By Ryan O’Connell
Associate Editor
Daniel Greene, the subject matter knowledge expert at the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum and curator of the “Americans and the Holocaust: What Did Americans Know?” exhibit gave a keynote presentation about domestic reactions to the Holocaust, Sept. 18.
The traveling exhibition, which is only visiting 50 libraries as part of its 2024-2026 tour, will stay at FSU until Oct. 11.
Greene said the goal of the exhibition is to ask difficult questions, and if attendees leave troubled by some of the questions they have, that’s a good outcome.
“I’m not up here to tell you exactly what to think about this history, but to tell you that it is important to think about this history,” he said.
Greene said the main question the exhibition set out to answer was “What did Americans know about the persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews in real time during the 1930s and ’40s, and when did they know of it?”
He added this led into the more difficult question: “Why didn’t rescue of Jews trying to escape Germany and other Nazi-occupied lands become a priority for the U.S. Government, or for most Americans?”
Greene said Americans' responses to the Holocaust cannot be understood without first understanding domestic conditions prior to WWII.
He first started with a photo of a blind WWI veteran taken in the 1930s, and said the U.S. at the time was a very isolationist nation which regretted involvement in the first World War.
He added the United States was also a nation of mounting white supremacy, noting the pageantry and violence the Ku Klux Klan used in order to restrict the idea of who could be an American.
America was also still segregated, and struggling with the effects of the Great Depression, he said.
Greene added only after the U.S. began war production did the country begin to recover economically, and also began to start fearing immigrants for the perceived threat of taking American jobs.
“We are a nation of immigrants. We are a land of refuge - that is a story that Americans tell themselves that has some truth to it,” he said. “And we are also a nation that closes our doors to immigrants.”
He added both of these are true, and he wants the exhibition to encourage attendees to think about these two contradictory truths, and how central immigration is to both America and its response to Nazism.
Greene said that in 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power, the advanced democracy of Germany crumbled quickly. American newspapers widely reported on the collapse of the German democracy, as well as antisemitism in Germany, he added.
He also shared a Time Magazine cover from July 1933 captioned, “Say it in your dreams: THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME.” The article, he added, explains to American readers that Nazis attribute all the ills of Germany to Jews.
“Now, there’s a danger in looking at something like this, now 90 years later, and saying, ‘Oh, we should have known.’”
Greene said it isn’t fair to say Americans should have predicted genocide, but it also isn’t fair to say they didn’t know how Nazis were treating Jews.
A 1938 public poll of Americans by The Gallup Organization, he said, reported 54% of Americans thought persecution of the Jews in Germany was “partly their fault.” Eleven percent of Americans thought it was “entirely their fault,” he added.
Greene said 1938 was also a turning point due to the Nazi annexation of Austria, and a nationwide, state-sponsored terrorist attack against Jews, Kristallnacht.
The attack saw 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps, as well as thousands of synagogues and Jewish shops destroyed, he said.
Greene said this was big news in America, and “no matter what newspaper you picked up in November of 1938, you would see headlines [referencing the attack].”
He added this headline also stuck around for two or three weeks at some newspapers, which was rare.
Greene said the exhibit also should inspire questions about presidential leadership, pivoting to the action and inaction taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Holocaust.
He said Roosevelt typically did not like to go on the record with reporters, but the week following Kristallnacht, he told reporters at a press conference he wanted to be quoted on the topic.
Greene said he ended his address, printed in many papers, with: “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could happen in a 20th century civilization.”
He added however that when a reporter asked if he would be increasing the number of Jewish refugees entering the country, Roosevelt replied they were “not contemplating that.”
Greene explained immigration laws in the U.S. were extremely restrictive at the time, and were designed to keep Jews and other “undesirable” groups out of the states.
He added Roosevelt committed no effort to having Congress loosen or change these immigration laws.
“We see this as a moment that is very common in our response to Nazism, which you could kind of boil down to ‘sympathy without action,’” Greene said.
He said this extended to the public as well.
According to a Gallup poll taken two weeks after Kristallnacht, 94% of Americans disapproved of the Nazi’s treatment of Jews, he said. He added, however, that 72% of Americans also said more Jews should not be welcomed into America.
Greene said there were some Americans who did advocate for Jewish refugees, such as Dorothy Thompson, a journalist and writer who recognized the bureaucracy of immigration paperwork was leading to thousands of deaths, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who promoted legislation to accept 10,000 Jewish children into America per year - which was never accepted by Congress.
America also had other harsh restrictions, he said, such as no legal status for refugees, no right to asylum, a slew of expensive and short-windowed paperwork requirements, and an extremely small pool of available visas per birth year - even smaller for southern and eastern European countries which weren’t considered white.
Greene said even as the war began in Europe following the invasion of Poland in 1939, America was committed to neutrality.
He said this anti-Nazi, yet neutral stance was held until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Green said opposition to war came most notably from Charles Lindbergh, a famous American pilot who had given advice to the Nazi’s air force on several occasions prior to wartime. Lindbergh made Roosevelt out to be a warmonger, he said.
Greene said Lindbergh threatened increased antisemitism if the U.S. joined the war, and promoted conspiracy theories such as that Hollywood and the press were secretly controlled by Jews.
Greene said Americans learned about the Nazis’ final solution from a 1942 telegraph. The State Department initially dismissed it as a rumor, but began investigating the claim after requested by Rabbi Stephen Wise.
Three months later, the State Department told Wise the rumor was true, but would not publicize the information, Greene said. Wise then told the Associated Press in Washington, D.C., at which point the story became national news.
“If you were paying attention - if you were a person who paid close attention to the news - you could follow this story in real time,” he said.
Greene said for Americans the war was about protecting Christianity, the U.S. Constitution and freedoms, and American children. They did not go to war to save Jews, he said.
In April 1945, American soldiers arrived at concentration camps, and for the first time, visual evidence was provided to the United States, he said.
Greene added Dwight Eisenhower, supreme allied commander, wired back to Washington, D.C. after seeing the camps firsthand, “Everything that we’ve read to date has been an understatement.”
In May 1945, Americans had an expected and appropriate celebration of the end of the war, Greene said. An eight-page spread of images taken at concentration camps was published in Life Magazine the same month, he added.
Despite this, results of a poll taken in December 1945, asking Americans if more, fewer, or the same number of European immigrants should be accepted into the country each year, yielded negative results, he said.
Only 5% said “more,” while 37% said “fewer,” he added.
Greene said, “And yet on this question our response to refugees and our response to immigrants - which is so central to American mythology and so central to our self definition as Americans - we actually don’t see any movement as a result of this history, at least immediately after.”