What did the United States know?
And when did they know it?

The Holocaust
Literally, "a completely burned sacrifice."
This is the term used to describe the destruction of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe and North Africa
between the years 1933 & 1945.

Here is a very brief chronolgy of some of the events of those times, with highlights of what the United States knew about the Holocaust, when they knew it, and what they failed to do about it!

1923-1924 — Hitler writes his autobiography, Mein Kampf, German for "My Struggle," while in prison after the November 1923 failed "Beer Hall Putsch." In it, Hitler explains his beliefs and plans for the future of the German nation. He describes the "Aryan" race, by eliminating all inferior and undesirable peoples, of which in particular he focuses on the "source of all evil" - the Jews.

March 20, 1933 — Establishment of the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, Dachau.

April 7, 1933 — Nazis' first anti-Semitic decree removes all Jews from the civil service.

September 15, 1935 — "The Nuremberg Laws" are passed. These were two anti-Semitic statutes enacted at the Nazi party national convention at Nuremberg, Germany, that basically deprived Jews of German citizenship, removed Jews from all spheres of German political, social and economic life, and established definitions of Jewishness, creating severe discrimination against people who even had a Jewish grandparent.

July 15, 1937 — Buchenwald concentration camp is opened.

April 26, 1938 — German Jews required to register their property.

January 2, 1939 — Time Magazine names it's Man of the Year for 1938: Adolf Hitler. Click on the magazine cover to read the article.

May 17, 1939 — British issue the Palestine "White Paper" fixing the upper limit to 75,000 Jews to be admitted into Palestine over the next five years.

June 1939 — The S.S. St. Louis, a steamship carrying 937 Jewish refugees from Hamburg, is turned away by Cuba. The U.S. refuses to admit the refugees, who are forced to return to Europe. Eventually the refugees are taken by England, Holland, France and Belgium, but their initial rejection by every country, including the United States, gives support to Hitler's theory that the nations of the world are unconcerned with the plight of Jewish refugees.

September 1, 1939 — German army invades Poland, marking the beginning of World War II.

May 20, 1940 — Concentration camp is established at Auschwitz.

June 1941 — New rules in U.S. government cut refugee immigration to about 25% of relevant quotas.

July 1941 — New York Yiddish dailies reveal that thousands of Jewish civilians have been massacred by Nazi soldiers in Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Lvov and other places.

September 1, 1941 — Jews in all of the Third Reich are required to wear the yellow Star of David.

October 1941 — Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, is established.

October 11, 1941 — "New York Times" story reports on massacres of thousands of Jews in Galicia.

December 7, 1941 — Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. The United States enters World War II.

January 20, 1942 — The Nazis hold the Wannsee Conference during which they outline a plan to kill 11,000,000 Jews in Europe. Although the Western Allies do not know about this plan yet, reports of massacres were already reaching the United States. [See above — July, 1941 and October 11, 1941]

January 30, 1942 — Hitler speaks at the Sports Palace in Berlin, and states: "The war will end with the complete annihilation of the Jews."

March 1, 1942 — Extermination begins at Sobibor.

March 17, 1942 — Extermination begins at Belzec.

March 20, 1942 — U.S. Intelligence [ie, the Secret Intelligence Branch of the Coordinator of Information — a predecessor to the OSS and CIA] receives a translated dispatch from the British. It is from Gonzalo Montt Rivas, the Chilean consul in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to his superiors in Santiago, Chile. In it, Rivas informs Santiago of a German decree revoking the citizenship and forfeiting the property of German Jews living outside Germany. Rivas also ominously states — "The German triumph (in the war) will leave Europe freed of Semites."

March 1942 — Jewish aid organization reports that eyewitness accounts indicate the Nazis have already massacred 240,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone.

May 1942 — The Jewish Labor Bund in Poland compiles summary of verified massacres and transmits it to the Polish government-in-exile in London.

June 1, 1942 — Treblinka opens.

June 1942 — Jewish "Bund" report, detailing mass slaughter of 700,000 Polish Jews and Nazi plans to murder the rest, reaches America, after broadcast of contents of report by BBC.

June 29, 1942 — At a press conference in London, the World Jewish Congress estimates that the Nazis have already killed over one million Jews.

Early August, 1942 — News of Nazi plan to annihilate Jews of Europe reaches Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland. His source is German industrialist with access to top Nazi circles.

August 8, 1942 — Gerhart Riegner informs U.S. consulate in Geneva about a Nazi plan to murder all the Jews of Europe.

Until recently [July 2001], this was believed by most historians to be the date the United States first obtained "reliable" intelligence of mass exterminations of Jews by the Nazis. But, see March 20, 1942 for possible earlier date.

August 11, 1942 — U.S. Legation in Switzerland passes information received from Gerhart Riegner to U.S. State Department regarding Nazi plan to kill all European Jews. The U.S. State Department decides the information passed on by Riegner is nothing more than a "fantastic" war rumor, and do not pass the information on to American Jewish leaders.

August 21, 1942 — President Roosevelt warns Axis powers that the perpetrators of war crimes would be tried after their defeat and face "fearful retribution."

August 28, 1942 — After receiving details of Gerhart Reigner's report regarding the Nazi plan to annihilate European Jews, a British politician cables the information to American Rabbi Stephen Wise.

September 2, 1942 — Rabbi Stephen Wise contacts U.S. State Department about Nazi plan to kill all European Jews. Wise agrees to remain silent until the information is confirmed. This 'confirmation' takes nearly 3 months.

November 24, 1942 — U.S. State Department confirms the existence of Nazi extermination camps and the murder of two million Jews to date. Rabbi Stephen Wise holds press conference to announce that the Nazis were deporting Jews throughout German-occupied territory to Poland for mass slaughter. The news makes little impact as the next day's New York Times reported this news on its tenth page. Throughout the rest of the war, the N.Y. Times and most other newspapers failed to give prominent and extensive coverage to the Holocaust.

December 8, 1942 — Jewish leaders meet with President Roosevelt and hand him a 20-page summary of the Holocaust.

December 17, 1942 — The Allies issue a statement condemning "in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination."

January, 1943 — U.S. State Department receives information from Switzerland that discloses that 6,000 Jews a day are being killed at one location in Poland.

February 10, 1943 — U.S. State Department asks legation in Switzerland to discontinue sending reports about the mass murder of Jews to private persons in the U.S.

April 12, 1943 — The 12-day Bermuda Conference opens. The conference grew out of concerns in Britain about reports that the Nazis were slaughtering Europe's Jews. The U.S. agreed to hold a closed-door conference with Britain to discuss the issue. But American delegates arrived with secret directives from the U.S. State Department to accomplish little. The delegates to the conference developed almost no concrete proposals. Perhaps because of this they decided to keep their report secret.

July, 1943 — Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish resistance, meets with FDR, giving him an eyewitness account of the Holocaust.

August, 1943 — A report received by Jewish leaders in the U.S. advises that the death toll of European Jews has reached four million.

September, 1943 — A bill is introduced to allow refugees who won’t endanger public safety to be allowed to enter the U.S. temporarily. The bill dies in office.

October 6, 1943 — 400 Orthodox rabbis march on Washington from the Capitol to the White House. The President refuses to see them. However, as a result, public hearings on rescue in the House and Senate are held.

January 13, 1944 — "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews" is received by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. Earlier, U.S. Treasury Department officials, working on projects to provide aid to European Jews, discovered that their colleagues in the U.S. State Department were actually undermining rescue efforts. They brought their concerns to Morgenthau, who was Jewish and a long-time supporter of Roosevelt. Morgenthau directed the preparation of this report, presented it to FDR and requested that he establish a rescue agency.

January 22, 1944 — January 22, 1944, The president issued Executive Order 9417, creating the War Refugee Board [WRB]. Estimates indicate that the WRB may have saved as many as 200,000 Jews. One can only speculate how many more might have been saved had the WRB been established in August 1942, when Gerhart Riegner's message reached the United States.

April, 1944 — Two escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolph Verba and Alfred Wetzler, provide Jewish underground in Slovakia with full description of the death camp.

May 16, 1944 — Rabbi Weissmandl sends out pleas to bomb camp and rail lines — based on his "Auschwitz Protocol" — a 31 page report from the eyewitness accounts of Rudolph Verba and Alfred Wetzler.

May 31, 1944 — Aerial reconnaissance photograph taken of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, by the U.S. Army Air Force's 8th Division. The U.S. had aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz as early as April 4, 1944. Go here for more information.

June 6, 1944 — D-Day. The Allies land at Normandy in their invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.

June 21, 1944 — Mantello sends out Auschwitz Protocols through the British Exchange Telegraph and, two weeks later, Swiss newspapers publish the story of 1,715,000 Jews being murdered.

June 26, 1944 — U.S. Secretary of State Hull and Anthony Eden of Britain issue warnings to Hungary's Admiral Horthy. King Gustav of Sweden sends a personal protest. The International Red Cross finally takes an active interest in saving Jews.

June 1944 — U.S. War Department turns down appeals to bomb rail links between Hungary and Auschwitz, after desperate appeals by the Jewish underground.

August 16, 1944 — U.S. War Department issues a statement that bombing Auschwitz would divert air power from "decisive operations elsewhere."

August 20, 1944 — 127 Flying Fortress Bombers drop high-explosives on the factory areas at Auschwitz, less than five miles east of the gas-chambers.

September 13, 1944 — U.S. heavy bombers rain destruction on factory areas a few miles from Auschwitz, but Allies refuse to bomb railroad tracks or gas chambers at Auschwitz.

November 2, 1944 — SS Chief Heinrich Himmler orders a halt to the gassing of Jews, followed by destruction of gas chambers and crematoria.

January, 1945 — Death marches of prisoners into the interior of Germany begin, taking 250,000 Jewish lives.

January 27, 1945 — Soviet forces capture Auschwitz.

February 1, 1945 — U.S. State Department announces that perpetrators of all crimes against Jews and other minorities will be published.

April 30, 1945 — Hitler commits suicide; end of the Third Reich.

May 7, 1945 — Germany surrenders unconditionally to the Allies.

June 1945 — Allied countries establish a tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany to try Axis leaders for war crimes.

November 20, 1945 — The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal commences.

1946 — After more than 200 days of proceedings, the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal concludes. Death sentences given to Goering, Ribbentrop, Streicher, Hans Frank and seven other Nazis.

— Conclusions —
Clearly, the American public did not discover the full extent of the Holocaust until after the Allied armies had liberated the extermination and concentration camps at the end of World War II.

But why the inadequate response from the United States government and what lay behind that inadequate response?