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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
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[b]PART ONE: BACKGROUND
1. THE SETTING: EUROPE AND AMERICA
In Europe: The "Final Solution"[/b]
During the spring of 1941, while planning the invasion of Russia, the Nazis made the decision to annihilate the Jews in the territories to be taken from the USSR. On June 22, before dawn, the German army opened its drive against the Soviet forces. Following directly behind the frontline troops were special mobile units (Einsatzgruppen) that rounded up Jews and killed them in mass shootings. Typkal of these scenes of horror is an eyewitness report by a German construction engineer:
Between June and December 1941, the Einsatzgruppen and associated support units murdered some 500,000 Jews in what had been eastern Poland and Russia. A second sweep through the occupied territory, lasting from fall 1941 through 1942, annihilated close to 900,000 more. [2]
Meanwhile, Hitler had ordered the systematic extermination of all Jews in the Nazi grip. The directive, issued on July 31,1941, by Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, instructed Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, to organize "a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe," Heydrich, who was already in charge of the mobile killing operations in Russia, began preparations for collecting the Jews in the rest of the Nazi domain and deporting them to eastern Europe. The organization of the deportations was assigned to Adolf Eichmann. [3]
Advanced planning for the extermination of the Jews took place in Berlin on January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference. There Heydrich outlined the basic program to a group of German officials whose agencies would collaborate in carrying out what the conference minutes called "the final solution of the Jewish question." In the interval between Goering's directive to Heydrich and the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis had acted to hem in their victims. From October 1941 on, Jews were forbidden exit from German-held territory. [4]
Most of the slaughter of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen in the East in 1941 and 1942 involved mass shooting at large grave sites. For the rest of Europe's Jews, the Germans established six extermination centers in Poland. The first of these, at Chelmno, began its work in late 1941, with gassing vans as the instrument of murder. The victims, packed into the enclosed trucks, were suffocated by carbon monoxide from the vehicles' exhaust systems. Mass annihilation at most of the other locations (Belzec, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz) was well under way in the spring and summer of 1942. There gas-chamber buildings and crematoria were constructed. Gassing was by carbon monoxide fumes produced by stationary engines, except at Auschwitz, where the crystalline Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide, or prussic acid) was used. Country by country, Jews from most parts of Europe were crowded into freight cars and carried to these assembly lines of death throughout 1942, 1943, and 1944. Nearly three million were murdered in the six killing centers. [i] [5]
The Nazis assigned very high priority to the annihilation of European Jewry. Locked in a world conflict, in which the very existence of their nation was at stake, Germany's leaders diverted significant amounts of war potential into the genocide program. Einsatzgruppen activities absorbed ammunition and able manpower. At several points in the march of murder, gasoline was used to burn the bodies of victims. The extermination process strained the overburdened German administrative machinery. But the heaviest costs were paid in transportation and labor. [7]
Moving millions of Jews across Europe to the death factories in Poland overloaded a railroad system that was hard put to meet essential transportation of troops and war material. Most important, despite a constant labor shortage, one that reached four million by 1944, the Nazis wiped out a capable work force of two to three million Jews. Even skilled Jews employed in war-related industries were deported to the gas chambers. And this occurred despite the recognition that Jewish labor productivity was frequently well above the norm, because Jews saw their best hope for survival in making themselves economically valuable. [8]
To kill the Jews, the Nazis were willing to weaken their capacity to fight the war. The United States and its allies, however, were willing to attempt almost nothing to save them.
[b]In America: Barriers to Rescue[/b]
Until the Nazis blocked the exits in the fall of 1941, the oppressed Jews of Europe might have fled to safety. But relatively few got out, mainly because the rest of the world would not take them in. The United States, which had lowered its barriers a little in early 1938, began raising them again in autumn 1939. Two years later, immigration was even more tightly restricted than before 1938, In fact, starting in July 1941, America's gates were nearly shut. The best chance to save the European Jews had passed. [9]
After 1941, with the Holocaust under way, the need for help became acute, By then, though, saving Jews was much more difficult, for open doors in the outside world, while essential, would not be enough, Determined rescue efforts would also be needed to salvage even a segment of European Jewry, But the United States did not take rescue action until January 1944, and even then the attempt was limited, Nor were America's nearly closed doors opened. Immigration was held to about 10 percent of the already small quota limits. [ii] Thus the second-and last-chance 10 help the Jews of Europe came and went. [10]
In the years before Pearl Harbor, the United States had reacted to the European Jewish crisis with concern but had refused to permit any sizable immigration of refugees, Although Congress and the Roosevelt administration had shaped this policy, it grew out of three important aspects of American society in the 19305: unemployment, nativistic restrictionism, and anti-Semitism. [11]
After Pearl Harbor, the war itself narrowed the possibilities for saving Jews. In addition, the mass media's failure to draw attention to Holocaust developments undercut efforts to create public pressure for government rescue action. But the deeper causes for the lateness and weakness of America's attempts at rescue, and for its unwillingness to take in more than a tiny trickle of fleeing Jews, were essentially the same ones that had determined the nation's reaction to the refugee crisis before Pearl Harbor.
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American Restrictionism From 193310 1941, opponents of refugee immigration had built their case around the high unemployment of the Great Depression. Restrictionists persistently asserted that refugees who came to the United States usurped jobs that rightfully belonged to unemployed American workers. Their viewpoint was widely accepted. The counterargument, that refugees were consumers as well as workers and thus provided as many jobs as they look, made little headway. [12]
Economic pressures against immigration had been reinforced by strong currents of nativism or "100 percent Americanism." These xenophobic feelings, which had run very high in the aftermath of World War I, had combined with economic forces during the 1920s to install the quota system, the nation's first broad restriction of immigration. Then, during the 1930s, anti-alien attitudes had played a major part in keeping refugee immigration at low levels. American nativism continued strong throughout World War II. [13]
Wartime prosperity did not dissolve the economic argument against immigration. Fear was widespread that the depression would return with the end of hostilities. Millions believed that demobilization of the armed forces and reconversion to a peacetime economy would bring, at the very least, an extended period of large-scale unemployment. [14]
Veterans' organizations were especially forceful in insisting on the protection of employment rights for returning servicemen. In their view, every foreigner allowed into the country meant unwarranted job competition. Accordingly, throughout the war, the American Legion called for a virtual ban on immigration, to last well into the postwar period. The Veterans of Foreign Wars demanded similarly tough restrictions. By August 1944, the VFW was urging a stop to all immigration for the next ten years. In the early 1940s, American Legion membership exceeded 1.2 million and included 28 senators and 150 congressmen. Enrollment in the VFW stood at nearly one million. In addition, a large array of patriotic groups actively backed the veterans' organizations in the drive to cut off immigration. In the forefront were the influential Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, a body that represented the legislative ' interests of 115 different organizations with combined memberships of some 2.5 million. [15]
The anti-immigration forces wielded substantial political power. Moreover, a large number of congressmen were staunchly restrictionist, a reflection of their own views as well as of attitudes that were popular in their home districts. Many of them, typified by Senator Robert Reynolds (Dem., N.C.), Senator Rufus Holman (Rep., Oreg.), and Representative William Elmer (Rep., Mo.), embraced an intense anti-alienism that shaded into anti-Semitism. [16]
Holman, who introduced a bill in 1942 to end all immigration (except temporary visits), constantly kept an eye open for attempts to weaken the barriers that kept aliens out. He once blocked legislation in the Senate simply because it aroused his suspicion "that it relaxes the immigration laws," though he openly admitted, "I know nothing about this bill." It did not concern immigration. Elmer, equally distrustful, warned the House in October 1943 of "a determined and well-financed movement ... to admit all the oppressed, Hitler-persecuted people of Germany and other European countries into our country." [17]
Even lawmakers as far removed from Reynolds, Holman, and Elmer as Senator Harold Burton (Rep., Ohio) lined up on the restrictionist side. Burton, a committed internationalist and a liberal-minded Unitarian, believed the United States should channel refugees "toward areas other than our own." He maintained that "there are many other places in the world where there is much more room for their reception than there is here." [18]
During the war, hundreds of bills were introduced in Congress to decrease immigration. Among the most important-and the most typical- were three put forward in the House. Leonard Allen (Dem., La.) initiated two of them. One would have suspended all immigration until the end of hostilities; the other called for terminating immigration when the war was over. Edward Rees (Rep., Kan.) sponsored a more moderate proposal: to cut the quotas in half for a ten-year period. [19]
The tendency in Congress was clear, and it frightened the leadership of several refugee-aid and social-service organizations. On the basis of their own information sources throughout the country, they were convinced by fall 1943 that a rising tide of public opinion, along with the anti-refugee mood in Congress, endangered the entire quota system. In response, these organizations began to plan an educational and lobbying effort to head off legislation for a "drastic curtailment of immigration." Their campaign probably helped preserve the quota system and avoid a complete stoppage of immigration; none of the many restrictionist bills were enacted. But it did not succeed in widening America's virtually dosed doors during the war, even to the extent of increasing the tiny percentage of the quotas that was being made available. [20]
America's limited willingness to share the refugee burden showed clearly in national opinion polls. In 1938, a year when the Nazis had sharply stepped up their persecution of Jews, four separate polls indicated that from 71 to 85 percent of the American public opposed increasing the quotas to help refugees. And 67 percent wanted refugees kept out altogether. In a survey taken in early 1939, 66 percent even objected to a one-time exception to allow 10,000 refugee children to enter outside the quota limits. [21]
Five years later, in the middle of the war, attitudes were no different. Asked in January 1943 whether "it would be a good idea or a bad idea to let more immigrants come into this country after the war," 78 percent of those polled thought it would be a bad idea. At the end of 1945, when the terrible conditions facing European displaced persons were widely known, only 5 percent of the respondents thought the United States should "permit more persons from Europe to come to this country each year than we did before the war." (Thirty-two percent believed the same number should be allowed in as before, 37 percent wanted fewer to enter, and 14 percent called for closing the doors entirely.) [22]
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American Anti-Semitism While it is obvious that many who opposed refugee immigration felt no antipathy against Jews, much restrictionist and anti-refugee sentiment was closely linked to anti-Semitism. The plain truth is that many Americans were prejudiced against Jews and were unlikely to support measures to help them. Anti-Semitism had been a significant determinant of America's ungenerous response to the refugee plight before Pearl Harbor. During the war years, it became an important factor in the nation's reaction to the Holocaust. [23]
American anti-Semitism, which had climbed to very high levels in the late 1930s, continued to rise in the first part of the 1940s. It reached its historic peak in 1944. By spring 1942, sociologist David Riesman was describing it as "slightly below the boiling point." Three years later, public-opinion expert Elmo Roper warned that "anti-Semitism has spread all over the nation and is particularly virulent in urban centers." [24]
During the decade before Pearl Harbor, more than a hundred anti-Semitic organizations had pumped hate propaganda throughout American society. At the head of the band were Father Charles E. Coughlin and his Social Justice movement, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, the German-American Bund, and the Reverend Gerald B. Winrod's Protestant fundamentalist Defenders of the Christian Faith. Within a few months of America's entry into the war, these four forces were effectively silenced, along with many of the lesser anti-Semitic leaders and their followings. Coughlin, stilled by his archbishop, also saw his Social justice tabloid banned from the mails. Pelley received a fifteen-year prison sentence for sedition. The German-American Bund disintegrated; some members were jailed and several others were interned as dangerous enemy aliens. Winrod, under indictment for sedition during much of the war, continued to publish his Defender Magazine, but its contents moderated noticeably. [25]
Organized anti-Semitism had been set back, but by no means did it go under. During the war, several of the minor demagogues remained vocal and new ones came forward. Father Edward Lodge Curran, president of the International Catholic Truth Society, worked to maintain the momentum of the Christian Front, a militant Coughlinite group. And in 1942 the fundamentalist preacher Gerald L. K. Smith came into his own as a front-ranking anti-Semitic agitator. That was the year Smith launched his magazine, The Cross and the Flag, inaugurated the Committee of One Million, and achieved a reasonably strong showing in the Republican primary for U.S. senator from Michigan. The next year, he formed the America First party, an isolationist, anti-New Deal venture. From his various platforms. Smith spread anti-refugee and anti-Semitic propaganda, along with attacks on internationalism, Communism, and the New Deal. [26]
It was during the war, 100, that anti-Jewish hatreds that had been sown and nurtured for years ripened into some extremely bitter fruits. Epidemics of serious anti-Semitic actions erupted in several parts of the United States, especially the urban Northeast. Most often, youth gangs were the perpetrators. Jewish cemeteries were vandalized, synagogues were damaged as well as defaced with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans, anti-Jewish markings were scrawled on sidewalks and Jewish stores, and anti-Semitic literature was widely distributed. Most upsetting of all, in scores of instances, bands of teenagers beat Jewish schoolchildren- sometimes severely, as when three Jewish boys in Boston were attacked by twenty of their classmates. In another incident, in a midwestern city, young hoodlums stripped a twelve-year-old Jewish boy to the waist and painted a Star of David and the word Jude on his chest. [27]
The worst outbreaks occurred in New York City and Boston. In New York, the incidents began in 1941 and continued at least through 1944. They spread throughout the metropolis but hit hardest in Washington Heights, where almost every synagogue was desecrated and where at· tacks on Jewish youngsters were the most widespread. In the fall of 1942, the city's commissioner of investigation, William B. Herlands, started a formal inquiry into the situation. His comprehensive report, released to the press in January 1944, analyzed thirty-one of the cases of anti-Semitic violence and vandalism and examined the backgrounds of fifty-four of the offenders. The Herlands Report criticized the city police for laxity and inaction in 70 percent of the cases. As for the perpetrators, the investigation found them to be typically in their middle to late teens, from poor and troubled home situations, and· with records of low achievement in school. All had been influenced by anti-Semitic propaganda and indoctrination, received mostly at home, at school, and through pamphlets. [28]
In Boston, three years of sporadic property damage, cemetery desecrations, and beatings turned into almost daily occurrences in 1943. Most flagrant were the violent attacks on Jewish children by teenage gangs, particularly in the Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury sections. In October, pressure from citizens' groups and exposure of the situation by the New York newspaper PM impelled Governor Leverett Saltonstall to act. An official investigation that cited police negligence led to the replacement of the police commissioner. The situation improved rapidly, although some beatings did occur well into 1944. Major factors igniting the trouble were the flood of anti-Semitic literature circulating Min Boston and inflammatory oratory and other ·provocative actions by local Coughlinite Christian Front groups. [29]
Throughout the nation, a particularly pernicious kind of anti-Semitism circulated in handbills, pamphlets, posters, and as jokes and jingles. The wide currency of this material was indicative of the extent to which anti-Jewish attitudes had spread through American society. These vehicles of hatred turned up in buses, subway stations, industrial plants, public buildings, army camps, schools, and numerous other places. The most recurrent theme involved the widely disseminated slander that Jews shirked military service, stayed home, and prospered, while Christian boys were sent off to fight and die. [iii] Here are two of the most extensively circulated items. The first parodied the Marines' Hymn.
The following piece, with minor variations, surfaced in all parts of the country, in oral and written form. It was called "The First American." No version mentioned that the bombardier who died on the same mission that claimed Colin Kelly's life was Meyer Levin, a Jew.
Symptomatic of even more deeply negative attitudes was a small but noticeable flow of hate-filled letters to government officials and members of Congress objecting to Jewish refugees. These three excerpts are typical:
Ugly and bitter though it was, the coarse, mostly overt anti-Semitism of the demagogues, the street gangs, the snide leaflets, and the poison-pen letters represented only the surface of the phenomenon. Negative attitudes toward Jews penetrated all sectors of wartime America. A more subtle social and economic discrimination against Jews was accepted and practiced by millions of respectable Americans. Many millions more were not anti-Semitic in the usual sense of the term. They would not personally have mistreated a Jew. Beneath the surface, however, were uncrystallized but negative feelings about Jews. In ordinary times, this "passive anti-Semitism" would have worked little damage. But in the Holocaust crisis it meant that a large body of decent and normally considerate people was predisposed not to care about European Jews nor to care whether the government did anything to help save them. [34]
The quieter strains of wartime anti-Semitism were more difficult to gauge than the blatant, overt type. But the fact that they reached serious levels can be established from anecdotal evidence as well as from results of opinion polling.
In the middle of the war, the British government sent Freya Stark, a pro-Arab archaeologist and author, on an extensive lecture tour of the United States. Her mission was to build American support for British policies, especially for those regarding Palestine. Miss Stark, a non-Jew, was impressed by the amount of anti-Semitism she ran across among well-to-do, well-educated Americans. Dr. L. M. Birkhead, a Protestant clergyman and close observer of anti-Semitic trends, traveled through the Midwest in 1943. He found vicious anti-Jewish attitudes rampant not only among extremist groups but also in the "best circles." The respectable elements, he thought, would probably not support violence, but neither would they oppose it. The following year, in its annual review, the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out that reports from across the nation carried "an almost unanimous verdict that race tensions are increasing, affecting Negroes, Jews, and Japanese Americans. Some even described the situation as 'explosive' or 'potentially dangerous.'" [35]
Nor were the armed forces exempt. In a letter to a Jewish magazine, a Marine corporal, two years in the service, expressed frustration about attitudes that were not uncommon in the military:
Anti-Semitism ran through the upper ranks as well, as illustrated by the experience of an American Red Cross staff member who was working alongside the liberating Allied armies following V-E Day. One morning she set out to visit Jews at a displaced persons' center near Magdeburg, Germany. About 2,700 of them had survived Bergen-Belsen and then ten days locked in a train before American Army units found and freed them. The Red Cross worker stopped at the American Military Government office in Magdeburg to ask directions to the DP center. The officers she saw were not aware that she was Jewish. This is what happened:
This incident was only one of several in which she encountered anti-Semitism in the American Military Government. [37]
Anti-Semitism was no stranger on Capitol Hill either. It was, in fact, an important ingredient in the sharp hostility to refugee immigration that existed in Congress. In early 1943, government officials and friendly members of Congress cautioned refugee-aid organizations about pushing too hard on immigration-related issues because of "the prevalence of anti-Semitic feeling in Congress." A leader of one of the aid organizations described this attitude as an "unprecedented and disturbing element throughout Congress." Several members of Congress- for example, Senators Claude Pepper (Dem., Fla.) and James Murray (Dem., Mont.)-sought to turn back these currents of prejudice, but without much success. [38]
For the most part, congressional anti-Semitism was not expressed openly, though a few legislators had no compunction about putting their anti-Jewish views on record, The most shameless anti-Semite in Congress was Representative John Rankin (Dem., Miss.), who regularly used his considerable oratorical talent to lash out at Jews. In June 1941, one of his verbal assaults contributed to the death of Congressman M. Michael Edelstein of New York. Edelstein collapsed and died of a heart attack in the House lobby shortly after rising to point out the unfairness of Rankin's comments. Undeterred, Rankin kept on with his diatribes. Speaking in the House in 1944, he referred to a Jewish news columnist as "that little kike." He was even petty enough to block special legislation, unanimously approved by the normally restrictionist House Immigration Committee, to allow a Jewish refugee couple and their daughter to come to the United States. The family's two sons, aged twenty-two and nineteen, were already in the United States, had joined the Army, and were about to be sent overseas. [39]
The pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in the United States during the late 1930s and the war years was confirmed by national public-opinion polls. A series of polls from 1938 to 1946 dealt with the images Americans had of Jews. The results indicated that over half the American population perceived Jews as greedy and dishonest and that about one-third considered them overly aggressive. [40]
A set of surveys extending from 1938 through 1941 showed that between one-third and one-half of the public believed that Jews had "too much power in the United States." During the war years, a continuation of the survey saw the proportion rise to 56 percent. According to these and other polls, this supposed Jewish power was located mainly in "business and commerce" and in "finance." From late 1942 into the spring of 1945, significant Jewish power was also thought to exist in "politics and government." [iv] [41]
Other surveys from August 1940 on through the war found that from 15 to 24 percent of the respondents looked on Jews as "a menace to America." Jews were consistently seen as more of a threat than such other groups in the United States as Negroes, Catholics, Germans, or Japanese (except during 1942, when Japanese and Germans were rated more dangerous). [43]
If a threat actually existed, however, it was not from Jews, but to them. An alarming set of polls taken between 1938 and 1945 revealed that roughly 15 percent of those surveyed would have supported an anti-Jewish campaign. Another 20 to 25 percent would have sympathized with such a movement. Approximately 30 percent indicated that they would have actively opposed it. In sum, then, as much as 35 to 40 percent of the population was prepared to approve an anti-Jewish campaign, some 30 percent would have stood up against it, and the rest would have remained indifferent. The threat never crystallized into organized action. But even allowing ample room for inadequacies in the survey data, the seriousness of American anti-Semitism in those years is evident. [44]
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These attitudes raised formidable barriers to the development of an American initiative to save European Jews. Yet the need was critical: an entire people was being systematically eliminated by America's principal enemy. And pressures against extending help were not the only forces on the scene. Other important factors in American society created the potential for a positive response. America was a generous nation, a land of immigrants, led by a national administration known for its humanitarian sympathies. Most Americans embraced Christianity, a faith committed to helping the helpless. The country had an articulate and organized Jewish population that could playa vital role in arousing those positive forces. A truly concerned leadership in the government and in the Christian churches could have turned that potential into a powerful influence for effective action.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
[i] Of the approximately 55 million Jews killed by the Nazis, close to 3.0 million were slaughtered in the extermination centers and almost 1.5 million were massacred in the mobile killing actions. Most of the rest died in other mass shootings, or on the deportation trains, or from the lethal conditions that prevailed in the ghettos (starvation, cold, disease, and crowding). [6] [ii] The quotas, established in the 1920s, set specific limits on the number who could immigrate to the United States in any given year from any given foreign country. Eligibility was based on country of birth. There was, for example, a German quota, a British quota, and so on. The total of all quotas was 154,000. Almost 84,000 of this was assigned to the British and Irish, peoples who had no need to flee. [iii] In reality, the proportion of Jews in the armed forces was at least as great as the proportion of Jews in the American population. [31] [iv] The view that Jews had too much power in government may have reflected the widely circulated assertion that Jews exerted excessive influence in the Roosevelt administration, a notion summarized in the term Jew Deal. The belief that Jews wielded substantial power in government declined sharply in the polls directly after Truman succeeded Roosevelt. [42]
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