Barely two months before the opening of the Nuremberg trials, British prime minister Clement Attlee wrote to President Truman about the “displaced persons”—the DPs—of numerous nationalities stranded in the fallen Reich. Attlee explained that British forces would continue to “avoid treating [the Jewish DPs] on a racial basis. . . . One must remember that within these camps were people from almost every race in Europe and there appears to have been very little difference in the amount of torture and treatment they had to undergo.”

As David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in “The Last Million,” there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust, so it’s just possible that Attlee (no anti-Semite but no Zionist either) believed what he wrote. Whatever his motive, he undoubtedly didn’t want to see “the Jews [placed] in a special racial category at the head of the queue.” Much of the reason was Palestine, then under British control: “We have the Arabs to consider as well.” Attlee’s worry, evident in the letter if never explicitly spelled out, was that defining the Jewish DPs as a distinct group, unable to return “home,” would bolster the argument that they be permitted to immigrate to Palestine, in which, and about which, tensions were running dangerously high. Attlee warned that “the whole Middle East” could be “set aflame.”