Did FDR know about the holocaust while it was happening?

Question

Is there any proof of foreknowledge? please site your source of info also.

Answer 1

Five weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt became President of the United States. Roosevelt's loathing of the whole Nazi regime was known the moment he took office. Alone among the leaders of the world, he stood in opposition to Hitler from the very beginning. He never wavered in his belief that the pagan malignancy of Hitler and his followers had to be destroyed. Thomas Mann, the most famous of the non-Jewish refugees from the Nazis, met with FDR at the White House in 1935 and confided that for the first time he believed the Nazis would be beaten because in Roosevelt he had met someone who truly understood the evil of Adolf Hitler. The President and Mrs. Roosevelt were leaders in the effort to help the German Jews fleeing political persecution. Mrs. Roosevelt was a founder of the International Rescue Committee in 1933 which brought intellectuals, labor leaders, and political figures fleeing Hitler to sanctuary in the United States. President Roosevelt made a public point of inviting many of them to the White House. In 1936, in response to the Nazi confiscation of personal assets as a precondition to Jewish emigration, Roosevelt greatly modified Hoover's ruling regarding financial sponsorship for refugees thereby allowing a substantially greater number of visas to be issued. As a result, the United States accepted twice as many Jewish refugees than did the rest of the world put together. As Professor Weinberg has stated, Roosevelt acted in the face of strong and politically damaging criticism for what was generally considered a pro-Jewish attitude by him personally and by his Administration.............For the first time since the First World War an American president had summoned home an ambassador to a major power under such circumstances. At his press conference then, Roosevelt said: "I myself can scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization."
Yes, he knew, from the very beginning. I will say, in his defense, that it was not FDR himself who held the country back from being involved...it was the American public....because of the drain in finance, manpower an other considerations left over form WW I.

Answer 2

I think the citations already in other answers suggest strongly enough that the US government and other allies knew about the Holocaust, or at least something about it even if full details were not known.
The important question becomes what could they have done about it? The answer there is: not a whole lot. There have been discussions about whether or not they could have destroyed the camps, destroyed the rail lines, whatever to stop the Holocaust. But the answer remains that none of those actions would have stopped the systematic murder of European Jews. New camps would have gone up, rail would have been repaired, more Jews would have been simply shot in their ghettos, or even worse, they would have simply been left to die in the railyards, victims of Allied bombings.
The only way to stop the killings completely would have been to knock Germany out of the war and occupy it. And that, as we can see, took some time.

Answer 3

Highly likely.

American and British WWII military intelligence authorities may have been aware of Adolph Hitler's "Final Solution" plan for the "eradication" of the Jews of Europe as early as 1942, according to documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.

In July 2002 a National Archives press release styated that, by March 20, 1942, a surreptitiously obtained document appears in the files of the United States Coordinator of Information (COI), a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, clearly discussing the Nazi intent to eradicate European Jewry.

See the story in full on the link below.

Answer 4

I am related to the Roosevelt family, and if he knew anything about th big H....why would it matter now!!! It is done and overwith, and Hitler, by the way, happens to be one of the MOST intelligent humans that ever lived, and thank GOD for that!!!!

Answer 5

no he didn't. he didn't find out until rumors were being spread from poland and switzerland so he went to investigate in 1946.