While the US crimes against the Vietnamese or the Iraqis are more or less known, what is less known is the role the ruling classes of the US and Britain had in the Holocaust against the Jews.
In reality Britain's Churchill and US President Roosevelt admired Hitler and Mussolini for their tough anti-communist and anti-union policies. When the mass killings did start, these governments claimed that they couldn't be certain of what was happening. This was a lie.
The US State Department's initial reaction was that the information was "a wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears", while the chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee said the information was being used "to stoke us up". In the eyes of these governments, the Jews simply did not exist.
The British and US governments refused to take in Jewish refugees. The British home secretary only talked of admitting one to two thousand to be confined on the Isle of Man, because of a lack of accommodation! When Romania, a German "satellite" country, offered to release 70,000 Jews, the British Foreign Office called this "a frightful prospect".
The United States' "closed gates" policy offered no hope to the potential victims of genocide. The story of the famous St Louis ship is known after a movie was made with the same name. In 1939, the St Louis ocean liner, carrying 1128 German-Jewish refugees, was turned back by US immigration officials because the immigration quota for Germany had been met. The mass graves and the gas chambers were not so discriminatory!
At the same time they claimed that the railway lines and bridges leading to the slave labour/extermination camps, and the gas chambers and crematoria that they housed, could not be bombed because the planes did not have the necessary range, payload or precision.
Roosevelt and Churchill opposed large-scale rescue plans, not because of logistical problems, but because they were fearful they would be successful. They fed the public the official line that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war as soon as possible. The costs of this unnecessary and inhumane policy of military victory at all costs were borne by the Jews.
