30 No. 77 JUSTICE The true reason the Holocaust was not addressed independently was never stated openly, but it emerges from the historical context. The Allies did not wish to place the Holocaust at the center, and they had clear reasons. There was no dispute that the Germans—first and foremost the Nazi Party leadership with Hitler at its head—assisted by all the organizations and mechanisms established in Nazi Germany, initiated and carried out the Holocaust, and bear the primary responsibility. But each of the four Allied powers had inconvenient actions it preferred not to expose publicly. French police not only handed over Jews but actively sought them out, and established concentration camps in the southern zone that collaborated with Germany. British and American air forces did not bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz despite repeated appeals. Officials of the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office thwarted rescue efforts and also blocked immigration to the Land of Israel via Turkey; the pursuit of refugee ships and deportations to Cyprus were well documented. The United States, fearing accusations of fighting “a war for the Jews,” established a rescue committee only in late 1944. In Soviet territories, local populations assisted in the murder of Jews, often on their own initiative, and in later years the regime erased the memory of the Holocaust entirely. One could elaborate extensively on the conduct of each Allied power during those years, including the question of who benefited from the Jewish property that remained even after German plunder, particularly extensive real estate. It must also be recalled that when reports of mass murder and extermination camps reached the West from early 1942 onward, they were not immediately believed. Suspicion lingered that Jews were exaggerating descriptions of impossible atrocities, geographic scope and numbers of victims. Even Jews in the free world, including in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in pre-state Israel, and Jews in Europe who were close to the events, struggled to believe them — the Holocaust lay beyond previous human experience. Yet the suspicion that Jews exaggerated was rooted in centuries-old antisemitism in Europe and the United States alike, and it contributed to the reluctance of placing the Holocaust in the spotlight. From all this it becomes clear why the term “genocide” was excluded from the indictment and verdict: genocide meant the murder of a people, precisely what the Holocaust was. As time passed—the trial lasted a full year, dragged on, and at times became tedious, with endless documents read aloud, as Jewish journalists reported7 — the Avengers watched with growing frustration. No one was on trial for crimes against the Jewish People. They therefore decided not to wait for the verdict, but to carry out with their own hands an act of revenge against the Nazi leaders themselves, first and foremost Hermann Göring, the most repulsive and bloated among them all, second only to Hitler in importance. The group's headquarters in Paris devised a meticulous plan and assigned the task to Manek, who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz and escaped from the death march. Other plans included killing all the defendants with a time bomb planted in the courtroom, or storming in armed and shooting them one by one. The principal goal was not necessarily their deaths, but mainly to cause an uproar—Manek and several other members of the group would be arrested, and during their trial, Manek would be able to testify before the entire world about the horrors that occurred in Auschwitz, while the others would describe the fate of the Jewish People, thus filling the void left by a trial dominated by documents rather than Jewish testimony. The main obstacles were obtaining entry permits to the courtroom and information about guard rotations. The Jewish soldiers they had befriended began to suspect their intentions and refused to help. The plans failed, though the Avengers took some comfort in the thought that had they succeeded and been caught, they would have endangered the larger operation they still envisioned — the poisoning of the drinking water of millions of Germans. Another consolation came later, when ten defendants were hanged, Göring committed suicide in his cell on the eve of his execution, and others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Fortunately, the Avengers group did not carry out its horrific plan to poison the drinking water of six million Germans. The commanders of the Haganah, the defense establishment of the Yishuv, and the Zionist leadership headed by David Ben-Gurion, vehemently opposed it, viewing the indiscriminate killing of perpetrators and innocent people alike as a grave moral and political error. Yet, the group’s members—thinking, principled youngsters by the horrors they had endured— offered a correct analysis of the legal and moral situation that emerged after the war 7. For a detailed analysis of the trials see Kim Christian Priemel, THE BETRAYAL: THE NUREMBERG TRIALS AND GERMAN DIVERGENCE (Oxford University Press 2016).
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