Quotes from Christopher Simpson

The radio announced that western Poland would be "Jew free" by December 1942. The occupation government in Holland pledged to deport all Jews by June of the following year.

The three major Allied powers finally issued their first formal protest against Nazi crimes against Jews on December 17, 1942.

The State Department's Theodore Achilles was almost blasé about it: "In due course our Government will no doubt be asked to appoint representatives to sit on the [war crimes] Commission," he told staffers in mid-December. But in the meantime, "no action is required.

These problems were particularly knotty in situations where the Nazis had "legalized" their acts of persecution by announcing laws and decrees that ordered deportations, compulsory labor, or seizure of property.

Shortly after the German collapse, for example, Tito's government in Yugoslavia wished to try as a war criminal Miklós Horthy, who had been royal regent of Hungary and supreme commander of Hungary's armed forces during its years of alliance with Nazi Germany. Horthy also shared personal responsibility for establishing Hungary's anti-Semitic race laws and other persecutory measures.

As for international law, the prevailing conception of national sovereignty gave the governments of Nazi Germany and other Axis states virtually unlimited authority over their own populations. Jews and so-called stateless refugees in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Romania enjoyed no real protection, under international law, from persecution by the governments of those countries.

The "Antifa" (antifascist) groups throughout Germany hastily organized local unions known as Betriebsrats (works councils) that took over management of hundreds of companies, particularly the larger factories. These committees then usually drove out the old boards of directors, Nazi-era personnel managers, Nazi Labor Front activists, and Gestapo informers.

Thus, the Nazis' systematic persecution of Jews and others trapped inside Axis countries appeared to be "legal." International law, as it then stood, seemed powerless to do anything.

By the end of the war, virtually all of America's most important German trading partners from the 1920s and 1930s were to have blood under their fingernails.

In October a decree barred non-Aryans (or persons married to non-Aryans) from work as editors. Nazi officials denounced "Jewish culture" in literature and the cinema; storm troopers burned books.1

Shortly before World War I, a secretive and disciplined cabal of young Turkish military officers known as the Ittihad took power in Turkey and brought the country into an alliance with Germany. These were the original "Young Turks," and their capacity for cruelty and violence still reverberates in that phrase today.

Beginning in late 1914 and accelerating over the next three years, the Turkish government rounded up Armenian men for forced labor, worked many to death building a trans-Turkish railway for German business interests, then shot the survivors.

Many Turks prospered by liquidating Armenians' businesses, stealing their stocks, and seizing Armenian farms and real estate.

The genocide was particularly cruel to Armenian women and girls, who became the objects of a pervasive, tacitly sanctioned campaign of rape.

The Ittihad also persecuted substantial numbers of Greeks, Jews, and other minority groups, in some cases deporting them along with the Armenians

By early 1942, the Nazis had wreaked destruction in the USSR that went well beyond the understanding of most people in the West. They killed millions of Soviets, looted everything from machines in factories to the gold from the mouths of the dead, and destroyed all that they could not cart away.

But Soviet radio broadcasts accusing the Nazis of atrocities against Jews and Soviet citizens began almost immediately after the Germans invaded the USSR in the summer of 1941 and remained a major Soviet theme for the remainder of the war.

The Armenians," Bristol wrote, "are a race like the Jews—they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character.

T]he Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities." Dulles went on to complain about the agitation in the U.S. on behalf of Armenians, Greeks, and Palestinian Jews. "I've been kept busy trying to ward off congressional resolutions of sympathy for these groups.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized that it would fly in the face of morals if the U.S. offered any aid to the Soviets in fighting the Germans.

for the "bystanders," to use psychologist Ervin Staub's term—whose active and tacit cooperation was necessary to implement Hitler's genocidal designs, Allied bombing seemed to be a war crime against Germans that justified harsh retaliation against the supposed enemies in their midst, the Jews.

Harry S Truman, then a senator from Missouri, went a step further: The U.S. should extend aid to Europe, he contended shortly after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, but give it to "whatever side seemed to be losing. If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible.

Later came the compulsory Aryanizations, which began in November 1938.4 The government seized Jewish property without compensation and sold the plunder to German companies or individuals.

Thus, the law and the crime became caught in a cycle in which the law facilitated the crime and the crime, in turn, helped institutionalize a form of law with which it could coexist. The losers in this vicious circle were the ordinary people, children, and rebels who have always borne the brunt of tyranny.