Americans and the Holocaust

On March 8, 1923, the Chicago Daily Tribune newspaper made its first mention of the “Bavaria Fascisti Chief” Adolf Hitler. Reporter Raymond Fendrick of the paper’s Foreign News Service noted three particulars about Hitler: his fervent antisemitism, especially his admiration for the antisemitic American automaker Henry “Heinrich” Ford; his 6,000-man force of militarist “shock troops”; and his rising reputation as an outspoken nationalist. But for most of the remaining 1920s, Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) German Workers’ Party remained on the fringes of German politics, and American press coverage about them was at best sporadic. Only during the early 1930s, as the Great Depression ravaged the world’s industrial nations, did some Americans begin to pay attention to the meteoric rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and to ask questions about its possible significance.  

Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader includes a sampling of the information available to Americans about the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews between 1933 and 1945. Presented in relatively strict chronological order, the selections intend to prompt readers to consider three essential questions in confronting this history: What did Americans know?” “When did they know it?” “What did they do with that knowledge? We urge readers to continually push against hindsight from their 21st-century knowledge about the Holocaust. We seek to show the ways the US government and American people responded to Nazism by wrestling with the rationales behind their actions and inactions in the context of the moment, which was defined by economic crisis, fear of communism, and widespread views that were isolationist, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, and racist.  

These sources also help to overturn the incorrect but commonly held assumption that Americans had little access to information about Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s. Even if it was not always front-page news, information about discrimination against Jews was available to the US government as well as the American public. But the contemporary responses to this information show that the real threats of Nazism and the murderous nature of the regime towards Jews were not comprehended. The relatively wide gap between information and understanding—an essential theme here—directly influenced how Americans responded to Nazi Germany and, eventually, to its annihilation of six million European Jews.  

A second animating theme at the heart of this book is the gap between many Americans’ disapproval of the Nazi regime’s treatment of Jews and a will to action among the American people and within the US government to help Jewish victims. The sources included here reveal actions both taken and not taken, especially as some Americans debated whether to provide refuge for those persecuted by the Nazi regime. In doing so, we challenge overly simple, inaccurate statements such as: Americans didn’t do anything to respond to Nazism while also raising an additional critical question: What more could have been done?  

Focusing on action and inaction opens this narrative to include many actors—governmental leaders and elected officials, faith leaders, grassroots organizations, culture makers, journalists, “ordinary” people—who faced critical choices about when and how to act, or not to act, in response to Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s. Reading sources that capture these multiple and diverse voices within the context of their times advances our understanding of the range of Americans’ responses to Nazism.