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December 15, 1942 The Palestine Deception of Great Britain

Riegner Telegram“Winant (e.g. the American ambassador to Great Britain) complied immediately but two more weeks passed before the British responded. Their (e.g. the Foreign Office) reply, finally delivered on December 15, showed that the economic-warfare argument had been a pretext which the British now realized was not going to stop the Treasury Department (e.g. Headed by Robert Morgenthau). Aware that Treasury’s interest in the Jewish situation went beyond the Riegner license and could lead to a serious American rescue drive, the Foreign Office had stepped in. The resulting message, described by Morgenthau as

‘A SATANIC COMBINATION OF BRITISH CHILL AND DIPLOMATIC DOUBLE-TALK, COULD AND CORRECT AND ADDING UP TO A SENTENCE OF DEATH,’

revealed the real British objection to the Riegner plan. It brought into sharp focus the underlying fear that had determined the entire British policy toward rescue—a fear that had similarly shaped the State Department’s response to the Holocaust. The core of the message follows:

“The Foreign Office are concerned with the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory… They [the Foreign Office] foresee that it is likely to prove almost if not quite impossible to deal with anything like the number of 70,000 refugees whose rescue is envisaged by the Riegner plan. For this reason they are reluctant to agree to any approval being expressed even of the preliminary financial arrangements.”

Source: Wyman, David. The Abandonment of the Jews. P 182; MD 688I/166, 688II/47A, 48-9; Collier’s, 11/1/47, 62. For this episode through British documents, see Wasserstein, 246-9.

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