Allied Response Essay

The Holocaust was a significant event in the 20th century and many debates still arise surrounding the issue. One such debate discusses the responses of the Allies towards the Holocaust. The Holocaust has been regarded as one of the most disastrous genocides in human history that resulted in the systematic killing of millions of Jews and other minority groups including the Roma, Slavs and homosexuals who were all considered ‘racially inferior’. After more than seven decades, the consequences of the Holocaust can finally undergo a more thorough evaluation, in order to determine what went wrong and what could have been done differently to reduce the number of casualties or avoid the genocide completely. Allied responses are believed to have

played a critical role in the development of the Holocaust. The Allies, otherwise known as the Allied powers, were the countries that collectively worked towards stopping German aggression. The Allied powers consisted mainly of the Western superpowers – Great Britain, France, United States as well as Soviet Union. The Allies played a substantial role in the development of the Holocaust, as the group was comprised of the four strongest nations that were most willing and able to counter German hostility.

The Allied responses refer to the actions that they had taken or avoided, following the acts of crime by the German Nazis. The purpose of this essay is to explore the key responses of the Allies, paying particular attention to its failures or inaction, in order to determine the lessons that could be learnt from their responses. This essay will begin by first examining the Allies’ reaction in terms of preventing the murder and crimes of the Holocaust. Secondly, the essay will discuss the measures that the Allied powers took to rescue the victims by facilitating the immigration of refugees and the liberation of victims from camps. Finally, the essay will justify the actions of the Allies with respect to the Auschwitz death camp. The essay will compare views from several historians including Monty Penkower, Richard Breitman, Dan Stone, William Rubinstein and Richard Levy. Overall, the Allied powers had failed to do more than they could possibly have to save the victims of the

Holocaust. They attributed their failure to excuses that eventually proved not to be credible such as their claim of being unaware of the genocidal extent of the Holocaust until much later on in the war. This essay acknowledges that there were plenty of reactions from the Allies, but the focus is on the three main responses listed above as they proved to have been the most significant aspects of the Holocaust. The reactions discussed had also taken place over different periods of time in the Holocaust, thereby providing a more holistic view of their reactions. Therefore, this essay will argue that although the responses of the Allies were either inadequate or complete failures, there is still plenty that can be learnt from their reactions.

Firstly, the Allied response to the acts of persecution during the Holocaust serves as an important learning point.

The Allies had failed to put an end to the acts of persecution during the Holocaust, as their actions were infrequent and ineffective in invoking fear in the European people. Their attempts to discourage the acts of persecution were challenged by the fact that the Europeans had their own personal opinions that were difficult to alter. For instance, the countries that were under German occupation tended to cooperate with the Germans, in fear for their own lives. On the other hand, some countries that were not under the German control were also willing to cooperate due to their own personal dislike for the Jews and other minority groups. These communities assisted in the Holocaust by either giving up the Jews to the Germans or killing the Jews themselves. Some political leaders in the Allied governments who were anti-Semitic were also supportive of the Nazi regime and chose to ignore what was happening in Germany, as they sympathized with the Germans. Thus, this made it difficult for the Allied powers to discourage the Europeans from assisting in the persecution of the Jews. However, the Allies took a harder stance towards discouraging the acts of persecution. They enforced several policies to alleviate the acts of persecution. Although they were rather infrequent, the Allies passed equivocal warnings that those who participated in the annihilation of Jews would

be held accountable. They also issued condemnations to deter Europeans from contributing to the annihilation of the Jewish population. On December 17, 1942, the Allies issued a censure towards Nazi crimes against the Jew with the purpose of invoking fear and discrimination towards perpetrators so that they would stop their criminal acts. However, this was the only exception that had been made prior to 1944. The Allies had also issued threats that the Nazi murderers would be punished after the war. These warnings proved to be futile as the Europeans seemed to have been more fearful of the Germans than the Allies themselves. Another form of deterrence that the Allies implemented took place several years later, in January 1944, during which the War Refugee Board (WRB) was established to rescue victims of the atrocities. Along with resistance organizations, the WRB helped rescue Jews from all over Europe. The WRB, which had been formed by the leadership of the Allied governments, was the only organization with the aim of rescuing Jews. The presence of the WRB was expected to help in preventing the annihilation of the Jewish community as it made it harder for the Germans to gain excess to the Jews. But ultimately, due to the lateness of their actions, the organization failed most prominently in the case of Riegner’s rescue proposal and food relief to the ghettos. As Monty Penkower argues, the WRB was largely unsuccessful. The infrequency in issuing warnings and censures as well as the lateness of the WRB had given the Germans the impression that they could get away with committing such a large scale of destruction. The delays and infrequency was a result of the Allied powers’ claim that they were unaware of what was happening. This could be attributed to the fact that it was hard to track what the Allies knew as most of their communications were based on intelligence data that tended to be false information. Despite this limitation, the Allies’ responded the best way they could. The lesson to be learnt from this is that frequency and timing of reactions towards acts of persecution is important when enforcing regulations so as to convey the seriousness of the matter to perpetrators.