'You go back to the 1930s, to the start of the persecution ... and it was only in 1939 that they got round to doing something. They said this has got to be stopped.' Tony Blair in 2004 (quoted, Observer 16 January 2005). The lesson that the British Labour Party leader learned from the Holocaust is that the Allies were right to take on Hitler to save the Jews (and by implication, the Coalition of the Willing was right to take on Saddam Hussein to fight persecution in Iraq).
But Blair is in need of a history lesson. The Allies did not go to war to save the Jews. They did not even like the Jews. For Churchill (as for Hitler) the Soviet Union was a 'tyrannic government of these Jew Commisars', a 'worldwide communistic state under Jewish domination', 'the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jew', or just 'these Semitic conspirators' (Churchill, Clive Ponting, Sinclair Stevenson, 1994, p230). Asked about Germany's anti-Jewish laws in 1938, Churchill thought 'it was a hindrance and an irritation, but probably not an obstacle to a working agreement' (Ibid. p 394).
At the 1943 Casablanca conference, 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' (Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, p.207). Harry S. Truman's anti-Semitism was pettier, but no less vicious: 'The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs', he wrote in his diary, when former treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau asked for help for Israel. 'The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish', he added. (Guardian, 12 July 2003). Harold Macmillan turned his ire on Morgenthau's assistant, Harry Dexter White 'a frightful little Jew - the worst type' with 'an insulting attitude to the British' he thought, though White was not Jewish (War Diaries, p 257).
Pointedly, the British Ministry of Information excluded atrocities against Jews from war propaganda: 'A certain amount of horror is needed but it must . deal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. . Not with Jews.' (Planning Committee Memorandum, 25 July 1941) 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) In the US, too, reports emerging of the Holocaust were suppressed by the State Department and the American Jewish Congress (Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Ch. 24.), being covered only by the far left press:
The State Department has meantime - so we are informed - suppressed information that it received from its consular agents in Switzerland. This information has to do with the treatment of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Evidence of the greatest atrocities has occurred there in connection with the renewed campaign to exterminate all Jews. Rumour even has it that the Ghetto no longer exists, that the Jews there have been completely wiped out. The reason this report has been suppressed by the State Department is that it does not wish any mass protests here that will force its hand on policy. (A. Roland, 'The Plight of the Jews and the Democracies', Militant, 19 September 1942, p.3.)
British anti-Semitism was far from being an academic issue. As holders of the Palestine Mandate, they attacked Jews fleeing persecution in Europe. In December 1941, 767 Jews boarded the Struma at Constanta in Rumania, hoping to make their way through Turkey to Palestine. The British pressured the Turkish government to refuse the Struma docking, sending the overcrowded and ancient boat back out to sea, where it sunk on 24 February 1942, with the loss of 760 lives. British policy continued after the liberation of the concentration camps, and in 1947 the Exodus, carrying 4500 Jewish refugees from France was attacked at sea by the British Navy, who fired at and then rammed the ship. The Jews were transferred to prison ships and taken to concentration camps in Cyprus.