The Debate about FDR's Response to the Holocaust
Sometimes when looking for a topic for this community, I'll check out various "this day in history" webpages as inspiration for topics. I noticed that yesterday was the anniversary of the closing of a certain concentration camp and that brought to mind the controversial debate about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his response to the Holocaust. It is a very emotional topic and one on which there are conflicting points of view. Entire books have been written, both supportive and critical of FDR and his own presidential library acknowledges this sensitive part of Roosevelt's legacy.
There are those historians who are critical of Roosevelt for his approach to refugee issues prior to and during World War II. Others argue any assessment must factor in the American public’s pre-war isolationism, strict immigration quotas (which enjoyed considerable public support) and the military impracticalities of the Allies’ ability to reach Jews trapped deep behind enemy lines.
One such incident for which Roosevelt is criticized is that of the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner most notable for a single voyage in 1939, in which her captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for 937 German Jewish refugees. The passengers were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada. They were finally accepted to various countries of Europe. Historians have estimated that, after their return to Europe, approximately a quarter of the ship's passengers died in Concentration Camps. The situation was discussed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. These members of Roosevelt's cabinet tried to persuade Cuba to accept the refugees. Their actions, together with efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were not successful.
It wasn't until 1942 when the public became aware of the details of Hitler’s Final Solution. In a December 13, 1942 radio broadcast listened to by millions, popular newsman Edward R. Murrow described “a horror beyond what imagination can grasp . . . there are no longer ‘concentration camps’—we must speak now only of ‘extermination camps.’” On December 17, 1942, the United States joined ten other Allied governments in issuing a solemn public declaration condemning Nazi Germany’s “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of the Jews. Some of FDR's biographers have said that Roosevelt believed that the surest way to stop the killing of innocent civilians was to defeat Hitler’s Germany as quickly and decisively as possible. Critics say that FDR’s “win the war” approach was insensitive to the possibility that a significant number of Jews could have been rescued.
In January 1944, after learning from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. that the State Department was obstructing rescue efforts, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to coordinate governmental and private efforts to rescue those who might still be saved. The Board is credited with saving at least 200,000 Jews. Critics argue that if FDR had acted earlier, and more boldly, even more lives could have been saved.
In his book The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, author Henry Feingold, who has written numerous books about the Holocaust, states the following:
“I feel that more might have been done but I am also aware that there were many factors in the rescue situation which were simply beyond the Roosevelt Administration’s control. Not the least of these was Berlin’s determination to liquidate the Jews and the great difficulty of assigning to a modern nation-state a humanitarian mission to rescue a foreign minority for which it had no legal responsibility. It is a moral and humanitarian response we seek from the Roosevelt Administration. Such responses are rare in history and practically nonexistent during wartime.”
In his keynote address given at the fifth annual Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Lecture, held October 17, 1996 at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois, Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel said this about the 32nd President:
How ironic that our greatest president of this century--the man Hitler hated most, the leader constantly derided by the anti-Semites, vilified by Goebbels as a "mentally ill cripple" and as "that Jew Rosenfeld," violently attacked by the isolationist press--how ironic that he should be faulted for being indifferent to the genocide. For all of us, the shadow of doubt that enough was not done will always remain, even if there was little more that could have been done. But it is the killers who bear the responsibility for their deeds. To say that "we are all guilty" allows the truly guilty to avoid that responsibility. We must remember for all the days of our lives that it was Hitler who imagined the Holocaust and the Nazis who carried it out. We were not their accomplices. We destroyed them.
Those who write about the Holocaust have an obligation to write in a context, a context that reflects the standards, the political realities, the value systems of the years that surrounded it--not to impose the reality of the present with a self-righteous morality that condemns others for what happened generations ago but allows us to remain silent and passive in the crises of our own time.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, more than any other American, is entitled to the historical credit for mobilizing and leading the forces that destroyed the Nazi barbarians and so saved western civilization. In the years of his leadership, he gave Jews dignity and self-respect as did no one before in American history. He understood and shared the anguish of the Holocaust as it unfolded.
A more critical assessment of Roosevelt is found in David S. Weyman's book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust in which the author states:
“Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jewry was made public in the United States in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder for fourteen months, then moved only because he was confronted with political pressures he could not avoid and because his administration stood on the brink of a nasty scandal over its rescue policies. . . . Franklin Roosevelt’s indifference to so momentous a historical event as the systematic annihilation of European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency."
Whether Franklin Roosevelt should have or could have done more to rescue European Jews is a question that will likely be debated by historians for decades to come.
There are those historians who are critical of Roosevelt for his approach to refugee issues prior to and during World War II. Others argue any assessment must factor in the American public’s pre-war isolationism, strict immigration quotas (which enjoyed considerable public support) and the military impracticalities of the Allies’ ability to reach Jews trapped deep behind enemy lines.
One such incident for which Roosevelt is criticized is that of the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner most notable for a single voyage in 1939, in which her captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for 937 German Jewish refugees. The passengers were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada. They were finally accepted to various countries of Europe. Historians have estimated that, after their return to Europe, approximately a quarter of the ship's passengers died in Concentration Camps. The situation was discussed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. These members of Roosevelt's cabinet tried to persuade Cuba to accept the refugees. Their actions, together with efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were not successful.
It wasn't until 1942 when the public became aware of the details of Hitler’s Final Solution. In a December 13, 1942 radio broadcast listened to by millions, popular newsman Edward R. Murrow described “a horror beyond what imagination can grasp . . . there are no longer ‘concentration camps’—we must speak now only of ‘extermination camps.’” On December 17, 1942, the United States joined ten other Allied governments in issuing a solemn public declaration condemning Nazi Germany’s “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of the Jews. Some of FDR's biographers have said that Roosevelt believed that the surest way to stop the killing of innocent civilians was to defeat Hitler’s Germany as quickly and decisively as possible. Critics say that FDR’s “win the war” approach was insensitive to the possibility that a significant number of Jews could have been rescued.
In January 1944, after learning from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. that the State Department was obstructing rescue efforts, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to coordinate governmental and private efforts to rescue those who might still be saved. The Board is credited with saving at least 200,000 Jews. Critics argue that if FDR had acted earlier, and more boldly, even more lives could have been saved.
In his book The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, author Henry Feingold, who has written numerous books about the Holocaust, states the following:
“I feel that more might have been done but I am also aware that there were many factors in the rescue situation which were simply beyond the Roosevelt Administration’s control. Not the least of these was Berlin’s determination to liquidate the Jews and the great difficulty of assigning to a modern nation-state a humanitarian mission to rescue a foreign minority for which it had no legal responsibility. It is a moral and humanitarian response we seek from the Roosevelt Administration. Such responses are rare in history and practically nonexistent during wartime.”
In his keynote address given at the fifth annual Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Lecture, held October 17, 1996 at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois, Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel said this about the 32nd President:
How ironic that our greatest president of this century--the man Hitler hated most, the leader constantly derided by the anti-Semites, vilified by Goebbels as a "mentally ill cripple" and as "that Jew Rosenfeld," violently attacked by the isolationist press--how ironic that he should be faulted for being indifferent to the genocide. For all of us, the shadow of doubt that enough was not done will always remain, even if there was little more that could have been done. But it is the killers who bear the responsibility for their deeds. To say that "we are all guilty" allows the truly guilty to avoid that responsibility. We must remember for all the days of our lives that it was Hitler who imagined the Holocaust and the Nazis who carried it out. We were not their accomplices. We destroyed them.
Those who write about the Holocaust have an obligation to write in a context, a context that reflects the standards, the political realities, the value systems of the years that surrounded it--not to impose the reality of the present with a self-righteous morality that condemns others for what happened generations ago but allows us to remain silent and passive in the crises of our own time.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, more than any other American, is entitled to the historical credit for mobilizing and leading the forces that destroyed the Nazi barbarians and so saved western civilization. In the years of his leadership, he gave Jews dignity and self-respect as did no one before in American history. He understood and shared the anguish of the Holocaust as it unfolded.
A more critical assessment of Roosevelt is found in David S. Weyman's book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust in which the author states:
“Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jewry was made public in the United States in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder for fourteen months, then moved only because he was confronted with political pressures he could not avoid and because his administration stood on the brink of a nasty scandal over its rescue policies. . . . Franklin Roosevelt’s indifference to so momentous a historical event as the systematic annihilation of European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency."
Whether Franklin Roosevelt should have or could have done more to rescue European Jews is a question that will likely be debated by historians for decades to come.