Rabbi Professor Jacob R. Marcus
(1896-1995) was a prominent American
Jewish historian. He
gained his PhD at the University of
Berlin in 1925, founded the American
Jewish Archives in
the 1940s, & wrote or edited almost
300 books & articles during his long
& distinguished career.
He, initially at least, dismissed
the gas chamber story, and the
6,000,000
figure of murdered Jews, putting the
figure at "many thousands."
Following is the article entitled World
War II and the Jews written
by Jacob Marcus for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. The
photograph below is of Marcus'
article in the 1956 edition, but
according to Mark Weber of the IHR,
this article first appeared in the
1947 edition. The main Nuremberg
Trial ended on October 1, 1946, and
it
had proven the
Nazis had murdered 6,000,000 Jews,
many in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka,
Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Maidanek,
and Oranienburg. The systematic
slaughter of millions of Jews had
repeatedly been reported by the US
press since 1942,
its impossible Marcus wouldn't have
known this.
World War II and the Jews.—During World War I, Jews suffered particularly because they were concentrated in Poland and west Russia where the tide of battle rolled back and forth. In World War II the situation of Jewry in the mass settlements of eastern Europe was even worse, for the national socialists set out deliberately to destroy large numbers of Polish and Russian-Jewish civilians. If but a fraction of the atrocities reported were accurate, then many thousands of defenseless Jewish non-combatants, men, women and children, were butchered after Sept. 1939.
The influence of World War II was felt most strongly by Jews in those European lands which had come under German domination. The pattern laid down by the Germans was carried out with a fatal consistency in all lands conquered or controlled by them. This included all European states with the exception of Sweden, Portugal, Switzerland and Turkey. Finland attempted with considerable success to maintain equality for her Jews; Spain, of her own initiative, deprived her 3,000 Jews of many of their civil, political and religious rights. In the conquered lands, from France to Poland, practically all Jews lost their political and civil rights; their property and businesses were confiscated, and their children, in most lands, were driven out of the elementary and higher schools. They lost the right to freedom of movement and in some lands were even deprived of almost all cultural and recreational opportunities and social relations. Quite a number sought to ameliorate their lot by converting to Christianity, particularly in Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary and Italy. The lot of the Jew was particularly bad in Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, which were under direct German control, and in Slovakia, Rumania and Croatia where anti-Semitic leadership was particularly virulent and violent. In those lands where the Gentile population was largely anti-German, the situation of the Jew was made more tolerable by the sympathy and help of their crushed fellow-citizens. This was particularly true of France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Bohemia, Greece, Serbia and even Italy. In order to effect a solution of the Jewish problem in line with their theories, the Nazis carried out a series of expulsions and deportations of Jews, mostly of original east European stock, from nearly all European states.
Men, frequently separated from their wives, and mothers from their children, were sent by the thousands to Poland and western Russia. There they were put into concentration camps, or huge reservations, or sent into the swamps, or out on the roads, into labour gangs. Large numbers of them perished under the inhuman conditions under which they laboured. While every other large Jewish centre was being embroiled in war, American Jewry was gradually assuming a position of leadership in world Jewry.
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