What Didn’t Happen Then, And Part Of The Reason Why

Ben Kingsley says that Europe “didn’t grieve” just after the war for the murdered Jews. Oh, it’s worse than that. European governments, and especially the British government, showed little sympathy to the Jewish survivors of the camps. It tried to prevent them from getting to Mandatory Palestine. Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s Foreign Secretary, himself threatened “the Jews” if they insisted, as he delicately put it, “in pushing to the front of the line” — as if, for god’s sake, they thought they might merit special attention in the immediate post-war period.

And efforts were made not to publicize what had happened to “the Jews.” Germany was to be rehabilitated, quickly, and all those Nazis in the German judiciary, in the universities, in the medical field, were quickly reinstated. And the German Parliament, as soon as the Occupation was over, passed one law dear to the hearts of so many Germans, forbidding the death penalty. And just a few years after the war, practically everyone was back in business in Germany and some, like Reinhard Gehlen and his colleagues, were now on the American payroll, and others, like Klaus Barbie, were also on the American payroll or helped, throuh such prelates as Alois Hudal, to make it to Argentina, like Eichmann, or Brazil, like Mengele. 

Just the other day “Night Will Fall,” a movie made by Alfred Hitchcock, from materials assumebled by Sidney Bernstein of the British Minsiter of Education, about the death camp of Bergen-Belsen and its liberation by British troops, was finally shown to the public on January 26, on HBO. It had never been shown publicly before, even though some of its footage “provided some of the most damning testimony presented at the Nuremberg war crimes trial.”

And why was it not shown publicly, after the war? Because in Great Britain, whose nationals had made it, it was deemed that such a showing was inimical to British interests. The review in The Wall Street Journal explains why:

“It [the film[ would be housd, from 1952 on, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Then four years ago the IWM undertook the enormous task of restoring andd digitiziing the documeentary, along with the long-missing sixth reel. Now titled “Night Will Fall,” the film leaves no question as to the reason it was withheld. Its commentators note that the British government then, whose policy was to bar any flow of European Jews to Palestine, was not eager to present a film that would create a great deal of sympathy for these survivors, as such a film surely would.”
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