arts&life exhibits Americans and the Holocaust A new exhibit dispels the myth that most Americans were unaware of the atrocities happening in Europe. COURTESY OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER TOP: Passengers aboard the MS St. Louis, May 13, 1939-June 17, 1939. On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba, carrying 937 passengers, the majority of whom were Jewish. When the St. Louis arrived in Havana, the passengers learned that the landing certificates they had purchased were invalid. After Cuba refused to allow the passengers to land and the United States (and other Western Hemisphere nations) did not offer to take the passengers, the ship returned to Europe. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee worked with the State Department, ultimately persuading four countries — Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium — to admit some of the passengers. The remaining 254 were forced to return to Europe and were killed by the Nazis. ABOVE: FDR broadcasts his first fireside chat, March 12, 1933. President Franklin D. Roosevelt prioritized economic recovery from the Great Depression and victory i n World War II above humanitarian crises overseas. 36 June 7 • 2018 jn W as it simply ignorance that Jews were being murdered en masse? Was it anti-Semitism? Or did the United States’ unwillingness to rescue Europe’s Jews from the Holocaust have more nuanced causes? That’s the question Daniel Greene set out to answer five years ago when he was asked to curate “Americans and the Holocaust,” a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It opened April 23 to commemorate the museum’s 25th anniversary and will run until the fall of 2021. Displays show how a number of factors, including the Great Depression, isolation- ism, xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism influenced decisions made by the American government, news media, Hollywood, advocacy organizations and individuals as they responded to Nazism. The exhibit dispels a popular myth that most Americans were unaware of what was happening in Europe by providing extensive documentation of news media accounts from the 1930s and 1940s. “The difficult question we want people to ask is: If Americans had this information, why didn’t the rescue of Jews become a pri- ority?” said Greene, who teaches history at Northwestern University. “Americans had lots of access to the information — more than previously had been assumed — though they didn’t always connect the dots at first,” Greene said. “They can’t say they didn’t know.” Throughout the exhibit, newspaper and magazine articles document the rise of Hitler and German persecution of the Jews. A touchscreen near the entrance to the exhibit connects visitors with regional and local coverage of the unfolding tragedy. The display is part of “History Unfolded,” a crowd-sourced effort in which anyone can search out articles from the era that dealt with the rise of Hitler, the persecution of Jews and efforts to save them, and post them on the museum’s website. “History Unfolded” (newspapers.ushmm. org) has links to more than 300 articles, with more being added. The archive includes eight articles from the Detroit Jewish News and 25 from the Detroit Jewish Chronicle, which closed in 1951. Greene says he’s hoping for additional submissions, especially from college newspapers and the ethnic/foreign language press. Greene says the collection shows that the information reached the American heart- land, not just major metropolitan areas and the coasts. told reporters afterwards that he would not consider relaxing the immigration quota system. Anti-Semitism in the State Department limited the admission of Jewish refugees even further. The Immigration Act of 1924 permitted a maximum of 25,967 visas annually from Germany, but in 1933, only 1,241 visas were issued and there was a three-year waiting list. Congress failed to pass proposed legislation in 1939 that would have admitted 20,000 German refu- gee children. The archive includes eight articles from the Detroit Jewish News and 25 from the Detroit Jewish Chronicle, which closed in 1951. The exhibit finds a number of answers to the question of why rescuing Jews never became a priority for the United States. A major reason was that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s clear aim in the war was defeating Hitler, a goal disassociated from the tragedy befalling the Jews. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, isolationist sentiment in the U.S. was strong. Many Americans viewed Hitler’s conquests as Europe’s problem, not ours. While Roosevelt felt he might be able to convince Americans to go to war to defend democracy, he knew they weren’t as likely to support efforts to save the victims of fas- cism. Anti-Semitism in America was at its height in the 1930s, said Greene; longtime Detroiters will remember the anti-Semitic radio rants of Royal Oak’s Father Charles Coughlin. Kristallnacht, the coordinated attacks against Jewish businesses, homes and syna- gogues in November 1938, was widely cov- ered by the American press, yet Roosevelt The exhibit shows how these national decisions affected ordinary people like Flora Hochsinger, a Ph.D. math teacher in Vienna, who desperately tried to find someone to sponsor her immigration to the United States. The White House, State Department, B’nai B’rith and various celeb- rities all turned her down. She was deport- ed from Vienna and murdered in 1942. Greene says he understands Roosevelt’s position. Throughout the war years, polls consistently showed that a huge majority of Americans disapproved of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews — but nearly three- quarters of them were not willing to accept more refugees. The president knew he had to lead Americans toward intervention while at the same time bowing to wide- spread public anti-immigration sentiment. Even toward the end, when the War Refugee Board urged military action to bomb the tracks leading to the concentra- tion camps, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy responded that the government’s