Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews (review)

Shlomo Aronson's latest book examines the interactions between Nazi officials, Jewish would-be rescuers, and Allied agencies during World War II (especially after 1943). A professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Israel, Aronson utters or implies some unpleasant truths, many of which are both ironic and tragic. Hitler's treatment of the German Jews helped to turn the West against him, yet the Allies went to war to not save the Jews, but to save themselves. In fact, their declarations of war only confirmed Adolf Hitler's innermost belief that the Western powers were puppets of his Jewish enemies. War—particularly a lengthy total war—therefore could not mean rescue; rather, it meant annihilation, just as Hitler had publicly promised on January 30, 1939. Aronson's provocative study takes us on a journey of exploration through this deadly trap.

While Aronson makes some scathing comments about would-be rescuers and their German and Allied contacts, he never loses sight of the fact that it was Hitler and his criminal cohort who imprisoned and murdered the Jews of Europe. British policy in Palestine compounded the crime, but—despite Aronson's claim—it is difficult to imagine that the "White Paper" of 1939 significantly changed the situation in occupied Europe. True, it made rescue more difficult, but had there been no such policy, the Jews of Poland still would have been crammed into the ghettos, the Jews of the Soviet Union still would have been gunned down by the hundreds of thousands, and the Jews of Europe still would have been carted off to places like Sobibór and Auschwitz.

Given the immensity of the tragedy, Aronson's point that Allied resistance to Hitler made the Final Solution possible—even probable—is fraught with tragic overtones. Worse still, the Allied governments feared that many of their own citizens might fall prey to Nazi propaganda, which told them that they were fighting a "Jews' war" or a "war for the Jews." The Jew, Goebbels claimed, was to blame for starting the war and for prolonging it. "International finance Jewry," Hitler proclaimed, had unleashed this war. Anxious to dodge such accusations, Allied leaders shied away from rescue efforts, anti-genocide proclamations, and anything that could be interpreted as support for Zionist aspirations. In other words, the Allies generally avoided doing or saying anything that smacked of special treatment for Hitler's primary victims. In fact, the policy of "unconditional surrender" prohibited negotiations with the Nazis, except in the most limited of circumstances, and then only through Swiss mediation.

Aronson's prose is sometimes dense and uneven; his book and its readers would have benefited from better organization and greater clarity. There are certain errors in the book; for example, Wendell Willkie was not the Republican candidate in 1944 (he exited early after a primary defeat in Wisconsin). Moreover, Aronson's comments on the origins of the Final Solution are somewhat contradictory. He traces the fatal decisions to March 1941, but offers no concrete evidence for so early a date. Later, he twice says that the decision to murder all the Jews of Europe came in the autumn of the same year. The early summer seems to me a more plausible date, for this was when the plans were made for the mass killing of Soviet Jews, and the defeat of the Soviet Union seemed possible. With the Soviets crushed, Britain isolated, and the United States not yet in the war, it seemed likely that Hitler would consolidate his control of Europe and annihilate the Jews.

These concerns aside, this book rewards the reader many times over. Much of the work concerns the Yishuv, the small Jewish community in Palestine. Here Aronson displays his unrivalled knowledge of persons and sources, and makes good use of oral history. He seems to have no ideological axe to grind, other than to decry the extremist actions of two or three pro-fascist Zionist fringe and terrorist groups. Aronson's sad...