4,000,000 Jews Killed in Europe by Nazis; Jewish Congress Appeals to Roosevelt

A plea to President Roosevelt and to Prime Minister Churchill, now in session at Quebec, urging them “to take substantive action now to save European Jewry after a year of inaction which has doubled the toll of Jewish victims” was addressed by the American Jewish Congress, following a report received by the Congress, through the State Department, declaring that 4,000,000 Jews have been murdered by the Nazis since the summer of 1942 when the accelerated Nazi program of exterminating the Jews was inaugurated.

The report, coming from trustworthy sources, estimates that less than two million Jews remain today in the whole of Nazi Europe. It contradicts the general impression that there are still four million Jews left in Axis Europe. In Poland, according to this report, virtually the entire Jewish population has been annihilated. “Only a few hundred thousand survivors remain, and the majority of these are either in hiding or have been pressed into service by the Nazis in slave labor camps,” the report says.

In addressing his plea to the heads of the Allied conference which is now taking place in Quebec, Dr. Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, pointed out that failure on the part of the United Nations to act would be to “doom the remaining Jews of Europe to complete destruction and to dissipate the hope of civilised peoples everywhere that this is a war of human freedom regardless of race, or creed, or color.”

Renewed representations are being made to the Government of the United States with a view to immediate action to rescue the remaining Jews of Europe, in behalf of the Joint Emergency Committee for European Jewish Affairs. The Committee comprises representatives of the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, the B’nai B’rith, Jewish Labor Committee, American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, Synagogue Council of America, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis and the Agudath Israel.