This came up on another message board, with a poster (not me) taking the position that yes, the US government did know what was going on, but chose not to do anything. Some of the responses ran along the lines of, "How the hell could we do anything, seeing as we were fighting a war at the time?
I seem to recall the US refusing to allow a ship of Jewish refugees to dock at a US port in the late 1930’s and I know that anti-Semitism, while not running rampant, was a minor happening in the US during the '30’s-'40’s.
Of course we did. We refused entry to a boat during WWII, not in the 1930’s, but there was an earlier boat, called the Struma. It was an unseaworthy cattle boat, carrying 769 Jewish refugees from the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanza towards Palestine, in February 1942, not the 1930s. Britain, who ruled Palestine under the UN Mandate, refused its landing. It sank in the Black Sea with only two survivors.
Britain intercepted many refugee ships in 1945 and 1946 headed for Palestine, including the Exodus. But that was after the War. However, there was one ship during the War that FDR refused entrance.
In November 1942, a group of Palestine citizens were allowed to leave Poland and return to Palestine. They brought with them news of the Nazi persecution, which, in and of itself was not news then, but of the systematic campaign of mass annihilation. The news was confirmed by the Allied Governments in December.
[source: * The Siege *, by Conor Cruise O’Brien, 1986
According to something I saw on PBS a couple weeks ago, the Allies had first hand accounts of what went on in Auschwitz from escapees in 1944. I haven’t looked myself, but I would guess that there would be more information at the PBS website.
I’ve always thought that we had a pretty good idea what was going on for a long time before that, though.
There’s a story in The Illuminatus! trilogy which the authors claim is one of the factual bits of the books is that there was an anti-semite who happened to be processing the intelligence reports on the concentration camps and he did his best to downplay what was going on in them.
There’s a reference to concentration camps being pretty horrific in the 1942 movie Casablanca, and there was some furor a few years ago because it was revealed that the US government debated bombing the camps, but chose not to. Many people thought that the government should have bombed the camps to either help the prisoners escape or at least end their suffering sooner.
The problem, at this far removed date in history, is that we’ve seen how bad the camps were, and we know what happened in them. Until the Allies liberated the first camps in WW II, all we had to go by were the accounts of those who’d seen the camps (or escaped from them), and aerial photographs. Had someone smuggled out film of what was going on in the camps, the Allies might have acted differently.
First hand accounts aren’t always very accurate and in wartime one hears all kinds of crazy stories, so without the Allies having hard evidence of what was going on, it would have been difficult for them to accept the true nature of the horrors going on there.
Yeah. I just offered a potential source of info (IIRC, PBS repeats its shows sometimes, and they give additional info on their website), coupled with the date they used. The year 1944 is the closest thing to an actual date for Allied knowledge I’ve come across that comes from a checkable source (not that I’ve checked, or will check for that matter). I offered it mostly for anybody who’s really interested to go check it out for themselves. Anyway, I wasn’t contradicting you. Like I said, I thought the Allies knew about the Holocaust prior to the time.
The Allied powers may have officially known some horritfying things wre going on, but I can’t imaginge the individual soldiers could have been prepared for what they discovered. The horror of what was going on and the indescision about what to do must have been incredible.
What, other than winning the war as fast as possible, were the allies capable of doing? If marching into Poland was easy, D-Day sure was overkill. Of course, the Soviets ‘liberated’ Poland, but you get my drift.
The only possible option I (and I now note Tuckerfan also - I’m submitting anyway) can think of would be carpet bombing the camps. Is that the plan you have in mind? If so, would that have helped, or would we be questioning that now? Reconstituting death camps does not seem particluarly difficult. Traditionally, a pit and weapons are sufficient for mass murder.
I guess I don’t see how the allies “chose” to do anything. Hitler’s Germany was the most powerful military at the time. That was what WWII changed.
