The United States government response to Nazi anti-Semitic policy is best viewed in the context of American foreign policy and the domestic economic crisis of the 1930s. During the refugee phase (1933-1941), there was a reluctance to accept Jewish refugees. As the situation developed, there was some response. Hugh R. Wilson, the United States ambassador to Germany, was "recalled for consultation" after Kristallnacht. After the annexation of Austria, the German and Austrian immigration quotas were unified in order not to lose the latter, and the existing quotas were fully utilised. But a bill to admit 10,000 Jewish refugee children outside the quota - the Wagner-Rogers Bill, introduced in 1939 and again in 1940 - did not emerge from committee. During World War II, the "Jewish question" maintained the low priority it had had before the war.
Isolationism and Anti-Semitism
The initial context of the United States relationship to Germany was its policy of isolationism, which prevented the Roosevelt administration from assuming an interventionist posture. More difficult to appraise is the direct link between isolationism and anti-Semitism. The Jewish community, because of its close ties to the Roosevelt administration, acted as a magnet for anti-New Deal sentiment. They earned, thereby, the opposition of isolationist spokesmen like Charles Lindbergh. During the 1930s, anti-Semitism was a sentiment that stemmed primarily from the right wing of the political spectrum, from men like Charles E. Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith. The possibilities of forming the necessary coalitions to shape rescue policy were thus limited to the liberal side of the political spectrum. Moreover, the fear that refugees would increase unemployment was one of the main arguments of anti-rescue policy. As a consequence, efforts to rescue Jews by means of refugee ships, like the St. Louis, failed.
The Evian Conference
Most of the steps taken by the Roosevelt administration were intended more as gestures than as a consistent policy to ameliorate the plight of the victims. The Evian Conference, called at Roosevelt's behest in mid-1938, was foredoomed to failure since the American delegation was instructed that no tampering with the immigration laws would be countenanced. Without taking the lead, the U.S. could not convince other nations to take in masses of Jewish refugees.
The American Entry into the War
America's entry into the war hardly stilled the strident anti-Semitism. Anti-refugee and anti-rescue sentiment was now buttressed by a new fear that Germany would infiltrate spies into the refugee stream. Perceiving these popular passions, Roosevelt believed that the war, which he considered necessary, must never be allowed to be depicted in terms of a war to save the Jews. The existing indifference to the refugees extended to the question of rescuing those in camps. Even when it became clear that Berlin had actually embarked on the "Final Solution," no immediate change came about.
