While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Paperback)

by Arthur D. Morse (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #392,295 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (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.

10 of 10 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A chilling account of America's indifference, March 12, 2002

By A Customer

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

This is one of the most important books written on the Shoah.
To reply to the reviewer who wanted to know what America could have done I dont know maybe excepted boats of Jews when they tried to come to America instead of refusing to and sending them back to their eventual slaughter. Thats just one of many.