On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler, head of the Nazi Party, Chancellor of Germany. Within the first six months the first concentration camp had been constructed at Dachau, books by Jews had been burned, a nationwide boycott of Jewish owned businesses had been announced, and Jews had been dismissed from the civil service and university positions. Within two years civil liberties had been suspended, Hitler had been granted dictatorial powers, the Nazi Party had been declared the sole legal party in Germany, and with the death of Hindenburg, the office of President and Chancellor had been merged and Hitler had become Reichsfuhrer. Nazi Germany had singled out Jews for special treatment and Hitler had the power to carry out whatever treatment he wanted.

Raul Hilberg, a noted Holocaust scholar, has written that the destruction of European Jewry proceeded from identification to separation to annihilation. Nuremberg “racial laws,” promulgated in fall 1935, defined who Jews were (those with three Jewish grandparents was the basic category), stripped Jews of their citizenship, and prohibited sexual relations and marriage between Jews and those of "German blood." Identification cards, ration cards, and passports were stamped with a "J." Jewish parents had to name their sons "Israel" and their daughters "Sara."

During the night of November 9-10, 1938, Nazi thugs burned Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes, and killed at least ninety Jews. Following Kristallnacht, 'the night of broken glass', the first widespread roundup of Jews took place. Over 30,000 Jewish men, and some Jewish women, were sent to concentration camps. Jews were prohibited from attending universities, concerts, and parks. When the German army invaded Poland in September 1939, Jews were driven into overcrowded ghettos in Lodz and Warsaw, thereby separating them from the general Polish population.

The annihilation phase began in June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Accompanying the German army were specialized mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, who were tasked with killing Communist officials and Jews. Within two years the Einsatzgruppen, supported by police battalions, had murdered at least one million Polish and Soviet civilians by shooting or through the use of mobile gas vans. A concentration camp at Auschwitz was established in May 1940. Soviet prisoners of war were gassed there in September 1941. Over five million Jews, gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, clerics, and opponents of Nazism would be killed in six permanent killing facilities - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, Chelmno, and Majdanek. In addition to these Polish extermination camps, there would be over 5000 concentration camps scattered throughout occupied Europe. Within Germany itself, at concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald, Jews and others were murdered, starved to death, or died from the effects of hideous experiments.

Knowledge of these mass murders, and the information that the Nazis were engaged in a deliberate attempt to wipe out European Jewry through extermination, began to leak to the West in the summer of 1942. At first these reports were considered so unbelievable they were assumed to be Allied propaganda similar to the atrocity stories of World War I. By November 1942, however, the British and American governments had confirmed the authenticity of these reports. On November 24th, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles informed the American Jewish leader Dr. Stephen S. Wise that his worst fears had been confirmed. On December 17th, Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and representatives of eight occupied countries issued a UN declaration specifically condemning the German government for its "intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe." The declaration also committed these governments to punish those who carried out this policy of extermination. When the declaration was read in the British House of Commons, the reading was followed by an unprecedented two-minute moment of silence.

While the British and American governments had confirmed extermination reports, and promised retribution, they did little to halt the killings, or to help those faced with annihilation. Although British and American bombers set German cities on fire throughout 1943, extermination facilities were not deliberately targeted, nor were the railroad tracks leading to the killing centers. The official response to requests to bomb these targets was that the best way to halt the killings was to end the war as quickly as possible. It was claimed that bombing only military targets was the best way to achieve this objective. More controversial was the deliberate policies of the British and American governments to tightly restrict immigration of desperate Jewish refugees. The American State Department was particularly restrictive and placed unnecessary roadblocks in the way of those fleeing for their lives. This policy was exposed when Treasury Department lawyers submitted an eighteen page report to Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. The memorandum, entitled "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," documented State Department obstruction in saving Jews.

Fearing a propaganda and publicity disaster, generated from one of its own agencies, the Roosevelt administration established a War Refugees Board. While State Department opposition to aiding refugees crumbled, the administration's restrictive policy on immigration did not. Many working with the War Refugees Board wanted the American government to announce a policy of temporary "ports" for those fleeing Hitler. Such a policy might have encouraged other nations to open similar "ports." As David Wyman has written, opening many "ports" might have encouraged Spain and Turkey to open their borders if they knew that refugees would be passing through their countries to temporary shelters in other lands. President Roosevelt's timid response to a specific refugee buildup in Italy, however, provided for only one "port." While the Haven at Oswego is a remarkable rescue story, it was also as I.F Stone wrote "a kind of token payment to decency, a bargain-counter flourish in humanitarianism." America with her vast resources could have done so much more.

Thomas W. Judd
History Department
SUNY Oswego