In those days, no one in their right mind claimed we should ignore the overwhelming evidence at our disposal, and first obtain a legal ruling definitively establishing that crimes were committed, before indicting those responsible.
According to this 2017 article in The Independent, allied governments were already receiving information about the unprecedented scope of the Holocaust in late 1941.
By late 1942 they were fully aware that several million Jews had already been killed, that millions more were at risk, and that Germany, in the words of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that December, was waging a war of extermination against Europe's Jews.
There has been ongoing debate about why nothing was done in direct response to this information.
Explanations range from anti-Semitism, to an allied assessment that bombing the railroad tracks leading to the extermination camps (or the camps themselves) would have an only temporary and limited impact, to the conviction among relevant governments that they should focus their resources on defeating Germany's Nazi government, because their priority was military victory and this would also be the most effective way to end the atrocities.
What is not debatable is that these governments could have spared large numbers of Jewish lives by offering them refuge but made a deliberate choice not to. It was the previous incarnation of "there's a reason nobody wants them", so popular among Israel flunkies these days when discussing Palestinians.
In contrast to today's Middle East, during the 1940s there were no fears expressed that refugees would be prevented from returning to their homes after war's end.
The article also reveals that allied governments, acting on the information at their disposal about Germany's slaughter of the Jews, which was far from complete, began drafting war crimes indictments against German leaders in 1942. This was several years before Soviet soldiers entered Majdanek, the first camp to be liberated in mid-1944.
There was opposition to such legal prosecutions, but then as now this was for political rather than legal reasons.
In those days, no one in their right mind claimed we should ignore the overwhelming evidence at our disposal, and first obtain a legal ruling definitively establishing that crimes were committed, before indicting those responsible.
By contrast, in 2025 any talk of the Gaza Genocide is denounced as "blood libel" because the International Court of Justice has not issued a final ruling on the matter. And if, as widely expected, it finds that Israel has indeed committed genocide in Gaza, that too will be denounced as a "blood libel", only more loudly.
independent.co.uk/news/world/wor
posted by Satish Sharma at
11:28
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