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last year-and-a-half of the war.⁶¹

      While the United States was failing to rescue most of the Jews of Europe, Britain was refusing to allow larger numbers of them to settle in Palestine. Given all the injustice and violence generated by the eventual creation of Israel, and the fact that a major concern of the British was Arab protests, the policy should not be simply condemned. But it was condemned by Jewish groups during World War II, and there is no question that the promise of a land in Palestine, combined with its denial, and combined with the failure of the world’s governments to follow through on numerous other possible destinations for refugees, created great suffering.

      In 1942, a small ship called the Struma sailed from a Romanian port on the Black Sea with 769 refugees trying to reach Palestine. After reaching Istanbul, the ship was in no shape to go on. But Turkey refused to admit the refugees unless Britain would promise that they could enter Palestine. Britain refused. Turkey towed the ship out to sea, where it broke apart. There was one survivor.⁶²

      Opposition to mass immigration into Palestine came not only from the people who lived there, but also from the King of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, whose oil was important to the Allies, and who hoped to build a pipeline to the Mediterranean. The Saudi King preferred Sidon, Lebanon, to Haifa, Palestine, as an end-point for the desired pipeline.⁶³ In 1944, his opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine was “well known” according to U.S. Secretary of State Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr. who on December 13, 1944, warned President Roosevelt that pro-Zionist statements could have “a very definite bearing upon the future of the immensely valuable American oil concession in Saudi Arabia.”⁶⁴

      Detractors of Franklin Roosevelt blame him for not doing more, arguing that he could have seen to it that Jews found safe haven in Cuba or the Virgin Islands or Santo Domingo or Alaska, or -- if Jews were really unwelcome as free citizens of the United States -- then in refugee camps. Of course, the same complaint can be lodged against the U.S. Congress. There were 425,000 German prisoners of war in the United States during the war, but only one camp for refugees, in Oswego, N.Y., which held about 1,000 Jews.⁶⁵ Were Nazi soldiers 425 times more welcome than Jewish refugees? Well, perhaps in some sense they were. Prisoners of war are temporary and isolated. Here’s what Gallup says of its polling results, even after the war, even after widespread awareness of the horrors that would become the top retroactive justification of the war in decades to follow:

      “After the war ended, Gallup asked several questions about the very large number of Jewish and other European refugees who were situated in the ravaged postwar Europe and seeking a home. Gallup found net opposition in response to each of the three ways the questions were worded. The least opposition was in response to a June 1946 question asking Americans if they approved or disapproved of ‘a plan to require each nation to take in a given number of Jewish and other European refugees, based upon the size and population of each nation.’ . . . The responses were 40% in favor, 49% opposed. . . . In August, a separate question invoked the name of President Harry Truman, saying that the president planned to ask Congress to allow more Jewish and other European refugees to come to the U.S. to live than are allowed under the current law. This idea did not sit well at all with the public, some 72% of whom said that they disapproved. A 1947 question localized the issue to the state level, stating, ‘The Governor of Minnesota has said that the Middlewest could take several thousands of displaced (homeless) persons from refugee camps in Europe,’ and asking the respondents if they would approve or disapprove of their own state taking about 10,000 of these ‘displaced persons from Europe.’ A majority, 57%, said no -- 24% yes, with the rest evincing uncertainty.”⁶⁶

      For those interested in more information on U.S. immigration policy and the Holocaust, there’s a section on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.⁶⁷

      In the end, those left alive in the concentration camps were liberated -- though in many cases not very quickly, not as anything resembling a top priority. Some prisoners were kept in horrible concentration camps at least up through September of 1946. General George Patton urged that nobody should “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” President Harry Truman admitted at that time that “we apparently treat the Jews the same way as the Nazis did, with the sole exception that we do not kill them.”⁶⁸

      Of course, even were that not an exaggeration, not killing people is a very important exception. The United States had fascist tendencies but did not succumb to them as Germany did. But neither was there any all-out capital-R Resistance crusade to save those threatened by fascism -- not on the part of the U.S. government, not on the part of the U.S. mainstream. Many made heroic efforts, with limited success, but they were in a minority. A Dr. Seuss cartoon showed a woman reading her children a story called “Adolf the Wolf.” The caption was: “. . . and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones . . . But those were foreign children and it really didn’t matter.”⁶⁹

      In July 2018, with anti-immigrant sentiments less acceptable but still raging, the singer Billy Joel told the New York Times, “My father’s family left Germany in ’38, after Kristallnacht, but they couldn’t get into the United States. There was a quota on European Jews, and if you couldn’t get in here, you were shipped back, then you were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz -- which is what happened to my father’s family. They were all killed at Auschwitz, except my father and his parents. So this anti-immigration stuff strikes a very dark tone with me.”⁷⁰

      Was WWII a just war by accident because it ended before all the Jews had been killed? That’s a tough case to make, since efforts could have been made, in combination with the war or instead of it, to save millions who died. In fact, it wouldn’t have taken much effort, just a willingness to say “welcome” or, perhaps to say something like this:

      “Give me your tired, your poor,

      Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

      The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

      Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

      I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

      Perhaps WWII was a just war; but we’ll have to find another reason why. The popular notion of a war to save Jews is fiction. The variation in which the war is justified simply because the enemy killed Jews is weak if the war was not aimed at stopping that evil. The political or propagandistic nature of popular myths and misconceptions can be easily illustrated by a couple of facts. First, the victims of the Nazi concentration camps and other deliberate murder campaigns included at least as many non-Jews as Jews; these other victims were targeted for other reasons, yet are sometimes not even mentioned or considered.⁷¹ Second, Hitler’s war efforts were aimed at killing and did kill many more people than the camps killed. In fact, numerous nations in both the European and Pacific wars killed many more people than were killed in the camps, and the war as a whole killed several times the number killed in the camps, making the war an odd cure for the genocide disease.⁷²

      3. WWII did not have to happen

      “One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.” —Winston Churchill⁷³

      World War II grew out of World War I, and almost nobody tries to argue that World War I was just or glorious. Generally it’s treated, even in school history texts, as pointless and even barbaric. Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1962 book The Guns of August tells the story of the slow launching of WWI, driven by war planners and the momentum of their plans. Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel All's Quiet on the Western Front described WWI so well that the Nazis banned and burned it. By behaving more wisely, governments could have chosen not to launch World War I, or not to end World War I in a manner that had people predicting WWII on the spot. A war that could have been avoided is only a justifiable war if actually desirable, if actually preferable to peace -- a position generally limited to sadists and weapons

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