A Failure to Respond essays

A Failure to Respond essays Between June 1941 and May 1945, six million Jews were systematically annihilated under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. However, because of Germany's firm control over most of Europe, information about theFinal Solution? wasn't leaked to the presses until a year later. In June 1942, the Daily Telegraph was the first to report that 700,000 Jews had been gassed (Laqueur, 261). The United States had already declared war against the Axis powers following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. One would then assume that after reading this published report that the United States, as a world power, would have jumped in and taken immediate action to halt the atrocities that were being committed by the Nazis. However, the United States? response was quite the opposite. As a world power, the United States could have and should have put forth a sizeable effort towards assisting the European Jewry, without compromising its war efforts against the Axis powe rs. The American government chose to sit on the information of the mass genocide of the European Jewry. It wasn't until November 24, 1942 that information about the genocide of the European Jewry was published in non-prominent U.S. newspapers. However, at that point, two million European Jews had already been murdered. To make matters even worse, the American State Department actively blocked information about the Nazi's persecution of the European Jewry for eleven weeks. The despicable actions of the American government didn't stop there as United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ignored spies who had personally witnessed the atrocities that were occurring in the Nazi death camps. President Roosevelt even went as far as claiming that he was 'too busy? when 400 Rabbis from around the U.S. came to the White House, a day before the most holy Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, with a petition to form a council for rescue in hopes of saving 70,000 Rom...