Americans and the Holocaust Exhibit Audio Tour (Tour)

1. Intro Panel (Americans and the Holocaust Exhibit)

This exhibition asks two main questions: what did Americans know about the Holocaust? The Museum answers this in the exhibition. What more could have been done? This is for you to discuss and debate. The exhibition is divided into four sections exploring these themes, each section asking a specific question: What did Americans know? Did Americans help refugees? Why did Americans go to war? And how did Americans respond to the Holocaust? In order to contextualize American responses, it is important to understand what the United States looked like before 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany and Franklin Roosevelt became president of the United States.Please watch the large screen on the title panel of the exhibition.Based on what you saw in the video, what concerns and fears dominated the American mindset from 1918-1933? The United States was isolationist after World War I, with many Americans believing that the country should not engage in any foreign wars. Congress passed new immigration laws in the 1920s that limited the number of immigrants who could come to the United States. Americans were worried about communism, and many believed that Jews were linked with communism. Our country was also segregated by race in many places, legally and by custom in others. And in 1929, the Great Depression began. Millions of Americans were out of work and lost their life savings. The Depression was still going on when President Roosevelt took office in 1933.

2. Nazism in the News (Americans and the Holocaust Exhibit)

The first section of the exhibition asks what Americans could have known about the Nazi persecution of Jews. As soon as Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, he immediately began amassing power, and within two years was a dictator. The Nazi party was quickly the only political party allowed in Germany, and Hitler’s government immediately began persecuting German Jews. Jews were fired from their jobs in government and at universities, Jewish shops were boycotted, and books written by Jews and the Nazis’ political opponents were burned in the streets. News of Nazi Germany and Nazi persecutions were on the front pages of American newspapers and on the covers of American magazines.Please view the magazine in the center of the top row. This is the cover of Newsweek magazine from the summer of 1933. Joseph Goebbels [pronounced Gerbulls], the Nazi propaganda minister, is pictured. What is the line under the picture? Right. “Say it in your dreams, the Jews were to blame.” So Americans had information about Nazi antisemitism as soon as Hitler came to power in Germany. The Goebbels tagline reminded American readers that antisemitism (prejudice or hatred towards Jews) was central to Nazi ideology. At the kiosk over here, which we’ll walk over to now, you can explore nationwide newspaper coverage in the United States of the Nazi treatment of Jews.Walk to the West Window Kiosk. As you can see, even locally, there was news coverage of these events, which people in our state could have read. These are just a few samples of the thousands of American newspaper articles that covered the Nazi regime. Please feel free to come back and explore this interactive screen later. You can also participate in the Museum’s “History Unfolded” project to collect local news coverage of the Holocaust, and the librarians can help you do this.

3. Nazi Olympics

In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the summer Olympics in Berlin. Americans debated whether or not our country should boycott the Olympics because of Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews. After a public debate, and a debate within the athletic community, the United States decided to participate in the Games. But individual athletes, like Jesse Owens, were still pressured to boycott the games. Owens and other African American athletes were told to either stay home in solidarity with Germany’s Jewish community, or to go to the Games, win, and show that white supremacy in the United States and Nazi Germany was wrong. Eighteen African American athletes participated in the Games and won multiple gold medals, but their successes did not lessen racism either in the United States or in Nazi Germany.Read Jesse Owens’ quote.

4. German Terror Shocks Americans (Americans and the Holocaust Exhibit)

On the night of November 9th, 1938, Nazi Germany launched a nationwide terror campaign against Jews. Nazi supporters destroyed Jewish-owned shops across Germany and Austria—which had already been annexed by Nazi Germany—and they burned hundreds of synagogues and arrested 30,000 Jewish men and boys and sent them to concentration camps. These were the first mass roundups of Jews--before 1938, most concentration camp prisoners had been political opponents of the Nazis.These attacks, which were soon called Kristallnacht (pronounced Cryst-all-knockt), were front-page news throughout the United States for almost three weeks. You can see some of the headlines here, and this photo of a protest in Los Angeles after the attacks. But more importantly, look at these public opinion polls.View the poll on the left. How many people said “Disapprove?” View the poll on the right and see the percentage of people who said “No.” Despite Americans overwhelming disapproval of Nazi terror, most people did not want to admit more Jewish refugees into the United States. This divide between sympathy and action existed throughout this time period.

5. Reporting on Mass Murder (Americans and the Holocaust)

During World War II, there were magazine and newspaper articles about the Nazi plan to murder the Jews—particularly after Americans learned of that plan in November 1942, which we’ll talk about later. But most newspapers made the war the main headline, since Americans were fighting and dying overseas. It wasn’t until the spring of 1945, as the war in Europe ended, that Americans saw photos and film of the liberation of concentration camps. Americans were shocked by the images they saw, such as these photographs printed in Life magazine in May 1945. As the world struggled to understand what had happened, a new word, genocide, was needed for these crimes. Genocide is defined as crimes committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.. On December 9, 1948, three years after the end of the Holocaust, the United Nations approved a written international agreement known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention established genocide as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish,” Preventing genocide, the other major obligation of the convention, remains a challenge that nations, institutions, and individuals continue to face.

6. Obstacles to Immigration

The next section of the exhibition asks whether Americans helped Jewish refugees, and how the country responded to the refugee crisis. In the 1930s, as the Nazi persecution of European Jews worsened, hundreds of thousands of people applied to immigrate. People who wanted to immigrate had to add their name to a long waiting list. While waiting, they had to collect many different kinds of paperwork, including birth certificates, military discharge papers, tax documents, and had to pass a medical exam. It was an expensive and time-consuming process. Most also had to have an American financial sponsor, who had to submit evidence that they had enough money to support an immigrant during the Great Depression. You can see examples of some of these documents here. If an immigrant got to the front of the line, had all their paperwork in order, and passed an interview, they were granted an immigration visa and were allowed to leave for the United States.

7. Immigration Restricted (Americans and the Holocaust)

As you just saw, immigration was a very difficult process. Prospective immigrants seeking to enter the US faced restrictive US immigration laws that set limits on the number of people born in each country who could immigrate every year. The number of visas available per country was based on racist immigration laws established in the 1920s, which gave preference to immigrants from northern and western European countries. Germany was granted the second highest allotment of visas (after Great Britain). For most of the 1930s, 25,957 visas were available every year for immigrants from Germany. However, you can see on this chart that the State Department did not issue all the visas available under US law until 1939, but by that time, almost 300,000 people, mostly Jews, were on the German waiting list. After World War II began in September 1939, the State Department deliberately began to make immigration even more difficult, claiming that European immigrants—even Jews--might be a threat to national security. In October 1941, Nazi Germany banned all emigration of Jews from its occupied lands. If you get a chance later, come back and watch the short video on this kiosk, which shows how difficult it was to physically escape Europe after the war began and that fewer ships crossed the Atlantic. The video also tells the story of the St. Louis, a famous ship carrying Jewish refugees that was turned back from Cuba, whose passengers weren’t permitted to enter the United States.

8. Admit Refugee Children

Right after the Kristallnacht attacks, a Democratic senator and a Republican congresswoman introduced legislation to permit 20,000 German refugee children under the age of 14 to immigrate to the United States, in addition to the people admitted within the immigration quotas. Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, supported the bill, but many other Americans--both Democrats and Republicans--disagreed and opposed allowing in child refugees. You can see here that Senator Robert Reynolds, one of the loudest voices opposing the bill, was from President Roosevelt’s own Democratic party. You can see some of the statements and letters to the editor supporting and opposing the bill. Can one of you read one of the “Yes” arguments to us? And one of the “No” arguments? Take a look at the public opinion poll - what percentage of Americans opposed this bill? Right. Because of the strong opposition, the bill never made it to the floor of Congress for a vote.

9. In Search of Refuge (Americans and the Holocaust)

Somewhere between 180,000-220,000 refugees fleeing Nazism were able to immigrate to the United States between 1933 and 1945. Most of them needed help, either from American aid organizations or from individual Americans who were willing to either help family members or even support a total stranger. One such example is the story of Marianne Winter and Jane Bomberger, which you can read more about here. In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Marianne Winter, a teenager in Vienna, wrote to her pen pal, Jane Bomberger, who lived in Reading, Pennsylvania [pronounced “Redding”]. Marianne asked her friend if she knew a rich man who might be able to sponsor the Winter family in their attempt to immigrate to the United States. Jane went to her father, and although their family was not wealthy, they offered to sponsor all four members of the Winter family. Immigration was still difficult, but the Winters were lucky to find a family as generous as the Bombergers, whom they had never met. Jane and her family even welcomed the Winters into their home in Reading, until they could find their own apartment.As we have seen, American responses to the refugee crisis varied.

10. War in Europe (Americans and the Holocaust)

The third section of the exhibition asks why did Americans go to war? It looks at the debates Americans were having about whether we should get involved, and what the war was about. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, officially starting World War II. At that time, President Franklin Roosevelt declared that the United States would remain neutral. If you want to come back and explore more after this tour, there is a short film on this kiosk that shows Roosevelt’s actions between 1939 and 1941—how he went from declaring that the United States would stay neutral, to getting the country prepared to enter the war to support Great Britain. Most Americans did not want to get involved in a foreign war, and as you can see in this “Did you Know” section, the country wasn’t ready to fight. When World War II began, the United States had the seventeenth largest Army in the world.

11. Should Americans Go to War? (Americans and the Holocaust)

From 1939 to 1941, there was a public debate over whether the United States should go to war, should just support Great Britain and France (before France was defeated), or should stay out entirely. The America First organization, created by college students, quickly gained 800,000 members and argued that the United States should focus on defending the United States, not going to war in Europe. Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot and one of the most famous men in America, was the main spokesman for America First. During one speech he made antisemitic statements, blaming the American Jewish community for supposedly pushing the United States to enter the war, and was condemned nationwide for what he said. Do you recognize the artist over here? Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist at the time and drew dozens of cartoons about Lindbergh and America First, accusing Lindbergh in this cartoon of spreading Nazi propaganda.

12. America Attacked! (Americans and the Holocaust)

Do you know what event ultimately led to US participation in World War II? It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the morning of December 7, 1941, seen in this photo. After the attack, the United States declared war on Japan. Germany, which was aligned with Japan, declared war on the United States. So our country officially joined World War II. Only two months after the war began, President Roosevelt signed an Executive Order which led to the arrest and imprisonment of more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in camps, claiming that this was necessary for America’s national security. Public opinion overwhelmingly supported this; this “Hunting License,” created and carried by people who supported the arrests, demonstrates American racism during the period. Again, we can see how Americans debateddebated this issue. Read the bolded quote from middle column of the NAACP article. In both the article and this statement by a congressman, these camps were called “concentration camps” at the time. That is still the term the National Parks Service and survivors of those

13. Why We Fight (Americans and the Holocaust)

After the United States joined World War II, the government produced propaganda posters to explain to Americans why we were fighting. Take a look at the posters. What can they tell us about American motivations for entering the war? What do they leave out? Hitler and the Nazis were shown to be the enemies of Christianity and a threat to American values. But the propaganda posters did not remind Americans that the Nazis were a serious danger to Jews, indicating that the United States did not go to war to rescue Jews.

14. Mass Murder Confirmed (Americans and the Holocaust)

The final section of the exhibition explores how Americans responded to the Holocaust. In November 1942, Americans learned for the first time that Nazi Germany had a plan to murder all the Jews in Europe. If you go back to the newspaper kiosk we looked at a few minutes ago, you can see some of the nationwide coverage of this announcement. But that news reached the United States in a roundabout way. This man, Gerhart Riegner, learned about the Nazi plan in August 1942. At first, the State Department blocked the message, writing that it was likely a war rumor. But the news eventually got to Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the most influential rabbis in America. He asked the State Department to investigate and confirm the information. By November 1942, they did, and newspapers across the country printed stories informing Americans that Nazi Germany was murdering millions of European Jews. Of course, November 1942 is almost a year after Pearl Harbor. The United States was at war with Nazi Germany but could not reach Nazi controlled territory, where the murders were taking place. On this kiosk is a film that shows the progress of World War II--where the Allied soldiers were, and where the Nazi killing centers were located. What you see in the film is that by the time American soldiers landed in France during the D-Day invasion in June 1944, more than five million Jews had already been killed.

15. Hollywood Calls for Actions (Americans and the Holocaust)

After the US government confirmed that Nazi Germany and its collaborators were murdering Jews, activists in the Jewish community and in Hollywood pressured the US government to take action to try to rescue the victims. Hollywood celebrities staged a massive pageant called “We Will Never Die” that sold out Madison Square Garden in New York City twice in the same night and toured major cities throughout the country in 1943.As indicated in this “Did You Know,” most Hollywood studios, on the other hand, shied away from directly addressing Nazi persecution and murder of Jews. Consider the film Casablanca for instance, which has characters escaping from concentration camps, but never mentions that the Nazis specifically targeted Jews. One exception was Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator, which he produced independently.

16. Time to Act (Americans and the Holocaust)

In January 1944, the US Treasury Department argued to President Roosevelt that the State Department had failed to try to rescue Jews—and, in fact, had been lying about rescue efforts. Roosevelt agreed to create a new government agency tasked with trying to rescue Jews and other victims and put Treasury Department officials in charge. So in early 1944, the United States announced the first official policy about the Holocaust, and it was a policy of rescue.The War Refugee Board—the name of this new agency—put pressure on other countries to do more, tried to help Jews escape Nazi territory, and sent humanitarian aid into Europe. By the end of the war, they had saved tens of thousands of lives. They also opened a refugee camp at Fort Ontario, an army base in Oswego, New York, and brought nearly 1,000 mostly-Jewish refugees to live there. This is the only group of people fleeing the Holocaust to enter the United States outside of US immigration laws. Although they were permitted to come here, they had to live at the fort surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Finally in January 1946, eight months after the end of World War II in Europe, the refugees were permitted to enter the US as new immigrants.

17. Atrocities Revealed (Americans and the Holocaust)

We already talked a little bit about Americans seeing images of the liberation of concentration camps for the first time in the spring of 1945, just as World War II in Europe ended. Americans were horrified, and not just on the homefront. Battle-trained American soldiers were also shocked by what they saw. This is Stephan Lewy. He was one of hundreds of soldiers who came to the United States as Jewish refugees who later joined the American military. Lewy returned to Europe and participated in the liberation of the Buchenwald [pronounced Boo-kin-vahld] camp, which you can see here.Read Lewy’s quote. General Dwight Eisenhower, who later became the 35th president of the United States, toured the Ohrdruf [pronounced Or-druff] concentration camp in April 1945. He wrote back to Washington that he couldn’t even describe the horror that he had seen, and that he wanted people to see the evidence of the crimes so that someday people would not be able to claim this was propaganda.

18. Conclusion (Americans and the Holocaust)

As I hope you’ve seen, the United States faced many challenges between 1933 and 1945: the Great Depression, our own racism and prejudices, overcoming isolationism, and winning World War II by sacrificing on the battlefield and on the homefront. More than a tenth of the American population served in uniform, and more than 400,000 Americans were killed in the war. Even though Americans had information about the persecution and later murder of European Jews, rescuing them never became a priority for the United States or for the vast majority of the American people. But this exhibition also shows that individuals have the power to make a difference, and to do things to help. The Museum hopes that visitors to the exhibition will think about their own lives and ask questions about what more we can do to confront hatred and promote human dignity today.

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Americans and the Holocaust Exhibit Audio Tour

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