When was US intelligence aware of what Hitler was doing to the Jews, and was it a factor in the US decision to enter WWII in Europe? Or we were already there fighting with our European allies when the mass extermination of Jews was brought to the attention of US intelligence?
The US certainly knew of German atrocities against Jews, and the shooting of Jews on the Russian front, but the actual German decision to wipe out all the Jews of Europe wasn’t finalized until the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, after the US got into the war.
Hitler declared war on *us. *Nazi U-boats began attacking our ships, etc.
U.S. intelligence services were certainly aware that some of it was going on. Heck, even a lot of common folks who happened to have family still in Germany knew some of what was going on, so it’s not like it was a well kept secret or anything. The thing is, while a lot of folks knew what was happening, most people didn’t seem to have any idea of the scale of it all. In most wars, you see atrocities against groups. The U.S. for example rounded up a lot of Japanese folks and shoved them in concentration camps where they were treated poorly and many died from starvation and disease and that sort of thing. Most people looking at the situation in Germany thought that it was the same sort of thing going on. It wasn’t until we invaded Germany and our troops really saw the scale of it all firsthand that we really got an understanding of exactly what was going on.
As was already pointed out, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. did not immediately jump into war against Germany. There was a lot of question about whether or not we should at that point. We were already supplying materials to Great Britain so it’s not like we were truly neutral, but there were a lot of folks in the U.S. (including some at the higher levels of government) who thought that it would be better for us if we continued to give supplies to the British and let them do the fighting instead of doing the fighting ourselves. There were others though that wanted us to get involved personally. There was a big debate going on all the way up at the highest levels of government. Hitler ended up declaring war on us a few days later, which ended the debate. After that, Roosevelt got together with Churchill and they decided that even though Japan had attacked us first, we would put Germany first in our war efforts.
Our relationship with other countries like Britain, China, and the Soviet Union played a much more important role in the debate on whether or not to enter the war than the holocaust did. The holocaust wasn’t really a known issue at the start of the war.
None died from starvation. As for disease, of course people died from disease all across America, inside and outside the camps. No one has ever claimed the disease rate was higher in the Japanese-American internment camps.
http://www.japan-101.com/history/japanese_american_internment.htm
"*Conditions in the camps
The relocation camps also had the highest live-birth rate and the lowest death rate in the US during the wartime period. "*
Of course, the detention of American Citizens* of Japanese descent was one of the low points in US history. But the conditions- while spartan and certainly no picnic- were not inhumane.
- internment of “enemy aliens” was a standard of International Law. Every nation interned adult Citizens of a nation they were at war with. What was so very wrong about many of the Japanese-American internments is that they were based upon race, not citizenship.
The reports of the atrocities against the Jews were downplayed. People remembered the stories of the atrocities of the Huns during WWI and thought these were the same – exaggerations to make the Germans look bad.
In addition, it was hard for people to conceive of the scope of what was going on. The enormity of it was literally incomprehensible until the photos of the camps got out at the end of the war.
I am a big WWII buff and one thing I did ages ago, was I read the Chicago Tribune on Microfilm starting on Jan 1, 1939 through the war’s end.
There were a lot of articles of anti-Jewish sentiment, bad treatment of the Jews, the Jews wanting to leave Germany and having no where to go (evidently Alaska was suggeted by some). There were reports of the German camps and Jews and others being routinely rounded up and mudered.
There was also the Japanese attrocities, like the Rape of Nanking, and the list goes on.
The thing you I found odd was no one in America seemed conerned. We had the remains of a depression and no one wanted war. I recall the the “Question of the Day” in July of 1940. This is when the British were hammered by the Blitz, the Soviets were predicted to collpase and Europe was over-run. The quesiton of the day was "Do you like mayonaise or mustard style of potato salad at your 4th of July picnic.
The attitude was definately, “We bailed out those Europeans in 1918 and now they went are at it again.”
But is this so different from today? The genocide in Rwanda in the early 90s was reported, but how many people know nothing or next to nothing about it.
Have you ever heard of the Second Congo War also known as the World War of Africa. I read about this in the paper, but how many here on this board know anything about that war. That was a pretty big war.
Judging from the papers Americans simply felt too far removed and “superior” to those blood thirsty Europeans who were always fighting (Remember Spain had just had a long civil war)
Until Pearl Harbor there was sympathy but no real concern. The way we all feel bad when we see homeless people out in 20º weather, we feel bad for them, but how many would actually help them?
It’s kind of like that but on a much bigger scale
My grandfather had a huge extended family throughout Poland, Belarus and Western Russia. He received many reports of Jews being rounded up and killed or carted off to unknown destinations. There were all kinds of rumors, but none were totally substantiated; it was very rare that someone could escape from the camps and tell people the extent of the atrocities. And who would they tell, anyway?
After a certain point my grandfather no longer heard from his relatives. Not one of them survived.
None of mine survived either. It seems that whoever might have survivied the Nazi concentration camps were sent off to the Soviet ones. (They were “politicals” not ethnic).
Roosevelt was actively helping England as early as 1940 (ignoring isolationist opposition), before any large scale Holocaust murders occurred. He was also actively bullying the Japanese around the same time, ultimately resulting in the oil/iron embargo and the war in the Pacific. So what does the Holocaust have to do with it? The man did not like the Nazis, and neither did many other people in the government. If there had been no Jews, he would still have not liked the Nazis (or the Japanese).
On the other hand, when 100K Jews got killed in Kiev in 1941, it’s not like this was a big secret for the locals. Even without having a “human rights monitoring” agency that cares about atrocities as such, an event of this magnitude would get registered in any decent region-monitoring “desk”.
Well, and then, put yourself in the shoes of these people doing the monitoring, then so what? When several million people die on the battlefield or POW camps in 6 months and the region is in total disarray, why would you be especially concerned about those Jews? The State Department was not a philosemitic organization back then.
Before?
Hitler & the Nazis started almost as soon as they took power.
The first concentration camps were opened about 40 days after Hitler became Chancellor, and people were arrested & sent there at once. And more and more were sent as time went on.
I suppose it may depend on what you see as “large scale”. In 1938, a year before the war started, 17,000 Polish-born Jews were sent to camps. On Nov 9-10 (‘Kristallnacht’), 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. How many have to be murdered for you to consider it “large scale”?
While I am certain the general tone of your recollection is quite accurate, and it is genuinely a hell of a neat insight, I must point out that you must have your date and/or events confused here. In July of 1940 Germany was attacking England by air (though it wasn’t technically “The Blitz” yet, but whatever) but the Germans and Soviets were at peace. They did not go to war until June 1941, at which point the Blitz was over.
do you know the difference between “arrested” and “massacred”? How about between “were denied their civil right to vote and peacefully assemble” and “massacred”? Because sometimes it looks like some people nowadays just cannot grasp the difference anymore.
The first mass arrests of Jews, accompanied by beatings and looting of property, happened in Germany in 1938. Polish Jews were imprisoned in ghettos immediately after the fall of Poland in 1939. But the first massacres of Jews happened in 1941 in western areas of Soviet Union.
As for Dachau camp, it was initially an internment camp for political opponents, trade unionists and the like, Gentiles and Jews alike. Some people were briefly interned there and subsequently released (Solzhenicyn, who was used to people being imprisoned for 10 years in Siberia on fake charges, found this quite incredible). The gas chambers in Dachau were built only much later, during the war.
So, yes, everybody in the world knew through the late 30s that the Nazis were persecuting Jews. There were plenty of Jewish refugees floating around, some as far as Shanghai. But persecution does not equate to mass murder, which the Nazis did a decent job of covering up even from their own population.
Did mayonnaise win? I always got the impression that the potato salad with mustard wasn’t very popular.
Germany and Italy declared war against the United States after Pearl Harbor.
Concerning the “holocaust”, a lot of the bodies of the victims in the post war propaganda died because of a disease called typhus, and the lack of supplies to the camps because of the Allied bombing. Basically the Germans did with the Jews what the Americans did with the Japanese Americans.
The “holocaust” was barely breached in the Nuremberg trials, which held trial for every leading leader of the National Socialist Party except for Hitler himself. Where is the evidence? The crematoria was there to burn the bodies of the deceased who died of typhus or another disease.
Many of the leaders of the Soviet Union under Stalin were Jews. This government stole the land and starved the people of the Ukraine in the early 1930’s, in what history calls the Holomodor.
Millions of people men, women, babies, the elderly, whatever. This was done so that the Communist Party (again, majority Jewish, look it up…) can consolidate their power and commit a genocide against the gentile peoples there who did not want to be robbed.
Few people remember the Holomodor while the Jews get to built museums to their “holocaust” whioch of course is paid for by the American taxpayer and does little except bore millions of school children and provide a living for many people. It also gives them an ultimate weapon to those who strongly desent from their worldview. But if someone does, they scream and spittle “anti-semite”! Doesn’t matter if Israel is basically doing the same thing to the Palestinians to what Hitler did to the Jews.
Nothing but “anti-semite!” “Anti-semite!”
IIRC, the Dachau gas chambers were never used - didn’t get done in time.
Why does it not surprise me that Captain Midnight is a Holocaust denier? God, before breakfast.
This is meaningless. While typhus did kill a lot of people, that in no way lets the Germans off the hook for killing many more people immediately before typhus carried off some of the ones the Nazis hadn’t yet gotten around to killing. We know for a fact the Nazi genocide was deliberate because we have their word for it, over and over. They obsessively documented their decisions to kill.
This reminds me of the apologists for the Confederacy in the American Civil War who try to minimize the role of slavery in starting the war. And as in that case, the participants themselves were explicit about their actions and their reasoning. There’s no mystery or cover-up; you can read their very own words. That the Nazis deliberately killed on an industrial scale and targeted Jews is an incontrovertible historical fact.
With only enormously significant differences that make it almost unrelated.
C’mon, Cap, you’re not stupid. 
Cite? Because I have a countercite in this very thread.
This is GQ.
If you are going to make extraordinary claims like this you had better be prepared to back them up with cites.
The fact that the Germans did a lot worse to the Jews is very well documented. Please provide cites or evidence to support your claim that all of this holocaust evidence is faked or somehow false, and that the German extermination plan did not exist.
If recent history is any guide, he won’t be back to back up his “claims.” He has many posts like this one that deny the extent of the Holocaust and a few even worse ones that are pure anti-Semitism. My reporting of said posts has been in vain thus far.