FDR - Jean Edward Smith [383]
Morgenthau retitled the memorandum “A Personal Report to the President” and met with FDR on January 16, 1944. Accompanying the secretary were Paul and Pehle. Morgenthau summarized the findings of the report and urged the president to establish a cabinet-level rescue commission that would strip the State Department of its refugee responsibility. Roosevelt needed little convincing. On January 22, 1944, he signed Executive Order 9417, establishing a War Refugee Board (WRB) consisting of Morgenthau, Hull, and Stimson, with Treasury’s John Pehle as director. “It is the policy of this government to take all measures within its power to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death” and to provide “relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war,” the order stated.51 Three days after the WRB was established, New York congressman Emanuel Celler wrote Roosevelt, “Your glorious action has cleared the atmosphere. It is like a bolt of lightning dispelling the storm.”52
Under John Pehle’s aggressive leadership, the WRB moved swiftly to provide whatever relief was possible. “The board,” Morgenthau wrote later, “was made up of crusaders, passionately persuaded of the need for speed and action.”53 When Hitler occupied Hungary in March 1944 and ordered the deportation of 700,000 Jews—the largest intact Jewish community in Europe—the WRB dispatched the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest under diplomatic cover. With a combination of bluff and bribery, using funds funneled through the WRB, Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews. The board also arranged for air-leaflet drops warning of war crimes prosecutions and induced New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, the ranking Catholic prelate in the United States, to record a radio broadcast reminding Hungarian Catholics that persecution of the Jews was in direct contradiction of Church doctrine.54
Roosevelt addressed the issue again on March 24, 1944. Stung by Morgenthau’s report of State Department malfeasance, FDR took pains to clarify the government’s intention to provide succor. “In one of the blackest crimes of all history,” said the president, “the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour.” The Jews of Hungary were now threatened. “That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolized, would be a major tragedy.” FDR promised swift retribution. “This applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death … are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.”
Roosevelt pledged to persevere in the effort to rescue the victims of Nazi brutality. “Insofar as the necessity of military operations permit, this Government will use all the means at its command to aid the escape of all intended victims of the Nazi and Jap executioner.… We shall find havens of refuge for them, and we shall find the means for their maintenance and support until the tyrant is driven from their homelands and they may return.”55
The president’s statement received front-page treatment. “Roosevelt Warns Germans on Jews,” bannered The New York Times. It was broadcast by the BBC and translated into many languages throughout Europe, and copies were dropped behind enemy lines. Rarely has there been a more explicit announcement of American intentions. And rarely was there so little the United States could do.
In postwar years the question has often been raised whether the United States should have bombed the death camps or at least the rail lines running to