![]() ![]() In the first years after the United States declared war, when the Nazis’ killing machine was at its most intense in 1942 and early 1943, U.S. forces bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, or even Auschwitz itself? line was that the best way to help the Jews of Europe and liberate the concentration camps was to defeat the Nazis on the battlefield.Īs Greene put it: “We rally as a nation to defeat fascism, we just don’t rally as a nation to rescue the victims of fascism.” The United States actually had no formal refugee policies or protections until after World War II.ĭuring the war’s later years, the official U.S. should let in more refugees than the country had admitted prior to the war, and only 5 percent agreed. ![]() A poll in December 1945 asked Americans if the U.S. With one notable exception - the resettlement of nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees in 1944 to a specially built refugee camp in Fort Ontario, New York, on condition they return home after the war - “Americans were very reluctant to let in refugees,” Greene noted. A Gallup poll in early January 1943 found that fewer than half of the respondents believed the Nazis could have killed 2 million Jews (by that time 4 million actually had been murdered). Another factor in America’s shortcomings in helping European Jews was the inability of Americans - including Jews - to grasp the magnitude of the Nazi genocide. “I think Middle East and British/American politics had a lot to do with their lack of clear success,” said Erbelding. In the end, however, there wasn’t enough support for the army’s creation. ![]() Among the group’s supporters were artist Arthur Szyk, screen writer Ben Hecht, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Rep. (Library of Congress)īergson’s group circulated petitions, did radio interviews, ran newspaper ads, held dinners and staged We Will Never Die pageants across the country both to call for a Jewish army and for a stronger U.S. Congress significantly tightened its immigration policies in 1924, making immigration more difficult for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Immigrants waiting to be transferred to the U.S. He just needed the Allies to agree to the creation of this army.” “He argued that he could get tens of thousands of Jews from all over the world who would fight and who had a stronger motivation to fight than the Allied nations did. government to create this army, saying there are American Jews and Hebrews in Palestine who wanted to fight and that they should be allowed to fight under one flag,” said Rebecca Erbelding, a historian and author. “He was trying to lobby politicians and the U.S. In 1940, Peter Bergson, a leader of the Irgun Jewish militia in Palestine who also was known as Hillel Kook, arrived in the United States from Palestine to lobby for a Jewish army that would both assist in the war effort and help create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. State Department and others stoked fears that Jewish refugees from Germany could be spies for the Nazis. Once the war began, some officials in the U.S. “Antisemitism and xenophobia keep refugees out, but we are also in the depths of one of the worst economic depressions this country has ever faced.”Īt a time when there were bread lines in the United States and one in four Americans was unemployed at the peak of the Great Depression in 1933, letting in Jewish refugees who would compete for jobs was out of the question, Greene observed. And there were severe limits between 19, the first year of the Great Depression,” he said. “Between 19, immigration laws made it difficult to get in. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on America and the Holocaust. “There were multiple factors, and the film Burns made helps viewers understand that the answers are complicated,” said Daniel Greene, curator of an exhibit at the U.S. and the Holocaust,” demonstrates, there is more to it than that. ![]()
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