By Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive

"I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization."
-- Franklin Roosevelt, on the events of "Kristallnacht" in Nazi Germany, 1938

As the world watches the crisis in Kosovo unfold, televised images of refugees -- being herded across borders or waving frantically from sealed trains -- bring back haunting memories, especially for those who lived through the 1930s and '40s.

Black-and-white newsreel versions of those scenes, documenting Nazi brutality, still have the power to shock five decades later. They also draw inevitable comparisons. One of the more pressing questions appears to be: Has the international community learned anything from the hard lessons of Nazi Germany -- when the world collectively turned its back on the plight of European Jewry?

Franklin Roosevelt's first inauguration and Adolf Hitler's rise to power took place just weeks apart in 1933. In the United States, the Great Depression was well under way. Most Americans were adamantly opposed to any new wave of immigrants -- who, they feared, would compete for desperately scarce jobs. U.S. immigration laws, already biased in favor of Western Europeans, were further tightened.

Isolationism was strong as well. Many Americans had bitter memories of their nation's involvement in World War I and wanted to avoid any further entanglements overseas.

Overt racism and anti-Semitism were also rampant. Father Charles Coughlin influenced millions each week with his radio program, blaming Jews for many of the nation's economic problems. The German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization, also grew in popularity.

The voyage of the St. Louis

In Europe, Nazi persecution of Jews escalated into outright violence on the night of November 9-10, 1938 -- when Nazis killed and injured scores of German Jews nationwide, while destroying and confiscating their property. Known as Kristallnacht, or the "night of broken glass," the event was widely condemned by the international community -- to little effect.

Kristallnacht was a wake-up call for German Jews -- many of whom soon made plans to leave their country. But thousands who attempted to flee the Nazis were unable to find a home elsewhere.

One of the most infamous examples of refugees being denied sanctuary was the voyage of the St. Louis. That passenger ship, carrying more than 900 would-be refugees, left Hamburg for Cuba in 1939. Upon its arrival in Havana, however, the Cuban government allowed only a handful of refugees in -- and then ordered the St. Louis to depart.

The vessel spent a week crusing off the Florida coast -- while its passengers cabled Roosevelt, asking in vain for admittance to the United States. The ship was forced to return to Europe. Nearly 300 of its passengers were admitted into Britain. The rest were taken in by either Belgium, France or the Netherlands -- countries that were soon swallowed up by Hitler's war machine. Many of those St. Louis passengers who ended up in continental Europe later died in the Holocaust.

'Postpone and postpone and postpone'

In the years leading up to World War II, U.S. State Department officials worked to block the flow of Jewish refugees into the United States. Then-Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long wrote a memo at the time explaining his plans to U.S. diplomats:

"We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States," he wrote. "We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas."

"It was more indifference than anything else," says Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta. "Some thought it was an internal matter, it doesn't concern us and we should not interfere in Germany's domestic situation. There was also some latent anti-Semitism in certain corners of the world -- the Jews are "other," not Christian, not quite like us. And there were some people, including some Americans, who did not want Jews coming into their country."

This apparent cynicism and indifference carried over into the 1940s -- when the Nazi's "Final Solution" of genocide became evident to the world. Roosevelt, under pressure from Henry Morgenthau, his secretary of the Treasury, created the War Refugee Board in January 1944. By that time, however, the Nazis had already killed millions of Jews.

Birth of an organization

A half-century after the Holocaust, international treatment of refugees has changed. Following the birth of the United Nations at the end of World War II, the International Refugee Organization was established. It was replaced in 1951 by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The UNHCR also took the unprecedented step of legally defining just who is a refugee:

"Refugees are defined as those who have fled their counties because of a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, and who cannot or do not want to return."

The UNHCR was considered a temporary office, meant to help resettle the 1.2 million European refugees from World War II. Today, the UNHCR is a massive international organization -- concerned with the plight of 22.7 million people in more than 140 countries.

In Kosovo, the UNHCR estimates the crisis there has created 744,000 "displaced persons" as of mid-May 1999. Of that number, nearly 53,000 refugees have been resettled by the UNHCR in nearly 30 countries.

'A low priority'

Despite international efforts, many observers find familiar parallels between the plight of the Jewish refugees before World War II and the current refugees from Kosovo.

"The parallel would be in the world's response, or the lack thereof," to the Kosovo crisis, Lipstadt says. "There was a tepid response in Europe and the former Yugoslavia. ... (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic has been pulling this stuff for six or seven years."

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international human rights organization, also notes that those forced out of their homes in Kosovo are finding a mixed reception from their rescuers.

"The sad reality is that refugees are a low priority for nations," he says, "and we'll come up with any strategy except the one that allows them to come into our countries."

If there is a modern lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, says Hier, it is that "you have to protest sooner, rather than later." But he remains far from optimistic about whether NATO bombs can force Milosevic to end his persecution of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

"Fortunately the world has learned something," he says, "but the world still remains powerless. Here we have international coverage, the cameras are nonstop, but no one has been able to prevent Milosevic from doing this."