Just so we're clear about this: there were no Nazi death camps in 1939, none.
Yes, there were concentration camps, work camps, but no camps yet for the mass extermination of Jews.
Those didn't really get organized until after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941.
Please note my post #23 above.
There were many camps where deaths were taking place from horrible conditions and forced labor.
Yes, you are right that the Nazi organized their killing machine later, or perfected what was already trending. But the camps that existed before 1941 were not like the ‘show camps’ that were opened for viewing.
Hitler explained the camps were necessary to protect Jews and others from anti-semitic pogroms in the East and also from angry Germans who felt betrayed by Jewish bankers in WW I. He allowed them to emigrate but immigration was then, as it is now, a political hot potato as the advanced economic nations had all they could take especially in the backdrop of a worldwide depression.
And there’s nothing wrong with turning off the immigration spigots when economic calamity is the order of the day.
Americans were a tough breed back then and not at all prone to falling for every hard luck story that came along. So when a group of immigrants arrived unannounced with unconfirmed reports of slave camps or death camps, Americans responded “Oh yeah? Well here’s the world’s smallest violin playing my heart bleeds for you”. And that came from Americans who were losing their homes, their farms and were out begging for the first time in their lives, standing in soup lines.
Americans are ordinary people with a gift of liberty. Their generosity or stinginess correlates with good times and bad times. That’s not surprising, it’s simply human nature.
Hitler speech January 30, 1939:
“Europe will not have peace until the Jewish question has been disposed of. The world has sufficient capacity for settlement, but we must finally break away from the notion that a certain percentage of the Jewish people are intended, by our dear God, to be the parasitic beneficiary of the body, and of the productive work, of other peoples.”
“Jewry must adapt itself to respectable constructive work, as other peoples do, or it will sooner or later succumb to a crisis of unimaginable proportions.”
“If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”
They were already talking about “life unworthy of life” in 1939 though, although only those suffering from physical/mental handicaps back then, i.e. openly. And they pitched it to the public as being “your money” they were saving by not maintaining such people.