ABSTRACT
Very little was done by the great institutions of the Western world to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Not the Red Cross, not the League of Nations, not the Protestant Churches, not the Papacy, nor the governments of the Allies launched rescue efforts. While the wartime communiqués of the Allies dealt with aspects of war and peace, with shared views on their intent to create a United Nations Organization, with plans for the future of Germany upon defeat, and hundreds of other issues, the fate of the Jews was rarely mentioned and never with the voice of urgency. Until the pictures of the death camps and the mounds of naked corpses removed all doubt of the catastrophe that had taken place, most of the world had doubted, even dismissed, the Nazi genocide. Reports from escaped concentration camp prisoners and the Polish government in exile in London had been met with general skepticism; only the Jewish press carried increasingly more dire news. It would be expedient to simply condemn the Allies and neutrals for their lack of compassionate action and claim that anti-Semitism was at the root of this indifference. Such a wide brushstroke, however, is often misleading and judgment must await a review of the facts—brief though it must be in this context.
