Holocaust and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo-Jewry 1938-1945 (review)

In recent years the response of the democracies to the Holocaust, especially the possibilities for the rescue of Jews from the Nazis, has emerged as one of the most important areas of scholarly debate over the Shoah. While this debate about the possibility of rescue by the United States is probably well known to readers, it is interesting to note that a parallel discussion has also emerged concerning Britain, whose stance during the whole 1933–45 period has often been intensely criticized (but also defended) by historians. The latest addition to a long line of such works is Holocaust and Rescue. Instead of focusing centrally on the British government’s actions (or inactions), as many of these works have done, Pamela Shatzkes examines the attitude of the leadership of the 390,000-strong Anglo-Jewish communities. The apparent failure of Anglo-Jewry to “do more” to influence the British government to “rescue Jews” has been explained by critical historians in a variety of ways, especially its refusal to attract attention to itself for fear of causing antisemitism, its belief in the good intentions of the British government, and indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews. In contrast, Dr. Shatzkes argues that Anglo-Jewry’s leadership considered and proposed many rescue schemes, but by and large lacked the political skills and chutzpah to convince the British government to adopt any, its recognized leaders being indifferent politicians who were simply out of their depth in the circumstances of the unprecedented catastrophe emerging on the continent.

While there may well be an element of truth in her analysis of Anglo-Jewry—which is based (despite the range of previous writing on this subject) in very detailed and original research in the archives of Anglo-Jewry’s leadership body the Board of Deputies of British Jews and other organizations—in my opinion, as an explanation of the failure of Britain to rescue more Jews it is fundamentally misleading. The central reason why so few Jews were rescued is that no one in Britain (or anywhere else) could think of any way of rescuing Jews, who were prisoners of Hitler, marked for death. Anglo-Jewry was just as ingenious as any other group, and had many contacts with the Churchill government. If there were anything cogent to propose, it would have been proposed, and there is no reason to suppose that the British government would have been unsympathetic. The author’s discussion of all this is, too often, egregious and hallmarked by a comprehensive failure to understand the true situation in which European Jewry was placed after 1940–41. From mid-1940 the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe were not refugees, as the Jews of Germany had been in the 1930s, but prisoners. In international law, a “refugee” is a person who has to flee from his or her homeland because of a well-founded fear of persecution. After mid-1940, however, the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe were specifically forbidden by the Nazis to leave. This fundamentally important change in Nazi policy was made as plans to implement the “Final Solution” developed, and was rigorously enforced by the Nazis as a prelude to genocide. For this reason, none of the so-called “rescue plans” made during the war by Jewish or pro-refugee groups in Britain (or elsewhere) was feasible, and Dr. Shatzkes’ statement (p. 102) that “Anglo Jewish leadership . . . was soon mobilized into action and presented numerous rescue proposals to the government, most of which proved abortive because of the exigencies of Britain’s wartime priorities” is simply not true, as anyone who bothers to read these “rescue proposals” can see at a glance. No viable proposals for rescue were made, purely and simply, because no one in Britain (or elsewhere) could think of a realistic way of convincing Hitler to allow the Jews to leave. The problem was not (as most “rescue plans” suggested) that more visas to Palestine were needed. The...