While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy [Paperback]

Arthur D. Morse (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0879518367 | ISBN-13: 978-0879518363

First published in 1967, this work reveals the untold story behind the deliberate obstruction placed in the way of attempts to save the Jewish people from Hitler's "final solution", with detailed documentation from worldwide interviews with participants, research in archives around the world, as well as classified and official papers that had never been published before Arthur Morse's exhaustive study .

Product Details

• Paperback: 420 pages
• Publisher: Overlook TP (February 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879518367
• ISBN-13: 978-0879518363
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #870,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shocking Information, May 14, 2004

By 

Randy Keehn (Williston, ND United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Hardcover)

I had read suggestions over the years that the Roosevelt (FDR) Administration had a weak and obstructionist policy towards the plight of the Jews in Europe in the years leading up to WWII. Unfortunately, I let this book sit on the bookshelf for nearly twenty years before I got around to reading it. I was appalled at the extent of US governmental indifference and interference! One of the major problems facing the Jews who could sense the imminent danger in Germany was that of finding some place to move to. Most of the Western world did not want to accept them as refugees and especially in the numbers that were materializing. As the grandson of an immigrant, I had written a term paper on the US immigration policy with apparrent pride when I was in junior high school. I understood the various quota systems that favored North Western Europeans and heavily discriminated against those of other races. I had understood the reasons that it took two of my grandfather's brothers so long to immigrate here. I understood why many immigrants went to Canada instead (including the fact that Canada is a fine country). I had understood the laws requiring that persons coming to this country needed to provide proof that they would be able to provide for their own support once they got here. However, Arthur Morse gave examples after examples of how all of the existing immigration laws were twisted, tightened and squeezed to keep the Jewish refugees from finding a new home here. We were just another country that left them to fend helplessly for themselves in Nazi Germany. "While Six Million Died" is a difficult book to read for an American. It is a reminder of the anti-semitism that generations after the Holocaust find hard to understand. At best Americans can say that their government's behavior at the time wasn't any worse than that of other governments. The shame is that it wasn't any better either. America has faced its' disgrace over its' past racism and the scandal of the Japanese internment camps. However, I have not noticed much ado about the issues that Morse raises in "While Six Million Died". That is why this is such an important book to read.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A chronicle of apathy in the face of genocide, February 13, 2008

By 

Gary Selikow (Great Kush) - See all my reviews

This review is from: While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Paperback)

This volume tells of how the USA and Britain during World War II, were not only apathetic to the fate of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, but actually obstructed all efforts to save them.
The book explores the questions:
What did the rest of the world, in particular the United States and Great Britain, know about the Nazi plans for the annihilation of the Jews?
What was their reaction to this knowledge?
After it was learned from a German industrialist, and relayed by the representative in Switzerland of the World Jewish Congress, Gerhardt Riegner, of the plans by the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry (and after well over a million Jewish men, women and children had already been butchered , Czech exile Ernest Frischer urged the Allies urged the Allies to ease the blockade of Nazi-occupied Europe so that relief supplies could reach occupied Europe, and proposed that the International Red Cross supply food parcels to ghettos and concentration camps as it did prisoner of war camps. He asked that Jewish children be evacuated from German-occupied territories.
It was debated but no action in this regard was taken.

By January 1943, new evidence had come to light about Nazi mass murder. Riegner provided the American State Department a detrailed 4 page description of Nazi atrocities.
It was reported that the Nazis were killing six thousand Jews each day in Poland.
A 'Stop Hitler Now' Rally was organized by Rabbi Stephen Wise at Madison Square Gardens on March 1, 1943.Chaim Weizmann, President of the Jewish Agency for Palestine stated that "The world can no longer plead that the ghastly facts are unknown and uncomfirmed. At this moment expressions of sympathy without accompanying attempts to launch acts become a hollow mockery in the ears of the dying. The democracies have a clear duty before them. Let them negotiate with Germany through the neutral countries concerning the possible release of the Jews in the occupied countries. Let havens be designated in the vast territories of the United Nations which will give sanctuary to those fleeing from imminent murder. Let the gates of Palestine be opened...the Jewish community of Palestine will welcome with joy and and thanksgiving all delivered from Nazi hands".
Due to violent Arab opposition to Jews entering Palestine, the British closed the gates of the Palestine Mandate and turned back thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler back to the Nazi ovens.
The British announced that there would be no Jewish immigration into the ancient Jewish homeland "unless the Arabs are prepared to acquiesce in it.". They were not, and so millions of Jews who could have been saved died.

The British also rejected the idea of a Jewish parachute unit from Palestine to rescue Jews in Europe, as they were afraid this would advance Jewish Nationhood in the Land of Israel.
The USA refused entry to many Jewish refugees, including a consignment of ten thousand Jewish children, because of domestic objection to Jewish immigration. There was no objection however to the refuge in the USA of thousands of British children, from the German blitz of Britain.

Australia, with it's vast unsettled spaces, announced at the Evian Conference of 1938, that 'As we have no real racial problem we are not desirous of importing one."
Refuges were suggested in such places as the Dominican Republic, Mindanao, British Guiana, the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and Angola.
It all came to nothing.
The proposal, by Dr Weizmann, for the Allies to bombing the gas chambers and furnaces in the death camps was rejected after it was opposed by the Soviets.
And a deal offered by Eichmann to exchange hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives for ten thousand trucks was also rejected.
The Ghetto Fighters House, a kibbutz in Israel founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto published the Vittel Diary by Itzhak Katznelson whose recurring theme was apathy in the face of Nazi murder:
"Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they they warn the murderers, never a murmur. It was as if the leaders of the nations were afraid the killings might stop."
The Allied powers could have saved millions of Jews and chose not to.
Great Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union bare some responsibility for the Holocaust.
The Jews realized that only their own state and army could save Jewish lives, and citizens of countries that did not lift a finger to save Jewish lives have no right to condemn Israel in any way for saving her children against those who would murder them.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Holocaust was not just a Jewish tragedy; it was the world's tragedy, because the world did let it happen, December 4, 2010

By 

Alter Wiener (Hillsboro OR U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Paperback)

In June 1942, the Germans deported me to enforced Labor Camps. During my captivity of three years, and for 33 months prior to my deportation (from September 1939 to June 1942) I saw Germans and their collaborators (not just Nazis) looting, expropriating, deporting, mocking, beating, torturing, shooting, hanging, burning alive, babies choked or smashed to death, starving and other unimaginable acts of extreme wickedness carried out against innocent men, women and children. The Nazis' were enjoying watching their victims suffer (shadenfreunde).

In Klettendorf, one of the five camps that I had been incarcerated, I saw a long train, of cattle cars, filled with guarded human cargo. It passed close by the trench that I was digging. I could hear a pleading for water (Wasser.) That train was heading towards one of the six extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Maidanek, Sobibor and Treblinka, in occupied Poland. That horrifying spectacle still reverberates in my memory. I was unable to strangle the last sight of it; I was strangled by it. I could not understand then, at the age of 17 and I do not understand today, at the age of 84, the logic to send non-combatants to death. Few of the perpetrators have ever been brought to trial, but the character of civilization was! How could such slaughter go on without arousing the civilized world's wrath? By that time, in August 1944, the democratic world undoubtedly was aware of the death camps in Poland. I wondered whether Jews in America were protesting the slaughter of their brethren. Why the United States, a nation founded and populated by the oppressed of different faiths and from many lands did not stop Hitler's genocide? Where were the good Samaritans among the American Christians? They were expected to have compassionate regard for all people, not just some people! Where were the fighters for human rights? Why did civilized nations shirk their responsibilities to show pity for us! I doubted if the faithful, of any religious denomination, said a prayer for our deliverance! Their silence was spiritual poverty! Apparently people of the world put up a wall to isolate themselves from seeing our suffering. Was everybody in the outside world a passive accomplice? Where were the human rights groups? Was it not a betrayal of basic human solidarity? Was it not a failure of the entire moral fabric of society? There was nothing inmates inside the camps could do to alleviate their situation. Help could only come from the outside world, but the outside world failed to respond. I believe now that even mass demonstrations, in the democratic countries around the world would have forced the German to stop or at least moderate their policy of extermination (Ausrottung) of European Jewry. If President Roosevelt had been more vociferous in expressing his and the American people's indignation, the nonchalant world would have been awakened and protested the slaughter of the innocent. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad, it is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good."

I had a painful feeling of being abandoned by the international community. Had the world not been so indifferent, the Holocaust could have been stopped or at least interrupted and not let the dikes of civilization collapse. The widespread oppression didn't always happen in hidden places. The camps were large enough to be seen through the lenses of the contemporary cameras in the possession of the Allies intelligence.
WHILE 6 MILLION DIED reflects how the USA, Britain and other countries were not only apathetic to the fate of innocent Jewish men, women and children. In certain instances they actually obstructed all efforts to save European Jewry. In March 1943.Chaim Weizmann, President of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, stated that "The world can no longer plead that the ghastly facts are unknown and unconfirmed."

The Exhibits in the German Historical Museum, which opened in Berlin in October 2010, are indicative that many ordinary Germans had often celebrated Hitler; they enabled him to carry out his military objectives and the extermination of Jews and others. The German people nurtured and empowered Hitler. We see in many documentaries cheering crowds, marching students and other demonstrations of popular support; images of young and old adoring Hitler. The young visitors to the museum are asking now their parents and grandparents: "Daddy or grandpa where were you? How could you let it happen; why did not you resist Hitler's Holocaust?" This poignant probe should have also been addressed to the leaders of the USA, Britain and other enlightened nations. Why did not they interfere; why didn't they warn the murderers. It was as if the leaders of the nations were afraid the killings might stop." The Allied powers could have saved millions of Jews and chose not to take some responsibility for the Holocaust.

Arthur D Morse, deserve praise for recoding chronologically the tragic events of WWII, making us aware that indifference is a killer. Winston Churchill said: the Holocaust was not just a Jewish tragedy; it was the world's tragedy, because the world did let it happen." WHILE 6 MILLION DIED" should be required reading for students in a history class. Adults in our times and in the future should read it and derive an important lesson and message.