The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance by Barry Trachtenberg, and: Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Effort to Save the Jews of Europe by Rebecca Erbelding (review)

The subject of American responses to the persecution of the Jews and the subsequent Holocaust has been a contentious one. It began with the publication of Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died (1967) and the better-researched Paper Walls by David Wyman (1968). The main focus of this debate concerns American immigration policy from 1933–1941 and the possibility of rescue from 1942–1945, after the Holocaust began. The sentiments and actions of president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was strongly supported by American Jews, have also received much attention and criticism. It does not help that Roosevelt kept no diary and his correspondence often revealed little about these matters.

Two new books by Barry Trachtenberg and Rebecca Erbelding deal with these issues. Trachtenberg's book chooses the more compressed format, devoting only two chapters to the 1933–1945 period (one each on refugees and rescue), followed by three chapters on the development of Holocaust consciousness in postwar America. Erbelding examines the history and accomplishments of the War Refugee Board (WRB), a federal agency created to rescue victims of the Holocaust in 1944–1945.

In his first two chapters, based on secondary sources, Trachtenberg deftly summarizes the refugee and rescue issues in a rather conventional fashion. He pays special attention to the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which drastically limited immigration to the United States, the efforts of the State Department to allow only a small number of Jews into the country through administrative obstruction, and the prevailing antisemitism and xenophobia. He describes Roosevelt's greater involvement in the refugee issue in 1938 and the problems posed by the "spy scare" of 1940. This fear of German double agents caused a further decline in the number of visas issued to desperate Jewish refugees even before the United States entered the war in December of 1941. Trachtenberg then goes on to deal with the difficulties of carrying out rescue during wartime.

Trachtenberg's take on these matters contains a few new—and rather controversial—wrinkles worth noting. One regards the efforts of American Jewish organizations and their leaders to pressure Roosevelt and the administration into acting on behalf of European Jews. Compared to many other accounts, he paints a rather sympathetic portrait of these efforts, which yielded few results until 1943. Another is his puzzling treatment of Roosevelt. Despite Trachtenberg's critical take on the administration, especially the State Department, Roosevelt is presented as a kind of observer floating above the entire problem, unable to change very much of the prevailing status quo. This portrait of the president is less than convincing, especially since Roosevelt, when so inclined, or when it suited him politically, decisively intervened to fill the German-Austrian quota in 1938 and put pressure on the State Department to fill the quota in 1939. Roosevelt also created the Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, which was able to issue several thousand visas outside the quota system. Finally, although by this time Roosevelt was under great pressure to act, there was his executive order creating the WRB in 1944.

Why then, did Roosevelt not act more decisively, especially after the mass murder of Jews was confirmed? True, in the midst of dealing with a brutal depression and a world war, the rescue of foreign Jewish civilians could not be a top priority, and it was not even clear how exactly rescue could be accomplished. It is possible, however, that Roosevelt felt that the pressure from Jewish organizations was another case of the ethnic special pleading usually dealt with by his wife, Eleanor. He was no antisemite, but it may be that he never fully understood the scope of the monumental and unique catastrophe...