Question

What was the nation's response to the Holocaust?

Answer 1

Even though most Americans, concerned with the war itself, remained unaware of the terrible plight of European Jewry, the American Jewish community reacted to Wise 's news with fear. American and British Jewish groups put pressure on their governments to act. As a result, Great Britain and the U.S. declared that they would hold an emergency conference in Bermuda to establish a strategy to rescue Nazi atrocities' victims.

Ironically, the Bermuda Conference opened in April 1943, the same month the Jews staged their revolt in the Warsaw ghetto. At Bermuda the American and British delegates proved far less heroic than the Warsaw Jews. Instead of discussing strategies, they worried about what to do with any Jews they rescued successfully. Britain refused to consider allowing more Jews into Palestine, which it controlled at the time, and the US was similarly adamant not to change its immigration quotas. The conference did not produce a practical plan to aid European Jewry, although it was reported to the press that "significant progress" had been made.

After the unsuccessful conference in Bermuda, American Jewish leaders became deeply interested in a discussion about Zionism. Yet the Emergency Committee to Save Europe's Jewish People, headed by Peter Bergson and a small group of Irgun emissaries, a right-wing Palestinian Jewish resistance organization, turned to websites, marches, and newspaper ads to compel Roosevelt to establish a government agency to find ways to save European Jewry. In Congress, the Emergency Committee and its members helped to publicize it and the need for response from the US.