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Robert "Bob" Hilliard was an American WWII era veteran who succeeded in informing American citizens and politicians of the deplorable plight of post WWII concentration camp survivors who continued to die by the thousands, and of those survivors taken to an unequipped hospital which was formerly St. Ottillien Monastery in the district of Landsberg, Oberbayern Germany. The monastery, built in the 16th century as a castle, was remodeled in the 17th century.

How Hilliard helped the survivors

Acting against the stated policy of the American military to refrain from political activities, Hilliard, treated for frostbite and twice wounded in WWII, wrote hundreds of letters to American citizens, and Congressmen informing them of the absence of food, medicine, and clothing available to the surviving concentration camp survivors at the end of WWII, then known as displaced person's camps, and at the hospital at St. Ottilien. After getting a letter to President Harry Truman who championed their cause with the Truman Directive of December, 1945, Hilliard and his partner Edward Herman, both Privates in the U.S. Army, succeeded in beginning to supply food, clothing and medicine to the patients at St. Ottilien, and to the remaining concentration camps, and in helping to change the policies restricting displaced persons from voluntarily leaving the camps. At the time, the camps were heavily surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed American servicemen instructed to shoot escapees, as had the German guards that previously guarded the camps. Due to their efforts, displaced persons were fed, clothed, and treated, and eventually were allowed to leave the camps and immigrate to other countries in greater numbers, particularly Palestine, and the United States.

Background of Robert Hilliard

Robert Hilliard was born in New York City in 1925. He was drafted in February, 1944, and was assigned to the Ninth Regiment of the Second Infantry division. Having received instruction in morse code and radio operation, he was responsible for serving in an advanced unit that would inform American command of the location of the enemy. He was soon wounded by mortar fire, and later served during the bloody combat that took place at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest in the frigid winter of December, 1944. He was wounded again in the Spring of 1945 by flak from an 88mm German gun, and like many American troops, also suffered from frostbite. After recovering, he was assigned to the Second Air Disarmament Wing. After helping to start a newspaper that would provide news for allied troops, and hoping for a good story, he drove a jeep for miles to attend a concert put on by concentration camp survivors at the hospital at St. Ottillien. He found himself driven to tears by the emaciated and sick survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau, still on stretchers, without food, and wearing the cold, threadbare and inadequate striped uniforms they had formerly been issued as camp inmates. Hilliard and Herman tried to buy food from the black market to supply refugees, but the supply was inadequate, and they lacked funds to make a significant improvement in the lives of the survivors.

After Truman received the letter from Hilliard and Herman, he may have criticized General Eisenhower, who sent a full Colonel to inform Hilliard and Edward Herman that the military would improve the situation, but that he and Herman should refrain from writing any more letters, as they might end up with an undesirable assignment like the frigid Aleutian Islands. Hilliard took the advice as a threat, rather than a promise to help holocaust survivors. He and Herman continued to push their cause of informing the American public. On September 30, 1945, a prominent New York Times headline loudly announced “President Orders Eisenhower to End New Abuse of Jews . . . Likens Our Treatment to that of the Nazis.”

Coming months after the surrender of Germany, the Truman Directive of December 22, 1945, among other objectives, intended to set the United States as an example to the World by vastly increasing and expediting the admission of displaced person to the United States, and to open U.S. immigration to full use. It also requested that Great Britain allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. On October 21, 1945, 1,500 packages containing food, clothes and medicine arrived at St. Ottillien. The arrival of supplies prior to October had been partly the result of U.S. Military and State Department policy to with hold the delivery of the supplies.

Examining U.S. policy toward immigration during WWII

Though controversial, author David Wyman wrote in The Abandonment of the Jews, that the policy of both the U.S. Army under Eisenhower and the U.S. State Department were at best lax, and at worst instrumental in obstructing the flow of food, medicine, and clothing to the survivors of the Holocaust and in summary, made the following points:

• President Roosevelt failed to act for fourteen months after he and the American press were informed in November, 1942 that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jews.
• Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, was in essence powerless to improve the situation facing European Jews, received no cooperation from Roosevelt or his administration, and received only 10% of its funding from U.S. Goverment sources. 90% was funded by the American Jewish community, despite facing shortages and economic pressures during WWII.
• Only 21,000 refugees were permitted to enter the United States during the 42 months America was a war with Nazi Germany. In noted contrast, American immigration quotas would have allowed around 210,000 refugees to immigrate to the United States during that period.
• Factors that restricted immigration included; Anti-Semitism in American society, much of the U.S. military leadership, and entrenched among many leading members of the American Congress, failure of the American media to publish news of the Holocaust despite having the information available through wire services and other news sources, the silence of the vast majority of the leadership of Christian Churches, and President Roosevelt refraining to speak out on the issue.

Role of anti-Semitism

David Wyman, also made the significant observation that it was inefficiency, not lack of knowledge that led the State Department to fail to act, and more importantly that the leadership of the U.S. State Department feared that a large number of Jews might actually leave Germany and the area occupied by the Axis. This fear dominated the thinking of the U.S. State Department at least during the Roosevelt administration. Also of considerable importance, it was noted by University of Virginia History Professor Joseph W. Bendersky that in addition to the State Department, "Anti-Semitism permeated not only the thinking of the State Department but also the thinking of the military officers and attaches assigned to the European embassies who attempted to influence Roosevelt administration policy in favor of Hitler and the Third Reich...". Anti-Semitism was also widely existent among many of the high ranking officers in the U.S. military which Wyman believed included "Mark Clark, George Van Horn Mosely, George Patton, Truman Smith, Albert Wedemeyer, and Charles Willoughby". Bendersky wrote that many of these officers promulgated some of the same stereotypes about Jews held by European anti-Semites, a form of social Darwinism that held that somehow Jews were largely responsible for their plight in Eastern Europe due to their greed and avarice.

References

1. ^ "Robert Hilliard Honored With Documentary". gotosanibelcaptiva.com. Retrieved 21 December 2024.
2. ^ Wyman, David S., Preface to The Abandonment of the Jews: American and the Holocaust 1941-1945, (1984), New York, Pantheon Publishing
3. Hilliard, Robert, Surviving the Americans, (1979), New York, Seven Stories Press, pg. 9
4. Hilliard, Robert, Speech Transcript of Displaced: Miracle at St. Otillien, (Katz Jewish Community Center, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 10 November 2002)
5. ^ Morris, Rob, "A Place Called St. Ottilien", Untold Valor, (co. 2006) Washington, D.C., Potomac Books, pg. 18-19
6. Fischel, Jack, review of The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army by Joseph W. Bendersky, Forward, February 16, 2001, pg. 15