Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy, 1939-1945

On 1 March, 1943, Chaim Weizmann, the elder statesman of Zionism, addressed a rally in Madison Square Garden to "Stop Hitler Now!". Three months earlier, a public declaration by the Allied governments had acknowledged that the German authorities were implementing Adolf Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Some 2,000,000 Jews had already been killed since the beginning of World War II by the Third Reich and its collaborators, yet a deafening silence resounded throughout free world corridors of power. Alas, Weizmann's and similar heartfelt pleas went unanswered. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury and Arthur Cardinal Hinsley called on that same occasion for speedy deeds to meet the most appalling horror. Faced with the crime of the Holocaust - Christianity and Western humanism abdicated moral responsibility to try to save an innocent people. Without that decay of conscience, already evident in the years between Hitler's advent to power and the Nazi blitzkrieg againstPoland, European Jewry would not have gone abandoned into the night. Over the past two decades, access to most of the archives has enabled historians to authenticate this grim truth. Political expediency reigned supreme in the war counsels of those governments which alone could have checked the tempo of Hitler's Final Solution of the Jewish problem.

Monty Noam Penkower is the Victor J. Selmanowitz Professor of Modern Jewish History and Chair of the Division of The Social Sciences at Touro College, New York City.