Bystanders to the Holocaust (Review of Monty Penkower’s The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust and David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945)

Abstract

We have now a growing shelf of books and a burgeoning file of articles on bystanders to the Nazi Holocaust, focusing particularly on the response of the Anglo-American world to the persecution and massacre of European Jews. Among the best known are the volumes on Britain by Joshua Sherman and Bernard Wasserstein; on Canada by Irving Abella and Harold Troper; and on the United States by Arthur Morse, David Wyman, Saul Friedman, Henry Feingold, Yehuda Bauer, and Leonard Dinnerstein. The news, as we all know, is not good: Research has uncovered a persistent unwillingness to assist the Jews in their hour of need and a remarkable failure to grasp the nature of the Jewish catastrophe. The drift of scholarly opinion is summed up in the tides of the two solid investigations under review, important additions to the foregoing list: The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 by David Wyman and The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust by Monty Penkower.¹