The Obama campaign’s recently released online documentary, The Road We’ve Traveled, opens by evoking the plight of the economy when Obama took office: “This will be as deep as anything we’ve experienced since the Great Depression,” and “not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.” It mixes a photograph of the Depression — “Unemployed — will take any job” reads one placard carried by a man — with a shot of suited office workers on the streets, presumably out of work, or about to be, because of the Lehman bankruptcy.

How historically accurate is the Great Depression comparison? The dizzying collapse of the housing and stock markets, followed by a deep and painful economic downturn, indeed was scary. It’s easy to forget the days when panicked investors were pulling their savings out of presumptively safe money market funds; the mega-layoffs that rocketed the unemployment rate to more than 10 per cent; the automobile industry going into intensive care; and the huge swathes of abandoned and foreclosed homes (“if you build it they will buy it” turned out to be a cruel mockery of the American fields of homeowners’ dreams). All that granted, the Great Depression comparison doesn’t work.

Don’t get me wrong. I am an admirer of both FDR and Obama but I don’t think the Great Depression and our current economic problems are in the same ballpark, or even the same league. On the day that FDR took office, March 4, 1933, the United States of America was plunging into an abyss. Every state had shut its banks or restricted their operation; there was not enough money in the Treasury to meet the federal payroll, and the New York Stock Exchange had shut down with no date set to reopen. Since the 1929 stock market crash, stock prices had plummeted 85 percent, and manufacturing in the United States had all but ceased: The automobile industry was operating at 20 per cent of normal capacity and the steel industry at only 12 per cent. The year before, 273,000 families had been evicted from their homes.

“Millions stayed alive,” wrote historian William Manchester in his extraordinary account, The Glory and the Dream, “by living like animals.” Two million homeless Americans were wandering the nation’s roads or riding the freight cars, one quarter of them between the ages of 16 and 21. The writer Edmund Wilson, while visiting Chicago, witnessed 100 starving people clambering through a garbage dump, “falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the [garbage] truck had pulled out and digging into it with sticks and hands.” Each night 200 Chicago women slept on the ground without shelter in Grant and Lincoln Parks. (On the Vineyard, up-Islanders, in particular, actually fended better for themselves because, according to one oral history, they could hunt, fish and farm).

One-fifth of the students in the New York city school system suffered from malnutrition. Nationally, a third of a million children were no longer being educated because their schools had closed for lack of funds. Before the 1929 crash, there were almost no shoeshine boys in New York City; now there were thousands (19 on one block alone). And among the more than 15 million persons looking for jobs that were nowhere to be found, were nearly 22,000 graduates of Ivy League universities.

The Great Depression didn’t just destroy jobs and savings (to the point that an estimated 28 per cent of the population had no income), it damaged people’s souls. “I haven’t had a steady job in more than two years,” a man told a New York Daily News reporter in 1932. “Sometimes I feel like a murderer. What’s wrong with me, that I can’t protect my children?” A special suicide category, “altruistic suicides,” according to Mr. Manchester, was created for “men who killed themselves rather than become a burden to the community.” After looking into the faces of thousands of Americans on a campaign swing, FDR told a friend that “They have the frightened look of lost children.”

And shortly after noon on March 4, it all changed. The “only thing we have to fear is fear itself” speech was a transformative historical event, like the Gettysburg Address. Roosevelt’s speech was the best thing his countrymen had heard in a long, long time — and that week, 450,000 wrote Roosevelt to tell him just that. Even Ronald Reagan, in the midst of a Presidency largely devoted to dismantling the New Deal, recalled how Roosevelt’s leadership revived American spirits: “It was that engrained American optimism, that sense of hope Franklin Roosevelt so brilliantly summoned and mobilized.”

President Obama deserves, in my view, great credit for intelligently and skillfully managing the country’s recent economic travails. But he did not face anything like the economic devastation of the Great Depression; nor did he create a magical, game-changing moment in the midst of an existential American crisis the way FDR did. He would do better, and The Road We’ve Traveled, would be more compelling, if he touted his achievements on their own merits and not on the basis of a mistaken analogy to the Great Depression.

The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust, but the indifference of onlookers facilitated it. One of the guiltiest parties in this regard, according to a new book by former federal prosecutor Gregory Wallance, is the U.S. State Department. In the book, America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace Of An American Aristocracy, Wallance quotes Treasury Department lawyers who accused State Department officials of being “accomplices of Hitler” and “war criminals in every sense of the term.”

The Jewish Press recently spoke to Wallance about the State Department’s sins of commission and omission; the extent of Roosevelt’s culpability in them; and the Treasury Department officials who lobbied to save Jews.

The Jewish Press: Why would Treasury Department officials charge their colleagues in the State Department as being accomplices of Hitler?

Wallance: Because Jewish groups in Switzerland provided information to the U.S. legation in Switzerland that 6,000 Jews were being killed daily in a single location in Poland. The legation then sent that information to the State Department, which, in turn, gave it to Jewish groups. The very next day, however, the State Department sent a cable back to the Swiss legation that said, in effect, “Don’t send any more cables like that.”

In addition, the department later blocked, if not sabotaged, a plan to rescue 70,000 Romanian Jews, as I recount in the book.

Why would it do that?

Anti-Semitism was part of it. But it was more than that. It was a heartlessness, an inability to empathize, to see this terrible crime that was being committed, and to say, “We’ve got to do something about it.” Some of them even opposed a plan to rescue Romanian Jews because “if it succeeds we’ve got no place to put them.”

Contrast that with the reaction of these Treasury Department lawyers – men like John Pehle and Josiah Du Bois – who, in my mind, are heroes. These lawyers found out about [the State Department’s cable to the Swiss legation], and that’s what made it possible for them to persuade their boss, [Treasury Secretary] Henry Morgenthau, to go to Roosevelt and persuade him to take Jewish rescue affairs away from the State Department and invest it in a War Refugee Board.

That board is credited with directly or indirectly saving 200,000 Jewish lives. But by the time it was created in January 1944, a year and a half had gone by since the first reports [of genocide had reached the U.S. government]. The War Refugee Board did a fair amount, but it was too little and too late.

How do you account for the State Department trying to derail rescue efforts and the Treasury Department trying to advance them? Weren’t they both departments of the same government?

Many members in the State Department were sealed off from the rest of America. They were educated in a bubble of privilege and wealth and told they were the chosen, the elite, imbued with Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. They also received a healthy dose of conformity. The lawyers in the Treasury Department didn’t grow up in this aristocratic cloister.

Second, the Treasury Department was involved in almost all the New Deal programs. People were drawn to the New Deal because they wanted to change the world. They were idealists. The State Department was more like one of those old-line clubs like The Knickerbocker and attracted people, in large part, from this aristocratic bubble that I described. They had a completely different mindset about the world, and it was more of a “don’t rock the boat” attitude.

Finally, as I said, there was a significant degree of anti-Semitism in the State Department. I don’t think anti-Semites would’ve gone to work for Morgenthau, who was Jewish. Morgenthau’s hiring policy by the time war loomed actually was: “Does [the prospective employee] hate Hitler and does he want to lick Hitler’s guts?” So people in the Treasury Department naturally had a much different mindset.

Why assign so much blame to the State Department? Doesn’t the buck stop at the president’s desk? If Roosevelt wanted to do more to save Europe’s Jews, he could have, regardless of the State Department’s opinion on the matter.

Roosevelt certainly neglected the issue, so in that sense he’s responsible. But he wasn’t anti-Semitic. He appointed many Jews to high posts in his administration, for which he was attacked by both American anti-Semites and the Nazis. Furthermore, when he was presented with a rescue plan to save [tens of thousands of] Romanian Jews, he approved it on the spot.

His record is mixed. I don’t think it can be said that he set out in a deliberate and methodical way to block reports from Europe of massacres or to sabotage a rescue plan [as the State Department did].

Some people say Roosevelt abandoned the Jews, others say he saved the Jews. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

In a recent letter to the editor to The Jewish Press, Wyman Institute director Rafael Medoff disputed your claim that your book is the first to properly examine the State Department’s role in the Holocaust. He argued that books like The Abandonment Of The Jews by David Wyman already covered the topic in depth.

In these books, the State Department’s role tends to get submerged in what I call the “collective guilt approach” to the American response to the Holocaust, which is that everybody was guilty: the press, Roosevelt, Congress, the churches, Jewish American groups, etc.

I came away from my research with the sense that, while very few of these actors are really free from responsibility, the State Department didn’t simply neglect the issue, which you could accuse Roosevelt of doing for example. It actually used its authority and power to block reports of the [Holocaust] and then obstructed efforts to save 70,000 Romanian Jews. These actions struck me as a different order of misconduct that needed to be examined on its own.

Your first two books (published in 1981 and 2005, respectively) were about corruption in the NYPD and the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. How did you get from these topics to the State Department and the Holocaust?

A couple of years ago, I was reading newspaper accounts about the discovery of letters written by Otto Frank to friends in the U.S. seeking their assistance in getting visas for himself and his family. The visa obstacles proved too much, though, and he decided to take his family into hiding in Amsterdam. We all know the rest of the story. I just was struck by the notion that American visa regulations and policies might have doomed the Frank family. So I started reading up on the subject and felt that not enough attention had been paid to the State Department’s role.

The second reason I decided to write this book is these Treasury Department lawyers; I found their outrage at the State Department morally redeeming. In part, they morally redeemed the good name of the United States. I can’t say enough about them. I’d like to see their story and all that they did really widely known because it’s an inspiration.

This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post on 03/20/2012.

Israeli prime minister’s reference to War Department’s handling of Auschwitz was unwarranted.

In his address last week to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu provoked a controversy by comparing the Iran nuclear threat to the Holocaust.  Yehuda Bauer, a scholar at Yad Vashem, dismissed Netanyahu’s analogy as “sheer nonsense.”

Overlooked in the din was Netanyahu’s other Holocaust parallel in his speech – his citation of the War Department’s refusal in 1944 to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz.  The War Department, Netanyahu pointed out, rejected Jewish bombing requests, partly on the bizarre ground that bombing Auschwitz would drive Nazi Germany to even more “vindictive action.”

This parallelism should have generated its own controversy because it implies that the American conduct during World War II — what Holocaust historian David Wyman called the “abandonment of the Jews” — could be repeated.  In the speech, to be sure, Netanyahu acknowledged that the current American government is not the same as the 1944 one.  If so, why mention the War Department incident other than to question American resolve in the face of a second potentially existential threat to the Jewish people and perhaps stir up a guilty national conscience?

The American government’s response to the Nazi exterminations was indeed, as Harry White, a senior official in FDR’s treasury department (and later an architect of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements that established the IMF and World Bank), put it at the time, “little short of sickening.”  Even before the War Department’s rejection of the Auschwitz bombing request, highly educated, patrician officials in the State Department had covered up reports of the extermination scheme and blocked the rescue of 70,000 Romanian Jews.

But these wartime diplomats were part of a now all-but-vanished American aristocracy that existed outside the experience or even awareness of most of their fellow Americans.   Sheltered in a hermetically sealed aristocratic archipelago, they went from elite northeast boarding schools to Ivy League educations to diplomatic postings.  Imbued with a sense of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, convinced that America needed them more than they needed America, and virulently anti-Semitic they developed a heartless indifference to the sufferings of human beings from different ancestries, religions or economic backgrounds (Breckinridge Long, a wartime assistant secretary of state once described Mein Kampf as “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and Jews as exponents of Communism and chaos”).

The head of the Division of European Affairs in 1940, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, as a young diplomat in Warsaw shortly after the end of World War I, had watched desperate refugees flee oncoming Soviet armies: “they sounded like so many cackling geese and generally behaved in a manner that made us pray like the pharisee, ‘Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men’.”  It was as though whatever nerves transmitted human empathy and compassion had been amputated.

John J. McCloy, the War Department official who rejected the Auschwitz bombing request, hailed from this same eastern establishment tribe.   His father-in-law refused to do business with Jews, his own clubs barred Jews, and he demonstrated a similar lack of compassion.   After lawyers in the treasury department discovered the state department’s cover-up and obstruction — the lawyers called the diplomats “accomplices of Hitler” — FDR had no choice but to take refugee and rescue responsibilities away from the State Department and vest them in the newly-created War Refugee Board.   But McCloy withheld War Department assistance from the board’s rescue efforts and then rejected the Auschwitz bombing request.

But the point is, that apart from a few yacht clubs, class no longer wields power in America (just ask any Tea Party member).  It has been more than 15 years since the Secretary of State was a white man and the current president of the United States is not likely to utter the Pharisee’s prayer (except perhaps for the sake of private irony).

While there are important lessons to be drawn from the State and War Departments’ response to the Holocaust, especially the hazards posed by powerful elite groups cut off from society’s mainstream, how to formulate a policy toward Iran is not one of them.  The American response to the Holocaust is irrelevant to the Iran nuclear crisis.

The writer lives in New York City and has authored several books, including America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy, which will be released on April 19, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Originally published in The Jewish Press on Wednesday, November 04 2009.

Recently, the Romanian government unveiled a long overdue memorial to the 300,000 Romanian Jews and Roma who perished in World War II at the hands of their own government and the Nazis. Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department, whose wartime diplomats doomed tens of thousands of the Romanian Jews commemorated by the memorial, has yet to acknowledge its own role in the Romanian Holocaust.
 
During the war, the Romanian government forced hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jewish men, women and children out of their homes and made them march hundreds of miles to the killing fields of Transnistria, where the survivors were expected to die from cold, disease or starvation. A gift from Hitler to his Romanian ally, Transnistria was a grotesque chunk of land carved out of the Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
 
Romania turned it into the world’s largest concentration camp. In one Transnistrian town, tens of thousands of the deported Jews had to live in just a few hundred small houses made of clay, many in ruins from bombing and shelling.
 
“As to the Jews,” the Romanian leader, Marshal Ion Antonescu, told officials of his government, “I have taken measures to remove them entirely once and for all from these regions [of Romania]. If I do not purify the Romanian nation, then I have achieved nothing.”
 
In early 1943, the German army and its allies suffered a devastating defeat at the battle of Stalingrad. The Romanian army alone had 160,000 casualties. Antonescu, no longer confident about the outcome of the war and seeking to ease harsh peace terms, offered to allow the surviving Transnistrian Jews to emigrate to Palestine (after the war the Russians executed him anyway). The Romanian government requested $50 per Jew as a bribe.
 
By mid-1943, Jewish groups in the United States and Switzerland had put together an elaborate rescue plan, including escrowing the bribe monies in blocked Swiss bank accounts, and managed to get it before FDR.
 
“This is a very fair proposal,” FDR told his secretary of the treasury, who then issued the necessary license for the Jewish groups to transfer private funds for the rescue. Roosevelt assured them that “the matter is now awaiting a further exchange of cables between the State Department and our mission in Bern regarding some of the details.”
 
But very few Jews, blacks or women served in the wartime State Department and the few who did were largely relegated to backwater posts. The State Department bureaucracy was run by a cadre of diplomats who were callous toward Jewish suffering far beyond even the anti-Semitic norms of the era. Their elite, cloistered upbringings had cut them off from the ethnically divergent American mainstream and imbued them with a deep-rooted sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority, a “don’t rock the boat” mentality, and disdain for Jews and other minorities.
 
Whatever nerves transmit normal human empathy had simply atrophied in these officials. And, like all good bureaucrats, as one Washington journalist observed, these diplomats were “masters of the negative, the gentle objection, the postponement, the misplaced paper, the need for further consideration.”
 
The diplomats argued that the British would never permit the Transnistrian Jews, whom they termed “enemy aliens,” to emigrate to Palestine and therefore there was no place to put the dying Jews. After the American mission in Switzerland reported to the State Department on the Jewish massacres in Europe and on the plight of the Transnistrian Jews – “60,000 had already died and 70,000 were starving … living conditions indescribable” – the State Department dispatched a cable directing the mission to stop sending any reports about the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, told inquiring U.S. senators that there was no foundation to the Romanian offer, and refused even to forward the Treasury Department license to the Jewish groups.
 
In late 1943, young, middle-class Christian lawyers at the Treasury Department, tough-minded bureaucratic infighters dedicated to the defeat of Nazi Germany, discovered the State Department’s sabotage of the Transnistrian rescue and cover-up of the Nazi extermination plan. They described the State Department officials as “an underground movement to let the Jews be killed,” “vicious men” who were “accomplices of Hitler,” and “war criminals in every sense of the term.”
 
In memoranda, the young lawyers explicitly accused the State Department of “willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler,” effectively charging their own government with complicity in genocide.
 
Their morally redeeming outrage (and their direct threat to go public) eventually forced FDR to take refugee and rescue affairs away from the State Department. The new rescue agency, the War Refugee Board, which is generally credited with saving 200,000 Jewish lives in occupied Europe, did help to get thousands of Jews out of Transnistria. Had the U.S. acted earlier, tens of thousands more Romanian Jews would have survived.
 
Short of defeating Nazi Germany, the U.S. had no means to rescue most of the Jews who ultimately perished in concentration camps such as Auschwitz. But that was not true of the Transnistrian Jews and therefore their plight became a morally defining moment. The State Department should acknowledge its shameful past by creating its own memorial to the Romanian Holocaust victims. The memorial would not simply be an act of expiation, but rather a permanent reminder that, as the Talmudic saying goes, “To save one life is as if you have saved the world.”

Copyright 2008 www.JewishPress.com

Originally published in JTA – Jewish & Israel News on 1/18/2012 and reprinted in the Huffington Post on  01/26/2012 9:03 am.

It is virtually impossible to imagine anything more reprehensible than the recent spectacle of haredi, that is ultra-Orthodox, Jewish boys wearing yellow stars of David and simulated striped black-and-white concentration camp uniforms at a demonstration in Jerusalem. Offended by the Israeli authorities’ efforts to curtail the verbal and physical abuse of women and girls in haredi neighborhoods, the demonstrators knowingly and intentionally desecrated the memory of the more than 1.5 million Jewish children whose collective suffering and death will be remembered on Jan. 27 at the United Nations’ annual Holocaust commemoration.

“This protest,” said one of the rally’s organizers, “reflects the Zionists’ persecution of the haredi public, which we see as worse than what the Nazis did.”

The image of one particular boy at the demonstration raising his hands in mock surrender to re-enact the famous photograph of a terrified Jewish child being rounded up by the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto struck a very personal chord within me. Sixty-nine years ago, another little Jewish boy named Benjamin was living with his parents in the city of Sosnowiec in southern Poland. The previous month he had celebrated his fifth birthday. He was a smart, good-hearted, totally innocent child who had never done any harm to anyone. Only he had already been sentenced to death.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the other Allied leaders knew full well that Benjamin and virtually every other Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Europe were about to be brutally and systematically murdered. On Dec. 17, 1942, the United States, Great Britain and the USSR had condemned the German government’s “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of Jews in Nazi-occupied or -controlled Europe. Yet Benjamin’s fate and that of other Jewish children like him was not a priority for any government official anywhere.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” said Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark. “Forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” This fundamental Christian imperative was ignored by the U.S. State Department bureaucrats who deliberately frustrated any attempt to come to the rescue of European Jewry. Even in the midst of World War II, if the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and other Western democracies had announced a willingness to give refuge to Jewish children, Benjamin might still have had a chance.

Instead, as Gregory Wallance chronicles in his forthcoming book, America’s Soul in the Balance, The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy (Greenleaf Book Group Press), after Gerhard Riegner, the director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, had sent a telegram through U.S. diplomatic channels in Switzerland in January 1943 reporting that 6,000 Jews “are killed daily” at one location in Poland, and Romanian Jews are similarly being murdered under dire circumstances, Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the American legation in Bern not to accept similar “private messages” in the future.

On the night of Aug. 3-4, 1943, Benjamin arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp with his parents and grandparents. In her posthumously published memoirs, his mother, our mother, recalled her final moments with my brother:

We were guarded by SS men and women. One SS man was standing in front of the people and he started the selection. With a single movement of his finger, he was sending some people to the right and some to the left. … Men were separated from women. People with children were sent to one side, and young people were separated from older looking ones. No one was allowed to go from one group to the other. Our 5 1/2-year-old son went with his father. Something that will haunt me to the end of my days occurred during those first moments. As we were separated, our son turned to me and asked, “Mommy, are we going to live or die?” I didn’t answer this question.

Benjamin, his father and my grandparents were murdered that night in one of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Since my mother’s death in 1997, he has existed inside of me. I see his face in my mind, try to imagine his voice, his fear as the gas chamber doors slammed shut, his final tears. If I were to forget him, he would disappear.

Tragically, the hundreds of thousands of children who were killed in the subsequent 20th century genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere fared no better. The 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was supposed to protect them. So was the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Rwanda, Serbia and the Sudan are all parties, which affirmed that “every child has the inherent right to life.” The mutilated corpses of children and infants hacked by machetes in Rwanda or buried in mass graves in Bosnia epitomize the international community’s failure to live up to this most fundamental of all aspirations.

My brother and every other child murdered in any genocide deserve to be remembered as fragile flames extinguished in tsunamis of hatred, intolerance and bigotry. Exploiting their memory to score cheap political points is obscene.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, the son of two survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, is general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. He teaches about the law of genocide at Cornell Law School, Columbia Law School and Syracuse University College of Law.

By Gregory J. Wallance

Some days it feels like Franklin Delano Roosevelt is still in the White House, jauntily waving his cigarette holder, tossing back his head and smiling as debate rages over his policies. The Obama administration’s first hundred days are so frequently touted as the second coming of FDR that some columnists have begun reminding the public that the economy actually tanked in Roosevelt’s second term and have even trotted out his disastrous 1937 Supreme Court-packing plan to illustrate the dangers of presidential hubris. Now, the forthcoming publication of the papers of Roosevelt’s refugee advisor has reignited a far more emotional controversy over Roosevelt’s legacy: whether he should be credited with having saved Jewish lives in Europe or blamed for having abandoned European Jewry to the Nazis.

It is an often bitter debate. The historical probing of Roosevelt’s moral failings, especially regarding his response to the Holocaust, tends to fall into the “you are either for him or against him” paradigm.

If Roosevelt were truly great, one school asks, then why didn’t he do more to help the Jews? Why didn’t he rescue more Jewish refugees and admit them to the United States? Why didn’t he bomb the railroads leading to Auschwitz? He failed in the face of the greatest crime in civilization’s history, and therefore, goes the subtext, he was not a great man.

The other school argues that Roosevelt, in successfully prosecuting the war, did more to save Jewish lives than any other person. In this telling, he was a great man, who did the most important thing he could do to save Jewish lives — he destroyed Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Both sides have their own spins on the refugee papers, which reveal that Roosevelt secretly conceived a plan in 1938 to find a refuge for German Jews in other countries. The pro-Roosevelt school claims the new documents demonstrate that Roosevelt’s heart was in the right place. The anti-Roosevelt historians dismiss the revelations as nothing new and point to the barriers that his administration later erected against Jewish refugees.

Why, 64 years after Roosevelt’s death, does his response to the Holocaust still provoke pitched battles between historians? After all, the world has changed several times over, and soon there will be no one left who, crouching on the living room floor, fiddling with the dials of the family’s radio, heard the new president tell the stricken country that “the only thing we have to fear is — fear itself.”

But one only has to recall the impact of those words to grasp why debates over Roosevelt are so emotionally charged. After that address, 450,000 Americans almost immediately sat down at their desks or kitchen tables and wrote the president to thank him, because his speech was the best thing any of them had heard in a long, long time. Roosevelt was the crippled man who put a crippled America back on its feet and then led it to wartime triumph over fanatical dictatorships. He was the presidential father for whom every generation since has yearned.

And that’s part of the challenge we face today in making sense of Roosevelt’s record. How do we examine the moral legacy of a leader through eyes that are moist with gratitude?

Roosevelt was beloved by so many Americans, and particularly by so many American Jews. That’s one reason there’s a real sense of betrayal when Roosevelt’s moral failings surface. As a result, the historical dialogue tends to become very polarized, with little in the way of middle ground.

The reality is that both sides in this debate have plenty of evidence they can marshal in making their respective cases. Not long after the 1938 rescue proposal, World War II began and Roosevelt’s calculations shifted. He was so fearful of fifth columnists and saboteurs — and of isolationist and antisemitic American public opinion — that in 1940 he allowed the State Department to block Jewish refugees from entering the United States, using American consuls in Europe, in the words of one State Department memorandum, “to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” But then, in 1943, Roosevelt approved a plan brought to his attention by an important American Jewish supporter to rescue tens of thousands of Jews in Transnistria, then within Nazi-occupied Ukraine, and bring them to Palestine.

Rather than trying to squeeze Roosevelt into neat categories, let’s recognize him for who he really was: a tough-minded, politically dexterous leader who saved the lives of countless Jews by defeating Hitler but demonstrated cold-blooded indifference toward the fates of untold others when it was not politically expedient to do otherwise. It’s a record for which he deserves great historical credit but for which he also must pay a historical price — and it’s a record that dooms the rest of us to forever debate his elusive humanitarian legacy.

These charges were made at the height of World War II. The men who made them were senior officials of the United States Department of the Trea­sury. But they were not speaking of French collaborationists or the satellite allies of Nazi Germany. They were referring to other Americans—indeed, Americans who happened to be highly placed officials in another governmen­tal department.

This book is about the response of the United States Department of State to the systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Holocaust historians have handed up broad, sweeping indictments of American leaders and institutions for abandoning Jews in occupied Europe and the Soviet Union to the Nazi extermination machinery. The indictments cover a lengthy period, from the initial persecution of Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s—before Hitler apparently had even conceived of a “Final Solution” in the form it eventually took—to the end of the war. To be sure, Holocaust his­torians have described and criticized the State Department’s conduct, but in the same breath, and often with the same vehemence, they have criticized all conceivable organizational and individual governmental and private actors, including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his aides, other gov­ernment agencies, Congress, American newspapers and journalists, church groups, and even American Jewish leaders. Especially in recent years, as much time and effort have been devoted to books, articles, and even a play (The Accomplices by Bernard Weinraub) to the wartime infighting among American Jewish organizations over the rescue of European Jews as to the conduct of the State Department. One influential book about the American response to the Holocaust, David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews, contains a chapter titled “Responsibility” (“America’s response to the Holocaust was the result of action and inaction on the part of many people.”). Less than a page of the chapter’s twenty-nine pages is devoted to the State Department’s conduct, while three full pages are spent on the action and inaction of American Jewish groups.

The drawback to universal blame is the risk that the most culpable find ref­uge by simply being part of a guilty crowd. But when everyone is guilty, no one individual or group of individuals is especially guilty. The failure to res­cue Jews becomes a matter of collective responsibility, not of individual mis­conduct. The premise of this book is that, while very few of these institutions and their leaders are free of responsibility for America’s failure to do more to save Jewish lives, not all were equally guilty, and one particular group—offi­cials in the wartime State Department—behaved in such a manner as to stand out from all others.

Authoritative eyewitnesses—young Christian lawyers in the wartime Treasury Department—concluded that State Department officials indeed were especially reprehensible. These idealistic but tough-minded lawyers, New Dealers from middle-class backgrounds, fought with the diplomats in the State Department to rescue dying Romanian Jews in a place called Trans­nistria (now a disputed land claimed by the Republic of Moldova). Many thousands who could have been saved perished while this bureaucratic battle played out. The Treasury Department lawyers not only believed that State Department officials were guilty of a failure to act but also became convinced they deliberately suppressed reports of the vast slaughter in occupied Europe and blocked efforts to rescue Jews in the few places where rescue was possible.

This is an extraordinary accusation; indeed, it is one of the most startling and provocative ever to be leveled against a discrete group of senior officials of the American government. Given the evidence supporting these claims, which the Treasury Department lawyers obtained by essentially stealing dip­lomatic cables from the State Department, the conduct of the State Depart­ment deserves a historical condemnation far greater than that leveled against other players in the drama of America’s response to the human and moral cataclysm that became known as the Holocaust.

What possessed them to act in such a manner? As a start, anti-Semitism played a significant role in the State Department’s response to the Holocaust. While this may be self-evident to many, some historians’ judgments of col­lective American guilt have tended to minimize or entirely overlook the viru­lence of the anti-Semitism that pervaded the State Department bureaucracy like no other cabinet department in wartime Washington, D.C.

But it would be a mistake to explain the State Department’s conduct sim­ply on this basis, because other factors were at work. The State Department’s most influential personnel—particularly in the Foreign Service—came largely from America’s Christian aristocracy. In fact, they were Christian America’s “best and brightest.” They had followed a path far outside the experience or even awareness of most of their fellow Americans: from wealthy upbringings to exclusive boarding schools—especially one school, Groton, in Massachu­setts—to Ivy League and other elite undergraduate educations, to diplomatic postings. Very few Jews, blacks, or women served in the wartime Foreign Service, and the few who did were largely relegated to backwater posts.

In some respects, therefore, this was the last group of people one would expect to behave so inhumanely. Many State Department officials had been given the best formal education that America had to offer, a strong grounding in religion (with its attendant emphasis on the eternal struggle between good and evil), exposure to different cultures, and knowledge of history, litera­ture, languages, and science. But their education and maturation within an aristocratic cloister walled them off from the rest of America, especially from other ethnic and religious groups. This patrician upbringing, with its con­stant emphasis on Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, also accounts for the callous response of State Department officials to the sufferings of human beings from different ancestries, religions, or economic backgrounds.

Another factor was that the State Department may have been the most dysfunctional wartime government agency in the nation’s capital. At the high­est level, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a former Tennessee senator from a hardscrabble mountain upbringing, and his undersecretary, Sumner Welles, a Groton-Harvard graduate with an impeccable lineage, sumptuous homes, and a close friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, loathed each other. The mutual enmity between these diametrically opposite personalities, which was no secret in official Washington, poisoned the State Department. Ultimately only one of these men would survive their bitter feud, but before their rivalry reached its denouement in the form of a sex scandal, no less—they contrib­uted to a calamity that neither wanted.

Neither of them was either inhumane or anti-Semitic. Cordell Hull was married to a woman of Jewish descent, and Sumner Welles was the one high-ranking State Department official who appeared sympathetic to the plight of Jews in Europe; after the war, in fact, he became a committed Zionist. But their management styles and personal animosity allowed the unfeeling, anti-Semitic assistant secretaries and careerists in the State Department to step into, and ruthlessly exploit, a bureaucratic vacuum on refugee issues and thereby doom an unbearable number of Jews who could have been saved.

An important backdrop to the State Department’s conduct was that, after the United States entered the war on December 7, 1941, a genuine opportu­nity arose to save Jewish lives: at least seventy thousand Romanian Jews who had been deported by their government, an ally of Hitler, to the killing fields of Transnistria. There, these Jews were left to perish from cold, disease, and starvation. In fact, one of the most distinct groups of Transnistrian Jews were the thousands of newly created orphans, including one, eleven-year-old Ruth Glasberg, whose valiant struggle to survive in Transnistria forms a part of this narrative. Short of defeating Nazi Germany, the United States and its allies had no realistic means to rescue most of the Jews who ultimately perished in concentration camps such as Auschwitz. But that was not true of the Trans­nistrian Jews and, as a result, their plight became a morally defining moment for the U.S. government, especially the State Department.

Finally, the specific personalities caught up in the State Department’s response to the Holocaust account in no small part for the tragic course of events. The Holocaust illuminated the very worst and the very best in people. In their use of both state apparatus and industrial infrastructure to carry out a scheme to eradicate European Jewry, Hitler and his henchmen appeared more like a mutant species than human beings. But a prominent German industrial­ist courageously risked his life to get word to the United States and Britain of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” and a Catholic member of the Polish Underground also risked his life—and his sanity as well—by reporting on conditions in the extermination camps (which he infiltrated in the guise of a camp guard) and in the Warsaw ghetto. In the United States, which has never given rise to
anything like the Nazis, the range of human response to the Holocaust was nonetheless remarkable. Indeed, it seems impossible that, given their opposite reactions to the plight of the European Jews, the uncaring Christian State Department officials and the idealistic Christian Treasury Department law­yers worked in the same government within just a few hundred yards of each other.

And then, of course, there was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a towering fig­ure in American history with a sunny but commanding personality and a spi­der-like mastery of his cabinet secretaries. Roosevelt’s complex relationships with the State Department’s Hull and Welles, on the one hand, and the Jewish Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., on the other, simultane­ously enabled the State Department’s opposition to rescue and the Treasury’s campaign to save Jewish lives. But for once Roosevelt miscalculated, and the titanic interdepartmental battle turned into a race by the Treasury Depart­ment not just to save the lives of the Transnistrian Jews but also to salvage the historical reputation of the president himself.

According to the twelfth-century physician and scholar, Maimonides, “If one person is able to save another and does not save him, he transgresses the commandment ‘neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor’” (Leviticus 19:16). In our time, as the wretched place-names have piled up—Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur, to name just a few—we often debate the meaning of that decree: that is, what are the obligations of the United States to rescue victims of genocide? Typically, such debates end with retrospective regret at the failure either to intervene at all or to have intervened sooner. The precur­sor to those debates took place in 1943 between the State Department and the Treasury Department over the rescue of the Transnistrian Jews.

Parallels between the Holocaust and the more recent genocidal tragedies can be overstated. In its objective of biological extermination through modern industrial means, the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany stands qualita­tively and quantitatively apart from the horrors of our own times. Moreover, during World War II, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died in the cause of defeating Nazi Germany and its allies. While these soldiers fought in order to remove a mortal threat to the United States, the defeat of Ger­many also unquestionably saved the lives of the remaining two million Jews of Europe. The sacrifice of so many Americans must never be forgotten in any assessment of American responsibility as a whole. By comparison, relatively few American lives have been sacrificed to destroy or remove contemporary genocidal dictators.

But there is at least one similarity between what happened to the Trans­nistrian Jews and the fate of genocide victims since World War II. In all of these events, countless lives essentially hung on the outcome of a battle in the halls of government thousands of miles away in Washington. To be sure, the State Department’s obstruction of efforts to rescue the Transnistrian Jews, as witnessed by the Treasury Department lawyers, was far more inhuman than anything done by American officials in connection with the more recent acts of genocide. Nor is it possible for any nation, not even one as powerful as the United States, to stop every instance of genocidal madness. But as we weigh the costs of intervention to stop genocide against the consequences of not acting, the story of the State Department in World War II is a cautionary tale that should always remind us that, in the words of the Talmud, “To save one life is as if you have saved the world.”