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Could the Holocaust have been prevented if the United States and countries of Western Europe had acted against Germany in the 1930s? It’s a question that has often been asked by survivors and historians. Only two European countries defied the Nazi effort to exterminate their Jewish citizens: Denmark and Bulgaria, whose citizens believed there was no “us” versus “them”; all citizens were one body. Any Nazi attack on Jews was perceived as an attack on all citizens.
And what of America? Many potential refugees looked to America as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” and as a nation of immigrants. The Statue of Liberty put out a welcoming mat to all who wanted to enter the country. Inside the pedestal of the statue is a famous sonnet by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.” It sums up America as a land that welcomes the downtrodden and the outcasts from all other lands.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”1
As Germany’s oppression of Jews and of Roma and Sinti grew more and more onerous and deadly, the lamp of the lady in the harbor shone as a welcoming light. There was America, across an ocean. It was large and sprawling, populated by many people of different races and religions. There was safety and tolerance for refugees. However, the U.S. State Department and various members of Congress turned off the lamp in the harbor. For those attempting to escape the Nazis, the lamp had turned to darkness. The doors of open immigration were slammed shut and locked. The immigration policy of the United States went from welcoming to being complicit in the deaths of millions of Holocaust victims. So lacking in compassion were many Washington officials that in place of “The New Colossus” they might have written a new sonnet titled “The New Callousness” with the warning “No Jews Allowed.”
Why did a nation of immigrants offer such obdurate resistance to Jewish immigration? Anti-Semitism was a virus circulating in the air. During the years before America entered the war, there were more than one hundred anti-Semitic organizations that published vile stereotypes of Jews. Henry Ford in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, railed against the Jews in every issue. So pleased were the Nazis by Ford’s screeds that copies of his newspapers were bound and distributed throughout the Third Reich. Henry Ford is the only American praised in Mein Kampf. Many people were led to believe that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make matzos. During Holy Week, countless clergy preached that Jews had killed Christ. In numerous cities, young gangs of anti-Semites vandalized Jewish cemeteries and synagogues. Incitement came not only from men such as Henry Ford but also from such popular figures as Father Charles Coughlin, who preached a hateful ideology on a weekly radio broadcast that attracted millions of listeners. He referred to FDR as “President Rosenfeld.” The famous aviator Charles Lindbergh claimed that American Jews were angling for a war with Germany, and they would suffer the consequences. He made his remarks while German Jews were being thrown in concentration camps. He visited Germany and received an award from Herman Göring. Another ideologue who railed against the Jews, while referring to President Roosevelt as “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” was Fritz Kuhn, leader of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, surveys revealed that anti-Semitism ranged from 40 percent to 60 percent of the American population. In a 1938 poll, approximately 60 percent of the respondents said that Jews were greedy, dishonest, and pushy, and they agreed with the statement that Jews “have too much power in the United States.” In addition, several surveys taken from 1940 to 1946 found that Jews were seen as a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial group.
Though many senators, congressional representatives, and members of the Roosevelt administration paid lip service to the plight of the Jews (while omitting mention of Roma and Sinti) in Germany, they refused to permit large numbers of Jews into their country. In a report issued years later by the State Department, Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat noted that the United States had accepted only 21,000 Jews, far fewer per capita than many of the neutral European countries and fewer in absolute terms than Switzerland.
Many of those in important government positions who could have lobbied to alter the country’s immigration policies were passively anti-Semitic. They would never commit an act of violence against a Jew, would never even condone such an act—they would just refuse to take any remedial action. Their point of view was dramatized in the award-winning movie Gentleman’s Agreement, in which Gregory Peck plays the part of a gentile reporter posing as a Jew in order to uncover the injurious role played by passive anti-Semites. His fiancée (played by Dorothy McGuire) tells their Jewish friend (played by John Garfield) that a man at a dinner party told an anti-Semitic joke that disgusted everyone but no one said or did anything in opposition. They just sat there, feeling embarrassed. Garfield tells her how good she would have felt if she had hit back, if she hadn’t been a passive patsy. During the 1930s, America was not willing to hit back, not willing to be proactive against a growing threat to humanity. And during the years of World War II, America refused to bomb the railroad tracks on which cattle cars of condemned Jews were delivered to the slaughterhouses of Europe.
Anti-Semitism, like an out-of-control fire, not only raged in groups that admired the Third Reich but also found voice in some politicians. For example, Congressman John Rankin, a malevolent and spiteful anti-Semite, supported a visa policy that caused Jews to run a gaunt-let of dehumanizing obstacles before they could gain entry into the United States. Even then, many were turned away. He vituperatively called out Jews as a threat to the welfare of the United States and referred to them on the floor of Congress as “dirty kikes.”
Another defender of the anti-immigration status quo was Brecken-ridge Long, an assistant secretary of state. He was an expert at creating obstacles to Jewish immigration. He denied that he was an anti-Semite and thought that as a WASP member of the upper echelons of society and government, he would be safe against accusations of bigotry. He was a member of the best clubs and he had been a long-standing friend of FDR, yet in his official capacity as an assistant secretary of state, he wrote the following memorandum in 1940.
We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.2
His efforts to obstruct the rescue of European Jewry and restrict immigration by creating large, fictitious numbers of refugees admitted to the United States were eventually exposed. He was held in contempt not only by the Jewish community but also by others who believed the United States had a moral obligation to live up to its ideals. Criticism of his actions mounted. In 1944, President Roosevelt was presented with “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews.” The report was a thorough indictment of the State Department’s immigration policies. It condemned the U.S. policy of complicity in the destruction of European Jewry by not only closing and locking and double-locking the doors to the entry of immigrants but also by opposing the release of funds that could have been used to rescue Holocaust victims. For example, seventy thousand Romanian Jews could have been saved if the State Department had not blocked the payment of a $170,000 bribe. The bribe had previously been approved by the president and the Treasury Department. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau used the report to convince Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board, which was done by executive order in 1944 (and which should have been done years earlier). The order declares that
it is the policy of this Government to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.
Government officials estimated that if Breckenridge Long had not prevented Jews from entering the United States, between 190,000 to 200,000 Jews could have been saved from the gas chambers of the concentration camps. Long’s erstwhile friend, FDR, demoted him. Yet Roosevelt refused requests to bomb the railroad tracks to such infernos of horror as Auschwitz because this was not, as his executive order declared, “consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.”
And what of German anti-Semitism in the years before the outbreak of World War II? From its inception, the Nazi Party required a scapegoat to further its heroic image of protecting pure-blood Aryans against contamination from the viral infection of Jewry. As a tiny minority comprising a mere 0.76 percent of the German population, Jews were an easy target. In addition to being portrayed in propaganda films as disease-carrying rodents, they were blamed for interwar hyperinflation and for conspiring with Germany’s enemies to bring about the defeat of the German army in 1918. As conspiratorial traitors, the Jews had stabbed Germany in the back. They had not only engineered the country’s military defeat, they had induced the government to agree to the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis claimed that Germany’s onerous reparations payments profited the Jews, who made out like bandits, laughing all the way to their Swiss banks. It didn’t matter that thousands of Jews had served honorably in the military and many had been killed during World War I. The stab-in-the-back accusation became a rallying cry for the Nazis and the basis for their anti-Semitic propaganda.
Though a small minority of the German population, a disproportionate number of Jews were represented in the legal, medical, and financial professions. Their presence in those professions incensed the Nazis, who as nationalistic and jingoistic populists not only declaimed the superior virtues of Aryan man but demanded that the Jews be kicked out of all the professional classes. Only true Aryans should be permitted to practice medicine, law, and banking or any kind of financial brokerage. In their propaganda and rallies, the Nazis were able to generate envy and hatred of Jewish elites who were accused of controlling the levers of power. If given an opportunity, Goebbels claimed, the Jews would press their boots on the necks of ordinary, patriotic Germans. Soon many resorts, universities, and clubs would not admit Jews. Many churches, fearful of antagonizing the Nazis, remained timidly silent about government inspired anti-Semitism. To win favor, some of the clergy preached viciously anti-Semitic sermons. All the elements came together to create a perfect storm that led to the death of millions of Jews. As in America, most German citizens remained passively anti-Semitic. They did not join the SA, did not volunteer for the SS, and were only vaguely aware of what was being done at the concentration camps. Better to avert one’s eyes and go on with one’s life.
Ronnie Landau writes that the institutionalization of anti-Semitism provided “formal confirmation of the isolation and removal of the Jews from the midst of the German nation … The laws met with public approval because they curbed the apparently random and anarchic anti-Semitic violence, containing it securely within the framework of law and order.” He adds, “The German population appears to have remained entirely consistent in their indifference towards the persecution of the Jews, even when its level was severely increased during the summer of 1938.” He concludes that “the public had gradually grown used to an anti-Semitic reality and had generally taken no notice of it. Their toleration of ‘mild’ anti-Semitism had unquestionably paved the way for harsher measures.”
One would think that after one of the most-civilized countries in Europe attempted the extermination of a portion of its population, the citizens of America would be on their guard to make sure that nothing like it would happen again. And one way of ensuring that future genocides are avoided would be knowledge of what happened in the past. Yet a 2018 survey in the United States found that 22 percent of 1,350 adults said they had never heard of the Holocaust while 41 percent of Americans and 66 percent of millennials did not know what Auschwitz was. Even worse, of course, are the professional Holocaust deniers.
And what of Germany today? According to an article in the New York Times Magazine,
in the decades that followed, a desire among many Germans to deflect or repress guilt for the Holocaust led to a new form of antipathy toward Jews—a phenomenon that came to be known as “secondary anti-Semitism,” in which Germans resent Jews for reminding them of their guilt, reversing the victim and perpetrator roles. “It seems the Germans will never forgive us Auschwitz,” Hilde Walter, a German-Jewish journalist, was quoted as saying in 1968.
Holocaust commemoration in West Germany increasingly became an affair of the state and civic groups, giving rise to a prevailing erinnerungskultur, or “culture of remembrance,” that today is most prominently illustrated by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. But even as Germany’s remembrance culture has been held up as an international model of how to confront the horrors of the past, it has not been universally supported at home. According to a 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey, 51 percent of Germans believe that it is “probably true” that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust”; 30 percent agreed with the statement “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.”
Now some 200,000 Jews live in Germany, a nation of 82 million people, and many are increasingly fearful. In a 2018 European Union survey of European Jews, 85 percent of respondents in Germany characterized anti-Semitism as a “very big” or “fairly big” problem; 89 percent said the problem has become worse in the last five years. Overall reported anti-Semitic crimes in Germany increased by nearly 20 percent last year to 1,799, while violent anti-Semitic crimes rose by about 86 percent, to 69.
Often intertwined with economic and social resentment, demonization of Jews was long part of Christian tradition, and, with the growth of European nationalism in the nineteenth century, it took on delusive notions of race. Now as a worldwide resurgence of racist tribalism fuels a rebellion against the liberal democratic order, Germany’s renewed confrontation with anti-Semitism will say much not just about the fate of its unnerved Jewish communities but also about the endurance of any nation’s capacity to build a tolerant, pluralistic society resistant to the temptations of ethnonationalism.3
I have wondered if Harry Haft, Nathan Shapow, Johann Troll-mann, Salamo Arouch, Victor “Young” Perez, and Max Schmeling would be appalled, resigned, or optimistic about the level and knowledge of anti-Semitism in Germany and America today. In the United States, the percentage of the population surveyed to be anti-Semitic is 9 percent, a figure far lower than what existed in the 1930s and 1940s. This represents a cause for hope.