Over the last year, a renewed controversy has arisen over the morality of World War II. For the last eighty years, World War II has been sold in the West as “The Good War” in which the United Kingdom and the United States, in spite of committing some war crimes, saved millions of Jewish refugees from perishing in the Holocaust. But the evidence actually shows that both countries’ refusal to allow millions of innocent civilian refugees to immigrate to Britain and the U.S. before, during, and after the war contributed to the deaths of millions.
If Britain and the U.S. had admitted mass numbers of refugees through immigration—and avoided entering the war as belligerents—far more lives would have been saved. Instead, Britain admitted only 80,000 Jewish refugees before and during the war, and the United States admitted only about 125,000, far less than the millions that could have been allowed in by both countries.
Contrary to popular myth, the Reich’s initial policy towards Europe’s Jews was a program of ethnic cleansing and expulsion from Germany and eventually its occupied territories. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938, Britain and the United States should have immediately began allowing millions of European Jews to immigrate. It was not until August 1941 that the Nazis forbade all Jewish emigration from Nazi-occupied countries and not until October 23, 1941 that they prohibited all Jewish emigration from Germany itself. Bernard Wasserstein, in his Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, notes that during the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany “was not the primary obstacle to Jewish emigration from Nazi-controlled areas of Europe…That the great majority of Jews failed to emigrate was primarily due to the extreme reluctance of all countries to admit them.” The Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews didn’t begin in full until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
After the United Kingdom entered the war in September 1939, the British maintained a strict maritime blockade against people and goods from entering and exiting Nazi-ocuppied Europe, including ships of Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitism in Europe. In the first week of September 1939, off the coast of Palestine—then controlled by London—Royal Navy gunboats and Royal Air Force warplanes fired on the Tiger Hill, a ship of 1,400 Jewish refugees from Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland attempting to reach shore. During the duration of the war, numerous ships filled with Jewish refugees such as the Alsina, the Patria, and the Struma, the Hilda, the Sakaya, the Rudnitchar, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Milos, the Salvador/Tsar Krum, and the Darien II had to circumvent the British wartime blockade of Europe to “illegally” escape from Nazi-controlled or Nazi-allied countries. The phenomenon of ships of civilians trying to evade the British blockade wouldn’t have occurred if the United Kingdom had allowed all of these refugees to come to Britain or one of its dominions.
After the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the unexpectedly rapid German advance caused between 200,000-300,000 Polish Jews to flee eastward, into the Soviet invasion on September 17. Germany sought to expel these Polish Jews from its half of invaded-Poland.
Wasserstein argues that in the early part of World War II, the Nazis “favored, encouraged, and even promoted” Jewish emigration from Germany and Nazi-occupied territories. When the Allies didn’t respond by offering to take in Jews, Adolf Eichmann, head of the Berlin, Vienna, and Prague offices of the Reich Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration worked with Zionist groups to emigrate Jews to Palestine. In Open the Gates (1975), a Jewish Agency representative, Ehud Avriel, claimed that he was treated by Eichmann’s office “as a preferred customer.” Wasserstein also notes that Helmut Wohlthat of the German Economics Ministry sent an official message to Britain in October 1939, stating Germany’s intention to expel as many Jews from Germany as possible. Germany also informed the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees of its willingness to work with that international agency to encourage Jewish emigration from Europe. Britain’s response did not include agreeing to allow substantial European Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom
The British White Paper of 1939 had stipulated that over the next five years a grand total of 75,000 Jews would be allowed visas to Palestine, yet by the end of 1942, when at least two million Jews had already been murdered in the Holocaust, only 39,000 Jews had been allowed into Palestine. By war’s end, the 75,000-person quota remained unfilled. And in the United States during the war, the quotas for immigration from Germany and Austria—which were ethnically cleansing and expelling their Jews—also remained unfilled.
According to Wasserstein, in May 1941, the British Colonial Office considered re-implementing its policy of firing on Jewish refugee ships as both a deterrent to more illegal immigration and to prevent any Nazi German spies—possibly smuggled among the ship’s passengers—from reaching Palestine and the Middle East.
By the end of 1942, reports from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union reached the West that the Nazis had begun a mass genocide of the Jews of Europe. On December 17, 1942, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden read to the British House of Commons a statement signaling the Allies’ public recognition of the Holocaust:
“From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe…None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions.”
Members of the House of Commons rose in silence. This declaration served as the first public acknowledgement by the Allies of the reality of the Holocaust. But the declaration led to no kinetic action in favor of doing more to rescue Holocaust victims. According to Wasserstein, two weeks later on December 31, 1942, during the first meeting of the Cabinet Committee on the Reception and Accommodation of Jewish Refugees, Britain’s Home Secretary Herbert Morrison amazingly argued that Britain could only admit 1,000-2,000 additional Jewish refugees.
Also, in December 1942, British MP James de Rothschild of the Rothschild family personally appealed to Prime Minister Winston Churchill to increase British attempts to rescue European Jews. Later that month, an offer by the Romanian government—itself complicit in the Holocaust—to transport 70,000 Jews out of Romania was received by Britain. But Michael J. Cohen notes in Churchill and the Jews, the British Foreign Office declined to help rescue these Jews with this reply on February 27, 1943:
“The blunt truth is that the whole complex of human problems raised by the present German domination of Europe, of which the Jewish question is an important but by no means the only aspect, can only be dealt with completely by an Allied victory, and any step calculated to prejudice this is not in the interests of the Jews in Europe.”
These 70,000 Romanian Jews later died in the Holocaust.
Additionally, because of the demand for unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers, the Allies refused to negotiate with Germany in the later years of the war, even when Jews might have been rescued in the process. In 1944 in Budapest, Hungary, Adolf Eichmann proposed to Joel Brand of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee that the Nazis would release one million Jews to the Allies in exchange for 10,000 trucks, tea, and other goods. But Britain refused to even consider the offer. Britain later arrested Brand in Aleppo when he was conveying the proposal to the Jewish Agency in Syria. Later, 437,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Nazi death camps.
Most Britons in the late 1930s didn’t want another war with Germany. On Neville Chamberlain’s return in 1938 from the Munich Conference with a peace agreement with Hitler, British crowds greeted Chamberlain as a hero. And the British people appeared to have been less anti-immigrant than the British government assumed. According to the Jewish Chronicle of April 2, 1943, a Gallup poll taken in the United Kingdom in February 1943 about allowing into their country European Jews threatened with death, 78% of Britons supported their admission. Of this supermajority, 40% specified that asylum should be given only until the refugees could be settled elsewhere, 28% approved of admission until the end of the war, and 10% favored the granting of refuge for an indefinite period.
The people of both Britain and the United States in the 1930-40s would almost certainly have supported the immigration of millions of European Jews if it meant avoiding involvement in another disastrous world war and saving the lives of their sons, brothers, and fathers on the battlefield. And a mass exodus of Europe’s Jews to the UK and the U.S. would have meant far fewer Jewish emigrants to the Middle East after the war. Consequently, the seeds of today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict were planted by decisions made by London and Washington before, during, and after World War II.
For both major western powers, entering the war was a choice. A better course would have been to stay out and help innocent civilians by allowing extensive immigration of war refugees. Instead, both countries entered the war and the historical record shows that both nations placed the total destruction of Germany and Japan—not rescuing their victims—as their top priority. Only about a third of Europe’s pre-war Jewish population was saved by the actions of the Allies. The Jews’ darkest hour didn’t produce the Allies’ finest hour.
