Robert Cherry. Science & Society. Volume 63, Issue 4, Winter 1999/2000.
U.S. cold-way interests have had a significant impact on historical writings concerning the roles of various groups during the World War II destruction of European Jewry. These writings focus, for example, on the Catholic Church’s actions in saving children, rather than on the antisemitic pronouncements of Church leaders and their indifference to the killing of Jews during and immediately after the war. Holocaust historiography understates the aid given to Jews by the Soviet Union. It also minimizes the continuation of antisemitic acts on the part of Polish organizations, including the Home Army. Finally, the mythology surrounding Raoul Wallenberg dovetails nicely with cold-war politics and the desire of sections of the ultraorthodox Jewish community to forget their own disastrous actions.
Among people on the left, interest in the Holocaust has been limited.’ In a recent essay, Norman Geras (1997, 37-38) shows how this reluctance to come to terms with the enormity of the attempted extermination of European Jewry was manifested in the work of Ernest Mandel. Geras concludes that Mandel’s reluctance probably reflected “a socialist and in a way Jewish universalism that would not risk belittling the suffering of others by dwelling too emphatically on the tragedy of the Jews.” In the United States, this reluctance stems at least partly from political conflicts. Since the 1960s, black-Jewish conflicts domestically and Palestinian-Jewish conflicts in the Middle East have made it difficult for many leftists to seek an understanding of Nazi genocidal policies towards European Jews. It is feared that to recognize the horrors visited on Jews by Nazism would at least indirectly weaken the position of black Americans and Palestinians in these conflicts.
In the absence of input from the left, the Holocaust literature has developed certain distortions, In particular, I will argue, anticommunism and the Cold War have had the greatest negative impact on that literature’s scholarly objectivity, and have created the most controversy. A central objective of the Cold War was to rehabilitate anticommunist forces who were complicit with Nazi exterminationist policies. This was most evident at the opening ceremony of the U.S. Holocaust Museum on April 22, 1993. Under pressure from the U.S. government, heads of state from eastern European governments were invited to sit on the platform. Elie Wiesel threatened to boycott these ceremonies, as he considered President Trudjman of Croatia to be an unrepentant supporter of the fascist Utasha forces, an affront to the memory of the victims of racist genocide. Recently, the Holocaust Museum was called anti-Christian because it had not gone far enough in minimizing the harmful role of the Catholic Church. Judith Miller (1998) reported that this attack was led by Elliott Abrams and a small group of rightwing Jews who are allied with Evangelical Christians.
This paper will document the negative role of the Catholic Church, and the minimization of that role in standard accounts. Imbued with Cold War politics, these accounts sought to picture the Church as one more victim of communist totalitarianism, rather than as a victimizer of Jews. The political climate has also made it difficult to present an accurate picture of the aid given to Jews by communists and the Soviet Union. Anticommunism and Cold War politics, for example, have led to minimization of the collaborationist role played by the Polish government’s underground and its political organizations during World War II. This allows the picture of the Polish underground as fighters against the Nazis and defenders of the Jews to go unchallenged. In addition, the designation of Raoul Wallenberg as the preeminent righteous gentile dovetails with right-wing attempts to undermine Jewish support for detente with the Soviet Union.
The Holocaust literature contains a vast array of academic and non-academic writings, and it is not a simple matter to select representative or dominant sources. This paper will therefore rely heavily on the presentations found in the U.S. Holocaust Museum, as that Museum has acquired a certain stature as the “official” synthesizer of the Holocaust literature. My intention, however, is not to offer a critique of the museum as such, since I do not cover all of its exhibits but only those that touch on the issues treated here.
In contrast to the claims of its right-wing detractors, the Museum made a conscious effort to downplay the linking of Christian teachings, pronouncements, and actions with the Holocaust the Museum’s documentary “Roots of Antisemitism,” which was the focus of the attack, emphasizes the role of the Catholic Church and the New Testament in the propagation of antisemitism primarily during the Dark and Middle Ages. Once the presentation reaches the 20th century, there is a shift to political antisemitism and little mention of the Church. As Linenthal documents, this reflected a conscious decision made by the Museum’s advisory committee. Christian committee members believed that the Museum should not anger Christian visitors unnecessarily. In addition, Linenthal (1995, 227) reports that there was concern not to undermine the “popular understanding of the role of religion in American life that it is a force for good, that it humanizes, and empowers people to heal grievous personal and societal wounds.”
The Museum does not mention the 1933 Concordat with the Nazi regime by Pope Pius XII when he was head of the church in Germany, nor the claim by Pope Pius XI that the Nazis were a “bulwark against communism.” Catholic priests were honored guests at Nuremberg rallies and leading Polish Catholic intellectuals enthusiasticly supported Nazism. In his Easter 1936 pastoral letter read to millions of Poles, Cardinal Hlond justified Polish antisemitism in no uncertain terms:
Jews fight against the Catholic Church, they are free-thinkers and constitute the vanguard of atheism, bolshevism, and revolution …. It is also true that the Jews are committing frauds, practicing usury and dealing in white slavery. It is true that in the schools the Jewish youth are having an evil influence, from an ethical and religious point of view, on the Catholic youth. … One does well to … avoid Jewish shops and Jewish stalls in the markets …. One should protect oneself against the influence of Jewish morals. (Ainsztein, 1974, 172.)
The Museum does not mention that church leaders administered the Nazi puppet states of Croatia and Slovakia, nor that the Catholic Church pipeline was used to smuggle Nazis out of Europe to safety in Latin America. Instead, when it discusses the Vatican, the resource room only quotes Pope Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas Eve broadcast in which he expresses sorrow for the “hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation and race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.”
Finally, in the Museum’s exhibit on the 1946 Kielce pogrom, which played a decisive role in the decision of Polish Jews to migrate, there is no mention of the complicit behavior of the Catholic Church. On the day of the pogrom, the local church leader, Bishop Kaczmark, refused to intercede. A week later, in a prepared statement, Cardinal Hlond blamed the Jews and failed to condemn the murders, while Bishop Wyzszynski, who would later become Poland’s Primate, stated, “The Germans murdered thejewish nation because the Jews were the propagators of communism” (Lipson, 1996, 6).
Defenders of the Catholic Church always highlight the role of Catholic institutions in hiding young Jewish children. In contrast, Ringelblum’s diary (1974, 151) documents how it had little interest in saving older children, who would be unlikely to convert. Moreover, Ringelblum stated,
the Polish clergy has reacted almost with indifference to the tragedy of the slaughter of the whole Jewish people. Before the war, the Polish clergy- was distinguished for its remarkably anti-Semitic attitude. When year after year the blood of Jewish students was shed … when anti-Semitic savages rioted … the clergy either kept silent or approved these deeds of the anti-Semites. … To some extent [their silence] constituted approval of the steadily rising tide of pogroms and excesses. For example, the Catholic clergy tolerated the capers of a priest like Trzeciak, who collaborated with Nazi antiJewish organizations. (Ringelblum, 1974, 206-208.)
While the compromise made by the Museum and other writers, including Dawidowicz (1975), reflected pragmatic considerations, the decision to suppress knowledge of the complicity of the Catholic Church also dovetails nicely with Cold War politics. Starting with the Spanish Civil War, U.S. foreign policy advocates highlighted the persecution of Catholic priests to encourage anticommunist attitudes. This continued after World War II, when the communist governments in Yugoslavia and Czechoslavakia imprisoned Catholic leaders who had led and/or actively supported Nazi-puppet governments. It continued through the 1980s, when evidence of the antisemitic past of many of the leaders of the Polish Solidarity movement was suppressed.”
Communist Behavior Towards Jews
During World War II, the most reliable allies of the Jews were Polish communists and the Soviet Union. Polish communists consistently condemned antisemitism, and even had a Jewish leader during the war, Pawel Finder. In virtually every ghetto resistance organization or Jewish partisan unit, communists had leadership positions and these formations received aid from the Soviet Union whenever possible. None of these facts are presented in the Museum and indeed it has only a few problematic references to the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, anticommunists have belittled and distorted the role of Jewish resistance and the motives of the Soviet Union.
Anticommunists have often argued that Jewish resistance was rare and symbolic, only materializing at the last moment when all other options were exhausted, and had virtually no impact on the Nazi war machine.” They claim that communists had little concern for the welfare of Jews. For example, the influential historian Lucy Dawidowicz (1975, 322) claimed that “the first thing the partisan—Jew or Gentile—learned, if he lived long enough, was that in defense of the Soviet Union no human cost was too high.” Dawidowicz also suggested (432) that antisemitism was rampant among Soviet partisans.
That antisemitism was experienced by Jews who sought to join the Soviet partisan movement is undeniable. Family camps were particularly vulnerable to indifference. Eckman and Lazar (1977, 85) note that “Russian partisans accused the Jewish family camps of acts of robbery and plunder… and decided to remove arms from the family camps.” However, as Ainsztein notes (1974, 307), virtually all overt examples occurred before May 1943 when General Linkov was sent to discipline the spontaneously formed partisan units. While the Soviets opposed separate Jewish partisan units, they were equally opposed to any hostile actions against them. Levin (1968, 376) notes that when Home Army units made the clearing of Jewish family camps from the forests a condition for joint actions with Soviet partisans, the Soviets rejected this. Even Eckman and Lazar (1977, 150) state:
A tremendous change for the better… came in 1943 when the organization of partisan groups was carried out by specialty trained teams sent from Moscow. The men from Moscow, aware that the Germans used anti-Semitism as a means of dividing their enemies, would not tolerate it in the partisan ranks.
Given such a contentious assessment of Jewish resistance, it is not surprising that its presence in the Holocaust Museum is dwarfed by the companion exhibits on the actions of the righteous gentiles.
Finally, there is little acknowledgment of the positive effects of the Soviet educational system in limiting antisemitism. The Nazis lamented that they could not organize local pogroms. A report submitted in August 1941 was typical:
No Jewish problem exists for the White Ruthenians. Here, too, Soviet education was able to impose its view that racial differences do not exist. All around the Jews are objects of pity and compassion, and the Germans are regarded as barbarians and hangmen. (Ainsztein, 1974, 251.)
This was most evident in the striking difference in the behavior of eastern Ukrainians, who were part of the Soviet Union, from that of their ethnic counterparts who lived within the pre-1939 Polish borders. Nazi collaborators came only from the ranks of Polish Ukrainians. When ethnic Poles began being massacred by these Nazi collaborators, they fled across the pre-1939 border to be saved by Soviet Ukrainians.
The Actions of the Polish Populace and the Home Army
Almost immediately after the Soviet eastern bloc was consolidated, Cold War propaganda pictured the Polish people and their leadership as symbols of communist oppression and their wartime crimes were ignored. The Museum could have countered this distorted view but chose not to. It avoided any discussion of antisemitism among the Polish populace in the prewar period, even though almost one-half of all Jews who perished lived there. As a result, the exhibit “Terror in Poland” focuses entirely on the actions of the Germans in Danzig. Similarly, the exhibit “Role of Local Populations” does not list any Polish organizations that collaborated with the Nazis in the killing of Jews. In contrast, it features prominently those Poles who aided Jews. There is an exhibit on Zegota, an organization which gave aid to Jews who were hidden outside the Jewish ghettos. Also, of course, the Museum highlights on its Wall of Honor many individual Poles who saved Jews.
By understating the anti-Jewish sentiment and actions of the Poles, the Museum makes it possible for their role to be distorted by others. Typical is the work of Kasimierz Iranek-Osmecki (1971: x), a high-ranking officer in the Home Army, who credited “at least a million Poles for participating in the humanitarian efforts” to help Jews during World War IL Dismissing criticisms of Polish behavior, he argues that Polish antisemitism was solely a middle-class phenomenon caused by competition for urban professional employment, and contends that the Polish government never wavered in its condemnation of antisemitism. More recently, Richard Lucas (1990) has claimed that, given the persecution ethnic Poles experienced under the Nazis, they are the forgotten holocaust.
This distortion of history was also aided by those who were unwilling to criticize the mistaken Bundist policy of following the dictates of the London government-in-exile. The illusions they held about their alliance with the Polish Socialists led them to refuse to enter into an alliance with the left-Zionists and communists until the deportation of 90 percent of Warsaw’s Jewish population had been completed. The Bundists also supported the Polish socialist leadership in Auschwitz, a leadership that thwarted attempts to organize rebellion there. Finally, they supported the decision of the Polish government-in-exile to refuse an alliance with the Soviets to fight the Nazis. Instead, the Polish underground Home Army allied itself with fascist antisemitic organizations, together killing the remnants of Polish jewry who had escaped the death camps and ghettos.
The Polish-Jewish historian Philip Friedman was one of the first to write about the Holocaust. To reinforce this notion that Polish antisemitism diminished during the war, Friedman claimed that even the most rabid antisemites had a change of heart. He points to the attitude of the virulently antisemitic Camp of the National Radicals (ONR), which in Cracow allowed “itself to be taxed to help refugees of Jewish origin.” As others (Bartoszewski, 1970; Garlinksi, 1975) have done, Friedman (1957,114) cites the example of one of its founders Jan Mosdorf, who had been deported to Auschwitz:
Mosdorf altered his views in regard to Jews. Some of the food parcels he received… Mosdorf distributed among jewish prisoners. As an employee in the camp office, he sometimes warned Jews of imminent selections for the gas chambers.
Friedman chose, however, not to mention that the ONR was the Polish organization most responsible during the war for promoting antisemitism among the Polish populace, and that the moderation of their behavior in Cracow was unique. The vast majority interned in Auschwitz continued to maintain their antisemitic credo: “Beat the Jews everywhere and anywhere.” When Mosdorf’s changed behavior was noticed, the ONR denounced him to the camp Gestapo, which killed him (Ainsztein, 1974, 780; Ringelblum, 1974, 195, 198).
Part of the reason Friedman was so favorable to the Poles is that when he wrote, the only available copy of Ringelblum’s diary had been edited substantially by the Polish government, with most references to antisemitic actions by Poles purged. In an uncensored edition published in the 1970s. Mordekhai Tennenbaum, whose assessment was purged from the earlier Polish edition, states:
If it had not been for the Poles, for their aid-passive and active-in the “solution” of theJewish problem in Poland, the Germans would never have dared to do what they did. It was they, the Poles, who called out “Yid” at every Jew who escaped from the train transporting him to his death, it was they who caught the unfortunate wretches, who rejoiced at every Jewish misfortune—they were vile and contemptible. (Ringelblum, 1974, xxvii.)
During the war, the Home Army was the main institution in Poland of the London-based government-in-exile. Some criticisms of the Home Army are found in the Museum. The Warsaw Uprising exhibit states, “The Polish underground was unprepared to aid ghetto combatants.” The exhibit on Jewish partisans states, “The Home Army was often hostile.” In contrast, the resource room, under “Home Army,” gives no hint of antisemitism. Instead, it indicates that the “Home Army gave some aid to the ghetto… [and] engaged in intensive economic and armed sabotage” and lists the 1944 Home Army@ led Warsaw Rising as a act of anti-Nazi resistance.
This generally positive view of the Poles dominates the work of Polish writers and also the work of anticommunists like Solomon Schwarz (1951, 320) who states: “In spite of antisemitic feelings, the Polish resistance movement… made protection of Jews part of the war which it relentlessly waged against the occupying power.” Finally, a central role on the Wall of Honor is given to Jan Karski, a member of the Home Army, who is considered most responsible for informing the Western Allies of the gassing of Jews in the death camps. Let us now look at each of three areas: aid to Jewish resisters; the information sent to the Western Allies; and the 1944 Warsaw Rising.
Home Army supporters generally agree that the material aid given to Jewish resisters was modest. They often emphasize that at issue was the willingness of Jews to fight and whether or not they were loyal Poles. For example, Iranek-Osmecki contends that Jews “did not Join the underground struggle in the German- and the Soviet-occupied halves of the country, nor did they Join the struggle openly fought in the West…. They were clearly unwilling to shed more blood in order to help [Poland] regain its independence.” Indeed, Iranek-Osmecki (1971, 66-67) goes on to quote from Polish reports that during 1939-41 in the Soviet-occupied portion of Poland, “90 percent of the Jewish proletariat had joined and played an active part in the organs of authority established by the Communists. Above all, the Jews flocked to the ranks of the Red People’s Militia and became the mainstay of the occupying power’s apparatus of terror,”
Despite the fear on the part of loyal Poles that by their actions Jews had demonstrated that they were a potential fifth column, Iranek-Osmecki suggests that more military aid would have been forthcoming if Jews had been willing to engage in active resistance. Unfortunately, he claims, “passive acceptance was the rule” (1971, 69). Consistent with this position, Raul Hilberg writes that during the Great Liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto the Home Army decided to aid armed resistance, but that this offer was rejected by the Jews. Hilberg (1961, 320) takes as his source Bor-Komorowski, who claimed that after the offer was rejected the Home Army “decided to intensify the sabotaging of German lines of communication in such a way as to hamper and delay the deportations.”
Hilberg should not have been so quick to accept Bor-Komorowski’s version of events. As Ringelblum (1974, 131) reports, “the Home Army … regarded partisan warfare in 1942 and 1943 as premature and harmful.” When the Bund went to their so-called allies in the Polish underground, it was unable to obtain any weapons and there was not a single known act of sabotage of the Warsaw-Treblinka line during the Great Liquidation. More telling, one of the Home Army’s agencies, Antyk, issued this statement: “The extermination of the Jews … represents from our point of view an undoubtedly favorable development, for it will weaken the explosive power of Communism” (Ainsztein, 1974, 589-90). To combat the survival of even a remnant, Antyk published a list of names and addresses of Poles belonging to the Home Army whose crime was to take part in the work of the Council of Helping Jews, an action which was equivalent to denouncing them to the Gestapo.
The Home Army’s attitude toward Jewish partisans was one of virulent antisemitism. It was virtually impossible for Polish Jews to join the Home Army. As the number of Jews escaping the ghettos and labor camps grew, Jews began to form their own partisan units. The Home Army considered these units to be subversive and characterized them as bandits. General Bor-Komorowski issued a directive in August 1943 which ordered Home Army units to take armed action against them and to liquidate their leaders. Dan Kurzman (1976) notes that this directive was enthusiastically taken up by field units, which attacked Jewish resistance units whenever possible, especially by the overtly antisemitic National Armed Forces (NSZ). Not only did the Home Army command refuse to condemn these actions, it began to combine forces with the NSZ in recognition of “their moral values and military achievements” (Ainsztein, 1974, 407).
During 1942, the Western allies were unwilling to believe individual reports of the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews. Jan Karski, the liaison between the Polish underground and the London-based government, changed this situation to some degree. Karski had smuggled his way into the death camp at Belzec so that he had firsthand accounts of the Nazi program to eliminate Jews. When he went to London in December 1942, he communicated this information to the Polish government-in-exile and to British and American authorities.
While Karski’s motives cannot be questioned, the reason why the Polish government circulated his report can be. It strengthened the Polish government’s claim that it was democratic and encouraged the Jewish communities to funnel aid to Polish Jewry through them. Ringelblum’s diary (1974, 213-14) noted that less than 10% of the funds received from abroad to help Jews was allocated to those efforts.
As Halivi, 1979 documents, the willingness to substitute dissemination of information for real aid also seems to reflect the attitude of the Polish4ed resistance movement in Auschwitz. Its leader, Jozef Cyrankiewicz, did not tell Jewish inmates that as long as interned ethnic Poles were safe, there would never be an armed uprising. When the British asked for permission to bomb the synthetic rubber and petrol factories at Auschwitz in 1943, the Home Army refused to allow it, claiming too many inmates would be injured. Only after Cyrankiewicz finally admitted his unwillingness to support an armed uprising did Jewish gas chamber workers stage their hopeless revolt in October 1944.
In 1944, the Home Army “two-enemy” directive ordered its troops to refrain from fighting the Nazis so that they could inflict as much damage as possible on the invading Red Army. According to Ciechanowski, 1974, the Home Army command also believed that they had to lead the liberation of Warsaw to remain a credible political force. Since it was too weak to be successful on its own, the command hoped to time the revolt when the Red Army would be so near to Warsaw that it would be able to “buttress our success,” by its entry into the city. Without any communication, however, the Home Army was forced to guess when the Red Army was about to enter Warsaw.
When he received an unsubstantiated report that the Red Army was successfully entering the outskirts of Warsaw on July 31, Bor-Komorowski issued the order to begin the Rising at 5 p.m. the next day. Despite further information that evening that the Germans had repelled the Red Army’s advance well outside Warsaw, Bor-Komorowski refused to rescind his order.
The Rising went badly as the German counteroffensive successfully pushed back the Red Army. Since the entire revolt had hinged on Red Army support against a collapsing German army, no provisions were made for prolonged fighting. Moreover, Friedman (1957, 124) reports that when Jewish partisans joined the struggle they were shot by Home Army detachments (which now included NSZ supporters). As a result, the Nazis were able to destroy Warsaw, killing over 200,000 Poles and dispersing another 800,000 refugees. Despite this preponderance of evidence, Cold War politics successfully promoted the view that the Red Army could have entered Warsaw but chose not to in order to allow the Nazis to destroy the heroic Home Army fighters.
The Myth of Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg is generally pictured as the preeminent savior of the over 100,000 Hungarian Jews who survived. In recognition, the Museum’s address is Raoul Wallenberg Drive. Elsewhere (1995a), I have shown that this view of Wallenberg is a myth. Wallenberg is a myth. Wallenberg’s diplomatic efforts had little impact on Hungarian or Nazi policies and his institutional safeguards (passes or safe houses) did little to impede the deportations and random violence Jews experienced. It is only his direct personal intervention on behalf of individual Jews that seems to have been responsible for the saving of at most a thousand Jewish lives.
In 1973, the U.S. Congress refused to approve an antiballistics treaty President Nixon had negotiated. U.S. foreign policy became extremely anti-Soviet, culminating with the “evil empire” rhetoric of the Reagan Administration. Since Wallenberg bad been captured and killed by the Soviets, promoting his heroism could win influential sections of the Jewish population away from detente. As would be expected, Malcolm Toon, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1976 to 1979, saw “anti-Semitism as a very potent factor in Raoul Wallenberg’s arrest” (Rosenfeld, 1982, 112). Consistent with this hypothesis, there were four books on Wallenberg written in the early 1980s when there had been none before the mid-1970s. Moreover, histories written before the mid-1970s (e.g., Braham, 1963) did not characterize Wallenberg as a savior of the remnants of Hungarian jewry.
While Cold War politics might explain why the U.S. government and its anticommunist supporters were willing to inflate Wallenberg’s exploits, there are other reasons why the Jewish community allowed this distortion to occur. I believe that it resulted from a desire to deflect attention away from the scandalous behavior of the ultraorthodox Jewish leadership in Hungary.
John Conway (1986) summarizes the disastrous role of the ultraorthodox leaders in Hungary, beginning with their role in Slovakia. The communal leader there, Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, was aware that deportation meant certain death. However, he and his Working Group made no effort to inform any of the Slovakian Jews who were being deported, engaging in what Braham called a “conspiracy of silence” (Conway, 1986, 23), Weissmandel’s behavior reflected negotiations in which, in exchange for Nazi commitment to allow some Jews to be saved, the communal leaders agreed to pay bribes and remain silent. Under the illusion that more Jews would be saved if the bribes were increased, Weissmandel made desperate broadcasts to groups in Switzerland to send as much money as possible.
Wislicency was brought to Budapest in March 1944 to coordinate deportations. Rabbi Weissmandel wrote a letter in which he “recommended negotiating for some plan to ransom ‘worthy elements’ in exchange for two million dollars, as Wislicency was a ‘trustworthy man” (Conway, 1986, 25). Weissmandel’s close friend, Philip von Freudiger, President of the Budapest Orthodox Jewish Congregation, was able to convince the Hungarian leadership to follow the policies of the Slovakian Working Group: rely on bribery and keep the true information from the 437,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported during May and June 1944. The Nazis kept their part of the bargain, allowing 1700 “prominent” Jews, including Weissmandel, Freudiger, and other council members and their families, to survive the war.
Concluding Remarks
This paper documents the important role of the Cold War and anticommunism in explaining the political choices made in presenting Holocaust history. The Cold War required that the Catholic Church and the Polish populace be considered victims of communist aggression; thus, dredging up the antisemitic actions of these groups would not be helpful. Since communists were evil, any evidence of their positive role in the aid to Jews had to be suppressed. These efforts were indirectly aided by Bundists, who had their own reasons for emphasizing the positive actions of their Polish allies and condemning the actions of communists, who were their political enemies. In addition, I have indicated how the needs of the surviving Hungarian Jewish community, particularly its ultraorthodox elements, helped Cold War interests promote the view that Raoul Wallenberg, who was killed in the USSR after the war, was singlehandly responsible for saving over 100,000jews.
I also pointed to the important dimension of political antisemitism. Too often, Christian antisemitism is associated with the New Testament indictment of Jews for the death of Christ. While this imagery has some importance, it ignores the condemnation of Jews for their cultural, political, and economic values. In particular, it was claimed by both church leaders and Polish leaders that Jews were allied with communists, and were therefore unreliable allies during the Second World War. That Jewish intellectuals and political activists had disproportionate sympathy with communist ideals presents a complexity generally ignored in Holocaust historiography. Many writers no doubt feared that inclusion of this fact would provide a rationale for the violence visited on Jews. After all, if some Jews supported the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939-41, isn’t it justifiable that Jewish communities should be viewed with contempt and hostility by Polish nationals already imbued with antisemitic values? Thus, it is understandable why the Holocaust literature, in general, chooses to present the Christ killing motif as the basis of Christian antisemitism, and ignores the association of Jews with communism, as well as with other unpopular cultural and economic values.