Hitler's policies convinced many German Jews that they had no future in their homeland. After the Nuremberg Laws stripped them of their citizenship and rights in September 1935, a steady stream of Jews sought to emigrate from Germany. This grew following Kristallnacht in November 1938 and after the confiscation of Jewish businesses in early 1939. At around this time the Nazis began to physically expel Jews from Germany and Austria.

The response of the international community was slow and inadequate. By mid-1938 some 150 000 German and Austrian Jews had been accommodated in new homelands, over one-third of them in the United States. Even though American public opinion was generally sympathetic to the Jewish cause, President Roosevelt did not speak out against the Nuremberg Laws even though his Ambassador to Berlin warned that they were just a preliminary measure to the "complete separation of the Jews from the German community."

Cartoon from the New York Times, July 3 1938

In July 1938 Roosevelt finally acted, calling together delegates of 32 nations at Evian in France to discuss the plight of the thousands of refugees from Nazism, and especially the many Jews who were attempting to find new homes. Many fine speeches were given and much sympathy offered, but no nation stepped forward to take significant numbers of Jews. Australia's delegate distinguished himself by stating that it "will no doubt be appreciated that as we have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one."

The Nazis closely watched the world's response to their persecution of the Jews. They realised that sympathy did not extend to action. In November 1938 the SS newspaper stated that "because we no longer hear the world screaming, and finally because no power in the world can stop us, we shall therefore take the Jewish question towards its total solution. It is: total elimination, complete separation."

As World War II approached the international community turned its back on the developing humanitarian catastrophe. In May 1939 the American, Cuban, Colombian and Chilean governments turned back the "St Louis", a ship carrying 900 Jewish refugees, many of whom later perished in the death camps after they were returned to Europe. That same month the British government introduced severe restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, a British-administered land in the Middle East which London had set aside as a Jewish homeland during World War I. Even after Hitler launched his war in September 1939 the West did not act. In 1940 the U.S. Congress rejected attempts to open Alaska to Jewish refugees, as well as a Swedish scheme for the rescue of
20 000 German Jewish children. The following year Congress also rejected a further proposal to admit 20 000 German Jewish children.

The policy in Western capitals at that time is summed up in the words of a Canadian official who dismissed proposals for Jewish immigration into Canada with the bigoted comment that "none is too many." In Australia the mood was captured by Attorney General Robert Menzies who visited Hitler in August 1938, returning with praise for the "spiritual quality in the willingness of the young Germans, who are devoted to service to the State." Twelve months later, as Prime Minister, it was Menzies' duty to declare war on Germany following the invasion of Poland.

Western intelligence received reports of the Nazis' program of mass murder from the very beginning of the campaign in Poland. By the time the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, swept into Stalin's Russia in June 1941, British intelligence had broken many secret Nazi codes and listened in to radio reports of mass shootings in the Baltic states, the Ukraine and other Soviet territory. Detailed information was provided to both the British and American governments as the Holocaust got into full swing in 1942. That year U.S. airforce aerial photographs showed not only the existence of Auschwitz-Birkenau but also its real purpose. Yet nothing was done to either disrupt the rail lines taking the Jews to their death, or to destroy the gas chambers which kept operating until the last possible moment.

In April 1943 a conference of British and American officials in Bermuda "ruled out all plans for mass rescue." The British Foreign Office "revealed in confidence" to the U.S. State Department their fear that if approaches to Germany to release Jews were "pressed too much that that is exactly what might happen." The reality behind the Bermuda Conference was that not one Allied country wanted to let the Jews settle in their country. This attitude remained in force until the very end of the war.

There were many reasons for this attitude, including antisemitism among the British and American elites; the pursuit of Allied war aims above humanitarian concerns, especially the determination to force Germany into an unconditional surrender; and the belief that if too much pressure was brought to bear on Hitler to release the Jews then he might actually do that and the Allies would be forced to take them. Furthermore, the British feared that any relaxation of Jewish emigration from Europe would result in an influx into Palestine which would bring about violent opposition from the Arabs and force them into the German camp.