Did F.D.R. Do Enough?

By John Elson

"Whosoever saves a single Jew," teaches the Babylonian Talmud, "Scripture ascribes it to him as though he had saved an entire world." How then should one regard those who, out of indifference, cowardice or neglect, did not help Jews whose lives were in peril? The Holocaust raises that question with particular force. As Vice President Al Gore said at a commemorative ceremony in Washington last week, people who watched and did nothing share blame with the Nazis for the death of 6 million Jews.

According to America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, an accusatory, tweaked-up documentary that aired on PBS last week, the watchful do-nothings included high officials of the U.S. government. The 90-minute program, part of the "American Experience" series, was based partly on The & Abandonment of the Jews (1984) by David S. Wyman, who appeared on camera as a commentator. The documentary echoes charges in Wyman's book that State Department bigots tried to suppress accounts of the genocide from gaining a wide audience and that they blocked Jewish refugees from entering the U.S. America and the Holocaust also attacks President Franklin D. Roosevelt for bending to political expediency in failing to take actions that might have saved more Jewish lives. Keepers of the F.D.R. flame -- notably historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. -- immediately responded that the program was biased and distorted.

The documentary does force some of its claims. It implies, for example, that when F.D.R. scribbled the words FILE, TAKE NO ACTION on a 1939 letter from a Congresswoman urging him to support a bill that would have allowed 20,000 Jewish children to enter the country outside the immigration quotas, he was referring to the bill rather than simply indicating the letter should not be answered. However, America and the Holocaust is well grounded in showing the extent to which anti-Semitism was a part of the American way a half-century ago. Immigration laws had the effect of preventing Jews from coming to America, and Jews were routinely barred from certain professions as well as from vacation resorts that advertised themselves as favoring a "Christian clientele." Even after World War II broke out, according to polls cited in Wyman's book, as many as 24% of respondents considered Jews "a menace to America."

As details of Hitler's terror against the Jews seeped out from Nazi-occupied Europe, American Jews begged federal officials to help. The bureaucrat in charge of immigration, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, was both anti-Semitic and obsessed by fears that European refugees might be security risks. In a 1940 memo he argued that Jews could be kept out of the U.S. by "advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way, which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas."

State Department foot dragging was eventually brought to the President's attention by the Treasury Department, whose Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was Jewish. F.D.R. responded by setting up an interdepartmental War Refugee Board that ultimately rescued and repatriated about 200,000 European Jews.

Despite that effort, William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian of the Roosevelt era, agrees with Wyman that F.D.R.'s record on the Holocaust was "shameful." ^ The U.S. Government could not have prevented the Holocaust, Leuchtenburg explains, but it took little advantage of opportunities to help its victims. Consider the question of whether American bombers should have attacked the railroads and gas chambers at Auschwitz. The documentary contends that while American Jewish leaders were being told such raids would be too dangerous for airmen, U.S. bombers based in Italy were attacking an I.G. Farben factory less than 50 miles from the death camp. In partial defense of this military myopia, Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz has argued that the Germans could have quickly rebuilt the bombed railways and that attacks on crematoria would have killed thousands of Jewish inmates.

Dawidowicz has written that historians should limit their moral judgments to "the is of history, not the ought." Robert Herzstein, author of Roosevelt & Hitler, concurs. Whatever his failures in dealing with the refugee issue, F.D.R. was "the most consequential anti-Nazi leader of his time." He quietly fought anti-Semitism at home and took enormous political risks in preparing the U.S. to join the Allies at a time when most Americans favored neutrality. "Suppose he had adhered to the Neutrality Act," says Herzstein. "What kind of world would the Jews have been in, in Europe? How many would have survived the Holocaust?" In seeing that the only sure way to end the genocide was to destroy Hitler, F.D.R. surely had a larger vision than his critics.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/ New York