ACCORDING to documents recently declassified, Britain's Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) was able to supply the Churchill wartime coalition with information about the Nazi holocaust as early as the summer of 1941. The intelligence officers at Bletchley Park by that time were already intercepting German police messages referring to "cleaning up operations" and "gas cleansing stations" by Hitler's Ordnungspolizei and SS battalions on the eastern front.
One report in July 1941 referred to the shooting of 1,153 Russian Jews in just one day. Another 55 message read: "The figure of executions in my area now exceeds the 30,000 mark".
Tens of thousands of civilians from other racial groups were also being slaughtered, but the Bletchley Park codes, similar to documents declassified six months ago by the US Archives in Washington, leave no doubt as to the level of awareness, on the part of the Allies, of the particular plight of the Jews. Many of these reports were later used as evidence during the Nuremburg war crimes trials: from 1942 onwards, they gave specific information about the concentration camps and the number of internees killed there.
Murdered populations
Moreover, other reports, such as one released on May 10th this year under the heading, "German Plundering of Artistic and Scientific Material from Occupied Countries", referred to a special 55 battalion set up by Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, with the task of looting Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France of valuable possessions belonging to their murdered Jewish populations.
Despite this weight of evidence, the Allies couldn't and didn't do much about it. The first reports of genocide in June 1941 coincided with the nadir of Allied fortunes: France had fallen, the United States was still on the sidelines, the Wehrmacht was ploughing through the Soviet Union. For the GCCS to reveal its information would have alerted Berlin to the Bletchley Park operation, seriously imperilling the war effort.
Undoubtedly there were people in the British government concerned with the Jewish plight at the time. But despite this, and given the anti Semitism among the British establishment, a certain consensus precluded open talk: such discussion could both inflame domestic anti semitism and be dismissed as propaganda, as had the Great War's atrocity stories.
Later, of course, aerial bombing of the German rail lines to the camps could have saved tens of thousands of lives. But most evidence then and now suggests that despite what was coming across through intelligence, the British government chose not to aid the Jews largely through a lack of concern.
That said, history will remember the British as the people who stood up to and vanquished the perpetrators of this evil. Perhaps more importantly, from the standpoint of neutral Ireland, they did let in at least some of the half a million refugees from the Holocaust.
25 Jewish refugees
During the entire lifetime of the Third Reich, only 25 Jewish refugees entered Ireland, many of them converts to Christianity. The country's Jewish population, which stood at 5,381 in 1946, did not increase through immigration during the 1939-45 war; hardly a surprise when one considers that the Irish Co Ordinating Committee for Refugees, set up in November 1938, stipulated that only Christian refugees be given status here.
It was in July of that year that a 32 nation conference was held at Evian, France, which unsuccessfully sought to deal with the issue of refugees flooding out of Central Europe. The three strong Irish delegation's contribution was to argue that this country, bedevilled by poverty and overcrowding, simply didn't have the facilities to take in these people. As many off those fleeing Nazism came from the professional and educated classes, Ireland undoubtedly lost, at a crucial time in its youth, a golden opportunity to enrich itself in the fields of politics, science and the arts.
The anti Semitism then existed in Ireland is irrefutable. On July 9th, 1943, Oliver J. Flanagan made an odious speech in the Dail, lambasting the supposed malign influence of Jewry and Freemasonry in the Irish economy, and claiming: "Where there are bees there is honey and where there are Jews there is money."
But much of this bigotry was that of the ill educated bumpkin, whereby peasant nationalism was infected with a very parochial xenophobia. Ireland did not possess the same set of deeply ingrained socio economic factors which begat centuries of Continental anti Semitism.
The Irish government also knew of the Jewish crisis; that too is irrefutable. On October 9th, 1938 the former Chief Rabbi, Issac Halevi Herzog, wrote to the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, requesting the admission of seven professional refugees, but in vain.
Meeting with de Valera
One week later Rabbi Dr Solomon Sehonfeld of London wrote to de Valera seeking an interview. They met on November 15th in Dublin. The Taoiseach expressed concern, but was unable to consent to the setting up of an Irish Rabbinical Seminary.
There were also the efforts of the former Cork mayor, Gerard Goldberg, who set up a committee to help refugees and made overtures to Dublin, where Robert Briscoe TD met de Valera on behalf of the Dublin Jewish Committee. Dev expressed concern which was probably genuine, but said that with regard to Jewish refugees, his hands were tied: Ireland's policy had effectively been decided at Evian.
All in all, our record during this worst episode in human history is not one to be proud of. And when, on January 20th, 1942, senior Nazis met at Wansee to determine their "final solution", neutral Ireland was on their list of nations containing a population of Jews to be "processed" after the war. A victorious Third Reich would, without hesitation or reflection, have turned 5,381 Irish citizens into ashes.