Displaying: 1 25 of 67 matches for “ushmm”
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1. Main
This exhibition examines the motives, pressures, and fears that shaped Americans’ responses to Nazism, war, and genocide.
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2. Burma’s Path to Genocide
This online exhibition explores how the Rohingya, a religious and ethnic minority in Burma, became targets of a sustained campaign of genocide.
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3. Personal Stories
These stories show what Rohingya lives were once like and how decades of persecution culminated in genocide.
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4. Chapter I Belonging
"It will take us a hundred years to get back the life we had been living since our forefathers."
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5. Chapter II Targeted
In its first years as a new nation, the Burmese government recognized all members of its diverse population as citizens. That changed when General Ne Win seized control of the government in 1962.
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6. Chapter III Weakened
"They are making us valueless," says Bodru, a Rohingya man.
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7. Chapter IV Destroyed
On the morning of August 25, 2017, Burmese soldiers launched a planned attack, referred to as a “clearance operation,” on Rohingya throughout northern Rakhine State.
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8. Chapter V Surviving
"I feel like I’m out in the middle of the sea, and I can’t find land."
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9. About
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10. Marianne Winter Pen Pals
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Jews living there, like sixteen-year-old Marianne Winter and her family, quickly became subject to new antisemitic laws. Many sought to immigrate to the United States but struggled to gather the documents required to obtain a US immigration visa. Refugees also needed to find an American sponsor willing to sign a financial affidavit promising to support the new arrivals. Remarkably, Marianne and her family were able to receive an affidavit through her American pen pal Jane Bomberger, whom she had never met.
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11. Stephen Wise
Rabbi Stephen Wise was a prominent 20th century American Jewish leader. A charismatic orator, he championed liberal social justice and civil rights causes and became an outspoken opponent of Nazi Germany.
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12. Richard Schifter
After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 (an event known as the Anschluss), Paul and Balbina Schifter knew that their family would be in danger if they stayed in Vienna. They made the difficult decision to send their only son, 15-year-old Richard, to live with relatives in the United States.
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13. Otto Frank
Otto Frank escaped Nazi Germany with his wife and two daughters soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They lived a peaceful life in Amsterdam until May 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. Otto, determined to leave Europe with his family, contacted an old college friend in the United States for help.
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14. Herta Griffel
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Beila Griffel made the painful decision to send her only child, seven-year-old Herta, to the United States. Herta was never reunited with her mother—she died after being deported to Nazi-occupied Poland—and was one of the only children in her Jewish elementary school class in Vienna to survive the Holocaust.
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15. Franz Goldberger
Professor Franz Goldberger hoped to immigrate to the United States, but before he could obtain an immigration visa, he needed to prove that he had financial support in the United States. He did not know any Americans, so he wrote to total strangers begging for help. One letter reached Helen Roseland, a postal employee in rural Iowa, who agreed to sponsor him. Ultimately, her efforts to bring Goldberger to safety were unsuccessful—he was deported to a concentration camp and murdered in the Holocaust.
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16. Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States for twelve years, longer than any other woman in American history. During her husband’s presidency, she used her social and political influence to bring domestic and international crises to the attention of the American people by strongly advocating for racial and social justice.
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17. Breckinridge Long
Between 1940 and 1944, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long supervised the US State Department’s Visa Division, which regulated the issuance of visas to people who applied to immigrate to the United States—including Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Long and his staff implemented new immigration rules and restrictions in response to national security threats, and often showed little sympathy for humanitarian concerns. Long fought any attempt to make immigration easier, and resented any criticism of the State Department, particularly by Jewish organizations.
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18. Anthony Acevedo
Anthony Acevedo was a Mexican American who served as a US Army medic during World War II. He was captured by German troops during the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner of war (POW) in the Berga forced labor camp, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. While there, he kept a secret diary of his experiences, including a record of his fellow American soldiers’ deaths.
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19. Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins (1880–1965) was the secretary of labor under President Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945. The first female cabinet secretary, Perkins was the longest serving secretary of labor and one of the architects of Roosevelt’s New Deal economic policies designed to combat the Great Depression. During her tenure as labor secretary, Perkins advocated on behalf of German Jewish refugees seeking to immigrate to the United States—often in opposition to the prevailing public sentiments.
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20. Charles Coughlin
Reverend Charles E. Coughlin (1891–1979) was a Canadian-born Roman Catholic priest and radio celebrity based in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan. His sermons, aired on Sundays, often featured populist, anti-Communist, and antisemitic claims. At the peak of his popularity, Coughlin had as many as forty million devoted weekly listeners. By 1942, his anti-Roosevelt and antisemitic screeds had ended his radio career, but Coughlin remained a parish priest until his retirement in 1966.
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21. Henry Morgenthau Jr.
Henry Morgenthau Jr., President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury and close friend, was the only Jewish member of the cabinet. Protective of his friendship with the president, Morgenthau hesitated to alert Roosevelt to what the Treasury staff uncovered in late 1943. Not only had State Department officials delayed aid intended for European Jews, they had also secretly forbidden US diplomats in Switzerland from sending information about the Nazi regime’s mass murder of Jews to the United States. In January 1944, Morgenthau finally decided to go to the White House and demand, as one of his colleagues called it, “a new deal.”
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22. Dorothy Thompson
Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) was a prominent American reporter, columnist, and radio personality. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, she urged her fellow Americans to pay attention to the threat that Nazi Germany posed to democracy and to Europe’s Jews. In 1939, Time magazine called Thompson and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “undoubtedly the most influential women in America.”
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23. Varian Fry Emergency Escape
After France surrendered to Nazi Germany in June 1940, the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, sent American journalist Varian Fry to Marseilles. In France, Fry aided anti-Nazi refugees who were in danger of being arrested and turned over to authorities in Nazi Germany. Fry used legal and illegal techniques to help some 2,000 people, including a number of prominent writers and artists, escape France and emigrate to the United States. He was expelled from France in August 1941.
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24. Kurt Maier
Kurt Maier was one of 6,504 Jews from southwest Germany deported to France in October 1940, as part of a large ethnic cleansing drive by the Nazis. Like many of the deportees, his family was already on the waiting list for American immigration visas. Some, like Kurt and his family, succeeded in their quest and made it to the United States. Others ended up in Auschwitz.
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25. Max and Fanny Valfer
Max and Fanny Valfer were among the 6,504 Jews from Southwest Germany deported to France in October 1940, as part of a large ethnic cleansing drive by the Nazis. Interned in Gurs, in southwestern France, they spent much of the next 20 months trying to acquire visas for the United States.