The Allied Leaders on the Holocaust

One of the many anomalies concerning the Holocaust is that the three leaders of the Western Allies – Eisenhower, De Gaulle and Churchill – did not seem to be aware of it. Despite Nuremberg and despite that they, of all people, were highly informed in every aspect of the war, their memoirs are unexpectedly laconic about the Holocaust. So let’s see what exactly they had to say.

Dwight Eisenhower

In his memoir Crusade in Europe we find only this:

“Of all these DPs the Jews were in the most deplorable condition. For years they had been beaten, starved and tortured. Even food, clothes, and decent treatment could not immediately enable them to shake off their hopelessness and apathy. […] They were, in many instances, no longer capable of helping themselves; everything had to be done for them.” (p. 439)

Nothing new here. Beaten, starved, tortured, but not exterminated.

Charles de Gaulle

In The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle the Final Solution is mentioned three times. But De Gaulle had even fewer to say. First we read this:

“During the summer the persecution of the Jews grew worse, conducted by a special ’commissariat’ in collaboration with the invader.” (p. 346)

Then this:

“During the course of the winter the persecution of the Jews redoubled, despite public indignation, the protests of bishops – such as Monsignor Saliege in Toulouse and Cardinal Gerlier in Lyon – and the condemnation of Pastor Boegner, president of the French Protestant Federation.” (p. 403)

And finally this:

“During the same period the shameful horrors of the persecution of Jews were unleashed.” (p. 496)

So De Gaulle was aware of a persecution but not of any extermination program.

Winston Churchill

Well, if the above fail to meet our expectations, then perhaps it’s time for the British Bulldog to show its teeth with the 6-volume The Second World War. Alas, we are quickly disappointed. Two passages are relevant, the first from Volume 1, which is as follows:

“The progress of Hitler and his doctrines is thus registered with precision. In 1928 he had but twelve seats in the Reichstag. In 1930 this became 107; in 1932, 230; By that time the whole structure of Germany had been permeated by the agencies and discipline of the National Socialist Party, and intimidation of all kinds and insults and brutalities towards the Jews were rampant.” (p. 52)

This of course is about the first anti-Semitic measures. For the Holocaust we find only this in Volume 6:

“There is no doubt that this [persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory] is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe.” (p. 597)

This does not confirm the official account at all. It’s actually quite damning. For if the Hungarian Operation by itself was bad enough for Churchill to be considered the greatest crime in the history of the world, then what would we expect him to say about the entire Holocaust? As it turns out, nothing.

So, in the above works we read about Jews being beaten, starved, persecuted but shockingly nothing about death camps, gas chambers, crematories and the genocide of 6 million victims. How do we explain this? Can we really believe that all of these were deemed to be simple details? Or that they had no idea about them? Of course not. The only plausible explanation, no matter how undesirable, is that they had not confirmed any of this and therefore passed over them in silence.

See also: Robert Faurisson, "The Detail: The alleged Nazi gas chambers," The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (March/April 1998), pp. 19f.