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True, many of the officials in FDR's State Department were anti-Semitic establishment types who didn't care a rat's ass about Jews. And, true, the State Department repeatedly poohpoohed the reports of the Nazi German regime's measures against Jews. There are a couple of other points needed here for clarification:
1. Many Americans were anti-Semitic as well, and thus showed little or no interest in the fate of Jews, except perhaps to think that Hitler might be right about them.
2. Many other Americans remembered the virulent propaganda on both sides during the First World War -- both the Allies and their adversaries accused one another of brutalities and atrocities, and the vast majority of those charges were flat out bogus. Thus, when reports of genocide and death camps began to reach the West, many Americans believed that these reports were just as phony as those of a generation before.
3. FDR's plight in the late 1930s was that he faced a populace the vast majority of which did not want to go to war in Europe again, in light of the frustrations and disappointments of the attempt to fight a war to end all wars in 1917-1918. The Japanese expansion into the Pacific, however, was more unpopular, for many Americans, especially on the Pacific Coast and in the Far West, regarded the Pacific as somehow being an American ocean. Thus, FDR had more support for a vigorous American foreign policy counter to Japanese expansionism than he did for countering Nazi and Fascist expansionism.
4. FDR himself was appalled by the reports that somehow did reach him; in fact, when he discovered that Justice Felix Frankfurter had not gone to him for help in saving a close friend from the Nazis, he rebuked Frankfurter. FF replied that he did not want to embarrass the President or to ask personal favors.
5. Finally, let's not forget that we are children of an era that knows that the Holocaust happened, that it was possible for a regime to set out to kill tenbs of millions of people based solely on their religion (Jews) or ethnicity (Slavic or Gypsy) or sexual preference (gays and lesbians) or political affiliation (Communist). In the 1930s and 1940s, these seemed fantasies, horrific and unbelievable fantasies, until we actually had proof positive before us. (Listen to or read Edward R. Murrow's April 1945 radio reports from Buchenwald, and you'll see what I mean.)
Arthur D. Morse's WHILE SIX MILLION DIED and Deborah Lipstadt's BEYOND BELIEF are superb analyses of American reactions to the impending Holocaust.
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