carrying over 900 Jewish refugees from Germany was turned away by Cuba. The ship sailed up the Florida coast, followed by the U.S. Coast Guard, which had been dispatched by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. to keep track of the ship in case the U.S. government could be persuaded to allow it to dock. The government was not persuaded, the ship returned to Europe, and over 250 of its passengers perished in the Holocaust.40
As the fate of the Jews worsened in Europe, openness to accepting them into the United States did not significantly increase. One reason was fear of enemy spies. According to Time Magazine, looking back from 2019, “After the rapid German conquest of France, pervasive concerns about American security fostered a fearful and resentful climate of opinion; Roper Poll in June 1940 found that only 2.7% of Americans thought the government was doing enough to counteract a Nazi ‘Fifth Column’ operating in the U.S. German Jews were not immune from these suspicions. Some Americans thought Jews could be coerced into spying for Germany based on threats to their relatives in Germany; others, including a former undersecretary of state, thought that inherent ‘Jewish greed’ might lead refugees and immigrants to work for the Nazi cause. By mid-1941 the State Department instructed consuls to deny visas to applicants who had relatives living in the totalitarian countries of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Italy—and then Congress passed a bill directing consuls abroad to refuse a visa to any alien who might endanger public safety.”41
In fact, in June 1940, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Immigration Breckenridge Long circulated a memo proposing that the United States indefinitely delay the admission of immigrants: “We can do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.” The restrictive U.S. quotas, with millions of lives in the balance, were one thing, but 90% of the allowed places were not filled, condemning 190,000 people to their fate.42 There were over 300,000 people on the waiting list in early 1939.43
Dick Cheney's and Liz Cheney's 2015 book, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, is one of countless accounts of U.S. superiority that finds the historical and moral greatness of the United States in WWII and in contrast to the Nazis.44 Featured, as is often the case, is the death of Anne Frank. There is no mention of the fact that Anne Frank’s family applied for visas to the United States, jumped through numerous hoops, found people to vouch for them, pulled strings with well-connected U.S. big-shots, produced funds, forms, affidavits, and letters of recommendation -- and it wasn’t enough. Their visa applications were denied.45
In July 1940, Adolf Eichmann, a major planner of the holocaust, intended to send all Jews to Madagascar, which now belonged to Germany, France having been occupied. The ships would need to wait only until the British, which now meant Winston Churchill, ended their blockade. That day never came.46 On November 25, 1940, the French ambassador asked the U.S. Secretary of State to consider accepting German Jewish refugees then in France.47 On December 21st, the Secretary of State declined.48 On October 19, 1941, former U.S. President Herbert Hoover, in a speech on the radio, said over 40 million children in German-invaded democracies were dying as a result of the British blockade. He denounced it as a “holocaust.”49
On July 25, 1941, the British Ministry of Information created a policy of using material on Nazi atrocities sparingly and only regarding “indisputably innocent” victims. “Not with violent political opponents. And not with the Jews.”50
By 1941, the Nazis had arrived at their decision to murder the Jews rather than expel them to a world that wouldn’t take them or even let them out of Europe. Time Magazine notes that “From October 1941 on, [Germany] formally blocked the legal emigration of Jews from its territories, and it called on allies and satellite countries to turn over their Jews. Most German Jews who made it through the difficult security screening in the U.S. came from neutral countries.”51
On July 29, 1942, Eduard Schulte, the chief executive of a German mining company, risked his life to take knowledge of the mass murder underway in German camps to Switzerland to get it into the hands of Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress. For Riegner to get it to the president of his organization, Rabbi Stephen Wise, in New York, he had to ask the U.S. diplomats in Bern to send it. The U.S. State Department buried the report, sharing it with neither Wise nor President Roosevelt. After a month’s delay, Wise received the report through the British government. He announced that Germany had killed 2 million Jews and was at work killing the rest. The New York Times put that story on page 10.52
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a forerunner of the CIA) had its own sources on the genocide in progress, as well as having been in possession of Schulte’s report. An official word from the State Department or the OSS might have moved the story to page 1, but neither said a word. Allen Dulles of the OSS -- future director of the CIA -- met Schulte in Zurich in the spring of 1943 but was interested in learning about the Nazis, not their victims. When German foreign service official Fritz Kolbe risked his life repeatedly to bring Dulles information on Nazi crimes, Dulles repeatedly ignored it. In April 1944, Kolbe alerted Dulles that Hungary’s Jews were about to be rounded up and sent to death camps. Dulles’ report on that meeting ended up on Roosevelt’s desk but made no mention of Hungary’s Jews or of the proposals urged by Schulte and others to bomb the rail lines to the camps or the camps themselves.53
The U.S. military bombed other targets so close to Auschwitz that the prisoners saw the planes pass over, and erroneously imagined they were about to be bombed. Hoping to stop the work of the death camps at the cost of their own lives, prisoners cheered for bombs that never came. The U.S. military never took any serious action against the construction and operation of the camps or in support of their expected victims. Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern, who was a B-24 pilot during the war, and who flew missions in the vicinity of Auschwitz, testified that it would have been easy to add the camp and the rail lines to target lists.54
Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League, was very concerned in 1942 by stories of Nazi plans, no longer focused on expelling Jews but turning toward plans to murder them. Hughan believed that such a development appeared “natural, from their pathological point of view,” and that it might really be acted upon if World War II continued. “It seems that the only way to save thousands and perhaps millions of European Jews from destruction,” she wrote, “would be for our government to broadcast the promise” of an “armistice on condition that the European minorities are not molested any further. . . . It would be very terrible if six months from now we should find that this threat has literally come to pass without our making even a gesture to prevent it.” When her predictions were fulfilled only too well by 1943, she wrote to the U.S. State Department and the New York Times: “two million [Jews] have already died” and “two million more will be killed by the end of the war.” She warned that military successes against Germany would just result in further scapegoating of Jews. “Victory will not save them, for dead men cannot be liberated,” she wrote.55
British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden met on March 27, 1943, in Washington, D.C., with Rabbi Wise and Joseph M. Proskauer, a prominent attorney and former New York State Supreme Court Justice who was then serving as President of the American Jewish Committee. Wise and Proskauer proposed approaching Hitler to evacuate the Jews. Eden dismissed the idea as “fantastically impossible.”56 But the very same day, according to the U.S. State Department, Eden told Secretary of State Cordell Hull something different:
“Hull raised the question of the 60 or 70 thousand Jews that are in Bulgaria and are threatened with extermination unless we could get them out and, very urgently, pressed Eden for an answer to the problem. Eden replied that the whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very difficult and that we should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and
