American Response to The Holocaust

In August of 1942, the State Department received confirmation of Nazi plans for total destruction of European Jews. They asked Rabbi Stephen Wise, who also received reports, to refrain from announcing it until they could confirm it. Wise later took his case for assistance directly to the President.

The following year, the information started to get into the press(Click here for video footage on Americans protesting Nazism), but the State Department continued to delay. They had issued orders to overseas embassies to delay visas as much as possible with red tape, with the result that less than the allowed amount of immigrants were admitted. In many cases, the visas were issued, or were still pending when the people in question had been deported to concentration camps.

In 1944, under pressure from the Head of the Treasury Department, Henry Morgenthau, amongst others, President Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to help rescue refugees.

Requests for the Allies to bomb the railroad tracks to the concentration camps and possibly the camps themselves were denied by the United States and their Allies as impractical, despite the fact they did bomb a factory manned by concentration camp inmates only a few miles from Auschwitz, the most infamous of the camps.

They could have helped...but they didn't, arguing that the best way to help was to win the war.