The Other Schindlers (33 page)

James McDonald’s resignation sparked an immediate response by several
international
organisations, in the form of a petition to the XVIIth Plenary Assembly of the League of Nations supporting McDonald’s request that the League use its moral authority to demand a modification of the German government’s policy towards non-Aryans.
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But as we know from history, this had little effect.

In 1943 he wrote a paper, which was published by the Jewish Agency, in which he described the dire condition of Europe’s Jews. He wrote:

McDonald eventually became America’s first Ambassador to Israel in 1948. In the preface to his memoirs, he wrote that his acceptance of the earlier post and his interest in Jewish affairs arose from his experience as Chairman of the Foreign Policy Association in the early 1930s:

There is some irony in McDonald’s reference to the Nazis’ attack on the Jews being a prelude to an attack on Christianity, all religion and ultimately humanity itself. Firstly, it has resonance with Pastor Niemoller’s famous poem in which ‘they’ come first for the Jews, then the Communists, the Trade Unionists, and when ‘they’ came for him there was no one left to speak for him. Secondly, amongst the mere ten international organisations who were signatories of the petition supporting McDonald’s letter of resignation was the International Federation of Trade Unions, whose president at the time was Sir Walter Citrine.
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McDonald made his choices and presented his case, but no one took much notice. However, William Temple (1881–1944), Archbishop of Canterbury (1942– 44), made an impassioned speech pleading for help for the persecuted Jews; much opposed to his predecessor Cosmo Lang’s views. He brought a resolution to the House of Lords on 23 March 1943 saying:

He spoke eloquently for some considerable time and was well informed on
conditions
for Jews, quoting several different sources. He begged the House to avoid procrastination as an exploratory conference in Ottawa had already been months in the planning. He stressed:

Even prior to his appointment he had joined with Chief Rabbi Hertz (1872– 1946) to help establish the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ).
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Unfortunately,
his passion and eloquence in the House of Lords seemed only to lead to the Bermuda Conference of 19–29 April 1943. This consisted of discussions between US and UK officials, with no Jewish representation, ‘there amid the Eater lilies’ the officials decided there was little they could do to help the Jews:

We may here also recall the controversial role of Pope Pius XI (Pope 1922–39). His failure to speak out was apparent to Edith Stein, who although born into an orthodox Jewish family in 1891, converted to Catholicism in 1922 and entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne in 1934. It was well known that she had written to Pope Pius XI in 1933; however the letter, dated 12 April 1933, was only recently discovered in papers in the Vatican archives. They were part of the mass of secret pre-war files opened by the Vatican on 15 February 2003. A Jewish-Catholic team of academics had asked to see the letter some three years before, but permission was denied at that time.
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Edith had held a post at the German Institute of Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, but the anti-Jewish legislation led to her being dismissed.
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At Easter 1933, her anxieties about the Jews’ plight led Edith to wish to speak to Pope Pius XI personally at a private audience. When this did not prove possible, she wrote to him describing the impact of the Nazi boycott on Jewish businesses. She told him that it had destroyed many people’s livelihoods and led to many suicides:

In her diary, Edith noted that she received a reply from the Vatican sending the Pope’s blessings to her and praying that God would protect the Church enabling it to respond.
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In a memoir dated 18 December 1938 she wrote:

Edith was arrested by the Gestapo in Holland, as a result of Hitler’s order for the arrest of all non-Aryan Roman Catholics dated 26 July 1942. She was sent to Auschwitz where she went to the gas chamber on 9 August 1942, as a ‘reprisal against a Dutch Catholic Church official’s condemnation of Nazi-anti-Semitism’.
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She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1986 and on 11 October 1998 she was canonised as a martyr-saint. This caused controversy amongst Jews because the Nazis killed her precisely because she was not Aryan.
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When it comes to choices by bodies in the UK, there were different
reactions
in England in the pre-war period amongst the most educated in the land. However, bodies do not have their own minds – they are led by individuals and those individuals decide on policy.

As the Nazis’ persecution increased, the British government had to consider how to deal with all the visitors arriving at its ports who admitted to being refugees. The arrival of many refugees led the Cabinet to review its position. Medawar and Pyke examined Cabinet papers and noted that on 12 April 1933 the Cabinet had reviewed the question of the Jewish exiles. It decided to:

This resonates with the work of Varian Fry, who was sent out with a list of 200 names of prominent artists and intellectuals but ended up saving thousands of people – mostly quite unknown and insignificant. Instead of winning praise he was castigated on his return to the US for breaching his instructions and there was a major row with the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). It seems that both the ERC in America and Britain’s Cabinet were only interested in the prominent and the famous. When Varian was expelled from Marseilles, the chief of police told him it was because ‘you have protected Jews and anti-Nazis’.
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When he returned to America, he was expelled from the ERC for helping anti-fascists who were mostly Jewish. This was covered in the original version of his book
Surrender
on Demand
in 1941, although a modified version was published in 1945. As late as December 1942 his most famous article, ‘The Massacre of the Jews’, pleaded that immigration should be increased and the procedure for issuing visas improved.
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Whilst the British Medical Association (BMA) was not very sympathetic to its fellow refugee physicians in the pre-war years, Lord Dawson of Penn, President of the Royal College of Physicians, told Home Secretary Sir John Gilmour in 1933 that ‘the number that could be usefully absorbed or teach us anything could be counted on the fingers of one hand’. He was convinced that those doctors seeking admission were merely economic migrants.
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It is generally known that the medical profession became very agitated by the attempts to permit Austrian doctors to come to England following the Anschluss in 1938, when Germany took over Austria. Viscount Templewood, who was descended from Quakers on his father’s side, wrote of his time as Home Secretary (1937–39) and his sympathy for the desperate Jews. However, his attempts to help caused suspicion – was he letting in German spies or ‘endangering professional and Trade Union standards by admitting cheap labour’? In his memoirs he wrote:

Nevertheless, he had to be more circumspect when he answered questions in the House of Commons. On 7 July 1938 he was asked about the numbers of refugee doctors, dentists and oculists permitted to practise after being registered with British medical and dental registers since 1933. The answer was 185 and 93
respectively
.
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A week later, the question was raised again and the Home Secretary was discretion itself; reading his answers in the debate one would never have known his true feelings. He referred to co-operation with the medical profession, the refugee committees and the Home Office to reconcile the needs of the refugees and the fears of the doctors ‘of flooding the profession here with doctors who are not required in the country’. Perhaps he should have been more open with his views.

The lack of understanding of the refugees’ true plight is exemplified by the final question to the Home Secretary that day. Mr William Thorn, MP for West Ham Plaistow, asked: ‘Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that if an
application
were made to the German Government, they would allow these doctors to stop in their own country?’
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It appears that dentists were more fortunate than doctors, since those holding German diplomas were allowed to practise without undergoing extra training.
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A positive reaction to the plight of the persecuted European academics came from the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), which was created mainly at the instigation of Sir William Beveridge. He was then Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) and was encouraged by a Hungarian nuclear physicist, Dr Leo Szilard, who wanted to set up a ‘University in Exile’. Beveridge himself was a witness to the early dismissals of Jewish academics when he visited Vienna in March 1933 with his colleague from the LSE, Professor Lionel Robbins: