Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi regime sought to wipe out all European Jews. The Nazi regime’s policy towards the Jews saw it murder at least six million of them in what the world came to know as the Holocaust. Given that, after the end of the First World War, the world’s major countries had committed themselves to ensuring world peace, it seems prudent to expect that it was unlikely that a conflict of the scale similar to that of the Holocaust would occur. The occurrence of the Holocaust despite the actions that the world’s major countries had taken to ensure world peace makes it interesting to study how these countries reacted to the Holocaust. The proposed study will examine the reactions of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill – the United States President and British Prime Minister at the time of the Holocaust respectively – to the Holocaust. The study will provide insights into the possible actions that the world’s major countries would have taken in order to stop the Holocaust.
Historical Topic Defense
A study of the reactions of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill is relevant for two reasons. First, it will provide an understanding of how the United States and Britain’s acts of omission led to the success of the Nazi regime’s genocidal policy. In an attempt to ensure world peace, Britain and the United States led other countries in holding Germany accountable for starting the First World War, and this makes it reasonable to expect that they would have undertaken some policy initiatives in order to stop the Holocaust. The scale of the Holocaust suggests that the political leaders of the United States and Britain were not keen on seeing their countries play the roles they had played in the aftermath of the First World War.
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Second, the study will provide insights into the socioeconomic changes that made the United States and Britain lose the incentive to ensure world peace. The initiative of the world’s major countries to ensure Germany had no capacity to instigate conflict after the First World War showed how the political leadership of Britain and the United States understood that it was in their interests to ensure world peace. Given what was at stake for Britain and the United States if the world was not peaceful, it is surprising that Roosevelt and Churchill’s reaction to the Holocaust was lackluster. The lackluster response of Roosevelt and Churchill points to some socioeconomic changes in Britain and the United States after the First World War, and the proposed study will establish these changes.
Topic Interpretation
The proposed study will address this question: How did Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill respond to the Holocaust? One tentative conclusion of the proposed study is that Winston Churchill did not acknowledge the Holocaust before it got to the advanced stages. Churchill’s government understood that there was a growing anti-Semitic sentiment among the Britons, and this made it apprehensive of the potential for a further growth of this sentiment in the event of an influx of Jewish immigrants into Britain. According to Lawson, the Foreign Office found it essential to avoid taking any action that would enhance the chances of Britain receiving the Jewish refugees. Goldman notes that the aftermath of a stampede at an underground station attests to the prevalence of the anti-Semitic attitude in Britain at the time of the Holocaust. An air raid occasioned a stampede that killed 173 people at the Bethnal Green London Underground station, and after this stampede, there were rumors that it was the work of the Jews. In order to quell the rumors, the British government had to step in and inform the public of the circumstances that led to the stampede. Considering the prevalence of the anti-Semitic sentiment in Britain at the time of the Holocaust, it would have been a costly political mistake for Churchill to acknowledge the Holocaust and take action to try to stop it.
Another tentative conclusion is that Roosevelt, too, did not acknowledge the Holocaust before it got to the advanced stages. In the United States, the public opinion did not support an intervention that would have rescued the Jews from Nazi persecution. The United States was still recovering from the Depression, and an influx of Jewish immigrants would have made it difficult for the Americans to find jobs. The recession saw at least 8 million Americans lose their jobs, and, therefore, throughout the Second World War, it was not economically viable to accept more refugees fleeing the Nazi atrocities in Europe. A sizeable constituency of the supporters of the Roosevelt administration favored isolationism and they did not like the idea of the United States’ entanglement in a foreign conflict in order to secure the Jewish interests. The prevailing isolationist sentiment in the United States meant that the American Jewish community’s lobbying for the support of the US government in halting the holocaust seemed at odds with the isolationist paradigm that informed the US foreign policy at that time.
Research Methods
The proposed study will utilize both primary and secondary sources in gathering the necessary information. The primary sources will be the public records and documents on how the United States and Britain handled the Holocaust, and they will be appropriate for the proposed study because they will offer the accounts of Roosevelt and Winston’s responses to the Holocaust. The secondary sources, on the other hand, will be the scholarly articles that interpret the actions of Roosevelt and Winston during the Holocaust.
- Goldman, Aaron. “The resurgence of antisemitism in Britain during World War II.” Jewish Social Studies 46, no. 1 (1984): 37-50.
- Kushner, Tony. “‘The Western Allies and the Holocaust’: Rules of the Game: Britain, America and the Holocaust in 1944.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5, no. 4 (1990): 381-402.
- Lawson, Tom. “Debates on the Holocaust.” Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010.
- Medoff, Rafael. “Conflicts between American Jewish leaders and dissidents over responding to news of the Holocaust: three episodes from 1942 to 1943.” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 3 (2003): 439-450.
