During the Holocaust, the Roosevelt administration claimed that rescuing Jews was too difficult, bombing Auschwitz was impractical, and even if the president wanted to help, his hands were tied by Congress and public opinion. Now two young historians are making many of the same excuses. These excuses were untenable then, and the passage of time has made them no more credible.
Rebecca Erbelding’s Rescue Board, her first book, focuses on the War Refugee Board, a small U.S. government agency created in 1944 to save Jews from the Nazis. The main achievements of the board have been chronicled by many previous scholars since the late 1960s. Erbelding adds more details to the story, but more trees do not always make it easier to see the forest. She thinks it germane to point out, for example, that one of the board’s emissaries “always wore a white shirt; he abhorred colored ones,” and that another was “at most, one-sixteenth Jewish,” rather than half-Jewish as rumors had it. Needless to say, such trivia serves to clutter rather than illuminate the larger story. Erbelding’s penchant for piling on irrelevant details is, however, the least of her book’s flaws.
The United States and its allies confirmed in late 1942 that the “cold-blooded extermination” of Europe’s Jews was underway but insisted nothing could be done to help them except win the war. Jewish activists, by contrast, were convinced that if there was a will, ways could be found to save lives. They were backed by members of Congress who, in the autumn of 1943, introduced a resolution urging the establishment of a rescue agency. The Roosevelt administration, trying to head off pressure to take rescue action, sent Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to Capitol Hill to testify against the measure.
Long’s prevarications ignited a firestorm of criticism in the press and galvanized the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to unanimously adopt the resolution. Meanwhile, a handful of Treasury Department officials discovered the State Department had been suppressing news about the mass murder and blocking rescue opportunities. They persuaded Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. to confront the president with a plea to create a rescue agency before Congress embarrassed him by passing the resolution.
Erbelding acknowledges this sequence of events but cannot imagine the president’s positive response to Morgenthau reflected anything but the purest of motives. FDR “needed no convincing” from his Treasury secretary, she claims. In fact, he needed quite a bit of convincing, in the form of a looming full Senate vote that would show him up on the rescue issue, a potential election-year scandal over the State Department’s actions, and a rising clamor among Jewish and refugee advocacy groups. That’s why Roosevelt, who was against rescue before he was for it, suddenly reversed himself and created the War Refugee Board through an executive order. According to Erbelding, the president’s action was “altruistic”—not a motive commonly found among seasoned politicians.
What the board achieved in its brief 15-month existence was remarkable. By financing the hiding of Jews and the bribing of Nazis, moving Jewish refugees out of the way of the retreating German armies, and sponsoring Raoul Wallenberg’s rescue mission in occupied Budapest, the board played a major role in saving some 200,000 Jews, mainstream historians estimate. Erbelding’s description of this work as “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s little-known effort late in the war to save the Jews” is contradicted by the fact that the president and the rest of his administration obstructed or ignored much of the board’s work.
The State and War Departments often refused to cooperate with the board’s efforts. The president gave the board only token funding; 90 percent of its budget was provided by private Jewish organizations. (Erbelding does not mention that unflattering statistic.) The board’s proposals for U.S. government rescue actions, ranging from bombing Auschwitz to creating temporary refugees’ havens in the United States, frequently were rejected, watered down, or stalled. Unfortunately, Rescue Board fails to adequately explain the shabby treatment that the board suffered.
Erbelding does her best to pour cold water on the notion that Auschwitz or the railways leading to it should have been bombed. She accomplishes this by reporting the War Department’s disingenuous rejections of the bombing proposal as if they were factual and reasonable. The department claimed it had conducted a feasibility study, which found that such an operation would require “diverting” planes from battles elsewhere in Europe. Erbelding neglects to mention that no such study was actually undertaken (a fact that historians established long ago). She fails to explain that the “diversion” argument, too, was a lie: U.S. planes were already in the vicinity, bombing German oil factories less than five miles from the Auschwitz gas chambers. At least Erbelding is consistent—she recently declared her opposition to any U.S. bombing of Syrian chemical weapons sites.
She even rationalizes the nearly five-week delay in publishing a White House statement threatening to punish those who collaborated in Nazi atrocities. The delay “ended up being fortuitous,” Erbelding claims, because in the meantime, “Nazi Germany invaded Hungary.” Sure, the delays left more Jews in lethal danger, but at least the optics were better for the White House. It does not seem to have occurred to Erbelding that the president could have issued an initial statement when the board requested it, and then issued another one when the crisis in Hungary began.
Barry Trachtenberg’s The United States and the Nazi Holocaust is cut from the same cloth as Erbelding’s Rescue Board. They thank and praise one another, he cites her unpublished research, and he shares her determination to justify President Roosevelt’s meager response to the Holocaust.
Trachtenberg favors the “yes, but” technique. Yes, FDR turned away boatloads of refugees, but he “acted entirely in accordance with the prevailing sentiment in the United States,” Trachtenberg asserts. Yes, the administration rejected requests to bomb Auschwitz, but it was “only in the beginning of 1944” that U.S. planes were able to reach the death camp. (Meaning “only” 800,000 Hungarian Jewish lives were at stake.) And yes, Roosevelt suppressed Jewish immigration below the levels allowed by law—but it was “unlikely” that “there were sufficient numbers of Jews seeking to leave Germany for the United States to fill the quota” in 1933-1935, anyway. In fact, more than 100,000 Jews fled Germany in those years—more than enough to fill the quota, had FDR permitted it— and surely many more would have left if they had a place to go.
Trachtenberg paints a portrait of an America neatly divided between the good guys—FDR, Democrats, intellectuals, minorities—and everyone else, who were hopelessly racist and reactionary. Facts that reflect poorly on the good guys are minimized or omitted. For example, Trachtenberg writes a good deal about the 1943 Zoot Suit riots against Mexican-Americans but does not mention President Roosevelt’s refusal to say anything against the rioters. He cites the Nazis’ euthanizing of the disabled, yet he does not mention that the Roosevelt administration knew of the euthanasia policy and remained silent.
FDR is not the only character in the story who gets a pass by virtue of belonging to Trachtenberg’s pantheon of political favorites. Consider the pacifist Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which Trachtenberg plucks from obscurity as an example of overlooked progressives who “played a significant role” in helping refugees. He hails its efforts on behalf of “political prisoners, protesting the deportation of suspected communists, and countering the spread of U.S. imperialism” (hardly relevant to the ostensible subject of his book), yet does not mention the mass defections of its Jewish members in 1938 after the League refused to denounce Hitler’s persecution of Jews, for fear it would be suspected of encouraging war against Germany.
Trachtenberg, like Erbelding, views the history of the Holocaust as a basis for taking specific positions on contemporary political and social issues. The Trump administration has “instituted mass deportations of people from Mexico,” and “Latinos, Muslims and Middle Easterners, African Americans and undocumented persons” in the United States are all “facing rising violence,” Trachtenberg writes. His solution? Jews should cease “perpetuating a narrative of Jewish exceptionalism” and instead “link their fate to that of other oppressed peoples,” so that “nativism and racial hatred can be consigned to the margins of society.”
The notion that Jews should submerge their particular concerns among those of the “oppressed” masses is hardly novel. The Roosevelt administration likewise sought to obscure the mass murder of the Jews by lumping it together with the suffering of other groups. In an episode that neither Erbelding nor Trachtenberg mention, Allied foreign minsters meeting in Moscow in October 1943 threatened postwar punishment for Nazi war crimes against “French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages…Cretan peasants…the people of Poland”—but not Jews. Similarly, President Roosevelt did not mention Jews in his 1944 message commemorating the first anniversary of the Jewish revolt against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Acknowledging the Jews were being singled out for persecution and death might have increased the pressure to rescue them. That was precisely what was wrong with FDR’s policy, and why rescue advocates pressed for the creation of the War Refugee Board in the first place. Now, ironically, these two authors have chosen to excuse, or even align themselves with, some of the very arguments and policies of those who abandoned the Jews.
