The Holocaust And The Holocaust: The Final Solution

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic moments in history, it was the methodical and state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime, which came to power in Germany in January 1933. They believed that Germans were racially superior and that the Jews, who they deemed inferior, were a foreign threat to the German racial community. The Jews who died were not casualties of the fighting that toke place during World War II, but were the victims of Nazi Germany's attempt to annihilate an entire population of Jews living in Europe, a plan Hitler called the Final Solution. This paper will look at the actions taken by the United States after becoming aware of what was happening in Europe concerning the Holocaust, and my …show more content…
For most Americans, the Pacific conflict was a matter of much greater concern than the war in Europe. So wasn’t the fact that they claimed to not be aware they couldn’t handle dealing with that and the war with Japan. It is disheartening to think that Americans could care less about what the European Jews were going through. I don’t believe that the American policymakers didn’t care about what was going on they didn’t want to dwell on it because they were dealing with other things. Their reasons for deemphasizing the Jewish genocide in Europe could be many. In the case of Germany unlike Japan there was no attack against Americans to be avenged. Hitler didn’t hit America like the Japanese did, there was no equivalent to what happened at Pearl Harbor. The task of American wartime propagandists in this situation was to show Nazi Germany as the mortal enemy of all free people everywhere. The fact that Nazis were the enemy of the Jews was well known; there was no advantage in continuing to talk about the fact and constantly bring it up. They wanted to show that they were everyone's enemy; the U.S. wanted to increase rather than decrease the range of Nazi victims to the world in some aspect. This is possibly why the policymakers resisted suggestions for a focus on Jewish victimhood. All one can do is speculate what was on the minds of Americans during this time, the country was at war and decisions had to be made. In the US, even the strict immigrant quotas in place from laws passed in 1924 and 1941 were not fully used, the War Refugee Board could have done more (Encyclopedia Britannica). The board started its work after the Nazis had already killed millions in concentration and extermination camps. It can be said that they dragged their feet on the matter not seeing it as top their list. A late start compacted with