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Auschwitz and the Allies by Martin Gilbert (1981-08-01) Hardcover
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- ASIN : B01K3LP83E
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,787,434 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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About the author

Learn more about Sir Martin at www.martingilbert.com
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Sir Martin Gilbert CBE is the official biographer of Winston Churchill and a leading historian on the Twentieth Century, who, in his 88 books has shown there is such a thing as "true history".
Apart from the seven Churchill Biographies, accompanied by seventeen Churchill documents, a lifetimes work; his other major works includes Churchill a Life,The First World War, The Second World War,The Holocaust,Israel A History, History of the Twentieth Century and his nine pioneering atlases which harness cartography to history.
Born in London in 1936 to Jewish parents, Peter and Miriam Gilbert whose own parents came as refugees from Czarist Russia, he was sent with his parents to Cornwall in 1939 when the Second World War broke out. In the spring of 1940, Martin was evacuated with thousands of children to safety in Canada and returned from Toronto after four years in 1944 as a seven year old boy with his parents and baby sister. They were later evacuated, to Wales, where they were when the war ended. He attended Highgate School for ten years from 1945 to 1955.From 1955 to 1957, Martin did his National Service and in 1957, received a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1960 with first-class honours in modern history.
Two years were spent as a Research Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford where Gilbert was approached by Randolph Churchill to assist his work on a biography of his father, Sir Winston Churchill. That same year, 1962, Gilbert was made a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and he spent the next few years combining his own research projects in Oxford with being part of Randolph's research team in Suffolk, working on the first two volumes of the Churchill biography. When Randolph died in 1968, Gilbert was commissioned to take over the task, completing the remaining six main volumes of the biography.
In 1995, he was awarded a Knighthood "for services to British history and international relations and in 1999 Merton, Oxford, awarded Sir Martin Gilbert a DLitt, " for the totality of his published work."
Researching and exploring, lecturing and teaching, Sir Martin had many travels to major cities throughout the United States and Canada. His travels through Europe included lectures in Lisbon, Cracow, Skopje, Kaunas, Prague, Geneva, and Paris, among others. In each place he visited old friends, made new ones, and was constantly making notes of personal experiences or eye-witness accounts he could weave into his books.
"I returned from New York to Liverpool by ship in April 1944. Since then, having been a mini-part of history, I have never stopped travelling in search of history."
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He poses the questions as to why the Allies never bombed Auschwitz , and analyses Allied lack of reaction , despite ample news of the holocaust - revealing how the allies could have - but did not- act to save millions of Jews.
The prelude to the book deals with Hitler's pledge to completely anihilate the Jews of Europe , on January 20 1942.
By 1941 , the reality of the Nazi massacre of Jews had certainly reached allied governments. On 3 May 1941 the Polish Government-in-Exile sent a formal note to the governments of allied and neutral powers describing how 'tens of thousands' had been interned in concentration camps and it went on to mention four such camps: Oswiecim (Auschwitz) , Oranieburg , , Mauthausen and Dachau as camps whose names will 'mark the most horrible pages of the annals of German bestiality.' The Polish note contained more than 200 accounts of the tortures and murders commited in the camps.
But the persecution of Jews was still not thought of as a specifically important issue. On 25 July 1941 , a Ministry of Information document "had warned British policy makers that to make the Nazi danger 'credible' to the British people it should 'not be too extreme as concentration camp stories 'repel the normal mind'"...while a certain amount of horror was needed "it must deal always with the treatment of indisputably innocent people , Not with violent political opponents and not with Jews".
In 1939 the British issued their infamous White Paper severely restricting the entry of Jews into Palestine , barring their only root of escape from Nazi terror , largely in order to appease Arab opinion .
About 500 000 Jews actually attempted to enter "Palestine" after the Shoah had begun in 1942, but were brutally turned back by the British even after news of the death camps and gas chambers had filtered back to the British. Sir Harold McMichael , British High Commisioner in Palestine telegraphed to the colonial office: " The fate of these people was tragic , but the fact remains that they where national of a country at war with Britain , proceeeding directly from enemy territory. Palestine was under no obligation towards them."
In 1942 Anthony Eden , British Foreign Secretary , refused once again to relax the restriction of Jewish immigration into Palestine claiming that turning back the ships would 'in the end be more merciful.'
British MP Eleanor Rathbone hit the nail on the head when she said: "If it had not been for the restrictions placed on immigration to Palestine in pre-war years , even before the Palestinian White Paper , imposed partly for economic reasons , and partly to please the Arabs , tens of thousands of men , women and children who now lie in bloody graves would have been among their kindred in Palestine..."
Others like Lord Cherwell also urged a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a refuge for Europe's persecuted Jews pointing out that "After the last war Arabia (as big as Western Europe) was conquered by us from the Turks and handed over to the Arabs ; it seems strange that one corner of it , the size of Wales is grudged to the Jews"
This information makes it particularly sickening to see much of the British establishment, including the British media (epitomized by the hate speech of the likes of Robert Fisk, and the BBC), politicians , academics like Tom Paulin and others, leading the international campaign to vilify and harm Israel.
They are showing the same callousness in regard to Jewish men, women and children being murdered today, as they did during the British Mandate.
Aside from the British refusal to let Jews escape to Palestine , the allies rejected taking in Jews into their own countries , claiming that they did not want to be inundated with a 'flood of refugees'.
The book documents the unceasing efforts by Zionist leaders , such as Richard Lichtheim and Chaim Weizmann , to alert the allied governments of the enormity of what was going on and to try to urge them to act to save the Jews , but they constantly fell on deaf ears.
Throughout the war the allied governments where inundated with reports of the atrocities taking place against Jews , throughout Europe but reacted with characteristic calousness such as the remark of a leading British Foreign Office official in September 1944 : "In my opinion a disproportionate amount of time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews..."
Eventually the report of two young Jews who had escaped Auschwitz landed on Churchill's desk and the possibility of bombing the railway lines leading to Auschwitz , and the gas chambers themselves was indeed examined . But why was the plan never carried out?
In the wake of this callous inaction , a section of the world's Jews realized that never again could their safety and survival be left up to the nations of the world alone , and that is the meaning of the State of Israel.
The survival of Israel means the prevention of any such holocaust ever happening again to the Jews.
Will the world stand by as Israel's existence is threatened by Islamic terrorists and Moslem and far-left bigots across the globe?
The author did not fully investigate this question, and to be fair it would probably be difficult given the decisions made here were by a very few people and not verbalized. The book is interesting and details a good number of facts on the topic. I did seem to pick up on a seemingly anti non Jewish bias in the book. The author examines the Allies ignoring of the mass killings, but does not try to explain what could have actually been done to stop them. Looking at the full picture of the war, there was not an easy fix for this problem if one at all. Even if air power resources would have been diverted to camps, there were many that the overall war effort would have been negatively effected. How much longer would have the overall war gone on and how many more people would have died? Even if the Allies had stopped the camps, there were still killing squads that were activity in the country side that killed almost two million people. Nothing short of a full victory would have stopped this activity.
Overall I found the book interesting but limited. If you are just coming to this discussion, this book gives the reader a nice overview of the "Allies Knew" field of study, but what it does not do is present the story with all the facts about the Allies position in the war. It also seems a bit self severing that the author seems to only care about this one section of the European population that was dieing when countless millions more died at the hands of Hitler and Stalin. This was a horrific period in our collective history and I hope that the end effect of this and other books like it, help to keep in focus our responsibility on stopping these atrocities in the future regardless of if they are Europeans, Africans or Asians that are being killed.
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We are confronted with the disturbing revelation that, although supplied with considerable information about the decimation of Jewish communities in the Nazi Concentration Camps & gas ovens of Europe, the Allies allegedly turned a blind and incredulous eye to the suffering and slaughter.
In relation to the British involvement (or lack of it), the book quotes from a letter by Winston Churchill to Anthony Eden dated July 1944 pertaining to the Nazi slaughter of Jews in Europe;-"...there is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible single crime ever committed in the whole history of the world..."
One would think that this expression of apparent concern would have led to the most aggressive intervention possible to rescue the vast numbers facing genocide. Not so ! The book shows that Churchill did indeed order a so-called feasibility study for possible air-strikes on Auschwitz, but subsequently did nothing. The issue was passed to the Americans who also did...nothing.
Before some say that it was too late in 1944 anyway, the book clearly illustrates the Allied possession of such knowledge of an ongoing genocide in 1942.
Hitler himself being shown to have publically announced during 1942, before an enormous crowd & film crews, that the war in Europe would result in the complete annihilation of the Jews. Some 11,000,000 in Europe. The Allied Government's all heard this, but looked away.
The book details a number of British newspaper headlines and extensive reports, some of which follow;-
"Nazis murder 700,000 Jews in Poland". - Daily Telegraph, 25 June 1942, which also included a follow up report under the heading "Travelling Gas Chambers".
Additionally, the following reports were published publically on 30 June 1942;
"Massacre of Jews - Over 1,000,000 have died since the war began". - The Times.
"Greatest pogrom - one million Jews die". - Daily Mail.
Other such references are also included, all of which show an alarming knowledge of the Nazis agenda and operations for the last 3-4 years of the war.
The contents of this study clearly show that the Allies had both the equipment and technology to bomb/destroy the railway lines and bridges leading to Nazi Concentration Camps and even the gas chambers themselves at Auschwitz. Allied aircrews and far-reaching amounts of aircraft were even risked to drop supplies to assist the Polish resistance during the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans.
Missions that even entailed overflying Auschwitz itself whilst en-route to Warsaw, yet not a single bomb or supply was dropped to assist the Jews. Having served in the British armed forces, I feel an incredible level of shame whilst writing this.
The book proceeds to examine whether it was not perhaps `politically expedient' for the Allies to intervene on behalf of the Jews. The British situation in Palestine is studied, in particular the restrictions placed upon Jewish immigration into Palestine and British interests in the Middle East in parallel with the latter's relationship with the Arab world.
Reference is made amongst others to the incident surrounding what the British called the `illegal' refugee ship `Struma', carrying some 750 men, women and children, forbidden entry into Palestine and sent back to the Black Sea. Despite there being little food or sanitary provisions for these poor people and their vessel being declared as unseaworthy, no help was forthcoming. Indeed, the book shows that neither humanitarian or military considerations would change British policy towards the Jews. The `Struma' mysteriously blowing-up in the Black Sea with all but one of the 750 refugees being allowed to perish.
This is an essential contribution towards Holocaust studies. Might I respectfully recommend another book upon this same subject entitled "The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945" by David Wyman.
The Nazi extermination of European Jewry was shrouded in secrecy (alleged "resettlement", extermination camps in distant Poland). The programme was already well under way when in 1942, Jewish Agency representatives in Switzerland put two and two together (massive deportations and news of experiments with gas chambers). This was initially largely ignored by the Allies, because extermination on such a scale seemed just too incredible, and because the Jews were said to exaggerate everything. However, eyewitness accounts corroborated the terrible things going on, at about the time the minor camps - Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec - were running down their operations.
The most amazing thing of all, and a tribute to the Germans' secrecy, is that the biggest and worst of the extermination camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, retained its secret until mid-1944. The existence of a camp at Auschwitz was known from the beginning, but the Allies thought it was a labour camp (because of the factories attached to it). They also thought that Birkenau was an entirely separate labour camp elsewhere.
And when the secret was discovered, then what? The Allies had a limited ability to do anything. Reprisals against German civilians (e.g., by bombing) for the murder of Jews were considered unwise, because this could have led to counter-reprisals against Allied POWs. The camps were for much of the war at extreme range for Allied bombers.
Especially tragic is the tale of the Hungarian Jews. Admiral Horthy, ruler of Hungary, had resisted Nazi attempts to deport the Jews for extermination, and the Nazis were able to start only in mid-1944, with the defeat of the Nazis less than a year away. Jewish Agency demands that the railway lines be bombed (they eventually were in range of Allied aircraft operating from Italy) were met with the arguments of the difficulty and uncertainty of such an operation, and that resources should not be diverted from the ultimate salvation of the Jews - the defeat of Nazi Germany. Churchill was keen to disrupt the murder schedule and passed the problem to the Royal Air Force, which passed it to the US Air Force, which did nothing. Eventually, Allied threats to try the Hungarians as war criminals stopped the shipments, but only after a substantial proportion of Hungary's Jews had been slaughtered.
And Auschwitz kept on with its deadly work until the Russians were almost at the gates, at which point the SS sought to destroy the evidence by demolishing the place
Sir Martin tells the sorry tale in a reasoned, dispassionate way, never attributing blame and letting the various elements of a complex story speak for themselves. It is not a straightforward story, in which blame can be attributed - except to the depraved monsters who, in contravention of all logic and humanity, were set on mass murder, even at the cost of taking resources from their own desperate and failing war effort. Confronted with a crime of unimaginable proportions, the Allies fumbled the ball, because they really didn't know what to do, how to do it, or who should do it, whatever "it" was. Edmund Burke said that, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing". The good men did something - they defeated Nazi Germany. Whether this was enough and whether something more could have been done to save more of the Jews of Europe is something we shall never know.



