The lilies were in bloom for Easter when British and American officials gathered beside a pristine beach on Bermuda’s northern shore. Amid the fury of the Second World War, their task in April 1943 was to find a way of saving as many Jews as possible from Hitler’s gas chambers.
As if to drive home the urgency, the Waffen-SS stormed the Warsaw Ghetto on the same day as the conference opened. While the delegates pored over maps in The Horizons, one of Bermuda’s most idyllic resorts, Jewish fighters were mounting a desperate resistance in the fetid alleys of the Ghetto.
In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph, published on Sunday, this almost forgotten wartime conference is cited as the main reason for the suicide of Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish government-in-exile who made it his mission to tell the world about the Holocaust.
David Rosenberg, who led the campaign for Zygielbojm’s London home to receive a memorial plaque, writes that Britain and America “ruled out the possibility of taking in Jewish refugees from Nazism”. Zygielbojm chose to take his own life as the “one final and dramatic protest he could make”.
The record of the Bermuda conference vindicates this interpretation to the full. A wartime gathering remembered only by specialists amounted to the great missed opportunity to save many of Europe’s Jews. Most shamefully of all, Britain and America turned down a plan to approach Nazi Germany and offer to accept Jewish refugees not because this proposal might have been rejected – but because they feared its acceptance.
Almost three years before the liberation of Auschwitz – the 70th anniversary of which fell last Tuesday – the Telegraph on June 25, 1942 disclosed the murder of 700,000 Jews in Poland. All of the information was supplied by Zygielbojm. Using a network of informers across occupied Europe, who risked everything to smuggle eyewitness reports to London, he compiled the first evidence about the extermination of the Jews.
As the BBC began reporting atrocities in Poland, the British government came under pressure to act. In March 1943, William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, pleaded for the rescue of as many Jews as possible, adding, “We, at this moment, have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.” The Bermuda Conference was the outcome. From the outset, however, the British and American governments were reluctant participants. They believed that the best way of saving the Jews was to win the war and liberate Europe as quickly as possible.
The ambivalence of the two governments was made clear by their selection of representatives: the American delegation was led not by a serving official but by Harold Dodds, the president of Princeton University; his British counterpart, meanwhile, was Richard Law, a junior minister at the Foreign Office and hardly a titan of Churchill’s government.
The central proposal was that the Allies should approach Germany via a neutral intermediary and offer to accept Jewish refugees. Yet Britain and America feared that such an approach might actually be too successful.
On the second day of the conference, Law warned, “If Hitler accepted a proposal to release perhaps millions of unwanted persons, we might find ourselves in a very difficult position.” Put simply, the Allies feared that Hitler would land them with millions of Jewish refugees, forcing the diversion of ships away from the war effort to take the fugitives to safety.
Nothing – not even the rescue of millions from concentration camps – would be allowed to take resources away from winning the war.
Having rejected this plan, the delegates turned to the relatively minor issue of how to help 5,000 Jews who had already escaped Nazi Germany for neutral Spain.
As Law and Dodds continued their work, the Warsaw Ghetto was under furious assault. Incensed by the strength of the resistance, the Nazis chose to raze every building to the ground and burn their inhabitants alive.
On April 21, the day after Law had voiced his fear of the consequences of Hitler releasing millions of Jews, a secret transmitter sent a last message from the Ghetto.
Before the signal was cut off, two words were picked up in London, “Save us.” But in Bermuda, the only item left on the agenda was how to help the Jews who had already saved themselves by reaching Spain.
In the end, the conference’s sole outcome was to move 630 of them to North Africa. The gathering ended without saving a single Jew.
It did, however, contribute to the death of one. Szmul Zygielbojm, dismayed by the failure of the conference, learnt that his wife Manya and their son Tuvia had died inside the Ghetto.
On May 11, 1943, he took his own life at his home near Porchester Square in London.
“The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out,” he wrote. “But indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime.”