In Europe

Johnson carried out a survey among older Germans in Cologne and Krefeld concerning their awareness of the Holocaust before 1945. Of those questioned, sixty-six per cent admitted to have been more or less informed.
    Awareness of the Holocaust was reasonably widespread in other parts of Europe as well. Fifty years later, a group of students examined the war diaries of seventy non-Jewish Dutch people. They wanted to determine what the people in the occupied territories knew about the persecution of the Jews, and when they had found out about it. More than a third of the diarists turned out to have come rather quickly to the conclusion that the Jews were being murdered on a massive scale. The wife of a physician wrote on 9 November, 1941: ‘Most of the Jews in our circles, who were taken away so quickly, are already dead – within a few weeks’ time, in other words.’
    On 13 December, an office clerk from Rotterdam wrote: ‘In Poland, the mass murder of Jews continues. They say Himmler wants to kill all the Jews before 1943.’ As from early 1943, the name ‘Auschwitz’ also crops up regularly in the Netherlands. One citizen of Rotterdam wrote, on 14 February, 1943: ‘The execution of Jews and Poles continues: 6,000 a day, in one place; first they are undressed; then … (gas?).’
    All these diarists were extremely indignant, and most certainly believed in the rumours about the use of gas chambers. Yet when the camps were opened after the war and it became clear that this unthinkable mass murder really had taken place, the shock was enormous, even among staunch anti-Nazis and resistance fighters. It was as though people knew and did not want to know, all at the same time; as though they knew rationally about the millions of murders, but were unable to accept it in their hearts, even after the war, because it defied imagination. The groupof women with their underwear flapping in the wind in the dunes outside the Latvian town of Liepaja had a face. The 1.1 million killed at Auschwitz were merely a number.
    The Allies concentrated on a ‘total victory’, not in retaliation for the Nazi atrocities, but to minimise the risk of individual peace treaties and to keep the mutual ties as close as possible. Only in that way could they, as one British government memorandum put it, ‘solve the entire complex of human problems caused by German domination’. Anything that would distract them from that goal would also harm the Jewish cause. That was the rationale.
    Telling in this regard is the story surrounding the few rare aerial photos of Auschwitz. They were taken on 31 May and 25 August, 1944, by a British reconnaissance plane that had been sent to scout out the nearby I. G. Farben complex for the production of synthetic rubber. Quite by accident, the crew left the camera on as they flew above the death camps. At the end of the roll shot on 25 August there are clear images of the platform at Birkenau, where a train had just arrived. A line of prisoners can be seen, on their way to Crematorium II. The negative was discovered by chance only thirty years later. In 1944, no one on the RAF staff noticed it.
    In addition, the British and the Americans had agreed not to respond to the ‘blackmail politics’ of Germany and its allies. As early as February 1943, the Rumanian government under Ion Antonescu had offered to allow 70,000 Jews to leave for Palestine. The British rejected the offer. Any horse-trading with human lives would, after all, have run counter to their military strategies. Although they admitted that mass murders were taking place – the British House of Commons had even held a minute's silence for the victims on 17 December, 1942 – the restrictive refugee policy remained firmly in place.
    There were instances of courage and resistance everywhere in Europe, even in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In the grounds of Crematorium III, a series of handwritten notes in Yiddish was dug up in summer 1952. Probably left there by a Jewish member of a
Sonderkommando
, they documented a whole series of incidents. In late 1943, for example, almost200 Polish partisans were taken to the gas chambers, along with a few hundred Dutch Jews. When they were all completely undressed, a young Polish woman held an impassioned speech, closing with the words: ‘We will not die now, the history of our people will make us immortal, our will and our spirit will live on and blossom.’ She also addressed the Jews of