The U.S. and the Holocaust

Holocaust survivor Eva Geiringer reflects on life in Auschwitz. In 1944, Americans first learned details of the camp when three escapees meticulously documented what they’d seen. When the War Refugee Board received the report from Switzerland, they made the firsthand testimony public, and it became headline news. But Americans still couldn't grasp the scale and scope of the crime.

Award-winning memoirist Daniel Mendelsohn reflects on myths surrounding the Holocaust, like how people assume every Jew died in a concentration camp or gas chamber. But that’s only part of the story – they were killed in all different manners and unimaginable ways. The tragedy is that there were millions who couldn’t be rescued, and the particularity of what happened is already being erased.

In 1944, President Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board – the only government agency created by any of the Allies specifically to do what it could for the Jews still under Nazi threat. Much of the Board’s most effective work was focused on Hungary with the help of fellow diplomats from neutral nations. It was still home to some 800,000 Jews, the largest remaining population in Europe.

After the Germans occupied northern France, Susan and Joseph made their way from Versailles to the Chateau des Morelles, a home for Jewish children separated from their parents. Their father had gotten himself, his wife and youngest boy to the United States. But, when Susan and Joseph finally arrived at Ellis Island to join them, only their father was there to greet them.

In 1940, American public opinion for providing aid to Britain was slowly starting to change. Charles Lindbergh became the chief spokesman for a new isolationist organization dedicated to keeping America out of the war – the America First Committee. Founded by a handful of students at the Yale Law School, it soon became the largest anti-war organization in the history of the United States.

In 1939, two senators introduced a bill to help refugee children enter the United States. It was backed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt – and opposed by the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies. But no group was more adamantly opposed to admitting Jewish refugees than the German American Bund, led by the “American Fuhrer.”

By the early 1900s, many white protestant Americans came to fear they were about to be outnumbered and outbred by immigrants and their offspring. They embraced a new pseudo-science born in Britain, called eugenics. It falsely claimed you could eliminate everything from poverty and prostitution to disabilities if you stopped the individuals they dismissed as “socially defective” from reproducing.

It wasn’t easy for foreign correspondents to report what was really happening in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Sources were often too frightened to talk. Reporters were reluctant to quote witnesses by name for fear of betraying them to the secret police – called the Gestapo. But the best American journalists did write about what was going on, however much the Nazi government tried to hide it.

As Jewish children living in Germany, these Holocaust survivors saw their lives turn upside down when the Nazis came into power. But the changes didn’t happen overnight. Instead, they were gradual – step by step – and no one realized how much worse things would get.