This is a curious book. What Allied leaders said about the Holocaust, a term used widely only after the war, could be reproduced in a dozen pages – and what they said publicly in even fewer. Richard Breitman, who was among the first historians to show twenty-five years ago what British intelligence agencies knew about the murder of Jews in the Soviet Union, explores at length the background to and circumstances in which Allied leaders addressed the genocide but this is for the most part well known. Boiled down, the facts are that Allied leaders said very little.

Breitman examines the few occasions when the leaders might have been talking about the genocide of the Jews. Churchill’s famous speech in August 1941, in which he talked about the Germans perpetrating ‘a crime without a name’, may have been an allusion to intelligence reports showing the killing of Jews and others on the Eastern Front, but then again, according to Breitman, it may not have been. In the speech he gave in Red Square as the Germans approached in November 1941, Stalin mentioned briefly the renewal of pogroms in the captured areas, but said nothing more specific about the fate of the Jews. Breitman says Stalin probably authored a Pravda editorial in early 1942 on German atrocities, including the murder of Jews, but that cannot be confirmed. The Soviet dictator said nothing more for the rest of the war on the matter. Roosevelt remained cautious about privileging the Jews in his public comments on the war for politically prudential reasons, and as a result made few observations on the subject until late in the war, and then only brief ones. 

Breitman spends much more time discussing what was known about the murder of Jews, how it was communicated and its effect on lower-level officials and ministers, rather than discussing the response of the Allied big three, which again reveals a generally ambivalent, even sceptical response to the claims of