THE PUBLIC RECORD OF THEJEWISH REFUGEE CRISIS

1933-1939: 60% of Germany’s 500,000 Jews flee their country before the outbreak of the Second World War. 1937-42: The British severely restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine because of unrest among Palestinians.July 1938: At the Evian Conference, delegates from 32 countries refuse to help Jewish refugees. January 1939: Hitler tells the Reichstag that a Second World War would lead to the “destruction of Jewry.”April-October 1940: The German occupiers confine all Polish Jews to ghettos.Summer 1940: German officials propose to Vichy France the deportation of all European Jews to Madagascar.

Jewish pioneers in the Jezreel Valley in Palestine, 1920s.

“Palestine: Promised Land,

Land of Promise”(Zionist

recruitment film, 1935)

THE SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHIC BALANCE IN BRITISH PALESTINE

There were about one million Arabic-speaking Palestinians in 1920. They confronted:

• 150,000 Jewish settlers in 1926

• 172,000 Jewish settlers in 1931

• 384,000 Jewish settlers in 1936

Palestinian militants sought to prevent further immigration through the Hebron massacre of 1929 and the Arab Revolt of 1936/37.

The British crushed the Arab Revolt in 1937 but also restricted Jewish immigration to 15,000 per year.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini

Scottish troops hunt Arab rebels, 1936/37

The Grand Mufti fled to Cairo and then to Berlin, to appeal to

Hitler for support

THE EVIAN REFUGEE CONFERENCE, July 6-15, 1938

At the urging of FDR, delegates from 32 countries and 24 charitable organizations assembled in France to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees.The USA & Britain agreed in advance that the issue of immigration to Palestine would not be raised, and that no country would be asked to alter immigration laws.All countries except the Dominican Republic declared that they were already “saturated” by refugees. Golda Meir told the press afterward, "There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore."[ In 1939 the USA admitted only 27,000 refugees from Germany and Austria.

Burning Synagogues in Siegen and Bielefeld

after Reichskristallnacht,

November 9/10, 1938

When Great Britain confirmed its anti-immigration policy in May 1939,

Zionists split between moderates (led by David Ben-Gurion, below) and

“Revisionists” who decided to fight the British (led by Vladimir Jabotinsky)

The odyssey of 937 Jewish refugees on the S.S. St. Louis

The SS St. Louis in May 1939

The refugees sight Havana, 3 June 1939.After they were forced to return to Belgium, half made their

way to safety in Britain and half perished in Auschwitz…

Entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto, established in October 1940, where over 400,000 Jews lived in a

neighborhood built for 50,000

German Jews deported from Würzburg, spring 1942

Everyone knew in 1942 that the Germans were “evacuating” all Jews to “labor camps” in the East

Nazi propaganda in 1942 blamed the Jews for the

war

“The Jewish Conspiracy”

“THE JEW:Warmonger

War-Prolonger”

The Secret History of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”

Preparations for the invasion of the USSR focus on plans for the “annihilation of the Jewish-Bolshevik system” and execution of all “commissars”.The top leaders of the Third Reich agree in secret meetings sometime in 1941 that the policy of forced emigration must be replaced by mass murder.Mass shootings of Jewish men, women, and children in occupied Soviet territory began in August 1941 (some known to the British through Ultra intercepts).Genocide became in effect the official policy of the German government at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

Soviet POW’s fill in the ravine where the SS shot 33,000 Jews from Kiev at Babi Yar on September

29/30, 1941

Site of the Wannsee Conference, convened on January 20, 1942, by the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich and SS Colonel Adolf

Eichmann

The Network of Death Camps Created in 1942

DECODED ULTRA INTERCEPT: SS report from January 1943 on the killing of 1,274,166 people in the four camps of “Operation Reinhard” in the year 1942

PERSONS DEALT WITH

Lublin Belzec Sobibor Treblinka

Last two weeks

12,761 0 515 10,335

Total for 1942

24,733 434,508 101,370 713,555

Rail Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942

A new shipment of Jews undergoes selection on the Auschwitz train ramp

The weak were disposed of immediately:Hand-carved model of the main gas chamber and

crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Details

United Nations Declaration of December 17, 1942

(read to the House of Commons by Anthony Eden)

The Allied governments had received “numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities… are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland… the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.

“The above-mentioned governments condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination…. They reaffirm their solemn resolution to insure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end."

PROPOSALS REJECTED BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT (see Richard Breitman)

To punish German citizens held in the USA and bomb the civilian population (proposed to FDR by General Sikorski in June 1942).To broadcast propaganda denouncing racism in general and/or anti-Semitism in particular.To further publicize the mass murder of the Jews after December 1942.To open large refugee camps in 1943 in liberated Morocco or Algeria (General Patton warned of an Arab uprising).To exchange German POWs for Jewish children.

Admiral Miklos Horthy,Regent of Hungary

(1919-1944):He bowed to German

pressure to deport 100,000 “alien” Jews but refused to deport

the 800,000 Hungarian Jewish citizens.

Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, and mass deportations to Auschwitz began in

May.

Raoul Wallenberg and Nuncio Angelo Rotta, in Budapest, leaders of the campaign in Budapest

to rescue Hungarian Jews in 1944

A group of Jews in Budapest, saved from deportation by Wallenberg in November 1944

A TRANSPORT OF HUNGARIAN JEWS ARRIVES IN AUSCHWITZ, JUNE 1944

Elie Wiesel in 1943(at age 15),

the year before his deportation to

Auschwitz.He published

Nightin 1958.

Elie Wiesel, freed in Dachau, 16 April 1945 (middle bunk, rear)

Elie Wiesel on the Day of Remembrance in the U.S. Capitol with President Carter & Senator Robert Byrd, 1978

Auschwitz alone was both a death camp and industrial center

U.S. planes bomb the Buna synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz, 13 September 1944

THE DEBATE OVER BOMBING AUSCHWITZ

Details of the Auschwitz killing operation finally became public knowledge in the West in June 1944.Some Jewish leaders in Britain and the USA implored their governments to bomb Auschwitz, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau took up the cause.Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy refused to consider the idea, insisting that only military assets be targeted. Only in 2002 was it revealed that McCloy changed his story in 1986, shortly before his death. Of course he had referred the matter to FDR, who replied, “Why, the idea! They’ll only move it down the road a little way.” FDR added that Americans would then be accused of “bombing these innocent people…. We’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business!”

Jewish victims of the Third Reich