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The German ocean liner St. Louis left Hamburg in 1939. Her 937 passengers on board were trying to escape the genocide.
Hitler’s German Nuremberg Laws classified Jews as an inferior race. Jewish children were expelled from school. Concentration camps were open. Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed.
Adolf Hitler told parliament, “If war breaks out, it will mean the extermination of the Jews of Europe.”
Soon he will start that war.
But the U.S. government severely restricted immigration, even for fugitives who risked their lives. Isolationism and anti-Semitism were rampant. Charles Lindbergh, a respected American aviator, warned about the Jews at a rally in 1941, saying, “Their greatest danger to this country is that they are the ones who will be seen in our films, the press, the radio, and the government.” It has a lot of influence,” he said.
St. Louis turned away from the United States, Cuba, and Canada. The ship had to return to Europe and hundreds of passengers died in concentration camps.
In the week leading up to Holocaust Remembrance Day, a recent study by the National Assembly of State Legislatures found that most states have no laws requiring schools to teach about the Holocaust. This is a time of increasing anti-Semitic incidents, including hate crimes.
Teaching Holocaust history to students is not just for the sake of history. It is to help them recognize crimes against humanity that are repeated over and over again in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and elsewhere, including today’s detention of Uyghur Muslims by China. To confront America’s own crimes in slavery and segregation.
The Holocaust was a calculated industrial murder of 6 million Jews. Millions were executed, including Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses and dissidents. Abroad was not the only force that encouraged mass murder. America’s slow response contributed to the outbreak of the Holocaust.
The great journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote from the Dachau concentration camp liberated by US forces in June 1944: We are blind and incredulous, we are slow and we can never go back.”
Today, many people fleeing death from tyranny, crime, and poverty are turned away at America’s borders. Should we increase the number of students learning about the Holocaust, not less?
Copyright 2023 NPR. For more information, please visit https://www.npr.org.
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