Jewish Americans and the Holocaust

Jewish Americans and the Holocaust

Figure 8.17

Jewish refugees aboard the SS St. Louis were permitted to leave Hitler’s Germany in 1939. They intended to seek asylum in Cuba but were denied. They later appealed to the United States but were also denied asylum due to strict quotas in the number of Jewish migrants that were permitted to enter the nation at this time. After being denied asylum in the United States they were forced to return to Europe where many were later sent to concentration camps.

Jewish Americans also experienced discrimination in and out of the military. For many, theirs was a personal fight against Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. By early 1942, German military officials had transformed concentration camps into death camps. An estimated 6 million European Jews were murdered in poison chambers and crematoriums throughout Poland and Eastern Europe. Others were subjected to medical experiments to test the reaction of the human body to extreme temperatures, biological weapons, fire, radiation, and rapid altitude changes. Children and pregnant women were special victims of experiments designed to test fertility and childhood diseases because Hitler hoped to use these scientific experiments to study the body’s ability to recover from wartime injuries and promote fertility and childhood immunity among members of his “master race.”

As Russian troops liberated the survivors of Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe throughout 1945, reports confirming the suspected brutality of the Final Solution produced strong reactions of outrage and denial in Americans. For the last decade, Americans had demonstrated a different kind of denial, relegating news of German atrocities against Jewish citizens to the back pages of newspapers. Thanks to the efforts of Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, intelligence reports confirming Hitler’s intention to exterminate the Jews remained in front of the US public throughout the war.

With few exceptions, Americans supported the continuation of immigration quotas and other restrictions that prevented tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from entering the country during the 1930s and throughout World War II. After newspapers stopped printing these reports as news, Jewish leaders purchased full-page advertisements detailing the killing with headings such as “How Well Are You Sleeping? Is There Something You Could Have Done to Save Millions of Innocent People from Torture and Death?” Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers and others failed in their attempts to modify immigration restrictions to allow Jewish refugees to enter the United States until 1944. At this time, Jewish leaders convinced Rogers’s peers in Congress and President Roosevelt to lift immigration restrictions against Jewish refugees and create the War Refugee BoardEstablished by the federal government in 1944, the War Refugee Board worked with international Jewish organizations and foreign governments to help rescue Jews and others who were at risk of being sent to German concentration camps.. Other Americans donated money to international Jewish groups who waged secret operations in Nazi-held territory.