The Abandonment Of The Jews: America and the Holocaust

Reviewed by Mark Weber

Most of the important information assembled in this significant new book has already been presented and evaluated by others, most notably by Bernard Wasserstein, Martin Gilbert and Arthur Morse. But in The Abandonment of the Jews, David Wyman goes further than any other historian to accuse the Allied wartime leadership of passive complicity in the Holocaust.

Wyman makes no secret of his basic outlook. In the preface he describes himself as "strongly pro-Zionist" and a "resolute supporter of the state of Israel." He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles. The bias that pervades this book is reflected, for example, in Wyman's reference to "the alleged Russian massacre of Polish officers at the Katyn forest." (p. 334. Emphasis added.) While eager to accept at face value the unsubstantiated Holocaust story, Wyman is unwilling to acknowledge the indisputably established Soviet slaughter of thousands of leading Poles in the Katyn forest near Smolensk.

Wyman devotes just three pages of "evidence" for the Holocaust itself, including a lengthy excerpt from the widely-quoted affidavit of Hermann Graebe (Nuremberg document 2992-PS) describing a mass shooting of Soviet Jews in 1942. Wyman does not mention (and probably does not know) that in 1964 and 1965 Graebe was proven to have been a professional liar who perjured himself in 145 Allied "war crimes" trials, and that his famous "eyewitness" affidavit is now thoroughly discredited. (See: Der Spiegel, 29 December 1965, pp. 25-28) Also cited is Göring's well-known letter of 31 July 1941 to Heydrich which Wyman describes as the "directive" for "the systematic extermination of all Jews in the Nazi grip." But as the letter's text (not given by Wyman) makes rather clear, and as Martin Broszat and some other anti-Hitler historians have conceded, Göring's reference to "the final solution of the Jewish question" in this key document meant peaceful emigration and deportation, not extermination. More