World War and the Growth of Global Power 265most notably Kristallnacht, or the “night of broken glass,” a series of attacks on
Jews and their stores, homes, and synagogues in Germany and Austria in
November 1938, gained significant attention. Likewise, many were aware of
Nazi concentration camps, areas where Jews and others were sent to live in
prison-like conditions for some contrived misdeeds they had committed.
After Kristallnacht, for example, the Nazis put 30,000 Jews in camps. Still,
no one envisioned even at the outset of the war that Nazi ideology would
lead to millions of deaths by 1945. The Germans began seriously to plan and
accelerate the “final solution,” the mass extermination of Jews and others, and
the world became aware of it later, in 1942.
Once the invasion into the Soviet Union stalled in December 1941, Hitler
began to intensify his repression and order the final solution as an attack on
both Jews and Communists. FDR and other allied leaders were aware of the
plight of European Jews under Nazi control by mid-1942, but did little to
confront or stop it. In fact, it took FDR about 18 months, in January 1944,
to establish a War Refugee Board to coordinate the rescue of Jews escaping
Germany, and even then it took in only 132,000 people fleeing the Nazis, just
FIGuRE 5-8 A truck load of dead prisoners from the Nazi Buchenwald
concentration camp in Weimar, Germany, April 14, 1945