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Still, by the summer of '42, too many cables had been intercepted, too many codes broken. The Holocaust became an open secret. In August the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland sent Washington reports of a German plan to kill 4 million victims by chemical means. But the Ambassador appended a postscript: the cable should be regarded as "wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears." Even among the knowledgeable, there was an unwillingness to accept truth. Willem Visser't Hooft, founding secretary general of the World Council of Churches, provided a haunting rationale for moral numbness: "People could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror ... It is possible to live in a twilight between knowing and not knowing."
Operating in that twilight, the Roosevelt Administration preferred not to bomb Auschwitz, or even the train tracks leading there. Instead, the White House ordered "rescue through victory"—though by the end of the war, only a remnant could be saved. The Soviet Union refused to recognize specific crimes against the Jews, even when 70,000 were murdered at Babi Yar; in Britain, Anthony Eden feared that statements about Nazi slaughterhouses might cause the Germans to "harden their hearts." As Laqueur indicates, it is difficult to see in what additional ways the victims might have suffered. The martyrs themselves were euphemistic; "We can do very little, we must hope for the best" sustained many until they were behind the gates of Auschwitz or Treblinka. The author is not a man to dwell in the conditional: those who might have been saved are gone, and Laqueur is more interested in first causes than in lamentations. No accusations are made; he is well aware that "nothing is easier than to apportion praise and blame, writing many years after the events." His towering subject is approached with calm and humility. But after all the evidence has been presented, all the statistics meticulously compiled, and the lethal indifference of the Allies faithfully recorded, Edmund Burke's 200-year-old dictum reverberates as never before: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."