American views on the Holocaust

¶ … Misperceptions of History -- the Holocaust

The Jewish Holocaust provides one of the most vivid illustrations of the potential moral depravity of which so-called "civilized" modern human societies are still capable of perpetrating under the right circumstances. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the Holocaust is that, at the time of its occurrence, a strong argument could be made that Germany represented the absolute height of human intellectual and cultural perspective and achievement.

The most common historical view of the Holocaust in relation to the U.S. involvement in the Second World War is that the reports of German atrocities against Jewish (and other) civilians and the moral obligation to intervene played an important role in the eventual decision to support Britain and liberate the captive civilian populations of Nazi-occupied Europe. However, an examination of the historical record reveals that the U.S. government actually ignored the obvious evidence of the need to intervene on behalf of Jewish (and other) civilians during the entire period preceding the Lend-Lease era, and that abject insensitivity, lack of moral concern, and undeniable anti-Semitism all but precluded any meaningful effort on the part of the U.S. specifically for the benefit of rescuing the victims of the Jewish Holocaust.

Today, as the last few Holocaust survivors and other members of the World War II generation are departing, the historical record will soon be the only evidence of this monumental event in human history. For reasons not specific to the Holocaust, those records are subject to various forms of erroneous retrospective analysis, ignorance, and also to manifestations of modern anti-Semitism.

The Roosevelt Administration's Official Response to Obvious Evidence of Genocide

By the time the Nazis occupied most of the European continent during World War II, the United States considered herself to be the refuge of the "poor" "huddled masses" "yearning to breathe free…" in precisely the manner inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor just outside of New York City. Ironically, when faced with a passenger ship, the S.S. St. Louis, loaded with almost 1,000 German Jewish refugees fleeing certain death in their homeland in 1939, the U.S. refused entry to the Port of Miami (Lipstadt, 1993, p. 127). After being refused entry by Cuba, U.S. authorities responded similarly, even dispatching U.S. Coast Guard vessels, first to fire warning shots to deter entrance into sovereign U.S. waters, and eventually, to escort the ship back out to the high seas to prevent any of its passengers from attempting to dive from the ship and swim for their lives back to U.S. shores. The passengers of the ship were finally granted asylum in several European countries; unfortunately, nearly all of them were killed in Nazi concentration camps after those countries also fell under German occupation during the war (Lipstadt, 1993, p. 127).

By late 1938, there was sufficient evidence that Jews were being violently persecuted in Germany and rounded up en mass for shipment to slave labor and extermination camps in Germany. Prior to the events of Kritallnacht, in November 1938, only one in six Americans supported admitting German Jewish refugees and even afterwards, that only increased to one in five (Leff, 2005, p. 28). Roosevelt himself was sympathetic to the plight of the German Jews on a personal level; unfortunately, he chose to put his political interests ahead of his moral concerns, ever aware of the inevitable consequences of falling on the wrong side of ethnic politics in the U.S. (Neufeld & Berenbaum, 2000, pp. 46-47).

By that time, Cyrus Adler of the American Jewish Committee had submitted a thoroughly researched and documented formal brief to the U.S. State Department on the extent of Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Germany as well as on the substantial historical precedents for the use of national power against foreign intercessions on behalf of persecuted minorities (Leff, 2005, p. 27). His efforts were to no avail, largely because of the attitude of U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to whom Roosevelt had ceded the authority to deal with the issues. Other influential individuals responsible for rejecting the mounting pleas to assist German Jewish refugees included various career State Department and Consular officials with well-known anti-Semitic inclinations, most notably, Breckinridge Long who oversaw the State Department Visa Section from 1940 to 1944 (Leff, 2005, p. 88).

Long was a descendent of the British elite; as Ambassador to Rome, he admired Mussolini and in his prior capacity as a Washington lobbyist, promoted the interests of Franco Spain (Leff, 2005, p. 111). Once described by Congressman Emanuel Celler as the individual "least sympathetic to refugees in all the State Department," he was in charge of the issuance of American visas in all American consulates abroad. In that capacity, instead of relaxing existing restrictions on immigration to rescue German (and later the rest of Europe's) Jews, he did the exact opposite immediately after his appointment to office in 1940. He issued a new and very specific definition of the concept of "undesirables" in connection with eligibility for the legal issuance of U.S. visas to and entry of foreign refugees. Well aware of the Nazi policies that had rendered most German Jews unable to maintain any employment, Long ordered consuls abroad to reject any visa applicant about whom the consul had "any doubt whatsoever," effectively excluding hundreds of thousands of desperate German Jewish visa applicants (Leff, 2005, p. 256).

As a result, in the decade from 1933 to 1943, Jews represented only one-third of the nearly half a million foreign immigrants admitted into the U.S. (Neufeld & Berenbaum, 2000, p. 16). Even when the Congressional Wagner-Rogers Bill sought to allow the implementation of a humanitarian act to save 10,000 (mostly Jewish) refugee children from extermination by the Nazi murder machine in 1939 and 1940, Roosevelt refused his support of the bill. That effort would have allowed 5,000 American families to take in the children with their financial support guaranteed by numerous humanitarian organizations in the U.S. who were involved in the attempt. Without Roosevelt's support, the bill was defeated. Meanwhile, when a very similar bill was introduced later that same year on behalf of British children during the battle in the skies between the Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe, it passed easily. Finally, it was also Breckinridge Long who was primarily responsible for delaying consideration of extending assistance to the children of Jewish parents in Vichy France whose parents had already been rounded up and dispatched to Nazi death camps in railway cattle cars. Before the measure could even be considered by Congress, those children were also swept up by the Nazi killing machine (Neufeld & Berenbaum, 2000, p. 259).

The U.S. War Department also had a role in ignoring pleas on behalf of the European Jews. By late 1944, there was no longer any doubt as to what measures the Nazis has employed all across Europe to solve what Hitler famously referred to as the German's "Jewish Problem." The U.S. War Department and its offices of strategic operations new exactly where the massive Auschwitz camp complex was located (Neufeld & Berenbaum, 2000, pp. 32-34; 216-217). At least twice in late 1944, massive concentrations of U.S. bombers raided industrial targets within five miles of Auschwitz without ever bothering to target any part of the camp complex or the railway lines leading to it. The War Department conducted only a brief study of the possibility of doing so, concluding that any such effort would have required diverting resources necessary for the war effort in chief. Postwar estimates suggest that a bombing campaign against the Auschwitz camp complex could have saved most of the more than 100, 000 Jews who died during the last year of the camp's operations (Neufeld & Berenbaum, 2000, pp. 216-217).