Read Online A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power - Free Book Online Page B

could not conceive of the atrocities Karski was describing. He was not alone. Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy in Washington from 1942, saw only a massive pogrom. So, too, did Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben- Gurion, and other leading Zionists."'
    The Germans did their part, issuing ritual denials and cloaking the Final Solution in the euphemisms of"resettlement"Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda and national enlightenment, met atrocity reports by pointing to British abuses carried out in India and elsewhere, a tactic he deemed "our best chance of getting away from the embarrassing subject of the Jews"" The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which documented the deportations, did not publicly protest because, it concluded, "public protests are not only ineffectual but are apt to produce a stiffening of the indicted country's attitude with regard to Committee, even the rupture of relations with it"'Z Intervention would be futile and would jeopardize the organization's ability to conduct prison inspections, deliver humanitarian parcels, and transmit messages among family members. Neutrality was paramount.
    The Allies' suppression of the truth about Hitler's Final Solution has been the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship." Intelligence on Hitler's extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources. The United States maintained embassies in Berlin until December 1941, in Budapest and Bucharest until January 1942, and in Vichy France until late 1942." The British used sophisticated decryption technology to intercept German communications. The major Jewish organizations had representatives in Geneva who relayed vivid and numerous refugee reports through Stephen Wise, the president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and others. In July 1942, Gerhard Riegner, the WJC Geneva representative, informed the State Department of a well-placed German industrialist's report that Hitler had ordered the extermination of European Jewry by gassing. In November 1942, Rabbi Wise, who knew President Roosevelt personally, told a Washington press conference that he and the State Department had reliable information that some 2 million Jews had already been murdered. The Polish government-in-exile was a goldmine of information. Already by the fall of 1942, for instance, Zygielbojm had begun meeting regularly with Arthur J. Goldberg, General Bill Donovan's special assistant at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to discuss the death camps.
    But the intelligence was often played down. In June 1942, for instance, the London Daily 7i'lcgraph published the Build report's claim that 7(10,000 Polish Jews and more than I million Jews throughout Europe had been killed.The :A"cii' brl Times picked up the Tch:~raph's report., but buried them deep inside the paper." When Riegner cabled word of Hitler's plot the following month, British and U.S. officials and journalists were skeptical about the veracity of "unsubstantiated information.- In the words of one Swiss foreign editor, "We received no picture of photographic e,:actitude, only silhouettes." "' In 1944, when John Pehle, the director of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, wanted to publish the report of two Auschwitz escapees, Elmer Davis, the head of the U.S. Office of War Information, turned down his request. The American public would not believe such wild stories, he said, and Europeans would be so demoralized by them that their resistance would crumble. The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Hershel Johnson, sent a cable in April 1943 detailing the extermination of Jews in Warsaw, but he ended his message by noting: "So fantastic is the story... that I hesitate to make it the subject of an official report"° In the November 1943 Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill declaration, reference to the gas chambers was deleted because the evidence was deemed untrustworthy. To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies'