Why We Watched: How Anti-Semitism in the Allied Nations Allowed Hitler to Exterminate European Jewry (review)

To begin by conforming to the Truth-in-Reviewing Act, I am uncomfortable reviewing a book whose thesis resembles one I put forth in a book published three decades ago—Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979)—which is not cited By Theodore Hamerow. But my theses and methodology were more subtle, and many other exemplary secondary works are not cited either. Although I am generally in sympathy with Hamerow’s thesis, I wish he had used more sources and had not made so many errors.

The errors start with his causal linkage. “Throughout Europe there was a rough but close correlation between anti-Semitic prejudice and the relative size of the Jewish community. The greater the proportion of Jews, the greater the hostility they were likely to arouse” (p. 69). In Accounting for Genocide, I found that both political anti-Semitism and Jewish victimization were better correlated with the visibility of the Jewish community (the percentage of Jews in the capital or in the major city having the most Jews) than with the relative size of the Jewish population. Hamerow repeats the relationship between “intensity of anti-Semitic prejudice in any given country and the relative proportion of the Jews in that country who perished during the Second World War” (p. 328) without looking at the deviant cases (e.g., the Netherlands, with low anti-Semitism and high victimization) or the chain of Jewish victimization that determined how Jews were caught. This latter point is explicated in my Accounting for Genocide, where I also showed how behaviors of state and social institutions—the church, resistance movements, and so forth—saved Jews.

Besides conceptual errors, Hamerow’s book is marred by factual errors. The caption for one of the photographs in the book says that “Albert Einstein with Rabbi Stephen Wise and the author Thomas Mann in May 1938 . . . urged the Roosevelt administration to take action to stop the genocide of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.” But in fact they could not possibly have made any such protest in May 1938 because the genocide did not begin until 1941 (or 1939 if we take the earliest estimate cited at Adolf Eichmann’s trial). On page 189, Hamerow identifies Kristallnacht as a “wave of mass riots encouraged by the authorities” rather than a Nazi state-initiated pogrom in which almost 300 synagogues were burned and 30,000 male Jews interned in concentration camps.

Important omissions also arise, including the role of Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in supervising preparation of a report to President Franklin Roosevelt (first titled “Report of the Secretary on the Acquiescence of the Government in the Murder of the Jews”) that led to the creation of the U.S. War Refugee Board in January 1944. Hamerow does not consider what could have been done if this effort had begun earlier.

Hamerow’s conclusion that the “decision to adopt genocide as the only way of solving the ethnic problem” was transformed by the war and the “rising sense of frustration and apprehension among the leaders of the Hitler regime [which] found an outlet in their decision to exterminate the Jews, who were held to be ultimately responsible for the growing danger confronting Germany” (p. 293) is hard to take seriously, seeming as it does to depict genocide as an instance of the frustration-aggression hypothesis. Hamerow does not discuss the contending views about the origin of the Final Solution. Nor does he cite any of the original sources regarding the number said to have perished (p. 453), an almost impossible number to estimate with such precision. Moreover, he denies or at least obfuscates the genocide of the Gypsies (p. 454).

In brief, this is an important but unsatisfactory book. Hamerow concludes that the post–World War II recognition of the Holocaust is a consequence of the disappearance of...