BY PETER SEIDMAN  
Following World War I German capitalism faced unparalleled economic crisis. Lacking investment funds and squeezed out of foreign markets, the economy reeled from bouts of intensive inflation to prolonged recession and massive unemployment.

This produced a tremendous radicalization of the powerful and well-organized working class. Ultimately, in order to maintain its profits, a section of the ruling class chose a collision course with the workers aimed at breaking the backs of their unions and political parties.

The mass movement of small shopkeepers, professionals, and other middle class and lumpen elements crazed by the effects of the economic crisis and welded together by Hitler behind his fascist National Socialist Party became a weapon of big capital against the workers movement.

Anti-Semitism, along with anti-Communism, was part of the ideological glue used to hold the Nazi movement together and to direct its fury against the Jews and the workers. In this way, and given the failure of the Communist and Socialist parties of Germany to provide effective leadership in the struggle against it, fascism served to turn the middle class victims of the capitalist crisis against the workers and the Jews, who were also victims, instead of against the real criminals--the capitalist ruling class.

When Hitler became chancellor of the German government in 1933, he transformed the anti-Semitic actions of the Nazi goon squads into official state policy against the 350,000 Jews of Germany. In April 1933, the Nazi regime imposed an official boycott on all Jewish businesses. In that year, Jews began to be excluded from all the professions and many of the cities and towns of Germany....

The Nazis unleashed a campaign of physical terror against Jews, making public announcements that their police chiefs could not be "responsible for the safety of enemies of the Reich." By 1933, the New York Times had carried descriptions of the prison camp at Dachau. That year, there was one estimate that said there were 80,000 prisoners in sixty-five camps throughout Germany.

Following the assassination of a Nazi ambassador in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, the son of a Polish Jew expelled from Germany by the Nazis, the Nazis unleashed a pogrom against the German Jews on November 10, 1938--the infamous "Kristallnacht," the "Night of Broken Glass." This orgy of revenge for the death of the German diplomat included the burning of some 195 synagogues, the destruction of more than 800 Jewish-owned shops, and the looting of some 7,500 others.

Twenty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. And on November 12, 1938, the German government imposed a collective fine of approximately $400,000,000 (one billion marks) upon German Jews as "money atonement" for the death of Vom Rath, Grynszpan’s victim.

During this time, anti-Semitic regimes were also bearing down on the 725,000 Jews in Hungary, the 900,000 Jews in Rumania, and the 3.3 million Jews in Poland. With the conquest by German imperialism of Austria (with 200,000 Jews) and Czechoslovakia (with 350,000 Jews), the anti-Jewish terror threatened to engulf all of Europe.

In the wake of this mounting Nazi repression, refuge in other countries became a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands of Jews and other fighters against fascism as well. By May 1939, for example, there were enough applications for U.S. entry visas on file in the U.S. consular offices in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to fill the existing U.S. immigration quotas for the next five years!

The Roosevelt administration, the upholder of the "liberal democratic values" so beloved by the B’nai B’rith, followed a consistent policy of barring entry to this country for these refugees, thereby condemning many of them to death. This policy of the U.S. government showed that any serious effort to save the victims of European anti-Semitism would require a fight against Roosevelt’s administration, and not reliance on it.  
 
New Deal and refugees
Following Hitler’s march into Austria in March 1938, President Roosevelt announced plans for an international conference to aid refugees from Germany and Austria to be held at Evian, France. Roosevelt launched this conference with a statement about how the U.S. has always been a haven for the oppressed and a land of the free.

But in motivating the conference, he explained that no country that attended would be expected to raise its immigration quotas to solve the refugee crisis, that the U.S. would not raise its quota, and that all funds for projects of the conference would be raised from private agencies....

The outcome of all these artificial barriers to immigration was that even the existing quotas were not filled. Between 1933 and 1943, more than 400,000 more people could have legally entered the U.S. from countries under Nazi domination than were actually permitted. Between 1938, the year of "Kristallnacht," and 1941, the year the involvement of the U.S. in the second world war made transportation from Europe almost totally unavailable to refugees--a period of time when the acute plight of the refugees was at the height of public attention--there were still some 60,000 unfilled places in the U.S. immigration quota.

As was pointed out above, the Roosevelt administration, far from aiding the masses of European refugees from Nazi terror, had in fact stood quietly by while hundreds of thousands of Jews and others were being murdered. Estimates as to the total number of refugees that were permitted to enter the U.S. between 1933 and 1945 vary from about 150,000 to a high of about 250,000. A very small number indeed compared to the millions of victims of fascism.  
 
 
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