american us history?

Question

I need help with these 2 questions

Why didn't France and Britain accept a many German Jews as they might have?

Why didn't United States accept a many German Jews as they might have?

Answer 1

In the US, if I recall correctly, the Secretary of the Interior (who at that time had authority over immigration) or his subordinate over immigration was anti-Semitic, and refused to increase the number of visas allowed to German Jews fleeing Germany. This was not Roosevelt's intent, but by the time FDR found out and reversed the policy, it was too late to do a lot of good.

Britain often stymied Jews because they controlled Palestine at the time, and they were attempting to avoid a mass migration of Jews into Palestine, which would exacerbate an already tense situation there between the Jews and Arabs. However, Churchill was a proponent of disabling the concentration camp infrastructure via bombing.

By the time the holocaust was widely known by Allied governments, France had fallen.

One of the paradoxes of the Holocaust was that if the Allies had taken early reports seriously, they could have saved a lot of people, however, by the time they took the reports seriously, it was too late (because the victims couldn't leave).