United States Is Doing the Holocaust Again
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power with an credo of national and racial superiority. As the Nazis deepened their control over Germany in the 1930s, they implemented policies and passed laws that stigmatized and persecuted many groups of people that they considered to exist outsiders and enemies of Germany, including Jews, political opponents, homosexuals, and Roma and Sinti people. Violence against Jews and their property was on the rise. During Kristallnacht in 1938, synagogues, businesses, and homes were burned and thousands of Jews were interned for varying periods of fourth dimension in concentration camps.
Until 1941, official German policy encouraged Jews to go out the country by making life in Frg increasingly difficult for them. Jews were forbidden from working in certain professions and renting or owning homes in many places; they could not concur on to their financial assets and could non motility freely. These policies, together with a entrada of hateful antisemitic propaganda and an increasingly violent climate, fabricated life in Germany impossible for many Jews. Those who had no pick but to flee for their survival and the survival of their families became refugees, seeking safe havens in other parts of Europe and beyond. At first, Jews were allowed to settle in neighboring countries such as Kingdom of belgium, French republic, and Czechoslovakia, but as German occupation spread beyond the continent, these countries were no longer rubber and refugees became increasingly desperate to escape. Philosopher Hannah Arendt described Jewish refugees' predicament in this manner:
[The refugees] were welcomed nowhere and could be alloyed nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, in one case they had left their state they remained stateless; once they had been deprived of their human being rights they were rightless, the scum of the globe. 1
This refugee crunch created a dilemma for many nations, including the United States. How would they respond to the refugees' plight? Would they welcome refugees or reject them admission?
In July 1938, delegates from 32 nations met in Evian, French republic, to discuss how to respond to the refugee crisis. Each representative expressed regret about the electric current troubles of refugees, simply nigh said that they were unable to increment their country's immigration quotas, citing the worldwide economical depression. The representatives spoke in full general terms, not well-nigh people only near "numbers" and "quotas."
In the finish, only one country, the Dominican Republic, officially agreed to take refugees from Europe. (Dictator Rafael Trujillo, influenced past the international eugenics movement, believed that Jews would improve the "racial qualities" of the Dominican population.) Throughout the 1930s, other countries, including Republic of bolivia and Switzerland, equally well as the Shanghai International Settlement and the British protectorate of Palestine, admitted Jewish refugees. Even so, the number of refugees far exceed the opportunities, both legal and illegal, to emigrate. After the Evian briefing, Hitler is said to have concluded, "Nobody wants these criminals."
Similar almost other countries, the U.s.a. did not welcome Jewish refugees from Europe. In 1939, 83% of Americans were opposed to the admission of refugees.2 In the midst of the Great Depression, many feared the burden that immigrants could place on the nation's economy; refugees, who in most cases were prevented from bringing any money or assets with them, were an fifty-fifty greater cause for concern. Indeed, equally early as 1930, President Herbert Hoover reinterpreted immigration legislation barring those "likely to go a public charge" to include fifty-fifty those immigrants who were capable of working, reasoning that loftier unemployment would make information technology incommunicable for immigrants to find jobs.
Political cartoon entitled "Will the Evian conference guide him to liberty?" in The New York Times, July 3, 1938
While economic concerns certainly played a role in Americans' attitudes toward immigration, so too did feelings of fright, mistrust, and fifty-fifty hatred of those who were unlike. Immigration policies were shaped by fears of communist infiltrators and Nazi spies. Antisemitism too played an important role in public opinion. Information technology was propagated past leaders like Father Charles Coughlin, known as "the radio priest," who was the outset to offer Catholic religious services over the radio and reached millions of people with each circulate. In addition to his religious message, Coughlin preached antisemitism, accusing the Jews of manipulating financial institutions and conspiring to command the world. Industrialist Henry Ford was another prominent vocalization spreading antisemitism.
Martha and Waitstill Abrupt challenged this strong tide of opinion when they agreed to travel to Europe to help victims of the Nazi regime. They were amid a minor number of Americans who worked to aid refugees despite popular sentiment and official government policies. Many of those involved had friends and relatives abroad. They inundated members of Congress and government officials with messages and telegrams. A smaller number still, including the Sharps, actually traveled to Europe in an attempt to help the refugees. Most rescue and relief work was done under the auspices of assistance groups such as the Unitarian Service Committee (created through the Sharps' work), the American Friends Service Commission (run by the Quakers), the Committee for the Care of European Children, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Some American government officials also recognized the danger and looked for means to bring more refugees into the land. At a time when having the correct "papers" determined a refugee's chance of survival, clearing policy was crucial. In 1939, Senator Robert Wagner, a Democrat from New York, and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican from Massachusetts, sponsored a bill that proposed to allow German Jewish children to enter the United States outside of official immigration quotas. The bill caused a loud and bitter public fence, but it never even reached a vote in Congress.
In 1940, members of the President's Informational Committee on Political Refugees argued with the State Department to simplify immigration procedures for refugees. This effort was too defeated. Refugees had an marry in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who supported liberalizing immigration laws, wrote near the refugee crisis in her weekly newspaper column, and worked backside the scenes to event change. Mrs. Roosevelt'due south interventions successfully helped some individual refugees, peculiarly artists and intellectuals, but she was not able to shift national policies. Those in ability in the Country Section insisted on enforcing the nation's clearing laws as strictly every bit possible. Breckinridge Long, the Land Department officer responsible for issuing visas, was deeply antisemitic. He was adamant to limit clearing and used the Land Department'southward ability to create a number of barriers that made information technology almost incommunicable for refugees to seek asylum in the The states. For instance, the application form for US visas was 8 anxiety long and printed in small type. Long believed that he was "the first line of defense force" confronting those who would "brand America vulnerable to enemies for the sake of humanitarianism." Long and his colleagues at the State Department went and so far every bit to turn away a group of Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis in May 1939 when the German ocean liner sought to dock in Florida later the refugees were denied entry to Republic of cuba. Following their deportation back to Europe, many of these people perished in the Holocaust.
Historian David Wyman has described American immigration policies during World War Ii as "paper walls that meant the difference between life and death." Despite the many obstacles to clearing, some 200,000 Jews did manage to accomplish the United States betwixt 1933 and 1945; even so, this number is a minor fraction of those who attempted to come.
Citations
Source: https://www.facinghistory.org/defying-nazis/america-and-holocaust
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