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Americans Knew a Lot about the Holocaust as It Was Happening
(JTA) Ron Kampeas - A new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington asks: What did Americans know about the Nazi genocide against the Jews? "Visitors will be surprised at how much Americans knew about Nazism and the Holocaust and how early they knew it," said curator Daniel Greene. Yet according to public opinion polls from 1938 until after the war ended, over 70% of Americans opposed allowing a larger number of Jewish refugees from Germany to come to the U.S. to live. At the same time, 94% disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. Sympathy for the plight of the Jews is a constant, but so is resistance to measures that might mitigate the impending genocide. A museum crowdsourcing initiative launched in 2016 found 15,000 articles published in American news outlets on atrocities against Jews as they happened. At a time when 2/3 of Americans saw newsreels at the cinema at least once a week, they made clear that the Nazis' prime victims were Jews.