Seventy-five years ago – on April 19, 1943 – a tragic event began to unfold in the heart of Warsaw. Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto revolted against the Nazis – holding out for nearly a month. Most were ultimately killed, although a relative few escaped with the help of the Polish Underground, and some even participated in the Warsaw Uprising of August-September 1944.
People interested in the fate of Polish Jews, and in the issue of ultimate responsibility for what had happened to them, need to ask a very important – but largely neglected – question: Was it possible for the Nazi mass murder operations in Poland between 1939 and 1945 to have been rendered very much less successful and efficient than they actually were? A critical factor often left out of the equation is the attitude of the Allied Powers, especially Britain and the United States because of their great material resources, great political and financial leverage with the Polish Underground, and their appeal to Polish public opinion.
Any Pole who would help Jews during World War II risked his own life and that of his family. But Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt lived in great comfort and safety in their respective countries. They spouted all sorts of wonderful slogans and they controlled and disposed of enormous material and political-psychological resources. The Free World looked to them for leadership. As their own admission in the Allied Powers’ London Declaration of December 17, 1942 reveals, they knew that the Nazis were exterminating the Jews of Europe and had chosen Poland as the “principal slaughterhouse” to carry out their nefarious policy. The Declaration did not call for either (a) any Allied help for the Jews or (b) any Allied effort to impose or impede the murders in progress. Nor did it call for equivalent actions by the people of Europe. It merely promised retribution to “those responsible,” implying actions contingent on ultimate victory.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was an event all but instantly known to the whole world. General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile, stationed in London, offered words of sympathy and praise for the Jews fighting in the Ghetto in a radio broadcast on the BBC on May 4, 1943. Twelve days later on May 16, the Nazis issued an official communique declaring “victory” over the so-called “Jewish bandits” in Poland’s capital.
But where were Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt with respect to Nazi murder of the Jews? Specifically, where were they during the events that unfolded in Warsaw in April and May 1943? Did they utter a single public word of sympathy or support for the Jews during those tragic events? Did they send any help to the Jews or to the Polish Home Army for the purpose of helping Jews? In his post-war book The Secret Army, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski recalled in 1950 that there were 424 successful flights from Britain to occupied Poland between 1941 and the summer of 1944 carrying various kinds of aid – weapons, agents, money, etc. Some of those flights even landed on improvised Polish airfields. This amounts to about 10 flights a month. But how many of those flights included aid – of any kind – offered to assist Jews? How many were intended to help support the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? The answer, of course, is absolutely none.
The Polish Home Army (Armja Kzajowa) founded an organization known as Zegota to provide assistance to Jews. Did either Britain or the United States, with enormous material resources at their command, offer any aid to Zegota? Did either of those nations even open their own doors, or otherwise find places for Jews escaping the inferno of Hitler’s Europe? Hardly. The United States refused to extend its available immigration quotas to accommodate Jewish refugees. At the same time the British, under Churchill’s leadership, sought to bar from Palestine Jews fleeing Hitler’s death machine – in flagrant breach of the League of Nations treaty under which Britain governed that country since 1922. All of this was done without a single word of protest or criticism from President Franklin Roosevelt who was empowered by virtue of the 1924 Anglo-American Convention on Palestine to voice policy objections and, under Article 7 of the Convention, to insist that any modifications to the treaty could not be applied to affect American rights without the consent of the United States.
Whatever else may have transpired in Poland, the Polish Government-in-Exile and the leadership of the Polish Home Army did a significant and very laudable job of informing the West about the Nazi Final Solution. Many names and published sources connected with these actions come to mind: Prime Ministers Wladyslaw Sikorski and Stanislaw Mikolajeczyk, Foreign Minister Edward Raczynski in his official note to Allied Governments on December 10, 1942, Jan Karski in the White House on July 28, 1943, Jan Nowak, Stefan Korbonski, Jan Ciechanowski, Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, and many others are witnesses. Scholars like David Engel and Michael Fleming have discussed the remarkable extent of these communications from Poland.
During World War II, the United States and Great Britain gave all sorts of aid – military and material – to virtually every anti-Nazi resistance movement in Europe. But none ever to the Jews. As the Holocaust unfolded, the Allied armed forces never attacked or interfered with a single component of Hitler’s death machinery – not the camps, not the trains or the railroads supplying the gas chambers and other extermination methods with victims, and not the personnel or the equipment involved in the massacres. In the face of this incontrovertible fact, Allied apologists have falsely alleged that “Poland was much too far for the Allies to reach.” As the flights carrying aid to Poland and other examples reveal, this was simply not true. Coincidentally, the Allies did not extend help to Jews in any places close to their bases, France, Holland or Italy for example.
When the Warsaw Ghetto burned in April and May 1943, General Wladyslaw Sikorski and the Polish Government-in-Exile were on the side of the Jews; Churchill and Roosevelt were effectively on Hitler’s side. Their studious silence on an occasion of great historic and moral significance cannot be denied. In stunning contrast, in August and September 1944 – in an election year for Franklin Roosevelt – he and Winston Churchill had no problem sending many planes to Warsaw with supplies for the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising. Gallant Allied pilots, including Polish pilots, sacrificed their lives in an effort that, despite their bravery, ultimately proved to be futile. Churchill publically expressed sympathy for the Warsaw Uprising in the House of Commons at least twice. Roosevelt contacted Stalin to secure landing rights for some of the Allied planes in Soviet-held territory. On October 2, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden declared Polish participants in the Uprising to be regular combatants, implying that retaliation would follow if they were otherwise treated by the Nazis. The effect of this implicit threat was apparently sufficient to save at least some – even if not all – Polish lives including that of General Bor-Komorowski who lived to write a post-war account of his service in The Secret Army. No one in London had considered equivalent help for Marek Anielewicz and his colleagues in 1943.
Churchill and Roosevelt not only mistreated Jews, they also betrayed Poland. In 1943 they had secretly agreed to the Soviet amputation of half of pre-war Polish territory, betraying their own pledges in the 1941 Atlantic Charter concerning people’s right to self-determination. They did this without even informing the London-based Polish Government-in-Exile whose soldiers, airmen, and sailors fought at the Allies’ side for all of World War II. No scheme of property compensation for displaced Poles was ever implemented. The Allies were also very good “actors” in pretending not to notice the Katyn Forest murders of thousands of Polish officers who were shot by Stalin’s secret police in 1940. This had to be disclosed to the world in 1943 under German auspices. Finally, the Allies were all but criminally negligent in accepting Stalin’s empty promises of “free elections,” and all of his other “assurances” concerning post-war Poland.
Substantial aid to or on behalf of Jews in Poland during Nazi occupation was feasible, but never materialized. Anyone seriously interested in the question why Hitler’s Final Solution was as successful as it was both in Poland, and in Europe as a whole, needs to consider, honestly and diligently, the role of the Great Powers.
Alexander J. Groth, Ph.D.
Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Author, Accomplices: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2011), as well as numerous articles on politics in Poland.
Tony J. Tanke, J.D., LL.M.
Co-editor and contributing author to the forthcoming Allied Powers Response to the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, expected 2019)