Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust (review)

The Nazi crime of genocide against Jews in World War II was so monstrous; it has left two generations of survivors and eyewitnesses to reckon with the consequences. For too short a time (perhaps a year or two before the Cold War proved the folly of such efforts), the civilized world focused its attention upon identification and punishment of the principal miscreants. Government officials, historians, and theologians rationalized that we really did not know about the operative intricacies of Buchenwald and Dachau. Lacking credible information about death camps, confronted with inhuman enemies on five continents, suffering the effects of a destabilized wartime economy, and undermined by racist elements at home, how could Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, or any leader of the free world have mobilized against Auschwitz and Treblinka?

The year 1968 proved to be a watershed in the examination of relief and rescue of Europe's Jews. Government documents were passing through the magic barrier of twenty-five years shielding them from the scrutiny of professional historians. That summer, Look magazine published a series of extracts from Arthur D. Morse's While Six Million Died. And, ever since, the world of academe has witnessed periodic tilts among scholars claiming unique insights into these issues.

The most recent contribution to literature exploring Roosevelt's relationship with American Jews is Robert Rosen's Saving the Jews. A prominent attorney from Charleston, South Carolina, Rosen offers a well-packaged book that has been endorsed by such notables as James MacGregor Burns, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and William J. vanden Heuvel. Five hundred pages in, readers are even treated to an afterword by Alan Dershowitz.

There is no disputing Rosen's facile writing style, the weaving of greater political events (the fall of France in 1940, Roosevelt's dalliances with King Ibn Saud in Egypt in 1945) with contemporary issues then highlighting the Jewish agenda. But it is premature for Rosen to render verdicts on Roosevelt's actions in a number of crucial issues. Namely:

1. 1. On the feasibility of changing America's immigration laws to save more Jews, Rosen writes: "Roosevelt's policies saved as many Jews as could realistically be saved" (437). America's immigration laws were, in fact, altered to make special provision for Chinese and Mexican laborers, and, as Rosen notes, the president fretted about pressure to admit special numbers of Polish gentiles during the war years.

2. 2. Rosen exculpates Roosevelt from the "charge . . . of indifference to the fate of the SS St. Louis refugees," emphasizing that two-thirds of its passengers who were returned to Europe survived the war rather than addressing the fate of the more than 250 who perished when Germany conquered Holland, Belgium, and France (443).

3. 3. Rosen defends Roosevelt against those who condemn his "failure to speak out" and denounce mass murder (452). But the first joint Allied condemnation of mass murder (a brief collection of vagaries) was not issued until the end of 1942, long after Roosevelt and Churchill had championed the rights of Greek and Norwegian fishermen, Filipino and Cuban peasants.

4. 4. While conceding the marginal efforts of the April 1943 Bermuda Conference on Refugees, Rosen asks if there was anything that the conferees could have done to change "the course of the Holocaust," and he answers his question with a resounding "no" (458).

5. 5. He champions the War Refugee Board as "a vigorous, sincere effort by the Roosevelt administration to save the surviving Jews of Europe" (462). It evolved, of course, late in the war and thanks to the prodding of Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

6. 6. Finally, Rosen renders verdict on the question of bombing Auschwitz. That, of course, remains yet an open wound among military experts who debate the feasibility of such an assault, the potential cost in inmates' lives, and the ultimate question of who vetoed the project.

Saving the Jews supposedly resolves a host of other issues. Rosen maintains Allied shipping losses in the Atlantic blocked any hope...