In the decades since the Holocaust some national governments and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort. While the Allies were at war with Nazi Germany and engaged in a massive military campaign of unprecedented scale against it, they did little if anything to either stop the ongoing slaughter of millions of Jews and other minorities, or to save and absorb refugees.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt hated the Nazis and wanted to support Jewish refugees from Europe but the American public had mixed feelings. There had been an early push to ease immigration rules to let refugees into the United States, but after the Great Depression the public wanted to stop letting new people into the country. In addition to dealing with the mixed feelings of the public, FDR also had to put
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After World War I the League of Nations had been deflated to a hollow shell and was seen as a useless authority. Due to the fact that there was little substance in this governing body no one in the League of Nations could do anything to stop Hitler. The Red Cross knew about the Nazi atrocities as early as August 1942. In February 1945, the President of the Red Cross wrote to a U.S. official: "Concerning the Jewish problem in Germany we are in close and continual contact with the German authorities." However, they did nothing and kept the horrors at Auschwitz a secret in order to help American prisoners of war. The Red Cross believed that if they told the world what was happening to the Jews then P.O.W.’s would be severely punished or even