The "apathy" of the government towards the Holocaust is quite weighted and needs to be understood in the context of the times in which it occurred.
First, it is important to define "Holocaust." In this case, I will be using it to mean the intentional targeting of Jews, as a group, in Nazi occupied Europe for extermination. This means that some instances of Jews killed at the hands of Germans were not, at least in this limited definition, a part of the Holocaust (not that this should at all take away from their nature as victims of Nazi hatred or persecution). For other activities against the Jews, legal persecution, abuse, concentration in ghettos, use as slave labor, etc. I will use the term persecution of the Jews. The reason for this delineation is that prior to the the intentional planning of the extermination of the Jews, their fate was not "sealed." They were abused, killed, and certainly in danger, but we cannot say that the 6 million were destined to become victims. To do so would be to bring our present knowledge with us into the past and suppose that actors at that time should base their decisions on it.
With that said, let us go through a timeline to determine when the Holocaust began and when American leaders knew about it.
1933- Jews are forced out the Civil Service
1935- Nuremberg Laws- Jews are no longer citizens of Germany and restrictions are placed on marriages between Jews and Germans.
1936-1937- Jews are increasingly separated from a number of occupations
1938- Reichskristallnacht: Over 100 Jews are killed, tens of thousands are sent to concentration camps (Not death camps), synagogues and shops are burned, and many Jews are beaten. Jews are forced to pay the insurance companies for damages.
1939- Germany conquers Poland. Einsatzgruppen follow behind the lines with orders to exterminate the leadership of Polish nationalism. Jews, mentally ill, and others were also killed in some cases.
1939-1940- Ghettoization begins. Jews in Poland are placed into ghettos. Depending on the Nazi in charge of the ghetto, the focus could be on work or it might have been starvation. The intention of the ghettos was vague enough to leave room for multiple different interpretations. Hence, the first years of ghettoization saw the Jews working and receiving some food. Starvation was incidental, but, in most cases, not yet intentional.
June 6, 1941- Commissar Order issued by the German High Command. It orders that political commissars be killed when captured because of their relation to "Judeo-Bolshevism." It also included in those who should be killed, those who were thoroughly bolshevized.
June 1941- Operation Barbarossa (Invasion of the Soviet Union).
June 1941-Summer 1942- Open-Air Shootings in the USSR The Einsatzgruppen kill Jewish males across the areas conquered. Einsatzgruppen A in the Baltic states, followed later by the others, begins to include women and children in the exterminations.
January 20, 1942- Wannsee Conference. Nazi leaders of various offices and branches meet to discuss the "resettlement" of the Jews. It is understood that this means extermination.
January 1942- Limited Gassings begin at Auschwitz-Birkenau
March 17, 1942- Operation Reinhard Begins. The Operation Reinhard camps continue to operate until November 1943.
November 3, 1943- Operation Harvest Festival is instituted. In it, Jewish workers in three locations in the Lublin district are exterminated via shootings.
Mid January 1945- Auschwitz Evacuated
This timeline helps us to determine what was happening when and can bring us to a formulation of when the Holocaust began. While the exact date of when Hitler gave the order (verbal) to exterminate the Jews, most historians have dated it between summer 1941 and November 1941. Even if we take the earlier date, this means that the Holocaust was only occurring for six months before the United States entered the war. Additionally, we can also see that intentional killing processes began, at the earliest in June of 1941.
Moving to American responsibility, it is more beneficial to look at responses to events as they became known than it is to view the Holocaust as a whole. This is because there was very little to no understanding of the scale and nature of the Holocaust in the United States until after the war.
When we look at newspaper article written pre-war about the persecution of the Jews, we discover that Americans seemed to be upset. This includes statements by government officials. However, the persecution of the Jews was always placed in a secondary position to political and social considerations in the relationship of the United States with Germany and other states. For example, the Plattsburgh Daily Press wrote, in regard to the Geneva Conference, that goals of disarmament and avoidance of war "dwarfed for the time being the issue of Germany’s treatment of Jews."
Furthermore, some government officials believed that the initial persecutions of the Jews were emblematic of the destabilization inherent in a regime change. Indeed, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was quoted as saying that "following so far-reaching a political readjustment as has recently taken place, some time must elapse before a state of equilibrium could be reestablished. In the opinion of the Embassy such a stabilization appears to have been reached in the field of personal mistreatment [of Jews], and there are indications that in other phases the situation is improving."
Finally, some journalists even linked persecution of the Jews with similar persecutions in the U.S. In the Advanced News of Ogdensburg, it was recorded that “A returned traveler says Hitler is doing to the Jews in Germany what we have been doing to the Japanese and Chinese on the Pacific Coast.”
Even as late as 1938 when news of Reichskristallnacht was reported, it seems that the leaders of the Western Democracies saw the persecution of the Jews as secondary to peace. A United Press reporter wrote, "“Germany’s extreme anti-Jewish measures again monopolized the attention last night of European diplomats. But most of them are keeping discreetly silent, so-far as the public is concerned. They are fearful that any comment may disturb the delicate balance of European diplomacy at a time when general appeasement is hoped for.” While the U.S. did recall its ambassador over the issue, it did not cut off diplomatic relations.
It is important to remember that at this point, there were no indications that these persecutions would become the institutionalized extermination processes of the Holocaust. Indeed, it would be very difficult indeed, although some seem to have done this, to fault U.S. leaders for not recognizing the dangers which were about to beset the Jews of Europe. We should also note that at this time, only Germany's Jews were in danger (roughly 525,000).
In December of 1942, however, the Polish Government-in-Exile produced a report which detailed the killing processes which the Nazis had instituted in Poland. In response, the Western Allies issued the following statement:
The above-mentioned Governments and the French National Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. They declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom- loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitler tyranny. They re-affirm their solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end.
Again, we can see that while there is recognition of the victims, the policy of the governments was to focus on the war effort. Hence, again, the plight of the Jews, whether persecution or extermination, was secondary to other political or military necessities.
I hope that this helps understand why the American government did not act to save the Jews of Europe. While many historians will certainly disagree about whether or not the U.S. government should have increased quotas to allow more Jews, these discussions must be had with the appropriate contextualization and based upon the knowledge to which the historical actors had access.
Sources
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website
Abt, Ryan. "Representations of the Holocaust in Texas World History Textbooks from 1947 to 1980." Master's Thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, 2015, https://uta-ir.tdl.org/uta-ir/handle/10106/25042.