The U.S. and the Holocaust

Like a lot of Americans, I think I had a handle on the tragedy known as the Holocaust.  

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime led a campaign of terror and murder against Jewish people in Europe which came to an end when the Allies (and by "Allies", I mean of course the Americans and some other people) defeated Hitler's Nazi war machine and liberated the surviving Jews from Hitler's terrible grasp.

Hoo-ray for America! We won the war and saved the Jews.

Except...

Except...

Well, history is never quite that simple.

And in the case of the United States and it's role in the Jewish Holocaust, it was far from simple. 

As much as we might want to pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on a job well done, we cannot escape our culpability in the extermination of 6 million lives.  

I watched the PBS documentary series The U.S. and the Holocaust which lays bare how much of a partner the United States was in Hitler's efforts to marginalize, demonize and ultimately murder the Jewish community.  

The anti-semitism that Hitler stoked in his rise to power was not unique to Germany.  

In the United States, along side the signs in windows that forbade entry by black people to shops, schools and hospitals were also signs for Jews to not shop there, not apply for work there, to not seek medical help there.   

To further whitewash the face of America, a 1924 law imposed new, stringent immigration quotas that favored white Protestants.  With no exceptions for refugees. 

And there were a lot refugees looking to get the hell out of Germany.

When cheering throngs greeted Hitler's rants against how Jews were to blame for all the world's ills, he was emboldened to enact policies that stripped German Jews of their rights to hold property, to have jobs, access to education and health care.  

And when Hitler made manifest his ambitions to conquer Europe beyond Germany's borders, expanding into Poland and the Netherlands and more, he had more Jews to ostracize. 

And when de-humanizing the Jews was not enough, Hitler had more Jews to murder.  

Jewish men were rousted from their homes and sent to concentration camps.

Not satisfied with that, Jewish women and children were packed onto trains and shipped off to the camps.

Whoever wasn't worked to death as slave labor died of starvation, exposure and disease. And when that process was too slow, the Nazis built apparatuses like gas chambers and ovens to speed up the extermination of the Jews.

Surely the United States would do something about all that.

Desperate appeals by the Jewish community to seek safe haven in the United States fell on deaf ears. Anti-semitism was pervasive in the US State Department who refused to budge even an inch to relieve the immigration quota restrictions. 

Regarding the reports of the atrocities in the concentration camps, Americans felt the stories were too horrific to be true and were all part of some pro-Jewish propaganda.  

There were sadly Americans who did not doubt the veracity of these reports and figured those deceitful Jews had it coming just like the nice Hitler feller says.  

In response to such efforts to save German and other European Jews from torment, torture and extermination, North Carolina Sen. Robert Rice Reynolds had this to say in June 1941:  “If I had my way, I would today build a wall about the U.S. so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of this earth could possibly scale or ascend it.”

In short, what we have is ours and you can't have any part of it, no matter how bad things are for you where you are.

And if any of that sounds distressingly familiar, just look back over the rants and policies going back 6 years from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and more.   

The documentary concludes with a montage, a sequence with  images of the torch-carrying Charlottesville mob shouting, “Jews will not replace us” in 2017 and of the murderous 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, there's a man in a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt.

The U.S. and the Holocaust provides a solemn record of people, men, women and children who sought nothing more than the simple dignity of living their lives, heinously marked as "different", "other", "not to be trusted." For this inflammatory and false narrative of their threat to "good people", they were put to death in a horrifying efficient manner, in the death camps in gas chambers and ovens.  

The U.S. and the Holocaust also provides a damning testimony not just of the sins of Hitler and his Nazi machine of death but of the sins of the United States. 

Yeah, yay for America who won the war and saved the surviving Jews from the concentration camps. 

But what of our sin of omission, that we could've done so much more if we had lived up to our ideals instead of reaching down to our basest fear and ignorance?

And what of our direction today? Do we have the will to be better than our worst selves and live up to our ideals?

Or are we still on a path to not helping those in a time of need?