President Of The World Jewish Congress example essay topic

America's Responses To The Holocaust – OvertakenAmerica's Responses To The Holocaust – Overtaken By Events? America's Responses to the Holocaust – Overtaken by Events? In response to the Gallup Poll question, ? Do you think the U.S. should declare war on Germany and send our army and navy abroad to fight?? the September, 1939?

No? total was 94% of the re spondees; in October, the? No? response was 95%, in December, 96.59%. In April 1940, after the invasion of Norway by the Germans, the? No? response to this question was 96.3% and in June, 1940, after the collapse of France, it was 93%?

No.? Washington, D.C., was a? town where Raleigh Haberdasher on F Street ran advertisements suggesting that a man in an office job really should own more than one suit. (When the new and radical idea of zippers on men's trousers began to appear, Woodward and Lothrop posted signs in its men's department saying that for $3.50 it would remove the zippers and replace them with buttons.) A town where people routinely bought Chevrolet's not new but used.?? White residential neighborhoods were governed by strict covenants forbidding homeowners to sell their houses to blacks (or, in many neighborhoods, to Jews).? Washington, D.C. was a town, together with a government and a country completely unprepared to take on global responsibilities that the world was pushing toward it. The executive branch, despite its expansion during the New Deal, was still relatively small.

Its employees were passionately involved in monitoring egg prices and post office construction. They were social workers, "New Dealers' and not capable or desirous of analyzing and handling the global indicators of war developing in Europe and Asia. Unemployment was still close to ten million. One third of the black minority was on relief. While Franklin Roosevelt was a president with global capabilities, he was leading a nation still in pain from their first global conflict, trying to recover from economic depression, and desperately wanting to return to? normalcy? This was a country digging in its heels to avoid becoming part of the world, much less wanting to lead it.

The U.S. policy and response toward the victims of the Nazi genocide were inadequate. The scale of the Holocaust could have been lessened by U.S. involvement – but it was not. However, this inaction must be understood in the larger context of the times, including the economic, political, and widespread isolationism – as well as anti-Semitism. The 1929 world depression is a significant event in terms of understanding the attitude of the American government and people toward the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany (and, later, in Nazi-occupied Europe). Economic hardship and the insecurity it inspired had a profound impact on Americans. It instilled a profound fear in the hearts of the average person: a fear that he or she would not be able to provide for their family.

In the worst year of the Great Depression, 1932, between 25 and 50 percent of the American work force was unemployed. People who had always been able to put food on the table suddenly found themselves standing in bread and soup lines. People who had always been able to put a roof over their heads suddenly could not pay for housing and had to put all their property in their car or on their back and take to the roads looking for work. In the Midwest, drought and winds caused fertile farmlands to go dry and turn to dust. Many farmers in what was known as the Dust Bowl lost their farms and took to the roads with their families looking for work. Factories closed and put people out of work as well.

Henry Ford closed down one of his factories and put 75,000 people on the unemployment line. As a result, Americans become very inward-looking people, a people concerned first and foremost with feeding and sheltering their own families, and very little concerned with the situation of the Jews, or the Poles, or anyone else in Europe. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated president in 1933. In 1937, the small economic recovery that the New Deal had achieved was dwindling. Recession set in, and unemployment soared. Ten million Americans were out of work, and American confidence was shattered.

The issue of jobs was highest: you were unemployed or you knew someone who was unemployed, or maybe both. As the U.S. was struggling to emerge from the depression, a fear of strangers / foreigners /anti-Semitism began to grow among many Americans. Roosevelt?'s? New Deal? was often described as a? Jew Deal? because of several high-ranking Jewish staff members and their perceived influence on policy. A poll by Elmo Roper asked in 1938: ?

What kinds of people do you object to?? 38 percent answered, Jews; another 27 percent answered? noisy, cheap, boisterous, loud people.? Another Roper poll, same year: 70-85 percent opposed raising quotas to help Jewish refugees. In 1939, 53 percent of the American people told Roper that the Jews were? different? and for this reason? deserved social and economic restrictions.?

It was at this moment that the European Jews were looking for escape from the Nazis. The visa became, literally, their ticket to survival. In Washington, harsh opponents of immigration argued for a reduction of the U.S. quota by 90%. They further demanded a halt to permanent immigration for ten years, or until unemployment fell to three million. They wanted employment for Americans, and nothing else. Politically, it was a time of conflict, compromise, and deceit.

The president knew that the country did not want war (the Gallup Poll showed 83% felt that way). Many believed that Roosevelt could have gotten public support for a rescue effort if he had only spoken out on the issue. If nothing else, statements by the president would have brought the news of Jewish extermination into the headlines. As it was, Roosevelt did not speak out about a rescue effort.

But even as he was the leader of those who wished to stay out, he asked Congress to authorize arms traffic with Britain and France. Early in 1940, he decided to give Britain over a million rifles. Third, he assured extension of the draft. Then the White House began to give out statements about submarines being found off our coasts. In early 1941, the president instituted the Lend-Lease proposal. While Roosevelt was taking steps to support Britain and the rest of Europe, the main rescue proposals that were suggested at the time and dismissed by government officials, provides evidence that much more could have been done to rescue Nazi victims.

The record shows that the reasons the government gave for not being able to help the Jews were quickly set aside when it came to helping other Europeans. If this is true, then it is clear that there was a pervasive anti-Semite attitude in the United States. Roosevelt, however, knew that the war was not just a Jewish issue, and Britain could not win the war alone. Britain had a million men in France.

France had three million in arms. Italy and Russia were our allies. Italy had a million men against Germany and Russia had four million. Yet, with all of this, Germany was never driven out of France. Italy was against us instead of for us, and so was Japan. The president knew that to drive Hitler out of France, he would have to send the American Army and Navy.

Roosevelt believed that if he told the people the truth he would be defeated in 1940, and the nation could fall prey to Hitler. He thought that he had to trick the nation into acting in its own best interests. Another element of American inaction was isolationism. Opponents of intervention (isolationists) emphasized the absence of any direct threats to the security of the United States. They recalled World War I – the record of intrigue, enmity, atrocity and vengeance – and doubted that intervention by the U.S. would change anything. They talked about the fact that the world was consumed by violence and that America could not be the world's policeman.

Intervention, they argued, was simply not in the national interest of the United States. Advocates of intervention emphasized that this was a test of American world leadership and of the strength of the international community. They argued that defense of world order was a requirement for world citizenship, and international responsibility. With democratic Europe impotent before the horrors of the Nazis, the United States had an obligation to stop the atrocities, stop the fighting, and punish the war criminals. Letting war go on might encourage aggression and ethnic cleansing throughout the rest of Europe and produce general destabilization and a torrent of refugees. But in the 1930's it was hard to overrate the appeal of isolationism.

In 1937, Roosevelt sat in his office with his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, talking about the Germans and Japanese working hard producing weapons. They? had a cable from the U.S. consul general in Berlin saying members of the Hitler government were? psychopathic cases and would normally be under treatment somewhere.?? While Roosevelt knew that the world was coming toward some kind of explosion, and somehow, he had to get the country prepared for it, he was also very aware of the politics and the mood of the country. In a speech on October 5, 1937, Roosevelt said that? It seems to be unfortunately true, that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.?

He got an immediate and violent response to his speech.? Six pacifist organizations jointly charged that the president's speech? points the American people down the road that led to the World War.? The American Federation of Labor responded, ? American labor does not wish to be involved in European or Asiatic wars.?

Members of Congress raged and shouted for hours and days and some talked of impeachment. It was many months before Roosevelt again dared to mention the threat of war.? On November 8-9, 1938, Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, made the refugee crisis even more serious. In the U.S., however, government policy on the refugees remained the same. At his weekly press conference, President Roosevelt expressed his anger at the latest Nazi atrocities.

But when he was asked if the U.S. intended to allow more European Jews into the country, the president replied, ? That is not in contemplation. We have a quota system.? Even the advocates of refugees did not suggest raising the quota. The representative of? American Friends Service Committee? said, ?

To our knowledge, no one is trying to change the quota. It is considered highly dangerous to attempt such a step, and might jeopardize even the present quota.? As a result of Kristallnacht, about 20,000 children had been left homeless by the destruction and the imprisonment of Jewish men. In the U.S., Senator Wagner and Representative Rogers proposed the Wagner-Rogers bill that would allow these children to immigrate into the U.S. outside the existing quota.

The bill would allow only those children, and would not permit other children later. It was a one time only proposition. According to four different polls conducted in 1938, between 71% and 85% of the American public opposed raising the quota to help refugees. An estimated 67% of the American public wanted to keep all refugees out of the country. According to a Gallup poll taken regarding the Wagner-Rogers bill, two thirds of the American public opposed it. In the end, the bill did not even reach the floor of Congress for debate.

It was killed in committee. During the debate on the Wagner-Rogers bill, President Roosevelt remained silent. When the president was on a cruise in the Caribbean, his wife telegraphed him to ask if she could publicly say that both of them supported the bill. The president answered, ?

You may, but it's better that I don? t for the time being.? The? time being? did not change. The president never voiced an opinion. When Nazi Germany attacked western Europe and German bombs fell on England, just two years later, many Americans offered refuge to British children. This was a great contrast to the lack of support offered to Jewish children just two years earlier. The type of British child most American families requested was? a six year old girl, preferably with blond hair.?

On July 6-15, 1938, The Evian Conference was called by Roosevelt in order to discuss the refugee problem. It was a worldwide meeting, with all but one (Italy) of the 33 major nations invited attending. Some people believed that the reason for the Evian Conference was to show anger and disapproval of the Nazis, and others think that it was only a ploy to appease some of the more vocal public groups. The British delegate did not mention the possibility of British controlled Palestine. Instead, he said that the British Commonwealth was largely unavailable because it was already overcrowded and the climate was too severe. Britain itself, the delegate said, was completely out of the question as a place for refugees because of the high rate of unemployment.

The French delegate said that France had already reached extreme saturation of refugees. The Belgian and Dutch representatives were likewise in agreement. The Australian delegate said that thinly settled Australia could not be given as refuge since they had no real racial problems and did not want to import one. The Caribbean volunteered to contribute large areas for agricultural cultivation. In the end, nothing was accomplished.

In May, 1939, one month before the outbreak of World War II, the ocean liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, bound for the U.S. with several hundred Jewish refugees. The refugees figured they had nothing to lose and took the chance. The St. Louis sailed up and down the Atlantic coast of the U.S. from June 4-6, but was not permitted to dock at any port even though many of the refugees had valid, American quota numbers. It then sailed to Havana, Cuba, but the refugees were refused entry. In the end, the St. Louis sailed back to Europe.

The passengers landed at Amsterdam, Holland. Less than a year later, the German armies swept across western Europe and the former refugees of the St. Louis were caught up in the Holocaust. Shanghai was the only place in the world where Jewish refugees were permitted to land without a visa. It became a refuge for thousands of Jews who otherwise would have died.

On August 24, 1939, Roosevelt returned from his vacation and Cordell Hull met him at Union Station. Hull's greeting was not a happy one. At the same time they were meeting, Reinhard Heydrich, of Hitler's S.S., had put one of his agents, Alfred Naujocks, in the German town of Gleiwitz on the Polish border. Naujocks was to fake an? incident? – a Polish attack on Germany.

Roosevelt and Hull wrote a message to Hitler the next week to establish diplomacy instead of war. Neither of them thought it would do any good, but in the case of war, whenever it occurred, it would clearly place blame on Hitler. While Roosevelt was trying to figure out how to respond internationally, he had plenty to deal with domestically. He had to contend with not only with the country's lack of preparedness, but its mood, its economy, and its divisiveness. There were the Irish who were still unhappy about supporting the British who had exploited Ireland; anti-Semites who, while unwilling to openly admit it, were in support of the Nazis; socialists who wavered depending on Moscow's attitude; true isolationists who did not want to get involved in a global situation comparable to one that had so recently taken so many lives, and others with diverse reasons for not wanting to be involved. Then, there were the foreign propagandists, who not only wrote speeches for members of Congress, but who established? front? committees such as the Make Europe Pay Its War Debts Committee, and American Jewish committees, and British propagandists.

Every step that Roosevelt made to prepare the United States for war or help the British, he received vicious criticism and opposition. In 1940, Congress had voted reluctantly to draft young men, but only for one year. In 1941, the isolationists had substantial power and the draft was very likely going to expire. One young House Armed Services Committee member from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, met with Speaker Sam Rayburn to strategize about how to pull the votes together to extend the draft.

Rayburn and Johnson called Secretary Hull and asked for a dramatic statement in support of extension. They suggested that it say something about the country needing military power for its own defense whether it entered war or not. Rayburn read Hull's letter on the floor right before the vote. The message was that whatever happened in Europe, the great and glorious American republic must be ready to defend itself, and that? the American flag is too precious to endanger.? The vote was 203 to 202 in favor of extension. Four months before Pearl Harbor, the Congress decided to keep its armed forces intact.

Information about what the United States had access to on the Holocaust varies significantly, both in quality and content. There was a tendency to disbelieve the reports that were received as atrocity? tales? There was a general failure by both the government and the public to believe mass executions of thousands of civilians. This occurred largely from a failure to recognize the extent of Nazi policies since during World War I, Western governments had manufactured some atrocity stories to sway world opinion.

The discovery about manufactured atrocity reports were still fresh in the minds of the public and government. As an example, Felix Frankfurter, a Jewish Supreme Court justice who was among the best-connected people in Washington, D.C., could not bring himself to believe what he heard directly from Jan Karski, a Polish underground courier, in 1943. If the government, and the people did not really know or believe what was happening to the Jews, gypsies, and others, they could not act, or make plans for action. Recently declassified documents show that British officials had strong evidence of portions of the Holocaust directly from decodes of German police and SS messages. However, while this information was available, and reports were certainly made, the British government was not made widely aware, and tensions between Britain and the United States provided Britain with enough reason not to provide all available information to Washington.

In July 1942, a German industrialist living near Auschwitz-Birkenau learned of the camp's existence through friends and contacts in the Nazi high command. The industrialist, Dr. Eduard Schulte, also learned of Hitler's determination to destroy all of the Jews in Europe. In the effort to alert the leaders of the western democracies about the genocide, Schulte traveled to neutral Switzerland. In Geneva, he relayed information about the destruction of Jews to Gerhardt Reigner, an official of the World Jewish Congress.

Reigner transmitted Schulte's information to the British Foreign Ministry and to the U.S. State Department. Reigner specifically requested the State Department to forward the information to Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress. In August 1942, Reigner's telegram describing Schulte's information reached both London and Washington. Prior to this information, the west had information that atrocities had been conducted, but no one understood that the atrocities were a preparation to the total destruction of the Jews.

Schulte's information was the first information received by western leaders that there was a Nazi plan at the highest levels to eliminate all Jews and that deportations were only steps along the way to total extermination. Reigner's information was received by the State Department in Washington as? fantastic allegations? and they refused to pass on the information to Rabbi Wise. While some thought that the State Department declined to forward the information on the basis that the information would cause Jewish officials to react negatively (in the State Department's opinion). There was another belief that the action was indicative of anti-Semitism rampant in that department. A State Department official wrote an internal memorandum explaining U.S. policy regarding refugees: ? There was always the danger that the German government might agree to turn over to the United States and to Great Britain a large number of Jewish refugees.?

By late fall of 1942, sources in Europe had confirmed the contents of Reigner's telegram. One source was the Polish underground courier Jan Karski. He entered both the Warsaw ghetto and the Belzec death camp to witness the Nazi policies so that he could authoritatively report that Jewish destruction was not a rumor and that he saw it himself. Karski then smuggled himself out of Nazi-occupied Poland and to Britain from which he traveled to America. He then informed western governments of what was happening to the Jews in Poland. On November 24, 1942, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles informed Rabbi Wise, ?

I regret to tell you, Dr. Wise, that these (documents) confirm and justify your deepest fears? about the annihilation of European Jewry. That same evening, Rabbi Wise gave a press conference in which he detailed the destruction of the Jews in Europe based upon information the State Department had confirmed. The article in the newspaper, the first U.S. government acknowledgment of the Holocaust, appeared on page 10 of the New York Times. By December 1942, the United States government and the American Jewish Leaders were aware of the atrocities being committed against the Jews and other people of Europe by the Nazis. The United States did not pursue a policy to rescue the endangered Jews of Europe and the victims of Nazi genocide until 1944.

The Depression, strict immigration policies established in 1921 and 1924, isolationism in Congress, anti-Semitism, immigration conservatism and obstructionism in the State Department (Cordell Hull had opposed the anti-Nazi boycott and Breckenridge Long was a known anti-Semite) and Roosevelt's blind reliance on the State Department all contributed to this failure. The Depression also encouraged an unusual coalition of labor union and business leaders on the issue of immigration, specifically the enlargement of any quotas, an attitude reflected in Congress. In March 1943, one month before the Bermuda Conference, Secretary of State Hull, President Franklin Roosevelt, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and British ambassador to the U.S., Lord Halifax, met at the White House. At one point in the wide ranging discussions, Secretary of State Hull raised the subject of the 70,000 Bulgarian Jews and the possibility of their rescue from the Nazis. According the transcript of the meeting, Eden replied, ? The whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very difficult.

We should move very cautiously about offering to take all the Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and in Germany.? Eden was afraid that large numbers of Jews would be saved and result in huge refugee problems. This was his fear and everybody in that room knew then what was the fate of the European Jews. They had known for four months.

In that room were the foremost leaders of the two great western democracies with the one exception of Winston Churchill. As far as the record shows, no one objected to that statement. On April 19, 1943, the same day as the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, British and American diplomats met on the island of Bermuda to discuss what might be done to relieve the plight of European Jews. Breckinridge Long successfully argued against making concessions to Jews at the conference. The Bermuda Conference was held largely as a result of growing public pressure in England.

However, ? Rescue was not the purpose of Bermuda. The purpose was to dampen growing pressures for rescue.? In a phrase, Bermuda was a? facade for inaction? Again, there were no results.?

The job of the Bermuda conference apparently was not to rescue victims of Nazi terror, ? said Rabbi Israel Goldstein, ? but to rescue our State Department and the British Foreign Office.?? Not even the pessimists among us expected such sterility, ? said Sam Dick stein of the House of Representatives. Several months after the Bermuda Conference, the Jewish newspaper? The Frontier? wrote, ?

The Warsaw ghetto is liquidated. The leaders of Polish Jewry are dead by their own hand, and the world which looks on passively is, in its way, dead too.? Fourteen months after the State Department confirmed the Nazi extermination of the Jews, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board, a government agency whose purpose was to rescue Jews still alive in Europe. As usual, it was hard to tell whether this was a political gesture, or a humanitarian effort.

The Roosevelt administration was reluctant to be seen as friendly to the Jewish cause even at this late date. Public pressure had been forming and it had become evident that the government, particularly the State Department, was avoiding the task of Jewish rescue. The U.S. Treasury Department, under Secretary Morgenthau, realized that the State Department (led by Breckenridge Long) had actually obstructed efforts to rescue Jews. The State Department had issued secret instructions to suppress information about atrocities on Jews and to postpone issuing visas to Jews trying to escape the Nazis. Morgenthau had his subordinates at Treasury prepare a report detailing the State Department's actions, or lack of actions, regarding the Jewish question. The report, titled?

On the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of Jews? was sent to the president on January 15, 1944. President Roosevelt was in a position where he had to do something or a scandal was going to break. On January 22, 1944, the president established the War Refugee Board. The executive order the president signed establishing the War Refugee Board specified that it would have the support of every government agency, specifically the support of the State Department, Treasury Department, and the War Department. The best achievement of the War Refugee Board was the successful transport of 982 refugees (89% of the Jewish) from unoccupied territories in Europe to a small town in upstate New York (Oswego).

In order to alleviate the part of the American public that was against the admission of refugees, President Roosevelt pledged that the 982 refugees would return to Europe after the war's end. In fact, the refugees had to sign a document promising to do that, although the majority of the refugees had lost their entire families to the Nazis. In spite of the pledge, the refugees were met by hostility on the part of many residents of Oswego. After the war, President Truman issued an executive order permitting the Oswego refugees to remain in the United States. John Peele, a Treasury Department official who was a strong advocate of Jewish rescue, said this about the War Refugee Board: ? What we did was little enough.

It was late late and little.? The failure or negligence on the part of the United States with regard to the Nazi genocide was at least partially due to the State Department's anti-Semitism in the form of Breckenridge Long, a staunch anti-Communist, and the bureaucrat in charge of immigration issues up until the creation of the WRB in 1944. A memo of 1940 by Long requests that Jewish refugees be kept out of the country by? advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way, which would postpone the granting of visas.? It is widely acknowledged, even by the strongest historical supporters of FDR (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and William vanden Heuvel), that Breckenridge Long tried to bury the issue and actively sought to dissuade Congress and the President from enacting legislation that could have helped the Jews. In November, 1943, for example, Long testified before the Congress on a resolution introduced by The House Foreign Affairs Committee which would have created a commission of experts to try and rescue the remaining Jews of Europe. Long exaggerated the number of Jews to be rescued by stating there were 580,000 that would have to be brought to the U.S., while in fact there were only 200,000.

In 1944, after Roosevelt received Morgenthau's report, the WRB is established and perhaps as many as 180,000 Hungarian Jews are saved as a direct result. Two major events had to come together in order to produce results. First, the movement started by Peter Bergson and his persistent pursuit of bringing the Holocaust to the attention of the Government and the public, and, second, the efforts of Treasury Department Officials led by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., which led to an uncovering of the deliberate obstructionism and cover-up of the Department of State. It is an open question whether FDR's decision to create the WRB was more a political move in light of the pressing public pressure and congressional debate, or a humanitarian gesture after he understood how he and the people had been deceived by the State Department. In March of 1944, Germany violated its alliance with Hungary and occupied the country. Led by Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi expert on deportations, they went to work.

In less than two months, 439,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland. It was an unparalleled act of Nazi destruction, the high point of Eichmann's murderous career. The Jews of Hungary went to their death completely unaware of what was in store for them. As Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel said, ?

The diplomats in the western capitals knew about the Holocaust, but the Jews of Hungary did not.? Wiesel's village was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944. In the summer of 1944, Jewish underground leaders in Europe forwarded information about the destruction of Hungarian Jewry to London and Washington. They requested that the U.S. air force bomb the railroad lines to the death camp, and bomb the death camp itself.

The request was received by the War Refugee Board in Washington and was forwarded to the War Department. The War Department rejected it on the grounds that the aircraft could not be diverted to a target that was not? military related.? The war department also insisted that bombers flying from Britain did not have the ability to attack a site in distant Poland. However, the U.S. and British bombers stationed in Italy were already flying missions to Poland.

In the immediate vicinity of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Germans had established numerous synthetic oil refineries. In the effort to destroy those refineries, and cripple the German war effort, the U.S. air force, flying from Italy, repeatedly bombed the region around Auschwitz-Birkenau at the same time when the Hungarian Jews were being deported there. On two occasions, the camp itself was accidentally bombed, hitting a barracks. When the railroad line leading into the death camp was finally struck, the destruction of victims came to a temporary halt. One of the major reasons that President Roosevelt did not act, and one of the major reasons that the State Department did not act (even after they became convinced that atrocities were happening), was the fear of the anti-Semites and isolationists in Congress.

Unfortunately, the anti-Semitism in Congress was a mirror of public opinion at that time. In January 1943, when Polish Jewry had been destroyed and the rest of European Jewry was on the verge of destruction, the Rope poll asked Americans a simple question: ? Would it be a good idea, or a bad idea to admit more refugees (i. e., Jews) after the war?? Seventy-eight percent of the respondents answered it would be? a bad idea.?

In 1944, a survey of Americans identified? the most dangerous group to the USA? as 1. Jews (24%) 2. Japanese (16%) 3. Germans (8%).

Similar to other countries, the United States failed to respond effectively to Nazi crimes that foreshadowed the Holocaust. In 1938, Congress refused to increase Jewish immigration quotas to accommodate those fleeing Nazi persecution. The United States government knew of the killing centers as early as 1942, but failed to respond until 1944. Obedience and loyalty to the state were carefully manipulated by the Nazis during implementation of the Final Solution. In Germany, Poland, and elsewhere, Nazi and Nazi allies were doing their duty and following orders.

And, yes, a few seemed to enjoy their jobs in a sick way. And in the United States, bureaucrats were doing their duty and following orders. And, again, a few seemed to enjoy it more than others. Racism, corruption and greed killed a lot of Jewish and other Nazi victims. But delusion, disbelief, fear, political ineptness (inadequate, ill-conceived and thoughtless) and selfishness killed even more people. Few people thought clearly and acted according to their conscience.

Partisanship and nationalism clouded the ideals of reasonable speech and consequential actions. Eden and Long did not lay back in apathy because they were evil and anti-Semitic, but because they failed to think through what they were doing, or not doing. Did Roosevelt make too many petty compromises for the sake of his career? Or, is it possible that we all failed as human beings. Did we fail to respect the sanctity of human life.

Have we dehumanized war by large-scale modern warfare? Has human life become cheap and expendable. Have we lost the ability to believe in our politicians (are they believable? )? Have we become too obedient? Did we make logistics (transportation) the single greatest element of success or failure in saving lives?

Half a century later, Serbian concentration camps imprisoned Muslims who were on the verge of becoming human skeletons. The unfortunate starving women and children of Somalia suffered in the same sense. The piles of massacred bodies in Rwanda remind us of the horrors discovered by the liberators of the German concentration camps. There is a need to reconsider the basic concepts by which we live.

The Holocaust, and the world response to it, brought up difficult questions, demanding new answers, or at least adaptations of the old ones. The Holocaust (and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Cambodia, etc.) is where brutal and selfish nationalism can lead us. There is a need to reinforce and strengthen international organizations, to enlarge the fellowship between people, to merge races and nations. The free world beat the Nazi philosophy not only by force but also by spirit. That victory dictates hope to a new order, and only by protecting the order which seeks values and justice is there a chance to define ourselves from the recurrence of Nazism, or other forms of human annilhation. We must reject racism and nationalism in every form.

Nazism is not only a German phenomenon, but a general humanitarian one, against which no people is immune. We? ve proven it. We must protect communication (is it really possible that a large part of humanity lived with an almost total lack of information about what was happening in Occupied Europe? ). The importance of human communication, the opening of communication lines, the cultivation of journalism and other means of communication is one of the clear lessons. It would be better to have an open society with a wild flow of information than denial, hiding and suppression.

Last, we must study that period, because the events of this war expanded the concept of man, the possibilities of what he can and will do. It taught us things we did not know about the nature of man. It taught us about geography. With today's technology, there is nowhere far enough away. Roger W. Smith, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 8 Number 3, Winter 1994,329 G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary.

York, Pa. : Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947,328. Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983) David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984) Walter Liqueur and Richard Breitman, Breaking the Silence (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) Deborah E. Lip stadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1986) Verne W. Newton, ed., FDR and the Holocaust (New York, 1996) Robert Dalle k, Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) Judgment of the Tribunal, 6 F.R.D. 139, Holocaust History Project web Assassins of memory: essays on the denial of the Holocaust.

D 804.3. V 5313 1992 Nuremberg Documents PS-4064, as cited in Yitzhak Arad, ed., Unichtozhenie Evreev SSR vgody nemetskoi okkupatsii (1941-1944) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1991), p. 54: Git elman, Zvi, Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1997, pp. 255-256 President Truman's UNRWA Message to Congress, web / web Documents of World War II Abraham Sac her, The Redemption of the Unwanted, Harper and Row (1987) Nazi Book Burnings and the American Response. Washington, DC, Holocaust Memorial Council and Library of Congress Center for the Book, [1988]. (Y 3.

H 74: 2 N 23) Night of Pogroms: "Kristallnacht', November 9-10, 1938. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1988. (Y 3. H 74: 2 P 75) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.