During the Nazi era, Europeans weren't the only ones who ended up in concentration and slave-labor camps. Americans were also sent there. What's more, the US government knew but decided to take no action.
This untidy bit of history had been hidden for decades. Even with the still-growing mountain of literature on the Holocaust, the fate of Americans has been almost entirely ignored, garnering only a few passing mentions. After stumbling across these shards of an ignored truth, Mitchell G. Bard, PhD, did some serious archival research and conducted fresh interviews, resulting in Forgotten Victims, the only book to address the subject.
Bard estimates that “probably a few thousand” US citizens, mainly Jews, spent time in Hitler's camps. Hundreds died there. “American Jews,” he explains, “were subject to the same anti-Semitic regulations and dangers as any other Jews who came under control of the Nazis.”
Some of the victims were American civilians living in Europe at the wrong time. The State Department sent a total of nine ships during 1939 and 1940 to ferry back Americans living on the Continent. As documents from the time period make clear, State officials believed that Americans who didn't get on those boats deserved whatever happened to them. Around 2,000 of them landed in concentration camps, with at least 200 Jewish Americans ending up in a single one. Small numbers were reported in Dachau and Auschwitz, and some Americans, perhaps dozens, were trapped in the infamous Warsaw ghetto.
Bard further proves that US officials knew while events were happening that American citizens were in Nazi camps, prisons, and ghettos, yet they purposely refused to take action. The reasons for this policy of deliberate indifference were varied: These citizens might act as Axis spies. If we act to get American Jews out of harm's way, then all Jews will want the same help. Pure pettiness was also to blame: The government seemed miffed that these Americans had chosen to live abroad. In other words, they made their bed; let them die in it.
Captured Allied soldiers were principally kept at POW camps, but several hundred American prisoners of war, some Jewish, were shipped to concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and the slave labor camp at Berga. Some were summarily executed or worked to death. The US government pled ignorance, but the paper trail shows that at the very least they knew what was happening in Berga. After the war, when the POWs were debriefed, some even giving depositions, the official response was reprehensible. “The government denied many of these atrocities took place,” Bard notes, “resisted compensating them for their injuries and failed to bring the perpetrators to justice.”