The Report That Shamed the Allies

The Harrison Report and the “Liberated” Jews

This week on edJEWcation, Jay and ChayaLeah kick the Rabbi off the mic and dive deep into a little-known but wildly important post-Holocaust document: the Harrison Report.

After hearing disturbing rumors that Jewish survivors were being kept behind barbed wire alongside former Nazis (yes, really), President Truman sent Earl Harrison: lawyer, non-Jew, and moral compass, to investigate.

What he found was horrifying: Jews still wearing concentration camp uniforms, starving on moldy bread, living next to their former tormentors. And no one—not the Americans, not the Britshad any idea what to do with them.

We break down:

• How the Allies “liberated” Jews into open-air prisons

• Why Truman got mad and what Eisenhower did to fix it

• The British refusal to let Jews into Palestine…even after the Holocaust

• The moral cowardice of world leaders who knew better and did worse

• The astounding resilience of Jews in the DP camps (spoiler: 50,000 babies born in the American zone alone)

Plus: family stories, the politics of guilt, and why social media would have hated Earl Harrison.

This is one of those stories that should be common knowledge but isn't. So we’re fixing that.

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Links:

• The final Harrison Report

• Letter between Elie Wiesel and the Rebbe about fatherhood