The vexing question of what the allies knew

Author: By Michael Burleigh

Date: SUNDAY, December 27, 1998

Page: L3

Section: Books

Sanctimony has gone out of fashion here and in Europe. A Blairite weariness toward cultures of historic blame has become rapidly apparent in Gerhard Schroeder's Germany. Unlike Helmut Kohl, Europe's center-left leaders are not mired in the past, but advocates of a willed amnesia, whereby they will say ``sorry'' to anyone, but once only. Although these leaders owe much to President Clinton, the new forgiving spirit has yet to be reimported across the Atlantic. In ``Hitler's Willing Executioners,'' Daniel Goldhagen two years ago cited ``eliminationist anti-Semitism'' in the historic culture of Germany, then America's chief European ally. His critics often compensated by putting Balts, Hungarians, Romanians, or Ukrainians in the frame of generalized European anti-Semitism. Last year, it was the turn of Austrian and Swiss banks, the Red Cross, and the Swedes. Now, apparently, it is time to dig over the Americans and British, yet again. Since many modern Europeans set their moral compasses by Chile or South Africa, as their beneficial influence on one another and on peace in Northern Ireland shows, free-floating indignation about past crimes of commission or omission is marginal to Europe's new moral globalists. In short, we've moved on now from the Second World War, whose glories and guilts are perceived as obstacles to modernization via the ``Third Way.''

Richard Breitman is a first-rate archival scholar, and author of a fine study of Himmler. He also encouraged the National Security Agency to disgorge wartime decrypts of German radio traffic, part of a larger archive held by British intelligence services, which the leading British Holocaust scholar John Fox simultaneously forced into the public domain. Why the British were reluctant to make these materials public remains opaque, since they shared this intelligence with the Soviets, and withheld or ``wrapped'' information derived from the more sophisticated Ultra decoder until 1943, when they shared it with the Americans. But Britain is a need-to-know sort of place, despite many old Etonian alumni of the KGB.

The information about cryptography, one of the many highlights of Breitman's fascinating book, is not difficult to grasp. The Double Transposition system was a ``hand coding'' system involving a different key word each day. Breitman uses this intelligence material to build up the most comprehensive picture yet of Order Police depredations against Jews in Poland and Russia under Nazi rule. His book is not a study of the alleged motives of one police battalion but a synoptic overview of the organization's operations. He established beyond doubt that the Order Police chief, Kurt Daluege, was as big a villain as the better-known Reinhard Heydrich. This alone was worth undertaking. Intelligence reports based on these decrypts went regularly to Churchill, until the pattern of police murderousness required no further demonstration. SS and Gestapo codes were far harder to break, which explains the odd discrepancy in knowldege about their activities. According to Breitman, the British knew more about German police than historians did until the 1990s.

But having intelligence is not the same as acting on it, as Stalin so capably demonstrated, when he disregarded signs of an imminent German attack in 1941. An incensed Churchill offered to erase a German city by way of retaliation, an option his military advisers turned down. As human intelligence sources, notably that great Polish patriot Jan Karski, added further information on the elaboration of mass shootings into extermination camps, the British and their American allies confined themselves to threats of future retribution, just as the West does nowadays, in Bosnia or Iraq. There are morals here for everyone.

Breitman's book begins to go off-key when the Holocaust as fully revealed occurrence is retroactively elevated into the main event of World War II. If you do this, then virtually anyone can be found wanting, as they routinely are. The routinized nature of this accusatory process may be its undoing. The motives of the accusers are inevitably unimpeachable, though there are signs that this indulgent assumption is subject to change.

Britain went to war for traditional strategic reasons, and from a vaguer sense that Nazi totalitarianism was not for us. Nazi persecution of the Jews did not exhaust this feeling of revulsion, not least during wartime, when Britain was a haven for exiles and the British learned about the suffering of many peoples under Nazi suasion, and were expected to do something for everyone. Sometimes this cut across our wider imperial interests. Present-day readers need more on this wider context.

But there is another missing ``context,'' buried here as one fact among many. Britain's war commenced in September 1939, when the Nazis were beginning their partnership in crime with the Soviets, and the British were alone, except for our American friends. British cities were pulverized night after night, month after month, and the country faced imminent foreign invasion for the first time since 1588. Growing up on the coast, where concrete machine-gun emplacements were my first playground, and living in London's Docklands, where an old people's home in the next street has replaced houses and their occupants who were obliterated one night, I have as keen an appreciation as Breitman of what was at stake for this country. Some 43,000 British people were killed by bombing and a further 140,000 injured, with 13,000 tons of high explosives and a million incendiary devices dropped on London alone. The damage to several provincial cities, such as Bristol or Plymouth, was proportionately worse. It ill behooves anyone to lecture us about what we hypothetically should or should not have done for people trapped under Nazi hegemony. We were not fighting to prevent the Holocaust, but for free national determination. Horizons in wartime contract to these stark facts -- as they do in peacetime, when global misery becomes another item on CNN, and the political response is less bedeviled by such inconveniences as fighting for survival. No amount of sententious moralizing about the alleged limits of the ``liberal imagination'' (in 1940 the British were not ``liberal'' at all), or of suggestive comments about alleged ``Arabist'' anti-Semites in the Foreign Office or the US State Department, is going to alter these facts.

Churchill and Roosevelt decided that the priority was to defeat Nazism. Any collusive dealings with the Nazis were ruled out, including alleviating Germany's problems by trading money or materiel for refugees, a principle that escaped some Zionists at the time. That bombing Auschwitz or its railways would have made a difference is hard to reconcile with the German habit of dispersing, say, ball-bearing factories, or the alacrity with which they had plants up and running soon after they had been destroyed. It does not take long to repair a railway, or to revert to shooting, rather than gassing, especially when you have much practice at it. Arguably, Britain could have highlighted Nazi persecution of the Jews in its broadcasts, but this would have risked disbelief while confirming Nazi propaganda that the Allies were fighting a war on behalf of the Jews. Whether the British were keen to get war-crimes trials out of the way is a moot point, but Germany's successful readjustment to the values of the free world is the enduring victory of the Second World War, in which both the Allies and the Germans themselves can take justifiable pride. It was not a perfect war, but then war rarely is. Despite professor Breitman's commendable assiduity, I somehow feel we won't be having it any other way, least of all in the new post-postwar Europe.