266 ChaPter^5
10 percent of the quota allowed by law. FDR argued that the best way to
save Jews was to defeat Germany on the battlefield but Jewish leaders in the
U.S. pressured him into creating the refugee board, which was ordered to
“rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death
and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consis-
tent with the successful prosecution of the war.” The war, however, was more
important and took priority over saving those under Nazi control. By war’s
end, Hitler’s final solution, in addition to provoking the destruction of much
of Europe, accounted for 12 million deaths in the Holocaust as well.Rosie and ER: Women, Power, and Wartime
While the war was fought far away from the United States, it definitely had
a huge impact at home too. In 1943 the Bureau of Motion Pictures in the
U.S. Office of War Information released Glamour Girls of 1943 , a wartime
propaganda film designed to encourage women to enter wartime industries.
The film showed pretty, well-dressed white women working industrial jobs
with perfect hair and bright smiles. The narrator happily noted that “instead ofFIGuRE 5-9 Wartime women workers learning to solder, April 1942