The Albert Hall protest

On 29 October 1942 a great protest meeting against the German persecution and murder of the Jews was held at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It was chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, head of the Church of England, and the speakers included the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, General Władysław Sikorski, and the foreign minister of the Czechoslovak government, Jan Masaryk. Temple read out a message from the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It was one of the first public statements so explicit by British church leaders and politicians against the Holocaust then under way, seven weeks before the Allies’ official declaration on the matter.

What was known in the autumn of 1942

The meeting was not a response to a single piece of news but to a tide of reports that had been rising for months. At the turn of May and June 1942 the Bund Report reached London; it spoke of 700,000 Jews murdered on Polish soil and of gassing at Chełmno on the Ner. The BBC broadcast its contents, and Prime Minister Sikorski and the Polish National Council called on the governments of the free world to respond. In the summer came news of a new wave of deportations. In July the French police carried out the Vel d’Hiv round-up in Paris, and transports were leaving France, Belgium and the Netherlands for the east. On 22 July the Germans began deporting the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to the new Treblinka extermination camp; by 21 September they had sent at least 254,000 people there and murdered them.

In August Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress, passed a telegram through British and American diplomatic posts about a plan to murder all the Jews of the countries under German control, using prussic acid among other means. At the end of August it reached the British MP Sydney Silverman. The Foreign Office and the State Department, however, treated it with reserve, and in Washington Jewish leaders were asked not to publish it until the information had been confirmed.

The British churches had already tried to speak out. Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury since April 1942, had received letters throughout the year from Jewish and Christian leaders asking him to intervene. Together with the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Joseph Hertz, he helped found the Council of Christians and Jews, whose founding declaration, signed also by the Moderator of the Church of Scotland and the heads of the Free Churches, was broadcast by the BBC on 30 September and published in The Times on 1 October 1942. The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, agreed to become one of the council’s joint presidents.

The meeting

On the day before the meeting, 28 October, Temple led a deputation to the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, organised by the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees of the independent MP Eleanor Rathbone. The delegates asked for Jewish children from Vichy France to be admitted to Britain and for still-valid immigration certificates for Palestine to be put to use. Morrison refused, explaining that Britain had already taken in more refugees than other countries and had no room for more. According to surviving notes, after Temple had had to leave, Morrison asked Rathbone where it would all end, since once two thousand children had been let in, more would be asked for.

The next day the great hall of the Royal Albert Hall was packed. Temple read Churchill’s message: “The systematic cruelties to which the Jewish people – men, women and children – have been exposed under the Nazi régime are amongst the most terrible events of history, and place an indelible stain upon all who perpetrate and instigate them.” Free men and women, the message went on, denounced these vile crimes, and when this world struggle ended with the enthronement of human rights, racial persecution would be ended. The archbishop himself said that the ordinary Briton did not realise what the Germans were doing to the Jews, and that “it is hard to resist the conclusion that there is a settled purpose to exterminate the Jewish people if it can be done”.

Sikorski, one of the main speakers, warned the “German torturers” that they would not escape responsibility for all the crimes they had committed, and assured Poland’s Jews that after the victory of the United Nations they would share fully in its fruits on an equal footing with all other citizens of the Republic. Masaryk called for the voice of the Jewish people to be heard whenever plans and hopes for the post-war world were discussed, and for Jewish advice and co-operation to be sought far more closely than before. Another speaker was Viscount Robert Cecil, one of the founders of the League of Nations and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Letters of solidarity came from, among others, the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, the President of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, the Czechoslovak President-in-exile, Edvard Beneš, the prime ministers of the Belgian and Greek governments-in-exile, Hubert Pierlot and Emmanouil Tsouderos, and the Brazilian ambassador.

Press reports of the time do not record among the speakers Cardinal Hinsley or Chief Rabbi Hertz, who are sometimes associated with the meeting; both were, however, Temple’s closest partners at that time in the joint statements of the churches and the Jewish community.

From the meeting to the December declaration

The meeting did not change government policy at once, but it helped to break the silence. On 11 November Temple raised the matter in the House of Lords in the debate on the King’s Speech. He spoke of the deportation of thousands of Jews from Vichy France in cattle trucks and called for easier entry into Palestine, help for neutral countries taking in refugees and a more generous visa policy. At the end of November Jan Karski, a courier of the Polish Underground State who had been inside the Warsaw Ghetto and the transit camp at Izbica, reached London, and on 24 November in the United States Rabbi Stephen Wise, after the State Department had confirmed Riegner’s information, announced publicly that the Germans had already murdered some two million Jews. On 4 December The Times published a report headed “Nazi War on Jews”, with a subheading about a plan of extermination.

On 10 December the Polish foreign minister, Edward Raczyński, sent the governments of the United Nations a note on the mass extermination of the Jews in occupied Poland. On 16 December Temple, together with representatives of the Catholic Church and the Free Churches, presented the Foreign Office with a demand for a joint Allied declaration. The next day, 17 December 1942, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, read out in the House of Commons a statement by eleven Allied governments and the French National Committee which condemned the “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of the Jews and promised that those responsible would be punished. The members stood in a minute’s silence for the victims.

Significance

The Albert Hall meeting showed that in the autumn of 1942 knowledge of the Holocaust in Britain was not a secret confined to a narrow circle of officials. The most senior figures of the Church of England, the Prime Minister and the leaders of governments-in-exile spoke publicly about the systematic murder of the Jews, and the Archbishop of Canterbury used the word “exterminate” several weeks before the Allies officially acknowledged that the aim was the destruction of an entire people. It was the beginning of a campaign in which the churches, MPs such as Rathbone and Silverman, Jewish organisations and the Polish government-in-exile demanded no longer just words but rescue.

In that field little was achieved. The British government feared that admitting more refugees would provoke public hostility and undermine its policy in Palestine, and it gave priority to winning the war quickly. On 23 March 1943, in a celebrated speech in the House of Lords, Temple called for immediate action, saying that the Allies stood “at the bar of history, of humanity and of God”. A few weeks later the Bermuda Conference, convened by the British and Americans, produced practically no decisions, and on 12 May 1943 Szmul Zygielbojm, the Bund’s representative on the Polish National Council, took his own life in London in protest against the world’s indifference to the destruction of Polish Jewry. Churchill’s message of 29 October 1942 and the promise to punish the perpetrators were fulfilled only after the war, in trials in which the murder of the Jews became one of the principal charges against the leaders of the Third Reich.