Auschwitz and the Allies: A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler's Mass Murder

by Martin Gilbert

When Hitler announced that the result of the war in Europe would be "the complete annihilation of the Jews," he did so in 1942, not only in public, but before an enormous crowd in Berlin. The Allies heard, but astonishingly, they did not listen. Why?

In 1944, Allied reconnaissance pilots, searching out industrial targets in the area, repeatedly photographed Auschwitz. The pictures, apparently overlooked by the Allies, were routinely filed in government archives and not examined until 1979. Why?

First-hand reports on the horrors of the death camps came to the West by 1944 in the person of two escaped Auschwitz prisoners. Their testimonies, and those of subsequent escapees, were either ignored or dismissed. Why?

Despite the fact that, the same year, Churchill himself had ordered feasibility studies for air strikes on Auschwitz, the RAF not only did nothing, but eventually passed the buck to the Americans, who also did nothing. Why?

Genres: History, Holocaust, World War II, Nonfiction, War, Crime, Germany

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

The official biographer of Winston Churchill and a leading historian on the Twentieth Century, Sir Martin Gilbert was a scholar and an historian who, though his 88 books, has shown there is such a thing as “true history”

Born in London in 1936, Martin Gilbert was educated at Highgate School, and Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours. He was a Research Scholar at St Anthony's College, and became a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1962, and an Honorary Fellow in 1994. After working as a researcher for Randolph Churchill, Gilbert was chosen to take over the writing of the Churchill biography upon Randolph's death in 1968, writing six of the eight volumes of biography and editing twelve volumes of documents. In addition, Gilbert has written pioneering and classic works on the First and Second World Wars, the Twentieth Century, the Holocaust, and Jewish history.
Gilbert drove every aspect of his books, from finding archives to corresponding with eyewitnesses and participants that gave his work veracity and meaning, to finding and choosing illustrations, drawing maps that mention each place in the text, and compiling the indexes. He travelled widely lecturing and researching, advised political figures and filmmakers, and gave a voice and a name “to those who fought and those who fell.”

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Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is remarkable that given how many people were involved with the ruthless extermination of the Jews and many others in Nazi occupied Europe so very few people knew about it outside that vast area.

This was the conclusion I came to after reading Martin Gilbert's superbly researched book.

And, when the news of these atrocities began to trickle slowly into the Allies headquarters in 1944, it is equally surprising that so little was attempted to bring them to an end. Although, to be fair, defeating the Nazis was certainly one way of achieving this aim.

Auschwitz was the target of one or two Allied air-raids in late 1944, but these attacks had no significant effects on diminishing the rates at which the Jews were being killed, and might have been as unproductive as they had been when Buchenwald was bombed in August 1944 and almost 1000 prisoners were killed or wounded.

Those who find Gilbert's book of interest should also consider reading the accounts of those who tried to inform the Allies about the Nazi's genocidal activities such as
Jan Karski and Witold Pilecki (his book,THE AUSCHWITZ VOLUNTEER: BEYOND BRAVERY, was published this year).

[zed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why did the allies take so long to react is the question this book makes me ask. A touch too dense a read for me at times but as the 3 stars say I liked it. One to dip back into when a question arises.

[Ian Beardsell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really closer to four rather than three stars, but I kept my rating a bit low as it was such a difficult read. The author used a style similar to a PhD dissertation, quoting numerous sources, throwing out names and numbers in a way that made the book a tough slog. And the subject matter itself...well, that's depressing enough as it is. However, Gilbert's thoroughness makes this a terrific resource for scholars interested in the subject of the slow, lacklustre reaction of the allies as they learned about the Nazi killing factory of Auschwitz.

From what I've read in this book and others describing the Holocaust, the Nazis did a pretty good job of hiding their ultimate resolution of Hitler's pre-war claim that the war would be the end of the Jews in Europe. It wasn't until 1943 that "resettlement in the east" was fully exposed as deportation to various killing centers, the eventual clearing house of which ultimately became Auschwitz. This was mostly due to the persistent reporting of various Polish and Jewish watchdog organizations, and the daring escapes of a few Auschwitz inmates who made incredibly detailed reports of what was going on there.

One of the saddest things that struck me, as it echoes eerily to today's concerns with immigration issues with middle-eastern refugees, is how the allies suspected that there were many Nazi spies amongst the "enemy-alien" Jews being persecuted by Germany, just waiting for a chance to emigrate to America and lead Hitler and his boys into New York Harbour. Why risk bringing these people out of occupied Europe, they asked. The next saddest thing was the slow, wishy-washy bureaucracy of the British Foreign Office, with its undertones of anti-Semitism, as their officials debated if "these wailing Jews" were exaggerating the atrocities and how to handle all the potential refugees without flooding Palestine. The political constraints were of course complex, but many of the officials in the Foreign Office and State Department come off looking like they'd prefer that the Jews just walked into the gas chambers, which would make things much easier for the bureaucrats than trying to save their lives by coordinating immigration plans or bombing the railway networks into the camp.

All-in-all this is a sad piece of 20th Century history, but Gilbert does elucidate the Allied response if you can make it through the forest of details.

[F · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...there was also continuing reluctance to adopt an open door policy on behalf of those few Jewish refugees who did manage to escape [...] Many of the policymakers who opposed the appeals on behalf of refugees were particularly 'afraid' as they expressed it, of the 'danger' of 'flooding' Palestine, and indeed Britain, with Jews. They argued that even the arrival of a few thousand Jewish refugees in Britain itself would provoke an outburst of anti-semitism."

"The test of the Allied response came in the summer of 1944, when the British and American policymakers were asked to bomb Auschwitz [...] Yet even then, a few individuals scotched the Prime Minister's directive because, as one of them expressed it at the time, to send British pilots to carry it out would have then risked 'valuable' lives. At that very moment however Allied lives were being risked, and risked willingly by volunteer crews, to drop supplies on Warsaw during the Polish uprising: and during these missions, these very same pilots had actually flown across the Auschwitz region on their way to Warsaw.
The American War Department likewise rejected all appeals to try to destroy the gas chambers at Auschwitz, although American bombers regularly overflew the camp throughout August and September 1944, had already photographed it from the air on a number of occasions, and had even dropped bombs on it by mistake."

Martin Gilbert is measured, but I don't need to. British politicians -with the exception of Churchill- were fucking heartless pricks who contributed by total inaction for lack of sympathy and disguised antisemitism to the slaughter of the Jews in the Holocaust.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive study of what the allies knew about Auschwitz during the war, and how the understanding of the largest death camp in the final solution permeated Jewish and allied consciousness. Written with the obvious benefit of hindsight there is some uncomfortable reading, especially regarding the dismissive approach some took(including in the Jewish Agency) to the stories that were filtering out. It is important to keep the hindsight point in mind whilst reading this book to understand how people did not at first believe the scale of the horror being committee

Martin Gilbert sets out the book in three sections, the first covering what Hitler and he Nazis had done to signpost their actions and the evolution of repression to murder to industrialised destruction of an entire race. The second section covers the various schemes to aid the Jews of Europe, many frustrated by the distances involved and allied fears of the implications of immigration especially to Palestine. The final section deals with how and when the allies became aware of the camp and its role in the final solution, and options for support that were considered.

Whilst this book is littered with evidence of a lack of tangible action to help the Jews, at the early part of the war the distances presented real action, and Nazi offers to deal should not be taken at base value.

Hi is a harrowing but important account of the how the worst crime ever committed to humanity became known to the world.

[Cindy Wiedemer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok so I enjoyed the flow and detail of this book overall. It had me angry, shaking my head and frustrated throughout. It does contain a lot of facts and dates and names and dates and places I often got lost and confused as to what was what. This book shows how unwilling the human mind can be to believe horrific things even when presented with facts. The boom ends, and I agree, that as we look at it now, hindsight is 20/20 but given communication issues and delays and low technology of the time it is almost understandable how things went, almost. The topic of the mass extermination of Jews is of course a weighted topic that gives reading this detailed account, another level to wrap your mind around.

[Tomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book made me mad and sad...so much could have been done to help save the Jews (and others) who died at Auschwitz. Yet information was ignored - including eyewitness accounts of the death camp! Politics as usual...when does a country decide to do the right thing, no matter what politicians want?

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

LA FRANK ACCOUNT OF THE FAILURES OF THE ALLIES TO RESPOND TO REPORTS

Historian/biographer Martin Gilbert wrote in the Introduction to this 1981 book, “In this book I have told the story of how and when the Allies learned of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and of how they responded. To this end, I have given particular prominence to those atrocity reports which were received in the west during the war itself, and I have traced the allied reaction to them. This book is not, therefore, a history of the suffering of European Jewry, but an account of the facts of the exterminations as they filtered out of Nazi-dominated Europe, and of the Allied reaction to these facts, beginning when a series of explicit but incomplete reports reached London and Washington in the summer and autumn of 1942…

“By July 1944 the Allies knew both the location and purpose of Auschwitz, including the way in which Jews, deported to the camp from all over Europe, were killed by gassing. These facts had been smuggled out of Auschwitz itself by two young Jewish escapees. The same month the Allies also received a long and detailed account of life inside Auschwitz, explaining all the horrors which that entailed. This account had been brought to the west by a Polish Major, a non-Jew, who had likewise escaped from the camp.

“The aim of this book is to show how the Allies responded to each new piece of information as it reached them. As the story unfolds, it becomes possible to see how the most terrible crimes could be committed with scarcely any effort being made to halt them. There were many reasons for this lack of effort. At the beginning, the Allies themselves knew almost nothing about the crimes. Often, they only learned of specific killings long after they had taken place. In addition, the period during which facts first became known in any detail, and during which the most Jews were being killed, coincided with the period of maximum German military superiority, and corresponding Allied military weakness. At the same time, the Germans themselves pursued a policy of deliberate, and frequently effective deception. In 1944, the deception began to fail, and while a series of detailed reports of continuing Nazi atrocities were reaching the west, it was not Germany policy, but Allied skepticism and disbelief, as well as political considerations and even prejudice, that served to inhibit action.”

He states, “Thus it was that the beginning of the ‘final solution’ in March 1943 coincided with the moment at which the Allies were at their weakest. In several ways, it was intended to do so; it was the Nazi aim to murder the Jews of Europe without provoking a world reaction, to do so secretly and silently, and to complete the task while Britain, Russia and the United States could do nothing about it… All were to be destroyed. Only the Jews of Estonia were not listed: they had already been murdered by the killing squads in September and October 1941.” (Pg. 27)

He observes, “With their armies victorious in Europe and North Africa, the Germans were able to carry out a war of total destruction against millions of captive civilians, in conditions of secrecy and deception, knowing that even if the secret became known, the Allies were in no position to take any military action, either to liberate the captives, or to reverse the tide of war.” (Pg. 62)

He says, “At the very moment when the location and purpose of Auschwitz became completely known, the Nazis, determined to complete the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, continued with the massive deception which they themselves had mounted… It was a deception which had already succeeded for six weeks, reflected in the anguished response of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and London, caught in the trap of a false hope which they could not abandon.” (Pg. 239)

He concludes, “The American War Department … rejected all appeals to try to destroy the gas chambers at Auschwitz, although American bombers regularly overflew the camp throughout August and September 1944, had already photographed it from the air on a number of occasions, and had even dropped bombs on it by mistake…. In part, the story of the negative allied response to many of the Jewish appeals for help was one of lack of comprehension and imagination, in the face of the ‘unbelievable.’ Many Jews likewise found the scale of the slaughter difficult to grasp. But one man who did understand the enormity of the crimes was Churchill, who wrote… ‘There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible single crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.’ … But above all, the story told in these pages is one of many failures, and of two successes. The failures, shared by all the Allies, were those of imagination, of response, of Intelligence, of piecing together and evaluating what was known, or coordination, and initiative, and even at times of sympathy. The successes lay elsewhere, with the Nazis; in the killings themselves, and in a series of bizarre deceptions which enabled those killings to be carried out on a gigantic scale, for more than three years, almost without interruption.” (Pg. 341)

This book will be of great interest to those studying the reaction of the Allies to the Holocaust.

[Recato · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shocking to think that those people in Auschwitz could have been helped. But heck knows why it took the allies such along time.

This is a warcrime to which the allies participated.

[Adam DeVille, Ph.D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gilbert's usual fine historical research and writing much in evidence here in a book that is deeply depressing in what it says about human evil.

[Justin]

Book of the Year (1997)

[Jill Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unbelievable what we knew when and politics got in the way of getting anything done.

[Gk68 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Castles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to read, technically. The writing style is not particularly accessible, and the book deals with endless telegrams, reports, diplomacy, and bureaucracy, while in between detailing train shipments of Jews from all over Europe and their fate in Auschwitz. Almost always, around 90 percent were sent directly to the gas.

Should we believe that the Nazis managed to keep Auschwitz a secret for so long? The book argues that we should. Until almost 1943 to 1944, what the West officially knew was that people were being sent eastward, or “to Poland.” Was the secrecy really so effective that even 700,000 Hungarian Jews did not know what awaited them? History suggests that it probably was. And yet, some reports did arrive earlier. Rudolf Vrba once again emerges here as a heroic figure, whose warnings were taken seriously only when it was far, far too late. I highly recommend reading his remarkable autobiography.

Two figures who stand out throughout the book are Lord Halifax and Anthony Eden. I am not sure whether these two blockheads acted out of ignorance or malice, but their willingness to appease Arab opposition by withholding visas for Palestine cost the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, many of them children. The rest of the world fares no better. Almost no country was willing to accept refugees, sometimes not even when the number involved was as low as fourteen families.

Another disgraceful actor, then as now, is the Red Cross. Was this a bad joke, or an evil one? I honestly do not know. In fact, this entire book could almost be called: "a bad joke: Auschwitz and the Allies". In the best case it reads like a Kafkaesque chain of tragic impotence rather than a record of meaningful intervention.

After months of pleading, while people were being sent to the gas and the ovens by the hour, the Allies finally bombed the area. Not the camp, of course. Bombs were considered far more valuable than Auschwitz prisoners. The targets were the factories nearby, and the fact that a few bombs fell on the camp itself was merely the result of missed targeting.

The book devotes considerable attention to the aerial photographs of Auschwitz. As I write this review, the news is filled with reports of massacres in Sudan and Nigeria, accompanied by satellite images of real-time atrocities. Has the world learned anything? I do not think so.

Never forget.
Never forgive.

[Schvenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I get tired of saying "insightful", but it appropriately fits when you learn something more than you previously knew and can understand concepts you hadn't previously considered; and while it's hard to admit, I fully appreciate the complexities regarding reluctance to do something about the death camps. Yes, you read that correctly. Were the various governments correct in not stopping the death camps? No, of course not, but I understand their reluctance. Of course, there were the horrendous statements like "we cannot risk valuable lives" to bomb the railway lines or death camps. That type of mentality is easy to be mad about and the decisions to not bomb the railway lines to the camps were also wrong, but the Allies reluctance to kill innocent people in the camps to save more from going there was also understandable. It was a no win situation. In the end, the same argument always won, which was "We need to win the war. That's how we truly save people's lives." Doing nothing was the easiest solution and in hindsight, not one the overwhelming majority of us would likely agree with taking that same stance now, but we have the luxury of hindsight. Informative, but if you don't read it with cold detachment, the numbers and atrocities cited within this book are enough to give you nightmares.

[Roberta Westwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book

This is a very important book, written by a true expert. Sir Martin Gilbert is a highly acclaimed historian and was Churchill’s official biographer, and terrific writer, so I felt sure I would get a thorough and unbiased perspective on the holocaust with this book. It is, of course, horrifying. and potentially traumatizing for some to read, but I read it partially to honour those who lost their lives and to further educate myself. Of most interest to me was what world leaders did, or didn’t do, when stories of the Nazi concentration camps began emerging. I have wondered about where the outrage was, amidst the disbelief when accounts beyond comprehension were revealed, and why so little was done. This book corrected my thinking in some areas, and deepened my concern in others. The reluctance of nations to accept immigrants, especially once the truth was acknowledged and the race was on to save as many lives as possible before they also perished in death camps, was a real eye opener. If you can manage it, read this book,

[Greg Schloesser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes a book isn't what you expected. This is the case here, as I was expecting more of the day-to-day life within the Nazi Auschwitz camp. The book, however, doesn't deal with this subject at all. Rather, it concentrates a number of other aspects, including the statistics regarding the number of arrivals and deaths, the efforts made to inform the Allied Powers of the existence of the camp, as well as the efforts to convince the Allied Powers to take action to disrupt the killing. While this information is extremely valid for historical data and purposes, it does not make for riveting reading.

[Emanuele Gemelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard book to read; hard because it's hard to read about the Nazi's atrocities, hard because the accounting of all the deaths can only be digested not putting faces to the numbers; hard because it's difficult to accept what happened and, with the benefit of hindsight, could have been done more to save at least one additional person. This book does that; I do not think the Author makes any particular judgement about the (lack of)acts of the Allies' decision makers at the time; however, at the end, you could feel the pain about the consequences of the choices they made at that time.

[Christelle Faul Marais · Rating 5 out of 5]

This made a huge impression on me, even though I read it many years ago. Key takeaway is that hymanity is inherently selfish and may make a big noise about something when it is beneficial, but will bury its head when there is no selfish gain.

[David DeRienzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very hard to get through but an unbelievably important book. There wasn’t always a lot we could do, but what little could be done was often neglected. So sad.

[Abdul Alhazred · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't about death camps in general, or the holocaust in general but Auschwitz in particular. It also goes into excruciating detail over the chronological timeline of what news was made clear when to whom, who dictated a response to where, and what various leaders and organizations proposed along the way. The lack of a broad view of the holocaust and the level of detail on Auschwitz has to make this of primarily academic rather than popular interest. The conclusion of the book is similarly muddled, there was a failure of imagination and hesitation to act principally on the request of bombing the camp - which was in turn slow rolled by jewish leadership due to a belief the Gestapo could be negotiated with. While the book makes a lot of the messages sent regarding Palestine (then under british control) and fears about igniting zionist demands of a nation state there (it's even proposed to send refugees to Sicily to avoid this), little is made of this angle in the summarized conclusion. One reason for avoiding bombing the camps, beyond just the inadvertent death toll on those trapped, is giving the nazis a way to later blame the allies for all deaths, something that in retrospect looks legitimate given the way neonazis instead blame allied bombing of supply lines today. In short, a lot of fingers are pointed in a lot of directions, and while Gilbert in his summary seems to conclude bombings should have occurred there's certainly a lot of material presented justifying it not being a clear cut choice until too late for it to matter.
I recommend to the general reader Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin which covers the bulk of the systematic killings in the east (the majority of which happened before death camps existed as Snyder points out), as well as some of the failures to respond.

[Superangela · Rating 5 out of 5]

So little is well known about what the allies knew and did about extermination camps and this books explains it clearly