Focus Question

Was the FDR administration’s response correct

for fighting total war or should he have done
American Reaction to the more to save those doomed by Nazism?
Holocaust

The Holocaust Begins

Between 1933 and 1945, the German


government led by Adolf Hitler and the

Nazi Party carried out the systematic

persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews.



This genocide is now known

as the Holocaust. • For generations, many Europeans targeted Jews as
the cause for failures
• Germans blamed Jews for defeat in WWI and
economic problems after war
 The Nuremberg Laws (1935)
The Aryan Race
• deprived Jews of German
citizenship
• Hitler believed his plan of conquest
depended on the purity of the Aryan race • forbade marriage with non-
Jews
• had to eliminate other races, nationalities and
other “subhuman” groups • limited work opportunities
• Inferior groups – Gypsies, Poles, Russians, • banned from schools and
homosexuals, insane, disabled, incurably ill, other public areas
Jews • wear Star of David
• Jew tax

Ghettos Kristallnacht
• German official killed in Paris by a Jew
• November 9, 1939
• Night of Broken Glass
• isolated relocation of
Jews • Jewish stores, shops and synagogues burned down
• filthy, poor sanitation, • 100 Jews killed
extreme overcrowding
• 500,000 in 3 square
miles
 The “Final Solution”
• Hitler grew impatient waiting for Jews to die Phase 1 = Shooting
from starvation or disease in Ghettos
• The Final Solution was a program of
genocide • Jews rounded up and
told they were to be
relocated
• Taken to the woods and
shot one by one
• Bodies were buried in
mass graves

Phase 2 = Gas Vans Phase 3 = The Camps and Gas Chambers

• Again, Jews were • Nazi leaders decided to

rounded up and told drastically speed up the
they were to be Final Solution
relocated in vans • Camps
• The vans were • Jews from all over occupied
equipped so that the
Europe were to be brought
van’s exhaust was
piped back into the van here to be exterminated

700,000 Jews killed in Vans

 video from Schindler’s list

U.S. Response to the Holocaust U.S. Response to the Holocaust

• U.S. DID know about the death camps

• U.S. military refused to bomb gas chambers or rail lines to
the Nazi death camps
• believed bombing would divert essential military • American officials more concerned with larger goal
resources of winning the war than with the fate of the Jews
 The American response to the American Immigration Regulations
Holocaust

• American immigration policy limited the number of Jews who

could move to U.S.
• In 1942, Americans officials began to hear specifics about
what was happening to the Jews in Europe
• doubtful at first (thought reports might just be war rumors)
• 1944, Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board.

• High unemployment in the 1930s made immigration

unpopular
• only some Americans were anti-Semitic

American Immigration Regulations

• At an international conference in1938, several European countries Roosevelt’s Response to Governor of South Carolina’s
and the U.S. stated their regret that they could not take in more of Request to Help European Jews During 1933
Jewish refugees
• The St. Louis, with 930 Jewish refugees on board, was denied
permission to dock in Cuba or the United States and turned back to
Europe
“Confidentially, I instructed the State
• over a third of its passengers were later killed
Department recently to carefully
observe the situation in Germany
and to take every step that one
Government can take in a situation
where another Government is
dealing with a domestic
problem on its own”