Мартин Гилберт (1936-2017) Auschwitz and the Allies (1981)
How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler’s Final Solution
Chapter 11
‘This bestial policy’
...The Polish Government, Frank Roberts noted that same day, ‘are always glad of an opportunity (1) to make a splash as leader of the minor Allies and (2) to show that they are not anti-Semitic’. In any case, he added, although atrocities ‘are undoubtedly taking place, we have no reliable evidence. Nor are we sure’, he wrote, ‘that world Jewry as a whole wishes to draw public attention to what is going on’. Roberts had yet another objection to a protest meeting of the Governments-in-Exile, writing in his minute of December 1:
It also occurs to me that this is not a very suitable moment to breathe fire and fury against the Germans in connexion with their treatment of the Jews, since Hitler now has in his power our former friends in France and in particular M. Reynaud, M. Mandel, M. Daladier and M. Blum. He also has in his power various Spanish and other left-wing refugees in France. In addition Hitler seems to be in a very difficult mood about prisoners of war. It therefore seems to me inadvisable to irritate him more than is necessary, particularly on a Jewish issue.
...On the morning of December 2 both the BBC, and the Foreign Office News Department, telephoned to the Central Department to ask what they should do about the ‘story emanating from the World Jewish Congress’, about the German Government’s order ‘for the extermination of the Jews in Eastern Europe’. They were told that the question of an official statement was being considered, ‘and that meanwhile it seemed desirable to soft pedal the whole thing’. At the same time, the Central Department pointed out, they would not wish ‘the impression to be given’ that the Department ‘were deliberately trying to kill the story’.
...Also on December 7, the Colonial Office received a full report of the facts reported by the Palestinian eye-witnesses who had been exchanged for German nationals in November. This was a report which the Jewish National Council had sent from Jerusalem, following the decision of its special General Assembly to ‘send a cry of help’ to all the Allied Governments. Reading the details as reported by the eye-witnesses, and passed on by the General Assembly, J. S. Bennett noted: ‘Familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past’.
...The next item on the agenda was the recent request from the Jewish Agency; that 4,500 Bulgarian Jews, the majority of them children, should be allowed to leave Bulgaria for Palestine. This immigration, it was pointed out, would fall within the existing immigration quotas. But the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Stanley, opposed the request. ‘This proposal,’ he told the War Cabinet, ‘had been rejected on security grounds’; that was to say, he explained, in accordance with a much earlier Cabinet decision three years before, which had rejected the ‘exodus of nationals from a country with which we were at war’.
...James de Rothschild hoped that when news of the Declaration reached the Jews inside Europe, they would feel ‘that they are supported and strengthened by the British Government and by the other United Nations’, and that the Allies would ‘continue to signify that they still uphold the dignity of man’.