Emissary of the Doomed: Bargaining for Lives in the Holocaust by Florence Ronald

Author:Florence, Ronald [Florence, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2009-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Lieutenant Savigny was telling the truth when he told Joel Brand that Eichmann’s proposal was under consideration in London and Washington. On May 26, 1944, a week after Brand and Bandi Grosz flew from Vienna to Istanbul, Sir Harold MacMichael cabled the secretary of state for colonies in London to report that Moshe Shertok and David Ben-Gurion had visited him and told him about Brand and Grosz, their journey to Istanbul, and the proposal Brand had brought with him.14 The cable was considered sensitive enough to be classified SECRET. MacMichael summarized Eichmann’s offer, Brand’s report that three hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were already in concentration camps in Poland and twelve thousand were being deported every day, and Brand’s opinion that the negotiations could be prolonged and modified from the demands for war matériel to cash payments. He added that Brand’s reports of deportations from Hungary had been corroborated by eyewitness reports,15 and that the Jewish Agency was maintaining secrecy on the proposal but wanted the details communicated through official channels to Washington and to Zionist leaders Chaim Weizmann in England and Dr. Nahum Goldman in the United States. Copies of MacMichael’s cable were also sent to the British ambassador in Ankara and Lord Moyne in Cairo, the former because Brand and Grosz were then in Istanbul and the latter because the Foreign Office and the prime minister routinely consulted Lord Moyne as the senior resident official in the Middle East.

Except for the terms of Eichmann’s proposal, nothing in MacMichael’s cable was shocking to either the British or the Americans. By May 1944 they had received reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews from their own intelligence services, diplomatic listening posts, and relief and rescue organizations. The reports came in the midst of a flood of information and misinformation from groups promoting other agendas, which until the Auschwitz Protocols with their firsthand account arrived, could be and were dismissed as hearsay, unreliable, or propaganda.

The Jews were not popular in either Britain or the United States in 1944. Instances of open anti-Semitism could be heard in pubs and bars, and even in polite society there was widespread resentment and disdain for “those people,” especially toward the lobbying and propaganda efforts of Jewish organizations and individuals and the influence of Jews in Hollywood, the media, and the intelligentsia. By 1944, Britain saw an uptick of anti-Semitism because the Jews were perceived as having avoided playing their full role in the war effort; they were accused of being responsible for the black market, and of always being the first to evacuate London.16 Despite Allied awareness that the Germans had an organized program to persecute the Jews, American and British experts and the popular press failed, or refused, to understand the uniqueness of Nazi attitudes toward the Jews, and did not acknowledge the differences in scale and degree between the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the persecution of other minorities, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and homosexuals. The one distinction the British would

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