***** ...The recent controversy over Winston Churchill's prejudices should remind us that the politics of racial superiority were not exclusive to the German Nazi Party before the war. The Anglo-American elites shared many similar attitudes. Just as Nazi ideology emphasised the natural superiority of the Aryan races, so the dominant view in Whitehall and Washington was that blacks and colonial subjects were inferior breeds.
In relation to the Holocaust, it is particularly worthwhile to note how anti-Semitism was a key component of racial politics in Britain and America, too. Churchill himself was a Jew-baiter. After the First World War, he wrote to Liberal prime minister Lloyd George about the problem of appointing three Jews as cabinet ministers. 'There is a point about the Jews which occurs to me', said Churchill, 'you must not have too many of them'. Similarly anti-Semitic views were shared by British and American statesmen. At the 1943 Casablanca conference, for example, in the middle of the war against the Nazis, American president Franklin Roosevelt told the French of his plans to 'eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews...the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions should be definitely limited'.
>From the outset of the war, the British government was reluctant to draw
attention to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the Jews barely
featured in wartime Allied propaganda. A white paper on German atrocities
published in 1939 omitted atrocities against Jews, because of 'a reluctance
to identify in any way with the Jewish plight or somehow connect the
British war effort with the Jews' (T Kushner, 'British perceptions of the
Final Solution in the Second World War' in D Cesarani (ed), The Final
Solution, 1994, p249).
As late as May 1944, Frank Roberts, a senior official at the Foreign Office, wrote that 'the Allies rather resent the suggestion that Jews in particular have been more heroic or long-suffering than other nationals of occupied countries'.
In December 1943 a proposed United Nations declaration on behalf of the Jews was rejected by the British Foreign Office, which worried that 'among Jews it raised hopes and expectations of action to rescue Jews - expectations which have worried [the] refugees department ever since, particularly since the war situation has very largely prevented their fulfilment'. To the Foreign Office, keeping Jewish refugees out of Britain was more important than saving them from the Nazis.
Auschwitz ignored
The idea of the war as a fight to liberate the Jews was only thought up after 1945, when the opening of the concentration camps provoked widespread revulsion at Nazi racial policies. Britain's opposition to the Final Solution is an invention of postwar propagandists. The historical record shows that Britain acquiesced in the Holocaust. Although the Foreign Office was passed detailed plans of the rail lines and power stations serving Auschwitz and Treblinka, it deliberately withheld that information from the air ministry, preventing military action to disrupt the Final Solution.
If the allies weren't fighting to save the Jews what were they fighting for? To save Europe? A survey of the main arenas of conflict suggests otherwise. For the greater part of the Second World War, fighting in Europe was contained on the Eastern front between Germany and the Soviet Union. The British and Americans allowed Eastern Europe to bear the brunt of the war, while the German occupation of the West went unchallenged. Recent work by German and Russian historians working in the former Soviet Union suggests that the estimated 20m Soviet dead - the highest figure of any of the Allies and a figure long challenged by anti-Soviet historians - in fact underestimated the numbers killed in the German invasion.
Until 1944 North Africa and the Far East were the main theatres of war for Britain and America. There Britain was not concerned to liberate people from the iron heel of fascism, but to defend its colonies against the challenge from Germany and Japan. The war in North Africa between Rommel and Montgomery was not a war of liberation, but a war to decide whether Britons or Germans would rule over the Arabs. In the Far East British forces had been defeated by the Japanese at Singapore and were reluctantly backing America's campaign against the Japanese in an attempt to retrieve the honour of the Anglo-Saxon race, fearful that Japanese success would encourage anti-colonial revolts throughout the empire.
Thieves fall out
If the Allies were so keen to liberate Europe, why was D-Day delayed until 6 June 1944? Sympathy for the Soviet allies was high among ordinary British people and mass rallies demanded the opening of a second front in the West much earlier. Furthermore German defences were far from secure. As early as November 1941, after a repulse at Moscow, Hitler told his confidante General Alfred Jodl: 'Victory can no longer be achieved.' By February 1943 and the German surrender at Stalingrad, the delaying of a second front against Hitler had become a political embarrassment. But delay the Allies did, and for a further 16 months.
Pragmatic self-interest, not hatred of fascism, was what motivated each of the Allies. Creaky Britain sought the collapse of the twentieth century's upstart powers, Germany and Japan, because they challenged it economically and militarily, not because they were run by reactionary regimes. The defence of an overstretched empire was the principal consideration in all British strategy.
But even within the Allied camp rivalries held back the promised invasion of Europe. America had no intention of fighting to return to the prewar position of a world divided between European powers. The Atlantic Charter of December 1941 is supposed to have sealed the great anti-fascist alliance with America's entry into the war. In fact, the charter also committed president Roosevelt to dismantling the French and British empires - the better to open up the world to American trade and political clout. American calculations indicated that the longer the invasion of Europe was held back, the weaker its European rivals would be after the war.
Instead of preparing to liberate Europe, the Americans used the war to settle scores with their European allies. In South-East Asia US forces were under orders not to interfere with the Japanese expulsion of French troops. In the Middle East America took advantage of the conflict to supplant Britain in Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and France in Syria and Lebanon.
Fascist terror
The effect of leaving Europe to German rule was that the fascist terror against the European working class continued unabated. In France much of the establishment collaborated with the German occupation in its suppression of the resistance movement and the deportation of Jews to German concentration camps. The British authorities had no quarrel with fascist repression in Germany and Italy before the war. Far from it: some pillars of the British establishment, up to and including King Edward VIII, were open Nazi sympathisers. Even when war broke out, the British government was reluctant fully to endorse popular resistance to fascism in Europe right up to the invasion. After D-Day, the Allies' major concern seemed to be to disarm the popular resistance movements (many of which were Communist-led) as fast as possible.
After Britain and America landed in North Africa in November 1942, Eisenhower recognised Admiral Francois Darlan, a longtime collaborator with the Nazis, as High Commissioner there. Once Roosevelt insisted on Germany's unconditional surrender in January 1943, any possibility of German resistance to the Fuhrer was extinguished, and fascist rule prolonged. It was the same tale in Italy. First, happily for the Allies, overcoming a handful of German divisions in North Africa took all of five months. Then sloth and intrigue marked the invasions of Sicily in July 1943, Salerno in September 1943 and Anzio in January 1944.
In Sicily, US General George Patton rearmed the mafia against the left and allowed Axis forces to retreat in good order. By the summer of D-Day, the Allies had allowed the Germans to regroup and go about killing 50 000 members of the Italian resistance. By the end of 1944, the British general Harold Alexander called off his campaign for the winter and publicly ordered the Italian anti-fascist partisan forces to demobilise. The armies of German fascism took the hint, and promptly butchered the partisans. The Germans were not removed from Italy until as late as April 1945.
Resistance butchered
Churchill cooperated with American demands that the French Resistance be excluded from D-Day. Dismissing Resistance offers to cripple the French railways, the Allies bombed France from above, despatching 10 000 French to oblivion in the process. General de Gaulle himself was never told the date of the Allied landings. When he was installed in government by the Allies in October 1944, almost the first thing de Gaulle did was to order the Resistance to disarm.
D-Day and the military campaigns which followed it had nothing to do with rescuing people from fascism. In Greece, six months after D-Day, Britain negotiated a takeover plan with the German High Command, then sent in 60 000 troops to butcher the resistance movement. In Dresden, eight months after D-Day, Britain began a fourth year of the 'Area Bombing' policy. In the process, it murdered half a million German civilians, all the while carrying on the public pretence that the purpose of Area Bombing was to take out Nazi industry.
Politically, D-Day was a masquerade. Soon the Allies were to conduct a sham de-Nazification of the continent. Nearly half of the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were let off with their lives; ex-Nazis returned to positions of power in postwar German politics and industry, while Werner von Braun and scores of other top Nazi missile scientists were spirited away to help the West in a new, Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Everything points to the conclusion that D-Day was not a victory for the struggle against fascism, but a stage in the struggle between the great powers for a redivision of the world. In that struggle the Allies were also motivated by the politics of racial supremacy and the defence of Empire. And their support for democracy was conditional upon the right conditions for rebuilding a capitalist Europe. In practice this meant that the Allies sat back and left Hitler to demolish the European working class movement, before stepping in to take the spoils.
Reproduced from Living Marxism issue 68, June 1994 <http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM68/LM68_Delude.html> *****