are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.”57
Churchill agreed. “Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all the Jews,” he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, “transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.” Not enough shipping and transport? At the battle of Dunkirk, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of new planes. During even a brief armistice, the U.S. and British could have airlifted and transported huge numbers of refugees to safety.58
Not everyone was too busy fighting a war. Particularly from late 1942 on, many in the United States and Britain demanded that something be done. On March 23, 1943, the Archbishop of Canterbury pleaded with the House of Lords to assist the Jews of Europe. So, the British government proposed to the U.S. government another public conference at which to discuss what might be done to evacuate Jews from neutral nations. But the British Foreign Office feared that the Nazis might cooperate in such plans despite never being asked to, writing: "There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants."59
The concern here was not with saving lives so much as with avoiding the embarrassment and inconvenience of saving lives.
The U.S. government just sat on the proposal until Jewish leaders held a mass demonstration at Madison Square Garden. At that point, the State Department made plans for the Bermuda Conference of April 19-29, 1943, plans that ensured it would be no more than a publicity stunt. No Jewish organizations were included, the location served to keep people out, the conference was assigned to merely make recommendations to a committee, and those recommendations were not to include increased immigration to the United States or to Palestine. The Bermuda Conference, in the end, recommended that “no approach be made to Hitler for the release of potential refugees." There were also some suggestions for helping refugees leave Spain, and a declaration on the postwar repatriation of refugees.60
According to Rafael Medoff of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, “Until the Bermuda conference, most American Jews and most Members of Congress had accepted FDR’s ‘rescue through victory’ approach -- the claim that the only way to aid the Jews of Europe was to defeat the Nazis on the battlefield. This long, slow strategy that included blockade and starvation -- and the delay of the D-Day invasion for years -- condemned large numbers to their fate and has disturbing parallels with the later U.S. practice of imposing economic sanctions on whole nations for long periods of time. But in the wake of Bermuda, there was a growing conviction that by the time the war was won, there might be no European Jews left to save.” Public activism increased significantly, to the point where it seemed possible that even the U.S. Congress might act. Before it could, Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, which may have saved as many as 200,000 people during the last year-and-a-half of the war.61
While the United States was failing to rescue most of the Jews of Europe, Britain was refusing to allow larger numbers of them to settle in Palestine. Given all the injustice and violence generated by the eventual creation of Israel, and the fact that a major concern of the British was Arab protests, the policy should not be simply condemned. But it was condemned by Jewish groups during World War II, and there is no question that the promise of a land in Palestine, combined with its denial, and combined with the failure of the world’s governments to follow through on numerous other possible destinations for refugees, created great suffering.
In 1942, a small ship called the Struma sailed from a Romanian port on the Black Sea with 769 refugees trying to reach Palestine. After reaching Istanbul, the ship was in no shape to go on. But Turkey refused to admit the refugees unless Britain would promise that they could enter Palestine. Britain refused. Turkey towed the ship out to sea, where it broke apart. There was one survivor.62
Opposition to mass immigration into Palestine came not only from the people who lived there, but also from the King of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, whose oil was important to the Allies, and who hoped to build a pipeline to the Mediterranean. The Saudi King preferred Sidon, Lebanon, to Haifa, Palestine, as an end-point for the desired pipeline.63 In 1944, his opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine was “well known” according to U.S. Secretary of State Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr. who on December 13, 1944, warned President Roosevelt that pro-Zionist statements could have “a very definite bearing upon the future of the immensely valuable American oil concession in Saudi Arabia.”64
Detractors of Franklin Roosevelt blame him for not doing more, arguing that he could have seen to it that Jews found safe haven in Cuba or the Virgin Islands or Santo Domingo or Alaska, or -- if Jews were really unwelcome as free citizens of the United States -- then in refugee camps. Of course, the same complaint can be lodged against the U.S. Congress. There were 425,000 German prisoners of war in the United States during the war, but only one camp for refugees, in Oswego, N.Y., which held about 1,000 Jews.65 Were Nazi soldiers 425 times more welcome than Jewish refugees? Well, perhaps in some sense they were. Prisoners of war are temporary and isolated. Here’s what Gallup says of its polling results, even after the war, even after widespread awareness of the horrors that would become the top retroactive justification of the war in decades to follow:
“After the war ended, Gallup asked several questions about the very large number of Jewish and other European refugees who were situated in the ravaged postwar Europe and seeking a home. Gallup found net opposition in response to each of the three ways the questions were worded. The least opposition was in response to a June 1946 question asking Americans if they approved or disapproved of ‘a plan to require each nation to take in a given number of Jewish and other European refugees, based upon the size and population of each nation.’ . . . The responses were 40% in favor, 49% opposed. . . . In August, a separate question invoked the name of President Harry Truman, saying that the president planned to ask Congress to allow more Jewish and other European refugees to come to the U.S. to live than are allowed under the current law. This idea did not sit well at all with the public, some 72% of whom said that they disapproved. A 1947 question localized the issue to the state level, stating, ‘The Governor of Minnesota has said that the Middlewest could take several thousands of displaced (homeless) persons from refugee camps in Europe,’ and asking the respondents if they would approve or disapprove of their own state taking about 10,000 of these ‘displaced persons from Europe.’ A majority, 57%, said no -- 24% yes, with the rest evincing uncertainty.”66
For those interested in more information on U.S. immigration policy and the Holocaust, there’s a section on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.67
In the end, those left alive in the concentration camps were liberated -- though in many cases not very quickly, not as anything resembling a top priority. Some prisoners were kept in horrible concentration camps at least up through September of 1946. General George Patton urged that nobody should “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” President Harry Truman admitted at that time that “we apparently treat the Jews the same way as the Nazis did, with the sole exception that we do not kill them.”68
Of course, even were that not an exaggeration, not killing people is a very important exception. The United States had fascist tendencies but did not succumb to them as Germany did. But neither was there any all-out capital-R Resistance crusade to save those threatened by fascism -- not on the part of the U.S. government, not on the part of the U.S. mainstream. Many made heroic efforts, with limited success, but they were in a minority. A Dr. Seuss cartoon showed a woman reading her children a story called “Adolf the Wolf.” The caption was: “. . . and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones . . . But those were foreign children and it really didn’t matter.”69
In July 2018, with anti-immigrant
