The year 1942 is a particularly dark year for the Jews of Europe. It begins with the Wannsee conference, near Berlin, during which the genocide of the Jewish population is organized on an industrial scale with the “final solution”.
The consequences of this decision are clear: more than half of the Jews of France deported and killed during the Second World War were killed between March and November 1942.
If the objective of the Nazi regime is to conceal its horrible crimes, information leaks on the existence of the concentration camps. British and American leaders or the Red Cross are alerted to what is happening. Why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t they do anything?
To understand it, Sidonie Bonnec receives Olivier Lalieu. He is a historian at the Mémorial de la Shoah and he led the file Shoah, those who knew, those who could, those who were silent to read in the new issue of the magazine History.
The Silence of Winston Churchill
In 1941, it was a great victory for the British: they finally managed to crack the Enigma code, the encryption machine used by the Nazis, reputed to be inviolable. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, then discovers what jews go through.
He does some hints in his statements to the press. On August 21, 1941, he declared about the current Judeocide in the occupied territory of the USSR that “we are in the presence of a nameless crime”. On November 14, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Jewish Chronicle, he sent a message to the London paper stressing the importance of the Jewish victims of Nazism, writing “no one suffers more cruelly than the Jews”.
On the other hand, in his public speeches or his broadcasts, he remains within the limits of the consensus of a wartime government. Nor can he reveal to the Germans the successful decryption of their coded messages. This prevents him from making clear public statements about atrocities committed by the enemy.