Obituary

In Memoriam: David S. Wyman

David S. Wyman, who died in March at the age of eight-nine, changed the way Americans perceived their role in the Holocaust—and not just American academics, American Jews, or American politicians. Through his meticulous scholarship and powerful argumentation, Wyman led Americans generally to consider their nation's failure to help Europe's Jews.

In the decades immediately following World War II, Americans didn't worry about their role as bystanders to the extermination of the Jews; to stand by an event it has to be within view. Americans assumed the Holocaust had happened over there, out of sight of all but the German perpetrators and their Jewish victims. That perception began to change in the late 1960s with prescient journalism from Arthur Morse followed by path-breaking scholarship from Henry L. Feingold, Saul S. Friedman, Monty Penkower, Martin Gilbert, Yehuda Bauer, and Wyman himself in his first book, 1968's Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938–1941.

But America's role was still a bit blurry, the scholarly lens calibrated too broadly (on international diplomacy) or too narrowly (on a particular private or government agency). Then Wyman, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, brought it all into focus in his monumental 1984 book, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. The book lived up to its title; it demonstrated that the United States had abandoned the Jews of Europe by failing to provide sanctuary to greater numbers of desperate refugees and by refusing to consider rescue measures from the ordinary (food shipments to the ghettos) to the audacious (bombing Auschwitz).

Wyman punctured the then prevalent (and still surprisingly common) notion that the Germans had somehow managed to keep the murder of six million people a secret. He traced how the news of the systematic extermination campaign reached government officials, Jewish leaders, and the press, and how each responded. Much of Abandonment chronicled the fights that ensued over the proper response within and among Jewish groups and within the U.S. government. As Wyman described the battles, he explained exactly what the protagonists were struggling over: a plan to rescue 70,000 Rumanian Jews trapped in Transnistria; an interpretation of American immigration laws that would admit more people; the establishment of safe havens for surviving Jews; demands that the Allies threaten Axis satellites that assisted in the extermination campaign; a means to send food and medical supplies to Jews in ghettos or in hiding; and proposals to bomb the railway lines and bridges to Auschwitz and the camp itself. In clear, compelling prose, Wyman laid out the argument for what could have been done and what was not done to rescue European Jews.

Wyman realized it was not enough to contribute to scholarly debates. He spoke passionately, persuasively, and compulsively about Abandonment in churches, community centers, and synagogues, as well as in university lecture halls. Abandonment became a best seller. More importantly, its thesis entered the public conversation, reaching an even larger and sustained audience through PBS' 1994 documentary, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. Wyman served as an advisor and on-camera interviewee.

Although The Abandonment of the Jews received effusive praise and won prestigious awards, it also has drawn criticism. A body of scholarship has emerged at least partly in response, some of it, like mine, supporting and extending Wyman's conclusions, others challenging them. The attacks have centered on Wyman's interpretation, not his documentation. The most common complaint: Wyman was too moralistic, placing blame rather than merely describing events and expecting more than was reasonable of the decision-makers involved. Even worse, he applied contemporary moral standards to historical figures, his critics charged. Wyman responded bemusedly that having grown up in 1930s and 1940s America his values had, in fact, been acquired in precisely that time and that place.

This back-and-forth represented a profound difference over how much emphasis to place upon the historical actors who shaped the ultimate outcome and how much upon those who pushed in different directions. The Abandonment of the Jews showcases the dissenters: Congressmen and other...