Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment Of Americans In Hitler's Camps

One common explanation for the world's failure to prevent the Holocaust is that the information about the Nazi extermination program seemed too incredible to believe. Fifty years later, Americans may now also find it difficult to believe that their fellow citizens were among the twelve million people murdered by the Nazis, abandoned to this fate by their own government.The outbreak of war in Europe put tens of thousands of American civilians, especially Jews, in deadly peril, but the State Department failed to help them. As a consequence of this callous policy many suffered—and some died. Later, when the United States joined the war against Hitler, many brave young Americans were captured and imprisoned. Jewish soldiers were at a special risk—they were sent into battle with a telltale “H” (for “Hebrew'') on their dog tags, which helped the Nazis single them out for mistreatment. One group of Jewish GIs was sent to the brutal Berga labor camp, which had the highest fatality rate of any POW facility. Other POWs were sent to concentration camps, where they became victims of the machinery of the “Final Solution.”Why is it that none of the hundreds of books about the Holocaust has examined the fate of Americans who fell into Nazi hands? Perhaps it is because the number of American victims was relatively small compared to the total that perished. Perhaps it is due to the perception of the Holocaust as a purely European phenomenon; most people assumed that Americans could not have become victims. But, according to Mitchell Bard, the main reason this story has gone untold for a half century is that much of the evidence has been concealed by our own government.The U.S. government had good reasons to cover up this story. The revelation that Americans were mistreated and that their government knew and failed to do anything about it would certainly raise uncomfortable questions about this country's failure to offer safe haven to the Nazis' main target: European Jews. Forgotten Victims provides documentary evidence proving that American officials knew that U.S. civilians and soldiers were in danger, that they were being mistreated (including being placed in concentration camps), and that they were even being murdered by the Nazis. The story of how European Jewry was forsaken by the Western Allies is by now familiar, but this book exposes for the first time the abandonment of American Jews.