Montreal Holocaust Museum

The World Responds: Too Little, Too Late

    1942

    • February 23

      Britain refuses entry visas into Palestine to 769 Romanian Jews aboard the Struma. Ship is torpedoed by a Soviet torpedo near Turkey while searching for safety. One passenger survives.

    • View of the Struma in the Istanbul harbour. Source: USHMM

  • May

    Jewish Labour Bund in London releases document detailing mass murders of Jews in Poland, concluding with Nazis’ intentions to annihilate every Jew in Europe. The New York Times prints small item on bottom of page 5; omits any reference to systematic program of slaughter.

    • August 8

      Gerhart Riegner cables British MP Sidney Silverman and Rabbi Stephen Wise, President of the American Jewish Congress, relating Nazi plans to murder Jews. U.S. officials withhold the information for three months.

    • Telegram from Gerhart Riegner, Secretary of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, to the UK Foreign Office. Source: National Archives UK

    • November 25

      Jan Karski, an emissary of the Polish underground, arrives in London with eyewitness reports of atrocities and mass murder of Jews. Briefs British and American leaders. Few believe him.

    • Jan Karski. Source: USHMM

  • December 17

    The U.S., U.S.S.R., Britain, Canada and eight allied nations issue declaration condemning Nazis’ extermination of the Jewish people in Europe and promising to punish those responsible.

    1943

    • April 19-30

      Anglo-American conference in Bermuda on war refugees refuses to divert resources from the war effort to make concerted efforts to rescue Jews.

    • Delegates at the Bermuda Conference. From left to right are George Hall, the British parliamentary undersecretary in the Admiralty; Harold W. Dodds, president of Princeton University; Richard K. Law, British undersecretary for foreign affairs; Sol Bloom, chairman of the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee; and Osbert Peake, parliamentary undersecretary in the home office.

    • May 12

      Shmuel (Artur) Zygelbojm, Bund member of the Polish National Council, commits suicide in London as protest against Allied inaction to stop mass murder after Nazis kill last of Warsaw Jews following brutal suppression of ghetto revolt.

    • Artur Zygelbojm

    • October 1

      Danish resistance groups launch two-week operation that ultimately smuggles almost every Jew in Denmark by boat to safety in Sweden.

    • Jewish refugees are ferried out of Denmark aboard Danish fishing boats bound for Sweden. Source: USHMM
    • Danish Jews arrive in Sweden

    • October 16

      Pope Pius XII remains silent as Nazis deport Jews of Rome.

    • Pope Pius XII
    1944

    • January 20

      President Roosevelt creates War Refugee Board after report by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau shows U.S. obstruction of efforts to rescue Jews.

    • Third meeting of the board of directors of the War Refugee Board. From the left are Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Executive Director John Pehle. Washington, DC, United States, March 21, 1944. Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

    • June 26

      U.S. War Department turns down requests by Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz despite fact that nearby military targets are being attacked.

    • Photograph taken during bombing sortie on I.G. Farben Chemical Industries, 13/9/1944. The bombs are seen on the top left of the picture. The Camp seen on the photo is Auschwitz-Birkenau, But the bombs are headed to the factories east of it. Source: USAAC; National Archives
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
Close