As American Awareness Fades, Holocaust Museum Refreshes The Story

A new exhibit that opens Monday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum aims to honor a founding mission.

Five years in the making, "Americans and the Holocaust" contextualizes attitudes in the U.S. during 1930s and '40s persecution and mass murder of Jews in Europe.

Twenty-five years ago, when the building opened, noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel introduced the museum not as an answer to the horrors of genocide but to pose a glaring question: How could this happen?

The American responses "must and will be explored thoroughly and honestly," Wiesel said in a 1979 address before President Jimmy Carter, who had tasked a commission, chaired by Wiesel, with recommending an appropriate memorial for the 6 million lives lost.

The historical evidence in the museum collection in Washington, D.C., detailing what America knew and when, dispels myths that its actors didn't have enough information about the magnitude of Nazi Germany's campaign to intervene, says Daniel Greene, a historian and the curator