Sunday’s Ha’aretz ran a very important piece by Tom Segev reporting on the distinguished Israeli historian of the Holocaust Yehuda Bauer’s about-face about whether there was anything the Roosevelt Administration could have done aside from winning the war to prevent the Holocaust and minimize the loss of Jewish lives.
As I argued in a piece a few years ago (The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy), the conventional wisdom has become that the United States and the rest of the international community were guilty of grave indifference to European Jewry’s plight and should have realized even before the war what Hitler had in store for the Jews and acted more decisively to rescue them. Once the war began, so this argument goes, the Allies should have launched direct strikes on the Nazi death camps and the rail-lines leading to them to stop the killing. The fact that the United States did none of these things is prima facie evidence that Roosevelt “abandoned” the Jews in their hour of grave peril.
Segev has done great work in his own right as an historian in his book The Seventh Million in showing how the memory of the Holocaust has been used to construct a modern Israeli identity that encompasses both religious and non-religious Jews. Such politicized history serves current agendas more than historical truth.
Here as a journalist he reports that one of the leading historians of the Holocaust, who once shared the conventional wisdom, now after a life-time of professional reflection regards the idea that the Allies could have done anything other than win the war, which is what President Roosevelt pursued energetically, as a myth. Money grafs:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Bauer states that there was no possibility of saving a significant number of Jews by bringing them into the Land of Israel, because there was no way of extracting them from occupied Europe. Further examination led Bauer to conclude also that there was no real opportunity to destroy Nazi annihilation mechanisms by aerial bombings, except at the cost of the lives of many Jews. [H]ad the Allies bombed the gas chambers, the annihilation would have continued via other means, including the “death marches.” In this context, Bauer notes that some 50 percent of Jewish war victims were not murdered in the death camps.
The fiction about the United States and its allies survives not because there is compelling historical evidence for it but rather because it advances various political agendas in Israel and the United States.
Bauer’s turn-around matters because the Israeli Right — from Begin to Bibi — is stuck in 1938, and the weight of politicized Holocaust history blinds them to the fact that they have a partner in peace in Mahmoud Abbas and leads them to blow out of all proportion the threat they face from an as yet non-existent Iranian nuclear weapon.
Among American Jews, the Holocaust has become the secular Genesis story that melds together the otherwise disparate tribes of modern American Judaism by reemphasizing their peril in the diaspora and adding to it the supposed indifference of the Gentiles to their plight. The lesson is clear: They can only count on themselves and Israel.
Segev’s account of Bauer’s reassessment should put in stark relief the difference between real history (conclusions based on evidence) and politicized history (to advance current agendas) and hopefully prevent the misinterpretation of an historical tragedy from contributing to contemporary political folly in both countries.
These foundational myths, of the which there are quite a few, will cause much cognitive dissonance among those whose lives these myths seem to govern.
Thats when they really start slinging around that most repulsive of terms.
Excellent post by Prof Desch; and great news that Yehuda Bauer has changed his mind about Roosevelt.
What secret negotiations did the Nazi government attempt that we don’t know about?
The war objective of the Allies was unconditional surrender, which we negotiated with the Japanese to keep the emperor in power. But what of the Germans? Where there no overtures offered for an negotiated peace? There was Rudolph Hess who’s mission was covered in secrecy until the day he died.
It would seem implausible that there weren’t others.
There are Ben Hecht’s allegations in “Perfidy.” It would seem that plausible that other negotiations were initiated to end the war.
The Allies negotiated to feed the Greeks during the German occupation and the Allies negotiated an air drop of food to the Netherlands to feed the population at the close of the war.
Certainly Hitler remaining in power would be unacceptable, but unconditional surrender offered no alternative to end a massively destructive war and Holocaust.
The “failure to rescue” critique is not really a “foundational myth”. American Jews did not emerge from WW2 irreparably traumatized by the Holocaust and obsessed with Allied culpability. Nor is the counter-argument new; William Rubinstein made it in “The Myth of Rescue” in 1997. Robert Rosen defended Roosevelt in “Saving the Jews. FDR and the Holocaust” in 2006. Rosen’s book had an afterword from that great moderate voice in Jewish-gentile relations, Alan Dershowitz. Rubinstein noted Roosevelt’s great popularity with Jews, and how that later changed.
“This great and profound change in the perception of the Allies and their leaders arose fairly abruptly between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, wholly as a result of a near-universal perception that the Allies did virtually nothing to rescue Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust.”
In other words, the “failure to rescue” critique was part of the chauvinism that accompanied the June, 1967 war. A feeling shared by the Jewish left. Jewish Voice for Peace charged the Allies with the deaths of millions in its 2004 reader “Reframing Anti-Semitism” in 2004, 7 yrs after Rubinstein’s book appeared.
The first chapter of Myth of Rescue is on-line at the NYT, along with their pan of it. What will the NYT say about Bauer, if he produces a book? Their Zionist burden is now heavier. But no book is mentioned in the Haaretz article.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/rubinstein-myth.html
I’m not sure whether the myth of abandonment has been that useful in recent years in service of the Zionist cause; I sensed at one point that it seemed easier for supporters of the “special relationship” to set aside and downplay such historical critiques. I think some of the criticisms of David Wyman were in this vein, as well as the reception of William Rubinstein’s previous challenge to the so-called myth, although his argument had its own problems. This is interesting stuff, but may be more complicated at closer reading. Ultimately, I think the momentum of Zionist ideological tactics has been not to push to seriously on this issue, especially in comparison to punishing every alleged ex-Nazi who found refuge in this country.
Bauer has his own ideological agenda, as do so many Holocaust scholars. It might be useful to ask what it is in this case; I’m not sure that he’s simply joining the consensus that Zionists don’t benefit from turning over that particular historical rock.