17. The United States and Great Britain refused to shelter hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, instead of condemning many of them to die in the Holocaust
Whilst not explicitly a war crime like many of the events appearing on this list, the senseless rejection of Jewish refugees seeking to flee Nazi persecution by both Britain and the United States warrants mention. Despite the modern popular belief that both nations declared war on Germany to end the horrors of the Third Reich, the Nazi treatment of minorities was not a critical motivation in this decision; in fact Britain and the United States both owned long histories of anti-Semitism and persistently attempted to avoid accepting Jewish refugees, instead of pushing them into the hands of the Nazis wherein they faced repression and extermination.
The United Kingdom, although accepting the resettlement of some Jewish refugees during the 1930s and as part of the Kindertransport, feared a mass influx of migrants to its territories in the aftermath of Kristallnacht and the annexation of Austria in 1938. Among the measures taken to limit the numbers of Jewish refugees from Europe, the British Government introduced a White Paper in May 1939 severely limiting potential entry criteria for migrants after 60,000 German Jews sought asylum in the British Protectorate of Palestine under the Haavara Agreement.
Concurrently from March 1938 and September 1939 more than 300,000 German Jews sought refugee status in the United States, the majority of said applications being rejected. Of particular note, in May 1939 St. Louis arrived in Florida carrying over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing persecution but was denied permission to dock and sent back to Germany. Although Britain accepted 288 of the passengers, at least 620 were forcibly returned to Nazi control at the instruction of the United States Government whereupon at least 254 are known to have been killed in the Holocaust. Even as reports of the mass murder of Jews in Nazi Germany circulated, the U.S. Department of State issued stricter limits concerning immigration in 1941 and refused visas to tens of thousands of Jewish migrants arriving from Spain and Portugal after escaping Nazi Germany.