Quoting Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door, chapter 1:

At Allied‐run camps reserved for [Axis] prisoners of war, ex‐[Axis] officers watched movies, played soccer, even took college courses. At Jewish [displaced person] camps, meanwhile, the Holocaust survivors fought merely to get extra rations of soggy black bread and coffee to make up for the starvation of the war years.

American officials resisted; they complained that the Jews were getting “preferential” treatment and were using black‐market systems at the camps to violate limits on food rations. The situation became so volatile that German police—with the consent of American officials—staged a raid on black‐market activities in the Stuttgart and Landsberg camps in early 1946; rioting broke out, with police killing one [displaced Jew]. He had survived the Holocaust, but not its aftermath.

With word of the survivors’ conditions filtering back to Washington, President Truman sent a special emissary, Earl Harrison, a former immigration commissioner who was dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school, to inspect the DP camps and assess the plight, in particular, of the Jewish refugees.

The World Jewish Congress and other humanitarian organizations were protesting “conditions of abject misery.” The reports seemed unbelievable. Could these horrific accounts of squalor, desperation, and mistreatment among the survivors—all in the wake of the Allied victory—really be true? Harrison was told to find out.

Harrison’s blistering conclusions cast a pall over America’s postwar euphoria. His findings were an indictment of the United States’ refugee effort in the harshest terms he knew. “As matters now stand,” Harrison wrote to Truman after touring the [displaced person] camps, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” The [Axis’s] victims, the dean found, were being victimized once again—but this time by the Americans.

General George S. Patton, the gruff war hero whose soldiers ran the American DP camps, fumed over Harrison’s findings. Publicly, the general—Old Blood and Guts, as he was famously known—had adopted a posture of shock and revulsion that spring over the Allies’ discovery of the [Axis] death camps, and he urged journalists to see for themselves the horrors inflicted on the victims. Privately, however, General Patton held the surviving Jews in his camps in utter contempt.

“Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote in his diary after learning of the scathing report to Truman. Laying bare the rabid anti‐Semitism that infected the American refugee effort, Patton complained of how the Jews in one [displaced person] camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts.”

He told of taking General Eisenhower to tour a makeshift synagogue that the Jews in the camp had set up to celebrate the holy day of Yom Kippur. “We entered the synagogue which was packed with the greatest stinking mass of humanity I have ever seen.” This was Eisenhower’s first glimpse of the [displaced people], Patton wrote, so it was all new to him. “Of course, I have seen them since the beginning and marveled that beings alleged to be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act.”

Sadly, Patton’s contempt for the Jews—from the man responsible for overseeing the survivors of the biggest [extermination] in world history—was not that unusual among Washington’s élite. The Jews “do not desire to work, but expect to be cared for,” one Senate lawyer wrote in seeking to limit the number allowed into the country after the war. “It is very doubtful that any country would desire these people as immigrants.”

President Truman’s wife, Bess, did not welcome Jews in her home, and the president himself was known privately to deride “[insert slur here]” and “Jew boys.” Still, with Britain blocking Jews from going to Palestine and the United States closing its own doors for the most part, Truman agonized over the situation in the [displaced person] camps. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has somewhere to go back to,” Truman said, “but the Jews have no place to go.”

(Emphasis added.)