UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD JEWISH REFUGEES, 1941

1952
Although thousands of Jews had been admitted into the United States under the combined GermanAustrian quota from 19381941, the US did not pursue an organized and specific rescue policy for
Jewish victims of Nazi Germany until early 1944.
While some American activists sincerely intended to assist refugees, serious obstacles to any
relaxation of US immigration quotas included public opposition to immigration during a time of
economic depression, xenophobia, and antisemitic feelings in both the general public and among
some key government officials. Once the United States entered World War II, the State Department
practiced stricter immigration policies out of fear that refugees could be blackmailed into working as
agents for Germany.
It was not until January 1944 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under pressure from officials in
his own government and an American Jewish community then fully aware of the extent of mass
murder, took action to rescue European Jews. Following discussions with Treasury Department
officials, he established the War Refugee Board (WRB) to facilitate the rescue of imperiled refugees.
With the assistance of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish
Congress, as well as resistance organizations in German-occupied Europe, the WRB helped to rescue
many thousands of Jews in Hungary, Romania, and elsewhere in Europe.
In April 1944, Roosevelt also directed that Fort Ontario, New York, become a free port for refugees.
However, only a few thousand refugees were allowed there and they were from liberated areas, not
from Nazi-occupied areas. They were in no imminent danger of deportation to killing centers in
German-occupied Poland.
Ultimately, Allied victory brought an end to Nazi terror in Europe and to the war in the Pacific.
However, liberated Jews, suffering from illness and exhaustion, emerged from concentration camps
and hiding places to discover a world which had no place for them. Bereft of home and family and
reluctant to return to their prewar homelands, these Jewish displaced persons (DPs) were joined in a
matter of months by more than 150,000 other Jews fleeing fierce antisemitism in Poland, Hungary,
Romania, and the Soviet Union.

Most sought to begin a new life outside Europe. Palestine was the most favored destination of Jewish
Holocaust survivors, followed by the United States. Immigration restrictions were still in effect in the
United States after the war, and legislation to expedite the admission of Jewish DPs was slow in
coming.
President Harry S. Truman favored a liberal immigration policy toward DPs. Faced with
congressional inaction, he issued an executive order, the "Truman Directive," on December 22, 1945.
The directive required that existing immigration quotas be designated for displaced persons. While
overall immigration into the United States did not increase, more DPs were admitted than before.
About 22,950 DPs, of whom two-thirds were Jewish, entered the United States between December 22,
1945, and 1947 under provisions of the Truman Directive.
Congressional action was needed before existing immigration quotas could be increased. In 1948,
following intense lobbying by the American Jewish community, Congress passed legislation to admit
400,000 DPs to the United States. Nearly 80,000 of these, or about 20 percent, were Jewish DPs. The
rest were Christians from Eastern Europe and the Baltics, many of whom had been forced laborers in
Germany. The entry requirements favored agricultural laborers to such an extent, however, that
President Truman called the law "flagrantly discriminatory against Jews." Congress amended the
law in 1950, but by that time most of the Jewish DPs in Europe had gone to the newly established
state of Israel (founded on May 14, 1948).
By 1952, 137,450 Jewish refugees (including close to 100,000 DPs) had settled in the United States.
The amended 1948 law was a turning point in American immigration policy and established a
precedent for later refugee crises.
A number of controversies have arisen about United States policy and its impact on European Jews
during the era of the Holocaust.
ADMISSION OF IMMIGRANTS
One controversy involves the admission of immigrants from Nazi Germany into the United States.
Influenced by the economic hardships of the Depression, which exacerbated popularantisemitism,
isolationism, and xenophobia, the refugee policy of the US State Department and its stringent (and
questionably legal) application of the 1924 Immigration Law made it difficult for refugees to obtain
entry visas, despite the ongoing persecution of Jews in Germany.

Although several other European countries permitted limited Jewish immigration (for example
Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands) before 1938, many of these refugees disappeared as
Nazi Germany conquered Europe. Latin America had also been a potential destination for refugees,
although after 1938 these nations increasingly refused to admit further immigrants. A significant
exception was Bolivia, which admitted around 30,000 from 1938-1941.

Beginning in 1940, the United States further restricted immigration by ordering US consuls to delay
visa approvals on national security grounds. After the United States entered the World War II in
December 1941, the trickle of immigration virtually dried up, just as the Nazi regime began
systematically to murder the Jews of Europe. Despite many obstacles, however, more than 200,000
Jews found refuge in the United States from 1933 to 1945, most of them before the end of 1941.
PUBLICIZING REPORTS OF GENOCIDE
Another controversy centers on the State Departments delay in publicizing reports of genocide. In
August 1942, the Department received a cabled report, sent by Gerhart Riegner, the representative in
Geneva of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The report revealed that the Nazis planned to murder
Europe's Jews. Department officials declined to pass on the report to its intended recipient,
American Jewish leader Stephen Wise, who was president of the WJC. That same month, however,
Wise received the report via British channels and sought permission from the State Department to
make the contents public.
Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles requested that Wise refrain from disclosing the contents of
the Riegner cable to the public. Wise agreed, and only released the information contained in the
cable to the press on November 24, 1942, after receiving word from Welles a day earlier that the State
Department had confirmed its contents. On December 17, 1942, the United States, Great Britain, and
ten other Allied governments issued a declaration revealing and denouncing Hitlers intention to
murder the Jews of Europe. The declaration warned Nazi Germany that it would be held responsible
for these crimes.

RESCUE
Other issues have arisen as well. One involves the lack of action by the United States with regard to
the rescue of Holocaust victims. From 1941 to 1945, winning the war was the foremost priority for
Allied governments. On April 19, 1943, US and British representatives met in Bermuda to find
solutions to general wartime refugee problems, but neither government initiated any rescue

programs. On July 28, 1943, Polish underground courier Jan Karski informed President Franklin D.
Roosevelt about reports of mass murder that he had received from Jewish leaders in the Warsaw
ghetto and in the Izbica transit ghetto. US authorities did not, however, initiate any action aimed at
rescuing or providing safe haven for refugees prior to 1944, when the War Refugee Board was
established.
On January 22, 1944, Roosevelt, under pressure from American Jews and his own Secretary of the
Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., established the War Refugee Board (WRB) as an independent
agency to facilitate the rescue of imperiled refugees. In August 1944, the WRB and the US
Department of the Interior established the Fort Ontario Refugee Center in Oswego, New York. The
facility served as a haven for 983 refugees from Yugoslavia who had managed to reach Italy. Two
thirds of the residents of the Refugee Center were Jews. By the time the WRB was established,
however, four fifths of the Jews who would die in the Holocaust were already dead. Nevertheless,
the efforts of the War Refugee Board contributed to the rescue of approximately 200,000 Jews.
OTHER US INSTITUTIONS
In addition to the actions of the US government, criticism has been voiced about the behavior of
other US institutions during the era of the Holocaust. One such institution is the US media, which
did not always publicize reports of Nazi atrocities in full, and did not give the mass murder of the
European Jews the attention it deserved. For example, the New York Times, the nations leading
newspaper, consistently deemphasized the murder of the Jews in its news coverage.
BOMBING AUSCHWITZ
Finally, controversy has arisen about the decision not to bomb the killing facilities at AuschwitzBirkenau. During the spring of 1944, the Allies received more explicit information about the process
of mass murder by gas carried out at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Beginning in late spring, some Jewish
leaders pleaded unsuccessfully with US government officials to bomb the gas chambers and the rail
tracks leading to the camp.
Even after the Anglo-American air forces developed the capacity to hit targets in Silesia (where
Auschwitz was located) in 1944, US authorities decided not to bomb either the gas chambers or the
rail lines used to transport prisoners to Birkenau. US officials explained this decision in part with the
technical argument that US aircraft did not have the capacity to conduct air raids on such targets
with sufficient accuracy, and in part with the strategic argument that the Allies were committed to
bomb exclusively military targets in order to win the war as quickly as possible. Since the late 1960s,
the Allied decision not to bomb the gas chambers in or the rail lines leading to Birkenau has been a

source of lively and sometimes bitter debate both among scholars and among the general public in
the US.

DISPLACED PERSONS
Between 1945 and 1951, the United States (along with Great Britain) became the guardian of more
than a million displaced persons (DPs) in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, including
250,000 Jews at the peak period in late 1945. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency
and various private relief agencies assisted the Western Allied powers in meeting this enormous
challenge. Until September 1945, Jewish and non-Jewish DPs resided together in the same camps.
This sometimes required Jewish victims of the Holocaust to reside with former perpetrators or with
other non-Jews, some of whom expressed antisemitic sentiments painfully reminiscent of the
Holocaust. Jewish DPs, many of whom felt unsafe, protested these living conditions, as well as the
harsh treatment by US military personnel and the permitting of German police into the camps to
search for contraband.
These practices reflected postwar Allied insensitivity to the particular psychological plight of the
European Jewish DPs. Protests about the treatment of Jews by US Army personnel in DP camps
located in Bavaria induced President Harry S Truman to send Earl Harrison, Dean of the Law School
at the University of Pennsylvania, to the US occupation zone in Germany to investigate. Harrisons
report, filed in August 1945, led Truman to order the separation of Jews from non-Jews and more
sensitive treatment of Jewish survivors. The US authorities facilitated significant improvements in
living conditions by permitting Jewish relief agencies to operate in the camps and giving greater
autonomy to DP councils.

After the war, President Truman favored efforts to relax US immigration restrictions for Jewish
displaced persons. A December 1945 executive order allowed for 16,000 Jewish refugees to enter the
United States between 1946 and 1948. With the passage of the Displaced Persons Act in 1948, US
authorities granted approximately 400,000 visas to immigrants above the quota system. Jewish DPs
received 80,000 of these visas.