The American public started to hear murmurs of Hitler’s atrocities in November 1942, and there is reason to believe that the government knew even years before. Any rational person today would agree that the Holocaust was the most sickening attack on Humanity in modern history, but looking back at it, why did the United States not try to end it sooner? According to Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed? by Brent Douglas Dyck, the allies had the resources to put a dent in Hitler’s systematic genocide of Jews, Roma people, disabled people through Aktion T4, and other minority groups in Europe, but the extermination only came to a halt at the end of the war with the Death Marches starting in 1944 from the threat of imminent invasion. Though it took place during the largest war ever and the United States was almost solely concerned with winning, ethically and consciously, America should have given more effort to destroy the tools of the Holocaust like Aushwitz and prevent such a massive death toll.
The goal of the Holocaust was to eventually exterminate anyone that did not fit Hitler’s vision for of German people, which he himself did not entirely fit into, and America, even with its massive racial divide at the time, clearly wanted to prevent that, but not enough to destroy the root of the problem before it was too late. Jewish Americans heard stories from relatives in Europe about how serious the situation was, and Jewish leaders such as Johan J. Smertenko and A. Leon Kubowitzki petitioned the government to stop the Holocaust. But the Allies did not and instead focused their bombings on fuel refineries and munitions factories, often mere miles away from concentration camps. The most popular excuse by American Officials was that the bombings would take resources away from important frontlines, but there were serious issues to this argument. First, it is easily refutable now because, of the 10,000 sorties flown every month by the American Airforce in 1944, only an estimated 300 would be needed to destroy Auschwitz, the most prominent concentration camp, and that diversion of forces would not severely damage higher priority missions of the Airforce. Another issue with the argument was that part of the reason America joined the war was to fight against fascism, the ideology that propelled the holocaust, and if the United States took action to stop the Nazi’s genocide, it would have been a direct blow to Germany’s intentions and a signal that America was the righteous county it was positioning itself to become. America did have the goal of ending the Holocaust and achieved it with German surrender in 1945, but that goal came after the goal of militarily beating the Axis. Though there were news reports and coverage of the Holocaust, the horrors of the Germans’ treatment of Jews were indescribable. When American soldiers entered the camps, they found mass graves of hundreds of thousands and were instructed to take as many photographs as to document just how bad it was. While Americans back home heard about the Holocaust, it would be hard to comprehend and understand what was happening, and so the American public was less concerned about stopping it than defeating the Axis. Without a massive movement to cease the holocaust, military leaders had little pressure to divert troops to dealing with death camps. But with those decisions of inaction, they relinquished morality. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and the Holocaust is the greatest example of injustice ever, as millions of people were put to death without trial or witness just because of their ethnicity. From an ethical standpoint, the United States, with all its military and political power, should have taken more action to stop the final solution before the end of the war. By ends-based reasoning, stopping the holocaust by targeting concentration camps and the forced migrations of Jews would have helped millions of people, and there simply is not enough evidence that if the United States diverted resources to do it, it would have compromised any of our fighting power against Germany. If the Axis won the war in Europe, millions of more people would die and presumably, the Axis would go on to invade the Americas and other continents, causing millions of more casualties, but Axis victory would not have come from Americans quelling the holocaust. From a rule-based approach, if America was quicker to intervene in the Holocaust, the precedent would be set that America was the world’s police, and would likely intervene in the future like during the Rwandan Genocide. Lastly, from a care-based approach, the United States definitely should have intervened sooner to save millions of lives from terrible and unjust deaths for horrendous reasons. With hindsight, it is easy to say the Holocaust should have been stopped sooner, but back then, it is hard to understand why American officials were against the idea of stopping the Holocaust sooner. Personally, all of my Jewish European relatives died in the Holocaust, and my great uncles fought on the European front, so it is heartbreaking to hear that the United States would not use a tiny portion of its forces for such a massive cause. Just the scale of the Holocaust showed how absolutely terrible the Nazis were, and it is shameful that America missed such an opportunity from the ineptitude of officials and the prejudice of the public to save millions of people forced from their homes into the concentration camps. Winning World War II was among America’s great feats, but we made three enormous mistakes during it, dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan and not intervening soon enough in the Holocaust.
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May 2022
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