War is messy, we say. It’s not pretty, but let’s be real — it has to be fought sometimes. Cut to the image of a handsome unshaven G.I., somewhere in Italy or France, with a battered helmet and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. World War II, the most lethally violent eruption in history, is pacifism’s great smoking counterexample. We “had to” intervene in Korea, Vietnam, and wherever else, because look at World War II. In 2007, in an article for Commentary called “The Case for Bombing Iran,” Norman Podhoretz drew a parallel between negotiating with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and negotiating with Hitler: we must bomb Iran now, he suggested, because look at World War II.
True, the Allies killed millions of civilians and absurdly young conscripts, and they desolated much of Europe and Japan — that was genuinely sad. But what about the Holocaust? We had to push back somehow against that horror.
Yes, we did. But the way you push is everything.
The Holocaust was, among many other things, the biggest hostage crisis of all time. Hostage-taking was Hitler’s preferred method from the beginning. In 1923, he led a group of ultranationalists into a beer hall in Munich and, waving a gun, held government officials prisoner. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, he imprisoned thousands of Jews, releasing them only after the Jewish community paid a huge ransom. In occupied France, Holland, Norway, and Yugoslavia, Jews were held hostage and often executed in reprisal for local partisan activity.
By 1941, as Congress was debating the Lend-Lease Act, which would provide military aid to Britain and other Allies, the enormity of the risk became clear, if it wasn’t already, to anyone who could read a newspaper. On February 28, 1941, the New York Times carried a troubling dispatch from Vienna: “Many Jews here believe that Jews throughout Europe will be more or less hostages against the United States’ entry into the war. Some fear that even an appreciable amount of help for Britain from the United States may precipitate whatever plan the Reichsfuehrer had in mind when, in recent speeches, he spoke of the elimination of Jews from Europe ‘under certain circumstances.’”
In response to this threat, the American Hebrew, a venerable weekly, ran a defiant front-page editorial. “Reduced to intelligibility this message, which obviously derives from official sources, warns that unless America backs down, the Jews in Germany will be butchered,” the paper said. So be it. The editorial went on:
We shall continue, nay, we shall increase our efforts to bring about the downfall of the cutthroat regime that is tyrannizing the world, and we are not blind to the price we may have to pay for our determination. But no sacrifice can be too great, no price too dear, if we can help rid the world of the little Austrian messiah and his tribe, and all they stand for.
Other Jews, a minority, disagreed. (“In wars it is the minorities that are generally right,” Ponsonby once said.) In 1941, Rabbi Cronbach, of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, began talking to Rabbi Isidor B. Hoffman, a friendly, bald, hard-to-ruffle student counselor at Columbia University, and Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Omaha, Nebraska, about forming a Jewish Peace Fellowship. The fellowship would help support Jewish conscientious objectors who were then in alternative service camps or prisons, and it would, according to the first issue of its newsletter, Tidings, “strengthen the devotion to pacifism of self-respecting, loyal Jews.”
“Crony” Cronbach became the honorary chairman of the Jewish Peace Fellowship. He was a fine-boned man, always in a suit and tie, and he had a horror of vengeance as an instrument of national policy. He’d seen what happened in the Great War. “People of gentleness, refinement, and idealism became, in the war atmosphere, hyenas raging to assault and kill not merely the foreign foe but equally their own dissenting countrymen,” he recalled in his 1937 book The Quest for Peace. By supporting the earlier conflict, he suggested, America’s Jews had “only helped prepare the way for the Nazi horror which has engulfed us.”
The American middle class, still dimly recalling the trenches, the mud, the rats, the typhus, and the general obscene futility of World War I, was perhaps slightly closer to Cronbach’s pacifism than to Roosevelt’s interventionism — until December 7, 1941. Once Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row burned and sank, the country cried for the incineration of Tokyo. Abraham Kaufman gave his version of what happened in a letter to a historian in 1974: “Roosevelt,” Kaufman said, “was willing to use the natural Jewish opposition to Hitler to get US public opinion in favor of his war measures (was unsuccessful as far as the country at large) — and finally managed to force us in with the worst kind of skull-duggery of which history is yet to be written. Shalom, Abe.”
With the country demanding vengeance, the false-flag “peace” groups, such as America First, disbanded immediately; the absolute pacifists stuck to their principles. “Our Country Passes from Undeclared to Declared War; We Continue Our Pacifist Stand,” wrote Dorothy Day, in her Catholic Worker. She quoted Jesus Christ: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you.” A Catholic newspaper, in response, charged that Day was sentimental and soft. Day, whose life was spent in poverty, caring for homeless people, wrote back: “Let those who talk of softness, of sentimentality, come to live with us in cold, unheated houses in the slums.” She said: “Let them live with rats, with vermin, bedbugs, roaches, lice. (I could describe the several kinds of body lice.)” She said: “Let their noses be mortified by the smells of sewage, decay, and rotten flesh. Yes, and the smell of the sweat, blood, and tears spoken of so blithely by Mr. Churchill, and so widely and bravely quoted by comfortable people.”
At the War Resisters League headquarters on Stone Street in Manhattan, the executive committee members, including Kaufman, Jessie Hughan, John Haynes Holmes, Sidney E. Goldstein, Isidor Hoffman, Frieda Lazarus, A. J. Muste, and Edward P. Gottlieb (a schoolteacher who had changed his middle name to “Pacifist”), published a post-Pearl Harbor flyer, “Our Position in Wartime.” “We respect the point of view of those of our fellow citizens to whom war presents itself as a patriotic duty,” the flyer said; nonetheless, the league could not abandon its principles. “The methods chosen determine the ends attained,” they wrote. They promised to assist in relief work, to help conscientious objectors, to work for economic justice — and also to call for an early negotiated peace. “The war must end some time and it is proper that we should urge an early rather than a late ending on a basis of benefit and deliverance for all the peoples of the earth.” The flyer got a good response, and won them some new enrollees; only a few angry letters came in, one written on toilet paper. The FBI visited the offices and began making a series of what Kaufman called “exhaustive inquiries.”
Meanwhile, Hitler’s anti-Semitism had reached a final stage of Götterdämerungian psychosis. As boxcars of war-wounded, frostbitten German soldiers returned from the Russian front, and as it became obvious to everyone that the United States was entering the war, Hitler, his arm tremor now evident to his associates, made an unprecedented number of vitriolic threats to European Jewry in close succession — some in speeches, and some in private meetings. (The Jew, Hitler now claimed, was a Weltbrandstifter, a world arsonist.) A number of Holocaust historians — among them Saul Friedländer, Peter Longerich, Christian Gerlach, and Roderick Stackelberg — have used this concentration of “exterminatory statements” (the phrase is Friedländer’s) to date, in the absence of any written order, Hitler’s decision to radically accelerate the Final Solution.