Religious Response to the Holocaust

American Decades | Date: 2001

RELIGIOUS RESPONSE TO THE HOLOCAUST

A Muted Memory

As horrific as was the Holocaust in retrospect, it is surprising how muted the response to the calamity was in the 1940s. For non-Jews the Holocaust tended to be discussed in the context of German barbarism, a manifestation of the moral bankruptcy of war, or a sign of deep-seated human depravity. Many associated it with the other catastrophes of the period—with Japanese brutality toward prisoners of war, Japanese medical experimentation in Manchuria, and the Bataan death march in the Philippines; with the Lidice massacre and the murders in Katyn Forest; with scorched-earth warfare in Russia; with carpet bombing of European cities; and with V-2 rockets and the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Refugee Policy

As terrible as these events were, to a great extent they paled before the intentional, systematic extermination of 9 million innocent human beings (6 million of them Jewish) in the Nazi death factories. Placing the Holocaust in context perhaps assuaged more than a few guilty consciences: although the Nazis established the death camps, many nationalities were complicit in the Holocaust, especially in eastern Europe. Western governments, including that of the United States, continually downplayed the Nazi oppression of Jews before World War II, and none of the democracies liberalized their immigration policies during the Depression to provide German and east European Jews with refuge. In 1938, in fact, after the Nazis had begun wholesale appropriation of Jewish businesses, public-opinion polls showed that 83 percent of Americans favored increasing immigration restrictions. In 1939 only 10 percent of the legal quota of Jewish immigrants to the United States was filled. In 1939, moreover, a proposal to admit twenty thousand Jewish children to the United States was killed in Congress. Despite press reports of Nazi oppression, there remained considerable anti-Semitism within the United States. During the Depression anti-Semites such as Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Henry Ford had reinforced popular anti-Semitic stereotypes. As late as 1944, polls revealed that 65 percent of the public believed that Jews held too much American wealth and power. Popular opposition to refugee immigration remained high. The 1939 tragedy of the St. Louis, a German ship filled with nearly nine hundred Jews, illustrates the point. When the ship attempted to dock in the United States they were turned away and ultimately forced to return to Hamburg, after which the majority met their deaths later in the camps. While after the outbreak of war the U.S. State Department approved the admission of thirty-two hundred prominent Jewish intellectuals, academics, artists, and scientists, in June 1941 it cut off the migration, arguing that spies had infiltrated the immigrant stream. The Nazis initiated their "final solution" soon after.

War Refugee Board

By fall 1942 news of the Holocaust had reached American Jewish leaders, who pleaded in vain for some type of rescue attempt from the government. The government rejected proposals to bomb the rail lines to the death camps or to bomb the camps directly on the grounds that it would involve too great a reordering of war priorities. Not until 22 January 1944 did the Roosevelt administration establish a War Refugee Board, which restructured immigration policy and actively attempted to rescue east European Jews. The board did have some success rescuing Hungarian Jews, paying ransoms to Nazi officials in return for Jewish lives, but for the majority of Jews in Europe it was too late. By the end of the war fewer than 111,000 Jews had been rescued and provided refuge by the United States. However, there was little the American government could do. The Nazis were so determined to exterminate the Jews that they compromised their war effort badly and raced to murder as many Jews as possible, even in the closing days of the war. Even in Hungary more than half a million Jews died in the gas chambers.

Jewish Response

While American Jewish leaders unanimously condemned Nazi policies toward Jews even before the Holocaust, they were by no means united in recommending a response to the crisis. Boycotts of German goods, financial assistance to relatives, and proposals to ransom German Jews were forwarded; due to wrangling within the American Jewish community and slim support from non-Jews, all floundered. These proposals were complicated by Zionist resistance to British rule in Palestine and Jewish support for British resistance to the Nazis. Zionists argued that the laggard response of the Western democracies to Nazi oppression was proof the Jews must establish an independent Hebrew state; others continued to seek the help of Gentiles. The wrangling continued, no unified program developed, and no real rescue was made. Given the anti-Semitism within the United States, the chaos of war, and the sheer physical inability to move into eastern Europe, there was perhaps little for American Jews to do but wrangle. Such ineffectuality, however, wore heavily after the war.

Liberation

In 1945 Allied armies began to liberate the death camps of Europe. As graphic photographs and journalistic reports of the camps returned to the United States, the disbelief many Americans expressed at reports of the Holocaust in 1942 became horribly ironic. Still, the Holocaust was an unprecedented event that stunned many and boggled the imagination. Jews sank into despair, especially troubled by the ineffectiveness of their rescue efforts during the war. Liberal Protestants fell into silence, their optimistic assessments of human nature hopelessly compromised. The Catholic Church offered few insights beyond truisms, plagued by the overt collaboration of many east European clergy with the Nazis. With little public discussion, the response to the Holocaust became a private affair, especially among Jewish families who lost relatives. In a sense American public religion was perhaps too stunned to offer a clear assessment, and the 1940s passed with remarkably little reflection on the Holocaust, although in subsequent decades the witness of writers such as Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and others would ensure a most terrible place for the Holocaust in the memory of Western society.

Sources:

Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920-1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992);

Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter —A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).

Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.