The abandonment of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust has been well documented. But in recent years historians increasingly have turned their attention to the actions of the Roosevelt administration during the 1930s, before the genocide began.
What could have been done while the Six Million were still alive?
This compelling question will be the theme of “While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939,” a conference sponsored by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies on Sunday, September 18, at Fordham University Law School, 140 West 62 Street (between Columbus and Amsterdam) in Manhattan, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (To register, call 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org.)
Critics of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust have often accused FDR of paying lip service to the plight of the Jews in Hitler’s Europe. During most of the 1930s, however, Roosevelt did not even pay them lip service. Maintaining friendly diplomatic and trade relations with Germany was a higher priority for the administration than speaking out for the Jews.
Research by Prof. Laurel Leff of Northeastern University has shed disturbing light on Roosevelt’s failure even to speak out against the Nazi persecutions, much less do anything to actually help the victims.
Prof. Leff studied the transcripts of Roosevelt’s numerous press conferences during the 1930s. FDR’s famous “fireside chats” earned him a reputation as a master communicator. But when it came to the mistreatment of German Jews, his communications skills mysteriously failed him.
The president held 82 press conferences in 1933 alone. The subject of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews came up on only one occasion – and not because Roosevelt raised it.
A reporter asked him, “Have any organizations asked you to act in any way in connection with the reported persecution of the Jews over in Germany by the Hitler government?” FDR replied: “I think a good many of these have come in. They were all sent over to the secretary of state.”
That was it – there was not another word from the president about the Jews for the next five years. Between 1934 and 1938, Roosevelt held another 348 press conferences. It was not until September 2, 1938, that the subject arose again. A reporter asked whether FDR had any comment on the Italian government’s order expelling 22,000 Jews. The president’s reply: “No.” Period. A Jewish Leader’s Private Agony
For Rabbi Dr. Stephen S. Wise, the foremost leader of the American Jewish community, FDR’s silence was a source of particular anguish. Wise, the longtime head of the American Jewish Congress and the American Zionist movement, was a fervent supporter of Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the Democratic Party. As a result, he enjoyed a personal and political relationship with FDR that gave him far greater access to the White House than any other Jewish leader. But access did not necessarily equal influence.
Despite Wise’s vaunted friendship with Roosevelt and his fulsome public praise of FDR, Wise privately was frequently torn between his strong admiration for FDR’s policies and his frustration at the president’s unwillingness to say anything about the oppression of German Jewry.
As early as April 1933, just one month after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Wise agonized over Roosevelt’s silence. The president “has not by a single word or act intimated the faintest interest in what is going on” regarding the Jews in Germany, Wise confided to a friend.
Two months later, after returning from a round of meetings in Washington, Wise wrote to a colleague that “as far as the German situation is concerned…we could get nothing public out of the president.”
Other attempts to squeeze a few words out of the reluctant president fared no better. On August 25, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt brought her friend Alice Hamilton, who had recently spent three months in Germany, to Hyde Park to give FDR a detailed eyewitness account of German brutality against the Jews. The president still refused to publicly criticize Hitler.
