The Letter of the Blue Bloods

By Steve Rodan

February 1943 and the Holocaust was known to anybody who wanted to know. Hitler was mopping up the remnants of the Jewish community in Poland as the gas chambers in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek were killing around the clock. The big target on the German agenda was the destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, the largest in occupied Europe.

The Allies did nothing to rescue the Jews.

But opinion in the West was beginning to clamor for action. They included prominent members of British society, disgusted by the refusal by the government of Prime Minister Winston Churchill to stop the Final Solution.

On Feb. 16, 1943, more than 20 members of the British elite signed a petition that called on Churchill to "take the lead" in rescuing the Jews. They pointed to efforts by other countries to rescue their nationals and asserted that the Jews deserved the same protection.

"We suggest that the nation is eager to see the British Government take the lead in attempting to rescue as many as possible of these, the most helpless of Hitler’s victims," the petition said, "as they were also the first; the generous temper in which Italian settlers in Abyssinia have been repatriated to Italy should be applied to the right of the Jews to protection." [1]

Some of the petitioners were enemies of Nazism from the start. Others were pacifists who caught on to the danger of Hitler only a few years before World War II.

Bluest of blood

But nearly all who signed represented the bluest of blood in the British empire. William George Steward Adams was a principal at Oxford College. During World War I, Adams was principal secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. In the 1930s, he saved Jewish academics in Austria and Germany desperate for a refuge from Hitler. Frederic George Kenyon was president of the British Academy during and after World War I.

Paul Dirac was a Nobel Prize winner and regarded as the greatest physicist after Albert Einstein. Regarded by Einstein as wavering between genius and madness, Dirac was part of Britain's nuclear weapons program during World War II.

Phyllis Bottome was a top novelist whose works were made into movies. Bottome saw first hand Germany's persecution of the Jews in the late 1930 and wrote The Mortal Storm, which became the first film to mention Hitler. She was joined in the petition by the award-winning Edward Morgan Forster, author of the classic A Passage to India.

Storm Jameson was a leading journalist who as president of PEN International helped hundreds of her colleagues escape occupied Europe during the war. Jameson, who died at 95, also wrote some 50 novels as well as three autobiographies. Another signatory was Kingsley Martin, editor of the influential New Statesman.

Wyndham Deedes was from a different world. He came from a military and civil service background, which included tenure as the chief secretary to the High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine. There is a street that still bears his name in Jerusalem. A colleague was George Peabody Gooch, an historian and former member of parliament.

The most famous of the group was George Bernard Shaw, the playwright who defined Western theater in the 20th Century. His views were controversial and often contrary. At one point, he expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin.

Specific demands

But the most dedicated of the lot was clearly Josiah Wedgwood, a parliamentarian who challenged British policy in Palestine, particularly its restrictions on Jewish immigration. In 1942, Wedgwood wrote a preface to "STOP THEM NOW, the first report published in English on the Final Solution.

The petition was first published in the Times of London, the newspaper of the elite. The demands of the signers were specific: Britain must press the new United Nations to pressure Berlin to allow the Jews to leave occupied Europe. The UN must also offer protection to the Jews who escaped Hitler's clutches and transfer them to safe havens. The petition cited the need for neutral countries to host the Jews until the end of the war.

But the signers placed responsibility for the Jews on Britain. The petition called on Churchill's government to "make available the fullest possible facilities for the immigration of Jewish refugees into Palestine."

"We suggest that, as a prelude to these large-scale measures, the British Government should offer immediately to admit to Great Britain the largest possible number of Jewish refugees, especially children," the petition said.

"We do not deny either the magnitude or the complexity of the Jewish problem. But we do not feel that the Government and nation can stand helplessly by while a whole people is ruthlessly butchered." "Verbal sympathy is not enough. We must be prepared, whatever the action of other people, to act with resolution and magnanimity." The Jews are missing

The petition, however, lacked one thing -- Jews. None of the signers were Jews. Perhaps the Jews did not belong with the blue bloods. The signers and their letter were unapologetic, unlike the Jews who were obsequious. Wedgwood, a Christian, was regarded as a staunch and even militant Zionist. However, he was alone, not joined by any of the leaders of the Zionist movement, particularly Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann and his colleagues avoided any criticism of British policy during the war, particularly the refusal to rescue the Jews. They kept away from demonstrations that called on Churchill to open the country to Jewish refugees. Selig Brodetsky, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and a member of the Zionist Executive, torpedoed rescue efforts by rabbis. That was convenient to Churchill and his colleagues, able to claim that their policy was acceptable to the Jews, and particularly the Zionist movement. Wedgwood, a friend of Weizmann, sponsored more than 200 Jewish refugees out of his own pocket. He said his work faced opposition from several quarters. They included the Jewish establishment, worried over the repercussions to their careers. "I did it in the teeth of every obstruction from Government, from anti-Semites and from many English Jews who feared for themselves lest anti-Semitism should be increased here," Wedgwood, who died four months after the petition, wrote in his memoirs. [2]

Notes 1. "Britain Urged to Act Now and Save Jews." Daily Worker. Feb. 17, 1943. [British] National Archive. Daily Worker February 1943 - The National Archives

2. "The MP who spoke out to help Jewish refugees." Robert Philpot. Jewish Chronicle. Oct. 23, 2019. The MP who spoke out to help Jewish refugees (thejc.com)

Below: The story of the petition.