24: FDR and the Holocaust
Excerpts from FDR by Jean Edward Smith:
From the beginning of his presidency Franklin Roosevelt had been sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. Yet he faced insurmountable obstacles. The immigration Act of 1924 was unyielding, and the Seventy-eighth Congress was in no mood to consider changes. Public opinion, always susceptible to nativist appeals, was at best indifferent. Church leaders for the most part remained silent, and the intellectual community, with few exceptions, took little notice. The State Department's striped-pants set (particularly those charged with immigration matters) was permeated with genteel anti-Semitism. The War Department -- from Stimson and McCloy to Marshall and Eisenhower -- resisted any diversion of military resources from the central effort to defeat Germany. And at the time the American Jewish community itself was divided. Members of the old-school Jewish establishment, primarily German in origin -- men close to FDR such at Felix Frankfurter, Sam Rosenman, Herbert Lehman, and the publishers of The New York Times -- were lukewarm about mounting any special effort to rescue Jewish populations of eastern Europe, fearing its effect on efforts to assimilate.
Hitler's "final solution" had been launched with the utmost secrecy on January 20, 1942, at what historians call the Wannsee Conference -- a meeting of top government officials on the outskirts of Berlin. By the summer of '42 reports of death camps began to filter west. How much [Franklin] Roosevelt knew is uncertain. The State Department initially suppressed the information because of its "fantastic nature." Career service officers, remembering the atrocity stories manufactured during World War I, characterized the reports as having "the earmarks of war rumors inspired by fear" and declined to send them forward.
When Rabbi Stephen Wise, the head of the American Jewish Congress (and longtime friend of FDR) provided Sumner Welled with irrefutable documentation in September 1942, Welles asserted that State Department had authoritative confirmation that the Jews were being transported eastward to construct roads and fortifications on the Russian front. Throughout the autumn of 1942 the evidence mounted, including a report from Myron C. Taylor, the president's personal representatives to the Vatican. Welles soon confirmed the reports -- "There is no exaggeration," he told Wise -- and on December 2 the rabbi appealed directly to FDR:
"Dear Boss, I do not want to add an atom to the awful burden you are bearing . . . but you do know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history had befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres."
Wise asked Roosevelt to meet as soon as possible with him and other Jewish leaders to discuss a course of action. "As your old friend I beg you somehow to arrange this."
Roosevelt responded immediately. Wise was invited to the White House December 8 and brought with him the heads of four major Jewish organizations. FDR received the delegation cordially. Wise made a brief oral presentation and presented the president with a twenty-page summary of the extermination data. He asked Roosevelt "to warn the Nazis that they will be held to strict accountability for their crimes." Roosevelt agreed without hesitation and requested Wise and his colleagues to draft a statement for him condemning the atrocities. He said he would endorse it sight unseen.
Roosevelt acknowledged that the government was now aware that Wise's information had been correct. "We have received confirmation from many sources." The president asked for concrete recommendations as to what might be done. The group, which was apparently taken by surprise, had none to suggest other than a public statement. FDR said he understood, "We are dealing with an insane man. Hitler and the group around him represent . . . a national psychopathic case. We cannot act toward them by normal means. That is why the problem is very difficult." When the meeting ended, Roosevelt assured his visitors, "we shall do all in our power to be of service to your people in this tragic moment."
Nine days after meeting with [Rabbi Stephen Wise], Roosevelt induced Churchill and Stalin to join him in a Declaration on Jewish Massacres, which denounced "in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination"; condemned the German government's "intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe"; and announced their joint determination to try as 'war criminals' all those responsible -- the origin of the war crimes trials that later convened in Nuremberg.
Given that U.S. and British troops had yet to land on the continent of Europe, the declaration nevertheless represented a powerful statement of Allied purpose. It received wide publicity in the American and British press and committed the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to prosecute war crimes against European Jewry.
But the fact is that little tangible could be done. An Anglo-American conference on refugees convened in Bermuda in April 1943 but foundered on Britain's refusal to discuss Palestine as a possible destination for whatever Jews might be liberated from Hitler's grasp.
In the summer of 1943 the Treasury Department pressed plans to ransom 70,000 Jews from Romania at a cost of $170,000. The money would be deposited in Switzerland for Romanian officials to collect after the war. Roosevelt approved the arrangement, but because of State Department foot-dragging nothing came of it. Similarly, when Rabbi Wise came to FDR in July with a Swiss proposal to rescue Jewish children hiding in France, Roosevelt immediately agreed. Treasury approved the plan, but again the diplomats at State scuttled it.
By the end of 1943 it had become evident that the European Affairs Division of the Department of State was determined to block any rescue effort. Officials at Treasury (most of whom were not Jewish) were incensed. Led by General Counsel Randolph the Treasury staff prepared a confidential report for Morgenthau documenting State Department obstructionism. It charged that the State Department was "guilty not only of gross procrastination and will failure to act, but even of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler."
Morgenthau met with FDR on January 16, 1944 and summarized the findings of the report and urged the president to establish a cabinet-level rescue commission that would strip the State Department of its refugee responsibility. Roosevelt needed little convincing. On January 22, 1944, he signed Executive Order 9417, establishing a War Refugee Board (WRB) consisting of Morgenthau, Hull, and Stimson, with Treasury's John Pehle as director.
Under John Pehle's aggressive leadership, the WRB moved swiftly to provide whatever relief was possible. When Hitler occupied Hungary in March 1944 and ordered the deportation of 700,000 Jews -- the largest intact Jewish community in Europe -- the WRB dispatched the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest under diplomatic cover. With a combination of bluff and bribery, using funds funneled through the WRB, Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews.
In postwar years the question has often been raised whether the United States should have bombed the death camps or at least the rail lines running to them. There is no evidence the Roosevelt was ever approached about the matter. When John Pehle raised the issue with the War Department in the summer of 1944, John J. McCloy rejected the proposal as impractical. The U.S. Strategic Air Force in Europe concurred.
General Marshall firmly opposed any operation not aimed specifically at enemy forces, and Eisenhower, who had his hands full moving against the Siegfried Line, resisted any diversion from the main effort. If Roosevelt had been consulted, there is no question he would have backed the military. Aside from the fact that the president never intervened in tactical matters, he firmly believed that the most effective way to save the Jews from Hitler was to defeat Germany as quickly as possible.
Harvard's Alan Dershowitz put the matter into perspective:
"Roosevelt was a man with considerable, but certainly not unlimited, power to influence the course of events in Europe. And he prioritized the use of that power in what he believed was the most effective manner: win the war as quickly as possible and save as many Jews as was consistent with the first priority and the political realities that limited his power.
"Reasonable people can debate specific decisions, indecisions, actions and inactions. . . . But no one should question Roosevelt's motives or good will toward the Jewish victims of the world's worst human atrocity."
Source: Smith, J. E. (2007) FDR. New York: Random House.
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