David Wyman in his book The Abandonment of the Jews discusses one of the more shameful issues for Americans of World War II. This is the degree to which the American government knew about the Holocaust before and during the war and the way Americans failed to do the very least that could be expected and failed to make public the knowledge of what was taking place. The period covered is from 1941 to 1945, the years of the war. The government did not know about the Holocaust for certain until 1942, and it did little with that knowledge until much later.

At the outset, Wyman sets out the findings he considers most significant about the story he will tell, and these are indeed the conclusions that he reaches and shape the story as he tells it. He finds first that the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office had no intention of rescuing large numbers of …