The United States let the Nazis murder six million Jews without a murmur

Gerhart Riegner was in Geneva during the war. A member of the World Jewish Congress, he was the first to make known to the world the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. But he found himself up against the resistance of the Americans, who did all they could to avoid a flood of refugees. Today, Gerhart Riegner is still in Geneva and he recalls those days¹.

"The Allies, and in particular the Americans, did nothing to save the Jews. That's the real scandal!" Gerhart Riegner speaks from experience. During the Second World War he was the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. "After the fall of France in the summer of l940, my service became the main source of information on the fate of the European Jews." More than fifty years later, at the venerable age of eighty-seven, this former German Jewish refugee is still working for the organization of which he was one of the founders in l936. From the window of his office on the fourth floor of number l, rue de Varembé, he can glimpse the Geneva office of the United Nations, at the time the headquarters of the League of Nations... nations in league, before, during and after the war in their almost total indifference to the extermination of the Jews.

"It was after the Bermuda Conference in April of l943 that we understood that the Allies would never launch a rescue operation." The meeting with the British and American delegations produced no concrete results: obviously, the goal of the diplomats was not to save the Jews but to silence those who were pressing for help².

Suicide in London

The Bermuda Conference opened on the first day of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The crushing of the uprising coincided with the suicide, in London, of one of the heads of the Jewish community, in despair over the inaction of the Western powers.

This inaction was in no way the result of ignorance. The world knew from several sources, especially from the World Jewish Congress.

"In October of l941, three months after the beginning of the German offensive against the Soviet Union, I sent to the British and American governments a report communicating the information reaching me from the East. It was so catastrophic that I doubted that even a single Jew would survive the war," recounts Gerhart Riegner. On August 8, l942, he sent another report, of even greater significance and drawn from an unimpeachable source, revealing the existence of a plan of systematic extermination.

Washington's Uneasiness

Contrary to what one might think, this information merely made Washington uneasy. "Each one of my telegraphed reports triggered further pressure for the government to react," explains Gerhart Riegner. Moreover, the upper echelons of the government tried to silence the source of the information. On February l0, l943, the American ambassador to Berne received instructions signed by the Undersecretary of State, Sumner Wells, asking him, in the future, not to accept "reports which are submitted in order to be transmitted to private individuals in the United States, unless such action is justified by extraordinary circumstances"³.

"I was asked to pay."

When, in April l943, I turned up with a long report proposing two rescue operations, nobody said anything. But I could see that something was wrong. Finally, I was asked if I was ready to pay for the telegram. I accepted. They demanded an amount equal to my earnings for a whole month." Needless to say, the rescue operation did not come off.

How does one explain the indifference of those whom the former representative of the Jewish Congress considered "our best friends"? "It's incomprehensible!" he blurts out, stunned, even so many years afterward.

Incomprehensible? Indeed! Antisemitism was widespread throughout United States society, right up to the top of the power structure. A series of surveys done between l938 and l946 showed that more than half of the people of the United States considered Jews greedy and dishonest, and that 35% to 40% would have supported legal discrimination measures such as those in force against Blacks⁴.

Yankee Anti-Semitism

This Yankee anti-Semitism grew as the Nazi persecution increased. Between l941 and l944, acts of violence against the American Jewish community, such as vandalism of synagogues and attacks on children, multiplied, particularly in New York and in Boston. In the face of this violence, everybody kept a low profile. Roosevelt almost never mentioned the massacre of the Jews in his public utterances, and the United States press usually buried any news of it in the back pages or watered it down by incorporating it into articles dealing generally with the crimes of the Nazis.

German Propaganda

"German propaganda in the United States was very strong and very skillful," explains Gerhart Riegner. "It accused the Jews of wanting to push the United States into the war, while public opinion was generally against participating in the conflict."

American anti-Semitism had already found a particularly effective form of expression during the nineteen twenties, in the regulation of immigration..

Between l880 and l920, the United Stated had witnessed the arrival of an immense wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe - Russia, Poland, Galicia, Rumania - after the pogroms initiated in Russia⁵. These immigrants, influenced by socialist ideas current in their native lands, found their way in great numbers into the burgeoning labor union movements. American public opinion thus came to accept the idea that Jews were synonymous with Communists. Later, as the country sank into the Great Depression, it provided a ready-made scapegoat.

The Quota System

The quota law of l924 aimed deliberately at limiting Slavic and Jewish immigration. The number of immigrants to be admitted was based on their numbers in the United States in l890, before the arrival of huge numbers of Jews. Hence, of some 150,000 immigrants allowed in each year, more than half were to be English and Irish, whereas Poles and Russians together were allotted less than l0,000 entry visas⁶. In spite of various efforts by advocates of increased immigration for refugees, the law remained unchanged until l950. Even worse, during the war, an anti-Semite group at the State Department managed to reduce its applicability to such an extent that only 10% of the entry visas allowed under the law were actually granted, for example about 650 per year for Poles, whose country had had over three million Jews before the war.

Don't Help Hitler

This is not surprising when one considers that in May of l943, one of the heads of the visa section at the State Department, Robert C. Alexander, figured that rescuing Jews would end up "ridding Hitler of an enormous burden"⁷. Further, in order to hope to gain entry to the United States, Jewish immigrants had to respond to two criteria. They had to find some sort of sponsoring organization to underwrite all their expenses, and their "usefulness" to American society had to be indubitably proven.

Under such conditions, people fleeing the barbarity of the Nazis by their own means had almost no chance of being accepted, notwithstanding the words engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The "Saint Louis"

Some thousand refugees of the boat "Saint Louis" were among the first to learn this. Having left Hamburg May l3, l939, they were refused admission to Cuba - which at the time was little more than a United States protectorate - then to the United States itself. In the end, they had to return to Europe, where most of them were deported to the camps and murdered by the Nazis.

Several years later, the people aboard the "Quenza" had more luck - an exception resulting from the determined lobbying effort directed at Secretary of State Cordell Hull by two Jews, the Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldman. In his memoirs, Goldman recounts the episode⁸. "If you want," Goldman reputedly said to Hull, "I can telegraph to the refugees aboard the 'Quenza' and tell them to throw themselves overboard." "You are truly cynical, Mr Goldman," responded the American official. Whereupon the other replied, "I wonder who is more cynical, the Secretary of State trying to condemn hundreds of Jews to a certain death or he who is trying to save them."

"What would we do?"

Cynical: no other word better qualifies the American attitude toward the Shoah. The maneuvers- political, military, public relations - sought not to save lives but to avoid having to look after them. At the end of the Bermuda Conference, journalists were asked, "Suppose Hitler let something like two million Jews out of Europe. What would we do with them?"

Manuel Grandjean