Foundations of Holocaust: The Acquiescence of the U.S. in the Murder of the Jews

Background to the “Acquiescence”: In response to the impending Final Solution Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau approached Roosevelt in 1938 proposing the US use British Guiana as refuge for refugees but, “Roosevelt did not favor that particular proposal.” That proved one of several such suggestions rejected by the president that, along with a State Department policy commitment of barring Jewish immigration, even to providing assistance to Jewish refugees:

It was this systematic antisemitic policy expressed by the US government that led to three senior members of Morgenthau’s staff to charge the administration for complicity in   Germany’s Final Solution to the Jewish Probem.  

Treasury secretary Morgenthau received the Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews on 13 January, 1944. While we may not know how Morgenthau finally convinced the president to act, nine days later Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB). As to what the WRB achieved, its own director, John W. Pehle described the result as “too little too late.”  

The story of how one branch of the Roosevelt Administration came to accuse a second of complicity in the murder of European Jewry describes systemic antisemitism supported by bureaucratic apathy absent presidential concern or leadership. But the administration was not acting in a vacuum; it had the support of a broad majority within Congress itself enjoying broad popular support from an American populace overwhelmingly antisemitic. 

The Bermuda Conference: Five years after the United States and Britain agreed to a cosmetic “refugee conference” at Evian, France the two countries agreed to repeat the charade at a site inaccessible to protesters, the British colony Bermuda. American Jewish leaders asked to be allowed to attend and were declined for reasons mentioned below: 

But even had the US been more engaged in saving Europe’s Jews the mid-level diplomats representing the administration realized, 

With Britain unwilling to open Palestine to Jewish immigration and the US for years uninterested in rescue efforts, in the end the Allies agreed to “rescue” 2000 Jewish refugees from the safety of Spain to the safety of Morocco. 

The War Refugee Board: On January 22, 1944 President Roosevelt, Acquiescence Report in hand performed his sole gesture towards Jewish refugees and issued an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB). From the start the WRB was hobbled: The Executive Order designated the membership of the Board which, according to the president, would consist of the Departments of State, War and Treasury. State obstructionism regarding Jewish refugees inspired the Acquiescence Report, and War, never supportive of aid to refugees, would soon be called on to care for them as “Displaced Persons” often housed and guarded in the same concentration camps from which they were “liberated.” 

The president allocated just one million dollars to the Board, so a major task of its director was to locate private funding sources. In effect Roosevelt created a doomed agency, leaving it to American Jewry to fund and save European Jewry’s remnant. 

Of the approximately 200,000 Jews that are estimated to have benefitted from the War Refugee Board, approximately 10,000 might have qualified as “rescued,” the remaining having been moved from one “safe haven” to another.

The lessons of the WRB are the regrets surrounding “what could have been.” Had the US and its president provided leadership in “salvation” rather than “disinterest” the issue would not have been the concern described at Bermuda “that great difficulties would be presented if Nazi Germany released large numbers of Jews to the Allies.” There could have been “safe havens” (outside the United States) as outcome of the 1938 Evian Conference, and even earlier. 

The problem was not that nothing could be done: the administration facile excuse that  “the best way to save the Jews is by winning the war.” The problem was something beyond even apathy. The United States was, in fact, no less antagonistic towards Jews than was Europe engaged in their extermination. As reminder from last week’s article:

This is not a frivolous “what if” question. Roosevelt was elected in the midst of the Great Depression and while he won the popular vote, Industrial America and the wealthy not only opposed his agenda for reform, but were poised to overthrow the government with an Italy-styled Fascist coup! 

With the intensity of popular antisemitism across America; Corporate America’s attempted fascist-style coup d’etat against Roosevelt; American elites enthusiasm for Hitler and his National Socialist experiment in eugenics and social engineering: How would the Jews have fared had Roosevelt lost the 1940 election?

The two most popular and charismatic figures on the American stage of the day, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, were both considered possible presidential candidates by the Republican Party. And both were antisemites, admirers of Hitler and National Socialism’s program of draconian social engineering. With public sentiment strongly isolationist and opposed to involvement in the European war there is more than a possibility that the United States under either as president would at least have remained neutral in the European war. But the United States was also strongly anti-Communist. Lindbergh might have sat out a strictly European war, but would he have resisted an alliance with Hitler in the crusade against the “godless” Communists?

American eugenicists inspired and trained their German counterparts; American financiers such as the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Harrimans and others built and funded the schools and universities that trained the theorists behind the extermination of the Jews. American eugenics even preceded Germany by decades in the quest for a blond-haired, blue-eyed American gene pool, an American Aryan ideal.

If, under a Ford or Lindbergh administration the US remained “neutral” the survivability of the Jews might have been uncertain. But had the administration joined Hitler in his crusade against “godless Russian Bolshevism,” been a member of a victorious Axis alliance?

In the end the two populists chose not to run, Roosevelt was reelected and Germany declared war on the United States. In the end however we may judge the president, in the end at least the Jews survived.