The allies that liberated the concentration camps were appalled at what they saw there. They went to the nearest city to march the citizens to the camp to show it them. On the way to the camp everyone is happy and laughing like they were going on the picnic. After they saw the camp there were devastated by what they saw. They had no idea what was going on at those camps.
From:
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-response-to-the-holocaust
The Nazis attempted to keep the Holocaust a secret, but in
August 1942, Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, Switzerland, learned what was going on from a German source. Riegner
asked American diplomats in Switzerland to inform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of America’s most prominent Jewish leaders, of the mass murder plan. But the State Department, characteristically insensitive and influenced by anti-Semitism, decided not to inform Wise.
The rabbi nevertheless learned of Riegner’s terrible message from Jewish leaders in Great Britain. He immediately approached Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who asked Wise to keep the information confidential until the government had time to verify it. Wise agreed and it was not until November 1942 that Welles authorized the release of Riegner’s message.
Wise held a press conference on the evening of November 24, 1942. The next day’s
New York Times reported his news on its tenth page. Throughout the rest of the war, the
Times and most other newspapers failed to give prominent and extensive coverage to the Holocaust. During
World War I, the American press had published reports of German atrocities that subsequently turned out to be false. As a result, journalists during
World War II tended to approach atrocity reports with caution.
Although most Americans, preoccupied with the war itself, remained unaware of the terrible plight of European Jewry, the American Jewish community responded with alarm to Wise’s news. American and British Jewish organizations pressured their governments to take action. As a result, Great Britain and the United States announced that they would hold an emergency conference in Bermuda to develop a plan to rescue the victims of Nazi atrocities.
Ironically, the Bermuda Conference opened in April 1943, the same month the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were staging their revolt. The American and British delegates at Bermuda proved to be far less heroic than the Jews of Warsaw. Rather than discussing strategies, they worried about what to do with any Jews they successfully rescued. Britain refused to consider admitting more Jews into
Palestine, which it administered at the time, and the United States was equally determined not to alter its immigration quotas. The conference produced no practical plan to aid European Jewry, although the press was informed that “significant progress” had been made.
Following the futile Bermuda Conference, American Jewish leaders became increasingly involved in a debate over
Zionism. But the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, led by Peter Bergson and a small group of emissaries from the Irgun, a right-wing Palestinian Jewish resistance group, turned to pageants, rallies, and newspaper advertisements to force Roosevelt to create a government agency to devise ways to rescue European Jewry. The Emergency Committee and its supporters in Congress helped publicize the Holocaust and the need for the United States to react.
President Roosevelt also found himself under pressure from another source. Treasury Department officials, working on projects to provide aid to European Jews, discovered that their colleagues in the State Department were actually undermining rescue efforts. They brought their concerns to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was Jewish and a long-time supporter of Roosevelt. Under Morgenthau’s direction, Treasury officials prepared a “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Morgenthau presented the report to Roosevelt and requested that he establish a rescue agency. Finally, on January 22, 1944, the president issued
Executive Order 9417, creating the War Refugee Board (
WRB). John Pehle of the Treasury Department served as the board’s first executive director.
The establishment of the board did not resolve all the problems blocking American rescue efforts. For example, the War Department repeatedly refused to bomb Nazi concentration camps or the railroads leading to them. But the
WRB did successfully develop a number of rescue projects. Estimates indicate that the
WRB may have saved as many as 200,000 Jews.
One can only speculate how many more might have been saved had the WRB been established in August 1942, when Gerhart Riegner’s message reached the United States.
The American public discovered the full extent of the Holocaust only when the Allied armies liberated the extermination and concentration camps at the end of World War II.