“As early as 1941 and 1942 the Allies made preliminary plans for how to organize post-Hitler Europe. Yet the Jewish question did not feature in these early American, British and Russian formulations of the future.” This according to David Bankier, Yad Vashem’s Director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, who has researched this subject.
“Neither can any significant references to the future of the Jews be found in the discussions of governments in exile, either in London or elsewhere. There are no concrete plans. At most a few, usually abstract, remarks are all that exist.”
Poland: Jewish Survivors should Leave
“The attitude of Polish leaders was particularly revealing because, before the war, three and a half million Jews lived there, comprising about ten percent of the total population. Most Polish underground organizations believed that post-Hitler Poland would be a country without Jews. They knew that the majority of Polish Jewry was being exterminated.
“Those Jews who remained would have to leave Poland after the war. This view was expressed even in the Zegota organization, the Council for Aid to the Jews set up by the Polish resistance. Among them were people who endangered their lives, most notably Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a devout Catholic, a famous writer and one of the founders of the Zegota. Her opinion that Poland was not a country where Jews should live was highly indicative of true Polish feelings.
“In an article entitled ‘Whom do we help?’ written in August 1943, Kossak Szczucka referred to what the post-War attitude toward the Jews would be, saying: “Today the Jews face extermination. They are the victims of unjust murderous persecutions. I must save them. ‘Do unto others what you want others to do unto you.’ This commandment demands that I use all the means I have to save others, the very same means that I would use for my own salvation. To be sure, after the war the situation will be different. The same laws will apply to the Jew and to me. At that point I will tell the Jew: ‘I saved you, sheltered you when you were persecuted. To keep you alive I risked my own life and the lives of those who were dear to me. Now nothing threatens you. You have your own friends and in some ways you are better off than I. Now I am depriving you of my home. Go and settle somewhere else. I wish you luck and will be glad to help you. I am not going to hurt you, but in my own home I want to live alone. I have the right.”‘
A Thousand Years Residence: Outside Polish Society
“The Jews were never considered part of the fabric of Polish society. Their ancestors may have lived there for 900 or even 1,000 years, but, as they did not belong to the national majority, they remained foreigners. Most people did not see in the catastrophe befalling the Polish Jews a tragedy affecting the Polish nation. At best, they saw two parallel disasters caused by the Germans. One concerned the Polish nation, the other the Jews.
“Except for some socialist and communist underground movements, they never linked these two tragedies by saying that the suffering of the Jews was part of the Poles’ suffering. Those who belonged to the center or right did not see the Jews as fellow citizens. Their hardship thus could not be Polish suffering. That the ancestors of the Jews had lived so long in Poland and had Polish citizenship and passports was a formality without further implications.
“The Polish government in London, when making statements on the Jewish question, was under constraints. They would be heard by the British, the Americans and Jewish organizations, and they had to be careful in their declarations. Usually they said that, after the war, all surviving Jews would return and that their rights would be restored.
“They had to say this although many Polish leaders in exile were long-standing anti-Semites. The majority in the National Council of the Polish Republic in exile in London were Polish nationalists who didn’t see the Jews as a component of the Polish nation, despite the Council’s having Jewish representatives: Ignacy Schwarzbart for the Zionists and Artur Zygelbojm for the Bundists. There was also substantial anti-Semitism in the Polish army in the West, which led some Jews to desert their units in Scotland. Several Jewish organizations protested against this anti-Semitism to the Polish government in exile.
“Economic factors played a major role in the anti-Jewish messages emanating from the Polish underground. This became even clearer when the Jews returned to Poland after the war and wanted to return to their houses or farms. Many Jews were murdered or subjected to violence. The wartime attitudes of the Poles toward the Jews have been extensively researched, for example in a doctoral thesis by Joanna Michlic, and in articles written by Andrej Friszke and Szymon Rudnicki.”
Czechoslovakia: More of the Same
“Similar attitudes are often expressed in the reports which reached the leaders of the Czech government in exile in London: Eduard Benes, the country’s President and Jan Masaryk. Via Istanbul they got information from their home country which showed that the Czech people were shocked by the German horrors against the Jews. At the same time, the government in exile was asked not to allow the Jews back and to avoid creating the impression that they wanted them to return.
“Masaryk spoke at a dinner organized by the Jewish community in London, where he said that, after Hitler’s fall, Aryanization would be revoked and all rights of the Jews restored. The Germans used this for propaganda purposes, among the Czech population. It created commotion in Czech public opinion, as people who illegally held Jewish property became concerned that they might have to return it.
“Binyamin Aktzin, who became a well-known Israeli political scientist, real ized this when he wrote an article in Harpers Magazine in 1941. He concluded that the problem was much wider than just Czechoslovakia. He warned that elected post-war democratic governments in many countries would not be able to tell people to leave their formerly Jewish-owned houses and other properties, or to leave formerly Jewish-held jobs. Any government which would dare to say that would commit political suicide.”
France
“In the French underground, there were some declarations that after the war the Jews’ rights would be restored, though little is written on this. On the other hand, there were those who openly wondered whether France’s pre-war policy toward the Jews had been right. They said that France should reconsider the status of the Jews. Their opinion was that only the small minority of Jews of old stock, mainly from the Alsace-Lorraine and Avignon areas, should remain French cit izens.
“All others, who had come to France from Russia, Rumania and Poland – and even more so those who were naturalized in France after the First World War – should not necessarily have French citizenship. They should be foreigners without civil rights. This has been documented by authors such as Henry Rousso, Asher Cohen and John Sweet.
“Many Frenchmen classified the Jews of France into three groups: non-citizen immigrants and foreigners, naturalized Jews (including their children born in France), and native Jews who had lived in France for generations. Only the latter were recognized as genuinely French. The clandestine journal Les Cahiers, which was published in Paris by the center-right underground group OCM (L’Organis ation Civile et Militaire), advocated a similar distinction in its discussion of national minorities and the Jewish question.
“The authors of this clandestine publication recognized the existence of anti-Semitism all over Europe. While rejecting racism, they advocated citizenship only for Jews who had lived for at least three generations in France, and even they would have the status of a protected non-Christian minority.”
Bringing the Jews Back: Bad for de Gaulle’s Image
“Similar views were expressed in de Gaulle’s entourage in London. This was a very mixed bag of people. Some were French nationalists or monarchists. They were anti-Nazis, but belonged to the French Right. Some of them were even members of the Cagoule, an anti-Semitic extreme right-wing organization. There were also well-known Jews like Rene Cassin and Andre Weill-Curiel. Their only common denominator was that they were all anti-German.
“As the war progressed, de Gaulle received recommendations from the French underground not to declare that he would bring the Jews back to France, since that would harm his image. In post-war France there were demonstrations in the streets against the return of Jews who wanted their apartments back.
“Leaders of the Free French movement wondered whether discussing the Jewish question in their broadcasts would give Hitler ammunition allowing them to claim that de Gaulle was defending the Jews. De Gaulle was not an anti-Semite, yet it was important for him to keep up the image that the Free French movement was a French one, in which there were also Jews… but not too many.
“When once asked why he had so many people of Jewish origin around him in London he answered: ‘I take whoever comes,’ implying that he didn’t choose them but merely accepted those who arrived. Pierre Mendes France, one of France’s post-War prime ministers, wrote in his memoirs that, when he came to London in 1940 de Gaulle received him exclaiming: ‘Another Jew!'”
French Anti-Semites in London; Discrimination in Algeria
“One finds negative opinions about the Jews in London in the circle of the Free French even among important figures who had held key positions in the Third Republic. For example, Pierre Tissier, a member of the State Council and Jean Escarra, a leading lawyer. Both suggested that, after the war, the status of French Jews should be reconsidered. In their view, the Jews were not as discreet as they should have been; and they were pushing themselves into places where they were not wanted. They claimed that Jews moving into certain prestigious positions created anti-Semitism. When this was said in private, without public resonance, it could be considered as individual prejudice. When it was published, however, it was more problematic. The American Jewish Congress protested, and these statements had to be retracted.
“An important test case came when the Americans and British invaded North Africa. In Algeria, under the Vichy regime, the Cremieux Decree, awarding the Jews French citizenship, had been abolished. De Gaulle had declared that it would be restored after Algeria’s liberation. This promise was not kept for two reasons: Moslem public opinion, and because it would have endangered the civil service positions of those gentiles who replaced the Jews when the latter lost French citizenship. There was a substantial time lag between the Allies’ invasion of Algeria and the restoration of French citizenship to the Jews.
“In France, from 1943 onwards, some Frenchmen organized themselves in a group for the protection of the rights of Aryanizers. They were even counseled by Vichy officials who told them that, in the unpleasant contingency that Hitler would lose the war, they would, as individuals, stand very little chance of hanging on to their formerly Jewish properties. If, however, they presented themselves to the Americans as an organization, their position would be much stronger.
“After the war, one and a half million people returned to France. This included prisoners of war, slave laborers, political refugees, etc. There were very few Jews among them, perhaps only 2,500. At that time people did not believe that they needed to be compensated for their suffering. It would take another 30 years for the magnitude of the Holocaust to be internalized in this way. The French attitude toward the Jews during the war, and thereafter, has been studied in detail by Renee Poznanski and Annette Wieviorka.”
Germany: A Case Apart
“Germany is a case apart, as there was no German government in exile. One must thus investigate what specific groups, in various parts of the world, had to say about the Jews’ future. For the socialists, the Jewish question had never been important. They declared that after the war the Nuremberg Laws would be revoked, Jews would return to Germany and their civil rights restored. It is noteworthy that so little was said about the sensitive issue of property. Had one pressed them at the time, they would probably have said that property would be restored to the Jews. The position of the communists was the same.
“Willy Brandt, then in exile in Stockholm, was the only important socialist to contemplate a different solution. He personally wanted all German Jews to return to Germany. He was well aware, however, that they would not; either because they had been murdered or because many survivors would not want to come back. In April 1944, he suggested the establishment of a fund, using money the Nazis had confiscated in their 12 years of rule, to help those Jews who had arrived in Palestine. There the Jews deserved a state of their own.
“There are very few references to the Jews’ future in opposition circles within Germany. The Freiburg circle comprised conservative academic teachers at the city’s university. They started meeting around November 1942. It was already clear to them that the Jews were being exterminated. Their position was that ‘since not too many Jews will survive and return, their full civil rights can be restored.’ Constantin von Dietze, of this circle, believed discrimination against the Jews was unnecessary because ‘the number of surviving returning Jews would be so small, they would pose no threat to the German people.’
“This implied that if many Jews would have returned these rights should not have been restored. Their views followed conservative thinking in Germany since century: that one can assimilate only a small number of Jews.”
Goerdeler: No Solution in Europe
“Another example from the conservative circles concerns Carl Goerdeler, the pre-war mayor of Leipzig. He was meant to become Germany’s prime minister, had the attempted assassination of Hitler by Graf Stauffenberg succeeded. He believed that it was impossible to solve the Jewish question in Europe. It could only be resolved by establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, parts of South America or somewhere in Canada. German citizenship should be granted only to a small elitist minority of Jews, willing to assimilate completely.
“Goerdeler’s position can also be found in his writings in 1941. He repeated it in his testament in 1944, while in jail awaiting execution. When interrogated by the Gestapo regarding his solution for the Jewish question, he said the same. “In his testament, he says, more or less, that what the Germans did to the Jews would remain an eternal stain on their history. He considered the guilt of the German nation unforgivable. He did not say that the Jews deserved what had happened to them; but he felt that they didn’t do much to prevent it either.
They were too pushy, accepting positions beyond their station and becoming too prominent in the Weimar Republic.”
Bankier states: “His were the deeply entrenched stereotypes of the educated European. They might be summarized as saying that the Jews got an equality of rights which they did not deserve, as they were not really Europeans. They thus should not fully exploit their rights and keep a low profile.
“Goerdeler, von Dietze, as well as others with similar attitudes, did not subscribe to the crude stereotypes that placed the Jews outside the universe of moral obligation. Yet they viewed them as a category that was separate from their own realm, thus perpetuating the myths of Jewish otherness.”
Jews Adopting German Positions
“Some Jews held similar positions. Hans Joachim Schoeps lived during the war in exile in Sweden. He had previously led a very small organization, the Deutscher Vortrupp, Gefolgschaft Deutscher Juden, which advocated a combination of religious Jewish ideas and conservative, extremely right wing Prussianism. He pro posed that after Hitler, when the Jews would return to Germany, a numerus clausus would be imposed. In his view, anti-Semitism resulted from the fact that there were too many Jewish lawyers, doctors, prominent people in the world of art and cinema, as well as in other prestigious fields.
“He returned to the idea of making the Jews productive. Jews should go to farms and fields; they should work with their hands and not be coffeehouse Jews.
Conservative Jews like Schoeps were greatly disappointed by the dysfunction of the Weimar Republic. A similar feeling had existed in many French circles with respect to the Third Republic. They felt that the concept that Jews could be equal citizens and part of the nation was merely a polite fiction. They analyzed history factually and concluded that the Jews were not really accepted in European society.”
Different Approaches
“One can thus distinguish several disparate approaches to the Jewish problem. The first was to impose the Jews on European societies. Even if their countries could not integrate them, Jews still belonged to these nations. They must be given equal rights and be free to exploit these if they so choose. This might be considered a liberal position.
“The second approach held that, while Jews should be given full rights, they should be asked to better restrain themselves. Alternatively, they could be given a minority status with limited civil and political rights. For instance, they should not be chief of staff, head of the Supreme Court or assume other positions which are sensitive for a country’s image.
“The third approach was to help the Jews settle elsewhere. This is the position taken by center and right-wing organizations in exile. They considered it realistic that sizable populations in Germany and elsewhere did not want the Jews back.”
Socialist Voices: Germans Prefer Authoritarian Regime
“Several theologians, such as Karl Barth, who was in exile in Switzerland, ad dressed this issue in abstract terms. Political circles, however, have to refer to concrete realities. Paul Herz, an assimilated German Jew in exile in the United States, wrote in 1940 in a memorandum that some socialists said that one had to expect a hostile public opinion toward the Jews in post-Hitler Germany. These people realized that the Germans preferred an authoritarian regime to a democracy.
“They also said that, after the war, many changes would have to be imposed on the Germans. They would have to be reeducated and become more democratic; their state would have to be more decentralized and less authoritarian. There were different opinions among these socialists as to how much the German people would be willing to absorb Jews and whether one should try to impose the Jews on this hostile society.
“The socialists saw Judaism as a religion, not a nation. They disliked religious establishments, and thus also synagogues and their representatives. The socialists in the West knew mainly the bourgeois Jews, rather than the impoverished masses from the East. These Jews did not vote for them and had a mentality the socialists did not like.
“The socialists had another controversy with the Jews. The latter had emphasized, since Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, that they were the Nazis’ victims. The socialists, however, said that they had been the first ones to be sent to concentration camps such as Dachau. They had taken voluntary risks, whereas the Jews had tried to accommodate themselves, as much as they could, with the Nazi regime. Had Hitler not wanted to kill the Jews, they could have lived in Germany as a community with minority rights, as they did in fascist Italy, fascist Hungary or fascist Romania.”
The Communists: Reconsidering the Jews’ Future
“The communist viewpoint was different. Their writings implied that the Jews had been successfully assimilated. Nazism and fascism, however, had once again segregated them. As integration had failed, another solution had to be found. The future of the Jews should thus be reconsidered.
“Perhaps the Jews should be a recognized minority. Alternatively they should have their own state in Birobidzhan or Palestine. The communists accepted Palestine as a solution because they believed that there would be many Jews who would not want to reintegrate or assimilate, nor wish to live in Birobidzhan and build a socialist state there.
“These positions can be found among German communists in exile in countries such as the United Kingdom and Mexico. One finds the first expressions of this in 1942, when news of the ongoing exterminations shocked them. This stimulated some to start contemplating the future. Later their ideas gained acceptance in non-communist circles as well.
“But there was an additional reason for the communists’ support of a Jewish state in Palestine. Stalin was assessing what would happen after the war. He considered that, to serve Soviet interests, it might be wise to bring an anti-British element into the Middle East and thus destabilize the British Empire.
“This is also hinted in the contacts between Ivan Maiski, the Russian am bassador in London, David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann. Maiski had visited Palestine in 1943 and was very impressed by his visit to Kibbutz Maaleh Hakhamisha.”
American Jewish Positions
To complete the picture, one must also consider the positions the American Jewish organizations had reached. They gradually adopted an increasingly pro-Zionist stance. Many of them had concluded that Jewish integration in post-Hitler Europe would not work.
“They stated their positions explicitly, firstly demanding the total and retroactive nullification of all anti-Jewish measures enacted before and during the war by the Axis powers. Second, they insisted on the rights of all refugees, victims of
Nazi persecution, to return to their places of residence and the former positions from which they had been driven. Third, they claimed the right for survivors to return to their former occupations or to obtain new positions in the post-war economy. Zionists went further calling for complete civic equality and full parity of economic opportunity, and requested the resettlement of the refugees in Palestine. “The Jewish organizations also understood that, after the war, apart from
the criminal courts, special property courts would be created to determine disputes involving restitution of property. Each conquered nation would appoint commissions to investigate and gather evidence concerning the stolen property. Jews unwilling or unable to return to their countries of origin would be in a disadvantageous position, because their stolen goods would be returned to the government of the country from which they were removed. Hardly could they have imagined that more than fifty years later this issue would still make headlines in the world’s media.”
David Bankier was born in Zeckendorf, Germany in 1947. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University where he teaches at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry. He is also the Director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. His research interests focus on public opinion in Germany, on Nazi policy, and on that of the anti-Nazi exiles.