While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy

by Arthur D. Morse

First published in 1967, 'While Six Million Died' revealed the untold story behind the deliberate obstruction placed in the way of attempts to save the Jewish people from Hitler's "Final Solution, " with detailed documentation from worldwide interviews with participants, research in archives around the world, as well a classified and official papers that had never been published before Morse's exhaustive study. While the tragedy of the Holocaust continues to be told by historians, novelists, filmmakers, and others, no single volume has documented this dark period in its historical relationship to America as thoroughly and passionately as Arthur Morse's pioneering work.

Genres: History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, Politics, World War II, War, Historical

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[Jill H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a powerful book which takes a little different approach to the Holocaust. Instead of concentrating on the techniques and physical acts of the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people, it asks two questions:
* What did the rest of the world, especially the US and Britain, know about the planned annihilation.
* What was their reaction to this knowledge.

The answer to the first question is "yes, they knew about it". Hitler stated in a speech to the Reichstag in 1939, his clear intention of destroying all Jewish people. In order to support that statement, he again repeated it in 1942 and used the term "extermination". Additionally, the Allies were receiving many reports from Germany and other countries under German occupation of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish population.

The answer to the second question is "little or nothing". Jews escaping from Nazi Germany were turned away at the borders of the US due to the ridiculous immigration policies and, frankly, the anti-Semitic attitudes of some of the political leadership. (The incident of the ship, St. Louis is particularly shameful.) The initial excuse was neutrality but even after the US entered the war, attempts were futile.

The author goes into great detail about the political machinations that stalled any attempt or action to address the human tragedy that was engulfing Europe. I felt that he was fair in his assessments and his research and source material were based on fact, not opinion. It is not an easy book to read as it will cause anger and actual shock at the attitudes and actions that prevented the saving of lives. I recommend it.

[Matty S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

When historian Barbara Tuchman reviewed Arthur D. Morse’s pioneering 1968 work, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, she offered a verdict that still echoes today: "For national self-knowledge, the historical record Arthur Morse has compiled is one of the most important of our time". Morse’s book is not merely a recounting of Nazi atrocities; it is an unblinking courtroom indictment of the American and Allied governments. Drawing on previously classified State Department cables, secret memorandums, official archives, and private diaries, Morse reconstructs a chilling reality: while Nazi Germany systematically executed six million European Jews, the world’s leading democracy erected administrative "paper walls" to keep victims out, suppressed news of the genocide, and actively thwarted private rescue efforts.
If you have ever wondered how the moral credibility of the free world fractured during World War II, picking up Morse's book provides a devastating, indispensable answer.

The myth persists that America was eager to save those fleeing Adolf Hitler but was simply blocked by rigid pre-existing immigration quotas. Morse thoroughly shatters this excuse. While it is true the 1924 Immigration Act capped annual entries at roughly 150,000 aliens, the Roosevelt administration administered the law with an incredible mosaic of bureaucratic severity. Between 1933 and 1943, over 400,000 allowable quota slots for countries under Nazi domination were left completely unfilled.

Under Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long—a wealthy political contributor and former ambassador to Italy who had once praised Mussolini’s regime as "the most interesting experiment in government"—the State Department turned visa processing into an obstacle course. In a Kafkaesque twist, German Jews fleeing Gestapo terror were required to present an official police certificate from their hometowns in Germany attesting to their "good character" before a U.S. visa could be issued!

Whenever public pressure mounted to aid refugees, officialdom staged diplomatic theatrics designed to stall rather than solve. An internal State Department memorandum from 1938 bluntly admitted that the famous Evian Conference was conceived by Undersecretary Sumner Welles and Secretary Cordell Hull primarily to "get out in front and attempt to guide the pressure, primarily with a view toward forestalling attempts to have the immigration laws liberalized".

When genuine rescue avenues appeared, Washington systematically slammed the door shut. In November 1938, British Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay made a staggering offer: Britain was willing to relinquish part of its unused 65,000 U.S. immigration quota places so German Jewish refugees could use them. Sumner Welles rejected the offer on the spot, citing "legal" and "policy" objections. Months later, in June 1939, the German liner St. Louis, carrying 907 Jewish refugees, was turned away from Havana and trailed by U.S. Coast Guard vessels off the coast of Florida, forcing its passengers back to Europe. The Nazi propaganda journal Der Weltkampf mocked democratic hypocrisy: "We are saying openly that we do not want the Jews while the democracies keep on claiming that they are willing to receive them—and then leave the guests out in the cold!".

When mass exterminations began in earnest following the invasion of Poland and Russia, reports of wholesale slaughter poured into Washington. In August 1942, Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress, sent an urgent, confirmed cable through the U.S. legation in Switzerland. Riegner alerted the State Department that Hitler had ordered all European Jews deported to the East and exterminated at a single blow using prussic acid.

Rather than mobilizing aid, State Department officials engaged in a campaign of denial and censorship. Robert Borden Reams, the Foreign Service officer put in charge of "Jewish questions" (who privately described refugee specialists as "people who live off the misery of others"), objected to issuing Allied warnings. Reams argued that public statements confirming Nazi crimes would only open "the way... for further pressure from interested groups for action which might affect the war effort".

Then came the smoking gun uncovered by Morse. On February 10, 1943, the State Department dispatched secret Cable 354 to Minister Leland Harrison in Bern. Under the guise of a routine administrative instruction regarding censorship rules, Cable 354 explicitly ordered Harrison not to accept future atrocity reports from private individuals like Riegner for transmittal to the United States. The American government was deliberately cutting off its own flow of intelligence about mass murder to prevent the public from demanding action.

Two months later, in April 1943, as the Warsaw Ghetto burned, Anglo-American diplomats met at the Bermuda Conference. The American delegation arrived carrying strict State Department instructions: no discussions of changing U.S. immigration quotas, no allocation of shipping, no negotiations with Germany, no easing of the Allied blockade, and no mention of Palestine. The Manchester Guardian scathingly reported that "well-dressed gentlemen assemble to assure each other in the best Geneva fashion that really nothing much can be done". Myron C. Taylor, President Roosevelt's personal representative, delivered his own damning assessment in a secret memo: "The Bermuda Conference was wholly ineffective, as I view it, and we knew it would be".

The most gripping narrative arc in Morse’s book details how a small group of non-Jewish Christian lawyers in the Department of the Treasury discovered the State Department’s duplicity and staged a high-stakes rebellion.
In mid-1943, the World Jewish Congress requested Treasury licenses to transmit private funds to Switzerland to rescue 70,000 Romanian Jews starving in Transnistria and evacuate Jewish children from France. While Treasury granted immediate clearance, Breckinridge Long’s State Department sabotaged the licenses with eight months of manufactured delays.

Outraged by the obstruction, Treasury General Counsel Randolph Paul, Assistant General Counsel Josiah E. DuBois Jr., and Foreign Funds Control Director John Pehle launched a secret investigation into State Department files. They discovered the original text of Cable 354 and realized that State officials had excised its cross-references when forwarding copies to disguise their act of censorship.
DuBois drafted an explosive, uncompromising 18-page memorandum titled Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews. The report explicitly accused State Department officials of using government machinery to block rescue:

"They have not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews... They have tried to cover up their guilt by: (a) concealment and misrepresentation; (b) the giving of false and misleading explanations... and (c) the issuance of false and misleading statements..."
The document highlighted Representative Emanuel Celler’s razor-sharp public attack on Breckinridge Long: "Frankly Breckinridge Long, in my humble opinion, is least sympathetic to refugees in all the State Department. I attribute to him the tragic bottleneck in the granting of visas... It takes months and months to grant the visa and then it usually applies to a corpse".

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. condensed the memorandum into a Personal Report to the President and secured an urgent White House confrontation with Franklin D. Roosevelt on Sunday, January 16, 1944. Morgenthau handed the paper to FDR, warning him directly that State Department obstruction was driven by "plain anti-Semitism" and warned that a explosive political scandal was about to erupt.

Morgenthau also exposed Long's secret testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee two months earlier, in which Long had falsely claimed under oath that the State Department had admitted 580,000 refugees from Nazi terror. In truth, official Immigration and Naturalization Service records proved that only 165,756 Jews had been admitted to the United States in the decade between 1933 and 1943—a mere 10 percent of the legal quota allowance.

Confronted with the evidence and realizing the political peril, President Roosevelt acted within six days. On January 22, 1944, he signed Executive Order 9417, creating the War Refugee Board and placing 34-year-old Treasury officer John Pehle at its head. Breckinridge Long was stripped of his authority over refugee matters.

The War Refugee Board proved what could have been accomplished years earlier. Working with a tiny staff and private funds, Pehle and DuBois bypassed diplomatic red tape. They wired immediate instructions to overseas consulates to unblock channels, financed the heroic relief work of Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary, issued false passports, and helped save an estimated 200,000 lives during the final months of the war.

Yet, as Morse emphasizes, the creation of the Board was a heartbreakingly belated gesture. Executive Order 9417 was signed 17 months after Gerhart Riegner’s original warning cable. During those 17 months of American and Allied apathy, an estimated four million Jews were murdered in Nazi gas chambers and firing pits.

Even after the creation of the Board, anti-refugee prejudice lingered in the bureaucracy. When Pehle attempted to set up "free ports" (temporary emergency shelters) in the U.S., Roosevelt approved only a single camp—Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. Fewer than 1,000 refugees were brought there, and despite having sons serving in the U.S. armed forces, they were kept enclosed behind chain-link fences for the remainder of the war.

Arthur D. Morse’s diagnosis of the American response is unsparing. He demonstrates that the collapse of America's historic role as a haven for the oppressed was brought about by "a combination of political expediency, diplomatic evasion, isolationism, indifference and raw bigotry which played directly into the hands of Adolf Hitler even as he set in motion the final plans for the greatest mass murder in history".

While Six Million Died is not a comfortable read, but it is an essential one. It forces us to confront how ordinary bureaucrats sitting in comfortable offices in Washington and London—men who wrote polite memos, guarded their fiefdoms, and fretted over political liabilities—became passive accomplices to genocide.

If you want an unvarnished lesson in how paper pushing can turn into complicity, and how dedicated individuals like DuBois, Pehle, and Morgenthau fought back to save human lives against all odds, Arthur D. Morse’s masterpiece belongs at the very top of your reading list.

[Erin Marchant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a tough book to read because you desperately want the U.S. and the European countries to do the right thing, but you know exactly how it turns out; the chapter on the S.S. St. Louis is probably the most painful example of this, and one of the most embarrassing moments in United States history. It's a great book. It answers the question that so many people ask about the Holocaust - "Why didn't the Jews just leave?" - with the horrible reality of, "They tried, but no one would take them."

[Erroll Treslan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dispiriting but well researched description of the Allies' complicity in the Nazi's discrimination against the Jews and others. Morse provides an undisputed historical record that the lives of at least hundreds of thousands who perished in concentration camps could have been saved. The banality of evil described by Hannah Arendt was not confined to within German borders.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long on my to-read list, the time was finally right for me to delve into the other dark side of the Holocaust: The world’s indifference to the plight of the Jewish people and the Nazi’s other civilian victims in Europe. While Six Million Died is Arthur D. Morse’s scathing review of the many failures of world leaders to save lives, feeding Hitler’s madness in his persecution and murder of the Jewish people. This book has too few heroes and too many villains.

Morse’s subtitle is a bit misleading: Apathy was not at all limited to the United States. However, other nations and territories clearly looked to the US for leadership and example, neither of which were forthcoming until far too late. The British shared in the shame, for their inaction, but the US had a much greater capacity to bring additional refugees within its borders. The fear of spies slipping through and talk of racial/religious favoritism drove the anti-refugee campaign in America, even to the point of denying 50,000 children temporary safety and security. As Morse put it, opponents had “won their war against the children. The aliens had tried to breach the wall of the mighty Republic, but the patriots had withstood their assault.”

Those who find themselves wondering why the allies didn’t bomb the death chambers of the concentration camps aren’t asking the right question: Why did we allow them to be built and filled with human beings in the first place? But the former topic is addressed as well, towards the end of the book, and after all the outrageous reasoning and explanations for the latter question, in the decade before the end of the war, it actually makes a little sense.

The book does not spend much time on the details of mistreatment with which we are already familiar, but necessarily includes some of the unspeakable crimes to boost the reader’s exasperation.

This one is destined for removal from high school shelves in the US, I’m certain, based on current events We don’t like owning up to our mistakes.

Suggested tie-in reading: While Six Million Died has a chapter on the passenger ship St. Louis, which was turned away at Cuba and sent back to Europe by the US. Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust tracks the fate of everyone aboard.

[Kenneth Barber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a very difficult read. It tells the story of America’s reaction to the Nazi execution of the Jewish race during WWII. The United States ignored or downplayed all reports of the plight of the Jews. As the actions of the Nazis worsened, we not only refused to aid the Jews, but actually made it harder for them to immigrate to the United States. The State Dept was especially culpable. They constantly made the requirements for immigration more difficult. Led by Breckinridge Long, the State Dept displayed discrimination against Jewish refugees. Congress followed suit by tightening immigration laws. FDR refused to use the power and prestige of his office to help.
The United States called for a world conference on the refugee issue, but it resulted in nothing being accomplished. Our position was to ask others countries to accept the refugees while we took none. Our refusal to take in refugees was a big propaganda tool for Hitler and his program. The story of the plight of the refugees on the ship St Louis is only one episode in this drama. We refused to allow entry to these people even though most of them had visas to enter the US. For most of the critical years of 1933-1939, our immigration quotas weren’t even filled to capacity.
Not until January,1943 with the creation of the War Refugee Board, was any effort made to rescue Jews. Even then, the State Dept did all in it’s power to stall and delay rescue efforts. The book details the heroic efforts of the men and women, like Raoul Wallenberg, who labored tirelessly to rescue these refugees.
This book delineates a sad chapter in our history.

[carl theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look at all that could have been done to obstruct the
holocaust. Lots of facts and stories that come in handy for
debates in showing the world in general had their misgivings about
taking in the Jews, which in turn provided perfect propaganda
for the Germans.

However you can see many items are a question of slanting, eg
FDR had war priorities, do you divert
resources to say bomb death camp ovens and provide
short term relief, or prosecute the war and end it all?

[Andrew Bryson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an in depth examination of the inaction of the Allies save the Jews during the Holocaust. The sentiment towards the plight of the Jews was not matched by any concrete action. The State departments dithering, the UK's protracted excuses doomed millions to barbaric cruelty and death. A sad tale that must be told and must never be forgotten. Mankind cannot close it's eyes to such barbarity ever again.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. Painted an objective and maddening picture of the apathy of American bureaucrats who couldn't figure out how save millions of lives despite the solutions and power they possessed. Effectively dispels the myth that America didn't have a clear sense of what was happening in Europe during the war.

[Elizabeth Guider · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye-opening and jaw-dropping. This book will help make up for what we did not learn in school about the apathy of the American government toward the fate of Jewry before and during World War II. Written by a first-rate journalist who had worked with Edward R Murrow at CBS, the book is not only meticulously researched but also very moving. The chapter on the tragedy of the St Louis, a passenger ship carrying almost a thousand refugees from Hamburg to Cuba, and subsequently the U.S. in 1939, is particularly dramatic, vividly evoked and indicative of the political and cultural cross-currents whipping the western world at the time. I was inspired to read this book after watching Ken Burns’ latest documentary series, America and the Holocaust, to understand better “what we knew, when we knew—and what we did, or didn’t do, about it. Well worth the effort, both the series and the book.

[Chandra Boulden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Awe man! What a sad depressing time in our history. SO meany things we could have done differently, if nothing else- let the immigrants come! I don't understand why in a time of such turmoil for the Jewish people they were not helped more, especially when they were sponsored or on ships at our ports! The last 2 chapters shined a little light on some of the good that was done then. However, it's good to know the history so we can change our future not hide it.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume tells of how the USA and Britain during World War II, were not only apathetic to the fate of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, but actually obstructed all efforts to save them.
The book explores the questions:
What did the rest of the world, in particular the United States and Great Britain, know about the Nazi plans for the annihilation of the Jews?
What was their reaction to this knowledge?
After it was learned from a German industrialist, and relayed by the representative in Switzerland of the World Jewish Congress, Gerhardt Riegner, of the plans by the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry (and after well over a million Jewish men, women and children had already been butchered , Czech exile Ernest Frischer urged the Allies urged the Allies to ease the blockade of Nazi-occupied Europe so that relief supplies could reach occupied Europe, and proposed that the International Red Cross supply food parcels to ghettos and concentration camps as it did prisoner of war camps. He asked that Jewish children be evacuated from German-occupied territories.
It was debated but no action in this regard was taken.

By January 1943, new evidence had come to light about Nazi mass murder. Riegner provided the American State Department a detrailed 4 page description of Nazi atrocities.
It was reported that the Nazis were killing six thousand Jews each day in Poland.
A 'Stop Hitler Now' Rally was organized by Rabbi Stephen Wise at Madison Square Gardens on March 1, 1943.Chaim Weizmann, President of the Jewish Agency for Palestine stated that "The world can no longer plead that the ghastly facts are unknown and uncomfirmed. At this moment expressions of sympathy without accompanying attempts to launch acts become a hollow mockery in the ears of the dying. The democracies have a clear duty before them. Let them negotiate with Germany through the neutral countries concerning the possible release of the Jews in the occupied countries. Let havens be designated in the vast territories of the United Nations which will give sanctuary to those fleeing from imminent murder. Let the gates of Palestine be opened...the Jewish community of Palestine will welcome with joy and and thanksgiving all delivered from Nazi hands".
Due to violent Arab opposition to Jews entering Palestine, the British closed the gates of the Palestine Mandate and turned back thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler back to the Nazi ovens.
The British announced that there would be no Jewish immigration into the ancient Jewish homeland "unless the Arabs are prepared to acquiesce in it.". They were not, and so millions of Jews who could have been saved died.

The British also rejected the idea of a Jewish parachute unit from Palestine to rescue Jews in Europe, as they were afraid this would advance Jewish Nationhood in the Land of Israel.
The USA refused entry to many Jewish refugees, including a consignment of ten thousand Jewish children, because of domestic objection to Jewish immigration. There was no objection however to the refuge in the USA of thousands of British children, from the German blitz of Britain.

Australia, with it's vast unsettled spaces, announced at the Evian Conference of 1938, that 'As we have no real racial problem we are not desirous of importing one."
Refuges were suggested in such places as the Dominican Republic, Mindanao, British Guiana, the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and Angola.
It all came to nothing.
The proposal, by Dr Weizmann, for the Allies to bombing the gas chambers and furnaces in the death camps was rejected after it was opposed by the Soviets.
And a deal offered by Eichmann to exchange hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives for ten thousand trucks was also rejected.
The Ghetto Fighters House, a kibbutz in Israel founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto published the Vittel Diary by Itzhak Katznelson whose recurring theme was apathy in the face of Nazi murder:
"Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they they warn the murderers, never a murmur. It was as if the leaders of the nations were afraid the killings might stop."
The Allied powers could have saved millions of Jews and chose not to.
Great Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union bare some responsibility for the Holocaust.
The Jews realized that only their own state and army could save Jewish lives, and citizens of countries that did not lift a finger to save Jewish lives have no right to condemn Israel in any way for saving her children against those who would murder them.

[Terra · Rating 5 out of 5]

gli americani liberatori, grandi eh? però sapevano molto bene che cosa succedeva in europa e non solo non hanno fatto nulla per impedire il genocidio: hanno chiuso l'accesso a centinaia di migliaia di persone che si sarebbero potute salvare, hanno boicottato l'opera di chi cercava di porre un freno alla shoah. questo libro racconta bene, nei particolari, quanto gli stati uniti siano stati conniventi con hitler. certo noi abbiamo poco di cui andare fieri, ma questo lo sanno tutti. invece ciò che si legge qui non è altrettanto noto e andrebbe saputo e tenuto a mente.

[Ryan O'Malley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book makes you consider the part the US played in letting Jewish people die in the holocaust. It makes you consider how our current refugee and immigrant policies are preventing people who need safety from reaching our shores. It exposes the inhumanity of nativism and its results

[Rebecca Brenner Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

narrative nonfiction from 1967, surprisingly useful for research

[Brenda Schubert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very disturbing chronicle of America's and other's apathy toward the Nazi's treatment of the Jews.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the best books I've read. And necessary to understand why FDR was no friend of the Jews.

In February 1973 I borrowed the book from our synagogue's library. I was 15 at the time, and so spellbound that I engineered my bedroom windows so my mother, coming home from a date with my eventual stepfather, couldn't see the lights on in my room from the road.

The book takes us from Hitler's early anti-Jewish policies to the Nuremberg Laws, to Kristallnacht, to the voyage of the St. Louis and the establishment of death camps. In the face of this impending slaughter, the U.S., Canada and to a lesser extent Britain actively prevented Jewish arrivals in safe countries.

During the war, FDR arranged matters so that he could maintain "deniability." Overall, an entrancing book that shook my roots as a budding young Democrat to the core.

I was reading another review of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro. She states in part:

Midway through adolescence, I began wondering a bit which life event would finally make me feel like an adult. Of course I had the usual teenaged hypotheses, and acted accordingly to test some of them out. Getting drunk? Having sex? Driving a car? Going to college? None of these things did make me feel grownup; in many instances, their effect was the opposite. *************For the past few years I’ve had the sense of wearing an oversized grownup life that wasn’t actually mine, while that magical rite of passage into adulthood continued to elude me. Maybe when I have children things will click into place, I’ve mused, listening to Talking Heads with one ear and sort of doubting it.... Part of this might be generational; if thirty is the new twenty, it’s no wonder that I get that Lost Boys feeling, and shrug confusedly when overnight company makes fun of my teddy bear.

I’m pleased to announce that thanks to the glory of Robert Caro, this stage is basically behind me. Having finally finished The Power Broker, I feel much more like a grownup, and believe it or not, I’m pretty into that.

***********
But reading this book made me feel like a grownup because it helped me to understand the way the world works as I never had before.

In a similar sense, this book really made Judaism a central part of who I am.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the Italian version of this book, that tells the universal indifference of a whole planet towards a genocide. Nothing can me more actual than that.

Ho letto la versione italiana di un libro che racconta l'indifferenza di un intero pianeta (tranne rari casi) ad un genocidio. Niente di più attuale.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

much too heavy to read now that i've already spent concentrated time in the concentrations camps and the Third Reich. may revisit at a later date. gut wrenching and frustrating. the wheels of justice grind SOOOOOOOOO slowly.

[Deena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of Morse's facts have been proven wrong since this was first published in 1968, but it is still a masterpiece.

[Hope]

Scary how much procrastination took place. They all knew! Evil. Pure Evil. America, England, the Vatican, all guilty by association

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good and poignant book about the failures of the UK and American governments to stop the Holocaust. The book goes into detail about what each country knew and when.

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relevant now more than ever.