The U.S. held more Fascist prisoners of war than it held Jewish refugees

Pictured: Dozens of Wehrmacht prisoners of war in one of the U.S. Army’s provisional prison camps.

Quoting David Swanson’s Leaving World War II Behind, chapter 2:

Detractors of Franklin Roosevelt blame him for not doing more, arguing that he could have seen to it that Jews found safe haven in Cuba or the Virgin Islands or Santo Domingo or Alaska, or — if Jews were really unwelcome as free citizens of the United States — then in refugee camps. Of course, the same complaint can be lodged against the U.S. Congress.

There were 425,000 German prisoners of war in the United States during the war, but only one camp for refugees, in Oswego, N.Y., which held about 1,000 Jews.⁶⁵ Were [Axis] soldiers 425 times more welcome than Jewish refugees? Well, perhaps in some sense they were. Prisoners of war are temporary and isolated.

For the record, here is the number of Jews who successfully escaped to Imperial America:

The U.S. Holocaust Museum’s website informs visitors: “Though at least 110,000 Jewish refugees escaped to the United States from [Fascist]‐occupied territory between 1933 and 1941, hundreds of thousands more applied to immigrate and were unsuccessful.”¹⁹

In the words of Eric Lichtblau:

In the early months, and first few years after the war, beginning in mid‐1945, [there were] only a very limited number of immigration visas to get into the United States.

Of all the [Shoah] survivors in the camps, only a few thousand came in in [the] first year or so. To get a visa was a precious commodity, and there were immigration policy makers in Washington who were on record saying that they didn't think the Jews should be let in because they were “lazy people” or “entitled people” and they didn’t want them in.

But there were many, many thousands of [Axis] collaborators who got visas to the United States while the survivors did not — even though they had been, for instance, the head of [an Axis] concentration camp, the warden at a camp, or the secret police chief in Lithuania who signed the death warrants for people.

The bulk of the people who got into the United States — some were from Germany itself, some in fact were senior officers in the [NSDAP] under Hitler — but more were the [Axis] collaborators.

Now you may be wondering how many Axis personnel actually stayed in Imperial America. Did hundreds of thousands of former Axis personnel and their collaborators remain there? My answer: probably not that many, but the total number must have been disturbing indeed. Quoting Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, chapter 1:

With [the Axis’s] defeat, the flight of the [Fascists] to America only accelerated. The true total of fugitives may never be known, but the number of postwar immigrants with clear ties to the [Axis] likely surpassed ten thousand, from concentration camp guards and SS officers to top Third Reich policymakers, leaders of [Axis] puppet states, and other Third Reich collaborators.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)