Going through the museum to all the exhibits, you saw the evidence chronologically about Hitler’s rise to power with nazism and then the aftermath. But in the basement, you got to see and interact with the American perspective of the Holocaust. Seeing what the government knew at the time and Americans’ perspectives on the genocide were.
While we couldn’t have stopped the genocide completely, there were several things we could have done and didn’t. The American Jewish population wanted the government to condemn what was happening overseas while disagreeing on what exactly the next step should be to help.
But then on the other side of things, we can also see the uprise of the American nazi movement led by people like Fritz Khun and Charles Lindbergh. While parts of America were working to help allow more german refugees, boycott nazi goods made, and urging the government to do something. At the same time, you had people like Charles Lindbergh who led the group of people with the opinion that the Jewish population of Austria and Germany did this to themselves and that we shouldn’t help. Even today we see Lindbergh as an American hero and pilot and his history of nazism didn’t become readily available till later.
