The Allies and the “Holocaust”

Two books are very good in exploring the failure of the Allies to act as though there was an “extermination” going on. They are Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies and Walter Laqueur's The Terrible Secret. The latter is especially interesting because Laqueur in effect proves that it could not have been a “secret” if it happened, but does not realize the obvious implication. In such books we read comments on the wartime extermination propaganda by senior British officials: “Jewish Agency sob-stuff”; the stories “tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up”.

Newspapers in allied countries likewise did not seriously speak of “extermination”. On the Op-Ed page of the New York Times of 24 September 1996 A.M. Rosenthal wrote:

For years Times editors, reporters and executives tried to explain to themselves why the paper grievously underplayed the Holocaust while it was going on. Most of the world press did the same. But what mattered to us was the record of our own paper. Stories appeared now and then about Nazis killing Jews, but usually small, inside and without even trying to deal with the total horror.

Last modification: 25 September 1996.