all Jews to Madagascar, which now belonged to Germany, France having been occupied. The ships would need to wait only until the British, which now meant Winston Churchill, ended their blockade. That day never came.46 On November 25, 1940, the French ambassador asked the U.S. Secretary of State to consider accepting German Jewish refugees then in France.47 On December 21st, the Secretary of State declined.48 On October 19, 1941, former U.S. President Herbert Hoover, in a speech on the radio, said over 40 million children in German-invaded democracies were dying as a result of the British blockade. He denounced it as a “holocaust.”49
On July 25, 1941, the British Ministry of Information created a policy of using material on Nazi atrocities sparingly and only regarding “indisputably innocent” victims. “Not with violent political opponents. And not with the Jews.”50
By 1941, the Nazis had arrived at their decision to murder the Jews rather than expel them to a world that wouldn’t take them or even let them out of Europe. Time Magazine notes that “From October 1941 on, [Germany] formally blocked the legal emigration of Jews from its territories, and it called on allies and satellite countries to turn over their Jews. Most German Jews who made it through the difficult security screening in the U.S. came from neutral countries.”51
On July 29, 1942, Eduard Schulte, the chief executive of a German mining company, risked his life to take knowledge of the mass murder underway in German camps to Switzerland to get it into the hands of Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress. For Riegner to get it to the president of his organization, Rabbi Stephen Wise, in New York, he had to ask the U.S. diplomats in Bern to send it. The U.S. State Department buried the report, sharing it with neither Wise nor President Roosevelt. After a month’s delay, Wise received the report through the British government. He announced that Germany had killed 2 million Jews and was at work killing the rest. The New York Times put that story on page 10.52
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a forerunner of the CIA) had its own sources on the genocide in progress, as well as having been in possession of Schulte’s report. An official word from the State Department or the OSS might have moved the story to page 1, but neither said a word. Allen Dulles of the OSS -- future director of the CIA -- met Schulte in Zurich in the spring of 1943 but was interested in learning about the Nazis, not their victims. When German foreign service official Fritz Kolbe risked his life repeatedly to bring Dulles information on Nazi crimes, Dulles repeatedly ignored it. In April 1944, Kolbe alerted Dulles that Hungary’s Jews were about to be rounded up and sent to death camps. Dulles’ report on that meeting ended up on Roosevelt’s desk but made no mention of Hungary’s Jews or of the proposals urged by Schulte and others to bomb the rail lines to the camps or the camps themselves.53
The U.S. military bombed other targets so close to Auschwitz that the prisoners saw the planes pass over, and erroneously imagined they were about to be bombed. Hoping to stop the work of the death camps at the cost of their own lives, prisoners cheered for bombs that never came. The U.S. military never took any serious action against the construction and operation of the camps or in support of their expected victims. Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern, who was a B-24 pilot during the war, and who flew missions in the vicinity of Auschwitz, testified that it would have been easy to add the camp and the rail lines to target lists.54
Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League, was very concerned in 1942 by stories of Nazi plans, no longer focused on expelling Jews but turning toward plans to murder them. Hughan believed that such a development appeared “natural, from their pathological point of view,” and that it might really be acted upon if World War II continued. “It seems that the only way to save thousands and perhaps millions of European Jews from destruction,” she wrote, “would be for our government to broadcast the promise” of an “armistice on condition that the European minorities are not molested any further. . . . It would be very terrible if six months from now we should find that this threat has literally come to pass without our making even a gesture to prevent it.” When her predictions were fulfilled only too well by 1943, she wrote to the U.S. State Department and the New York Times: “two million [Jews] have already died” and “two million more will be killed by the end of the war.” She warned that military successes against Germany would just result in further scapegoating of Jews. “Victory will not save them, for dead men cannot be liberated,” she wrote.55
British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden met on March 27, 1943, in Washington, D.C., with Rabbi Wise and Joseph M. Proskauer, a prominent attorney and former New York State Supreme Court Justice who was then serving as President of the American Jewish Committee. Wise and Proskauer proposed approaching Hitler to evacuate the Jews. Eden dismissed the idea as “fantastically impossible.”56 But the very same day, according to the U.S. State Department, Eden told Secretary of State Cordell Hull something different:
“Hull raised the question of the 60 or 70 thousand Jews that are in Bulgaria and are threatened with extermination unless we could get them out and, very urgently, pressed Eden for an answer to the problem. Eden replied that the whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very difficult and that we should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.”57
Churchill agreed. “Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all the Jews,” he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, “transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.” Not enough shipping and transport? At the battle of Dunkirk, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of new planes. During even a brief armistice, the U.S. and British could have airlifted and transported huge numbers of refugees to safety.58
Not everyone was too busy fighting a war. Particularly from late 1942 on, many in the United States and Britain demanded that something be done. On March 23, 1943, the Archbishop of Canterbury pleaded with the House of Lords to assist the Jews of Europe. So, the British government proposed to the U.S. government another public conference at which to discuss what might be done to evacuate Jews from neutral nations. But the British Foreign Office feared that the Nazis might cooperate in such plans despite never being asked to, writing: "There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants."59
The concern here was not with saving lives so much as with avoiding the embarrassment and inconvenience of saving lives.
The U.S. government just sat on the proposal until Jewish leaders held a mass demonstration at Madison Square Garden. At that point, the State Department made plans for the Bermuda Conference of April 19-29, 1943, plans that ensured it would be no more than a publicity stunt. No Jewish organizations were included, the location served to keep people out, the conference was assigned to merely make recommendations to a committee, and those recommendations were not to include increased immigration to the United States or to Palestine. The Bermuda Conference, in the end, recommended that “no approach be made to Hitler for the release of potential refugees." There were also some suggestions for helping refugees leave Spain, and a declaration on the postwar repatriation of refugees.60
According to Rafael Medoff of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, “Until the Bermuda conference, most American Jews and most Members of Congress had accepted FDR’s ‘rescue through victory’ approach -- the claim that the only way to aid the Jews of Europe was to defeat the Nazis on the battlefield. This long, slow strategy that included blockade and starvation -- and the delay of the D-Day invasion for years -- condemned large numbers to their fate and has disturbing parallels with the later U.S. practice of imposing economic sanctions on whole nations for long periods of time. But in the wake of Bermuda, there was a growing conviction that by the time the war was won, there might be no European Jews left to save.” Public activism increased significantly, to the point where it seemed possible that even the U.S. Congress might act. Before it could, Roosevelt