain has behaved in handling the Zionist question, that it might be a solution of your difficulties if the Mandate were transferred from Britain to the United States who, with her great wealth and strength and strong Jewish elements, might be able to do more for the Zionist cause than Great Britain. I need scarcely say I shall continue to do my best for it. But, as you will know, it has very few supporters in the Conservative Party, and even the Labour Party now seem to have lost all zeal.’17

Churchill was both right and realistic; Weizmann was near despair. Yet Churchill’s intention remained to discuss Palestine at a special Middle East peace conference: the ‘Peace table’ Churchill called it. This, he hoped, would be held after the Potsdam conference – code name Terminal – that was to begin on 15 July, presided over by the Big Three: Churchill, Stalin and Truman, to discuss the future of Europe, and the continuing war against Japan.

Seeking to put Weizmann’s mind at ease, Churchill wrote to John Martin on 15 June, for transmission to Weizmann: ‘I said till the Peace Table, which means the peace table in Europe unless the Japanese war comes to an end beforehand.’18 Weizmann was not assuaged, telling his closest confidants on 27 June, at Zionist headquarters in London, that Churchill and Roosevelt had ‘let them down, maybe not intentionally, but inadvertently. They made promises which they did not carry out or mean to carry out. They were only a small people; he could not fight Churchill or Truman but he could keep his conscience clear by telling them “You have done what you have done, but you cannot expect me to swallow it.” He did not think the Agency would swallow it. He knew his resignation might lead to a dangerous state of affairs, and that the consequences for them might be serious. He felt very bitter; he had reached the end of a long road. They had tried their best. He had absolute confidence in Mr Churchill and Gen. Smuts but both their letters were great disappointments.’19

On 20 July Randolph Churchill wrote to his father: ‘I had a talk with Weizmann yesterday. As you probably know the World Zionist Organization are meeting on July 31 for the first time for six years. Weizmann appears genuinely concerned at the possibility of being thrown out by the Extremists unless he can hold out some hope for the future. Immigration is of course the burning topic. He fears that, unless the present ban can be mitigated in some way, there are bound to be a lot of illegal immigrants, many of whom will be caught and ejected, possibly with bloodshed.’

Weizmann had told Randolph that President Truman was ‘fully informed on the position and very sympathetic.’ Randolph told his father: ‘I am sorry to trouble you with this now, when you must have so many other much more important things in mind. But it occurred to me that, whether or not you discuss Palestine with Truman, and whether or not any useful results are reached, somebody ought to see Weizmann before the 31st and brief him on the line he ought to take.’20 Churchill suggested Oliver Stanley, who saw Weizmann; but the Middle East Peace conference would have to wait until after Potsdam.

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On 5 July the British electors cast their votes. The results would not be known for another three weeks until the soldiers’ votes, including those who were still on active service in the Far East, had been counted. On 6 July, the day before leaving England for a nine-day respite, painting in the French Pyrenees, Churchill wrote to the Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley and the Chiefs of Staff, with a copy to Eden: ‘The whole question of Palestine must be settled at the Peace table, though it may be touched upon at Terminal. I do not think we should take the responsibility upon ourselves of managing this very difficult place while the Americans sit back and criticise. Have you ever addressed yourself to the idea that we should ask them to take it over? I believe we should be the stronger the more they are drawn into the Mediterranean. At any rate the fact that we show no desire to keep the Mandate will be a great help. I am not aware of the slightest advantage which has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task. Somebody else should have their turn now.’21

At Potsdam the Big Three did not discuss the future of Palestine. Churchill had not been averse to doing so prior to the Middle East ‘Peace table’, but Oliver Stanley told Churchill on 13 July that he and Eden felt that ‘in the absence of any Government decision either on short term or long term policy it would be best’ – at Potsdam – ‘not to raise the question ourselves.’22 Churchill knew that there was no way that the Conservative caretaker government would come round to his point of view.

At Potsdam the future of Poland – on which the Soviet liberators were imposing Communist rule – dominated the discussions. Palestine did come up briefly and tangentially during a discussion about what was to become of the former Italian colonies, in particular Tripolitania and Cyrenaica – which were later joined together to form Libya. Churchill raised the possibility of transferring Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, then under British military occupation, to Jewish rule and future settlement. Britain had ‘wondered if any of these countries would do for the Jews,’ Churchill told Truman and Stalin, ‘but it appeared that the Jews were not very smitten with this suggestion.’23 As Churchill knew, the half million Jews of Palestine, builders of towns, tillers of the soil, creators of its national and educational institutions, had no intention of even discussing an alternative National Home.

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Churchill broke off the Potsdam talks to return to Britain to learn the election results. The Conservative Party had been defeated at the polls and Labour was returned to power for the first time in fourteen years. The British people, Churchill told Captain Pim, the head of his wartime Map Room, ‘are perfectly entitled to vote as they please. This is democracy. This is what we have been fighting for.’24

As Churchill had warned Weizmann a few weeks before the election results were known, the Labour Party had lost its zeal for Zionism. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, appointed Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary. In 1929 Bevin had attributed the Arab riots in Palestine to Arab peasant indignation against the power of Jewish money – a cruel mischaracterisation at a time when the Zionist movement had been struggling with lack of funds and with the burden of defending Jewish towns and villages against unprovoked Arab attack.

On taking charge of British foreign policy on 27 July 1945, Bevin set himself against allowing into Palestine the 100,000 survivors of the Holocaust who were then being gathered in Displaced Persons camps in the British and American zones of Germany. He also set himself against Churchill’s assurances to the Peel Commission eight years earlier that the British Government contemplated, in due course, a Jewish majority and a Jewish State in Palestine. These were severe blows to the half million Jews of Palestine, and to those Jews waiting in DP camps in Europe to be given refuge there.

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In the spring of 1946 Churchill was in the United States. On 18 March he was the guest of honour at a dinner given by Bernard Baruch in New York. One of the guests present, Elisha Friedman, a leading economist, wrote to Churchill the following day to compliment him on having spoken with ‘the assured touch of a master.’ Churchill had moved him ‘most deeply,’ Friedman wrote, ‘when you said you were a Zionist.’ Indeed, Friedman continued, Baruch had told him ‘that you were trying to convert him to Zionism. This was heartening to me, for I have not succeeded in doing so, after thirty years of effort.’25

The British Government not only refused to allow the 100,000 survivors to emigrate to Palestine, it also sent to detention in camps in Cyprus those who were caught trying to arrive by sea. This led to an upsurge in conflict in Palestine, with Jewish terrorists carrying out violent attacks on British troops and police. Faced by unrest and violence that it did not have the troops or will power to challenge, the Cabinet in London set up an Anglo-American Commission to make recommendations about the future of Palestine, with a view to ending the Mandate. The Commission concluded that the British Mandate should be replaced by two sovereign nations, one Jewish, the other Arab, in a partitioned Palestine.

Churchill had come to see Partition as the only realistic solution. On 1 May 1946 he wrote, as part of a draft letter to Clement Attlee: ‘I strongly favour putting all possible pressure upon the United States to share with us the responsibility and burden of bringing about a good solution on the lines now proposed by the Anglo-American Commission. If adequate American assistance is not forthcoming, and we are plainly unable either to carry out our pledge to the Jews of building up a national Jewish home in Palestine, allowing immigration according to absorptive capacity, or if we feel ourselves unable to bear single-handed all the burdens cast upon us by the new Commission’s report we have an undoubted right to ask to be relieved of the Mandate.’26

In the event, Churchill decided not to send this paragraph, but it reflected a view he had held and expressed on several occasions in the past.

In Palestine acts of Jewish terror continued: on 16 June there was a countrywide sabotage of bridges, and two days later, five British officers were kidnapped from the Officers’ Club in Tel Aviv. But such actions were still the method of a minority that believed violence was the way to drive out the British. ‘Yielding to terrorism would be a disaster,’ Churchill wrote to Attlee on 2 July 1946, but he added: ‘At the same time I hold myself bound by our national pledges, into which I personally and you also and your Party have entered, namely the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, with immigration up to the limit of “absorptive capacity”, of which Britain, as the Mandatory Power, was the judge.’ Churchill went on to tell Attlee: ‘Several of my friends are far from abandoning Partition, and I am very much inclined to think this may be the sole solution.’27 ‘We shall not accept any solution,’ Attlee replied, ‘which represents abandonment of our pledges to the Jews or our obligations to the Arabs.’28

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In Poland, those survivors of the Holocaust who wanted to return to their pre-war homes and rebuild their shattered lives were attacked and even murdered by Poles who did not want them to return to the homes that were being lived in since the deportations of 1942 by neighbours and strangers. In Kielce on 4 July 1946, forty-two Jews were killed by an anti-Semitic Polish mob. Two of those killed were young children. Four were teenagers who had reached the city a few days earlier and were on their way to Palestine. Within twenty-four hours of the killings becoming known, more than five thousand Polish Jews fled westward, determined to make their way to Palestine. Tens of thousands more followed in the months ahead.