Confirmation of the Final Solution didn’t get out widely in the Western press until November 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise, after inexplicable delays, called a press conference to reveal the substance of an urgent telegram he had received from Switzerland in August. The Associated Press reported: “Dr. Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said tonight that he had learned through sources confirmed by the State Department that about half the estimated 4,000,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe have been slain in an ‘extermination campaign.’”
Once Wise broke his silence, there was a surge of press coverage. President Roosevelt promised retribution and, as Churchill had done not long before, quoted Longfellow: “The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.” Yiddish papers carried black bars of mourning. And in December, Anthony Eden, Churchill’s foreign minister, read an Allied condemnation in Parliament. “The German authorities,” Eden declared, “not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.” Like Roosevelt, Eden promised that the culprits would “not escape retribution.” After Eden was finished, there was a moment of silence: a minute or two of grief for the Jews of Europe. “The whole crowded House — an unprecedented thing to do and not provided for by any Standing Order — rose to its feet and stood in silent homage to those who were about to die,” Sydney Silverman, MP, recollected after the war. “We could not do much to help them. No one desired that our war activity should be moderated in any sort of way or that our war effort should be in any way weakened in order to bring succor to those threatened people.”
The atrocity was so gargantuan, wrote the Nation a week later, that it would have to await the perspective of history to be understood. Again came the question — what to do? “Peace with Hitler for the sake of saving hostages is out of the question,” the Nation’s editors asserted. “Such a surrender would mean disaster for the world, for the Jews above all. Yet the harder we fight, the nearer the doom of the Nazis approaches, the fiercer will grow their homicidal mania. Let it be admitted in all solemnity that there is no escape from this ghastly dilemma.” The only thing to do was fight on.
No, there was a better way, thought Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League. Hughan, a soft-faced, wide-smiling woman in her late sixties, was a poet and high-school teacher (she had been Abraham Kaufman’s English teacher at Textile High School). On November 27, 1942, she sent a letter to two fellow pacifist leaders, asking them to help her mount a campaign.
It seems that the only way to save thousands and perhaps millions of European Jews from destruction would be for our government to broadcast the promise of a speedy and favorable armistice on condition that the European minorities are not molested any further. I know how improbable it is that our U.S. government would accept this but if it is the only possibility, ought not our pacifist groups to take some action?
Hughan gave talks on the necessity of rescue, she wrote letters to the State Department and the White House, and she and Abraham Kaufman, with the help of volunteers, distributed thousands of pro-armistice flyers. We must look beyond slogans like “unconditional surrender,” Hughan wrote. “The European Jews, helpless victims of the Nazism we are fighting, are being ruthlessly massacred as the war goes on. Victory will not save them, for imminent defeat may be the signal for their extermination: only an armistice can rescue them, by including in its terms the immediate release of all Jews to allied guardianship.” A peace without delay, conditional upon the release of Jews and other political prisoners, might bring the end of Hitler’s reign, she suggested: “There are many anti-Nazis in the Reich, and hope is a stronger revolutionary force than despair.” She wrote a blunt letter on the subject to the New York Times: “We must act now, because dead men cannot be liberated.” The Times didn’t print it.
Other pacifists publicly took up this cause. In a peace letter, Vera Brittain said that Jewish rescue required “the termination or the interruption of the war, and not its increasingly bitter continuation.” Dorothy Day wrote a front-page article in the Catholic Worker in May 1943, headlined PEACE NOW WITHOUT VICTORY WILL SAVE JEWS:
If we persist in our present war of unconditional surrender; if we promise only executions, retributions, punishments, dismemberments, indemnities and no friendly participation with the rest of the world in a post-war world, we shall be depriving not only the German people of all hope, but we shall be signing the death sentence of the remnant of Jews still alive. If, on the contrary, we demand the release of all Jews from the ghettos of occupied Europe and work for a peace without victory, offering some hope, as Wilson did in his fourteen points, then there is a chance of saving the Jews.
In the following issue Day laid out a detailed plan: loosen immigration quotas, reopen Palestine, issue Nansen passports to stateless Jews, establish safe havens and sanctuaries in neutral countries, and feed those who are trapped where they are: “In view of the fact that mass starvation is the design of the Nazi regime, the United Nations should take appropriate steps without delay to organize a system for the feeding of the victims of Nazi oppression who are unable to leave the jurisdiction and control of the action.” The Jewish Peace Fellowship called for an armistice to prevent Jewish extermination and “make an end to the world-wide slaughter.”
Even lapsed or near pacifists — including Eleanor Rathbone in the House of Commons, and the publisher Victor Gollancz — urgently echoed this sentiment: If we failed to make some kind of direct offer to Hitler for the safe passage of Jews, we shared a responsibility for their fate. Gollancz printed a quarter of a million copies of an extraordinary pamphlet called “Let My People Go,” in which he questioned the Churchill government’s promise of postwar retribution. “This ‘policy,’ it must be plainly said, will not save a single Jewish life,” he wrote.
Will the death, after the war, of a Latvian or Lithuanian criminal, or of a Nazi youth who for ten years has been specially and deliberately trained to lose his humanity — will the death of these reduce by one jot or tittle the agony of a Jewish child who perhaps at this very moment at which I write, on Christmas day, three hours after the sweet childish carol, ‘O come, all ye faithful,’ was broadcast before the seven o’clock news, is going to her death in a sealed coach, her lungs poisoned with the unslaked lime with which the floor is strewn, and with the dead standing upright about her, because there is no room for them to fall?
What mattered, Gollancz held, was, and he put it in italics, the saving of life now. The German government had to be approached immediately and asked to allow Jews to emigrate. The Allies had nothing to lose with such a proposal. “If refused, that would strip Hitler of the excuse that he cannot afford to fill useless mouths,” Gollancz wrote. “If accepted, it would not frustrate the economic blockade, because Hitler’s alternative is not feeding but extermination.”
Nobody in authority in Britain and the United States paid heed to these promptings. Anthony Eden, who’d been tasked by Churchill with handling queries about refugees, dealt coldly with one of many importunate delegations, saying that any effort to obtain the release of the Jews from Hitler was “fantastically impossible.” On a trip to the United States, Eden candidly told Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, that the real difficulty with asking Hitler for the Jews was that “Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.” Churchill agreed. “Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all Jews,” he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, “transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.”