Could Churchill have stopped 'bestial policy'?
The new evidence suggesting that Britain was aware of Witold Pilecki's plans to liberate Auschwitz will reignite the long-running debate over how much Winston Churchill knew about the death camp and whether he did enough to prevent the genocide taking place there.
There is little doubt that Churchill, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, was a staunch defender of the Jews and one of the few statesmen to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust.
As early as 1941 the code-breakers at Bletchley Park had furnished Churchill with ample evidence of the systematic mass murder of Jews. By 1942 he was condemning what he called “a bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination”. More specifically, he knew that a train containing 4,000 Jewish children had left Lyon for “somewhere in Poland”.
“There is no doubt,” he wrote to Anthony Eden, “that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe.”
Read entire article at Times (UK)
There is little doubt that Churchill, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, was a staunch defender of the Jews and one of the few statesmen to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust.
As early as 1941 the code-breakers at Bletchley Park had furnished Churchill with ample evidence of the systematic mass murder of Jews. By 1942 he was condemning what he called “a bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination”. More specifically, he knew that a train containing 4,000 Jewish children had left Lyon for “somewhere in Poland”.
“There is no doubt,” he wrote to Anthony Eden, “that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe.”