International response to the Holocaust

Part of a series on
The Holocaust
Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944
Responsibility Nazi Germany People Major perpetrators Adolf Hitler Heinrich Himmler Joseph Goebbels Heinrich Müller Reinhard Heydrich Adolf Eichmann Odilo Globocnik Theodor Eicke Richard Glücks Ernst Kaltenbrunner Rudolf Höss Christian Wirth Organizations Nazi Party Gestapo Schutzstaffel (SS) Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) Einsatzgruppen Sturmabteilung (SA) Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT) Wehrmacht Trawniki men Collaborators during World War II Nazi ideologues
Early policies Racial policy Nazi eugenics Nuremberg Laws Haavara Agreement Madagascar Plan Forced euthanasia
Victims Jews Romani people (Gypsies) Poles Soviet POWs Slavs in Eastern Europe Homosexuals People with disabilities
Ghettos Będzin Białystok Budapest Kaunas Kraków Łódź Lublin Lwów Minsk Riga Sosnowiec Warsaw Vilnius Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland List of selected ghettos
Camps Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz II-Birkenau Belzec Chełmno Jasenovac Majdanek Sajmište Sobibor Treblinka Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz I Bergen-Belsen Bogdanovka Buchenwald Dachau Mittelbau-Dora Gonars (Italy) Gross-Rosen Gusen Herzogenbusch Janowska Kaiserwald Mauthausen Neuengamme Rab Ravensbrück Sachsenhausen Salaspils Stutthof Transnistria (Romania) Theresienstadt Uckermark Warsaw Transit and collection camps Belgium Breendonk Mechelen France Gurs Drancy Italy Bolzano Netherlands Amersfoort Westerbork Slovakia Sereď Divisions SS-Totenkopfverbände Concentration Camps Inspectorate Politische Abteilung Sanitätswesen Extermination methods Gas van Gas chamber Extermination through labour Einsatzgruppen Human medical experimentation
Atrocities Pogroms Kristallnacht Bucharest Dorohoi Iași Izieu Szczuczyn Jedwabne Plungė Radziłów pogrom Kaunas Lviv (Lvov) Marseille Tykocin Vel' d'Hiv Wąsosz Einsatzgruppen Babi Yar Bydgoszcz Częstochowa Kamianets-Podilskyi Ninth Fort Odessa Piaśnica Ponary Rumbula Erntefest "Final Solution" Wannsee Conference Mogilev Conference Operation "Reinhard" Holocaust trains Extermination camps End of World War II Wola massacre Death marches
Resistance Auschwitz Protocols Vrba–Wetzler report Czesław Mordowicz Jerzy Tabeau Rudolf Vrba Alfréd Wetzler Bricha Jewish partisans Sonderkommando photographs Witold Pilecki Resistance movement in Auschwitz Military Organization Union Witold's Report Ghetto uprisings Warsaw Białystok Łachwa Częstochowa
International response Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations Auschwitz bombing debate MS St. Louis Nuremberg trials Denazification
Aftermath Bricha Displaced persons Survivors Central Committee of the Liberated Jews Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany
Lists Holocaust survivors Deportations of French Jews to death camps Survivors of Sobibor Timeline of Treblinka extermination camp Victims of Nazism Rescue of Jews Memorials and museums
Resources Bibliography Bibliography of Nazi Germany The Destruction of the European Jews Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Functionalism versus intentionalism
Remembrance Days of remembrance Memorials and museums Righteous Among the Nations
v t e

In the decades since

By 1939, about 304,000 of about 522,000 German Jews had fled Germany, including 60,000 to the British Mandate of Palestine (including over 50,000 who had taken advantage of the Haavara, or "Transfer" Agreement between German Zionists and the Nazis), but British immigration quotas limited the number of Jewish emigrants to Palestine.^[4] In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria and made the 200,000 Jews of Austria stateless refugees. In September, the British and French governments allowed Germany the right to occupy and annex the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, and in March 1939, Hitler occupied the remainder of the country, making a further 200,000 Jews stateless.^{[citation needed]}

In 1939, British policy as stated in its 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine at 75,000 over the next five years, after which all further Jewish immigration would be made subject to Arab approval. The British government had offered homes for Jewish immigrant children and proposed Kenya as a haven for Jews, but refused to back a Jewish state or facilitate Jewish settlement, contravening the terms of the League of Nations Mandate over Palestine.^{[citation needed]}

Before, during and after the war, the British government limited Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine so as to avoid a negative reaction from Palestinian Arabs. In the summer of 1941, however, Chaim Weizmann estimated that with the British ban on Jewish immigration, when the war was over, it would take two decades to get 1.5 million Jews to Palestine from Europe through clandestine immigration; David Ben-Gurion had originally believed 3 million could be brought in ten years. Thus Palestine it has been argued by at least one writer, once war had begun—could not have been the saviour of anything other than a small minority of those Jews murdered by the Nazis.^[5]

The British government, along with all UN member nations, received credible evidence about the Nazi attempts to exterminate the European Jewry as early as 1942 from the Polish government-in-exile. Titled "

Initially, America refused to accept Jewish refugees who were in need. Between 1933 and 1945, the United States accepted more refugees than any other country: around 132,000. It has faced criticism for not admitting more refugees, especially during the war, as even the immigration quotas available went unfilled.^[11][12]

In Washington, President Roosevelt, sensitive to the importance of his Jewish constituency, consulted with Jewish leaders. He followed their advice to not emphasize the Holocaust for fear of inciting antisemitism in the U.S. Historians argue that after Pearl Harbor:

Roosevelt and his military and diplomatic advisers sought to unite the nation and blunt Nazi propaganda by avoiding the appearance that the United States was fighting a war for the Jews. They did not tolerate any potentially divisive initiatives nor did they tolerate any diversion from their campaign to win the war as quickly and decisively as possible. ... Success on the battlefield, Roosevelt and his advisers believed, was the only sure way to save the surviving Jews of Europe.^[13]

Historian Laurel Leff has written on modern day attempts by State Department historians to whitewash the indifference of certain US consular officials dealing with visa applications of Jewish refugees attempting to flee from Nazi Germany. She contends that the record of those diplomats was far worse than the State Department today is willing to admit, and presents a number of examples in which the actions of US officials directly prevented imperiled Jews from finding sanctuary in the United States even though immigration quotas had not been filled.^[14]

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (March 2021)

The Soviet Union was invaded and partially occupied by Axis forces. Approximately 300,000 to 500,000 Soviet Jews served in the Red Army during the conflict.^[15] The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee established in 1941, was active in propagandising for the Soviet war effort but was treated with suspicion. The Soviet press, tightly censored, often deliberately obscured the particular anti-Jewish motivation of the Holocaust.^[16]

However as early as August 1941, Radio Moscow's Yiddish language broadcasts publicised that the Germans were systemically massacring Jews in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union.^[17][18]

Soviet media circulated photographs and journalists’ reports in January 1942 of the Nazi killing spree of 7000 Jews at Kerch in November–December 1941.

The Nazis built the majority of their death camps in German occupied Poland which had a Jewish population of 3.3 million. From 1941 on, the Polish government-in-exile in London played an essential part in revealing Nazi crimes^[20] providing the Allies with some of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the ongoing Holocaust of European Jews.^[21][22] Titled "The Mass Extermination of the Jews in German Occupied Poland", the report provided a detailed account of the conditions in the ghettos and their liquidation.^[23][24] Though its representatives, like the Foreign Minister Count Edward Raczyński and the courier of the Polish Underground movement, Jan Karski, called for action to stop it, they were unsuccessful. Most notably, Jan Karski met with British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden as well as US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, providing the earliest eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.^[25][8] Roosevelt heard him out however seemed uninterested, asking about the condition of Polish horses but not one question about the Jews.^[26]

The report that the Polish Foreign Minister in-exile,

During the occupation period, 3 million Polish Jews were killed. This represented 90 percent of the pre-war population and half of all Jews killed in the Holocaust.[29] Additionally the Nazis ethnically cleansed another 1.8-2 million Poles, bringing Poland's Holocaust death toll to around 4.8-5 million people.^[30][31] After the war Poland defied both the wishes of the Allied and Soviet governments, allowing Jewish emigration to Mandatory Palestine. Around 200,000 Jews availed themselves of this opportunity, leaving only around 100,000 Jews in Poland.^{[citation needed]}

Portugal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs received information from its consuls in German-occupied Europe from 1941 about the escalation of the persecution of Jews. The historian Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses writes that it was nonetheless considered insignificant:

Salazar's analysis of the European situation [...] was based on an old-fashioned brand of realpolitik which saw states and their leaders acting out of reasonable and quantifiable considerations. The murderous racial enterprise that drove the Third Reich appears to have bypassed Salazar, despite the information that must have been accessible to him (very little of which survives, however, in his archive). The Portuguese press, meanwhile, was prevented from reporting on the Final Solution as its details became known, and Salazar never made a pronouncement on the subject. The fate of Europe's Jewish population was not seen as an issue that affected the national interest...^[35]

Salazar's regime took limited steps to intervene on behalf of certain Portuguese Jews living in German-occupied Europe from 1943 and did succeed in saving small numbers in

Francoist Spain remained neutral during the conflict but retained close economic and political links with Nazi Germany. It was ruled throughout the period by the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco which had come to power with German and Italian support during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Paul Preston wrote that "one of Franco's central beliefs was the 'Jewish–masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy'. He was convinced that Judaism was the ally of both American capitalism and Russian communism".^[36] Public Jewish religious services, like their Protestant equivalents, had been forbidden since the Civil War.^[37] José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní, the Director of Security, ordered a list of Jews and foreigners in Spain to be compiled in May 1941. The same year, Jewish status was marked on identity papers for the first time.^[37][38]

Historically, Spain had attempted to extend its influence over

Ángel Sanz Briz, a Spanish diplomat, protected several hundred Jews in Hungary in 1944. After he was ordered to withdraw from the country ahead of the Red Army's advance, he encouraged Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian businessman, to pose as the Spanish consul-general and continue his activities. In this way, 3,500 Jews are thought to have been saved.^[42] Stanley G. Payne described Sanz Briz's actions as "a notable humanitarian achievement by far the most outstanding of anyone in Spanish government during World War II" but argued that he "might have accomplished even more had he received greater assistance from Madrid".^[43] In the aftermath of the war, "a myth was carefully constructed to claim that Franco's regime had saved many Jews from extermination" as a means to deflect foreign criticism away from allegations of active collaboration between the Franco and Nazi regimes.^[38]

Sweden remained neutral throughout the conflict but also retained close economic ties with Nazi Germany. German forces invaded and occupied Norway and Denmark in April 1940 while Finland entered into a de facto alliance with Nazi Germany from 1941 meaning that Sweden was drawn towards the Axis sphere of influence and German soldiers were even able to travel through its territory on leave from German-occupied Norway until 1943. Sweden itself had only a small Jewish population and had tightened its immigration policies in the interwar years which meant that few Jewish refugees had been taken into the country before the war. Swedish society remained highly conservative and introspective, although antisemitism remained marginal in national politics.^[44] In some circles, there was some sympathy for Nazi war aims and anti-communism as well as Nazi racial theories which overlapped with the Nordicism. Several hundred Swedish nationals volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS and some were reported to have served as guards at Treblinka extermination camp.^[45]

In Sweden, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs received news about the policy of extermination. In a chance discussion in a train, the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter was told of the extermination of Jews at Belzec extermination camp by an SS officer in August 1942. He reported the information to the Ministry in the hope that it would publicly condemn the atrocities, although no action was taken.^[46] Even so, the historian Paul A. Levine writes that "Swedish officials, and in fact much of the newspaper-reading public, had as much or more information about many details of the 'Final Solution' than their counterparts in other neutral or Allied countries".^[47] Although coverage varied by newspaper, there were widespread reports in the Swedish press of the extermination of Jews in German-occupied Europe throughout much of the subsequent period.^[48]

The authorities in German-occupied Norway began

In the post-war period, the Swedish government placed emphasis on its humanitarian actions to save Jews as a means of deflecting criticism of its economic and political relations with Nazi Germany. Historian Ingrid Lomfors states that this "sowed the seed of the image of Sweden as a 'humanitarian superpower'" in post-war Europe and its prominent involvement in the United Nations.^[46] Göran Persson, a former Swedish Prime Minister, founded the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 1998.

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (March 2021)

Of the five neutral countries of continental Europe, Switzerland has the distinction of being the only one to have promulgated a German antisemitic law.

Turkey was also the only neutral country to implement anti-Jewish laws during the war.^[58] Between 1940 and 1944, around 13,000 Jews passed through Turkey from Europe to Mandatory Palestine.^[59] More Turkish Jews suffered as a result of discriminatory policies during the war than were saved by Turkey.^[60] Although Turkey has promoted the idea that it was a rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, this is considered ostensible by certain historians.^[61][56] Such authors suggest that Turkey used this image to promote Armenian genocide denial.^[62]

Most of the states in Latin America remained neutral for much or all of World War II. The region, in particular Argentina and Brazil, had historically received large numbers of European immigrants including significant numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe. Immigration restrictions were introduced in the 1920s and 1930s, however, in response to nationalist unrest and the Great Depression. Antisemitism remained common in many parts of Latin American society.

Brazil's foreign ministry, for example, ordered consulates in Europe to deny visas to people of "Semitic origin" in the 1930s. These stipulations were followed by many Brazilian diplomats who held strong antisemitic views. Some such as Luis Martins de Souza Dantas, Brazil's ambassador in Vichy France, nonetheless actively disobeyed their instructions and continued to issue visas to Jews as late as 1941.^[63]

Latin American diplomats remained in German-occupied Europe for much of the conflict and there is evidence that they were aware of the Holocaust. Gonzalo Montt Rivas, Chilean consul in Prague, reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that "German triumph [in the war] will leave Europe freed of Semites" in November 1941. According to the historian Richard Breitman, his reports "reveal considerable access to the thinking of Nazi officials" which he speculates may have originated from Montt's friendly relations with the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Reich Security Main Office. Chilean diplomatic correspondence, including Montt's November dispatch, was regularly intercepted by British intelligence services and shared with their American counterparts.^[64]

Some Latin American Jews lived in Europe at the time of the Holocaust. Although warned on several occasions by the German authorities to repatriate its Jewish citizens, the Argentine regime refused to repatriate its approximately 100 nationals living in German-occupied Europe before the country severed diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany under Allied pressure in January 1944. All are believed to have been exterminated.^[65]

The

When 60,000 German soldiers and the Gestapo occupied Rome in 1943, thousands of Jews were hiding in churches, convents, rectories, the Vatican and the papal summer residence. According to Joseph Lichten, the Vatican was called upon by the Jewish Community Council in Rome to help fill a Nazi demand of one hundred pounds of gold. The council had been able to muster 32 kilograms (71 lb), but unless the entire amount was produced within thirty-six hours had been told three hundred Jews would be imprisoned. The Pope granted the request, according to Chief Rabbi Zolli of Rome.[68] Despite the payment of the ransom, 2,091 Jews were deported on October 16, 1943, and most of them died in Germany.

Upon his death in 1958, Pius was praised emphatically by the Israeli Foreign Minister and other world leaders. But his insistence on Vatican neutrality and avoidance of naming the Nazis as the evildoers of the conflict became the foundation for contemporary and later criticisms from some quarters. Studies of the Vatican archives and international diplomatic correspondence continue.

The International Committee of the Red Cross did relatively little to save Jews during the Holocaust and discounted reports of the organized Nazi genocide, such as of the murder of Polish Jewish prisoners that took place at Lublin. At the time, the Red Cross justified its inaction by suggesting that aiding Jewish prisoners would harm its ability to help other Allied POWs. In addition, the Red Cross claimed that if it would take a major stance to improve the situation of those European Jews, the neutrality of Switzerland, where the International Red Cross was based, would be jeopardized.

Today, the Red Cross acknowledges its passivity during the Holocaust and has apologized for this.^[69]

The Évian Conference was convened at the initiative of Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1938 to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees. For ten days, from July 6 to July 15, delegates from thirty-two countries met at Évian-les-Bains, France. However, most western countries were reluctant to accept Jewish refugees, and the question was not resolved.^[70][71] The Dominican Republic was the only country willing to accept Jewish refugees—up to 100,000.^[72]

The UK and the US met in Bermuda in April 1943 to discuss the issue of Jewish refugees who had been liberated by Allied forces and the Jews who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Bermuda Conference led to no change in policy; the Americans would not change their immigration quotas to accept the refugees, and the British would not alter its immigration policy to permit them to enter Palestine.^[73][74]

The failure of the Bermuda Conference prompted U.S. Secretary of the Treasury

In 1936,

Response after the Holocaust

Nuremberg Trials

Main article:

Nuremberg Trials

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2008)

The international response to the war crimes of World War II and the Holocaust was to establish the Nuremberg international tribunal. Three major wartime powers, the US, USSR and Great Britain, agreed to punish those responsible. The trials brought human rights into the domain of global politics, redefined morality at the global level, and gave political currency to the concept of crimes against humanity, where individuals rather than governments were held accountable for war crimes.^[81] Twelve were sentenced to death, ten were hanged,^[a] seven were sentenced to varying prison lengths and three were acquitted. Four organisations were ruled to be criminal – The Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS, the Gestapo, and the SD.

Towards the end of World War II, Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent, aggressively pursued within the halls of the United Nations and the United States government the recognition of genocide as a crime. Largely due to his efforts and the support of his lobby, the United Nations was propelled into action. In response to Lemkin's arguments, the United Nations adopted the term in 1948 when it passed the "Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide".^[82]

Many believe that the extermination of Jews during the

• Auschwitz bombing debate
• History of the Jews during World War II
• Holocaust victims
• Kindertransport
• Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust
• Responsibility for the Holocaust
• Riegner Telegram
• Righteous Among the Nations
• Role of the international community in the Rwandan genocide
• Secondary antisemitism
• Szmul Zygielbojm
• Witold Pilecki
• World War II