The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (review)

Book Reviews f.:' 149 Especially worthy of mention is Jacques Picard',s chapter on Switzerland, the conduct ofwhich has been very much in the news recently, Without apologizing in the least for the behavior of Swiss officials who turned Jewish refugees away at the border, and who transacted a good deal ofbusiness with Nazi Germany, Picard reminds us that individuals and organizations in Switzerland rescued Jews, including about 1,300 children smuggled across the border with France. It is to be hoped that this collection and its forthcoming companion volumes will find their way into English translation. They raise the study of "rescuers" to the next level ofsophistication and are refreshingly devoid ofthe moralizing tone that continues to plague the field of Holocaust studies. Alan E. Steinweis Department of History University ofNebraska-Lincoln The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis, by William D. Rubenstein. New York: Routledge, 1997. 267 pp. $25.00. Historical reassessment often comes with the contested territory ofHolocaust study, and just as often, these efforts can take a nasty, ad hominem tum. William D. Rubenstein's counter-thesis-that the world's democracies did all that was pragmatically possible in the years when German Jews were candidates for emigration and that nothing, absolutely nothing, could have been done when they became political prisoners of the Third Reich-flies in the face ofmore widely known interpretations of the free world's silence and the awful consequences of its inaction. Never one to mince words, Rubenstein attacks a wide range ofHolocaust scholars, from Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died (1968) and Saul Friedman's No Havenfor the Oppressed (1973) to David Wyman's enormously influential The Abandonment ofthe Jews (1984). Rubenstein dismisses these studies-and especially Wyman's-as longer on "myth" than on solid research, and as symptomatic of scholarly efforts to blame virtually everybody except the Nazis who, after all, perpetrated the Holocaust and who are solely responsible for the oceans ofblood it produced. To argue that the democracies might have done "more" is, so far as Rubenstein is concerned, an exercise in bad historiography and bad faith. Take, for example, the claim that the bystander countries erected high walls and barriers to refugee migration, resulting in tens of thousands ofJews being trapped in the Nazi Reich after the Second World War broke out in September 1939. Myth, all myth, Rubenstein fairly shouts, and goes on to insist that the very opposite of such claims is true: "Fully 72 per cent of German Jewry escaped from Nazi Germany before 150 SHOFAR Fall 1998 Vol. 17, No.1 emigration became impossible, including 83 per cent ofGerman Jewish children and youth." Rather than a moral failure on the part of the world's democracies, a correct reading ofthe facts suggests that this period represents "one of the most successful and far-reaching programmes of rescue of a beleaguered and persecuted people ever seen up to that time." The Myth ofRescue continues in this vein, overturning old assumptions by pointing out new evidence and new interpretations. Rubenstein clearly means his book to be controversial (that is at once its strength and its weakness), but his archly polemical tone often undermines his central thesis. Moreover, there are places (e.g., his overly generous reading of how the Church responded to Nazism) where his arguments don't square with the facts as we know them now. Still, Rubenstein's account ofthe Jews as political prisoners is worth pondering. In such a war situation, what, indeed, could be done-that is, short of winning the war itself? In short, was an allied bombing ofthe rail lines to the concentration camps really feasible (Rubenstein argues that it was not), and what about the possibility of an exchange of Jews for trucks? On the latter point Rubenstein is hardly convincing. The result, then, is something of a mixed bag. The Myth ofRescue argues its prodemocracies message with vigor, but not with much subtlety. Thus, even those who fully agree with Rubenstein's major point-namely that "it cannot be emphasized too strongly that the responsibility for the Holocaust lies solely and wholly with Adolf Hitler...