Honoring International Holocaust Remembrance Day through history

Last Thursday, Jan. 27, marked one of the few recognized international holidays. It received less attention than it deserves.

The United Nations General Assembly in 2005 designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jan. 27 was chosen because on that date in 1945, the Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. The Auschwitz camp, with its four huge gas chambers and nearby crematoria, stood by far as the most horrific of all the German death camps.

Toward the end of the war, Auschwitz was killing 6,000 Jews a day, men, women and children. Some would-be Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites in America and elsewhere continue to claim the Holocaust never happened, or that it really didn’t amount to much. 

Survivors of the horror provide eyewitness evidence to the contrary, as do testimonies at the postwar Nuremberg trials of Nazi perpetrators. As an example, here’s Rudolf Hoess, an Auschwitz camp commander, bragging about his extermination methods using a crystallized prussic acid called Zyklon B:

“It took from three to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about a half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.”

The Third Reich prided itself on maintaining detailed minutiae of the entire Nazi war effort. Consequently, graphic evidence of gruesome Holocaust procedures, and the full enormity of what the Nazis called “The Final Solution,” came to light after the German surrender in 1945. 

At that point, and ever after, the question was always what the West could have done to save European Jewry. The Holocaust claimed the lives of a third of the Jewish people – two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. Six million Jews died under Nazi rule over a period of about a decade. How many could the United States, and the Roosevelt Administration, have saved?

After President Roosevelt learned the truth about the fiendishly efficient genocide, he did take some action to help Jews in Europe. At the insistence of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt in January 1944 (before D-Day) created the War Refugee Board (WRB). After a few months, the board brought 982 refugees who had escaped into Italy to a refugee camp near Oswego, New York, a pitifully small number but at least a start.

A few months later, after Hitler occupied Hungary and Adolf Eichmann started deporting mass number of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, the WRB sent Raoul Wallenberg to Hungary with Swedish diplomatic papers. Through bribery and insistence, Wallenberg’s effort may have saved 200,000 Jews from agonizing death at Auschwitz. 

Roosevelt also persuaded British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin to join him in promising that German and Japanese “war criminals” would be formally tried after the war, and publicizing that pledge throughout the Third Reich.

However . . .

Historians note that German persecution of European Jews took place during the Great Depression in the United States, thereby strengthening America’s opposition to allowing wartime refugees into the country. Opposition to immigration was already strong in the U.S., and with unemployment at unusually high levels, granting asylum to Jewish refugees was politically unpopular.

n 1939 a Fortune Magazine poll asked, “If you were a member of Congress, would you vote yes or no on a bill to open the doors to a larger number of European refugees?” In response, 85 percent of Protestants, 84 percent of Catholics, and even 26 percent of Jews answered no.

Great Britain at that time governed Palestine as a mandate in the treaty after World War I. Jews and Arabs there were already at each other’s throats, and Britain was not eager to facilitate emigration of European Jews to Palestine, which would have been a likely destination. Consequently, Britain dragged its feet in some instances when refugee rescue was considered.

In addition, even though word of the atrocities found its way to America as early as the 1930s, the details were so terrible that many American leaders simply doubted their credibility. The disbelief persisted even as late as 1943. Doubters included Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, probably the most eminent Jew in America. 

But when the truth finally could not be denied, the WRB in 1944 recommended to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy that the Auschwitz death camp should be destroyed by bombing, even if that killed some Jewish prisoners. McCloy rejected the request on the ground that it would divert Allied air support from the war effort in the west, and that anyway Auschwitz was beyond the range of Allied bombers.

That was not the case. American bombers had already run successful bombing sorties near Auschwitz. 

Among the most regrettable failures of the United States to provide aid to Jewish refugees was the tragic episode of the MS St. Louis, a passenger ship of the Hamburg America Line. In May 1939, it sailed from Hamburg, Germany, to Havana, Cuba, carrying 937 Jewish refugees seeking asylum.

Cuba refused the ship entry, since earlier that month Havana had retroactively invalidated landing permits of all foreigners except U.S. citizens. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau unsuccessfully tried to change Havana’s mind. Only 28 were allowed to leave the ship at the port, most of them with valid U.S. visas. 

Ship Captain Gustav Schroder then turned toward Florida, circling off the coast and hoping for permission to enter the United States. The ship’s refugees could see the bright lights of Miami. But both Hull and Roosevelt denied the ship entry. Schroder considered running the ship aground on the Florida coast to allow the refugees to escape, but Hull ordered U.S. Coast Guard cutters to follow the St. Louis to prevent that move.

A group of Canadian academics and clergy tried to persuade the Canadian government to grant sanctuary to the ship’s refugees, but that too was denied. Schroder thought about wrecking the ship on the British coast. 

Finally British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to take 288 of the 907 passengers. The remaining 619 were allowed to go ashore at Antwerp, Belgium. They were accepted by France, Belgium and the Netherlands. All three countries were conquered by Hitler the following year, putting Jews there in great danger.

Postwar research determined that 254 of the 907 who were returned to Europe died in the Holocaust.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of State formally apologized for America’s treatment of the refugees on the St. Louis in a ceremony attended by 14 survivors of the incident.

America’s response to the Holocaust while it was underway is one of the many issues in American history that involved actions, and non-actions, both admirable and shameful. Our history, like that of all nations, is complex. Students need, and deserve, to understand that complexity.