One important lesson of 'Americans and the Holocaust' is that the most simple excuse for inaction - that Americans lacked access to information, that they “just did not know” about the dangers Jews faced at the hands of Nazism - absolutely does not hold up to scrutiny. At the beginning of the Nazi regime’s terror in 1933, newspapers across the United States reported on persecution at Dachau, the first concentration camp that the Nazis established. Ten years later, subscribers to the Indianapolis Star in Indiana (as just one example of how news of the Holocaust was widely available) could have read about the “murder camp” in Oświęcim (Auschwitz). At the very moment that hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in summer 1944, American newspapers reported that more than 1.7 million Jews already had been killed there. By November, as prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau were being evacuated for brutal death marches, American newspapers ran stories about the Auschwitz Report, released to the public by the War Refugee Board, which provided even more graphic detail about what occurred in the complex of camps. Readers in Chicago, New York City and, Washington, DC, had access to this information about the horrors in their daily papers, and so did readers in Greenville, South Carolina; Athens, Ohio; Helena, Montana and scores of American cities in between.
What may be most troubling is to realize just how much Americans could have known about these atrocities as they were occurring - and then to consider why this information did not lead to concerted, sustained efforts to rescue Nazism’s victims.
Daniel Greene, PhD, is curator of 'Americans and the Holocaust', a special exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. A web version of the exhibition may be found at www.ushmm.org/americans.
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