The Holocaust was public knowledge in wartime America yet drew no policy response

Evidence

On 22 June 1941 the German army invaded the Soviet Union. In the occupied territories, mass murders began at once. News about them could be found, for example, in the extensive Chronicles' section of Contemporary Jewish Record, published by the American Jewish Committee. But it was also possible to find information on the terrible events in Europe even in the main newspapers in the USA. Complete elimination of Jews from European life now appears to be fixed German policy,’ wrote the New York Times on 28 October. The Jews, it reported, were being transported eastwards in goods trucks. The authorities abroad were also informed through ambassadors and diplomats about deportations and other evidence that the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe, prophesied by Hitler on 30 January 1939, was being seriously pursued. There were no changes in the United States’ restrictive immigration policy. Nazi anti-Semitism was constantly intensifying and being aggravated by unbelievable actions, which most people for a long time did not, in fact, believe. The Western democracies made no resolute protests or large-scale efforts to assist. The Soviet Union was an exception, but had been Hitler’s ally until he attacked. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 332

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the Frankfurt School chapter’s later material on American disbelief and Roosevelt’s refusal to relax quotas after Kristallnacht — this is the contemporaneous documentation for that claim. — connects to: Post-Holocaust America confronted its own creed being violated in practice; World War One atrocity propaganda made the Holocaust’s truth widely disbelieved — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1481
• QUESTION: How exactly did German exiles in New York read the Contemporary Jewish Record chronicles against their own assimilationist caution?
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Post-Holocaust America confronted its own creed being violated in practice; World War One atrocity propaganda made the Holocaust’s truth widely disbelieved — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1481