Holocaust Guilt

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HOLOCAUST GUILT

World War II profoundly affected American society and culture, not least because of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. In his 1993 speech at the dedication of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., President Bill Clinton expressed the sense of guilt felt by many Americans about U.S. inaction during the Holocaust when he said that "far too little was done" to save the six million Jews from annihilation. Since the 1960s, it has been common not only for politicians like Clinton but also for Holocaust scholars to suggest the United States was guilty of not doing enough to help the Jews during the war. These scholars include David Wyman in The Abandonment of the Jews, Arthur Morse in While Six Million Died, and Saul Friedman in No Haven for the Oppressed. Another prominent historian, Deborah Lipstadt, described Allied policy as bordering on complicity with Nazi Germany in the Final Solution. The basic premise of these scholars is that the United States is partially responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews because it failed to ease its immigration restrictions before the Nazis shut off further emigration; it failed to bomb the rail lines leading to death camps such as Auschwitz; and it did not press vigorously enough for the release of Jews from Nazi-occupied countries during the war.

It is often assumed that feelings of guilt drove the United States to support the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This is an easy conclusion to make, considering that Israel became a state just three years after the war. During those three years, Americans had the opportunity to view firsthand the horror of stacked corpses and emaciated human beings left behind in extermination camps. If Americans did feel at all responsible for the Holocaust, what better way to atone for its guilt than to push for a Jewish state for the victims who managed to survive? This is essentially what Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman argue in Friends in Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance. According to Raviv and Melman, as a result of the Holocaust "a shamefaced, remorseful postwar West now supported the Jewish demand for an independent state in Palestine" (p. 22).

It is unclear whether or not guilt was behind U.S. policy to support the creation of Israel. According to Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life, there is no evidence President Harry Truman or his advisors ever felt guilty during their push for a Jewish state. Although Truman did show genuine concern for the survivors, probably also high on his list was the effect his support of Israel might have on his chances for reelection in 1948. In the case of U.S. policy toward Holocaust victims in general, Novick notes that no evidence points to a sense of guilt as motivation. According to Novick, "sympathy" is probably a better word to explain how Americans felt about the plight of Holocaust victims after the war. In later years, the government expressed sympathy for victims of genocide, such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and for victims of natural disasters, such as the Armenian earthquake of 1988, and chose to assist them; this sympathy was also at the root of U.S. assistance for Holocaust victims.

After World War II, thoughts of the Holocaust gave way to a preoccupation with the Soviet Union and the threat of nuclear annihilation. However, the Holocaust came back into the national consciousness in the 1960s, when the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel and when the Israelis defeated a coalition of Arab nations aligned against it during the Six-Day War (as well as during the 1973 Yom Kippur War). With Israel under attack, memories of the Holocaust were reawakened, and the possibility of a second Holocaust became all too real. Universities all over the country began to offer courses on the Holocaust. In 1978 NBC broadcast its miniseries The Holocaust, which attracted an audience of 120 million viewers. That same year President Jimmy Carter announced the formation of a commission to create a memorial for the victims of the Holocaust.

Once the Holocaust became prominent in the American consciousness, politicians and private citizens alike often used memories of the Holocaust to rally others against later genocidal atrocities and to assist peoples being oppressed by dictatorships. During the Vietnam War, protesters drew parallels between the government's inaction during the Holocaust and the passivity of the American people during the 1960s and 1970s to prevent the killing of innocent Vietnamese. In their protests, they often linked images of Nazism with military actions in Vietnam, such as when they equated U.S. soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre with Nazi Storm Troopers. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush used Holocaust imagery to mobilize support for war against Iraq, likening Saddam Hussein to Hitler. In the 1990s, when the so-called boat people from Haiti attempted to escape to America, some recalled the fate of Jews aboard the steamship St. Louis, who, having been refused entry into the United States, had no choice but to return to Nazi Germany, where many were killed. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the news media broadcast images of emaciated Bosnians in detention camps, and many compared them to the pictures of Jews in concentration camps. Thus the Holocaust,

both as fact and symbol, has become part of American culture. The Holocaust evokes both American failure and responsibility to protect human rights.

bibliography

Friedman, Saul S. No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1973.

Lipstadt, Deborah. "Witness to the Persecution: The Allies and the Holocaust." Modern Judaism 3 (October 1983): 323, 329.

Melman, Yossi, and Raviv, Dan. Friends in Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance. New York: Hyperion, 1994.

Morse, Arthur D. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. New York: Random House, 1968.

Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

James C. Mott

Americans at War