A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

1080 Ch. 26 • World War 11

how long one could live in subfreezing temperatures; or whether prisoners
would allow themselves to be killed if they thought their children might be
spared. Gypsies were also Nazi targets, viewed as “biological outsiders” who
were both “alien” by virtue of not being “Aryan” and “asocial,” because
they were nomadic. A half million gypsies perished. Communists, social­
ists, and repeat criminal offenders were also considered “asocial.” Many of
them perished as well. The Nazis persecuted homosexuals ruthlessly, iden­
tifying them in the death camps with pink stars.
One of the most haunting questions of World War II is at what point the
leaders of the Allies and of neutral states actually learned that the Nazis
were undertaking the extermination of an entire people. Rumors of mass
exterminations had begun to reach Britain and the United States in 1942,
although the details were not known. Even after confirmation provided by
four young Jews who escaped from Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, and
by information arriving via the Polish underground and diffused by the
Polish government in London, many people—including even some leaders
of the Jewish communities in Britain, Palestine, and the United States—
refused to believe “the terrible secret.” (“Who, after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians [by the Turks in 1915]?” Hitler exclaimed
just before the war.) Articles in British, Swiss, and U.S. newspapers began
to relate the mass killings of Jews. Pope Pius XII (pope 1939-1958), who
had served as the Vatican’s representative in Berlin before his election as
pope and who issued no papal encyclicals condemning anti-Semitism,
knew of the death camps by the end of 1943. Yet the pope did no more
than offer reminders of the necessity of “justice and charity” in the world.
The U.S. and British governments had no official reactions to the terrify­
ing news. A head of the British intelligence service claimed that Poles and
Jews were exaggerating “in order to stoke us up.” President Roosevelt cer­
tainly knew by the summer of 1942, but he rejected the idea of retaliatory
bombing of German civilians. He believed that only a sustained military
effort could defeat the Nazis. With Hitler’s invasion of Russia having gone
awry, it looked as though the tide was beginning to turn against Germany.
The Allied governments feared that if too much publicity was given to the
disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Jews—millions seemed simply
too many to believe—it might generate calls to aid them directly. This, they
worried, might undercut the united war effort. The Holocaust continued
until the very end of the war; by then 6.2 million Jews had been murdered.

Collaboration

In Western Europe, the Nazis found leaders willing to follow German direc­

tives obediently and often enthusiastically. In Norway, Vidkun Quisling

(1887-1945), organizer of a fascist party in the 1930s, became the puppet

head of state in Norway, his name entering the dictionary as synonymous

with traitor. In Belgium, principally Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of