FDR and the Jewish Refugees During World War Two
One of the most shameful aspects of the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt concerns his administration's indifference to the plight of European Jews who were the target of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution". Not everyone in Roosevelt's administration adopted such an attitude. His Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, urged the President to come to the aid of those seeking to avoid the concentration camps set up by the Nazis. But the stronger influence on Roosevelt came from his State Department, and specifically from Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles.
In his outstanding 2015 work 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History (reviewed here in this community), author Jay Winik critically examines the actions and inaction of Roosevelt at the time when the world was witnessing horrendous occurrence of Hitler against the Jews in territory under his control. Six million European Jews were killed at Hitler's direction. Winik makes a powerful case showing how men like Long and Welles willfully obstructed the provision of aid and rescue to European Jews who were bound for the death camps. These men not only sought to prevent the release of news about the atrocities being committed, but also threatened those who tried to bring these atrocities to the world's attention. They prevented the immigration of Jews fleeing the death camps from coming to the United States and other safe havens, prevented military aid that could have been accomplished with little effort, and ran bureaucratic interference on those seeking to provide rescue and humanitarian aid to the persecuted. Winik exposes what was surely a national disgrace and does so in a dignified but powerful manner. Within Roosevelt's administration, only Henry Morgenthau battled obstructionist bureaucrats to convince Roosevelt. He was ultimately able to bring about the creation of the War Refugee Board, an agency intended to help the persecuted Jews. But in spite of the heroic efforts of these too few, Winik points out that there was much that wasn't done to prevent the killings, and there is much to accept responsibility for.
Benjamin Sumner Welles was born in New York City in 1857 to a wealthy and socially prominent family. He was a grandnephew of Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, known as "the Mrs. Astor". The Welles family was also connected to the Roosevelts. A cousin of Sumner Welles married James "Rosy" Roosevelt, Jr., half brother of the future President Franklin Roosevelt In September 1904, Welles entered Groton School in Massachusetts, where he roomed with Hall Roosevelt, the brother of Eleanor Roosevelt. At the age of 12 he served as a page at Franklin D. Roosevelt's wedding to Eleanor in March 1905. After graduating from Harvard, Welles followed the advice of Franklin Roosevelt and entered into the Foreign Service.
In April 1933, FDR appointed Welles Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. In 1937, FDR promoted Welles to Under Secretary. Following the famous "Kristallnacht" in November 1938 (Hitler's pogrom against Jews in Germany), there were a flood of applications by Jews to emigrate from Europe. The British government proposed that the major part of its quota of 65,000 British citizens eligible for emigration to the United States be taken up by Jews fleeing Hitler. Welles nixed this idea, on the basis that doing so, in his words, "will merely produce a 'Jewish problem' in the countries increasing the quota."
Welles was able to exercise considerable influence in the State Department because of the absence of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who was often absent due to poor health. As one New York Times story reported, "Mr. Hull, never an expert at paper-shuffling, has long left the actual administration of the Department to his chief aide, Sumner Welles. And Cordell Hull may choose not to retire. But even if Welles never becomes Secretary, he will still hold his present power: through Presidential choice, his own ability, background and natural stamina, he is the chief administrative officer of U.S. foreign policy." Roosevelt was always close to Welles and often preferred the advice of Welles over that of Hull.
Ultimately, the effect of the immigration policies set by Welles and Long's department was such that 90% of the quota places available to immigrants from countries under German and Italian control were never filled. If they had been, an additional 190,000 people could have escaped the atrocities being committed by the Nazis. On one occasion, a passenger liner full of refugees from Germany was denied entry and sent home where many of the occupants ultimately ended up in concentration camps.
Welles might have become Secretary of State but for a sexual scandal that he was at the center of. In September 1940, Welles accompanied Roosevelt to the funeral of former Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead in Huntsville, Alabama. While returning to Washington by train, Welles solicited sex from two male African-American Pullman car porters. Cordell Hull leaked details of the incident to Republican Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, and Brewster in turn gave the information to journalist Arthur Krock (a critic of Roosevelt's) and to Senators Styles Bridges and Burton K. Wheeler. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to release the file on Welles, and Brewster threatened to initiate a Senatorial investigation into the incident. Roosevelt was angered over the attack on his friend, but he felt obliged to accept Welles' resignation in 1943.
There was no official announcement of Welles' resignation. Writing in The New York Times, Arthur Krock did not directly refer to the details leading up to Welles' resignation. He said that despite the "personal fondness" of the President and his wife for Welles, the Senate would not support Welles for Secretary of State or any other office. Krock cryptically added, "Other incidents arising made the disagreements between the two men even more personal. It was those which aroused the Senate to opposition to Mr. Welles that was reported to the President."
On September 26, 1943, Roosevelt announced the resignation of Welles and the appointment of Edward R. Stettinius as the new Under-Secretary of State. He accepted Welles' resignation with regret and explained that Welles was prompted to leave government service because of "his wife's poor health." Many believed that the reason for Welles' departure was because of his personal conflict with Cordell Hull. It was not until March of 1956 when the details of the scandal were made public. That year, Confidential, a scandal magazine, published a report of the 1940 Pullman incident. It claimed that this was the reason for Welles' resignation from the State Department, along with additional instances of inappropriate sexual behavior or drunkenness. Welles explained the 1940 incident as nothing more than drunken conversation with the train staff.
Sumner Welles died on September 24, 1961 at age 68. The story of his connections with Roosevelt, his influence in the State department, and his downfall are detailed in Irwin Gellman's 2003 book Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles.
Wells was not the only one in the Roosevelt administration who obstructed giving aid to European Jewsdestined for Adolph Hitler's gas chambers and concentration camps. Surprisingly, two of Roosevelt's aides who supported this policy were Jews themselves: Samuel Rosenman and Stephen Wise.
Sam Rosenman (seated to the right of FDR - on FDR's left - in the photo above) was born in San Antonio, Texas, the son of Solomon and Ethel Rosenman. He graduated From Columbia Law School in 1919 and became active in Democratic politics. He was a member of the New York State Assembly for five years in the 1920s and served as a Justice of the New York Supreme Court from 1936 to 1943. Rosenman became a leading spokesman for the New York Jewish community. Rosenman was a senior advisor to Roosevelt and later became a leading figure in the war crimes issue. He was also the first official White House Counsel (then called Special Counsel) from 1943 to 1946. Previously he had been a speechwriter for Roosevelt, dating back to Roosevelt's tenure as Governor of New York, and it was Rosenman who couned the term "New Deal", a phrase in the conclusion of FDR's acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic National Convention. He also helped with speech writing during the 1936 campaign and was a key speech aide for the remainder of Roosevelt's life.
Stephen Wise was a Rabbi from New York and was also a close friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR turned to Wise for advice on issues concerning the Jewish community in the United States. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, he was a delegate from New York and at the opening of the sixth session on June 28, 1924, he offered the invocation. Initially, Wise was a vocal opponent of the Nazis in Germany and therefore his later actions were quite surprising. In 1933 while acting as honorary president of the American Jewish Congress, Wise led efforts for a Jewish Boycott of Germany. In a speech he said, "The time for prudence and caution is past. We must speak up like men. How can we ask our Christian friends to lift their voices in protest against the wrongs suffered by Jews if we keep silent? What is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked. It is not the German Jews who are being attacked. It is the Jews". He urged Secretary of State Cordell Hull to protest to the German government's treatment of Jews.
Wise served as founding president of the World Jewish Congress president until his death in 1949. On November 24, 1942, after meeting with Sumner Welles, Wise held a press conference in Washington, D.C. and announced that the Nazis had a plan for the extermination of all European Jews, and had already killed 2 million. The announcement failed to attract too much media attention.
But some of Wise's other actions have been judged by historians negatively. In the spring of 1941 Wise called for a complete embargo on all aid sent to Jews in occupied countries. He did so because he said that this was in compliance with the U.S. government's economic boycott of the Axis powers, which considered every food package sent to be direct or indirect assistance to the enemy. Wise gave strict orders to World Jewish Congress representatives in Europe to forthwith hald any shipment of packages to the ghettos. The order was made despite the fact that these packages did usually reach their intended destination, the Jewish Self-Help Association in Warsaw. In his cable, Wise wrote, 'All these operations with and through Poland must cease at once.' The cable was sent to Congress delegates in London and Geneva. He added: 'and at once in English means AT ONCE, not in the future.'"
On October 6, 1943, an event known as the Rabbis March took place. It was a demonstration in support of American and allied action to stop Hitler's "final solution". The March took place in Washington, D.C. three days before Yom Kippur. It was organized by Hillel Kook, nephew of the chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine and head of the Bergson Group, and involved more than 400 rabbis, mostly members of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, from New York and cities in the eastern United States.
The group had planned to meet with FDR, and as it turned out, FDR was available for a meeting. Roosevelt had several free hours that afternoon and could have met with the group. Instead he dodged them on the advice of both Stephen Wise and Sam Rosenman. Wise and Rosenman told Roosevelt that the protesting rabbis "were not representative" of American Jewry and not the kind of Jews he should meet. Wise also accused the rabbis of "offending the dignity of the Jewish people."
Vice President Henry Wallace agreed to meet with the group, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to do so on the advice of Wise and Rosenman. Shortly before the protest reached the White House, FDR left the building through a rear exit to attend an Army ceremony, and then left for a weekend in the country. Disappointed and angered by the President's failure to meet with them, the rabbis stood in front of the White House where they were met by Senator William Warren Barbour and others.
The march did attract media attention, much of it focused on what was seen as the cold and insulting dismissal of many important community leaders, as well as the people in Europe they were fighting for. The headline in the Washington Times Herald read: "Rabbis Report 'Cold Welcome' at the White House." Editors of The Jewish Daily Forward wrote in an editorial, "Would a similar delegation of 500 Catholic priests have been thus treated?"
The failure of the Roosevelt administration to come to the aid of European Jews who were being persecuted by Adolf Hitler continues to be a major black mark against its record. What is even more troubling is that prominent leaders in the American Jewish community were among those leading the obstruction of aid to those destined for Nazi death camps.
In his outstanding 2015 work 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History (reviewed here in this community), author Jay Winik critically examines the actions and inaction of Roosevelt at the time when the world was witnessing horrendous occurrence of Hitler against the Jews in territory under his control. Six million European Jews were killed at Hitler's direction. Winik makes a powerful case showing how men like Long and Welles willfully obstructed the provision of aid and rescue to European Jews who were bound for the death camps. These men not only sought to prevent the release of news about the atrocities being committed, but also threatened those who tried to bring these atrocities to the world's attention. They prevented the immigration of Jews fleeing the death camps from coming to the United States and other safe havens, prevented military aid that could have been accomplished with little effort, and ran bureaucratic interference on those seeking to provide rescue and humanitarian aid to the persecuted. Winik exposes what was surely a national disgrace and does so in a dignified but powerful manner. Within Roosevelt's administration, only Henry Morgenthau battled obstructionist bureaucrats to convince Roosevelt. He was ultimately able to bring about the creation of the War Refugee Board, an agency intended to help the persecuted Jews. But in spite of the heroic efforts of these too few, Winik points out that there was much that wasn't done to prevent the killings, and there is much to accept responsibility for.
Benjamin Sumner Welles was born in New York City in 1857 to a wealthy and socially prominent family. He was a grandnephew of Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, known as "the Mrs. Astor". The Welles family was also connected to the Roosevelts. A cousin of Sumner Welles married James "Rosy" Roosevelt, Jr., half brother of the future President Franklin Roosevelt In September 1904, Welles entered Groton School in Massachusetts, where he roomed with Hall Roosevelt, the brother of Eleanor Roosevelt. At the age of 12 he served as a page at Franklin D. Roosevelt's wedding to Eleanor in March 1905. After graduating from Harvard, Welles followed the advice of Franklin Roosevelt and entered into the Foreign Service.
In April 1933, FDR appointed Welles Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. In 1937, FDR promoted Welles to Under Secretary. Following the famous "Kristallnacht" in November 1938 (Hitler's pogrom against Jews in Germany), there were a flood of applications by Jews to emigrate from Europe. The British government proposed that the major part of its quota of 65,000 British citizens eligible for emigration to the United States be taken up by Jews fleeing Hitler. Welles nixed this idea, on the basis that doing so, in his words, "will merely produce a 'Jewish problem' in the countries increasing the quota."
Welles was able to exercise considerable influence in the State Department because of the absence of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who was often absent due to poor health. As one New York Times story reported, "Mr. Hull, never an expert at paper-shuffling, has long left the actual administration of the Department to his chief aide, Sumner Welles. And Cordell Hull may choose not to retire. But even if Welles never becomes Secretary, he will still hold his present power: through Presidential choice, his own ability, background and natural stamina, he is the chief administrative officer of U.S. foreign policy." Roosevelt was always close to Welles and often preferred the advice of Welles over that of Hull.
Ultimately, the effect of the immigration policies set by Welles and Long's department was such that 90% of the quota places available to immigrants from countries under German and Italian control were never filled. If they had been, an additional 190,000 people could have escaped the atrocities being committed by the Nazis. On one occasion, a passenger liner full of refugees from Germany was denied entry and sent home where many of the occupants ultimately ended up in concentration camps.
Welles might have become Secretary of State but for a sexual scandal that he was at the center of. In September 1940, Welles accompanied Roosevelt to the funeral of former Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead in Huntsville, Alabama. While returning to Washington by train, Welles solicited sex from two male African-American Pullman car porters. Cordell Hull leaked details of the incident to Republican Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, and Brewster in turn gave the information to journalist Arthur Krock (a critic of Roosevelt's) and to Senators Styles Bridges and Burton K. Wheeler. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to release the file on Welles, and Brewster threatened to initiate a Senatorial investigation into the incident. Roosevelt was angered over the attack on his friend, but he felt obliged to accept Welles' resignation in 1943.
There was no official announcement of Welles' resignation. Writing in The New York Times, Arthur Krock did not directly refer to the details leading up to Welles' resignation. He said that despite the "personal fondness" of the President and his wife for Welles, the Senate would not support Welles for Secretary of State or any other office. Krock cryptically added, "Other incidents arising made the disagreements between the two men even more personal. It was those which aroused the Senate to opposition to Mr. Welles that was reported to the President."
On September 26, 1943, Roosevelt announced the resignation of Welles and the appointment of Edward R. Stettinius as the new Under-Secretary of State. He accepted Welles' resignation with regret and explained that Welles was prompted to leave government service because of "his wife's poor health." Many believed that the reason for Welles' departure was because of his personal conflict with Cordell Hull. It was not until March of 1956 when the details of the scandal were made public. That year, Confidential, a scandal magazine, published a report of the 1940 Pullman incident. It claimed that this was the reason for Welles' resignation from the State Department, along with additional instances of inappropriate sexual behavior or drunkenness. Welles explained the 1940 incident as nothing more than drunken conversation with the train staff.
Sumner Welles died on September 24, 1961 at age 68. The story of his connections with Roosevelt, his influence in the State department, and his downfall are detailed in Irwin Gellman's 2003 book Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles.
Wells was not the only one in the Roosevelt administration who obstructed giving aid to European Jewsdestined for Adolph Hitler's gas chambers and concentration camps. Surprisingly, two of Roosevelt's aides who supported this policy were Jews themselves: Samuel Rosenman and Stephen Wise.
Sam Rosenman (seated to the right of FDR - on FDR's left - in the photo above) was born in San Antonio, Texas, the son of Solomon and Ethel Rosenman. He graduated From Columbia Law School in 1919 and became active in Democratic politics. He was a member of the New York State Assembly for five years in the 1920s and served as a Justice of the New York Supreme Court from 1936 to 1943. Rosenman became a leading spokesman for the New York Jewish community. Rosenman was a senior advisor to Roosevelt and later became a leading figure in the war crimes issue. He was also the first official White House Counsel (then called Special Counsel) from 1943 to 1946. Previously he had been a speechwriter for Roosevelt, dating back to Roosevelt's tenure as Governor of New York, and it was Rosenman who couned the term "New Deal", a phrase in the conclusion of FDR's acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic National Convention. He also helped with speech writing during the 1936 campaign and was a key speech aide for the remainder of Roosevelt's life.
Stephen Wise was a Rabbi from New York and was also a close friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR turned to Wise for advice on issues concerning the Jewish community in the United States. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, he was a delegate from New York and at the opening of the sixth session on June 28, 1924, he offered the invocation. Initially, Wise was a vocal opponent of the Nazis in Germany and therefore his later actions were quite surprising. In 1933 while acting as honorary president of the American Jewish Congress, Wise led efforts for a Jewish Boycott of Germany. In a speech he said, "The time for prudence and caution is past. We must speak up like men. How can we ask our Christian friends to lift their voices in protest against the wrongs suffered by Jews if we keep silent? What is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked. It is not the German Jews who are being attacked. It is the Jews". He urged Secretary of State Cordell Hull to protest to the German government's treatment of Jews.
Wise served as founding president of the World Jewish Congress president until his death in 1949. On November 24, 1942, after meeting with Sumner Welles, Wise held a press conference in Washington, D.C. and announced that the Nazis had a plan for the extermination of all European Jews, and had already killed 2 million. The announcement failed to attract too much media attention.
But some of Wise's other actions have been judged by historians negatively. In the spring of 1941 Wise called for a complete embargo on all aid sent to Jews in occupied countries. He did so because he said that this was in compliance with the U.S. government's economic boycott of the Axis powers, which considered every food package sent to be direct or indirect assistance to the enemy. Wise gave strict orders to World Jewish Congress representatives in Europe to forthwith hald any shipment of packages to the ghettos. The order was made despite the fact that these packages did usually reach their intended destination, the Jewish Self-Help Association in Warsaw. In his cable, Wise wrote, 'All these operations with and through Poland must cease at once.' The cable was sent to Congress delegates in London and Geneva. He added: 'and at once in English means AT ONCE, not in the future.'"
On October 6, 1943, an event known as the Rabbis March took place. It was a demonstration in support of American and allied action to stop Hitler's "final solution". The March took place in Washington, D.C. three days before Yom Kippur. It was organized by Hillel Kook, nephew of the chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine and head of the Bergson Group, and involved more than 400 rabbis, mostly members of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, from New York and cities in the eastern United States.
The group had planned to meet with FDR, and as it turned out, FDR was available for a meeting. Roosevelt had several free hours that afternoon and could have met with the group. Instead he dodged them on the advice of both Stephen Wise and Sam Rosenman. Wise and Rosenman told Roosevelt that the protesting rabbis "were not representative" of American Jewry and not the kind of Jews he should meet. Wise also accused the rabbis of "offending the dignity of the Jewish people."
Vice President Henry Wallace agreed to meet with the group, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to do so on the advice of Wise and Rosenman. Shortly before the protest reached the White House, FDR left the building through a rear exit to attend an Army ceremony, and then left for a weekend in the country. Disappointed and angered by the President's failure to meet with them, the rabbis stood in front of the White House where they were met by Senator William Warren Barbour and others.
The march did attract media attention, much of it focused on what was seen as the cold and insulting dismissal of many important community leaders, as well as the people in Europe they were fighting for. The headline in the Washington Times Herald read: "Rabbis Report 'Cold Welcome' at the White House." Editors of The Jewish Daily Forward wrote in an editorial, "Would a similar delegation of 500 Catholic priests have been thus treated?"
The failure of the Roosevelt administration to come to the aid of European Jews who were being persecuted by Adolf Hitler continues to be a major black mark against its record. What is even more troubling is that prominent leaders in the American Jewish community were among those leading the obstruction of aid to those destined for Nazi death camps.