A Failure to Respond
Between June 1941 and May 1945, six million Jews were systematically annihilated under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. However, because of Germany?s firm control over most of Europe, information about the ?Final Solution? wasn?t leaked to the presses until a year later. In June 1942, the Daily Telegraph was the first to report that 700,000 Jews had been gassed (Laqueur, 261). The United States had already declared war against the Axis powers following Japan?s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. One would then assume that after reading this published report that the United States, as a world power, would have jumped in and taken immediate action to halt the atrocities that were being committed by the Nazis. However, the United States? response was quite the opposite. As a world power, the United States could have and should have put forth a sizeable effort towards assisting the European Jewry, without compromising its war efforts against the Axis powers.The American government chose to sit on the information of the mass genocide of the European Jewry. It wasn?t until November 24, 1942 that information about the genocide of the European Jewry was published in non-prominent U.S. newspapers. Howe
It wasn?t until January 1944 when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 91417, establishing a War Refugee Board (WRB), that the United States firmly took a stand against the atrocities of the Holocaust. He wrote, ?The Jews inside Europe could not have escaped their fate, those outside were too weak to help, and the neutrals and the Allies might not have done more than they did in any case, which, as is known, was very little indeed? (262). , whose father had witnessed the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Nazis (Dwork, 316). However, one can only imagine how many more Jews might have been saved if Allied rescue missions had begun sooner with sufficient financial support. In turn, this would have put immense pressure on Britain to open Palestine. In his book, The Abandonment of the Jews, David S. Thus, it is not surprising that President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder of European Jews for fourteen months. Wallenberg also set up hospitals, nurseries, and soup kitchens for the Jews of Budapest. The German army was very strong and its ties with its Allies and satellites were unchallenged. Walter Laqueur, Chairman of the International Studies at Georgetown University and history professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel, described the European Jewry?s dire circumstances in his book, The Terrible Secret. Wallenberg helped protect tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from being deported to Auschwitz by distributing protective Swedish passports. During the April 1943 conference, delegates arrived knowing of the atrocities that were occurring in Nazi occupied countries and yet did nothing about it. Following the conclusion of the Bermuda Conference, the delegates blatantly lied to the concerned United States citizens, saying that matters discussed during the conference were top secret, but in general, the conference had been a success and plans were currently in the works to help aide the Jewish refugees. The Allied air forces could have bombed and destroyed the gas chambers and crematories at the various death camps, such as Auschwitz.
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