Behind the Headlines New Book Poses Possible British Complicity in Hitler’s ‘final Solution’

In an explosive new book, one of Britain’s leading historians comes close to accusing British officials of passive complicity in Hitler’s “final solution” of the Jewish question. Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, provides a wealth of new documents showing that while the Nazis aimed to murder the Jews of Europe, Britain sought to prevent sizeable numbers of them from escaping to Palestine and other countries.

The allegations are made in “Exile and Return: The Emergence of Jewish Statehood,” to be published here next month by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. It reassesses the origins of the State of Israel and the attitudes of the Western powers both to anti-Semitism in Europe and Arab terrorism in Palestine. The prestige of its author, and the evidence he presents, could well have a lasting influence on Jewish appraisals of this period.

A Fellow of Merton College, Gilbert has more than a score of books to his name, even though he is still under 40. In addition to his weightier historical studies, he has also produced a stream of pamphlets and atlases illustrating various facets of Jewish and Israeli history. He spent the past two years as a historical consultant for the lengthy Thames Television documentary account of the Palestine conflict, and was largely responsible for its copious coverage of the Holocaust.

His discoveries about the attitudes of British officialdom to the Jewish question in Europe and Palestine may well tempt many readers to revise their assumptions about the essential relations between Britain and Zionism. To the extent that they vindicate the anti-British, anti-Weizmann school of Zionist thought, they could even be termed “revisionist,” but with a small “r.”

CHILLING EXAMPLES CITED

It was in the course of his Churchill researches that Gilbert found much of the documentation on Britain’s foreign policy during the 1930s and 1940s. It sheds new light on day-to-day British pressure to prevent Jews from escaping from Europe both during the Hitler years and after the war. Here are some chilling examples:

. Only six months before the war, Britain and the United States asked Hitler Germany to “discourage” Jewish travel in ships bound for Palestine and “to check unauthorised emigration” of Jews from the Reich.

. After the war began, Britain refused to permit 20,000 Jewish children to go to Palestine from Poland on the grounds that to do so would free the Germans from the economic burden of having to feed them, thus helping the Nazi war effort.

. A secret Foreign Office document expressed the hope that all German Jews would be “stuck at the mouth of the Danube for lack of ships to take them.” At the height of the war, the government refused to allow into Britain even a few hundred extra Jews who might escape from the Nazis, despite a plea by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Gilbert is no less critical of Britain’s extraordinary decision in November, 1947 to curtail the trials of Nazi war criminals and to encourage short sentences. “If sentences err on the side of leniency, that is a fault on the right side,” one official is quoted as saying.

BORNE OUT BY ANOTHER STUDY

That Gilbert’s findings are not an isolated reading of the pre-war period is borne out by another study, just released here, of American attitudes towards refugees from Hitler. Writing in “Pattems of Prejudice,” issued by the Institute of Jewish Affairs, Michael Mashberg, an American scholar, concludes that racial prejudice was one of the principal reasons for America’s inaction and procrastination in regard to the rescue of Jews.

Mashberg’s findings add new weight to the conclusions reached, 10 years ago, by the late Arthur Morse in his book, “While Six Million Died.” Mashberg writes:

“Although some in the United States government attempted to save the remnant of European Jewry in 1944 and 1945, they were restricted and checked by an almost universal pattern of prejudice. The attempts to save European Jews were stymied by all concerned nations, both Allied and Axis: the Germans wanted to kill Jews; the Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians and others helped; whereas, the Allied and neutral countries refused to permit large-scale rescue operations or to allow the persecuted Jews entry for temporary resettlement.

“Britain, for example, refused to grant asylum to more than a few Hungarians and other Jews in Palestine with full knowledge that such denial meant extermination for each Jew left in Nazi-occupied Europe. France and the United States respectably limited their refuge to a few thousand souls in North Africa and America. With little or no help from the non-Axis countries the machinery in the death camps continued unabated….”