Hitler and the Holocaust (27 page)

Although anti-Semitism in America never crystallized into a coherent, organized political movement or seriously infiltrated the mainstream political parties, it was nonetheless pervasive enough in the 1930s and 1940s to affect American responses to the Holocaust. Opinion polls indicated that on the eve of the war 75 to 85 percent of Americans opposed relaxing the drastically prohibitive immigration quotas to help Jewish refugees. At the end of the 1930s, anti-immigration sentiment was so strong in Congress that proposed legislation to open America’s doors to refugees had to be withdrawn.
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The same fate awaited Senator Robert Wagner’s bill in 1938 to admit twenty thousand Jewish children over the existing narrow quota. Then, early in 1939, the American government callously turned back German Jewish refugees on the ocean liner
Saint Louis
, who had been refused Cuban entry visas. It was yet another sign of the strength of popular sentiment against changing the immigration laws.

America’s entry into the war, ostensibly to make the world safe for democracy against Nazism and fascism, weakened the potential impact of anti-Jewish sentiments. Yet opinion surveys indicate that, after the Japanese and the Germans, Jews were considered the greatest menace to American society during the war years. In 1944, one poll found 65 percent of Americans declaring that Jews had too much power (a figure about three times higher than estimates for Great Britain), and stereotypes of Jews as dishonest, greedy, materialistic, aggressive, and subversive were rather widespread.
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Such prejudices played a role in shaping the behavior of top State Department officials like Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge
Long, Jr., who was responsible for refugees during the Roosevelt administration. Long was a paranoid anti-Semite who thought
Mein Kampf
“eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of Communism and Chaos.”
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Not surprisingly, when Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department attempted to license the transfer of money from Jewish charities to fund a program for the relief and rescue of Jews, Long and other officials delayed it for months. They were encouraged in this prevarication by the British government, which in December 1943 cabled Washington that it was opposed to such relief programs because “of the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued.”
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This callous response stunned Morgenthau and Secretary of State Cordell Hull into action. An internal investigation of the State Department’s handling of the question of rescue produced a document dated 13 January 1944 and starkly entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this government in the murder of the Jews.”
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This unrelenting indictment demonstrated that not only did certain State Department officials fail to use the American governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, they sought to prevent such aid. They failed to cooperate with private organizations seeking to develop their own relief programs and even actively obstructed them. Further, they had surreptitiously tried to stop the obtaining of information by various Jewish and other organizations concerning the massacres in Europe and then issued false and misleading statements to cover up their guilt. Roosevelt was shocked by the report and realized that the facts, if known, would be political dynamite. The result was the creation in January 1944 of the War Refugee Board to assist in rescuing the Jews in Europe.
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It was the only such Allied government agency created during the war, but it was too little and too late. No military resources whatever were diverted to it, and it succeeded in obtaining the admission of no more than one thousand refugees.

The prevailing anti-Jewish climate inhibited the willingness of most American Jews to lobby the Roosevelt administration to change U.S. policy in the face of the Holocaust. American Jewry was profoundly shaken by what it took to be a steep rise in anti-Semitism in America. As recent immigrants, many Jews still felt insecure about their own position and rights. Hence, they were reluctant to do anything to “make
rishis
”—to create a fuss for fear that their own loyalties would be questioned and the wrath of the Christian world might be stirred up.

The American Jewish community, which numbered about 4.5 to 5 million during the war years, was far from monolithic. Indeed, never had its internal ideological and political divisions seemed greater than in the 1930s. There were Orthodox and Reform, uptown and downtown Jews, “Germans” and “Russians,” not to mention the Galitzianers and secularists of all shades—socialist, Communist, labor and “revisionist” Zionists. The bonds of religious and ethnic solidarity had been eroded considerably by secularization and acculturation to American life, weakening the cultural ties with the Jews of Russia, Poland, Germany, and Palestine.
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What united most American Jews much more than links across the ocean was the desire to prove their newfound American patriotism. This imperative was spectacularly demonstrated by the fact that more than half a million young Jews served in the armed forces of the United States. Responses of American Jews to the Holocaust were very much shaped by such acculturating trends. For example, the more Americanized Jews tended to marginalize or underestimate the scale of the disaster, much like Gentile Americans. This was less true of Jews in the immigrant centers, such as the Lower East Side of Manhattan or Williamsburg in Brooklyn, for whom the European Jewry that was being destroyed was far from being an abstraction. Not surprisingly, the Yiddish-language press covered the events of the Holocaust more closely and intensely than its counterparts in the English-language news media.
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But the harsh truth is that rescue was not a particularly high priority for the major American Jewish organizations and barely featured on their wartime agendas. There were a few private approaches to the president and high government officials, but even these feelers were not intensively followed up. Such apathy notwithstanding, the leaders of American Jewry did find a common voice in condemning the activities of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, founded by a complete outsider, the militant Peter Bergson, a representative of the Palestinian Jewish Irgun Zvai Leumi in the United States.
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They objected to the committee’s loud, provocative style of advertisement in reminding the American public and Congress of what was actually happening in Europe; they disliked the violence of its anti-British tone, its insistent emphasis on the need for a Jewish army, and its emotionally raw, immoderate language.
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Above all, the Jewish establishment was displeased at this unexpected invasion of their organizational territory and at being upstaged by a tiny group, linked from 1944 onward with the terrorist activity of the Irgun against British colonial rule in Palestine.

Mainstream American Zionists also disapproved of the extremism of the Bergsonites, notwithstanding their own opposition to British policy. Having observed the American government’s unwillingness to open the door to Jewish refugees in the 1930s, they concentrated their energies on helping to build up the Jewish National Home in Palestine. They cooperated with David Ben-Gurion and the rest of the Yishuv leadership in protesting the British White Paper of 1939, which in effect blocked any prospect of a future Jewish majority in Palestine, and rallied around Ben-Gurion’s arguments in favor of Jewish statehood as an immediate postwar goal. This aim was formally endorsed on 6 May 1942 at the Biltmore Hotel in New York.
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At the conference, Chaim Weizmann (at that time still the leader of world Zionism) grimly predicted that a quarter of eastern European Jewry
would probably perish as a result of Nazi atrocities, while some four million homeless Jewish survivors would remain suspended somewhere between heaven and hell.
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The Gentile world would, however, be persuaded by Zionism, because Palestine offered the only practical solution to Jewish homelessness. At long last, Weizmann suggested, Jews would relieve non-Jews “of the trouble of settling our problems.”
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In August 1942, three months after the Biltmore meeting, the best-known American Zionist (and leader of the World Jewish Congress [WJC]), Stephen Wise, was given a telegram from Dr. Gerhart Riegner (representing the WJC in Geneva) outlining the existence of a German plan to systematically destroy all the Jews of Europe at one blow.
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The State Department had initially withheld this information from him, but he was finally authorized by Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to release it on 24 November 1942. The devastating news had a brief galvanizing effect on Jews in the United States, with American Zionists in the forefront of efforts to lobby the Roosevelt administration to undertake a more serious rescue program. On 1 March 1943, more than twenty thousand people (mobilized primarily by the WJC), jammed into Madison Square Garden in New York to express support for the millions of European Jews threatened with extinction.
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A week later, a similar number attended the spectacular ninety-minute pageant
We Will Never Die
, which included a searing recitation of some of the atrocities that the Nazis had perpetrated against Jewry. Its initiator, the popular author and dramatist Ben Hecht, hoped to pierce the veil of silence around the tragedy of the Jewish people with flaming rhetoric: “The corpse of a people lies on the steps of civilization. Behold it. Here it is! And no voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end.”
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The New York Times
and some of the other daily papers were sympathetic to the pageant, helping to reopen the public debate over helping the Jews. One indirect result was the Bermuda Conference of April 1943, at
which British and American officials (belatedly aware of the political risk of doing nothing) announced that they would try to develop plans to aid European Jewry, a vain promise, as it soon turned out.

The Anglo-American conference began on the first day (19 April 1943) of the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising, which also happened to coincide with the first night of Passover. The coincidence of dates was a particularly cruel irony, since the conference would reveal that the Allies had abandoned European Jews to their fate, despite optimistic pronouncements to the contrary. The two delegations categorically ruled out any appeal to Hitler to release Jews in Nazi-occupied countries, any exchange of Nazi POWs and internees for Jews, or the sending of food (through the Allied blockade) to help feed the Jews of Europe.
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After quickly and smoothly settling the problem of dealing with non-Jewish Polish and Greek refugees, the delegates had much more difficulty in agreeing about even a relatively small item like the temporary settlement of Jewish refugees in North Africa. Eventually, an Anglo-American compromise was struck, based on one fundamental and tacit assumption: the Americans would not press the British over Palestine, while the latter would act with similar discretion about Jewish immigration to the United States.
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After the conference, Richard Law, minister of state at the British Foreign Office, wrote to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, commenting on the different internal pressures concerning refugees that faced the American and British governments. In Britain, he alleged, public officials felt extreme pressure from an alliance of Jewish organizations and archbishops “but as yet no counter-pressure from the many people who feared and opposed alien immigration.”
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In America, Law observed, there was, in addition to Jewish pressure, a body of opinion “which, without being purely anti-Semitic, is jealous and fearful of an alien immigration
per se.
And in contradistinction to the position at home, that body of
opinion is very highly organised indeed. The Americans, therefore, while they must do their utmost to placate Jewish opinion, dare not offend ‘American opinion.’ ”
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Law was probably correct in his assessment. President Roosevelt had been eager since 1939 not to give any credibility to anti-Semitic claims that he was an “instrument of the Jews,” especially while he was strenuously seeking to involve America more closely in the war, against the powerful weight of isolationist and nativist opinion.
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He also knew, as a practical political matter, that reversing congressional or popular sentiment on the immigration laws was not feasible either before or during the war.

What of later possibilities of rescue or slowing down the German genocidal machine by the bombing of Auschwitz-Birkenau? After September 1943, American and British bombers were able to reach targets all over the Reich, especially from airfields in southern Italy. On 4 April 1944, an Allied reconnaissance plane took off from an Italian base and, after a flight that took two and a half hours, managed to photograph the new industrial installations at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The photographs showing a synthetic-oil refinery were examined minutely, but no attention was paid to the gas chambers and crematoriums.
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On 20 August 1944, 127 Flying Fortresses escorted by a hundred Mustang fighters successfully dropped their bombs on a factory fewer than five miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau. On other occasions, too, the Allies targeted the nearby industrial complex of Auschwitz III (Buna-Manowitz), passing over the death camp and railway lines leading to it, which were not viewed as military targets.
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