Longtime FDR friend and soon-to-be cabinet member Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and New York judge Irving Lehman visited the White House in September 1933. Their goal was to secure a statement from the president condemning Hitler’s oppression of the Jews. They came away empty-handed. FDR told them he preferred to make a statement about human rights abuses in Germany in general, without focusing on the Jews.
Even that would have been better than nothing. Ultimately, however, Roosevelt did not do even that much.
“FDR has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany,” Wise wrote to a colleague the following month. “We have had nothing but indifference and unconcern up to this time.”
A Revisionist View of Roosevelt
Yet despite Rabbi Wise’s blunt complaint (in private) about Roosevelt’s “unconcern,” defenders of FDR have in recent years claimed that the president in fact was deeply concerned about German Jewry.
In the spring of 2004, readers of The New York Times were startled to learn about what was billed as a major new development in research on FDR and the Jews of Nazi Germany. It grew out of the publication, by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, of the first of three volumes of the diaries of James G. McDonald, a journalist, diplomat, and refugee advocate.
The volumes were edited by Museum historians Richard Breitman and Severin Hochberg. According to a prominently placed article in the Times, entries in McDonald’s diary showed he returned from a 1933 visit to Nazi Germany feeling deeply pessimistic about the fate of German Jewry and hurried to inform the president.
The Times reporter claimed McDonald “shared [his pessimistic view] with President Roosevelt” when they met on May 1, 1933, and FDR “seemed deeply concerned and said he wanted to find a way to send a warning message to the German people over the head of Hitler.” The article’s large pull quote declared: “Signs that Roosevelt was concerned about Hitler’s plan early on.”
Hochberg gave statements to the Times promoting the notion that the diaries revealed a Roosevelt who cared about the Jews. According to the Times, Hochberg said that “that the entries show that Roosevelt was greatly concerned” and that “this picture is very different from the claim that he was indifferent to the fate of the Jews.”
Breitman, for his part, likewise asserted that the diary shows Roosevelt was “not the indifferent figure depicted in some of the scholarly literature about America and the Holocaust.”
This revisionist view of Roosevelt, if accurate, would have constituted a significant new development in our understanding of FDR and European Jewry. And the U.S. Holocaust Museum made every effort to promote this new perspective. As part of its marketing of McDonald, the museum even published a 2005 James G. McDonald Wall Calendar. (Fortunately, museum officials resisted the temptation to branch out into McDonald key chains and bobble heads.) The section for February featured an enlarged excerpt from that May 1, 1933 diary entry. Here’s how the calendar quoted McDonald, writing about his meeting that day with Roosevelt:
[He] asked me to talk about Germany.… [He] asked many questions, showing a very real grasp of the situation. I expressed the view that it would be desirable if some very frank speaking could be done to Hitler.… He…intimated, though I did not at the time get the full implications of it, that he had a plan in mind to appeal over the head of Hitler to the German people…
Since the other monthly quotations in the McDonald calendar were about the Jews, anyone looking at the calendar would naturally assume that the May 1 quote meant FDR asked McDonald to “talk about” the plight of German Jews; that FDR “asked many questions” about the Jews; that he “showed a very real grasp of the situation” of the Jews; and that the “appeal” FDR was planning would be a protest about the treatment of the Jews.
