FDR: New Files Reveal His Role In The Holocaust
The Jews Should Keep Quiet reassesses the hows and whys behind the Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies during the Holocaust.
Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR’s consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away—actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war.
What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president’s private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt’s statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration’s policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans.
The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR’s personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry’s foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR’s policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration’s realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.
For years after war’s end the full horror of the holocaust was hidden from the public. A short 1955 film NIGHT AND FOG a decade after the war began to reveal the truth. You can watch it here:
Click this link for NIGHT AND FOG
“This highly original work addresses the U.S. government’s unwillingness to undertake serious rescue efforts and the deep divisions within American Jewry over how to respond to U.S. indifference to European Jewry’s plight. Expanding on David S. Wyman’s pathbreaking work on America’s response to the Holocaust, using new archival materials and interviews with persons then on the scene, Medoff provides the best assessment to date of the relationship between America’s foremost Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
—Professor Stephen H. Norwood, author of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower and coeditor of Encyclopedia of American Jewish History
“The Jews Should Keep Quiet reveals in troubling detail how FDR manipulated American Jewish leaders to suppress criticism of his abandonment of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. Our family was certainly impacted. I was two years old on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler became Reichschancellor and my Dad told my Mom: ‘We are leaving Germany forever.’ It took us two and a half years of seeking a sympathetic American consul to overcome the barriers of FDR’s State Department. We need to learn from Dr. Medoff’s disturbing but necessary and enlightening study of moral failure and its consequences.”—Rudy Boschwitz, U.S. Senator (1978–1991)
“The Jews Should Keep Quiet conclusively documents, far better than anything else I have read, how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s private attitude towards Jews motivated him to close America’s doors to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Medoff adroitly exposes how FDR suppressed Jewish immigration with the unwitting assistance of Rabbi Stephen Wise. This book is a revelation—courageous, scholarly, and chillingly honest. You will never think of FDR the same way after reading it.”—Irving Abella, president of the Academy of the Arts and the Humanities of Canada
“The Jews Should Keep Quiet is of lasting importance for the teaching and understanding of the Holocaust. Dr. Medoff’s incisive examination of the complex relationship between the US president and America’s foremost Jewish leader shines a light on troubling aspects of American history that many would prefer to ignore. This book is must reading.”—Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, director of Holocaust Studies, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, The University of Texas at Dallas
“The Jews Should Keep Quiet is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of elite complicity with government inaction. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise regarded Franklin D. Roosevelt as a friend, even though the Roosevelt administration was unfriendly to the plight of Jewish refugees, opposed the bombing of extermination camps, and remained ambivalent toward Zionism. Meticulously researched, engagingly written, and eminently fair-minded, The Jews Should Keep Quiet deserves a wide audience.”—Dean J. Kotlowski, author of Nixon’s Civil Rights and Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR
“In this important volume, Medoff shows there was a great deal Roosevelt could have done despite the various political circumstances and limitations. The new material and analysis he brings to light are vital study in a field rife with apologetic, consensus historians—and dare not to be forgotten.”—Allen H. Podet, professor emeritus, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Buffalo State, State University of New York
“The Jews Should Keep Quiet is a meticulously researched and disquieting history of the reasons behind America’s failure to rescue Europe’s doomed Jews. Readers may rightly conclude that if there is a Roosevelt they can admire, it is Eleanor and not Franklin.”—Dr. Alan L. Berger, Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies, Florida Atlantic University
“An essential study shedding further light on a watershed period, attempting a challenging balanced approach with irrefutable evidence condemning two major figures whose close collaboration ultimately carried disastrous consequences.”—CCAR Journal/The Reform Jewish Quarterly
Photo: Delegates to the 1943 Bermuda Conference on Refugees Holocaust Mystery: Ken Burns Gets Lost in a Bermuda Triangle
Scientists have long been puzzled by the frequent disappearance of ships in the Bermuda Triangle. In his new Holocaust documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns has managed to make the entire Bermuda Conference on Refugees vanish.
A rising tide of calls in the British parliament, media, and churches in early 1943 for the Allies to rescue Jews from the Nazi slaughter prodded the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department to plan an Anglo-American conference on what they termed the refugee problem.
The island of Bermuda was chosen for the gathering. Nahum Goldmann, cochairman of the World Jewish Congress, told colleagues that the remote setting was selected so that “it will take place practically in secret, without pressure of public opinion.”
Like the Evian Conference on Refugees five years earlier, Bermuda was conceived as a gesture rather than a serious attempt to rescue Jews from the raging Holocaust. Jewish Agency official Arthur Lourie said its aim was “quieting public opinion without undertaking anything effective.”
The Joint Emergency Committee of European Jewish Affairs, an umbrella for major U.S. Jewish organizations, requested permission to send representatives to the conference. The request was rejected. The Committee sent Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles a detailed list of proposals for rescue action. The proposals were ignored.
A group of seven Jewish congressmen met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss the rescue issue in advance of the Bermuda gathering. “It was a very unsatisfactory interview,” Congressman Daniel Ellison (R-Maryland) reported afterwards. “[We] asked the President about refugees, the White Paper, etc. What he proposed to do about these things. [We] made a number of suggestions to him as to what [we] thought he ought to do and the answer to all of these suggestions was ‘No’.”
The Bermuda Conference opened on April 19, 1943. Both sides had agreed beforehand that there would be no emphasis on the plight of the Jews—even the name of the conference masked their identity—nor would they adopt any policies that would benefit Jews in particular.
The U.S. would not agree to the use of any trans-Atlantic ships to transport refugees, not even troop supply ships that were returning from Europe empty. And there would be no increase in the number of refugees admitted to the United States.
The British delegates refused to discuss Palestine as a possible haven, because of Arab opposition. They also rejected negotiating with the Nazis to release Jews, on the grounds that “many of the potential refugees are empty mouths for which Hitler has no use.” Their release “would be relieving Hitler of an obligation to take care of these useless people,” a senior British official asserted.
The delegates dismissed the idea of shipping food to starving Jews as a violation of the Allied blockade of Axis Europe, even though they previously made an exception for German-occupied Greece. Instead, the Bermuda conferees spent a large amount of time on very small-scale steps, mainly the evacuation of 5,000 Jewish refugees from Spain to the Libyan region of Cyrenaica.
After twelve days of basking in the Caribbean sun, the delegates adjourned without achieving anything of significance. The two governments kept the proceedings of the conference secret, which only generated further suspicion.
The failure of the Bermuda Conference provoked the first serious public criticism of U.S. refugee policy. A large advertisement in the New York Times, sponsored by the rescue advocates known as the Bergson Group, was headlined “To 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death-Trap, Bermuda was a Cruel Mockery.”
Congressman Emanuel Celler (D-New York) accused the delegates in Bermuda of engaging in “diplomatic tight-rope walking,” at a time when “thousands of Jews are being killed daily.” In a slap at Congressman Sol Boom (D-New York), who was a staunch defender of the administration’s refugee policy and a member of the U.S. delegation to Bermuda, Rep. Celler characterized the conference as “a bloomin’ fiasco.”
The editors of The New Republic charged that Bermuda revealed “the bitter truth” that the U.S. and Great Britain were unwilling to aid “these potential refugees from murder.…If the Anglo-Saxon nations continue on their present course, we shall have connived with Hitler in one of the most terrible episodes of history.”
Bermuda galvanized some mainstream Jewish leaders to speak out more forcefully. Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the Synagogue Council of America (the umbrella for the major Jewish religious denominations) charged that “the victims are not being rescued because the democracies do not want them, and the job of the Bermuda conference apparently was not to rescue victims of Nazi terror but to rescue our State Department and the British Foreign Office from possible embarrassment.”
Even the chief British delegate to Bermuda, Richard Law, later acknowledged that Bermuda was a “façade for inaction.”
The Bermuda Conference was one of the era’s most vivid demonstrations of the Roosevelt administration’s abandonment of the Jews, as well as a pivotal moment in stimulating stronger American Jewish protests against the Holocaust.
How, then, could Ken Burns have omitted any mention of Bermuda from his six hour-long PBS series on “The U.S. and the Holocaust”? Was it because one of the themes of the series was to minimize President Roosevelt’s responsibility for America’s harsh refugee policy, and the Bermuda Conference conflicted with that narrative?
For now, this question remains a mystery. To date, no interviewer has asked Burns about this glaring omission, and he has not volunteered any comment. Is he hoping that, like ships disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle, his own Bermuda omission will vanish from public view before anyone notices?
by Rafael Medoff and Monty N. Penkower
Prof. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Prof. Penkower is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History at the Machon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies and author of a five-volume study about the rise of the State of Israel between the years 1933-1948.
Behind the paywall: A virtual program in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day featuring noted historian and author Rafael Medoff on Monday, January 25, 2021.
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