A Problem From Hell Page 7

  Earlier that year Jan Karski, a twenty-eight-year-old Polish diplomat and a Roman Catholic, had disguised himself as a Jew, donning an armband with the Star of David, and smuggled himself through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto. Posing as a Ukrainian militiaman, he also infiltrated Belzec, a Nazi death camp near the border between Poland and Ukraine. In late 1942 Karski escaped carrying hundreds of documents on miniature microfilm contained in the shaft of a key. He arranged to meet in London with Zygielbojm and his colleague, Ignacy Schwarzbart. On the eve of the meeting, Schwarzbart examined Karski’s documents, and, aghast, cabled the World Jewish Congress in New York, describing the suffering of the Jews in Poland:

  JEWS IN POLAND ALMOST COMPLETELY ANNIHILATED STOP READ REPORTS DEPORTATION TEN THOUSAND JEWS FOR DEATH STOP IN BELZEC FORCED TO DIG THEIR OWN GRAVE MASS SUICIDE HUNDREDS CHILDREN THROWN ALIVE INTO GUTTERS DEATH CAMPS IN BELZEC TREBLINKA DISTRICT MALKINIA THOUSANDS DEAD NOT BURIED IN SOBIBOR DISTRICT WLODAWSKI MASS GRAVES MURDER PREGNANT WOMEN STOP JEWS NAKED DRAGGED INTO DEATH CHAMBERS GESTAPO MEN ASKED PAYMENT FOR QUICKER KILLING HUNTING FUGITIVES STOP THOUSANDS DAILY VICTIMS THROUGHOUT POLAND STOP BELIEVE THE UNBELIEVABLE STOP4

  Karski met with Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm the next day in their office near Piccadilly Circus. He told them of naked corpses in the Warsaw ghetto, yellow stars, starving children, Jew hunts, and the smell of burning flesh. Karski relayed a personal message to Zygielbojm from Leon Feiner, the leader of the Bund trapped in Warsaw. Feiner had instructed Zygielbojm to stop with the empty protests and urge retaliatory bombing, leafleting, and the execution of Germans in Allied hands.5 Karski said that when he had cautioned that the proposals were “bitter and unrealistic,” Feiner had countered with: “We don’t know what is realistic, or not realistic. We are dying here! Say it!”6 Karski, who had a photographic memory, recited Feiner’s parting appeal to Jewish leaders to do something dramatic to force people to believe the reports:

  We are all dying here; let [the Jews in Allied countries] die too. Let them crowd the offices of Churchill, of all the important English and American leaders and agencies. Let them proclaim a fast before the doors of the mightiest, not retreating until they will believe us, until they will undertake some action to rescue those of our people who are still alive. Let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. This may shake the conscience of the world.

  Upon hearing Feiner’s message, Zygielbojm leaped from his seat and began pacing back and forth across the room. “It is impossible,” he said, “utterly impossible. You know what would happen. They would simply bring in two policemen and have me dragged away to an institution. . . . Do you think they will let me die a slow lingering death? Never. . . . They would never let me die.”7 As he continued questioning Karski, an agitated Zygielbojm pleaded with his messenger to believe he had done all he could. Two weeks later in a BBC broadcast Zygielbojm declared, “It will actually be a shame to go on living, to belong to the human race, if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in history.”8

  Karski traveled to the United States and met with Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who graciously heard him out and then responded, “I don’t believe you.” When a stunned Karski protested, Frankfurter interrupted him and explained, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.”9 Frankfurter literally could not conceive of the atrocities Karski was describing. He was not alone. Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy in Washington from 1942, saw only a massive pogrom. So, too, did Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and other leading Zionists.10

  The Germans did their part, issuing ritual denials and cloaking the Final Solution in the euphemisms of “resettlement.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda and national enlightenment, met atrocity reports by pointing to British abuses carried out in India and elsewhere, a tactic he deemed “our best chance of getting away from the embarrassing subject of the Jews.”11 The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which documented the deportations, did not publicly protest because, it concluded, “public protests are not only ineffectual but are apt to produce a stiffening of the indicted country’s attitude with regard to Committee, even the rupture of relations with it.”12 Intervention would be futile and would jeopardize the organization’s ability to conduct prison inspections, deliver humanitarian parcels, and transmit messages among family members. Neutrality was paramount.

  The Allies’ suppression of the truth about Hitler’s Final Solution has been the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship.13 Intelligence on Hitler’s extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources. The United States maintained embassies in Berlin until December 1941, in Budapest and Bucharest until January 1942, and in Vichy France until late 1942.14 The British used sophisticated decryption technology to intercept German communications. The major Jewish organizations had representatives in Geneva who relayed vivid and numerous refugee reports through Stephen Wise, the president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and others. In July 1942, Gerhard Riegner, the WJC Geneva representative, informed the State Department of a well-placed German industrialist’s report that Hitler had ordered the extermination of European Jewry by gassing. In November 1942, Rabbi Wise, who knew President Roosevelt personally, told a Washington press conference that he and the State Department had reliable information that some 2 million Jews had already been murdered. The Polish government-in-exile was a goldmine of information. Already by the fall of 1942, for instance, Zygielbojm had begun meeting regularly with Arthur J. Goldberg, General Bill Donovan’s special assistant at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to discuss the death camps.

  But the intelligence was often played down. In June 1942, for instance, the London Daily Telegraph published the Bund report’s claim that 700,000 Polish Jews and more than 1 million Jews throughout Europe had been killed. The New York Times picked up the Telegraph’s reports but buried them deep inside the paper.15 When Riegner cabled word of Hitler’s plot the following month, British and U.S. officials and journalists were skeptical about the veracity of “unsubstantiated information.” In the words of one Swiss foreign editor, “We received no picture of photographic exactitude, only silhouettes.”16 In 1944, when John Pehle, the director of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board, wanted to publish the report of two Auschwitz escapees, Elmer Davis, the head of the U.S. Office of War Information, turned down his request. The American public would not believe such wild stories, he said, and Europeans would be so demoralized by them that their resistance would crumble. The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Hershel Johnson, sent a cable in April 1943 detailing the extermination of Jews in Warsaw, but he ended his message by noting: “So fantastic is the story. . . that I hesitate to make it the subject of an official report.”17 In the November 1943 Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill declaration, reference to the gas chambers was deleted because the evidence was deemed untrustworthy. To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies’ response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.18

  Why and how did people live in “a twilight between knowing and not knowing”?19 For starters, the threat Hitler posed to all of civilization helped overshadow his specific targeting of the Jews. Widespread anti-Semitism also contributed. It was not that readers’ prejudice against Jews necessarily made them happy to hear reports of Hitler’s monstrosity. Rather, their indifference to the fate of Jews likely caused them to skim the stories and to focus on other aspects of the war. Others did not take the time to process the reports because they believed the Allies were doing all they could; there was no point in getting depressed about something they could not control. Such knowledge was inconvenient. Karski later recalled that Allied leaders “discarded their conscience” with the rationale that “the Jews were totally helpless. The war strategy was the military defeat of Germany.”20 Winning the war was the most efficient way to stop Hitler’s murder of
civilians. The Allied governments worked indirectly to help Jewish victims by attempting to defeat him, but they rejected the Jewish leaders’ request to declare as a war aim the rescue of Europe’s Jews.

  The vast majority of people simply did not believe what they read; the notion of getting attacked for being (rather than for doing) was too discomfiting and too foreign to process readily. A plot for outright annihilation had never been seen and therefore could not be imagined. The tales of German cremation factories and gas chambers sounded far-fetched. The deportations could be explained: Hitler needed Jewish slave labor for the war effort. During the Turkish campaign against the Armenians, this same propensity for incredulity was evident, but it was even more pronounced in the 1940s because of a backlash against the hyped-up “Belgian atrocities” of World War I.21 During that war, journalists had faithfully relayed tales of bloodthirsty “Huns” mutilating and raping nuns and dismembering Belgian babies. Indeed, they reported claims that the Germans had erected a “corpse-conversion factory” where they boiled human fat and bones into lubricants and glycerine.22 In the 1920s and 1930s, the press had debunked many of the Allies’ wartime reports of German savagery, yielding a “hangover of skepticism.” Although many of these stories were confirmed years later, they were still being discredited at the outbreak of World War II.23 When tales of Nazi gas vans and extermination plots emerged, many people believed that such stories were being manufactured or embellished as part of an Allied propaganda effort. Just as military strategists are apt to “fight the last war”—to employ tactics tailored for prior battlefield foes—political leaders and ordinary citizens tend to overapply the “lessons of history” to new and distinct challenges.

  In his campaign to convey the horror of Nazi atrocities, Zygielbojm tried to overcome people’s instinctive mistrust of accounts of gratuitous violence. But he began to despair of doing so. In 1943 he learned that his wife and child had died in the Warsaw ghetto. In April 1943, at the Bermuda conference, after twelve days of secretive and ineffectual meetings, the Allies rejected most of the modest proposals to expand refugee admissions, continuing to severely limit the number of Jews who would be granted temporary refuge in the United States and unoccupied Europe.24 On May 10, over dinner in London, Arthur Goldberg of the OSS informed Zygielbojm that the United States had rejected his requests to bomb Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto. “With understandable pain and anguish,” Goldberg remembered later, “I told him that our government was not prepared to do what he requested because in the view of our high command, aircraft were not available for this purpose.”25

  Zygielbojm could take it no more. He typed up a letter, addressed it to the president and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, and explained his imminent act:

  The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly also it weighs on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the Allied States, which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime.

  By passive observation of this murder of defenseless millions and of the maltreatment of children, women, and old men, these countries have become the criminals’ accomplices. . . .

  I can not be silent and I can not live while the remnants of the Jewish people of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing. . . .

  By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth, especially today. But as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.26

  Szmul Zygielbojm took an overdose of sleeping pills in his Paddington flat on May 12, 1943. News that the Nazis had crushed the Warsaw ghetto uprising and liquidated its inhabitants reached London and Washington the day of his memorial service.27

  The New York Times published Zygielbojm’s suicide letter on June 4, 1943, under the headline “Pole’s Suicide Note Pleads for Jews” with the further headline “He Denounced Apathy.” The last line of the Times piece suggested that Zygielbojm “may have achieved more in his death than in his life.” In fact, he failed to alter Allied policy in either state.28

  In Their Own Words

  Back in Washington, Raphael Lemkin, too, thought of taking his own life but concluded he was too “peculiarly placed” to bow out. After all, while others were mulling atrocity prevention for the first time, he had been thinking about it for more than a decade. He identified himself with the cause and quickly began to personify it. When he read the chilling reports from his homeland, he did what Zyegielbojm had done initially—he placed faith in information. Lemkin also played to his strengths: law and language.

  National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

  Jews in the Warsaw ghetto being marched to the rail station for deportation, in 1943. Of the four members of the family shown at the head of the column, only the man survived.

  In November 1944 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, by then a 712-page book of the rules and decrees imposed by the Axis powers and their client states in nineteen Nazi-occupied countries and territories in Europe. Having begun gathering these laws while in Sweden, Lemkin had continued the compilation as part of his service to the U.S. government. Whatever Lemkin’s stated aspirations to appeal to a popular audience, Axis Rule was a dry and staunchly legalistic reference book.29 It included proposals for postwar restitution of property to the dispossessed and for the reimbursement of millions to foreign workers who had been forced into labor in Germany. It also restated his 1933 Madrid proposal to outlaw the targeted destruction of groups and urged the creation of an international treaty that could be used as a basis for trying and punishing perpetrators.

  However useful the book’s recommendations, Lemkin believed his real contribution lay in reproducing the stark collection of decrees (which accounted for some 360 of the book’s pages). These, he was certain, would do wonders to combat widespread disbelief and despondency, especially in the Anglo-American reader, who, he wrote, “with his innate respect for human rights and human personality may be inclined to believe that the Axis regime could not possibly have been as cruel and ruthless as it has been hitherto described.” By presenting documents authored by Hitler and his advisers, he was ensuring that nobody in the United States could say he was exaggerating or propagandizing.

  A few scholars still rejected atrocity reports and tried to relativize German responsibility. The harshest review of Axis Rule appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 1946. The reviewer, Melchior Palyi, blamed Lemkin for his failure to explore the “extenuating circumstances” for Nazi behavior. According to Palyi, Lemkin had written a “prosecutor’s brief” rather than an “impartial” inquiry. The reviewer claimed that almost every one of the nine charges Lemkin made against the Nazis could be made against the Allies. “Of course,” the reviewer wrote, “there is this substantial difference: that the Nazis shamelessly displayed their intentionally planned misdeeds, while the western Allies stumble into illegal practices and cover them with humanitarian or other formulas.”30

  But most reviews were favorable and did not dabble in such false equivalency. The American Journal of International Law described Lemkin’s collection of Nazi legislation as a “tour de force.”31 Another reviewer wrote, “The terrorism of the German police is well enough known, but to see matters described in cold legal terminology creates in one perhaps an even greater sense of indignation.”32 At this time Lemkin was somewhat conflicted about the roots of responsibility and the relative role of individual and collective guilt, theories of accountability that continue to compete today. On the one hand, Lemkin urged the punishment of those individuals responsible for Nazi horrors. On the other, he espoused an early version of the theory, put forth a
gain recently by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, that ascribed guilt not only to the perpetrators of the crimes but to their fellow citizens who failed to stop them and often appeared actively supportive.33 In Axis Rule Lemkin wrote, “The present destruction of Europe would not be complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely [the Nazi] plan, participated voluntarily in its execution, and up to this point profited greatly therefrom.” He refused to accept the line that all but the most senior German authorities were just “obeying orders,” insisting that “all important classes and groups of the population have voluntarily assisted Hitler in the scheme of world domination.”34

  In January 1945 the New York Times Book Review devoted its cover to Axis Rule. “Out of its dry legalism,” the reviewer wrote, “there emerge the contours of the monster that now bestrides the earth.” This monster “gorges itself on blood, bestializes its servants and perverts some of the noblest human emotions to base ends, all with the semblance of authority and spurious legality which leave the individual helpless.” The reviewer credited Lemkin with capturing “what Axis rule in occupied Europe means and what it would have meant to us had it ever spread to our shores.” But he faulted Lemkin’s sweeping ascription of blame. By finding “innate viciousness” in the German people, Lemkin was feeding “nazism-in-reverse.” “Surely,” the reviewer wrote, “just because he is a Pole Dr. Lemkin would not want to be held personally responsible for all the acts of the Pilsudski regime.”35