FDR - Jean Edward Smith [381]
One of the pressing issues Roosevelt returned to confront was the crisis of European Jewry. Hitler’s campaign of genocide was now in full swing. Few as yet grasped the extent to which mass extermination was being conducted in specially constructed death camps, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the problem Washington faced was not so much providing asylum for several hundred thousand refugees but rescuing an entire population caught in the Nazi death machine.33
From the beginning of his presidency Roosevelt had been sympathetic to the plight of the Jews.* Yet he faced insurmountable obstacles. The Immigration Act of 1924 was unyielding, and the Seventy-eighth Congress was in no mood to consider changes. Public opinion, always susceptible to nativist appeals, was at best indifferent. Church leaders for the most part remained silent, and the intellectual community, with few exceptions, took little notice. The State Department’s striped-pants set (particularly those charged with immigration matters) was permeated with genteel anti-Semitism. The War Department—from Stimson and McCloy to Marshall and Eisenhower—resisted any diversion of military resources from the central effort to defeat Germany. And at that time the American Jewish community itself was divided. Members of the old-school Jewish establishment, primarily German in origin—men close to FDR, such as Felix Frankfurter, Sam Rosenman, Herbert Lehman, and the publishers of The New York Times—were lukewarm about mounting any special effort to rescue the Jewish populations of eastern Europe, fearing its effect on efforts to assimilate.
Hitler’s “final solution” had been launched with the utmost secrecy on January 20, 1942, at what historians call the Wannsee Conference—a meeting of top government officials on the outskirts of Berlin. By the summer of ’42 reports of death camps began to filter west. How much Roosevelt knew is uncertain. The State Department initially suppressed the information because of its “fantastic nature.” Career foreign service officers, remembering the atrocity stories manufactured during World War I, characterized the reports as having “the earmarks of war rumors inspired by fear” and declined to send them forward.34 When Rabbi Stephen Wise, the head of the American Jewish Congress (and a longtime friend of FDR*) provided Sumner Welles with irrefutable documentation in September 1942, Welles asserted the State Department had authoritative confirmation that the Jews were being transported eastward to construct roads and fortifications on the Russian front.35 Throughout the autumn of 1942 the evidence mounted, including a report from Myron C. Taylor, the president’s personal representative to the Vatican.† Welles soon confirmed the reports—“There is no exaggeration,” he told Wise—and on December 2 the rabbi appealed directly to FDR:
Dear Boss,
I do not want to add an atom to the awful burden you are bearing … but you do know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres.
Wise asked Roosevelt to meet as soon as possible with him and other Jewish leaders to discuss a course of action. “As your old friend I beg you somehow to arrange this.”36
Roosevelt responded immediately. Wise was invited to the White House December 8 and brought with him the heads of four major Jewish organizations.37 FDR received the delegation cordially. Wise made a brief oral presentation and presented the president with a twenty-page summary of the extermination data. He asked Roosevelt “to warn