The Holocaust, Without Jews

You wouldn’t think Vladimir Putin, the BBC and the National Education Association have much in common. But in recent weeks, they have demonstrated that they share a peculiar understanding of the Holocaust—one which omits the Jews.

Putin last week announced the establishment of a “Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People” by the Nazis during World War II. The actual victims of that genocide, Europe’s Jews, were not mentioned in Putin’s description of what the Nazis did.

Not that this is anything new for the Soviet dictator. Back in 2005, Putin spoke at the site of the Auschwitz death camp about Soviet soldiers who died while liberating Poland from the Nazis, and about other Russians who were killed in World War II. But no mention of the Jews.

Coincidentally, the BBC last week aired a television program about the Kindertransport, which brought 10,000 children from Nazi territory to Great Britain in 1938-1939.

Somehow the writers and producers forgot to mention that nearly all the children were Jewish, and were fleeing antisemitic persecution. According to the London Jewish Chronicle, actress Helen Mirren, who appeared in the program, did mention the word “Jew” — but it was edited out.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, the National Education Association — the largest union of public educators — has been circulating a similarly revised version of the Holocaust.

The NEA’s annual handbook contains a description of the Holocaust as having claimed the lives of “more than 12 million victims of different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities and other targeted characteristics.” 

The “12 million” figure was calculated by combining the fatality numbers among various people who suffered in the war, but who were not targeted by the Nazis for mass annihilation. And, incredibly, the NEA never mentions the actual victims of the genocide, the Jews.

All of this is painfully reminiscent of the way in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration omitted Jews from their references to the Holocaust — even as the mass murder was still raging.

The Roosevelt administration’s statement announcing a conference in Bermuda in 1943 to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis emphasized: “The refugee problem should not be considered as being confined to persons of any particular race or faith.”

Senior American, British and Soviet officials met in Moscow later that year to discuss the war effort. Afterwards, they issued a statement threatening postwar punishment for Nazi war crimes against “French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages … Cretan peasants … [and] the people of Poland” — but not Jews. 

President Roosevelt did not use the word “Jews” even in his 1944 statement commemorating the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt — a revolt by the Jews against the Nazis.

In early 1944, officials of the U.S. War Refugee Board prepared a draft of a statement that they wanted the president to send to the people of Axis-occupied countries, warning them not to collaborate in atrocities against Jews. But White House aides informed the Board that President Roosevelt “wanted the statement rewritten so as to be aimed less directly at the atrocities against the Jews.” 

The final version deleted a reference to Jews being murdered “solely because they were Jews.” It also removed three of the statement’s six references to Jews. And it added three introductory paragraphs naming various other nationalities who were suffering because of the war.

In September of that year, the War Refugee Board ran into a similar problem with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in.  

The Board drafted a leaflet which it wanted U.S. planes to drop over Europe, warning civilians to refrain from participating in Nazi atrocities against Jews. But Eisenhower insisted on deleting the leaflet’s reference to Jews. The final version urged readers not to “molest, harm or persecute” any of the “great many men” who were being held by the German authorities, “no matter what their religion or nationality may be.” 

Arthur Szyk, the famous artist and Jewish activist, charged that the persecution of Europe’s Jews was being “treated as a pornographical subject — you cannot discuss it in polite society.”

There was a reason behind the Roosevelt administration’s policy of downplaying or denying the Jewish identity of Hitler’s victims. FDR and his advisers were concerned that if they publicly recognized that the Jews were being singled out, then “the various [Allied] Governments would expose themselves to increased pressure from all sides to do something more specific in order to aid these people,” as one State Department official explained in an internal discussion.

Obviously the motives of today’s Holocaust-revisers are different from those of the Roosevelt White House. But whether today’s distorters are motivated by callousness, political convenience, or simply ignorance, the result is the same — the Jews are still regarded as unmentionable.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news