Hitler's Forgotten Victims : Nazi Racial Hygiene and the American Press

Between 1933 and 1945, more than a million Europeans with disabilities were brutally sterilized and slaughtered by the Nazis but America did not respond. This raises many terrible questions: when did the American public become aware of these atrocities? If the government could have intervened to save lives, why was this not done? And which persons, or groups of persons, were responsible for the American failure to act?

It is possible that thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of lives could have been saved if the American public had demanded that the country not “stand idly by” while innocent civilians were slaughtered, as Deborah Lipstadt and other Holocaust scholars have argued, but, “whenever it came to rescue, particularly when the victims were Jews, the public favored inaction over action.” This is also particularly true when the victims were disabled.

How, then, can we explain this behavior? Was it a function of prejudice or “other priorities”? Was it a matter of tacit approval, particularly in relation to the eugenic sterilization of the hereditarily disabled ? Or is it possible that the American public “did not really know” the full extent of Nazi atrocities against the disabled? President Roosevelt knew, the State Department knew, but, as Lipstadt asks regarding the annihilation of the Jews, did the American public know?