American immigration and the Holocaust

Maine Writer: This echo opinion letter published in the Lowell Sun, a Massachusetts newspaper, reminds me to recommend reading "On Tyranny", a very short series of 20 essays describing how history is at risk for repeating itself.

The Ken Burns documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust”* was absolutely right — and very true. The atrocities that were carried out by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany were accompanied by shameful attitudes and actions in this country. 

Deep-rooted prejudices led to sad failures to offer a helpful hand to refugees who were fleeing the horrors of 1930’s Europe. If nothing else, it was a regrettable episode in American history.

How easy it would be to take the attitude that we are still the land of the free and the home of the brave. How tempting it is to point to our free elections, to our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and feel that we still set a bright example for the rest of the world. We are a shining beacon of hope for all mankind, are we not?

Not as much as we may think we are. There were certain other facts in the Burns documentary that Mr. Kramer did not mention, but he could have. It seems that Hitler was knowledgeable about American society and history. He studied the methods and practices of Jim Crow-era discrimination against black people in the southern states. The segregation, the colored rest rooms, colored bus stations, colored schools, denial of voting rights, and numerous other examples appealed to Hitler; and they formed the basis of how the Nazis regarded Jews, set them apart from other people, and ostracized them as a race.

Hitler was also quite interested in the history of American settlers and pioneers. He knew about their relations with the indigenous native tribes they encountered as the nation expanded to the west. The native people were terrorized and driven off their traditional lands and hunting grounds. They were forced to migrate elsewhere, and ultimately herded onto reservations. That history formed the inspiration for the establishment of the Jewish ghettos in Warsaw, Krakow, and numerous other cities in Nazi-occupied lands. The concept expanded to concentration camps, beginning with Dachau in southern Germany, which started as a detention center for anyone who was known to oppose the Nazi regime. It culminated with the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps — enormous factories whose only product was mass murder.

Sometimes we Americans become blinded by the stars and stripes and deafened by the “Star-Spangled Banner.” 

We fail to realize that our actions have consequences, and the examples we set as a nation may be followed by other nations. 

To protect our interests, we do as we please. To advance our agenda, we invade where we please. With the dust still settling on the wreckage of Iraq, we find ourselves blustering and scolding the Russians and telling them how wrong they are to invade another sovereign nation which has never threatened them.

Do as we say, not as we do. History never stops repeating itself.

— J.F. Dacey in Lowell Massachusetts 

*The U.S. and the Holocaust is a three-part, six hour series that examines America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. Americans consider themselves a “nation of immigrants,” but as the catastrophe of the Holocaust genocide of Jews unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people who sought refuge. Through riveting firsthand testimony, witnesses and survivors who as children endured persecution, violence, and flight as their families tried to escape Hitler, this series delves deeply into the tragic human consequences of public indifference, bureaucratic red tape and restrictive quota laws in America.