Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate our three newcomers, the noble Lords, Lord Katz and Lord Evans, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt. I am sure they are going to make a distinguished contribution to this House, and all three maiden speeches were well worth listening to.

I have not intervened in these debates in the past. Part of the reason is that I have no family history to relate such as the harrowing stories we have heard today. Also, because I am a Roman Catholic, I have not felt that our religion’s performance allowed me to say much about the Holocaust.

I was in the Foreign Office as an official during the Six Day War. I saw the way in which the Foreign Office reacted, and it was very interesting. The Arabian departments did not want anything to do with it. Frankly, had it not been for Harold Wilson, we would probably have made a lesser contribution to the Six Day War and its aftermath than we did. The combination of Harold Wilson and Lord Caradon—better known as Hugh Foot—meant that Britain ended up having quite a reasonable outcome to the war. The reason I mention this is that they suddenly put together a special department of the Foreign Office, which I was posted to from the Arabian department. One of the things I noticed, which I will come back to later, was an inability of some people to see both sides of the story. That was not because they were malicious; it was because they were just blind to an extent.

I fully support the Conservative Friends of Israel and I have been horrified by the Hamas attack, and in particular the failure, it seems, of the British press to realise that it was Hamas that attacked Israel. Israel did not do any attacking; Hamas attacked. When I look at the three released hostages last week and the gloating of the Palestinians around them, I am sorry, but I cannot feel much sympathy for them. I just wonder at the damage they are doing to their own population. It is absolutely astounding. What is quite saddening to me is what I perceive as the bias in reporting in the British press. I do not see it as being even-handed; it is all, “on the one hand, this; on the other hand, that”. The people of Israel were attacked. They have a right to defend themselves—full stop, as far as I am concerned.

I was 25 years in the European Parliament. I had a lot of time to talk to politicians from other countries of Europe—many of whom had been alive during the war and some of whom had fought during it. One who became a good friend of mine was a German general. He joined at the very end of the war in the boy soldiers brigade in Berlin. I also spoke to a lot of people around Germany. The fact of the matter is that many Germans blanked themselves out from what was going on. If you want to know what I mean, it is the way in which we blank ourselves out from what is going on in British prisons this very day: rats running around, atrocious overcrowding. No one knows about it. No one writes about it. No one deals with it.

Talking to many of my German colleagues, I am afraid it was quite clear that many of them had just blanked it out. They had lived, or their parents had lived, through the terrible 1920s, when the Weimar Republic was frankly unstable, and Germany was a horrible place to live—with massive inflation and the like. Then, along came this little man, who nobody particularly liked and who was not from their class, but, somehow, the country became richer. Things started happening. We often overlook the fact that the dispossessed effects of the Jewish community were distributed largely to the remaining Germans. Many Germans got better flats; they got more furniture; they got all sorts of things. They turned their face to the wall. They pretended they did not know, because they did not want to know. They blanked it out.

That also applies to my own Church. The Pope at that time, Pope Pius XII—Eugenio Pacelli was his name—came from one of the most established families in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He was probably the most upper-class Pope that we have had in the last 200 years. He cut his teeth, so to speak, as papal envoy in Germany. He spoke fluent German but, in 1870, Italy was reunited and the papal lands were confiscated. That was a dreadful blow to the Catholic Church and the Pacelli family refused to deal with the Italian state. Then along came Mussolini, who signed the concordat and regularised relations with the Roman Catholic Church. Pacelli was influenced by that. By that time, he had left to become the Secretary of State, which is like being the Foreign Minister, and then he became Pope. He also blanked out what was going on. He was looking for Jews who had been baptised as Catholics who could be saved. The rest were cast aside.

When I was a little boy at a convent school, I was quite firmly told that we should not be sorry for the Jews because they killed Jesus. That was in 1953, so that was what was going on then.

My final plea to the Minister is that, if we need one good thing, apart from Holocaust lessons in schools, it is education. People do not understand the different religions, and we need some education so that people understand what the Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions are. That is needed because the base of tolerance is knowledge and education.