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DRAFT … in progress … whew! … done.
‘’Never Again!’ is happening again’
(23 May 2024)
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Dear Reader:
History is repeating itself.
– Hitler’s Germany, 1930s
– Crooked Drumpf’s Amerika, 2020s.
‘Never Again!’ is happening again, here, now, and you brought it to fruition.
While the narrative in the Immediate Resources identifies Jewish people as a target of Hitler’s Final Solution, remember that Hitler’s first target was the German Trans and LGBT Community in January 1933.
Liberation failed the Trans and LGBT prisoners of Hitler’s extermination camps. Eisenhower held those people captive throughout the post-War era. Eisenhower devised a plan to commit Social Murder based upon Hitler’s Enabling Acts, to declare that American Trans and LGBT Community are a ‘national security risk’ and therefore must be denied their Constitutional Rights, Civil Rights, Human Rights.
Silence equalled Genocide then, silence equals Genocide today.
I dare you Drumpfians and Deplorables to deny how there are parallels between Hitler and Crooked Drumpf.
– Sharon
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Immediate Resources:
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(https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/main)
AMERICANS AND THE HOLOCAUST
Holocaust history raises important questions about what Europeans could have done to stop the rise of Nazism in Germany and its assault on Europe’s Jews. Questions also must be asked of the international community, including the United States.
What did the US government and the American people know about the threats posed by Nazi Germany? What responses were possible? And when?
This exhibition examines the motives, pressures, and fears that shaped Americans’ responses to Nazism, war, and genocide.
Americans participate in an anti-Nazi protest in New York after learning of the Kristallnacht attacks on Jews in Germany, November 1938.
Associated Press.
IN 1933 . . .
This film provides a glimpse of what the United States was like in 1933. It is mainly silent, but includes a small audio portion of President Roosevelt’s inaugural address.
On his first day as president, Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
In the fourth year of the Great Depression, 25 percent of US workers were unemployed.
Public facilities, churches, and schools were racially segregated.
The United States continued to limit immigration, especially by people of “undesirable” national origin, including eastern European Jews.
Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler was appointed to lead Germany’s government.
NAZISM IN THE NEWS
American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. At least 2,000 daily newspapers were printed in the United States in 1933, and most American households received one. US press coverage included reports on the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, Communists, and other political opponents.
Yet American readers could not imagine that this persecution would lead to Germany’s mass murder of Jews and other civilians by 1941.
PROTESTING NAZISM
“What is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked. . . . We must speak out.”
—Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, March 1933
American Jewish leaders hoped to persuade the US government to condemn the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany but disagreed on strategy and tactics. Some favored public demonstrations and a boycott of German goods, but others advocated working quietly behind the scenes, perhaps concerned about an antisemitic backlash in the United States.
These silent historic films show some of the anti-Nazi protests in more than 65 American cities during the spring of 1933, in the first months of Nazi Party rule in Germany.
NOT A GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIR
US Ambassador William Dodd (seated left, in front of the waiter) celebrates Thanksgiving dinner at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin, Germany, November 1934.
US Ambassador William Dodd (seated left, in front of the waiter) celebrates Thanksgiving dinner at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin, Germany, November 1934.
William Edward Dodd Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC.
The United Churches of Lackawanna County in Scranton, Pennsylvania, sent this resolution to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, March 27, 1933.
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
“It has been a favorite pastime of the SA men to attack the Jews and one cannot avoid the plain language of stating that they do not like to be deprived of their prey.”
—George Messersmith, US Consul General, Berlin, July 26, 1933
American diplomats in Germany were well aware of the Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents. Yet the US government respected Germany’s right to govern its own citizens and was hesitant to aid those being targeted.
ANTI-NAZI PETITIONS
Throughout spring 1933, tens of thousands of Americans signed petitions protesting the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. Hundreds of petitions were sent to the State Department, but the US government made no official statement against the German regime.
ATTACKS ON AMERICANS
But when members of the Nazi Party’s SA militia physically assaulted Americans in Germany—as happened at least 35 times during 1933 alone—US diplomats did protest. During their first meeting, Hitler assured US Ambassador William Dodd that attacks on Americans in Germany would end, and many fewer occurred after 1933.
BOYCOTT THE OLYMPICS?
A New York City pedestrian reads flyers announcing a public meeting to debate boycotting the 1936 Olympics, December 1935.
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
Track and field stars Jesse Owens, left, and Ralph Metcalfe pose together in July 1936. Both athletes faced pressure to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but chose to attend and won multiple medals for the United States.
Associated Press.
VIOLATING OLYMPIC RULES?
As the 1936 Olympics in Berlin neared, Americans debated whether to boycott the Games as a protest against Nazism, with 43 percent of Americans supporting a boycott. Jeremiah Mahoney, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, contended that Germany violated Olympic rules by denying equal training and competition opportunities to Jewish and other minority athletes. US Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage argued that boycott advocates were injecting political concerns where they did not belong and suggested that the boycott movement was orchestrated by a Jewish-led conspiracy of “radicals and Communists.” In December 1935, the Amateur Athletic Union narrowly voted to participate in the Olympics.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ATHLETES
During the boycott debate, African-American and Jewish athletes faced pressure from within their respective communities to take a moral stand against Nazism. Some resented being asked to protest the discrimination against Jewish athletes in Germany while America had its own pervasive and segregationist Jim Crow laws. Eighteen African-American athletes participated in the Games and dominated the track and field events. Their victories abroad, however, did little to diminish racial discrimination and segregation at home.
AMERICAN NEWSREELS
During the 1930s, 80 million Americans—nearly two-thirds of the country’s population—went to the movies each week. Newsreels shown before the feature film, along with radio broadcasts, newspapers, and magazines, shaped how Americans understood the world in the era before television.
The newsreel clips in this six-minute compilation, depicting both national and international events, were shown in American theaters between 1934 and 1938.
NAZIS IN AMERICA
In 1937, the residents of Southbury, Connecticut, successfully opposed the Bund’s efforts to establish a summer camp in their town.
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
In May 1938, The Anti-Nazi Bulletin, a publication by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, printed this map depicting the locations of German American Bund training camps in the United States.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
The German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization for Americans of German descent, demonized Jews and Communists and dreamed of a fascist America. Fritz Kuhn, the Bund’s leader, tried to portray himself as the “American führer,” though he never received the support from the Nazi Party in Germany that he desired.
RALLIES
The Bund’s membership probably never exceeded 25,000, yet its pro-Nazi propaganda and mass demonstrations sometimes reached large crowds. At one Bund rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939, more than 20,000 attendees booed any mention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and cheered “Heil Hitler!” Thousands of anti-Nazi protesters filled the streets outside the arena.
SUMMER CAMPS
The Bund established more than a dozen summer camps around the United States to indoctrinate German American children. Campers wore uniforms of the Hitler Youth and carried Nazi banners.
IN 1938 . . .
This silent film provides a glimpse of what the United States was like in 1938.
Unemployment spiked to 19 percent during a new economic recession.
Most Americans wanted to keep refugees out of the United States.
More than 100 African Americans had been lynched since 1930.
Two-thirds of Americans believed German Jews were either “entirely” or “partly” to blame for their own persecution.
Germany expanded its territory by annexing Austria in March and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in September.
The peacetime US Army ranked 17th in the world, both in size and combat power.
THE REFUGEE CRISIS
Germany’s sudden annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938 brought approximately 200,000 additional Jews under Nazi rule.
President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the refugee crisis. Delegates from 32 countries gathered in Evian, France, in July 1938, but most countries refused to change their laws to assist Jewish refugees.
In mid-1938, nearly 140,000 Germans and Austrians, most of whom were Jews, had applied for US visas. Within a year, that number had increased to more than 300,000, creating an 11-year waiting list.
This two-minute film shows American newsreels depicting Germany’s annexation of Austria and the Evian Conference.
THE EVIAN CONFERENCE
The American press criticized the 32 nations attending the Evian Conference, including the United States, for their inaction. Most of the participants expressed sympathy for the refugees but offered little assistance, claiming that increased immigration might hurt their own nations’ economies. Some spoke bluntly about not wanting to admit Jews.
Time magazine concluded: “All nations present expressed sympathy for the refugees but few offered to allow them within their boundaries.”
THE CHALLENGES OF ESCAPE
Full Image
Refugees crowd outside the US consulate in Marseilles, France, ca. 1940.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
On November 7, 1938, only a few days before the Kristallnacht pogrom, the US consulate issued this US immigration visa to Fritz Treuer. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria earlier that year, and the consulate was now in “Vienna, Germany.”
US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It was very difficult to immigrate to the United States. In 1924, the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in order to set limits on the maximum number of immigrant visas that could be issued per year to people born in each country.
These quotas were designed to limit the immigration of people considered “racially undesirable,” including southern and eastern European Jews. After 1938, only 27,370 people born in Germany could immigrate to the United States each year.
Potential immigrants to the United States had to collect many types of documents, including proof of identity, police certificates, medical clearances, tax documents, a ship ticket, and exit permits prior to obtaining a visa. Most also had to find an American financial sponsor who had the resources to guarantee they would never become a burden on the United States.
The US government made no exceptions for refugees escaping persecution, and did not adjust the immigration laws in the 1930s or 1940s. The waiting lists for US immigrant visas grew as hundreds of thousands of Jews attempted to flee Europe.
ATTACKS ON JEWS SHOCK AMERICANS
Nazi Party officials set off a nationwide riot against Jews in Germany and Austria on the night of November 9–10, 1938, an event known as Kristallnacht. Units of the Nazi Party’s SA militia and Hitler Youth destroyed hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned shops. Nearly 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
American newspapers covered the Nazi terror attack against Jews in banner headlines on their front pages, and articles about the events continued to appear for several weeks.
PUBLIC OPINION POLLS AFTER KRISTALLNACHT
November 1938
Polls conducted several weeks after the Kristallnacht attacks found that Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews, but most did not want more Jewish refugees to immigrate to the United States.
Do you approve or disapprove of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany?
Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?
American Institute of Public Opinion
ROOSEVELT DENOUNCES NAZIS
At his press conference five days after Kristallnacht, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that the attack had “deeply shocked” the American public. He ordered the US ambassador in Germany to return home as a sign of protest and allowed 12,000 Germans—most of them Jews—who were temporarily in the United States to remain indefinitely.
“I cannot, in any decent humanity, throw them out,” he explained to reporters. But Roosevelt also said that US immigration quotas would not be changed to admit more Jewish refugees.
The White House, 1941.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
ADMIT REFUGEE CHILDREN?
Sen. Robert Wagner speaks with Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers about their bill to welcome German refugee children. Actress Helen Hayes, who testified in support of the bill, sits in the middle.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
The Non-Sectarian Committee for German Refugee Children published this brochure in support of the Wagner-Rogers bill.
American Friends Service Committee Archives, Philadelphia, PA.
In February 1939, Democratic senator Robert Wagner of New York and Republican congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts introduced legislation in Congress to admit 20,000 German refugee children under the age of 14 over a two-year period. The bill specified that the 10,000 children per year would enter the United States outside the existing restrictive immigration quota laws.
IN FAVOR
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt backed the Wagner-Rogers Bill, the first time that she publicly endorsed any pending legislation as first lady. Despite Mrs. Roosevelt’s urging, FDR never officially commented on the proposal to admit refugee children.
OPPOSED
Senator Robert Reynolds, a Democrat from North Carolina and a vocal opponent of the bill, had recently proposed banning all immigration for ten years or until the nation solved its unemployment problems. His compromise, a five-year total ban on all immigration in exchange for passing the child refugee bill, was rejected.
The American people agreed with Reynolds: 66 percent of Americans polled in January 1939 opposed expanding immigration to aid the refugee children. The Wagner-Rogers Bill never made it to a vote in Congress.
REFUGEE SHIPS AT SEA
More than 1,200 ships carrying nearly 111,000 Jewish refugees arrived in New York between March 1938, when Germany annexed Austria, and October 1941, when Germany banned emigration.
This seven-minute film shows the passage of ships carrying Jewish refugees from Europe to the United States between 1938 and 1941, as well as the atypical voyages of the MS St Louis in 1939 and the SS Quanza in 1940.
THE ST. LOUIS
On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner MS St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba, carrying 937 passengers, most of them German Jews. When the ship arrived in Havana, the passengers learned that the landing certificates they had purchased were invalid, and the Cuban government forced the St. Louis to leave its harbor. As the ship sailed toward Miami, passengers sent telegrams to loved ones and public officials in the United States pleading for assistance. But they did not have entry visas, and the US government did not allow the passengers to land.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ST. LOUIS PASSENGERS?
After the St. Louis passengers failed to find refuge in the Western Hemisphere, the ship sailed back to Europe. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee aid organization worked with the US State Department to persuade four countries—Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium—to admit the passengers. One year later, many of the refugees found themselves living under Nazi occupation again, after Germany invaded multiple western European countries. Of the 937 St. Louis passengers, 254 were murdered in the Holocaust.
WORLD WAR II
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Great Britain and France declared war two days later. President Roosevelt reassured Americans that the United States would remain neutral in World War II.
Americans clamor to see newspapers announcing the outbreak of war in Europe.
Associated Press.
FEAR OF SPIES
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at his desk, Washington, DC, 1940.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
The United States Office of War Information produced this poster in 1943 to warn Americans that enemy spies committing sabotage were a significant threat to national security.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . director, J. Edgar Hoover, revealed complaints and tips on acts against the national defense have reached the astounding maximum of nearly 3,000 a day.”
—Washington Post, June 12, 1940
After the war in Europe began, warnings about spies, sometimes referred to as a “fifth column,” dominated American culture. Fears worsened in the spring of 1940 when Nazi Germany invaded and quickly defeated France, leading Americans to worry that enemy agents had brought the country down from within.
In a June 1940 poll, 72 percent of Americans believed Germany had already placed spies in the United States, and 22 percent weren’t sure.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover published cautionary articles in popular magazines about spies and saboteurs in the United States. In a May 1940 radio broadcast to the American public—one of his many “fireside chats”—President Roosevelt called spies a significant threat to national security.
The State Department put additional security measures in place to screen potential immigrants, making an already difficult process even harder.
PUBLIC OPINION POLL ON ENTERING WORLD WAR II
May 1940
A poll conducted one week after Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, showed that Americans overwhelmingly opposed entering World War II.
Do you think the United States should declare war on Germany and send our army and navy abroad to fight?
AMERICA FIRST COMMITTEE
In 1940, a group of Yale University students founded the America First Committee to oppose US intervention in the European war. They quickly mobilized hundreds of other antiwar students to join the organization, and persuaded one of the nation’s most outspoken isolationists, Charles Lindbergh, to support its cause. Lindbergh’s enormous celebrity—dating to his 1927 solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean—helped the America First Committee become a national organization with as many as 800,000 members.
“WAR AGITATORS”
After Lindbergh accused Jews of being “war agitators” in a speech at Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, the America First Committee’s reputation changed significantly. Newspapers and magazines across the country denounced Lindbergh and the committee for promoting antisemitism and intolerance. Political cartoonists, including PM newspaper artist Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), accused Lindbergh of spreading Nazi propaganda. America First Committee leaders denied the accusation, but the criticism continued. As soon as the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the committee disbanded.
“ON THE VERGE OF WAR”
Most Americans hoped the United States would stay out of the war in Europe. President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced the challenge of trying to prepare an isolationist nation for the possibility of war while running for an unprecedented third term as president.
Watch a short documentary showing how FDR steered the US toward war between 1939–41.
WAR!
On December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise aerial assault on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Two days later, President Roosevelt told Americans:
“We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.”
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
CITIZENS OR ENEMIES?
“I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps.”
—Congressman John Rankin (Mississippi), 1942
In February 1942, two months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order permitting the government to take “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage.”
Citing national security concerns, the US government used that order to relocate more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry—at least two-thirds of whom were American citizens—to ten camps across seven inland states. Thousands of people of German and Italian descent also were detained and questioned as a result of the executive order.
Japanese Americans challenged curfew, evacuation, and detention restrictions in US courts at least 12 times during the war. Four cases reached the US Supreme Court. In each case, the court concluded that the war powers of Congress and the president justified forcibly detaining American citizens in camps.
PUBLIC OPINION POLL ON JAPANESE INTERNMENT
March 1942
Do you think we are doing the right thing in moving Japanese aliens (those who are not citizens) away from the Pacific coast?
How about the Japanese who were born in this country and are United States citizens, do you think they should be moved?
THIS IS THE ENEMY
Americans understood Nazism as an enemy of American values and a direct threat to Americans’ safety. Materials created to encourage Americans to support the war effort rarely mentioned the Nazi regime’s ongoing persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews.
Explore how Americans saw their wartime enemies and were encouraged to rally for victory.
IN 1942 . . .
This silent film provides a glimpse of what the United States was like in 1942.
The US military quickly grew to nearly four million troops. The United States spent most of 1942 fighting Japan in the Pacific and preparing to battle Nazi Germany.
Two million women entered the workforce. Fewer than five percent of Americans were unemployed.
The US Army was racially segregated, and African Americans launched a “Double-V” campaign to fight for victory against fascism abroad and against racism at home.
Nearly half of Americans believed that Jews had “too much power and influence” in the United States.
In November 1942, Americans learned about the Nazi plan to murder all the Jews of Europe.
“COLD-BLOODED EXTERMINATION”
After the State Department blocked Riegner’s information from reaching him, Rabbi Stephen Wise received the warning about the Nazi mass murder campaign via Great Britain.
Courtesy of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH.
Mass murder of Jews by German mobile killing squads began in the summer of 1941 as part of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In January 1942, high-ranking Nazi officials secretly planned what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” the effort to systematically annihilate Europe’s Jews.
THE US GOVERNMENT LEARNS ABOUT THE “FINAL SOLUTION”
Eight months later, news about the “Final Solution” reached Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress’s representative in Switzerland. Riegner attempted to alert the president of the World Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise, in New York. The US State Department blocked the message, claiming that the murder of the Jews was a “war rumor.” Soon after, however, Rabbi Wise received Riegner’s message from a contact in Great Britain.
AMERICANS LEARN ABOUT THE “FINAL SOLUTION”
In late November 1942, just weeks after American and British troops began to battle the Germans and their allies in North Africa, Wise informed the US press that two million Jews already had been murdered as part of the Nazi regime’s annihilation plan. In response, the United States and eleven other Allied countries issued a stern declaration, vowing to punish the perpetrators of this “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” after the war had been won.
PUBLIC REPORTS OF MURDER
Although war news dominated American publications, newspapers and magazines increasingly carried reports about the ongoing mass murder of Jews.
Some details were inaccurate and there was very little visual evidence of the crimes to print. Yet the crux of the story—that Jews throughout German-occupied and German-allied Europe were being deported and murdered in killing centers—was available to the American public. Many American readers may have dismissed these reports, remembering exaggerated stories of German atrocities during World War I.
Read some of the stories in the American press about the Nazi mass murder of Jews.
PRESSURE TO ACT
Jan Karski, a member of the Polish resistance, traveled to Washington in 1943 to provide details to American officials about the Nazi occupation of Poland, including Nazi treatment of Jews, 1944.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In October 1943, a group of 400 Orthodox rabbis marched on Washington to demand an organized US effort to rescue Jews. The march was co-sponsored by Peter Bergson’s organization, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe.
Thomas D. McAvoy/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
As details of the Nazis’ murderous plans trickled out to the public in 1943, American Jews remained divided about how much pressure to exert on the federal government to take special action to rescue Jews. Two non-Americans, Jan Karski and Peter Bergson, played prominent roles in trying to mobilize a US government response.
EYEWITNESS IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground resistance, witnessed the horrors suffered by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and in a transit camp. Karski met Roosevelt at the White House on July 28, 1943, and told the president about the dire situation in occupied Poland. Karski later recalled that FDR promised the Allies “shall win the war” but made no mention of rescuing Jews.
“ACTION, NOT PITY”
After news of the “Final Solution” became public, Peter Bergson, born in Lithuania and raised in the British Mandate of Palestine, openly challenged both the US government and American Jewish leaders to take decisive action to save European Jews. Bergson and his prominent supporters, including many Hollywood and Broadway stars, staged the We Will Never Die pageant to call attention to the ongoing murder of Europe’s Jews. In November 1943, Bergson persuaded members of Congress to introduce a resolution intended to pressure President Roosevelt to formulate a plan for rescuing Jews in Europe.
FURTHER READING
STATE DEPARTMENT OBSTRUCTION EXPOSED
In 1943, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long blocked information about Nazi atrocities from reaching the United States and misled Congress about the number of refugees admitted into the country.
Myron Davis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
The Treasury Department presented a report to President Roosevelt in January 1944, arguing for a new government agency devoted to rescuing Jews and other Nazi victims. This is a draft of that report.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In early 1943, US State Department officials blocked reports about the mass murder of Jews from reaching the United States. Some at the State Department wanted to avoid any increase in public pressure to aid Jews and thought that if the American people did not have information about the atrocities, they would not protest.
In April, US and British representatives met in Bermuda to discuss the possibility of assisting European Jews. Neither country, however, intended to loosen its restrictive immigration policies or to actually take any decisive rescue action.
CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS
In November 1943, a group of congressmen, influenced by activist Peter Bergson, introduced bipartisan resolutions in the House of Representatives and Senate calling for President Roosevelt to create a government commission to rescue Europe’s Jews. In secret testimony before Congress, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long declared that the State Department already had admitted 580,000 refugees, a claim soon publicly proven false.
TREASURY DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATION
At the same time, US Treasury Department staff investigated the State Department’s delays and obstruction in sending relief into Europe to aid Jewish refugees. They discovered that State Department officials had deliberately suppressed reports about the murder of Jews. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. agreed to present their findings to President Roosevelt.
As a result of Treasury’s efforts, Roosevelt signed an executive order on January 22, 1944, establishing the War Refugee Board. It was charged with the rescue and relief of victims of Nazi oppression as long as it did not interfere with the war effort.
WAR REFUGEE BOARD
“We have talked. We have sympathized. We have expressed our horror. The time to act is long past due.”
—John Pehle, Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, January 15, 1944
The establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB) marked the first time the US government adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of Nazi persecution. The WRB coordinated the work of both US and international refugee aid organizations, sending millions of dollars into German-occupied Europe for relief and rescue. Its representatives abroad pressured neutral nations to provide diplomatic aid to Jews and recruited Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg to help save thousands of lives in Budapest, Hungary.
The War Refugee Board’s final report estimated that it rescued “tens of thousands” of people and assisted “hundreds of thousands” more.
The leadership of the WRB (left to right): Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and WRB Executive Director John Pehle, March 21, 1944.
Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY.
FURTHER READING
A REFUGEE CAMP IN NEW YORK
In August 1944, the War Refugee Board brought 982 refugees from 18 different countries to the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York. This was the only time during World War II that the US government agreed to bypass immigration laws to allow a group of refugees to reach the United States. Instead of welcoming them as immigrants, however, the refugees were designated as “guests of the President.” They were held behind barbed-wire fences at Fort Ontario and were informed that they would be returned to Europe when the war ended.
In February 1946, nine months after the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter closed. The United States admitted the refugees on immigrant visas.
This one-minute compilation of newsreel footage shows refugees arriving at Fort Ontario.
“DIRECT BOMBING” OF AUSCHWITZ?
“I strongly recommend that the War Department give serious consideration to the possibility of destroying the execution chambers and crematories in Birkenau through direct bombing action.”
—John Pehle, Director of the War Refugee Board, to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, November 8, 1944
Throughout spring 1944, the War Refugee Board received dozens of recommendations about how to save Jews, including pleas for the Allies to bomb either the rail lines that transported Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center, its gas chambers, or the entire camp. In June and in November, board officials forwarded these requests to the US War Department, which refused. Although the US Air Force bombed nearby factories, the War Department told the WRB that bombing Auschwitz-Birkenau would divert the military from its main objective—winning the war as quickly as possible.
An American B-17 bomber flies over Auschwitz during a bombing run on the I.G. Farben Buna plant, August 20, 1944.
Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY.
COULD THE ALLIES HAVE STOPPED THE KILLING?
Allied troops invaded North Africa in November 1942. By that time, the Germans had opened six killing centers in Nazi-occupied Poland and already had murdered four million Jews, most by gassing or mass shootings. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and others also were imprisoned in concentration camps throughout the Third Reich.
When the western Allied armies landed in Normandy, France, on D-Day (June 6, 1944), more than five million Jews had been murdered, and only two killing centers—Majdanek and Auschwitz—were still operating. Both were liberated by Soviet troops. US military forces never encountered the Nazi killing centers.
This five-minute film shows the movement of Allied troops between 1942 and 1945 and the location of the killing centers.
WHAT COULD THE UNITED STATES HAVE DONE?
The US Government learned about the systematic killing of Jews almost as soon as it began in the Soviet Union in 1941. Throughout the war, however, the Allied governments prioritized defeating Nazism, not saving Jews.
Beyond the military goal of defeating Nazism, the United States could have publicized information about Nazi atrocities, pressured the other Allies and neutral nations to help endangered Jews, and supported resistance groups against the Nazis. Prior to the war, the US government could have enlarged or filled its immigration quotas to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the country. These acts together might have reduced the death toll, but they would not have prevented the Holocaust.
NAMING THE CRIME
Polish-Jewish refugee lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in response to news of Nazi mass murder.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
“We are in the presence of a crime without a name,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill informed radio listeners on August 24, 1941. His announcement came two months after British intelligence had received secret information about German mass shootings of Soviet Jews.
Before the war ended in spring 1945, the crime was given a name.
A December 3, 1944, editorial in the Washington Post introduced its readers to a new word, genocide, coined by Polish Jewish immigrant Raphael Lemkin: He defined the crime as the “deliberate destruction” of a nation or ethnic group.
IN 1945 . . .
This silent film provides a glimpse of what the United States was like in 1945.
The United States emerged as a world power.
President Roosevelt died on April 12, just as American troops first encountered concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
Americans celebrated victory in Europe in May and victory in the Pacific in August.
16 million Americans had served, and 416,800 were killed, in the war.
LIBERATION
In the final days of World War II, American magazines covered victories in war alongside some of the first widely circulated photographs from concentration camps. American soldiers who liberated concentration camps, or toured the newly freed camps, wrote letters to their families to tell them about what they had seen.
DISPLACED PERSONS
After Earl Harrison reported that the Allied military needed to take better care of Jewish Holocaust survivors, displaced persons camps opened specifically for Jews. American Carl Atkin, the director of the Deggendorf DP camp, received this songbook, drawn by the Jewish residents.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Jewish displaced persons board a US Army troop ship. They were among the first Jewish refugees to leave for the United States after the Truman Directive in December 1945.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
After fighting their way into Nazi-occupied territory, Allied forces discovered and liberated concentration camps, freeing hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, many of whom had no homes or families to return to. More than two million Europeans were displaced, including 250,000 Jews. American, Soviet, British, and French occupying forces set up displaced persons (DP) camps to house them. In the first few months after the war ended, the camps were places of suffering and hunger. Jewish survivors were often held in the same camps with German civilians, or even Nazi perpetrators.
Better Treatment for Jewish Survivors
In the summer of 1945, President Harry Truman asked former US immigration commissioner Earl Harrison to tour the DP camps. Harrison was shocked by what he found and informed Truman: “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis had treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.” Based on Harrison’s report, the United States established separate camps for Jewish DPs.
Truman Orders DP Immigration
President Truman issued the Truman Directive on December 22, 1945, which instructed State Department consular officials to give preference to DPs within the existing immigration quotas. Truman did not believe that Congress would be willing to expand the quotas, which had been in place since 1924, even in response to the clear humanitarian need.
Congress Acts to Admit Displaced Persons
In 1948, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, authorizing 200,000 displaced persons to enter the United States without being counted against the immigration quotas. The act did not include any special provisions for Jewish DPs.
Between the establishment of the DP camps in 1945 and the closure of the last camp in 1957, approximately 140,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors immigrated to the United States.
PUBLIC OPINION POLL: DECEMBER 1945
Should we permit more persons from Europe to come to this country each year than we did before the war, should we keep the number about the same, or should we reduce the number?
American Institute of Public Opinion
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024-2126
Main telephone: 202.488.0400
TTY: 202.488.0406
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Sharon Nichols
23 May 2024
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