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| Prisoners
at the Auschwitz concentration camp shown at their liberation
by the Allies in January 1945. Image Source: L'Histoire
a l'ecole primaire |
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While
the the Roosevelt Administration's pre-war policy against
undertaking more aggressive relief actions to help European
Jews and other refugees may have been influenced by the coalition
of interests formed by isolationists, labor unions and nativists
opposing relaxation of immigration quotas, the rapid shift
of public sentiment to unite against the Nazis and the other
Axis nations after Pearl Harbor did not generate any major
change to help rescue Jews or others fleeing the Nazis by
either military measures or enactment of higher immigration
quotas.
Within
the President's Cabinet, the conflict over refugees increasingly
pitted two of the President's closest advisers against one
another, Secretary of State Cordell
Hull and Secretary of the Treasury
Henry Morgenthau, Jr..
In August
1942, the State Department had received a copy of a cable
from Gerhart
Riegner, Secretary of the World
Jewish Congress in Geneva, reporting on the Nazi
plan for the murder of European Jews based on information
that Riegner had received from a confidential source, a German
industrialist. The cable was not forwarded to the President,
and the Department also asked Rabbi
Stephen S. Wise, a founder and president of the
World Jewish Congress who also received the cable, not to
publicize its contents, suggesting that the accuracy of the
information was questionable.
Cable
dated August 10, 1942, from Gerhart
Riegner, Secretary of World Jewish Congress, Geneva,
transmitted to U.S. State Department through U.S.
Vice Consul General at Geneva and Rabbi
Stephen S. Wise, a founder and president of the
World Jewish Congress
...Received
alarming report stating that, in the Fuehrer's Headquarters,
a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration,
according to which all Jews in countries occupied
or controlled by Germany numbering 3 1/2 to 4 millions
should, after deportation and concentration in the
East, be at one blow exterminated in order to resolve,
once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action
is reported to be planned for the autumn....
Source:
Focal Point
Publications
|
The State
Department did not confirm the accuracy of the Riegner cable
until November, and the following month a small group of Jewish
leaders including Rabbi Wise were given their only meeting
with the President during the War in which they briefed Roosevelt
on the information they had obtained on the Nazi extermination
plans. During the 29-minute session, the President offered
only a promise that he would issue another statement condemning
the Nazis.
...The
government of the United States is very well acquainted
with most of the facts you are now bringing to our
attention. Unfortunately we have received confirmation
from many sources. Representatives of the United States
government in Switzerland and other neutral countries
have given up [sic] proof that confirm the horrors
discussed by you. We cannot treat these matters in
normal ways. We are dealing with an insane man-- Hitler,
and the group that surrounds him represent an example
of a national psychopathic case. We cannot act toward
them by normal means. That is why the problem is very
difficult. At the same time it is not in the best
interest of the Allied cause to make it appear that
the entire German people are murderers or are in agreement
with what Hitler is doing. There must be in Germany
elements, now thoroughly subdued, but who at the proper
time will, I am sure, rise, and protest against the
atrocities, against the whole Hitler system. It is
too early to make pronouncements such as President
Wilson made, may they even be very useful....
Report
quoting President Roosevelt written by Adoph Held,
president of the American Jewish Labor Committee,
during meeting on December 8, 1942 with a delegation
of American Jewish leaders
Source:
PBS.org
|
On March
23, 1943, the Archbishop of Canterbury William
Temple pleaded with the British government to help the
Jews of Europe in a speech delivered in the House of Lords.
Partly as a result of the pressure
of the Archbishop and others in Great Britain, as well as
a mass public rally organized by American Jewish leaders protesting
Nazi atrocities held in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden,
in April the U.S. and Britain convened a conference of the
Allies in Bermuda to discuss refugee relief. Background documents
suggest, however, that key decision-makers continued to resist
any approach that would result in significant numbers of refugees
being allowed safe havens in the Allied countries, and the
Bermuda Conference ended after 12 days of discussion with
only vague statements of condemnation of the Nazi persecution.
See The
Bermuda Conference, America
and the Holocaust, PBS.
org.
On July
28, 1943, President Roosevelt received a more extensive briefing
on the Nazi persecution from Jan
Karski, a member of the Polish resistance movement who
had repeatedly crossed into Nazi-held areas and, in disguise,
had entered a concentration camp in Poland where he witnessed
the execution of Jews.
...Western leaders knew
what was happening. The problem is that they were
all preoccupied with military victory. Strategy was
crushing the German military and industrial power.
Ending the war as fast as possible, with as few losses
as possible. No side issues were to interfere.
What happened to the Jews
was never more than a side issue....
Interview
with Jan Karski for America
and the Holocaust
Source:
PBS.org
|
Also in
the summer of 1943, the conflicts between the State Department
and the Treasury Department over refugee policy came to a
head in a dispute over allowing the transfer of funds for
refugee relief raised by U.S. Jewish organizations to bank
accounts in Switzerland. The transfer was intended to implement
a plan to help save Rumanian and French Jews proposed by Gerhart
Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Geneva
who had first sent the August 1942 cable describing the Nazi
extermination programs. The transfer required government approval,
but the State Department took no action for 11 weeks after
receiving the request from the Jewish organizations.
When Treasury
Department officials were advised of the plan, they promptly
issued the necessary licenses for overseas transfers, but
the the State Department covertly continued to delay final
action needed for the money to be received in the Swiss accounts.
Toward the end of 1943, the Treasury Department staff learned
of the State Department's obstructions, and Treasury Secretary
Morgenthau directed that they prepare a report on the situation,
titled ``A
Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government
in the Murder of Jews'' dated January 13, 1944. The report
asserted in part that "State Department officials have
not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their
disposal to rescue the Jews from Hitler, but have even gone
so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the
rescue of these Jews." Secretary Morgenthau then gave
the President a condensed version of the report on January
16, 1944, and told others that he was prepared to resign from
the Cabinet and release the report to the press if the President
failed to act. See
Museum
of Tolerance Multimedia Learning Center; America
and the Holocaust, PBS.org; James
Carroll, The Haunted Memories of Robert Morgenthau, Boston
Globe, Frank
Olson Project
A few
days after receiving the report, the President signed Executive
Order 9417, establishing the War
Refugee Board. The Order authorized the Board to coordinate
the policies of the U.S. government regarding the rescue and
relief of those attempting to flee the Nazis, including evacuation
of people from Nazi-occupied territories, the creation of
safe havens, and delivery of relief supplies into concentration
camps. Despite an initial appropriation from the Congress
of only $1 million, the Board was able by the end of the war
to aid the rescue of about 200,000 Jews and other refugees.
The Board also supported the work of Swedish diplomat Raoul
Wallenberg, who was credited in saving the lives of thousands
of Jews in Hungary by providing them with protective passes
issued by Sweden, a neutral non-combatant during the war,
but who then mysteriously disappeared in January 1945 while
in Soviet custody. See generally The
International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
By the spring of 1944, the
Allies knew of the gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Jewish leaders pleaded unsuccessfully with the U.S.
government to bomb the gas chambers and railways leading
to the camp. From August 20 to September 13, 1944,
the U.S. Air Force bombed the Auschwitz-Monowitz industrial
complex, less than five miles from the gas chambers
in Birkenau. However, the U.S. maintained its policy
of non-involvement in rescue, and bombed neither the
gas chambers nor the railways used to transport prisoners.
The
United States and the Holocaust
Source:
United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum
|
In January
1945, Soviet troops liberated
Auschwitz. They found 600 corpses of prisoners whom the
Germans had murdered several hours before they fled, as well
as 7,650 living prisoners who survived because the Germans
were forced to leave before they could force them to join
death marches to territories still under Nazi control. See
Yad Vashem, The Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
On April 12, the same day that President Roosevelt died,
American forces liberated 21,000 prisoners at Buchenwald,
a relatively small proportion of the over 80,000 that were
estimated to be at the camp during the prior month.
Resources:
United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Museum
of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center
The
Holocaust, anti-Semitism, U.S. immigration policy, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, World War II >> PBS.org
The
Holocaust Chronicle
The
Shoah Foundation
World
War II History Info
Great
Depression and World War II >>Library
of Congress
Franklin
D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
Educational
Tools:
Holocaust
Education >>
United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Educational
Lesson Plans on the Holocaust >> Remember.org,
A Cybrary of the Holocaust
Suggestions
for the Classroom: The Holocaust, anti-Semitism, U.S. immigration
policy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, World War II,
PBS.org
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